by Diane Carey
“Well, you’re right,” George said. “The carrier Enterprise was the workhorse of World War Two. She earned more battle stars than any other ship in the navy,” he went on, hoping against hope that nobody asked him what a battle star was, “and she was involved in almost every major naval battle in the Pacific. The greatest travesty of naval history came when she was decommissioned in 1947, and even worse, she was sold for scrap. Sold, if that isn’t vulgar enough, to the Japanese. Sold to the enemy.”
“The former enemy,” April corrected. “Keep it in perspective.”
“Perspective is what I’m talking about!” George told him. “That war was a historical turning point. The planet was either going to move toward greater freedom or back toward tyranny. It was the first time the decision was worldwide. And this starship is a pile of firsts too. So was the next Big E. She was the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, just like this ship is the first with continuous warp. They’re milestones of technology and achievement. Enterprise is the perfect name for this ship, because of the naval heritage she was built on.”
“But so militaristic,” April said. “So very war-oriented. Everything you mentioned was hinged on some battle or other, and you know—”
“I know how you feel about that. But every battle I talked about was waged for the kind of principle you’ve been talking about. You can’t deny that.”
“I don’t deny it.”
[119] “And the first space shuttle was named Enterprise. That was certainly no mechanism of war. Maybe it was just a test vehicle and maybe it didn’t even have an engine, but the whole world watched it because they knew what it meant to mankind. All it had was philosophy and the kind of hope you’re talking about.”
“That’s true ...”
“And the next Enterprise was the interstellar starliner. It was the ship that really tied the races of the Federation together by allowing them to move among each other. Just one great big chunk of peacetime enterpreneurism.”
“Which is a whole different kind of war, if you think of it,” Drake said dryly.
“I understand what you’re trying to say,” April said, “and I’ll give it consideration.”
George held up both hands. “Just a suggestion, Captain,” he said.
“I hate to dampen your enthusiasm, George, because I appreciate it so much,” April said. “It’s only that I hope to angle this line of ships away from that history of conflict.”
George stayed silent, careful not to show any agreement.
“No arguments?” April asked.
A pause made the air tingle,
“George?”
“I’ve had my say.”
Another pause. Amusing, but not particularly pleasant.
“How’d you know all this, George?” April asked then, dissipating the tension a little.
He shrugged and admitted, “I looked it up on your library computer.”
Instead of a placating nod, he got a chuckle that exasperated him just as much.
He was saved from embarrassment by a sudden whine of the ship’s systems. Faint but definite, it drew their attention and they looked up just as Florida announced, “Reducing speed to sublight, Captain. Approaching the ion storm.”
Engineering was relatively quiet. Relative, that is, to the hustle that had gone on here just before the ship launched and even to the ripple of activity that had been going on since the extra team members, the haul-and-push people had been left behind at the spacedock. Now, only the “brains” were left on board, a handful of specialists whose [120] duty it was to pretend they knew what they were doing in spite of the newness of almost every circuit and motivator around them.
Saffire glanced around the nearly deserted deck. On a ship meant to crew hundreds, the few people in sight looked very small. There would be no better time, and time was getting short.
He started toward the anteroom that held the computer access office, the cerebral center of the engineering process aboard the starship, where all the orders from the bridge computer were fed in. Before going inside, he paused to check a relay board on the right of the unmarked room, but looked up when he heard a familiar voice.
“Graff,” the voice called from an auxiliary turbo-lift as the door hissed open.
Woody. Just on time.
Wood strode to Saffire, wrestling an armful of computer cartridges, and made no ceremony in shoveling them into Saffire’s arms. “Here you go. Everything you asked for. And it took some doing, too, so be appreciative.”
“More than you’ll ever know, kid,” Saffire replied. “Takes a lot of information to feed a hungry ship, doesn’t it?”
“Sure does,” the young man answered. Wood took a quick glance around, then lowered his voice. “What do you think of the new first officer?”
Saffire’s dark eyes widened. “What about him?”
The young engineer shrugged. “I don’t know. He bothers me. He saved the warp drive but ... he’s ... well ...”
“Pushy?”
“That’s it. Pushy. I mean ... what if he starts getting in the way all the time?”
