Rosetta

by Dave Stern

  He wondered just how smart it was.

  He wondered if Sen was the only one who could talk to it.

  He got to his feet.

  “Excuse me?”

  No response.

  “I know Governor Sen is probably sleeping, but this is something that maybe the ship’s computer can answer. Computer. Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  “Just a question about how much longer I have to sleep. Computer?”

  Still nothing.

  Archer sighed, and sat back down. It had been a long shot, anyway. Even if the program was able to recognize voice input, Sen probably had it configured to respond to him only—probably keyed to certain specific phrases, or words.

  Forget the computer, the captain decided, though of course he’d have to take it into account no matter what other plans he came up with.

  He yawned involuntarily then, and realized that he needed to sleep as well. But there wasn’t time. A few hours, Sen had said, and then they would be back at it.

  Approach the problem differently, he thought. Clearly, he couldn’t overpower Sen and the computer on his own. He’d need help to do that. Someone outside the ship. Enterprise, ideally, but if not…then someone else. Someone nearby.

  The problem with that approach was that he had no idea where, precisely, they were at the moment. He could take an educated guess; they certainly wouldn’t be headed toward Klingon territory, or back toward the Confederacy, they’d have to be going deeper into the galactic interior, or out toward the rim. Probably the latter, he decided. Who was out in that direction?

  He couldn’t think of anyone at the moment. Still. Assume they were out there, the trick was getting them to come. Getting a signal off, which was clearly possible, because he’d heard Sen talking earlier today…

  He frowned.

  Wait a minute.

  He thought back to what had happened, back when he’d been transporting the Klingon corpses down to the shuttlebay, and he’d paused in the corridor.

  Sen had been talking to someone. A contact back on Procyron, or elsewhere in the sector, he’d thought then. But what if…

  Hmm, he thought. What was that name he’d used again?

  “Roia,” he said out loud, remembering.

  Static hissed.

  “Working,” a voice said.

  Archer smiled.

  “Roia,” he said again. “This is Captain Archer.”

  “Identification confirmed. You are Captain Jonathan Archer, commander Earth ship Enterprise.”

  The captain nodded. “Right I wonder if…”

  He frowned, and thought furiously.

  “…if I could get a drink of water.”

  “Water. First Governor Sen must be awakened for permission to obtain—”

  “No, no, no,” Archer said quickly. “We don’t need to wake the governor. What I was really wondering…I’m having a hard time sleeping, Roia. I wonder if I could talk to you for a little while.”

  “You are talking.”

  “Yes, I know. What I should have said was…I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “Questions.” Archer could almost hear the frown in the computer’s voice. Amazing piece of programming. “Certain subject matter would be prohibited What did you wish to talk about?”

  “Well…” The captain shrugged. “You, for one thing.”

  “You refer to the Roia program?”

  “Yes. I’m curious. What, exactly are you?”

  There was no response for a moment.

  “Is this a prohibited subject?” the captain asked.

  “Negative.”

  “Then…”

  Another pause. Then:

  “This program is a modified version of the Roia-12 matrix. An independent, adaptive, software agent.”

  “Ah. And—where does the name Roia come from? Is it an acronym of some kind?”

  Again, the program hesitated.

  And then it—she—told him.

  An independent, adaptive, intelligent software agent, Archer thought. Which Sen twisted into an avatar of his own warped desires.

  Let’s see, the captain thought, if I can do a little twisting of my own.

  Twenty-Nine

  The Antianna ships kept coming.

  Hundreds of them, so many that Hoshi pictured a factory on the Antianna homeworld, wherever that was, just churning them out, one after another, giant machines spewing forth more machines, that then rocketed off into space.

  All she (and Jaedez, and everyone else on the flagship’s bridge) could do was watch as they assembled, just on the other side of Confederacy territory. If they decided to attack, then the Armada would be destroyed. It was as simple as that.

  But they did nothing.

  Jaedez had ordered the signal—the word, “Antianna”—stopped at least an hour ago. Now he frowned, and turned to Hoshi, and asked if she thought it should be broadcast again.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  If the word really meant what she thought it did—”join”—then sending it again could do no harm. On the other hand, if—as Jaedez had suggested earlier—it had another meaning entirely…

  “Something’s happening.”

  That from one of the bridge personnel, who now looked up from his station and frowned.

  “Ships on the move, sir,” he said to Jaedez.

  The general cursed and strode forward. “Prepare defense stations. Maneuver primary battle cruisers into delta formation. Attack squadrons, at the ready.”

  Hoshi, still seated at the aux station, saw the ships moving too. Correction.

  “Single ship, General.”

  Jaedez spun around, glared at her, and then turned back to the officer who had spoken.

  “Colonel?”

  “Confirm, sir. My mistake. A single Antianna ship, detaching itself from the main fleet.”

  Everyone’s attention went to the viewscreen, where indeed a single ship was moving away from the mass of others surrounding it. Though it was understandable why Jaedez’s officer had made an error in identification.

  The vessel was huge. Twice as big as any other Antianna ship they’d encountered.

