by David Mack
“Routing reserve power to the computer core.” Hesh flipped the toggles on his console. “The change in consumption will be minimal at first. After the rest of the crew hooks us up to the generator, however, the drain on our system will be heavy and sudden. Stand ready to modulate the strain on the primary juncture.”
“Ready,” Sorak said. An alert beeped on his console. He tucked a small transceiver into his ear, thumbed open a channel, and listened for several seconds before replying to whoever was on the other side of the signal, “Acknowledged. Stand by.” He swiveled toward Hesh. “The captain says the Master Chief is on his way to attach the data cable at the emergency node. Commander Theriault confirms the connections have been made at the computer core. Crewman Torvin is working on the signal adapter. Where do we stand with the virtual command panel?”
Hesh continued feeding data from his tricorder to the ship’s computer and watching the virtual model take shape on the system display screen above his head. “Almost ready, sir. I should have a working model of the master control console in ninety seconds.”
“For all our sakes, Lieutenant, I hope your estimate proves correct.”
Turning his back on Sorak, Hesh hunched over the sensor console and swallowed the sour bile welling in the back of his throat. “I hope so, too, sir.”
• • •
Never had one Tiburonian been asked to do so much for so many with so little. Torvin sat cross-legged on the floor of the fusion reactor’s control room, cobbling together seemingly random pieces of alien technology and scraps of Starfleet equipment from the hold of the Sagittarius. The idea was that, once assembled, this hastily imagined contraption would enable the data feed from the ship’s computer core to be understood by the hardware in the facility’s accelerator ring.
At least, that was what Hesh had said. Torvin wasn’t so sure. Everything about this improvised adapter had him expecting a meltdown of epic proportions when it was switched on. There were too many circuits and not enough heat sinks. Too many inputs and not enough buffers. It promised a data-transfer bottleneck more severe than any he’d ever seen.
Not my fault, he reminded himself. Not my design. For a fleeting moment he had thought about voicing his reservations, but then he realized he had no better idea, no superior suggestion, and if there was one thing the Master Chief hated above all else, it was critics without solutions.
He fumbled through the assorted tools scattered around him on the floor. Where’d I put the damned icospanner? His hand recognized its shape before his eye found it, and he lifted the precision instrument into place to complete the load-balancing procedure for the adapter.
He worked faster than he could think, proceeding on little more than instinct and muscle memory. In the back of his mind kindled a spark of fear, waiting for one final huff of misfortune to coax it back into full flame. He pretended it wasn’t there, that he wasn’t being driven by his terror at the prospect of confronting the great nothing on the other side of existence.
The astronauts from the space station stood inside the stairwell to the accelerator ring sublevel, paying out slack from the coil of data cable in front of Torvin. The Austarans’ job was to keep the coil from snagging or crimping—not because anyone feared it might fray or that such kinks would impede its ability to transmit signals, but because they were all aware of just how far Master Chief Ilucci needed to haul the end of the cable to reach the backup control center, and precisely how limited their supply of cable was.
Dastin charged through the door on the other side of the reactor control room, dragging the end of a long spool of duotronic data cable. He paused just inside the control room and fixed his manic gaze on Torvin. “Where does this go?”
Torvin waved him closer. “Here, sir!” He extended his hand.
Dastin hurried forward and passed the cable to him. “We still have a few meters of slack if you need it.”
A fast nod. “We might. Thank you, sir.” Torvin tucked the end of the duotronic cable under his arm while he finished his final adjustments to the adapter’s internal wiring. Once he was satisfied that it might not erupt into sparks and degrade into molten sludge at the first surge of power and data, he looked back at Dastin. “Sir, can I borrow your tricorder?”
“Whatever you need.” Dastin lifted the strap of his tricorder over his head and handed the scanning device to Torvin. “It’s got an open channel to the ship.”
“Excellent.” He checked the firmware and software in the adapter against the code from Lieutenant Hesh’s tricorder, to make sure no errors had slipped in. The comparison was done in the blink of an eye. “Looks good.” He plugged the duotronic cable into the adapter.
His work finished, Torvin froze. He had no orders beyond that moment.
Dastin trained his wide-eyed stare on the adapter. “So . . . is that it?”
“For now. Until the Master Chief plugs the native cables into the backup node.”
The lieutenant nodded. “Then what happens?”
“It either works like a charm, or we all die.”
“Oh.” Dastin seemed okay with that. “So we have a fifty-fifty chance.”
Who was Torvin to deprive an officer of hope? “Yeah, sure. Let’s go with that.”
• • •
Ilucci had half a dozen colorful metaphors to describe how hot the accelerator sublevel was, but not one was suitable for sharing with polite company. Sweat poured down his forehead and trickled through his eyebrows and beard. Pushing forward into the stifling swelter, a heavy bundle of data cables wrapped around his left arm, he struggled to draw breath. Each inhalation felt like fire in his chest. With every step he took down the long gradual curve of the sublevel, the harder it became to his lift his feet and soldier on.
