by David Mack
“Steady as she goes,” Picard said, hoping to project calm.
“Velocity is . . . beyond measure,” Faur replied. Flummoxed, she rolled her eyes at Elfiki. “You might need to invent a new warp-speed scale for this.”
Wesley’s voice was taut with strain. “Just a few more seconds . . .” A blinding blur flared white on the main viewscreen. Then the shrieking of the warp engines faded to silence as the image changed to a brilliant vista packed edge-to-edge with stars. The young Traveler took a deep breath and exhaled with relief. “We’re here.” He entered a few final taps on the console and swung the ship’s bow around to face what had drawn them there.
The mere sight of it chilled Picard to his core. It was all that Wesley had described and more: a planet-sized sphere of metal draped in a tattered shroud of purple vapors flashing with lightning, a black and vile godhead of merciless destruction. Beyond it, artificial wormholes turned like celestial gyres, vomiting planets and stars into the ravenous maw of Abbadon, and as each one twisted shut a new one was torn open from the fabric of space-time to take its place. Scathing flares of raw energy whited out the viewscreen as stars and gas giants were shredded like burning cotton candy in a thresher, adding their mass to Abbadon’s accretion disk.
“Mon dieu.” Picard stood and drifted forward, drawn toward the sheer majesty of the horror. It was an effort to raise his voice enough to be heard. “Lieutenant Elfiki, report.”
“We’re picking up another ship at bearing two-six-six mark five, range three hundred ninety-three kilometers,” she said, studying reports routed to the aft master systems display.
“That’s my ship,” Wesley offered. “The Erithacus. She’s operating on autopilot. I left her here when I went to the Travelers for help.” He looked at Picard. “Can we bring her aboard?”
“Of course.” With a nod to Worf, he delegated the task, and the first officer began a silent coordination with Glinn Dygan via the command console beside his chair. Picard looked back at Elfiki. “What do we have on the Machine and the singularity?”
She moved from one station to the next, compiling her information on the move. “Anomalous readings on the black hole. Starfleet’s records say its confirmed mass was four thousand solar masses. It now registers in excess of twelve thousand solar masses.” Her eyes widened as she spied another screen of data. “Our charts show Abbadon should have an orbiting stellar group—but as Mister Crusher said, it’s gone. Nothing there now but empty space.”
That revelation made Šmrhová shake her head. “So the singularity ate its own cluster.”
Elfiki nodded. “That appears to be the case. But the black hole’s mass has expanded beyond what that would account for. Based on the evidence in hand, I think it’s likely the Machine fed the cluster to it as an appetizer—and now it’s serving up the main course.”
Retina-scorching flashes of red and blue lightning danced through the tattered nebula surrounding the Machine. Half a second slow to block the glare with his hand, Picard blinked away the afterimage. “What are we picking up from the Machine and its cloud?”
“Energy readings are off the scale,” Worf said.
Dygan looked back from ops. “Passive sensors are reading broad-spectrum discharges from the cloud. However, it appears to be a medium for the energy—not its source.” He cast a wary look back at the viewscreen. “That would be the Machine.”
An urgent electronic tone issued from Šmrhová’s console, and she reacted without delay. “A fleet of ships is emerging from one of the artificial wormholes.” She magnified the relevant sector of the image on the main viewscreen, and the swarm of vessels snapped into sharp focus.
Picard squinted at the ships, straining to pick out details. “Do we know who they are?”
“Negative. Hull configurations and power sources aren’t on file.” The security chief looked up. “They appear to be moving into an attack formation against the Machine.” She checked her console. “Looks like they’ve started pinging it with active sensors.”
A flurry of white lightning spat from the indigo clouds around the Machine. The massive bolts of energy ripped through the alien fleet, which erupted into fiery vapors and a slow-spreading stain of smoldering debris. Blackened husks of starships tumbled away into the inescapable embrace of the singularity and its superheated accretion disk.
“Lieutenant Šmrhová,” Picard said, “had any of those vessels raised their shields, charged their weapons, or locked onto the Machine as a target?”
