Star Trek: Typhon Pact 02: Seize the Fire

by Michael A. Martin

  Dakal felt a hand grasp his arm firmly, restraining him. He opened his eyes to see Modan holding him back. “What?”

  “Wait just a moment,” said the cryptolinguist. “All we know for certain about this . . . thing is that it’s pulsing with energy. What we don’t know is whether it’s actually carrying any information.”

  Dakal scowled. “It certainly looks like an information hub to me. And to my tricorder. Not to mention the scanners aboard the Beiderbecke.”

  “But those readings and the conclusions you’ve drawn from them could just be an artifact of the interference coming from inside the city,” Evesh said.

  Dakal thought he appreciated reasonable caution as much as the next person, but this was beginning to border on the absurd. “Oh, please.”

  Though the Selenean language expert was usually quiet, she was making it clear now that she had no intention of backing down. “Dakal, you might be about to tap into the main power-coupling for the entire city.”

  Dakal allowed himself to sit, splaying his webbed feet out as far as the chamber’s limited space would permit. “All right. Just don’t think I’m going to let you stick an arm or any other body part in there just to see if it’s safe to do it.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Modan said as she drew closer to the sluglike mass, while stopping short of actually touching it. She waved her tricorder just centimeters over the thing’s slime-covered surface.

  “What kind of scan are you running?” Evesh asked, saving Dakal the trouble. “And how can you tell whether or not you’re dealing with a stream of data without actually tapping into it?”

  “I’ve never seen a data conduit that was completely efficient,” Modan said as she studied the device she clutched in her awkward-looking, froggish hands. “There’s always at least a little bit of leakage. The bigger the data stream, the more leakage there is. And I only need a tiny amount of leakage to construct a quick Zipf plot.”

  Dakal frowned. He knew that Zipf plots dealt with a particular probability distribution, one in which the frequency of any point in a data set was inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table.

  “And what does a Zipf plot have to do with Gral’s uppermost right teat?” Evesh said, saving Dakal the trouble.

  Modan blinked several times in holographic-amphibian puzzlement as she continued her scan. “I suppose one might have to have a cryptolinguist’s perspective to see the utility of what I’m doing. Zipf’s Law underpins the basic operation of the universal translator, at least in part.”

  “I thought the UT worked by cross-comparing the vocabularies and grammars of various languages,” Dakal said.

  “It does,” Modan said. “But that isn’t quite the whole story. The UT also looks for raw statistical relationships to which a simple Zipf plot might be applicable. Even before the translator understands a word of a new language, it calculates the relative frequency of word occurrences. The UT’s basic Sato algorithms assume that all natural sentient languages have essentially the same Zipf distribution with regard to the words, phonemes, or pictograms that make them up.”

  “But that rule doesn’t always hold true,” Evesh said.

  Modan assayed a salamanderlike shrug. “Of course not. But it holds up often enough to make a pretty good general rule of thumb. For languages, it works more or less this way: ‘The’ is the most frequently occurring word in Federation Standard and accounts for about seven percent of all word occurrences in that language, so we can place that word in the first rank. ‘Of’ comes in at the second rank, or second most frequent in occurrence, with a percentage frequency of three-and-one-half percent—roughly half the frequency of the first-rank word. And so on and so on, down the list of frequency rankings. Most humanoid languages fall into this pattern, more or less.”

  Dakal thought he was beginning to understand. “It’s a way of determining that an actual language—whether understood or not—is being spoken.”

  “Yes,” Modan said. “As opposed to a bunch of subsentient vocalizations.”

  “So by applying the same formula to whatever is pulsing through this conduit,” Dakal said, gesturing toward the slime-covered bioneural apparatus, “you can distinguish a uniform stream of electrical energy from ordered, information-rich content—without necessarily having to understand that content.”

  “Fortunately, we’ll be able to translate any such content later, once we’re far away from here, provided we can copy it from the source,” Modan said. “But if this conduit is carrying, say, raw electro-plasma system power, it won’t show any such pattern, and therefore will yield nothing but a potentially lethal shock. In that case, the Zipf plot I am compiling will settle in at a value close to zero.”