A tendril of white-hot electricity leapt from an uninsulated coil along the side of the tunnel. It danced down his side, prickling him with its stinging touch. As the jolts of pain abated, he was left with numb patches on his arms, legs, and torso—just as he had after the last five shocks he’d endured since venturing into the sublevel.
He glowered at the exposed components surrounding him.
I’m really starting to hate this place.
Turning back wasn’t an option. Too many people were counting on him to see this through. His captain. His shipmates. The astronauts. And an entire species, eight billion strong, who had no idea what was happening to them or even that he was here.
A chartreuse fork of lightning sprang from under his feet and seized hold of him.
The next thing Ilucci knew, he was lying on the floor of the tunnel. He blinked twice but couldn’t make his eyes focus. His limbs felt like super-heavy rubber.
Crap. How long was I down?
He lifted his left arm and met resistance. The data cables remained securely coiled around his beefy forearm. He brought his right hand to his throat and checked his pulse.
Weak and irregular. Something’s wrong. Heart’s messed up. Not good.
Grumbling vulgarities, he sat up. Violet spots clouded his vision. Very not good.
Standing was a Herculean labor. On his feet, he swayed like a willow in a storm. He made his feet carry him forward in clumsy, stumbling half-strides, weaving like a drunkard. Through it all, his surroundings refused to be still: They swam and rolled, churned and doubled.
Something caught his right foot. He tripped and fell.
Sharp, brutal pain in his knees, a sharkbite of metal into flesh that cut through his mental haze and sharpened his wits. Feel it, he told himself. Follow it. You can do this.
One hand on the floor, he pushed himself up. He stood and took a moment to inventory his wounds. The knees of his olive jumpsuit were torn open, just like the flesh on his kneecaps. Figures. I just had this pair washed.
He pushed forward, three more halting steps. Then he paused, awash in confusion.
W
here am I going? What am I doing down here? He looked at the cables around his arm. I need to patch these into something. But to what? And where is it? He looked back, over his shoulder. What if I passed it? How would I know? Something in his subconscious made him trudge ahead, and he decided to trust it. Can’t stop now. No second-guessing. Go forward.
Moving on was an act of faith, but it was all he had. He needed to trust himself. Even a quick look around revealed no obvious place to connect the wires he was dragging while paying out slack behind himself. If I’d found it already, I’d have known it. Which means it must be ahead of me. I have to believe that.
Two minutes of half-blind staggering later, he found what he had come for.
It was an open door that led to a circular chamber with a recessed center. Stairs led down into the concavity, to a singular round panel that dwelled there, apart from all the others. Certain this must be his destination, Ilucci weaved and blundered toward it. He navigated the first two steps of its staircase with uncertainty before pitching head-first the rest of the way down.
At the bottom he found himself in a tangled heap. Ferric, salty warmth on his lower lip made him sleeve it dry, only to see a crimson bloodstain mar the arm of his jumpsuit.
He used a nearby console to pull himself to his feet. Then he lurched toward the round console in the center of the lowest level of the peculiar room. The alien characters inscribed on the panel meant nothing to him, but he recognized the shapes of its inputs as the female access ports for the assorted male connectors on the cables snaked around his left arm.
Bingo.
In exaggerated motions he unwound the cables from his arm. Lifting each plug one at a time, he guided them into their respective receiver ports on the round console. After the last of the cables was firmly attached, he reached back to the pocket on his jumpsuit’s waistband and pulled out his communicator. He tried to open its antenna grille with a flick of his wrist, only to drop the device. He crawled across the floor in pursuit of it, then pried open its grille with fumbling sausage-fingers before opening a channel. “Ulicci . . . I mean . . . Ilucci to Hesh.”
The science officer’s voice was loud and sharp through the tiny device’s speaker. “Go ahead, Master Chief.”
“Hooked up. Good to go.”
“Understood. I will notify Crewman Torvin. But I urge you to expedite your retreat from the sublevel, Master Chief. We need to force the shutdown in less than four minutes, and there could be severe side effects inside the accelerator ring.”
“Don’t worry ’bout me,” Ilucci said, slurring his words like a drunk. “Just do it!”
“But if you’re still on the sublevel when it purges its charge—”
“I’ll be clear, just get it done.”
“Aye, Master Chief. See you on the ship. Hesh out.”
Ilucci closed his communicator and tottered toward the stairs to the exit.
He tripped over the first step and landed face-down.
Suddenly, the path back to safety looked a good deal longer than he’d expected.
• • •
Considering the Sagittarius was parked on a solid Class-M planet, the mayhem that possessed its master systems display in main engineering left Cahow speechless. Every duotronic switch in the ship was overwhelmed by the data feed from the dark energy lab. The Austarans had coupled their data- and power-transfer protocols, probably to facilitate easy hot-swapping of replacement components and stations. The result was a signal muddled with a flood of raw energy, one the ship’s data network wasn’t designed to filter out, and that couldn’t be separated from the information portion of the signal in the scant minutes they had to finish this task.
Relays were burning out all over the ship. Warning lights flashed on the board for the main computer core. Cahow keyed in cross-circuit commands to distribute the load, but the errors multiplied faster than she could improvise solutions.
