Now he leaned toward the access pad by the door and let it read his iris patterns; the door cheeped obediently and opened for him. Will slipped in, waited till the door was secure, and then went over to the freestanding console in the middle of the room and began touching it here and there, activating its linkage into the main “trunk” of the many-branched tree of the new LCARS console coordination system. It was the first implementation of this system on a starship, still experimental and still much too buggy for Scotty’s liking; but one of Enterprise’s jobs in her new incarnation would be to work the bugs out of it so that the rest of Starfleet could get it implemented. Self-configuring control consoles would be worth whatever trouble they cost, once they were up and running.
Will watched the console come alive with bands of color under his hands, in this particular mode indicating the activity in the computer core. They were installing more new memory down there, if they were on schedule—and Will suspected they were. He cleared the console and tapped it to bring up the graphical representation of the areas of the computer which were being worked with at the moment.
It showed him a pie chart representing quiescent memory, memory in use, memory being altered; 45 percent, that last, with quiescent down to 10 at the moment. No kidding they’re busy, Will thought, slightly surprised: this was not exactly a configuration that suggested they were about to start winding down for the night. They must have found something structural that was conflicting with the main system. Maybe even the problem that had been causing the bridge displays to go down. That would make Scotty happy….
Will touched the console again, instructing it to go “one level down” and show him what interactions were taking place inside the machine at the LCARS language level—the actual programming instructions. The console went briefly dark; then a sleet of characters, alphanumerics, and the various specialty symbols that had been added to the LCARS programming languages started running down the panel.
Will squinted at these, waiting for them to start making sense. It was a habit about which Scotty teased him, but then Scotty could read this language as effortlessly as a composer reading a score and hearing the music in his head. Will, though he was growing increasingly fluent in LCARScript, still took a few moments each time before he could start “hearing” the meaning of the instructions. Now he watched the language slide down the console, letting his eyes go a little unfocused, and it all started to make sense. Yes, they were restructuring active memory, more or less from the bottom up: a very elegant construction, this, it could make things run a little faster if they…
Will stopped short. There was at least one instruction there that made no sense at all. That one looked like it would stop a memory implementation dead in its tracks. It would modify everything else that came before it, too. And why would anyone…?
Will swallowed, seeing another pattern run by that he recognized. That was a comms call. The master memory management program was being instructed to wait for a communication from outside the system. One of the other in-ship nodes, perhaps, or something from comms proper, maybe even from the main communications board on the bridge. Yes, that was its “address” inside the Enterprise system. There shouldn’t be any calls like that in normal memory, Will thought. What the heck does this…?
His heart seized inside him.
It’s not like anyone’s going to attack her in Spacedock…
Oh, really?
His first impulse was to go down there with a security detachment—throw whoever was down there at the moment straight into the shiny new brig first, and ask questions later. But Will made himself hold still and just breathe for a moment, and think. What good would that do? We need some questions answered first. Who are they? What have they been doing? For how long! And why?
He smacked the controls harder than necessary, “moving” the readout of the work being done over to one side, and touching the cleared display to bring up a “new instructions” structure. Will was sweating, but it was no longer the cold sweat of fear. He was angry now, a useful state for him, one he could manage and use as fuel for what he needed to do. He ran an inquiry “root” down into another node of the Enterprise’s computer brain, sealing the inquiry to his ID information and iris pattern, and also sealing it away from the work presently being done in the core: to anyone down there, this research would be invisible. Will then called up the personnel information for the Enterprise reconstruction team.
It was a massive list of names and histories, for the man-hours involved in this refit were well up into the millions. Computer crew … The names came up: a hundred thirty-four people of various species, some done with their work, some not yet scheduled to start. The present crew involved in memory installation and structure numbered fifty-four. All of these were officially scheduled off-shift now until 0800 Greenwich, the meridian Enterprise used while in orbit with the spacedock. But the computer recognized that two of the computer crew had not logged off at end of shift; their names turned up bold in the list.
