Carey Bends the Shields and Torres Launches Into Fury Space
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Star Trek: Voyager - Invasion #4: The Final Fury
By Dafydd ab Hugh
ISBN: 0671541811
Chapter 18 splits cleanly between engineering wizardry and the first real shot of the Fury war.
Chakotay and Carey stand in Carey’s private lab off the bionet salt transfer monitoring equipment. Carey cannot believe what he is seeing. The shield soliton wave function has terms Starfleet never teaches command-track officers. Academy classes were ruthlessly practical. Great officers with gaping holes in their knowledge. Carey points at gamma of s and t. Standard model assumes it must be continuous. Wilson’s paper says that is not proven. Make gamma discontinuous and either the shields bend or the ship rips apart like an egg in a wind tunnel.
Carey bets on least-energy solution. Shields bend. He looks at Chakotay with near awe. If this is the Maquis way, no wonder you almost took over the Federation. Tell Tuvok Carey was wrong and he was right all along.
Chakotay asks how long for a working wedge. Carey punches keys. “I just did it.” The conversion is live. Chakotay keeps a straight face while his headache vanishes in adrenaline. The ship could have exploded and they would never have known. Carey says it did not. Chakotay tells him to rig the controller for the commander’s console, not the captain’s. She will be busy when the fertilizer starts to fly. Chakotay makes it back to his quarters before the shakes hit.
Cut to the shuttle bay. Torres straps on sixteen pouches of tools. Redbay boards with only a hand phaser. She brought fiberoptic cable, climbing line, tricorders, no weapons. He does not trust her. She means her silence to sting. He just straps in.
Janeway stands at the hatch and says nothing as the door closes. Redbay skims the sun’s corona, hull below ten thousand degrees, staying in plasma as long as he can. Then he yanks up and out, warps toward the planet-moon system diving straight out of the sun. Brilliant. Voyager follows the same trail so the Furies see one target cross section.
Warp four crosses the gap in five seconds. Redbay cuts warp and drifts behind the moon before shifting to impulse. Two hundred thousand kilometers out, klaxons scream. The moon knows it is under attack. Twelve Fury ships lift. Voyager pretends it set off the alarms, drawing most of the pack away while Redbay banks hard right in a crushing turn.
Torres runs countermeasures against disruptor locks. Janeway watches everything. Crew performance. Maquis and Starfleet. Chakotay in the bullpen with Dalby, Jarron, Chell, and Henley ready to leap into gaps. Paris senses where the Furies will go and threads them so they shoot each other. The jury-rigged inertial dampers lag. The crew gets slammed. B’Elanna is not here to see Paris fly like this.
Then Kim reports something worse than disruptors. A beam causing interspace flux brushed deck thirteen’s neural switches. No damage reports. Dead silence down there. Janeway’s stomach drops. Somebody just got a taste of Fury terrors. She activates the EMH and sends security and orderlies to the neural switchboard.
Chakotay crosses his fingers on the shield wedge readout. Tuvok confirms two Furies followed the shuttle. They are evading but not shooting back. Do not attract attention.
Janeway takes a breath. “Commence firing, Ensign Kim.” Voyager fires in anger again in yet another Delta Quadrant system. She thinks gloomily that at this rate the Federation will be about as welcome here as the Borg were at home.
This chapter is the launch sequence for the whole climax. Carey’s instant shield fix feels almost too easy after pages of impossible math, but the book frames it as desperate luck and Carey’s obsession paying off. The sun-skimming approach is cinematic and smart. And deck thirteen going quiet is the first on-ship proof that the terror projector is not an abstract threat. People are already breaking while Torres and Redbay still have eight hundred kilometers of moon between them and the core.
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