There’s got to be something I can do. Some way to keep it from frying the computer.
She heard shuffling steps on the deck behind her. A quick turn and she faced Threx, whose face had paled because of blood loss. Despite looking a lot like a bearded corpse, he forced a smile. “What’s the word, K?”
“The usual. Everything’s broken and we’ve got four minutes to live.”
“Plenty of time.” He slumped against the bulkhead. “Spell it out.”
She pointed from one redlining gauge to another. “Data feed from the complex comes with phantom power. As in, a flood of it. We’ve got burnouts galore.” She nodded at the board for the computer core. “Circuits are tripping like crazy. If we don’t rein this in, we’ll lose the core—which we need to simulate a master control node for the complex.”
He grunted. “Can’t we filter out the phantom power with an adapter?”
“No time and not enough parts. Plus we’d need a whole new load of firmware, since they bundle power and signal. For now, proceed on the assumption the two are welded together.”
“Inconvenient, but okay.” He blinked at the board, then squinted, apparently due to difficulty focusing his eyes.
Noting his struggle for visual acuity, Cahow asked, “Should you be out of sickbay?”
The hulking, hairy senior engineer’s mate grumped, “I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked you. If I tell Doctor Babitz you’re up here—”
“She’ll call me ‘a stubborn Denobulan pain in the ass,’ just like she did when I walked out of there.” After a moment, he added, “Okay, limped out of there.”
A flurry of new alerts marched across the display. Cahow suppressed her impulse to shoo him away. “Putting aside your poor medical judgment, any ideas what to do about this?”
“Not yet.” Another hard squint. “How hot is that signal from the complex?”
Cahow pointed at a gauge that showed the minor fluctuations in the power load over the data line. “Hot enough to melt its way through our safety buffers in the next minute.”
“Yeah, that’s not good. They’re like corks holding back an ocean.”
“Exactly. So how do we fix it?”
His eyes fluttered closed, and his head drooped forward.
“Threx!” Her shout snapped him back to a state of forced alertness. “You okay?”
“Nothin’ a shot of vivicin wouldn’t fix. Or maybe a cup of the Master Chief’s java.”
“Tell me about—” The idea struck her fully formed. “That’s it! The safeties are burning up because we’re trying to throttle the phantom power load. If we want to protect the core, we need to balance the load, not block it!”
The brawny engineer looked worried. “Do I want to know what you’re planning?”
She was already throwing switches and reconfiguring the capacitors and buffers around the computer core. “We can’t get a clean signal from the complex, or send it one it can use, unless we operate on its level. Instead of trying to strip the phantom power from the feed, we need to increase the power level inside our core to match it, or at least get as close to it as we can. And we need to send back our commands with the same power behind them.”
With her right hand she increased the power output from the impulse core, and with her left she recalibrated the subspace coil inside the computer core to absorb the excess input energy. In between steps she shot a pointed look at Threx. “You gonna lend a hand?”
“I’m not sure I can lift a hand, much less lend one.”
“Then shuffle to your left and stop blocking my light. I have work to do.”
He would have been within his rights to cite her for insubordination, but all he did was chuckle. “Is that any way to talk to your superior?”
“No, but luckily for me, Master Chief’s not here.”
Threx laughed until a hacking cough made him stop. “And have you considered the possibility that pushing that
much juice through the core might melt it down?”
“Sure I did. But since the alternative is certain death, I’m doing it anyway.”
“Huh.” A shrug and a nod. “Works for me.”
• • •
Surrounded by timers counting down, sensor readouts showing the distortion field ramping up, and system displays reporting the data link between the Sagittarius and the dark energy complex as “incomplete due to signal error,” Hesh felt as if he stood in the center of a storm no one else could perceive. He wanted to snap out orders like the captain, or demand updates like the first officer, but it wasn’t his place to harangue others. His job was to configure and operate the virtual master console for the complex, but until everyone else finished their work, his task would remain halted two steps shy of completion.
Doctor Kavalas paced behind him, his scaly green hands pressed against the side of his head, as if he feared it might swell and pop from anxiety. Whatever he was mumbling, the ship’s universal translator apparently wasn’t hearing it clearly enough to attempt to parse it.
He looked over his shoulder at Kavalas. “Be still, Doctor. Pacing will neither expedite our peers’ efforts nor facilitate our own.”
The normally polite-to-a-fault Austaran glared at Hesh. “My planet is two minutes away from a point of no return that leads to complete destruction. I pace rather than scream. Accept it.”
It was a compelling argument. Duly corrected, Hesh turned back toward the sensor console—and was elated to see the system diagnostics report that the data link to the complex was fully operational. “Doctor! The engineers have solved the signal problem. We are online.”
“Finally!” Kavalas turned and shouldered his way to Hesh’s side in front of the console. “Show me the master console. We don’t have much time.”
Hesh called up the simulated interface on the display above his station. “I have programmed this panel to trigger the functions of the virtual console. Note that the corresponding control for each function is noted in both our languages.”