Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis

by James Swallow

  “I’m touched, sir, really.” She managed a slight smile, concealing a wince of pain from her still-aching neck muscles.

  A two-tone ping sounded from the door, and Riker called out. “Come in.”

  The door hissed open to admit Deanna Troi. “Christine?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be in sickbay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Troi gave her a look that made it clear she knew that wasn’t the whole truth, but she had been a counselor and a Starfleet officer long enough to know that sometimes bed rest was the last thing a person needed.

  “Do we have a problem?” Riker asked.

  “That all depends,” said Troi, “on what we have onboard.”

  The captain nodded. “Where’s the device now?”

  “Cybernetics lab, Deck Ten. Lieutenant Sethe and Specialist Chaka are down there right now with Ensign Dakal, giving it the once-over.”

  Riker touched an inset keypad on his desk, and the ghostly pane of a holographic screen appeared. A live sensor feed from the lab showed a graphic of the alien module secured in a gantry made of silver tubes. Readings were streaming in as data probes attached to the device’s casing gave their first outputs.

  The captain’s jaw stiffened, and Vale saw Troi shoot her husband a glance. “Remind you of anything?” he said in a low voice.

  “I’ll admit there are some superficial visual similarities,” said the other woman.

  “Borg.” When Vale said the name, it was as if the temperature in the ready room fell ten degrees.

  “Yes.” Riker folded his arms, his eyes narrowing. “Are we certain—?”

  “We’re certain,” Vale said firmly, telling herself she was right. “It’s not them. Not even some sort of variant or splinter group. The commander is correct. There are some similarities, but that’s as far as it goes.” She pointed at the object on the screen. “That’s about as close to Borg tech as I am to a Klingon. Vaguely the same, but that’s all.”

  “Will, we should make sure the crew knows that.” Troi’s dark eyes were serious. “Everyone’s feeling the same thing you are.”

  “And what would that be?” He turned to his wife. “A gut fear?” Along with every other ship in Starfleet—and many more beyond it—months earlier, the Titan had been part of the forces ranged against the largest Borg attack the Alpha quadrant had ever seen, with thousands of cubes storming in via transwarp corridors to cut a path of destruction across the galaxy. It had been the actions of Riker’s crew, in concert with those of the Enterprise, the Aventine, and even the captain of the time-lost Columbia NX-02, that had finally led to the end of the Borg threat forever. The cyborgs had met their destiny at the hands of the Caeliar, the alien race that had unwittingly created them millennia ago. “It’s been months since the fall of the Collective, and yet here I am. The first shadow of something that looks like them, and I’m worried.”

  “That’s not fear,” noted Vale. “That’s prudence. I mean, how many times have we been burned by the Borg queen, how many people have we lost to them over the years? It’s right to be wary.” She shook her head. “I thought the same thing when I boarded that wreck.”

  “News travels fast,” said Troi. “It’s an anxiety the whole crew is experiencing.” She shook her head. “The wounds from that last confrontation at Axion… they’re still close to the surface.”

  Vale felt a sudden pang of sympathy for Troi. When that monstrous moment had come, when the Borg had been massing to destroy them all, it was Deanna who had been forced to hear the screams of their tortured psyches. The other woman must have sensed it, and she glanced at her, gave a wan smile.

  “Well, any hearsay ends right this minute,” Riker snapped, shrugging off his moment of introspection. “I want my people focused on the task at hand. Frankly, I’ll be happy if I never have to hear the word ‘Borg’ again as long as I live.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Vale agreed with feeling.

  “If I could think of a more polite way of expressing it, I would do so.” The tentacular fronds on either side of K’Chak’!’op’s broad head moved in lazy flicks; the locator modules on their tips translated the gestural movements into language, combining it with the snaps and ticks of the big arthropod’s mouth parts to let the vocoder unit around her neck reply in Standard. “You are completely wrong. Sir.” She acknowledged his rank as a sort of afterthought.

  Zurin Dakal sighed as it became clear that the interchange wasn’t going to conclude anytime soon.

  Chaka—as the Pak’shree was known—stood vertically, her segmented body taking up a large space in the compact cybernetics lab, making it near impossible to move around her without a mannerly dance of excuse me’s and do you mind’s. Her dark, gemlike eyes were all set on Lieutenant Sethe, who was as far away from her as he could get and still be in the same room.

  For his part, Sethe stood with his arms folded across his chest, his pallid face rigid, golden eyes narrowed, and stubby tail occasionally twitching. He glared at a padd in his hand, as if it were the device’s fault that the Pak’shree disagreed with him. “Your opinion is noted, Specialist,” he replied, putting acid emphasis on her rank.

  She didn’t notice. “But it’s good that you’re thinking in the right direction. It’s really quite clever of you.”