  As Hoshi watched, it crept forward toward the Armada, and then, when it reached a point equidistant between the two fleets, stopped.

  And broadcast the word back at them: Antianna.

  “Do we respond sir?” the com officer asked.

  Jaedez frowned.

  “I don’t think we need to repeat ourselves,” Hoshi said before the general could answer. “I think we need to take the next step.”

  “The next step?” the general asked.

  “Yes.”

  Hoshi rose from her seat, and gestured toward the viewscreen.

  “Go out there,” she said, “and meet them.”

  When she said “we,” of course, Hoshi meant herself, but she had no illusions about her relative importance in the larger scheme of things. She expected a long argument from Jaedez after proposing that the ideal envoys would be herself and Elder Green.

  She was surprised when she didn’t get one.

  Instead, Jaedez sent her with one of his officers to a flight simulator, so she could familiarize herself with the control layout of the ship they’d be taking. She made the point that it would take more than a few minutes for her to get comfortable, but the general didn’t seem troubled. So off she went. Green, she was told, was being shuttled over from S-12, and would join her in a moment.

  It took longer than that. Longer than Hoshi expected, and when Green did finally show, she looked a little worse for the wear. Problems, apparently, on her trip over.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Hoshi said.

  “Yes. Just a fainting spell, apparently. I’m fine now.”

  “The doctors looked at you?”

  “Yes, the doctors looked at me,” Green said, and then managed a smile. “I thank you for your concern, Ensign, but if you’re trying to dissuade me from coming
on this mission—you’ll have to do a lot better than that. The descendants of the Barreon…” Green shook her head. “This is—cliché as it may sound—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I have to talk to them.”

  Hoshi had to smile back. She understood entirely.

  The two of them made their way down to the shuttlebay, at which point a lot of things became clear to her.

  The ship they were taking was a military vessel. Much larger than any courier ship she’d ever seen, shaped more like a saucer than anything else, albeit a saucer with multiple weapons turrets, sharp angles, and a relatively large warp coil.

  Standing by the gangplank leading up and into that ship, talking to a single armored warrior, was General Jaedez.

  “Oh no,” Hoshi said angrily, and stalked over to him. “This is a military vessel,” she said.

  Jaedez nodded. “That’s correct.”

  “This is supposed to be a peace mission. We’re,” she gestured toward herself and Green, “supposed to be peace envoys. You send a ship that looks like this, and the Antianna will know…”

  “Will know what? That we do not readily give our trust to an enemy who has killed several hundred of us? That is exactly what I want them to know,” Jaedez said.

  “I’m not firing any weapons,” Hoshi said.

  “You won’t have to.” Jaedez turned to the man he’d been talking to. “You may take your station, Colonel. I will be in contact.”

  “Sir.” The Conani saluted smartly, and then, to Hoshi’s surprise, walked up the gangplank and disappeared inside the ship.

  “No,” Hoshi said. “You can’t put a soldier on the ship, too. That sends the entirely…”

  “There are ten soldiers on the ship, Ensign. There is a specially shielded compartment belowdecks. If all goes well, neither you—nor the Antianna—will ever be aware of their presence.”

  “And if all doesn’t go well? If the Antianna find out they’re down there? That could ruin the mission before it starts. You have to take them off the ship.”

  “The soldiers stay.”

  “General, think about it. What good are ten soldiers going to do…”

  “Ensign,” Jaedez cut her off, “you wish someone else to take your place? Younger Emmen, perhaps?”

  “No. What I want is…”

  “What you want is irrelevant. I decide the mission needs and the personnel that can best fulfill them. I have no second thoughts about the soldiers; if there is trouble, if things do not go as planned, their task is simply to see that Elder Green—and yourself—return safely. That should be easy enough to understand, yes?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “I hear your concerns, Ensign,” Jaedez said. “To a certain extent, I share them. But I have other concerns as well, that override them. Now. You have your orders. Carry them out.”

  Hoshi bit back the words on her tongue, and nodded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked past her then, to Elder Green.

  “Kanthropian. You will keep this one in check, yes?”

  Jaedez said it with a slight smile. Green managed one in return.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good. Good luck then.”

  The general saluted then, and left them on the gangplank.

  Hoshi watched him go a moment, and then took Elder Green’s arm and helped her into the ship.

  The cockpit was built for four, two seats in front, two in the back of the small compartment. She and Elder Green settled themselves into the forward pair. Hoshi found herself looking at a dizzying array of control screens, some whose functions were obvious—com, sensor, helm—some less so. As she reached for the helm controls—Haven’t done this in a long time, she thought—a voice sounded right at her ear.

  “Ensign Sato.”

  She caught Green’s eye and shrugged.

  “Right here.”

  “This is Colonel Diken. We will control helm.”

  Hoshi raised an eyebrow.