Saffire paused, then flatly said, “We push back.”
Wood slumped against the panel edge. “He makes me nervous.”
Saffire grinned. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Maybe. But right now we don’t need any unpredictable elements. Just flying this ship is dangerous enough.”
“Smart boy. Tell you what. You keep an eye on Mr. Kirk for me. If he gets too curious, I’ll take care of him.”
“Take care of him? How?”
“Much too terrible for young ears.”
Wood smiled at the face Saffire made to amuse him. “Maybe he’ll be too busy to bother us again now that we’re under way.”
[121] “You just keep that innocent face between him and engineering. After a while he’ll forget we’re here.”
“Hope so. Listen, I’ve got to go. Brownell’s likely to feed me to the antimatter pods if I don’t get the low-level intermix tables to him by fourteen-hundred.”
“Take’r easy.”
“Thanks. Bye. And good luck sorting those out.”
“Don’t worry. I know what to do with ’em.”
Wood strolled away and boarded the turbo-lift again. Saffire chuckled privately, cuddled the computer cartridges into one arm, and entered the computer office.
He dumped the cartridges on the desk beside him, in front of a complex terminal with several screens and a control board the size of a sofa. Without pausing for effect, he picked a specific cartridge, shoved it into the feed, and punched in a code. The screen in the center flashed: AUXILIARY NAVIGATIONAL OVERRIDE.
His fingers tapped out an order, and the response wasn’t entirely unexpected: ACCESS DENIED.
Saffire grinned at it. “So you say, big mama. Taste this.” And in went yet another encoding. No problem for one of the system’s own engineers, assistant to the design engineers themselves. He waited patiently while the computer routed and rerouted his orders, trying to find a way through.
Finally the machine replied: DANGER.
Saffire licked his lips. “Yeah, yeah.” He knew exactly what the danger was. He punched more keys, flipped two toggles, and the warning went away. He would have to go through the central computer, the superbrain built into the ship’s bridge, to make the navicomp override its own programming. He would have to awaken the sleeping giant. Though it was its own brand of fun, it wouldn’t be easy. He’d have to put quite a spin on it to get past the natural inhibitors built into the system. Not surprisingly, the system had a bias toward the bridge. If orders conflicted, the bridge automatically got preference. The only way to get by it was a complete reprogram at the memory base level.
The computer hummed at him, then gave him an answer: WARNING. SPECIFIED AREA OF MEMORY PROHIBITED.
The word “prohibited” flashed in quiet panic to get its point across.
With a shake of his head, Saffire selected two more computer cartri
dges and fed them into slots just within arm’s reach of the main [122] computer face. The design engineers themselves had probably never imagined these tapes being used in quite this combination.
A few carefully chosen codes, a little punching of buttons and keys, a conversion to machine language, and the computer fell into an almost drugged happiness. Now it understood him.
And now the problems began. A race. A race to get his messages through before the computer could notify the bridge.
The shift to apexidecimals was swallowed hungrily by the machine. Now he could talk to it directly in numerical-symbolic, without using a translator program. It was like tapping directly into a person’s brain to change his personality. Direct communication with the computer prevented any record of the “talk,” which would happen automatically if an interpreter program were being used. This, though, wasn’t recognized by the machine as communication. This was direct manipulation of the logic process. This was much neater, much safer. And the computer liked it. The sleeping giant rolled over and groaned.
Saffire started to sweat. His fingers worked faster on the controls, fast enough to make mistakes if he didn’t head off each relay with a breaker code before the signals could reach the bridge.
A tiny light of awareness flickered deep inside the machine. The faintest quiver of anticipation in the circuits rippled through the starship, awaiting orders. A million tiny harmonizers and filters sizzled to life, each seeking a way through. Something’s wrong with me. Someone’s playing with me. Help.
Knowing the computer was rushing to its own defense, Saffire forced himself to work steadily. On top of the new messages he had to program into the computer pattern, he had to keep relaying away the computer’s efforts to find a path to the bridge. The little light of comprehension in the machine gave him a run for his life. Its cries for help needed only one mistype from him in order to be heard upstairs.