MALIANI, ROBERT, ENSIGN/COMPSPC
DORWINIAN, ELWE, LIEUTENANT/COMPSPC
Will touched their names, and their expanded personnel files came up, with pictures. Maliani was a handsome, high-cheekboned young man, almost certainly of Italian extraction with a name like that; born in Milwaukee, educated in the Sao Paolo suburbs, entered academy in 2365, completed basic three-year matriculation specializing in electronics and computer heuristics, first “apprentice” assignment U.S.S. Intrepid computer refit, “journeyman” assignment U.S.S. Morgarten, new main computer installation, blah, blah, blah … Five or six complex long-term jobs, now, with various commendations, good work reports from previous team leaders and line commanders…
Will smiled grimly. Good work reports, he thought, and noticed a tendency among Maliani’s previous team leaders to commend the ensign for a willingness to do overtime. So that no one will think it unusual when you do it now? … He turned his attention to Darwinian. She was a tall willowy young woman, an Elthan to judge by the short-shorn silvery hair, born on 14 Corvacis, one of the Elthene Affiliate worlds; very good looking, too, with those big oblique golden eyes. She had gone through routine education in an Elthene early-latency program, accelerated acceptance to the secondary/symposial level, then into Starfleet Academy at the minimum acceptance age: completed the three-year matriculation in two and a half years, again with a specialty in heuristics. Then the initial installation on Morgarten, and others on Burundi, Gita, Al-Bulak, Nesvadba … Dorwinian had several commendations of her own, mostly for problem solving in difficult circumstances; otherwise nothing out of the ordinary…
The fact that these two bright young people were here at all was evidence that both had passed the usual Starfleet security checks. But such checks could never be completely exhaustive. Will studied their pictures. Both Maliani and Dorwinian were a bit dark-complected: a Mediterranean olive-skinned look in Maliani’s case, the standard Elthene duskiness in Dorwinian’s. Taken separately, it wouldn’t have meant much. But here were the two of them, together alone, late at night, doing work that Will was finding more suspect by the moment … and the coincidence seemed less coincidental. Cosmetic alteration has its limits, he thought. If you’re going to immerse operatives deep, better disguise them as little as possible….
Assuming I’m right. Let’s find out.
Will swallowed, and hit the comms button. “Sickbay.”
“Doctor Chapel,” she said. “Come on, Will, you promised…”
“It’s not about that,” he said. “I have a question for you.”
Christine caught the tension in his voice immediately. “What’s the matter?”
“How far can that scanner of yours scan?”
“Well, I’m still working on that. But readings get fuzzy around the edges, at distance. Are you not feeling well? I could come down with a normal medical tricorder….”
“No! I don’t want any activity down here yet. I need a reading from where you are.”
“On you?”
“No. The computer crew who’re working late.”
“What’s the matter with them?”
He was sensitive enough to possible charges of paranoia, even with Christine, that he wouldn’t say it out loud yet. “You take a look,” Will said, “and you tell me.”
There was a brief silence at the other end. “Just a moment,” Doctor Chapel said. Will could hear her stepping over to the control console for the bed scanner. “Hmm,” she said then. “Where are they, exactly?”
“Deck 16,” he said, “the computer core. That’s as close as I can tell you at the moment. Don’t try to pinpoint it. Exclude one area: node chamber twelve.”
“Hmm,” she said again. “All right. Hang on.”
More silence. “I see them,” Christine said then. “What did you want to know, specifically?”
“I just want you to look them over.”
“Don’t want to give me a hint?”
“No.”
“You really must begin,” Doctor Chapel said softly, “to trust your chief medical officer. Since I will be doing your physical and mental evaluations for a good long while…”
Will opened his mouth, then closed it again. No, not even after that accurately placed a barb was he going to respond. At the same time, he allowed himself a small grim grin. This woman had spent too much time around McCoy not to have caught something of his management style.
Another pause. “This thing is just about at its maximum range,” Doctor Chapel said. “And they both seem normal enough. One human, from Earth I would guess, not seeing atypical drift in the ‘normal’ temperature. One—Elthan, would it be? Running a little cooler.”
Will’s sweat went cold again. Paranoia … The thought of the irrationality he so feared swept over him and made him shiver. Just a crazy idea … All right, so this one had done no harm. Except to suddenly make you distrust, without reason, two innocent crew members, said that uncertain part of his mind again. How many more times will this happen? How many of your crew will you treat unjustly?
Are you really up to this job? Maybe the suspicious types at Starfleet are right after all….
“Now that’s interesting,” Christine said suddenly.
“What is?” Will could hardly be more interested now.
“A pair of little energy signatures down there,” said Christine, “one associated with each of your people.”
“Translator implants,” Will said.
“No,” said Christine, sounding much more interested … and suddenly sounding suspicious, too. “Not at all. A different frequency.”
Will’s eyes widened. “What are they for?”
“Good question. Each one’s set a little differently. You know, they might—”
“Might what?”
“Ssh.”
He kept himself quiet, though it was hard. “Now that is interesting,” Chapel said softly. “441 hertz…”
“What?”
“The human body ‘broadcasts’ bio—electricity,” Christine said. “Did you know? It’s one of the things our scanners read. Your human down there—”
“Ensign Maliani.”
“He? She?”
“He.”
“I thought so, but I didn’t want to guess … fine structural readings are fuzzy at this range. That little device inside him is broadcasting at 441. Your other one’s at 480; that’s right for an Elthene, but…”
“But if Elthenes broadcast at that frequency naturally…”
“…then why would they need a device to do it?” Christine said. A moment’s pause. “I’m telling my scanner to block those frequencies….”
Silence. Will held his breath.
More silence yet.