  “So an active EPS feed would plot out as information-null,” Dakal said. “But if this conduit carried, say, the collected works of Ulan Corac, it would have a Zipf value of one.”

  “More or less,” Modan said, waggling one webbed hand.

  “Faugh,” Evesh said. “Corac is an author that only a universal translator algorithm would find readable.”

  Dakal ignored the jibe, concentrating instead on watching over the Selenean’s shoulders as her tricorder gradually gathered and processed whatever data points it could glean short of Modan risking any physical contact with the hub’s slick surface.

  Modan turned toward Dakal, her thick green holographic lips parting in a broad, blunt-toothed smile. “It appears you were right, Zurin,” she said. “Go ahead and plug in—but do it carefully.”

  The Selenean backed away, giving Dakal full access to the glistening data node. Moving gingerly, he pushed the end of his cable into the pulsating mass; the cable’s end sank into the spongy node with a vaguely nauseating wet sucking sound. Once the cable seemed firmly attached, he activated the storage modules, which immediately began soaking up data at the ragged edge of their maximum rate.

  “Let’s hope I don’t burn anything out,” Dakal said, focusing on the swiftly blinking lights that showed the ferocious speed with which Hranrar’s planetary information stream was filling his data modules. Although the modules were capable of capturing prodigious amounts of data, Dakal noted with melancholy that he could capture at best only a tiny fraction of the planet’s informational output. He knew that what he was gathering was of critical importance, to be sure. It was, after all, part of a unique sapienogenic digital noösphere that might very soon represent the last trace and cultural epitaph of the entire Hranrarii civilization.

  But it was only a very small part. Dakal tried to imagine the fruits of his own civilization being subjected to such a terrible cultural bottleneck, with only the short stories of Ulan Corac surviving in complete form. Galactic scholars might be confined to sheer speculation regarding the significance of Corac’s long-form repetitive epics; The Never-Ending Sacrifice, widely hailed as the finest novel in the history of Cardassian literature, might exist only in fragmentary form, or as a woefully inadequate description in some half-corrupted library index or literary abstract. Even the horrendous destruction wrought by the Dominion had failed to bring Cardassia to such a pass.

  Dakal’s tricorder emitted a shrill tone that hauled him out of his unpleasant reverie and back into the here and now. Seeing that the data modules were already nearly full, he began the process of shutting them down and disconnecting them. Then he noticed that something else was happening as well.

  The sluglike data hub had begun . . . writhing.

  “I’m no information systems expert,” Modan said. “But I’m fairly certain it’s not supposed to do that.”

  The writhing abruptly stopped. The ambient lighting inside the hub chamber, which had been present ever since the team’s entry as a soft glow with no obvious source, abruptly faded into near-darkness.

  “Oh, shit,” Dakal said as he grabbed up his data modules and disengaged the cable. He heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that the storage devices had indeed grabbed a large chunk of Hranrarii data, on the order of
two hundred teraquads’ worth. Who knew what cultural treasures, literature, music, treatises on politics and science, might emerge from this mass of digital chaos once Modan and Titan’s other cryptolinguists had their way with it?

  After stowing the data modules and the cable in his toolkit, Dakal saw that Modan was passing her tricorder over the apparently lifeless data hub. “It reads like a dead or burned-out bioneural gel pack. The datatap must have tripped some sort of failsafe, shutting this hub down. The network appears to have compensated by bypassing this node entirely. It’s only one of thousands, after all.”

  Dakal experienced a frisson of disgust as he realized that his efforts may have just killed a living thing—perhaps even a sentient being, judging from the sophistication of the hub’s function as an organic router of prodigious amounts of data.

  “Zurin!” Evesh said, preempting Dakal’s ruminations with all the subtlety of a crashing shuttlecraft. Though Evesh had his full attention, she was too busy studying her tricorder’s display to make eye contact with him. “You know those readings I got from orbit, and the ones I took from just outside the city?”

