by David Mack
He closed his eyes.
Seconds later the end seemed, to Soloman, oddly overdue.
He opened his eyes to see the swirling, churning fluid mass of the atmosphere suspended mere centimeters away from him. The radiation alone should have been sufficient to terminate my life processes, he thought. This is quite unusual.
His surprise increased as the torrent of liquid-metallic atmospheric gases slowly withdrew from the confined space, retreating finally to hold its ground outside the gash in the hull. Soloman stared in wonder at this blatant refutation of the laws of physics and fluid dynamics.
The gases outside the rupture became suffused with an amber glow. A double-helical latticework of light descended like a ladder from the semifluid darkness into the narrow crawlspace, where it slowly grew and began to rotate on its vertical axis in front of Soloman. He suddenly felt weightless, and he realized that his freedom of movement had been restored.
The perplexed Bynar studied what, to him, resembled a three-dimensional sculpture of photonic energy. It was built in complex layers, each composed of dozens or even hundreds of tiny, moving beams of light. Some beams were nearly half a meter long; others were as short as a few centimeters and radiated from the longer beams, like branches on a tree. Each horizontal layer contained beams perfectly parallel to those in layers above and below; in some places, two or more horizontal layers were bridged by vertical beams of light.
Soloman marveled at the range of hues he perceived in the double-helix of light as it turned slowly counterclockwise in front of him. He realized the layers were undergoing myriad chromatic shifts too subtle for him to detect in their entirety.
He observed the behavior of the individual layers; watched how they rotated at slightly offset rates; noted how the beams that linked them shifted vertically, some rising, others descending; witnessed scores of individual beams—some nearly as fine as a human hair—fade out of existence while others shimmered randomly into being elsewhere in the lattice….
No, he thought, a sudden flash of understanding taking hold. Not randomly. There is an order to it. He reached out slowly and let his gloved finger pass through the latticework. He felt an electric tingle not unlike the surge he sometimes experienced when making direct neural contact with a powerful computer. This sensation was far less mechanical, but it still had the flavor of an intense, data-rich energy stream.
He drew back his hand and saw that the beams had changed color around the point where he had made contact. Ripples of indigo radiated away in widening concentric circles. He saw complex patterns taking shape in the movement and arrangement of the beams, the patterns of their colors, the tempo with which they changed, appeared, or vanished….
As quickly as it had appeared, the luminescent phenomenon suddenly withdrew, fading into oblivion even as it retreated. Soloman steeled himself for the sudden, catastrophic return of the atmosphere—then was startled by the hum of his pressure suit returning to normal function. Above him, the structural integrity field crackled back into place—still struggling to keep the high-pressure atmosphere at bay, but undeniably once again functioning.
Soloman turned back to the exterior of the Jeffries tube, braced himself, and prepared to cut through with his phaser. He aimed his phaser, then keyed his comm circuit. “Soloman to Gomez. I am preparing to cut through to the Jeffries tube now.”
“Soloman! Are you all right?” Gomez said, her voice pitched with anxiety. “We lost contact. What happened?”
Soloman triggered his phaser and started cutting through to the Jeffries tube. “I will make a full report once I have reached the core, Commander.” He executed the circular phaser-cut with tremendous geometrical precision. “I suspect you will find my report…” He at first resisted the impulse to pun, then gave in to the moment: “Enlightening.”
Chapter
4
“You’re sure it wasn’t a natural occurrence?” Faulwell said. He and Abramowitz had joined Gomez, Hawkins, Robins, Ina, and Wong on the bridge to hear Soloman’s report. “Some primitive crystalline life-forms are known to emit energy in patterns of prime numbers. It fooled more than one deep-space contact team back in the early days.”
“I am quite certain that what I saw was neither random nor natural,” Soloman said. Everyone had strained to hear his voice from Gomez’s combadge until she interplexed the Bynar’s signal to everyone else’s combadges as well. “It did not repeat in simple progressions, but I am certain there was a pattern to its organization.”
