Captain Lian T'su tightened her grip on the armrests of her seat. The Orion main viewer showed another huge web of lightning bolts tear through the roiling, red-orange clouds of the gas giant's atmosphere. The electrical discharges rendered the clouds visible for little more than a second and were followed immediately by a bone-rattling boom of thunder that reverberated through the decks of the Steamrunner-class starship.

"Do you have a lock on that signal yet?" T'su said to her tactical officer, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the din of the ship's groaning outer bulkheads.

"Negative, Captain," said Lieutenant Ryan. "Atmospheric interference is still too heavy. Switching to a delta-channel isolation frequency."

The hull of the Orion had begun shrieking in protest soon after they had descended ten thousand kilometers into the gas giant's turbulent lower atmosphere. Now that the ship had dived below twenty-five thousand kilometers, one-fifth of the way to the planet's core, the eerie sounds of fatiguing metal were becoming almost constant, and the vibrations through the hull were growing more severe by the minute.

Twelve years ago, when T'su had been an ensign, she had been at ops aboard the Enterprise-D as it skimmed the upper atmosphere of Minos while under fire by an automated attack drone. At the time, she'd thought that was a rough ride. Compared to this, that was nothing, she thought, wiping the sweat from her palms.

T'su turned back toward the main viewer, which now showed only a dim outline of the thermal disturbance they were speeding toward. The test of the Wildfire prototype had been about to commence when Lieutenant Sunkulo, her operations officer, had detected an unknown energy signal that mysteriously vanished the moment sensors had been trained on it. If there was another ship in the atmosphere, following the Orion, the mission's security was at risk. T'su had orders to keep the prototype out of the wrong hands at all costs, and she was well aware of the potential for disaster if she failed.

Right now, however, she was more concerned about the threat to her ship posed by the planet itself. "Current hull temperature and pressure?" she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. Always project confidence, she reminded herself.

Sunkulo tapped a few keys and answered calmly. "Temperature is eleven thousand four hundred degrees Celsius. Pressure is twenty-two million G.S.C." Anticipating his captain's next request, he added, "Structural integrity field still holding."

T'su nodded. Around her, the rest of the bridge crew was quiet, intensely focused on their work. Lieutenant Fryar was making constant, minor adjustments at the helm to keep the ship steady while Ensign Yarrow relayed his data from the science station to Ryan at tactical. They were using active tachyon scans to map the atmosphere's thermodynamic layers and currents in order to plot the course the Wildfire device would take to the planet's core. The data was being constantly uploaded to Lieutenant ch'Kelavar, the ship's Andorian second officer, who was in the forward torpedo room with the Wildfire development team.

Another lightning flash caused the main viewer to flare white for a split second. Another thunderclap, magnified by the density of the gas giant's atmosphere, drowned out the sounds of the Orion's groaning hull plates and shook the ship violently. The lights on the bridge flickered for a moment, and several display screens became scrambled and failed to recover even after the shaking ceased. T'su winced as the acrid odor of burned-out isolinear chips assaulted her nostrils.

Commander Dakona Raal, the ship's imposing first officer, placed a reassuring hand on T'su's shoulder. She silently smiled her thanks to him, and he nodded almost imperceptibly in return and moved his hand away before anyone else on the bridge noticed it had been there.

A native of Rigel V, Raal had been mistaken for a Vulcan by almost every member of the crew when he first came aboard last year. He had responded by shaving his head bald, growing a goatee, and making a point of leading a Klingon folk music sing-along during the crew's last shore leave. He also had learned to cook a hasperat so spicy it could knock the nasal ridges off a Bajoran, and Dr. Cindrich, the ship's chief medical officer, had described Raal's unrestrained laughter as "infectious."

Raal was unorthodox, brash, and sometimes a bit too obviously attracted to T'su for her comfort, but at times like this she was glad to have him close by. This was her first command, and although ferrying a contingent of Starfleet Corps of Engineers specialists wouldn't have been her first choice of assignments, the past month had taught her it was rarely boring. Through it all, Raal had proved himself to be an exemplary first officer, the one T'su could always count on in a crisis.

But this crisis was getting too close for comfort.

"Lieutenant Ryan, stand by to deploy the Wildfire device on my mark. Helm, as soon as it's away, get us out of here, best possible speed."

Ryan and Fryar both acknowledged and continued to tap keys. "We're ready, Captain," Ryan said. T'su leaned forward in her seat, about to give the order, when the image on the main viewer changed.

The low hum of activity on the bridge ceased as everyone turned toward the viewscreen. A latticework of glowing colors seemed to be growing around the ship like a coral reef; grids of light, in parallel and perpendicular rows, surrounded the Orion like a cage of energy. T'su snapped her crew back into action. "Tactical, what is that? Is it Tholian?"

"Negative, Captain. The energy signature doesn't match any known configuration."

T'su swiveled toward her science officer. "Yarrow, tell me something useful."

Yarrow studied his display. T'su could tell something was wrong; when Yarrow was alarmed, his mane puffed out and his whiskers twitched. Right now, his mane was twice its normal size. "It's a photonic energy grid, Captain, source unknown. I can't determine its--"

"It's shrinking!" Sunkulo said. T'su spun back toward the main viewer in time to see the image dissolve into static. Sunkulo's console was rapidly dominated by warning lights. "We're losing power all over the ship!"

T'su clenched her jaw as a powerful shock wave rattled the ship. "All decks! Damage reports!"

"We just lost comms," said Ryan. He pressed futilely at his console, which was stuttering its way into darkness like every other panel on the bridge. T'su found herself barraged with reports from every direction at once. Helm wasn't answering, auxiliary power was failing, tactical was offline. The voices overlapped, frantic and hoarse, struggling to be heard over the din of wrenching metal. One voice cut through the clamor, firm and quiet.

"Captain," Raal said gravely. "We're about to lose the structural integrity field." T'su looked at Raal, saw the hardness of his expression, and realized this was the no-win scenario she'd been warned about at the Academy all those years ago. "Recommend we release the log buoy, sir."

T'su nodded curtly, and felt her thoughts turn inward as Raal bellowed the order to Sunkulo. Seconds later, the buoy was away. T'su shivered from adrenaline overload as the bridge lights faded and the bridge slipped into total darkness. She covered her ears as the shrieking of the hull became deafening and the atmosphere's turbulence hammered her ship.

As a flash of lightning a hundred times larger than anything T'su had ever seen on Earth tore through the bridge, the last thing she felt was a hand on her shoulder.

Copyright © 2002 by Paramount Pictures