  “I got the same readings,” Dakal said. “But I had to screen them out in order to track down a usable data hub, remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Evesh huffed. “But I’ve been studying the interference patterns, rather than simply screening them out. They were starting to look familiar to me before, but now that I can compensate for both the planetary magnetic field and the local effects of the data hub, the patterns look really familiar. Tell me what you think of this.” She handed her tricorder to Dakal, who promptly began blinking at the display in disbelief.

  Now that the mysterious emanations from the city’s deep interior were no longer being obscured by the output of the now-defunct data hub, a pattern had emerged, one that anyone with some basic engineering experience would recognize instantly.

  The sudden dryness in Dakal’s throat belied his moist, amphibious appearance. “We have to get this to Commander Vale,” he said. “Right now.”

  15

  GORN HEGEMONY WARSHIP S’ALATH

  Asinking feeling was developing in the pits of Z’shezhira’s stomachs as she watched the tactical display, which showed one of Captain Krassrr’s six vessels separating itself from the others. Not wishing to rouse First Myrmidon Gog’resssh’s ever-more-easily-roused suspicions, she dutifully reported the development the moment she noticed it.

  “I have confirmed it, First Myrmidon,” Second Myrmidon Zegrroz’rh said moments later, his ruined compound eye seeming to stare into Z’shezhira’s soul though she knew this to be an utter impossibility. “One of Krassrr’s ships is breaking formation, moving away from the ecosculptor. It’s the Zser’resz, Krassrr’s best-armed vessel.”

  “Heading?” Gog’resssh demanded from the middle of the command deck.

  “It’s coming toward this hemisphere,” Sk’salissk said from the helm console.

  Gog’resssh pounded the arm of his chair, splitting it as though it were a cord of dunewood. “Have they detected us?”

  “Negative,” Z’shezhira said, focusing on her scanner’s readouts. The Zser’resz’s trajectory suggested that the vessel might be seeking the source of the two subspace pulses she had detected earlier in the ship’s day; Z’shezhira wasn’t certain, but she thought they might have originated on one of Hranrar’s five small moons, or else had been bounced off one of the satellites on its way elsewhere.

  She hoped that Gog’resssh wouldn’t act rashly—or at least not so rashly that he got everyone aboard the S’alath killed. But she knew how badly shipboard supplies had dwindled of late. The Gorn war-caster requirement for live food greatly constrained the size of each supply raid the S’alath’s de facto crew could conduct in its endless search for sustenance; therefore such raids had to be undertaken fairly frequently.

  If Gog’resssh and his cronies wait much longer, she thought with an inward shiver, then they will scarcely be able to restrain themselves from consuming me and the other technical personnel they have seized along with this vessel.

  Z’shezhira looked up from the tactical display and stepped into the harsh glare of Gog’resssh’s insect-eyed gaze. “Call the auxiliary-craft team,” he said as he rose from his partially wrecked command chair. “Tell them we must move immediately to take what we require from Krassrr’s main supply vessel. We may never have a better opportunity.”

  Z’shezhira nodded, grimly aware that she, too, would soon have an unprecedented chance to do what had to be done. . . .

  SHUTTLECRAFT BEIDERBECKE

  “Welcome back to your own phylum,” Ensign Olivia Bolaji shouted from the cockpit once the transporter’s shimmer had finished dissipating.

  “Ribit,” Commander Vale said, reaching for the hidden control stud that caused her holographic Hranrarii disguise to vanish; her plain red isolation suit was once again in neutral mode. The rest of the away team immediately did likewise and began stripping off their isosuits while Vale made her way forward to the copilot’s seat.

  “I take it the mission was a success, Commander?” Bolaji said, turning her pilot’s seat away from the aquamarine planet that dominated the forward windows in order to face the exec.

  “I suppose that depends how you define success, Ensign,” Vale said without looking up from the console into which she was already entering commands at a furious rate. A glance at Vale’s console displays told Bolaji that Vale was preparing to send another subspace burst to Titan, probably consisting mostly of a preliminary after-action report. “The Hranrarii are still on the chopping block, even if they don’t realize it. And the ax is getting closer to their collective necks hour by hour.”