The lithe brunette shook her head. “No, sir.”
Sobered by that realization, Picard spoke up for the entire bridge crew. “Everyone, make sure all sensors remain in passive mode. We must not provoke the Machine in any way.” He moved forward to stand behind the ops and conn stations and lowered his voice. “Glinn Dygan, hail the Machine on all possible frequencies. Make it clear that we come in peace and wish to engage in a diplomatic dialogue.”
“Aye, sir,” Dygan replied. He prepped a generic diplomatic hail and primed the ship’s main array to transmit the message.
Wesley crossed his arms and shook his head. “It doesn’t answer hails.”
“It’s not that we doubt you, Wesley,” Picard said, “but we’re obligated to exhaust all possible means of diplomatic contact before we resort to other means.”
“I know,” Wesley said, his tone freighted with frustration and disappointment.
Šmrhová perked up. “Captain? Not all of the ships we detected were destroyed by the Machine’s response.” She enlarged the image on the viewscreen to reveal a few damaged stragglers slowly navigating out of the tumbling maze of a starship graveyard wrought by the Machine. “As far as I can tell, they all have one thing in common: none of the surviving vessels is armed. The Machine might have ignored them because of that.”
“Good observation,” Worf said. He looked at Wesley. “Your ship is also unarmed.”
“That’s right,” Wesley said.
As the first officer’s eyes lit up with the promise of an idea, Dygan reported over his shoulder, “No answer to our hails, Captain.”
Picard looked at Worf. “Thoughts, Number One?”
Worf replied in a discreet voice. “If the Machine does not fire on unarmed vessels, we could make a detailed reconnaissance by sending a shuttle to scout its surface and interior.”
“Agreed. And it would have the added advantage of keeping the Enterprise at a safe distance while we gather intelligence. But I’m not prepared to gamble the lives of my crew on the goodwill of the Machine.” He looked up and lifted his voice. “Lieutenant Faur, I want you to remote-pilot a shuttle on a recon mission, to gather intelligence about the Machine. Work with Chief Engineer La Forge to prep the shuttle Iacovino for drone deployment. Glinn Dygan, Lieutenant Elfiki, make sure the drone shuttle’s sensors are locked into passive mode. We don’t want to give the Machine any reason to act against us.” The four junior officers acknowledged the orders and set themselves to work with swift and deliberate purpose. Then Picard returned his attention to Worf. “Number One, prepare an away team for a mission to the interior of the Machine. If the drone survives its recon mission and charts a course to the Machine’s core, I want us to be ready to act on that information as quickly as possible.”
“Aye, sir.” Worf turned away to start issuing commands via the panel by his chair, leaving Picard to stare in petrified wonder at the image on the viewscreen.
As he watched in appalled silence, the Machine cast another star, half a dozen planets, and nearly two dozen natural satellites into the black heart of Abbadon.
9
Space was at a premium inside the shuttlecraft Mendel, on account of the bulky EVA suits the away team had donned for the mission to the Machine. Worf’s burly frame was stuffed into the command seat, and security officer Lieutenant Peter Davila sat beside him, piloting the small craft toward the planet-sized metallic behemoth on the other side of the lightning-filled nebula. Packed into the passenger compartment
behind them were Chen, Elfiki, and Taurik.
All five officers had stowed their suits’ helmets near the aft exit ramp to lessen their sensations of claustrophobia during the flight to the alien juggernaut. Chen, however, continued to fidget and frown with discomfort. “Are these suits really necessary?”
Worf furrowed his thick brows as he glanced back at her. “Yes.”
Once it became evident that he had no intention of elaborating upon his answer, Elfiki did so for him. “There’s no atmosphere inside the Machine, Tryss. Without the suits, we’d be stuck inside the shuttle, and we really need to get an up-close look at this thing.”
Chen rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I get that. But why do we have to wear them in here?”
Her complaint attracted a sidelong “you must be joking” stare from Taurik. “A quick visual survey of this shuttle’s interior should be sufficient to answer your question, Lieutenant. Were we not already wearing them, we would not have room for both them and us.”
The outspoken contact specialist remained unsatisfied. “Then why aren’t we in a runabout? The Cumberland has more than enough space for us and the suits.”
“It also has a microtorpedo launcher and two phaser cannons,” Davila said over his shoulder, “either of which would get us blasted to bits by the Machine.”
Chen peeked over Davila’s shoulder at their destination. “Are we sure this is safe?”
“As sure as we can be,” he said.
Worf understood Chen’s concern, but he didn’t want it to taint the mission. “The Machine showed no interest in the remote-piloted shuttle we sent for the recon flight. Nor did it fire on the manned but unarmed alien vessels we tracked from one of the wormholes.” He looked her in the eye, hoping to impart some of his confidence to her. “I have every reason to think it will let us approach and investigate without harm.”
Elfiki rested a gloved hand on Chen’s shoulder. “It’ll be fine, Tryss. You’ll see.”
The half-Vulcan, half-human lieutenant calmed herself with a deep breath. “All right. Sorry I got a bit wound up there. I’ll be okay.” Another breath, and she appeared to relax. “Dina, how close did the recon flight get?”
“It made it almost halfway to the Machine’s core before we started to lose control and had to bring it back. Why?”
“I’d like to have a look at any visual records you made of its interior.”
The science officer picked up a padd from the deck by her feet and almost fumbled it as she passed it to Chen. “It’s all on here. Have a look.”
Outside the shuttle, the shadowy goliath loomed closer as the wispy veil of its nebula parted. Worf strained to discern any weakness in its shell, but found none. He stole a look at Davila’s flight controls. The lieutenant was following the recon flight’s path to the nearest gap in the Machine’s exterior, a kilometers-wide opening that led down into its dark heart.
Then he caught Chen’s reflection on the forward windshield, and he saw her jaw drop. He twisted to look back at her. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure,” Chen said. “But I think I’ve seen something like this before.” Her forehead creased with concentration. “Can I get a data link back to the Enterprise’s computer?”
“Yes,” Worf said. He established an encrypted channel and linked it to the padd Chen was holding. “Ready.”
She worked quickly, and within moments her intensity turned to horror. “Oh, that’s not good,” she muttered. “Very not good.”
“Report,” Worf snapped.
Chen composed herself. “The structures and energy readings from inside the Machine looked familiar, so I ran a pattern analysis against Starfleet’s databanks. There weren’t any exact matches for the overall forms, but when I restricted the analysis to the fractal patterns in its outer layers and the frequency harmonics in its energy transmissions, I found a perfect match.” She handed the padd forward to Worf as she declared, “V’Ger.”
Not sure he’d heard her correctly, he asked, “What is ‘Vejur’?”
Elfiki replied, “The abbreviated name of Voyager VI, a deep-space probe launched from Earth in the late twentieth century.”
“And the star of one of the most important contact missions in Starfleet’s history,” Chen said. “It fell through a wormhole and ended up halfway across the universe and a hundred thousand years in the past.”
Taurik’s face brightened with recollection. “I read about that encounter. The probe had been programmed to gather information and transmit it back to Earth—but it was damaged by its journey through the wormhole.”
“Then it was found by what was believed to be a super-advanced AI machine race,” Chen continued. “They upgraded it so that it could complete what they thought was its assignment: to learn all that was learnable and return that information to its creator.”
Elfiki cut in, “By 2273, it had crossed the universe, absorbing entire star systems into its virtual matrix—some reports said whole galaxies. It traveled inside an energized cloud structure more than two AU in diameter, and its primary vessel was nearly eighty kilometers long.”
“It made it all the way to Earth before Admiral Kirk and the crew of his Enterprise made contact and stopped it from frying the planet,” Chen said.
The junior officers’ report only worsened Worf’s already grim assessment of their situation. “And you think this is V’Ger?”