“Could it have been a probe?” Ina said.
“It is possible,” Soloman said. “However, when I made contact with it, I—”
“You made contact with it?” Hawkins said in an accusatory tone that Faulwell suspected the goateed young man had inherited from Corsi.
“Only for a moment,” Soloman said. “My impression is that the phenomenon is information-rich…possibly a photonic life-form.”
Faulwell noted a sudden pattern of raised eyebrows making a circuit of the personnel on the bridge. His own imagination raced at the notion of a light-based intelligence. For a moment, he almost forgot the da Vinci’s current predicament. Gomez, apparently, had not.
“Soloman, is the main core back online yet?” Gomez said.
“I am completing the patch-in now, Commander,” Soloman said. “Powering up the core in nine seconds.”
Wong drummed his fingers on his now-repaired helm console. “Maybe it’s a kind of living computer program,” the young conn officer said. “A kind of advanced optical matrix.”
“Perhaps,” Soloman said, although he clearly did not endorse the idea fully.
“Computer program, photonic life-form, alien superweapon,” Abramowitz said. “What’s it doing here, inside a gas giant?”
Robins frowned and looked up from her arms, which she held folded across her chest. “And did Starfleet know about it before it scheduled the Wildfire test down here?”
“Of course not,” Ina said. “Starfleet wouldn’t—”
“We don’t know what Starfleet would and wouldn’t do,” Abramowitz said. “For all we know, this thing was Wildfire’s real target all along.”
“That’s highly unlikely,” Gomez said.
“If I might interrupt,” Soloman said. “I have rebooted the core and established manual control. I am disabling the phaser generator security lockouts now.”
“Good work,” Gomez said. “Notify Duffy and Conlon when you’re done.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Until now, every encounter with this phenomenon has centered around the Wildfire device, yes?” Faulwell said, thinking aloud. “What if this energy we’ve encountered is sentient? Could it have been acting in self-defense?”
“I think we’re getting a bit ahead of the game, here, Bart,” Gomez said.
“Commander, if he’s right, then this…” Hawkins let the statement hang fire while he searched for the right word. He gave up and continued. “Whatever it is, it might’ve destroyed the Orion on purpose.”
“Okay, we have lots of theories and no facts,” Gomez said. “But right now our first priority is to stay alive, then to restore power. Further debate on this topic can wait.”
“Just one more thing, Commander,” Faulwell said. Gomez looked at him with a glare that he interpreted as, This had better be good. “If we determine that what we’ve encountered is an intelligent life-form that lives in this planet’s atmosphere, the Wildfire device must not be allowed to detonate.”
Gomez nodded slowly. “I agree. But right now, we don’t have the capability—or the time—to find and defuse the warhead. One thing at a time, Bart.”
Faulwell nodded his understanding. Gomez turned back toward the group as a whole. “We’ll be rerouting phaser power to the integrity field in a few moments,” she said. “Report to your stations and stand by. If there’s a burnout I want it contained, pronto.”
Everyone snapped to and exited the bridge, with the exception of Ina and Wong, who
took their seats at ops and conn. Faulwell followed the group into the corridor, picked up a tool kit, and moved quickly to his duty station. He eyed the items in the kit as he walked and frowned. I don’t know what half these things are, never mind how to use them, he thought. I hope I don’t have to fix anything by myself, or we’re all dead for sure.
* * *
Duffy was going crazy trying to ignore the itch between his shoulder blades. He was anxious to secure main engineering so he could remove his pressure suit and scratch the spot raw.
He and Stevens stood next to P8, off to one side of the door to main engineering, while Conlon operated the extractor that was pumping the superheated atmospheric fluids out of the compartment beyond. The extractor was close to breaking down because they had forced it to work past all its rated design specifications in order to clear a path, one sealed-and-flooded section at a time, down to main engineering. Fortunately, the remote station for closing the outer bulkhead of the now-empty warp core shaft had been intact, and its display indicated the core-shaft bulkhead had been successfully closed. Assuming the system wasn’t one giant malfunction, that one bit of good luck meant they might have a chance to restore partial operations in main engineering.
Duffy winced as Gomez’s voice squawked loudly inside his pressure suit’s helmet: “Gomez to Duffy.”
He lowered the gain on his transceiver and replied.
“Duffy here.”
“Phaser generators have been rerouted to the integrity field. How’re you doing down there?”
“We’re almost in,” he said. “Stand by.”
The extractor whined as its magnetic constrictor overheated for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes. Conlon decreased the extractor’s setting and looked pleadingly over her shoulder at Stevens. “Little help?” she said through her pressure suit’s fritzing comm. Stevens stepped over, affixed his liquid-nitrogen canister to the machine’s auxiliary coolant valve, and opened the nozzle.
“I’m running low here,” Stevens said, his comm signal fading in and out. “Make it count.” Conlon monitored the thermal gauge for a few seconds more, then returned the machine to full power. The throbbing hum echoed off the close—and now eerily molten-smooth—corridor walls. Duffy keyed his private comm circuit and subtly gestured to P8 to do the same. The short, insectoid structural engineer leaned forward slightly toward him, her body language equivalent of a nod.
“How badly would you say the interior structure’s been compromised in flooded areas?” Duffy said. P8 looked around and studied the walls, ceiling, and deck.
“We’ll probably lose most of the outer sections once the integrity field drops below forty percent,” P8 said. “After that, these bulkheads will fold like paper.”
“And main engineering will be cut off,” Duffy said.
“No, destroyed,” P8 said. “Unless we reinforce the compartment’s outer walls from the inside.”
“Congrats, Pattie. You just volunteered for that.”
“I figured as much.”
P8 and Duffy reset their comms to the main channel as Conlon switched off the extractor. She detached the nozzle from the emergency pump valve. “Here’s hoping the core-shaft bulkhead holds,” Conlon said, checking her tricorder readings of the main engineering compartment. “Ready to proceed.”
Duffy wedged a lever between the two halves of the sliding door, which had been partially fused shut by the molten metallic hydrogen. Stevens readied himself at the door’s manual-release lever. Conlon and P8 moved back to the emergency bulkhead lever ten meters down the corridor, in case this all turned out to be a big mistake.
Stevens and Duffy forced open the door. Duffy peeked around the corner as Stevens shone his wrist beacon inside.
Duffy squinted, trying to discern shapes through the wavy lines of heat radiation rising off the deck and walls. Main engineering looked mostly intact, except that any nonduranium surface or component had been completely vaporized. Essentially, the room had been reduced to a shell.
Stevens sprayed a cloud of liquid nitrogen across the deck and nearby surfaces. Duffy monitored the temperature changes with his tricorder, then stepped inside as soon as the deck was safe to walk on with the limited protection of the radiation-shielded pressure suits.
You have got to be kidding me, Duffy thought grimly as he surveyed the damage. Stevens, Blue, and Conlon edged into the room behind him. Duffy keyed his suit’s open comm channel.
“Duffy to Gomez.”
“Go ahead,” Gomez said.
“Main engineering’s secure, but I don’t think it’ll be much use. It’s gutted down to spaceframe.”
“Are any of the key systems intact?”
Duffy looked around at the smooth, featureless walls. “Hard to tell. Computers’re gone, consoles, everything. Core shaft is sealed.” He glanced at P8 and pointed toward the deck. “I’ll have Pattie go below to check antimatter containment.” P8 moved off quickly to find an access hatch to the main engineering sublevels. “Fabe and I’ll see if any of the spare-parts bays are intact. Maybe we can jury-rig you an engineering console.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Just one catch.”
“Wouldn’t be a day in Starfleet without a catch,” Gomez said.
“Sonnie, the impulse reactors are ruptured and the warp core’s gone—I mean, literally, gone. And there’s no way we’re getting outta this gravity well on battery power.”
“So what’s the problem?” Gomez deadpanned. “Don’t you have a so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan for just such an occasion?”
