Torres Kicks a Jammed Door and Rides the Fury Subway to the Core
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Star Trek: Voyager - Invasion #4: The Final Fury
By Dafydd ab Hugh
ISBN: 0671541811
Chapter 22 is Torres versus architecture, and architecture is winning until it is not.
Six kilometers through a shifting maze of passages, diving sideways from Brobdingnagian columns sliding across slotted doors and fiber sheaths. Then a locked door scant meters from the shaft. Torres kicks it, throws her body at it, Klingon fury running the show while the human half watches the repetitive folly. She beats her hands bloody and collapses gasping.
Redbay asks if he may try. She calls him scarecrow. He draws his phaser and blows the door out of existence. She stares at the glowing edges, unaesthetic and effective, and pushes through.
The tricorder says they should be in the shaft. More corridor. She turns in a slow circle scanning. Redbay tells her to dial up the scale. Maxed. She steps forward and the floor opens like a hollow pie crust. Twenty meters down onto a raised track. Redbay leaps after her with a phaser-electric torch from his boot.
Power generator nearby. Magnetic levitation track still live. Maybe a working subway. They almost run into a low flattened car, blue and yellow with red highlights. Redbay jokes about terminal color-clash if the Furies turned the lights up. Manual door. They yank it open by muscle because they might need the air seal inside.
Torres touches the blank panel with hieroglyphs along the top edge. The car lurches, three gravities acceleration, hurls Redbay to the deck. She wraps the pilot seat with no visible controls. Two minutes of crush, then sudden stop. She flaps into the command chair at roughly three and a half kilometers per second. Gravity drops as they sink toward the core. Half an hour plus still barreling along in silence. Temporary crewmates do not always become friends.
Redbay warns deceleration will be rough backward. The seats rotate opposite to travel direction. The car brakes as hard as it accelerated. Doors open automatically. Gravity at 0.005 g. One two-hundredth of Earth. A slight move floats her toward the roof.
The platform drops away in a kilometer cliff. The far side vanishes in blue haze. Below, a valley like a monstrous data clip packet. Power router conduits big enough to swallow Voyager. Fiberoptic cables thick as tree trunks. Millions of logic switches. Spark gaps wider than Hero’s Gulch. Arcing over everything, a glittering gold inverted convex power-grid antenna made of the same filament wire as the sun’s Faraday cage.
The sun grid was too big to feel real. This one is the maximal size her mind can register as a single object. Kahless’s beard. Redbay says it is big enough to scare the brass off a bald monkey. Central power router. This is it.
No way to blow the diffuser grid without two hundred photon torpedoes. Torres brought tools, not bombs. Maybe reroute smaller fiberoptic cables. Cut and paste. Set up a feedback loop so the supernova’s own energy fries adjacent sectors. How do they get down there? Redbay plants his feet on the cliff edge and launches into the valley. Near zero-g. Torres feels acrophobia crush her. Residual from the terror beam? She launches anyway so a human will not show her up.
They land a kilometer apart. She points at the tall spike focus collector. All power flows through there. Loop circuits into feedback and the supernova destroys the moon while the Furies watch the tidal wave roll in.
Redbay’s voice carries real malicious joy at twenty-seven billion dead. A day ago Torres would have been sickened. A day ago she had not felt the terror projector needle her brain. Today she would pull the switch herself without a second thought.
Head for the needle. Rendezvous. Not much time to return to Voyager. Redbay laughs and signs off. She wonders what was funny.
Chapter 22 is the breath after the shuttle explosion cliffhanger. Torres is still alive underground while Janeway thinks she might be dead. The maze and subway solve the eight-hundred-kilometer problem with weird Fury infrastructure instead of transporters, which this quadrant never developed. The color-clash joke is silly and humanizes Redbay for half a page before the vista hits.
That vista is the chapter’s real payload. Ab Hugh makes you see why brute force failed. You cannot phaser this scale into rubble. You have to trick the system into eating itself. Torres’s moral slide continues in plain language. The weapon did not just scare her. It rewired what she is willing to do to stop these people.
The leap setup for chapter 23 starts here. They are separated, sick with fear residue, and racing a star that is already dying.
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