  “But I’m guessing you succeeded in penetrating one of their data networks,” Bolaji said, determined to remain hopeful in spite of the dire threat she knew would probably wipe this world from existence. As far as she was concerned, hope was its own justification, no matter how bad any given situation might look.

  “We took as much Hranrarii data as Ensign Dakal could carry,” Vale said as she connected her tricorder to the console and continued working the controls.

  “Of course, we don’t have any idea as yet what’s in that huge pile of data,” said Commander Troi, who had just advanced from the amidships crew compartment, her isosuit replaced with a standard duty uniform. “For all we know, Ensign Dakal’s data modules could be filled with things that would embarrass a Hranrarii college student if his parents were to catch him looking at them.”

  Bolaji suppressed a snicker. She was no information systems expert, but from what she recalled of the history of computational technologies, the initial iteration of Earth’s global infonets was all but dominated by prurient, if not outright pornographic, imagery and text.

  “We can only hope,” Vale deadpanned as she entered the “transmit” command. “I’ve just given Titan a little taste of what we found on Hranrar.” She turned to face Bolaji, drawing her gaze. “Now we just have to get back to the ship so I can fill the captain in on all the fine details.”

  “You’ve got it, Commander,” Bolaji said, and began laying in a course that would retrace the Beiderbecke’s inbound steps, tracing a route back to Titan’s Kuiper-belt hiding place while remaining discreetly out of the Gorn terra-forming flotilla’s line of sight.

  Bolaji was half finished entering the necessary commands when an automated klaxon sounded. She responded by making a quick check of the passive scanners.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  Then the first incoming salvo rang the Beiderbecke’s hull as though it were a colossal bell, nearly drowning out the shriek of the alarm.

  U.S.S. TITAN

  Riker leaned against the railings of the catwalk that bisected the stellar cartography lab. Beside him stood his chief engineer. Both men looked up at a synthetic vista of the Vela OB2–404 system, in whose glowing, dust-and-debris-peppered midst Titan’s senior science officer floated like some mythol
ogical sky goddess.

  “Sorry about the delay, Captain,” said Melora Pazlar. “But I wanted to triple-check Commander Vale’s latest message the moment I saw Ensign Evesh’s diagram attachment. Looks like my first impression was right. There’s no longer any doubt about it.”

  “There never was any doubt about it,” groused Ra-Havreii. “We both had the very same first impression, Melora. This is my field of expertise, after all.”

  Riker tried to suppress a sour frown, but failed. Were these two merely engaging in a robust argument as scientific colleagues, or were they having some sort of lover’s spat?

  “There’s no longer any doubt about what?” the captain said.

  “About the fact that this one diagram changes everything,” Pazlar said. With a wave of her hand, a dynamic, oscillating line drawing suddenly appeared, cutting a jagged swath across the majesty of the lab’s holographically-rendered cosmos.

  At first glance, it looked like a painting of a zodiacal constellation executed by a lunatic. But Riker quickly understood that this was only because it was cast against a backdrop of black space and its abundant embroideries of multicolored stars. The realization made him see the lines as an energy pattern not unlike those he had seen produced by medical diagnostic equipment, or seismographs, or even warp-field monitoring devices.

  “In what way?” Riker said. Why did science officers find it so difficult to come straight to the point?

  “You may recognize this as the signature of a warp drive,” Pazlar said. “It appears to be produced by a warp core of considerably less power than those typically found aboard Federation starships. I’d say its maximum velocity output probably tops out at warp six.”

  “Closer to warp five, or possibly five-point-one,” Ra-Havreii said. “It reminds me of the Henry Archer designs I studied back in grad school.”

  “This pattern was attached to Commander Vale’s last subspace burst?” Riker said. Though he already knew from the last burst that Christine, Deanna, and the rest of the team were already on their way back to Titan from Hranrar, he was nevertheless beside himself with questions about their apparently successful mission.