“This is going to hurt,” she snapped, bringing up her hand phaser. “Close your eyes tight and turn your head.”
“Commander—”
“Do it now, Ensign!”
Fell nodded and did her best to bury her face in the helmet’s padding. Vale pressed her weapon’s emitter to the side of the machine’s casing and thumbed the beam gauge to its narrowest setting. She took a breath and pressed the firing pad.
The brief ray lit the chamber like a flash of lightning, cutting right through the device. Fell screamed in pain as the hard glare stabbed through her eyelids.
The glowing lens darkened, and the claws unlocked. Vale angrily batted the dead machine away and turned Fell’s helmeted head in her hands. “No breach…” she breathed. Gels secreted by the suit’s emergency systems bubbled at the cracks, working to seal them.
Behind her, Dennisar snatched the machine from the air and glowered at it. “Some sort of drone,” he rumbled. “An automatic defense system?”
“Keru to Vale.” The voice was rough with distortion. “Commander? We registered a phaser shot.”
“Wait one,” Vale snapped. “Peya? Peya, are you okay?”
Fell opened her red-rimmed eyes. Her pleasant olive complexion now had an ugly red cast to it, as if she had been sunburned. “I can’t see anything but blurs,” she managed. “It stings…”
“Take my hand.” Vale grabbed her and pulled her toward one of the other conduits, the only one illuminated by a ring of blue panels. “Chief, watch our backs. There’s more of those things in here, and they might come looking for their buddy.”
“Aye,” said the Orion, tossing the machine away and bringing up his weapon.
Vale blew out a breath as they moved into the next tunnel. “Keru? Tell Ensign Dakal that this dead ship isn’t so dead after all.”
The reply that greeted her was only static.
“Commander Vale, please respond.” Keru’s expression darkened as the hiss of interference filled the channel.
Dakal immediately tapped the communicator pad on his chest. “Away team to Shuttlecraft Holiday, do you read us?” The same static boiled back at him. “The radiation?”
“A sudden increase, enough to render our communications inert, at this precise moment?” Meldok’s tone was dismissive. “Extremely unlikely. I believe intrusion countermeasures have been deployed against us.”
The Trill pivoted. “Phasers,” he ordered, drawing his weapon. He pointed in the direction they had come. “Back to the shuttle, double-time.”
“Sir!” Dakal cried out as a fan of steel-colored petals emerged from the conduit walls and came together in an iris, sealing off the passage. He turned to see the same happening ahead of them, but these panels seemed to be malfunctioning, and they moved in fits and starts.
“Forward!” snapped the security officer. “We can’t let them seal us in!”
Dakal pushed off, and Meldok came with him. The ready fear on the engineer’s pallid face was the first emotional response he’d ever seen from the dour Benzite.
Dennisar looked up from the digital chronograph on his suit’s wrist pad and called out to her. “Commander Vale?”
“I’m watching the clock, Chief,” she told him, moving slowly toward the end of the blue-lit conduit.
“I don’t doubt it, ma’am,” said the Orion in a tone that suggested he did. “It’s just that I’m questioning how we’re going to get out of here.” He jerked a thumb toward the hatch that had sealed shut behind them as they left the open chamber where the drone had attacked Ensign Fell.
“One problem at a time,” she retorted. She glanced at the Deltan woman, who moved close by, now connected between Dennisar and Vale by means of a safety tether.
Fell must have sensed her scrutiny. She gave a weak smile. “I think my vision’s coming back. That is, if everything around me is made out of felt—” A chime sounded, and she fumbled with her tricorder. “I reset this to audio mode,” she noted as the machine burbled quietly to her. “It’s reading a coherent energy trace, up ahead, very close.”
Vale checked her own suit’s integral tricorder and saw the same reading. “There’s another compartment.”
Dennisar moved past her, gently pushing her aside. “I’ll go first.”
She followed him into a spherical chamber of similar dimension to the previous one. Vale’s first impression was of a mechanical rendition of a heart, as if some machine artist had reconstructed the impression of an organic being’s internal structure. Her eye was immediately drawn to the center of the chamber, where a stubby drum of dense crystalline circuitry no larger than a cargo pod was leaning at an angle, whiplike connector cables tethering it to the walls in some places, in others hanging free where they had been explosively severed. She imagined the central unit had been knocked askew in its mounting during the attack on the vessel; a pulsing glow of multicolored light issued from it in faint flickers, like a dying candle.
Dennisar pointed up with his phaser, and Vale followed his line of sight. Across what was the “ceiling” from their point of views, another ragged wound was ripped open, a massive cut through the levels of the ship’s hull that went all the way out. Vale saw stars between the fingers of torn metal. Great gray-black scorch marks discolored the intricate machinery, and more debris floated around them in slow clumps.
“Commander.” The chief’s voice held a warning. He was aiming at a familiar flask-shaped object amid the drifts, apparently inert. “There’s a lot of them in here.”