  She’d seen no trace of the colonel and his soldiers when she’d entered the ship—she’d pictured them crouched down in some dark, hidden compartment, weapons at the ready—but now she adjusted that image in her mind, visualizing something more akin to Enterprise’s command center. A chamber that big, she thought, the whole ship might have been designed around it. So maybe the shielding was as effective as Jaedez contended, and the Antianna wouldn’t find them either, even if they had cause to search the ship.

  Maybe.

  “All yours,” she told the colonel, and removed her hands from the helm control.

  “Guess we’re just passengers, for the moment,” she said, turning to Elder Green.

  “Indeed.” The Kanthropian smiled weakly, and nodded. Green still didn’t look well to her. Hoshi wanted again to ask how she was doing—actually, what she really wanted to do was suggest that Younger Emmen take her place—but she already had a good idea of how that suggestion would go over. Besides, she suspected Green, no matter the seriousness of her illness, would rise to the occasion. A good thing too—she had no illusions about her competency as a translator relative to Green’s. And speaking of translators…

  Hoshi checked her UT, to make sure that the Barreon language—what they had of the lexicon—had been correctly downloaded into their handhelds. Looked that way to her.

  She felt a tingle of excitement then herself. The Barreon. The Allied Worlds…

  Theera, she thought then, and a tiny bit of apprehension crept into her mind as well.

  “You are cleared for launch,” came the voice in Hoshi’s ear, and at that instant the bay doors opened.

  Thrusters fired, triggered by the soldiers hidden belowdecks, and the little ship surged forward, out into space.

  They took it slowly, even after they’d cleared the last of the Armada ships, and entered what she could only think of as “Antianna space.” The autopilot had them on the rough equivalent of one-third impulse, which put their destination at least ten minutes away.

  Hoshi switched her attention to the companel. The fifty-seven pulses were still coming in, loud and strong. She still had no idea how they related to the message they’d sent, that the Antianna had responded to: Join. Join what?

  The console in front of her beeped.

  Hoshi looked down and saw the terminal in front of her had filled with a line of text.

  Testing. Okay up there?

  Up there. The signal, she realized, was from the colonel, below decks. Testing.

  They were running silent. No internal transmissions for the Antianna to pick up.

  She keyed in a response:

  A-okay. No problems.

  Good. Stand by. Contact in five minutes.

  We will monitor.

  Hoshi signed off too, then, and turned her attention to the viewport, where the Antianna ship was just visible in the distance. The clean lines, the lack of visible weapons structures or sensory apparatus—the image rang a bell with her, and a second later she realized why. It was exactly the same view she’d had from her station on Enterprise, over a week earlier, when they’d been trying to press forward into uncharted space, and the Antianna ship had stood in their way.

  Same view, that is, except that judging from the incoming telemetry, this ship was more than three times the size of that vessel they’d first encountered.

  “Readings indicate the ship is unoccupied,” Green said, a note of puzzlement in her voice, and Hoshi looked to another screen, and saw the Elder was right, their sensor scans were picking up nothing remotely resembling biosigns, just a huge, diffuse energy field.

  “We had this problem on Enterprise too—on my ship. There’s some kind of force-screen that prevents us from getting a clear signal right away. Just wait a minute, and…”

  As if on cue, the telemetry changed.

  “Picking up something now,” Green said.

  “I see it.” A surge of energy aboard the Antianna ship. It looked to her like…

  “The power grid is reconfigu
ring itself,” she said out loud, shaking her head.

  Which was no more possible now than it had been that week and a half ago, when Trip had noted the same thing.

  Hoshi frowned.

  The console directly in front of her came to life.

  Incongruous sensor scans. You?

  She keyed in a response.

  Same. Noted in previous encounters.

  No cause for alarm.

  Just as she sent the message, Green inhaled sharply. At first, Hoshi thought she was in pain.

  “You all right?” she asked, turning quickly.

  Green was staring out the viewport. “I am fine. However…something very unusual has just occurred.”

  She gestured toward the space outside.

  Hoshi followed her gaze, and saw that the Antianna ship—for lack of a better word—had changed.

  There was now a clearly visible sensor array—at least, that was what it looked like to her—projecting from the underside of the vessel.

  “That wasn’t there before,” she said.

  “No. It appeared immediately following the reconfiguration of the power grid.”

  “There must be a bay of some sort on the bottom of the ship. They stow it there, and then lower it as needed.”

  “That makes sense,” Green said. “Although…such deployments, in my experience, usually take a fairly good length of time to complete. On the order of several seconds.”

  In her experience too, Hoshi thought. And this had occurred instantaneously. But…

  What other explanation was there.

  “I think,” Hoshi said, and that was as far as she got, because at that instant three of the screens in front of her began blinking and beeping all at once.

  “Massive power surge aboard the Antianna ship,” Green said.

  Hoshi saw it too. So did the colonel.

  Raising shields.

  She cursed under her breath and keyed in:

  Don’t. They may take that as an act

  of aggression just wait because

  “Allow me,” Elder Green interrupted, and Hoshi nodded and leaned back from the console.

  Colonel Diken wait. This is Elder Green.

  I concur with Ensign Sato do not raise shields

  There was no response for a minute. Then: