No pressure, Soloman, Stevens thought, recalling one of the last intelligible words he’d heard the little Bynar utter before the storm-tossed atmosphere cut off communication between the Kwolek and Ground Station Vesper.

He hoped he hadn’t misplaced his faith in Soloman’s ability to improvise. Maybe the Bynar’s facility with numbers was only an asset in situations that required one to go by the numbers.

This certainly wasn’t one of those instances.

The sound of rending, shearing metal jolted Stevens out of his reverie.

“I told you this vessel couldn’t stand up to this sort of punishment for long.”

“Shut up, Tev,” Gomez and Corsi said in a synchronized harmony that would have put a cadre of Borg drones to shame. Pattie’s tinkling laughter was barely audible over the roar of the wind.

“Excuse me?” the Tellarite said, a now-familiar dudgeon inflecting his voice.

There was a loud bang, as though something had struck the hull. An alarm Klaxon sounded, and the readouts on Stevens’s console suddenly changed. Numerous amber and orange warning lights suddenly shifted to a far friendlier green hue.

Stevens watched a grin spread slowly across Corsi’s features like a Venusian sunrise. “The da Vinci has just arrived. And they’re supplying all the power we’ll need to finish this.”

“How can you tell—” Stevens interrupted himself, watching the rhythmic pulsation of the energy-intake readout that monitored the main power coupling. “Morse code. Our comm system must be down.”

Stevens turned in his seat, hoping to share a triumphant smile with Gomez. He was surprised to see a dour expression clouding her face.

“That’s great,” she said. “But we’re still out of contact with Vesper. We can only hope that those last figures Soloman gave us are still precise enough to get the job done safely.”

“So do we maintain power for the full duration?” Stevens asked as he quickly rechecked the numbers. Soloman’s last batch of figures had required the Kwolek to bolster several key force-field nodes for another eight minutes and twelve seconds.

Gomez sighed. “We don’t have any other choice. Not if we want to keep the sky from falling.”

Corsi’s sharp intake of breath caught Stevens’s attention. “What’s wrong, Dommie?”

For once, the security chief didn’t seem ready to summarily execute him for using her family nickname. A quick glance at his own scanner readout told him why.

A large portion of the force-field network was suddenly twisting itself into an entirely unexpected shape.

Stevens felt a sharp pang of regret at having encouraged Soloman to improvise.

“Captain!” Shabalala shouted from the tactical station.

Startled, Gold turned his chair around almost quickly enough to cause a whiplash. He saw at once that Shabalala’s dark skin had suddenly gone gray. “What is it?”

“The force-field network is…changing.”

Turning back toward the main viewer, Gold said, “Show me a schematic.”

The static-marbled image of the Kwolek, held fast in the complex web of energy radiating from the da Vinci’s main deflector dish, vanished. It was replaced by a simple orange-and-black wire-frame representation of the planet and the constantly fluctuating force-field lattice that surrounded it. Gold looked to a position on the daylit side, about twenty degrees south of the equator, where concentric rings marked the epicenter of the volcanic activity that had already radiated out across the surface in every direction for several hundred kilometers. Noting that the late Ground Station Aphrodite now lay well within the still-spreading volcanic hell, he mouthed a silent prayer of thanks that his people had reached the Aphrodite team before the lava did.

Then he saw that several other ground stations still lay in harm’s way, the nearest of them perhaps another hour or two away from immolation.

Unless his people could find a way to work around the force-field network, all those people—Soloman included—were going to die. They would all expire, one small crew at a time, as each station slowly succumbed to the unleashed furies of the Venusian interior. The same way Galvan VI slowly ate away at my ship, killing people off one by one….

Gold cut off those thoughts and forced himself to study the lines that represented the field network itself, in response to Shabalala’s report. All across the schematic of the planet, the crisscrossing meshwork of field lines—the energetic meridians and parallels that connected hundreds of force-field generation nodes and covered the entire globe—appeared to have maintained a fairly stable, if lopsided, overall shape. The north-south field lines drew shapes that resembled overlapping slices of a strangely oblate orange, bulging out farthest across the planet’s sunward side, which was the only place from which the atmosphere could be successfully “blown off.”

But Gold saw a glaring exception to this general pattern: the portion of the force field that lay above the precise center of the volcanic eruption. Here, the lines of force were actively moving, twisting, and taking on a cylindrical shape that slowly rose above the rest of the world-girdling force field. It extended ever upward, like a tenacious plant determined to pierce the clouds and reach the sun.

“My God,” Shabalala said, his voice pitched scarcely above a whisper. “The network must be malfunctioning.”

From the forward ops station, Ensign Susan Haznedl said, “I don’t think it is, sir.” A lithe young human with strawberry blond hair, Haznedl had recently taken over as the primary operations officer. Two of the da Vinci’s ops personnel had died at Galvan VI, and the other transferred off, so Haznedl was new to the S.C.E. “The motions of those field lines are too—well, orderly, sir. I’ve never seen a failing deflector shield roll itself up into a funnel shape like that.”

Shabalala asked, “You’re saying somebody could be changing the field’s shape deliberately?”

“I think so, yes.”

Gold said nothing, focusing instead on the tale unfolding on the main viewer. As he watched, the single elongated tube of force split itself into two, then four, then eight and more progressively narrower tubes. He quickly lost count of the tubes, so quickly were they appearing, bringing to mind a sped-up recording of living cells dividing ad infinitum. He was, however, able to see that the bases of the force-tubules seemed to plunge themselves deeply beneath the planet’s surface—

—piercing the exact center of seismic and volcanic activity with almost surgical precision.

Gold smiled. “Haznedl, try to get me a real visual on what’s going on down there.”

Also smiling, the young woman turned back to her console and said, “Yes, sir.”

The tactical display vanished, replaced by a hash of static that slowly gave way to a grainy, computer-enhanced image of the Venusian dayside, no doubt relayed down either directly from Ishtar Station or from one of the many automated support satellites that ringed the planet. The resolution was poor, but understandably so given the current local weather.

Gold quickly found the spot where the force-field network had morphed itself into such peculiar shapes. Although the fields themselves were invisible, the material that was rising with projectile speed along the narrow, rapidly multiplying vertical tubes of force was quite noticeable. The material became white-hot as it shot through the cloudtops and into space, passing at least one hundred kilometers above the highest-altitude layers of the atmospheric “blowoff.”

The pitiless brightness of the sun made the nature of the ejected material immediately apparent. Recalling what Soloman had said about needing to relieve pressure, Gold looked around the bridge. He spent a moment watching the awestruck faces at each station as everyone present seemed to grasp the enormity of what they were witnessing.

The main mass of the lava flow was being diverted from the remaining ground stations and flung into a high orbit about Venus. No one seemed able to pry his eyes from the viewer as the molten material continued to be blasted hundreds of kilometers away from the greenhouse-desiccated world below.

The molten material continued trailing fire across the ochre sky, slowly turning dark as it exited the funnel-shaped, spaceward terminus of the reconfigured force-field network, gradually surrendering its heat to the airless void.

Haznedl finally broke the silence that had engulfed the bridge. “Somebody,” the ops officer said, “has obviously figured out how to turn the force-field network into a colossal mass driver.”

“Looks like the pressure may finally be off,” Shabalala said, still looking awed. “The lava’s being funneled off into space.”

Shaking her head, Haznedl said, “This is truly amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Gold sat back in his chair. “Just another day at the office for the S.C.E., Haznedl.”