“Right.” The more Vale’s eyes became used to the murk of the chamber, the more she became aware of dozens of the drones, all moving in lazy, silent orbits. “Look sharp.”
Fell was listening intently to her tricorder, the faint synthetic voice of the readout barely registering across her helmet communicator. “I think this may be a core element of the alien ship’s central computer,” she offered. “The scanner says almost all of the command pathways throughout the structure converge on this point.”
Vale let herself fall closer toward the cylindrical construct. Her tricorder presented her with a stream of data that she could interpret only on the most basic of levels—she would be the first to admit that xenotechnology wasn’t her strong suit—but she knew enough to recognize the configuration of a high-density data unit. “Peya’s right,” she said aloud. “Let’s see if we can talk to this thing.” Vale programmed her tricorder to beam an interrogative binary pulse into the cylinder.
“Commander,” said Dennisar in that tone again. “If I could suggest, there’s a way out up there. We could call this mission and return to the Holiday. The ensign needs medical attention, and we need to locate the rest of the team.”
“I’m all right,” said Fell. “Just a little dizzy.”
Vale hesitated on the edge of throwing the Orion a firm counter, but he was right. She was in danger of allowing the annoyance that had been bubbling away inside her ever since the Titan had been sandbanked to push out her better judgment. “Yeah. Maybe so. We’ll fall back to the shuttle and regroup—”
The tricorder buzzed as she was speaking, and a bright white bolt of color suddenly flashed inside the alien module. All around them, in among the debris, scores of blue eye lenses blinked into life.
Vale swore and grabbed her phaser.
• • •
It was a tight fit, but they made it through. Zurin winced as Keru pulled him hard through the closing gap, but then they were through, drifting in the gloom once more.
Meldok spoke after a moment, his face lit by the glow of his tricorder. He seemed ghostly in the dimness. “These subsystems appear to be operated from a unified command authority. I’m detecting a faint path of activation through the main trunks.” He pointed at the thick cables.
“Go on,” said the security chief.
“I believe we’re seeing reflexive behavior. Like the firing of a nerve cluster in a limb or other organic form.”
“The wreck is reacting to irri
tants…” Zurin wondered aloud.
“Some deceased beings do exhibit behavior that suggests life, often for some time after actual brain death,” said Meldok. “I believe this craft parallels that state.”
Keru shook his head slowly. “It’s not that. At least, it’s not all that.”
“I don’t follow you, sir,” said Zurin.
“Something’s been bothering me ever since we ran a scan on this thing, and now I think I know why.” The Trill turned to him, the faint light catching the dark-pigmented spots along the sides of his face and neck. “No extant lifesupport systems. No internal gravity. No crew spaces.” He ticked off the points on his fingers. “Ensign Meldok, have you detected any organic matter since we boarded this hulk?”
The Benzite hesitated. “I… have not.”
“Nothing,” said Keru. “Not even flakes of skin or stray hairs.” He gestured with his own tricorder. “Even after a catastrophic blowout, even if this ship was crewed by vacuum-dwelling blobs of protoplasm, there would be something, right?”
“There would be something,” echoed Zurin. “Some form of organic trace, no matter how small…” He drifted forward, farther down the conduit.
“I’m willing to bet the reason we haven’t found any crew, the reason the Titan couldn’t read any life out here, wasn’t the radiation. It’s because this ship never had living beings aboard in the first place.”
Meldok frowned at the idea. “Robots?”
“I’m wondering if this whole ship isn’t just some huge mechanism, “ said Keru.
“If so,” said Zurin, “I hope we can find a way to access it.” Using the beacon lamp on his wrist, the Cardassian shone the light down toward the end of the tubular tunnel. “Otherwise, without a way to override the central control system, we are trapped.”
Zurin’s torchlight picked out a blank, featureless wall, blocking any further movement through the wrecked starship. With the iris hatch locked shut behind them, there was no path out of their confinement. They had exchanged one trap for another.
The drones converged, darting on little jets of ion thrust, spinning and turning, coming in to englobe them.
Instinctively, the three of them retreated until the core cylinder was at their backs. Dennisar didn’t wait for Vale to give him the order; he pulled the compression phaser rifle to his shoulder and punched out bolt after bolt of yellow energy, blasting apart drones as the units came on, deploying their claw legs.
Vale quickly worked the controls on her hand phaser, widening the beam to a broad setting, strengthening the power output. She aimed into the center of the machine swarm and fired. A fan of light bathed the chamber for a split second, catching a dozen of the drones in its radiance. The machines stuttered and fell into tumbles, their internals fried, some of them colliding with one another.
“Nice shot, boss,” noted the security officer.
“Chews up the charge like you wouldn’t believe, though,” she replied. “One or two more, and I’ll drain it.”
As if to answer her, small hatches flipped open all over the walls, extruding holding cages like the ones she had seen in the other chamber. Each one had a fresh drone in it, and they were coming on-line, activating in a wave of unblinking blue eyes.