  Zurin wondered if the patronizing tone of voice generated by Chaka’s translator module was just some peculiarity of its programming or if it was accurately expressing her mannerisms in the closest way it could. Whatever the answer, the sharp snap of Sethe’s tail showed that the lieutenant wasn’t impressed by it. The disagreement had spun out of Sethe’s initial reading of Peya Fell’s tricorder scans, the analysis of the device they had recovered from the alien wreck. While Chaka had opined that the nexus core appeared to operate on a framework similar to duotronic technology, Sethe’s first thought was that it was a bubble-memory system. The Pak’shree argued that duotronic tech was much more resilient and therefore much more likely to be used by a spacegoing species, but she did her viewpoint no favors by talking down to the Cygnian and utterly ignoring the fact that he was her superior officer. Not that Sethe himself helped matters; in his own way, the officer was also quite idiosyncratic.

  Sethe shot Zurin a look. “Ensign, prepare a phased-array probe.” He approached the block of alien systemry, watching the dull pattern of firelight inside. “If we can make a process gate here—”

  “That’s a foolish thing to do,” brayed the Pak’shree. “More study is required to confirm that I am right and you are wrong.”

  The Cygnian drew himself up to his full height, attempting to look the bulky arthropod in the eyes. He tapped the gold pips on his collar. “Do you know what these mean?”

  “It’s your rank, Lieutenant,” Chaka said brightly, as if she were explaining something to a rather dull child.

  “And do you know what it means?” he repeated, his face gaining a little yellow and his tone rising. “It means I am in charge!”

  “Of course you are,” she responded soothingly. “But you are being rather impulsive. It’s very male.”

  Zurin sighed. That was a poor choice of reply, the Cardassian told himself. Over the months he had been serving aboard the Titan, he had grown to disregard the slightly condescending manner Chaka showed toward any beings who weren’t female. He didn’t take it personally; on the Pak’shree homeworld, the natives were born sexless, then became male after puberty before finally evolving into a final, female form for the remainder of their life-cycle. Masculine-phase Pak’shree were characterized by instinctual behavior patterns that largely revolved around procreating as much as possible. Consequently, a lifetime of living with those kinds of males made it difficult for Chaka to shrug off an almost cellular level of sexism; she simply found it hard to conceive that males of any species could contribute anything intellectual to a situation.

  Zurin was firmly convinced that the only reason Chaka was polite to him was that she had difficulty telling the difference between th
e sexes of some humanoid species and for most of the voyage had thought he was a woman.

  “What,” demanded Sethe, ice forming on the words, “does my gender have to do with anything?”

  “Oh, nothing, I’m sure,” she replied blithely. “Sir. It’s just that I thought you might benefit from a more enlightened female viewpoint.”

  Sethe’s eye twitched. “What are you implying?”

  “Isn’t that the way things are on your homeworld?” said Chaka, turning her tentacle manipulators to work one of the consoles.

  “I left my homeworld to get away from ‘enlightened female viewpoints,’ ” the Cygnian grumbled.

  From what Zurin knew of the planet Cygnet XIV, the world had been an early member of the Federation, noted for its excellence in computer sciences and a strict matriarchy for more than nine centuries. He was no stranger to matriarchs himself. Back on Cardassia Prime, he had grown up under the stern but fair gaze of his great-grandmother Junol, who had run the affairs of the Dakal clan with an iron grip until they had lost her during the Dominion War. But on Cygnet, males were in the minority, and any one of them who wished to progress in that society would have found it a hard road to follow. Sethe had almost certainly been shaped by that experience. Zurin recalled a human expression he had heard Lieutenant Radowski use: The man has a chip on his shoulder.

  Chaka was speaking again, doubtless saying something that would irritate Sethe even further, but all at once, Zurin’s attention was snared by something on the console in front of him. The comparative analysis cycle he set running had ended, and the data was surprising. “I think…” he began. “I think you’re both wrong.”

  The Cygnian and the Pak’shree turned to him. “Is that so?” demanded the lieutenant.

  Zurin’s gray face bobbed in a nod. “This device isn’t duotronic-based, and it’s not bubble-memory technology, either.” He held up a padd, showing them a complex energy-transfer waveform, the decay pattern of old data trails through the alien device’s circuitry. “It’s a tachyon-phase processor.”

  “Unlikely,” chuffed Chaka.

  “I’m compelled to agree,” said Sethe. “That’s highly theoretical, and compared with the level of technology exhibited in other systems aboard the wreck, it simply doesn’t track.”

  “I know!” Zurin said, enthusiasm creeping up on him in a broad grin. “But there it is!” He pressed the padd into Chaka’s manipulators, and Sethe crowded in to take a look. “Isn’t that fascinating?”

  “He might be correct,” the Pak’shree said carefully. “At the very least, it’s worth taking a look. Wouldn’t you say so, sir?”

  Whatever tension had been building in the lab dissipated instantly in the face of a shared intellectual challenge. “I do,” agreed Sethe, a thin smile on his lips. “Let’s get to work.”

  Behind them, the nexus core continued to run itself, the pulse of silent, faint color within it ever changing, never repeating.

