The Final Fury Ch. 5: Paris and Kim Dive the Moon Shaft and Parachute Into Hell

Title: Star Trek: Voyager - Invasion #4: The Final Fury
Author: Dafydd ab Hugh
ISBN: 0671541811

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A hundred kilometers straight down

Chapter five is mostly Tom Paris and Harry Kim inside the artificial moon, and it’s one of the most visceral action sequences in the early Voyager novels.

The shaft drives toward the moon’s center for more than a hundred kilometers. Paris keeps the shuttle centered while trying not to think about radiation, closing walls, and how they’ll get out without a lethal dose. The first eight kilometers are shielding so dense Kim says it can’t exist chemically. Paris nicknames it baloneyum and threatens to ram it as a test.

The tunnel narrows. Paris stops joking. Kim warns shields are leaking. They need to clear the microwave beam view in four minutes. Paris bumps throttle to twenty-five kilometers per minute. In free space that’s slow. Here, with guy lines, equipment spars, and wake turbulence from their own speed, it feels like a roller coaster in a sewer.

The Swoop of Death

The inner antenna ring is thirty meters across. Millions of filament threads anchor it like eye muscles. You can’t go around. You thread through microwave hell or die.

Paris invented the Swoop of Death flying Gawk hoppers as a kid. Success rate: two out of six attempts. He tells Kim they’ll try zero-G inversions. Kim hates them. Paris doesn’t mention the thirty-three percent odds.

Phase one: pitch ninety degrees, inertial dampers scream and fail, twelve G crushes him, color vision goes, tunnel vision follows. Phase two: roll one-eighty, pitch again, jog a kilometer sideways. He pulls late. They’re not going to clear the wall. So he yanks harder, exceeds structural limits, pegs fourteen G without a combat suit, hears a distant thud, kills acceleration.

Interior temp: sixty degrees. Another second between antennas and their lungs cook beyond EMH repair. Kim is unconscious but breathing. Paris slumps, exhausted, g-meter still mocking him.

Beaming into the hollow moon

Kim wakes disoriented in white noise, remembers his name, remembers Paris, feels skull-splitting pain, then focuses. Hull section ahead is thin enough to beam through. Livable environment inside. No life signs.

They phaser up, tricorder up, and materialize in a corridor of bundled pipes and cables with no catwalk. Near-zero gravity near the core. Kim jumps wrong, hits his head, Paris catches his leg. They learn shallow hops to move fast.

Kim finds a cross corridor, then a circular pit with smooth glass sides and no visible bottom. Paris does the math: six hundred meters fall in low gravity still kills you.

Blanket parachute, because Starfleet packs everything

Kim pulls a thermal blanket and mountaineering rope tagged 1000 M from the expedition pack. Low gravity means they can parachute down like holo-physics cartoons. Paris doesn’t trust him but trusts the math. They tie off, separate ten meters, Geronimo over the edge.

Descent rate one and a half to two meters per second. Nine minutes by chronometer. The shaft opens into a chamber two kilometers wide. Rope goes taut. They dangle a kilometer down, half a kilometer above the deck, staring at the biggest machine Kim has ever seen.

He scans. No idea what it is yet. That’s the cliffhanger.

Why this chapter works

It’s pure pulp engineering done with character voice. Paris jokes because that’s how he handles fear. Kim clams up then delivers the physics cheat that saves them. The Swoop of Death is ridiculous on paper and tense on the page because ab Hugh walks through G-force, blood pressure, and damper failure like he means it.

The blanket parachute could be silly. It’s not, because the book already established moon gravity at one-eighth Earth and packed expedition kits with absurd thoroughness. Harry wanting to try this since childhood holos makes it charming instead of random.

My take

This is Paris’s chapter the way chapter three was Navdaq’s. If you liked “Threshold” but wanted competent science and consequences, this is the novel version. Fourteen G without a flight suit. Sunburn-level microwave exposure. Kim’s clarinet-keying nervous habit on the console. Little details keep it human.

I also like the structural split. Janeway is walking into diplomatic doom on the planet while the helmsman and ensign are literally inside the enemy’s gun barrel. Voyager is investigating on three fronts at once and none of them are going well.

The machine at the bottom? Next chapter names the fear. B’Elanna will think it can crush a sun into a neutron star. She’s probably right.

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