by Diane Duane
Now, though, she found herself wishing she were completely mindblind, even though it would have rendered her useless for this mission. Her description of this ship’s gestalt to Picard as “a midden,” Deanna now found, had been an understatement. The only consolation was that there seemed to be fewer minds—a fact that left her uneasy, for reasons she didn’t have time to evaluate just now. No matter: those minds, fewer though they might be, were for the most part horribly vital, and much of that vitality was being spent on a constant flow of malice, wariness, and stifled fury. This, too, was as dreadfully varied as negative emotion was on her own Enterprise—hundreds of combinations, each reflecting its home mind’s preferences and the stimulus of the moment: sullen dislike and discontent and vengeful passion, animosity and envy, broad-based ill will and focused resentment, jealousy and smothered rage—“Name an emotion,” Will would say to her sometimes, teasing. Now Deanna found herself heartily wishing she had just one to name. And this perception was at a distance. Confronted with any one of the people feeling these things, her own perceptions, as always, would narrow down, locking on to the personality at the forefront of her attention, and those presently unfocused feelings would hit her full on, at pressure, like a firehose.
One of them did so now—but it was Geordi’s. “Damn!” he whispered.
“What’s the matter?” Deanna said, glad of the distraction, and ashamed of herself for it.
“I can’t get into the core. Security.” She looked over his shoulder. “See,” Geordi said, pointing at the console. “I can’t even get in far enough to fail out the core. It keeps asking me for an access code.”
“Voice override?”
“That leaves traces, I’d rather not. But…”
He frowned for a moment. “Let’s do this first.” He pulled out the isolinear chip that was in the slot, substituted another. “Computer, copy of present crew roster and nonprotected personnel files to hard medium reader.”
“Chief engineer voiceprint match confirmed,” the computer said. Deanna started, as did Geordi: the voice was male. “Security officer’s clearance required.”
Deanna swallowed. “This is Deanna Troi. Confirm voiceprint and acknowledge clearance.”
“Clearance acknowledged,” the computer said after a second. “Copy in progress.”
It only took a few seconds. “Copy ship’s history and condensed nonclassified Starfleet history to hard medium reader,” Geordi said.
“Security officer’s clearance required,” said the computer.
“Cleared,” Deanna said. “Comply.”
“Voiceprint clearance acknowledged,” the computer said. “Working…”
“I don’t want to do too much more of this,” Geordi muttered. “This kind of request leaves trails, too, if anyone thinks to look for them. Take this.” He pulled the chip out of the read/write device. “And here.” Out of his belt pouch he removed a tiny device that he clipped onto the chip. “Activate that; the transporter in the shuttle’ll pick it up and pass it back to the Enterprise. I don’t like beaming back anything before we’re ready to go ourselves, but this operation already isn’t going according to plan, and they’ve got to get this stuff if nothing else.”
Deanna touched the tiny stud on the clipped-on device, a small flat disc, then she put the chip down on the floor. It vanished in a small patch of glitter.
“Now then,” Geordi said, pulling in a long breath and letting it out as he thought. “I can’t think of any other way around this; we’re going to have to risk it. Computer, read program file ‘Runl’ from hard data reader.”
It cheeped. “Run program ‘Runl.’” It cheeped again. There was a second silence. Geordi looked at Troi, a grin beginning to spread across his face. And then the computer said, “Specified program affects security-sensitive areas. Security officer’s or captain’s authorization required.”
“Authorized,” Deanna said.
“Security officer’s authorization code required,” said the computer.
Troi stared at Geordi. He made a quick cut-his-throat gesture, and Troi said, “Abort run.”
“Aborted,” said the computer.
The smile was gone as if it had never been there. Geordi looked at her thoughtfully. “Do you have a password that you routinely use on your voice-locked files? Most people do—they tend to repeat two or three of them.”
Deanna blinked. “I have four or five. I rotate through them.”
Geordi shook his head. “Too many to chance it. If you try giving this thing a wrong password, it’ll set off alarms all through the system, from the looks of it. At least it does in ours. What it’s going to do in this place—they’re too paranoid here for words.” He made a face. “I don’t see how we can risk it. No. There must be some other way to get into the core.”
The console chirped and a voice said, “Security to Kowalski. Hourly check.”
Troi and Geordi stared at each other. Then Geordi leaned over sideways in his chair, reached underneath the control panel, and swiftly removed a facing: the panel went dead.
“What did you do?” Troi said.
“Killed the main power coupling. Now…” He looked around the tiny room, then back at Troi. “We have to decide how we want to leave this place.”
“You don’t mean beam back—”
“No,” he said, but he glanced over at the crewman whom they had incapacitated. “It had better look like his board failed, and he went to get help.”
Troi swallowed and nodded. “What about us?”
“My guess is that they’re going to have somebody up here in about a minute, maybe a minute and a half,” Geordi said, getting up and heading toward one of the wall panels. He touched it in a couple of places; it obediently fell away, revealing another panel behind it with much incomprehensible engineerese imprinted on it. This, too, he touched, in what looked to Troi like a coded sequence, and it fell away as well. “In,” he said. “Hurry up. Two meters back, the access tunnel bends to the right. A meter and a half past the first bend there’s a long drop, a vertical tunnel with ladder rungs set either side of the access. Go down one. There’s a big red line drawn right around the vertical tunnel, a meter and a half where it meets the access tunnel. When you go down the ladder, make sure your body is below that line, but whatever you do, don’t get your head below it.”