“Christine….” he said after a moment.
He heard her breathe out sharply. “465,” she said.
“Not human, then.”
“Neither of them,” Doctor Chapel said, “no.”
“Then what are they?”
“I’ve got to coax this thing, Will,” she said, briefly sounding rather fierce. “Don’t bother me for a moment.”
He held his peace with difficulty. Not human. They had indeed slipped through Starfleet’s safety net. And they had been playing with the most important system on his ship for months. And it took me this long to catch them. The damage they’ve almost certainly done—
“Those little devices,” Christine said, then, surprisingly conversationally, “will be interesting to examine, later. They very effectively fog the genuine vital signs riding underneath them, while substituting different ones, seamlessly, to Fleet-type med scanners. Fascinating…”
It occurred to Decker that McCoy was not the only member of Enterprise’s old crew to which Christine might have been overexposed. “And the real vital signs?” he said.
“Temperatures running around 104. Bone density’s heavy, about 16 percent heavier than human, 19 percent heavier than Elthene. I think I’m seeing trilobal spleens, though I’m not sure. Not that I need to be, when I’m reading cyanoglobin like this.” The humor in her voice was definitely grim now.
“Romulans,” Will whispered.
“They could be mistaken for Vulcans,” Christine said, “by someone less well acquainted with the subtle differences between the two species.” The humor was getting angry. “But they couldn’t have been mistaken for human or Elthene by anyone who actually touched them rather than just running a scanner over them. Damn it, how many of us touch our clients, anymore?—or feel their foreheads to see if they’re running hot? Not enough, it looks like.” That was McCoy’s annoyance, there, well adapted. “Will, stay where you are and I’ll call security.”
“No!” Will said, staring down at the two pictures that looked back at him, slightly smiling, from the console. “Not yet.”
“What? They’re doing God only knows what to the ship’s Computers, and you don’t want to—”
“I don’t want God to be the only one who knows,” Will said. “I want to know too! Christine, this ship has to be ready to go places shortly. To undo whatever they’ve been doing down there, we need to find out what it is.”
“How? They’re not going to tell you.”
“They have to have left traces of what they’ve done in the code.”
“Uh huh. In the clear, do you think?”
“Of course not. And not in English, either…”
“And you read Romulan, do you?”
Will considered for a moment. “There are ways around that,” he said. “Look, your computers are mostly separate from the main system. I want you to wall them off completely except for the connection to this node.”
“All right,” she said, “but you’d better give me a few minutes. I’m still getting the hang of how to do that right.”
“Make sure it’s right this time,” Will said softly, and killed comms for the moment.
The silence was loud, and in it he could hear the whispering. For the moment, though, Will paid no attention. It was not old problems he needed to think about, but a new one, and his own. When I find out what they’re doing—assuming that I can, said one of the less confident voices in the back of his head: he frowned. What do I do with them then? There was always the intelligence officer’s favorite solution to the discovery of an embedded enemy asset: leave it in place, and give it the “mushroom treatment”—keep it in the dark and feed it “unrecycled waste.”
But these two have had the run of any number of starships’ computers now, Will thought. It’s all very well to leave an asset in place when no lives are at risk. This case is different. Too many lives depend on those ships’ computers working … and this one’s. Better to be safe and uproot these two mushrooms right now.
“Captain,” said Christine’s voice.
“Ready.”
“So am I,” said Doctor Chapel. “Double-check the connection from your side.”
Will did. It was secure. “Good,” he said. “I’ll hook into your uni
versal translator system from here when I need it. You’ve got the non-implant version running for the medical beds—”
“Yes, but I’m warning you, the interface is cranky. It still has a lot of trouble with idiom.”
“I don’t think I’ll need it to be six-sigma precise,” Will said. “Wish me luck: I’m going to do some digging around. I may be some while….”
“Are you armed?” Doctor Chapel said.
Will grinned. “The usual number of arms and legs,” he said, “and my brains.”
“Let me know if you need something a little less organic,” Doctor Chapel said. “And I’m watching your pulse.”
“Thanks.” He cut off comms again and turned his attention back to the console.
The amount of data through which he was going to have to sort was daunting: millions of man-hours of code. But he had an advantage. As both captain and senior officer in charge of refit, Will had access to the master code templates which were stored in the spacedock facility’s own master computers, the “original version” of the computer software and memory management routines that were to be loaded into Enterprise and tailored to her. Now he touched the console here and there, opening his accesses to the spacedock computers, leaning close to let the panel see his iris again. He would tell the system to compare the templates against everything currently in Enterprise’s memory, and show him only material that differed from the originals. There would still be massive amounts of it, but from that point he could start narrowing the search….
Will checked the integrity of the wall between his node and the work being done down in the core; then gave the system his instructions, and leaned there on the console to wait for the comparison to finish and display its results. It would take a while.
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 15