Duffy snorted, happy to volley the gallows humor right back at her. “Don’t you?”
If only this were a laughing matter, he thought as he stared down the empty warp core shaft to see a featureless bulkhead plate where the ventral magnetic injectors should have been.
* * *
Soloman worked quietly and efficiently, despite his growing concern regarding the state of the da Vinci’s main computer. When he and 111 had first reported to the da Vinci as civilian observers, they had begun to make many direct interfaces with this system. When 111 died and Soloman relinquished his designation of 110 rather than rebond with another Bynar, he had enlisted in Starfleet, stayed on the da Vinci, and continued that program of general upgrading to the ship’s computer. He felt he had formed a bond of mutual understanding with the complex computer. Its heuristic networks, anticipatory subroutines, and state-of-the-art interface persona made it as real an entity to Soloman as any of his organic crewmates.
Now, the entire system was disoriented. Input nodes had been cut off, and power surges had crippled key backup circuits. Compounding the tragedy, Soloman realized that physical damage to the sickbay computers had prevented the main computer from initiating a protective backup of the Emergency Medical Hologram’s enormous memory database. Years of interactive learning for the EMH’s AI had been irretrievably lost.
For the Bynar, this was like seeing a brilliant friend and colleague reduced to a state of dementia.
He isolated the sensor protocols and ran a fast diagnostic. The software seemed uncorrupted, as did the sensor log database. However, without at least auxiliary power to the ship’s sensor network, he would be unable to confirm whether any of the ship’s vast array of detection devices were still operable.
He analyzed the sensor logs to verify their last recorded data point. He was encouraged to find the database had recorded a significant amount of data during the moment of impact by the Orion, and in the critical minutes that followed. The ventral sensor relays had failed on impact, and other sensor failures had cascaded outward from the point of impact as sections were breached, bulkheads collapsed, and power reserves failed.
Now that Stevens and Duffy had rerouted power from the phaser generators, Soloman had sufficient power to perform basic computer operations. But even with the auxiliary generators back online, Soloman knew it would not be enough. There would be no escape from the atmosphe
re without main or impulse power.
He replayed the visual sensor log and winced as he watched the Orion’s primary hull smash against the belly of the da Vinci. The Orion’s primary hull, already stressed to its limits, shattered and crumpled inward even as it ripped open the da Vinci’s underside from fore to aft. A cloud of wreckage torn loose from the two ships was swept up by the swift-moving atmospheric currents and swallowed alongside the vessels by a thermal vortex. The visual record distorted and degenerated into static as the two ships were pulled down together toward the lightless, crushing core of Galvan VI.
Soloman replayed the sequence again, from the collision to the end of the file. He checked its final seconds, and confirmed he was seeing the image correctly and not indulging in an irrational human behavior known as “wishful thinking.” He paused the image on a blurred silhouette of the Orion’s shattered hull and keyed his suit’s comm. “Soloman to Commander Gomez. I have information you need to see immediately.”
* * *
Ina watched P8 toggle the switches on her tricorder, which, using a few old tricks and some spare ODN cable, the Nasat had connected to one of the bridge’s science station viewscreens. Ina wrinkled her ridged Bajoran nose at the stench of death that permeated the bridge. There had been no time to remove McAllan’s body—or Gold’s hand—from beneath the mound of duranium in the center of the bridge. The odor of decay was growing worse with each passing minute and was aggravated by the heat.
P8 pointed out details from several enhanced images Soloman had transmitted to her from the da Vinci’s visual sensor logs. The images detailed moments from its collision with the Orion. Gomez and Duffy stood together opposite Ina and listened to P8, whose spiel was peppered with clicks, whistles, and other telltale signs of her heightened anxiety. “As you can see here,” P8 said, “Orion’s primary hull struck our ventral hull at an oblique angle. The force of impact crushed most of the Orion’s saucer, which had already been weakened from damage it sustained in the atmosphere. That was our first lucky break—”