Troi gulped, feeling his fear, and at the same time an odd exhilaration that she didn’t fully understand. She went straight in, headfirst; the access tunnel was small enough that crawling was easier than crouching. Immediately she found the right-hand bend and went on around it; then she came to the drop. There was no more gulping in her when she saw it; her mouth went dry. Heights had never been one of her strong points… and this, this was a height and a half. Down below her yawned a cylindrical pit, smooth-walled, dimly lit with engineering telltales in its walls—at least two hundred feet deep, maybe more. She saw the two sets of projecting ladder rungs, set one on each side of the cylindrical tunnel, leading downward. She saw the red line and wondered what it was about, at the same time feeling a faint buzzing hum that lingered on her skin, like an itch that hadn’t quite started to be an itch yet.
Behind her she could hear soft scrabbling sounds up in the access tunnel: the click of paneling, another set of clicks, then the soft sound of Geordi making his way down to join her. His head peered over the edge to see which set of rungs she was on, and he quickly scrambled down onto the other.
“Not used to closing those from the inside,” Geordi said softly, “but I managed it finally. Remind me to drop a note about an inward-closing utility to the people at Fleet Engineering.”
“Absolutely,” Deanna said. “But won’t this be the first place they look?”
Geordi chuckled as he settled himself in position on the ladder across from hers. “Counselor, do you know there are nineteen computer subprocessors in the bridge?”
“Well, yes, that’s common knowledge; they link to the cores in the primary and secon
dary hulls.”
“Right. Where are they?”
Troi opened her mouth and shut it again.
“Within plain sight,” Geordi said. “Take a guess.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Geordi chuckled very softly. “And neither would anybody else but engineering personnel. They’re in the wall behind the science stations, aft of Worf’s console, between the two turbolifts; but because of its positioning, everybody thinks of that area as just another wall. It’s the commonest thing about life on a starship: everybody but engineering assumes, on a day-to-day basis, that everything that looks like a wall really is a wall. I promise you that the access panels are the last place most people, and even our own security people, would look… and truly they have the odds in their favor looking in other places, simply because it’s so simple to go other places. But the Enterprise is a honeycomb, full of interesting opportunities for people who want to get places without using the corridors… and extremely full of places to hide. There is, of course, one problem: scan for life-signs.”
Deanna let out a long breath. “I was going to mention that.” And she twitched and blinked a little, for that itching, buzzing feeling was getting stronger. It ran up her body to just above her shoulders. She was neck-height to that red line, and the feeling stopped there; but still the faint sound of buzzing was in her ears as well, as if the sensation were trying to ascend higher.
Geordi shook his head and grinned, but the grin had a slight edge to it. “Not down here. We’ve got a whole lot of duranium framing around us, and a ton of superconducted current and optical signal… and a lot of it’s traveling faster than light. We’re down in the subspace field.”
She stared at him. “Is that safe?”
Geordi looked at her with a slight shrug. “I think it’s safer than getting shot with one of those phasers. What do you think?”
She could find no quick answer to that. The surge of Geordi’s own fear was subsiding for the moment: he was in his element, in his own hidey-hole, feeling much better, though still unnerved by how wrong things were going. “And besides,” he said, “I really don’t think they’ll give the room more than a second glance. Our friend is inside the panel, still sleeping the sleep of the just. As long as he doesn’t start snoring, we’ll be fine.”
“But couldn’t they pick him up on a scan?”
Geordi shook his head. “I doubt it. I was being extra careful in our case. But the subspace field puts up such a bloom of bremmstrahlung and other radiation that I doubt whether they’ll get more than the faintest buzz from him, and they’ll probably discount it as artifact from being so close to the core. That’s one of the reasons we keep sensor equipment so far away: you can’t be sure of getting a decent reading if you’re even within thirty or forty meters of an FTL-aided core.”
They stood there, poised above the polished abyss for a long while, it seemed to Troi. Geordi was much calmer now, and the interference made by the sudden upsurge of his emotion had gone off. Troi cast her sensitivities back up the little access passage and into the core room they had vacated.
“What did you do with the console?” she said.
Geordi raised his eyebrows. “I fused a very minor component in one of the packet shunt boards. When it’s checked, it’ll look like a routine time-of-life failure… that component looked like it was about five years old anyway.” He shook his head. “Sloppy maintenance. I’d never leave a part in place that long, at least not one that didn’t have four times that long an estimated active life.”
Deanna made a small amused expression at Geordi’s fastidiousness and went back to what she was doing, listening with all of her. Up above them she felt a faint bloom of concern, confusion, curiosity tinged with suspicion, but not tinged too strongly—well mixed with the sense of someone not particularly caring, the vague satisfaction and relief that there was actually nothing here to respond to. The level of emotion here was consonant with someone who did think that the crewman who had been here really had stepped away briefly because of an equipment failure. “I think it may be all right,” Troi said.