“No,” Chen said. “But based on its aesthetics and power readings, I’m almost certain it’s a product of the same advanced AI machine culture that modified V’Ger.” She turned a wary eye toward the yawning chasm of darkness into which the shuttlecraft was navigating. “Which means whatever else we do in there, we need to be very careful not to piss this thing off.”
Davila grumbled, “It’s already throwing star systems into a black hole. How much angrier could this thing get?”
Worf grimaced. “I think we do not want to know.”
* * *
Chen’s gaze was riveted on the view through the windshield during the entire descent into the heart of the Machine. The more she saw of its titanic structures and nested geometry, the more certain she became that this mammoth engine of destruction had been created by the AI machine race hinted at in the accounts of V’Ger. Its dizzyingly vast core burned with colossal fires that were as synthetic as the minds that conceived them thousands of millennia ago.
“There,” she said, pointing at a spherical structure suspended at six points between three intersecting and equilaterally spaced shafts of gleaming metal. “That nucleus is probably the control point. Peter, can you set us down just inside that nook over there?”
“I can manage it,” the security officer said as he began the landing protocol.
Worf turned and looked at the rest of the away team. “Helmets on. Prepare to debark.”
Taurik was seated in the last row of the passenger compartment, placing him closest to the crew’s stowed helmets. He passed them forward one at a time; Worf held on to Davila’s while he finished landing the shuttle inside what appeared to be the Machine’s control center. Chen fixed her helmet into place, secured the seals, and then verified the connections on Elfiki’s and Taurik’s suits while they performed the same safety check for her.
The Mendel set down with a soft bump that still startled Chen by virtue of feeling so close. As the shuttlecraft’s engines cycled down with a hum of slowly descending pitch, Worf and Davila donned their helmets and double-checked each other’s pressure seals. A thumbs-up from Elfiki confirmed that she, Chen, and Taurik were ready, so Worf nodded at Davila. “Depressurize the main cabin, then open the aft ramp.”
“Aye, sir.” Davila bled the air from the shuttle’s interior with a tap on the main console.
After a momentary hiss, all Chen heard was the gentle thumping of her heartbeat and the steady tides of her own respiration. Vibrations in the deck alerted her to the opening of the aft ramp, and then she heard Worf’s gruff voice over her helmet’s comm transceiver. “Move
out.”
Taurik led the away team out of the shuttle into the towering open spaces of the Machine’s control core. What had looked so small when viewed in the context of the mechanical leviathan’s staggering internal volume suddenly felt overwhelming when experienced from Chen’s personal vantage point. She activated the compact tricorder built into the left forearm of her suit and checked its display for guidance to a potential interface.
Ahead of her, Davila moved several paces ahead of the group, taking up the point position. He looked up and around, back and forward, searching for signs of danger. “Doesn’t look like we merit a welcoming committee,” he said over the team’s open channel.
“Do not lower your guard,” Worf said, his eyes also roaming the eerie biomechanoid environment. “There is no telling what might provoke the Machine into a violent response.”
“Over here,” Elfiki said. She waved the group toward an exposed section of circuitry and what looked like data ports. “I think this is what we’re looking for.”
The rest of the team converged around Elfiki. Taurik began studying the alien hardware while Worf and Davila faced away from the work to stand lookout. Chen suddenly regretted that the crew’s justified fear of the Machine had led the away team into its center unarmed.
Elfiki leaned toward Taurik. “What do you think? Can you jury-rig an interface?”
“I believe so.” He keyed commands into his forearm tricorder. “This system does not appear to rely on hard-point connections. Rather, it favors wireless interactions. Based on my scans of its transceiver, I think I can isolate its likely range of frequencies and devise a series of test transmissions to seek out compatible signal formats.”
Chen couldn’t resist the urge to tease him. “For future reference, you can just say, ‘Yes, I think we can learn to speak its language.’ ”
He didn’t look the least bit amused by her jibe. “Such an answer would be neither accurate nor informative.” Then, as if he hadn’t just embarrassed her in front of everyone, he returned to his work. “I am attempting to isolate the Machine’s transceiver frequency.”