Fell was at her back, in a crouch. “I read intensive data transfer from the, uh, core unit,” she said. “Not sure what it’s talking to, though. I don’t think it’s directing the drones…”
“Something is,” said Dennisar, blasting another three machines with a trio of quick shots.
“Can you shut it off?” said Vale. She chanced a look at the alien module. The glow of millisecond-fast operations flickered inside the casing like captured fireflies. “Tell it we’re friendly, beg it for mercy, anything!”
“We should make a break for it,” Dennisar noted. “We let these things bottle us up, they won’t need to kill us. We’ll blow our exposure limit and fry in our suits.”
The commander’s lips curled. “Chief, I appreciate your candor, but could you try to offer a more upbeat opinion in future?”
“I just call them like I see them,” replied the Orion.
“I can’t shut it down.” Frustration was thick in Fell’s voice. “I can’t see properly… if I could just see…”
Vale fired off another wide-beam discharge and glared at the cylinder. Whatever was in there, if it was some kind of intelligence or just a collection of programmed responses driven into defensive mode by the earlier attack, it was going to kill them one way or another unless she could stop it. Her lips thinned, and she pressed her weapon into the ensign’s hand. “Hold this. If anything fuzzy comes too close, blast it.”
“Commander, what are you going to do?”
Vale pushed in and found footholds where she could brace herself. “My mother once told me,” she began, taking purchase on the core module with her gloved hands, “that in some cases, the brute-force approach is the only one that will work.” Vale bent at the knees and yanked hard, pulling with all her might against the damaged frame still holding the kinked module in its support structure. Energy exploded around her, issuing from the still-connected cables and the framework. She felt heat wash over her suit and ignored it, tensing again.
The second time it worked. Already damaged by whatever had put the wreck in such a sorry state to begin with, the support frame fractured and split. There was an abrupt sensation of falling, and Vale was suddenly tumbling away from the center of the chamber, the drumlike nexus core going with her.
Uncontrolled power coruscated around her in a nimbus, and she bellowed in agony. She felt the suit’s built-in medical module nip at her arm as a hypospray shot painkillers into her bloodstream. The deck of the alien chamber rose to meet her, and she bumped into it, banging her head against the inside of her faceplate. Vale’s ears were ringing, and she tasted blood in her mouth.
She blinked owlishly. Her vision was blurry. Ah. This is what Peya meant. An indistinct object drifted close to her, and she batted it away with a jerk of reflex as she belatedly recognized the silhouette of a fluted shape and spindly legs; but it was dead, its eye lens dark.
A tinny voice sounded in her ear. It sounded like Keru. “Commander? Commander Vale, do you read? All of a sudden, the interference shut off. The hatches are retracting. We’re moving back upship. Do you copy this transmission, over?”
Vale tried to speak, but her throat was desert-dry, and all she could manage was a croak. The tingling aftereffect of the energy discharge was making every muscle in her body twitch.
“Copy that, sir,” she heard Dennisar say. “We’re heading to the shuttle. The commander took a shock, but her vitals are steady. She shut down the control core.”
“How did she do that?”
“Not the easy way,” replied the Orion.
THREE
“Usually,” said Riker, pausing at the window in his ready room, “it’s the first officer’s job to prevent a captain from doing things that might be considered foolhardy, not the other way around.”
“I understand thickheaded is the term that Lieutenant Commander Keru used, sir,” offered Vale. She stood at stiff attention in front of his desk. A small gray patch with a pulsing indicator on its surface—a medical module—was attached to her neck. Her hand twitched as she resisted the desire to scratch at it.
“That works, too.” He frowned at the cloud of wreckage off the starboard bow and turned to face her. “Damn it, Chris, what were you thinking? You could have been fried.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice, Captain,” she replied. “The circumstances weren’t exactly favorable to a lengthy, involved process of reasoning.”
“You’re not bulletproof, Commander, none of us is,” he replied. “You took a big risk.”
“Risk is our business,” she noted evenly, and Riker’s lips curled.
“Don’t quote James T. Kirk to me,” he told her. “That trick was old even when I was using it.”
Vale eyed him. “Never w
orked on Captain Picard, either, huh?”
“Nope. And he knew the man.” Riker blew out a breath. “Lucky for you, you made the right call. According to Ensign Meldok, disconnecting that…” He reached for a padd on his desk containing the Benzite’s report. “That ‘nexus core’ caused an immediate shutdown of all of the wreck’s autonomic defense systems.”
“Luck didn’t enter into it, sir,” she replied. Riker studied her gravely, and then she sighed. “Okay, well, maybe a little.”
“Just don’t use any more up on thickheaded spur-of-the-moment stuff like that,” he replied. “I’ve got you broken in nicely. I don’t want to have to replace you with Tuvok and thereby lose a good tactical officer.”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 5