“Yeah,” Geordi said, “for about five minutes. And when they find out that that crewman hasn’t gone for help and isn’t anywhere to be found…”
“What are we going to do with him?”
Geordi shook his head. “I would beam him over to the Enterprise, but I don’t think the captain would thank me for that—and we can’t leave him in the shuttle. And the more beaming around we do, the more likely these people are to notice something, even though the transporter carrier is tuned to match their own. I think the guy’s better left here. He’s got another four or five hours’ snoozing left to him, from what the doctor told me about those doses we’re carrying. I’m more concerned about us at the moment.”
That tingling, buzzing feeling appeared to be trying to wrap itself around Troi’s ears. She shook her head. Her eyes were feeling bleary, too, as if she had just awakened early. She said, “Exactly how long is it safe for us to stay down here?”
Geordi shrugged. “I’ve got two answers for that. The practical one is, ‘Twenty seconds after those guys have gone, it’s safe for us to come out and go somewhere else.’ And as to where, I’ll happily entertain your suggestions. If you’re asking me about the physiological effects of a faster-than-light field on the body…”
“That was what I had in mind.”
Geordi shook his head with a wry expression. “No one’s done double-blind testing, and when there’s heavy maintenance to do, we shut the field down first. But no one’s ever died of it. Fortunately, the body’s software is used to running at one speed—and even when it can run faster, it tends to stay at the old speed, because it tends not to believe that anything faster is possible. Spend too long in the field, and I think possibly your body might start noticing the possibilities, and trying to take advantage of them—with bad effects when the speed drops down to ‘normal’ again. I’ve spent more time down here sometimes than was wise, I think: the headache—” He shook his head. “But that’s why we usually try to keep our heads up out of the field. More sensitive ‘hardware’ than just the motor nerves, and more of it. But if we have to stay down here much longer, don’t try to make any fast moves—you may surprise yourself.”
They waited. After a while Deanna felt the typical “slackening” effect of someone who had decided to give up and try something else; then the attenuation of a mind moving away in space as well as intention. “They’re leaving,” she said.
“Just as well… I was starting to get tired of this.”
They went carefully up the ladders again, hoisted themselves up over the edge of the core cylinder, and sat there for a moment, rubbing their legs and getting their composure back. “You feel all right?” Geordi said.
“My head is buzzing a little, but it’s already less than it was a few seconds ago.”
“Good. I was afraid we might get more of the experience than we wanted.”
Deanna smiled at him. “I guess you’ll just have to write a paper on this.”
“It was that,” he said with a grin, “or write a paper on being dead. Now what?”
“I don’t much like the thought of trying to make our way out through those corridors at the moment. And the shaft-and-access tunnel method is going to take too much time—of which we have very little. I would think it’s going to have to be intraship beaming.”
Geordi nodded. “I agree. We’d better send a note home and tell them so—I agree with Chief O’Brien: I don’t want to use even scrambled communicators unless we absolutely have to.” He picked up an isolinear chip. “This one’s configured for voice. They’ll beam it in and slap it straight into a reader. I’ll flag it to the captain’s attention—the computer will transfer the audio straight to him. Go on, Counselor.”
“Captain, we have a problem…” Succinctly she described their present location and the events of the last twenty minutes. “We need to be beamed away from
here, but not off the ship, unless you feel it necessary. Someplace safe from scan, and preferably someplace where we stand some chance of not being disturbed.”
“Other problems,” Geordi said. Quickly he spelled out their difficulty with getting into the computer core. “The information we need requires voiceprint and authorization codes from the security officer or the captain. The counselor has at best one chance in five of getting the right one without instantly alerting the system, and almost certainly her counterpart as well. But the captain could order the security officer to release those codes… I think.”
Troi looked at him, opened her mouth, and shut it again at what he was suggesting. That Captain Picard should beam over here as well…
“We have no other chance of getting the material we need out of the computer,” Geordi said. “The thing’s security protocols are phenomenal—there are blocks all up and down the line. If you want to pull us out, we’ll come home. But my guess is that once they realize for certain that a crewman has gone missing, they’ll raise their shields, and after that no one will be able to transport in or out. So you’ve got about five minutes to make the call or pull us out of here. Awaiting orders. Out.”
He touched the control on the isolinear pad, put it down: it vanished in transporter effect.
They stared at the spot where it had lain and waited.
Picard was sitting in his ready room—that being as good a place as any to be nervous and keep the fact more or less private. His tea had gone cold, forgotten in the face of the material that the away team had beamed over a short while ago. The sociological and historical analysis teams were already working on it, but he could hardly afford the luxury of waiting to see what they said: he had pulled the Starfleet historical material and was skimming it. Picard was terrified by it, and fascinated at the same time—fascinated by the strangeness of it, terrified that he didn’t know where to set to work on it that would do the most good. The feeling wouldn’t go away that there was some vital piece of information buried in it that would make all the difference to his own ship’s problem. And all the while, the continuing silence of the away team had brought the hair up on the nape of his neck again and again, even though he had ordered it, even though it meant they were still all right.