  Vale entered stellar cartography and got that same slight giddy sensation she always did, as if she were stepping out into a crow’s nest atop the mast of an ancient sailing vessel; only in here, the sea was made of stars and worlds and nebulae. Resting just outside the gravity envelope of the walkway and control pulpit, Melora Pazlar turned and offered the commander an airy wave. Vale, however, was more interested in the other person in the room.

  “Ensign Fell,” she said firmly. “What are you doing here?”

  The Deltan girl hesitated, gesturing with her tricorder but not speaking. Across her eyes she wore a pair of solar shades, the kind issued to away teams deployed to worlds with bright suns. Vale tried not to frown when she saw the red patch on the ensign’s face from her own phaser shot.

  “I wanted to get my data to Lieutenant Commander Pazlar as soon as possible, ma’am,” Fell managed, after a moment.

  “It’s my understanding that Doctor Ree discharged you on the agreement that you would go back to your quarters and get some rest. In the dark.”

  Melora gave Vale a smirk. “Didn’t Ree say something similar to you, too?” Before she could reply, the Elaysian went on. “Anyway, I dimmed all of the illumination in here. It’s positively romantic.”

  Fell gave Vale an imploring look. “Commander… I haven’t been on a lot of away missions, and I kind of felt like I botched this one a little. I’m just trying to make up for that.”

  “You did fine,” Vale insisted. “If anyone screwed up, it was me.”

  “Great,” said Melora. “Now that we’re certain that you’re both equally bad at your jobs, how about you let me do mine?” She floated away from the podium, and Vale watched her go. The holographic display around them was a sectorwide view of the area around the Titan.

  Vale looked for and found the binary star pair Pazlar had first brought to her attention. Overlaid across it and the space surrounding the cluster were more zones of color—the subspace distortions.

  “Working from the data Peya has here, I’m getting some correlations between the areas of spatial flux and a number of ambient energy traces found on the wreckage. The uniformity between them is very strong.”

  “You’re saying that ship passed through these zones?”

  “Very likely,” noted Fell. “But the trace density is even higher than you would expect from that. It’s more like… like the distortion marked the ship.”

  Melora pointed to the areas one by one, highlighting them with a free-floating cursor. “In abstract, they resemble the fallout zones that occur after a thermonuclear detonation in a planetary atmosphere. But unlike those, there’s no clear pattern of dispersal. Just the vaguest impression of an epicenter.”

  “Let me guess,” said Vale, and she pointed at the double star. “Right there?”

  “Nice to see that electric shock didn’t destroy too many brain cells. Yes, that’s the locus, and we think it might also be the origin of the starship.”

  “All well and good, but I’m not hearing anything about what it was that took a bite out of our derelict friend.”

  Fell’s bald head dipped. “I have nothing for you, Commander. Perhaps if we can decrypt whatever data are inside the device we recovered, we may have a better idea.” She sighed. “All I can say is that deep analysis of the wreck has thrown up more anomalies than answers.”

  “Let’s see if we can do better than that.” Melora worked her virtual console and brought up a skeletal wire-frame graphic of the alien hulk. “Stellar cartography to engineering,” she said to the air.

  After a moment, the firm tones of the Titan’s chief engineer sounded across the chamber. “Melora. We’ve had that conversation about you calling me at the office…”

  “This is a work thing, Xin, don’t flatter yourself,” she retorted. “I’m here with Commander Vale and Ensign Fell. Have you had a look at the data from the derelict yet?”

  “Oh, of course. I cast an eye over it. Patchy, my dear, very patchy. But I was able to make some assumptions based on what still remains of the craft.” Vale heard him clear his throat. “First, we have what appears to be a rather unusual interstellar drive. Based on what I can see, I would believe the craft is capable of reaching FTL velocities below the Warp Five threshold by actually riding the lines of force radiating from ambient subspace shear effects in this sector. Clever but only useful in a zone laced with heavy distortions.”

  “Like this one,” said Vale.

  “Deflector technology is subpar,” he continued with a dismissive sniff. “No apparent life-support systems, nothing that appears to be a mechanism for matter-energy transfer…”

  “No transporters or replicators,” said Fell.

  Vale nodded. “What about weapons systems, Doctor?”

  “Ah, now, there it’s a different matter,” he replied. “As Mister Tuvok noted in his initial scans, there’s evidence of extremely high-powered energetic discharge arrays all over the hull. Omnidirectional channels for antiproton radiation, capable of emitting from almost any point on the ship’
s fuselage! It’s quite remarkable.”

  “No phaser batteries or hard points,” said the commander. “Starfleet Research and Development tried to make that work, but they couldn’t do it. Too much radiation overspill into the ship, too hazardous for the crew.”

  “I’ve saved the best for last, as I always do,” said RaHavreii. “The alien ship’s internal data systems are unlike anything I have seen, outside of prototypes at Utopia Planitia. Believe me when I tell you, the boys and girls at the Daystrom Institute would eat their doctorates for a piece of this. It’s almost an order of magnitude more advanced than Starfleet’s standard shipboard computers.”

  Fell’s hand ran over her hairless scalp. “That vessel is clearly the product of a very different technological society from the United Federation of Planets.”