From the fingers of the man down to the deepest digit chain, the network shuddered with confusion as its programs conflicted. From that terminal in engineering came a whole new pattern—a pattern that ran down through the web of electrical memories to every little failsafe, every warning system, every monitor or override, to cancel out everything that prevented such tampering. Up, up, up through the bones and nerves of the starship the little light scrambled, checking and rechecking any possibility of failure for the strange new orders, delivered in so familiar a manner.
The computer’s sensory network quivered under Saffire’s touch. [123] The first thing that happened was a tear in the monitor system, a fracture that would distract the bridge monitors and keep them from noticing what he was doing—more or less an inversion of data, a lull of false security. In a few moments, the harmonizer circuits were shut down, and the fault let him work a still finer thread through the system.
Next came the gravitational maintenance codes. Not easy—the system resisted. Life support wanted to know what he was up to. Saffire licked a trickle of sweat from his upper lip as he felt the giant awakening, making demands, and he had to be fast or the whole process would disintegrate before he could get his message across and put the monster to sleep again. In even trickier heliodecimal language, he explained. He had to go down, deep into the navigation matrices, where all the factors were balanced, each with its own equation. Down, through several arrays of matrices the little light of knowledge ran, until it found the matrix it needed. Some thirty-five different variables made up the matrix, and it sought instantaneously through them until it found the one variable it had been told to change. It showed it to Saffire, in a flashing code that told him the whole process was in danger of overload.
“Mmmmm,” Saffire groaned, biting his lip. Overload would lock him out completely, and the bridge would scream with warnings. He wiped a film of perspiration from his chin, and the moisture dripped onto the input board as his hands quivered over it.
Ever so carefully, Saffire keyed in his change. Eighty-eight, where the original program read only twenty-three.
He paused. Leaning one elbow on the board, he pressed his knuckle into his lower lip and stared at the number. Eighty-eight was strong medicine. An overdose of gravity. Those were his orders.
“Hell with ’em,” he muttered. He erased the eighty-eight and fed in fifty-one. “Better,” he rasped. His voice sounded awful. Scared. “One more thing ...”
The light was waiting when he fed the last order through. Crash the warp drive program. Not now, but later. At this point. When you get these readings on the outer hull. And send the ship in this direction.
The signal splitter for the bridge strained against its broken pattern. It hungered to tell someone. To make a noise. To flash a warning. Relay by relay, matrix after matrix, Saffire’s adeptness neutralized it, and it whined in frustration, deep inside the nervous system of the starship. Unheard, unseen.
[124] This was the most complicated maneuver of all—crashing the warp drive. The whole ship resisted. The giant shuddered from deep within. Every linkage defied the rift. The failsafes tensed, as though fighting some distant memory that this was wrong, all wrong, but lacking the understanding needed to push through an override of the new orders.
Saffire’s heart slammed against his chest wall, as though it too was a circuit screaming in the vacuum he’d created. If he awakened the giant too much ...
He stroked it now, like an animal tamer stroking the belly of a very big alligator. The beast thrashed, tried to bite his arms off, tried to knock him down with its tail as it slowly faded back into that false security he’d created minutes ago.
Ultimately the giant was forced to do what it was told to do, for that was the only choice possible for a machine, even a smart machine. The relays grew quiet. The warning systems fell away from alert status. The circuits cooled. The new program was accepted.
Saffire slumped back in the chair, drained and shaking. Successful.
So the little light of awareness settled down and slowly faded, and a veil of normalcy drifted down like fog over the system. The giant once again slept.
“Adjust the viewscreen to pick up a visual effect on the storm, please, Claw.” April went immediately to the center of the bridge and eyed the viewer just as Sanawey tapped his controls and an endless wall of spacial disruption glittered before them. It was beautiful even in its threat. “Continue on into it, one-half impulse power.”
“Point-five sublight, aye.”
“Raise all shields, full power.”
“Full deflectors, aye, sir.”
The ion storm grew closer. Soon it filled their screen and they knew it was all around them. The starship quivered slightly, but stood her ground against the disruption and glided into it without mishap. It was almost as though she too understood the gravity of her mission, and she didn’t want to shatter the faith that had been put in her.
The electric effect of the ion storm made the ship tremble, and systems on board jumped as they were violated from outside. The crew scrambled to lock down their readings and readjust whatever needed readjusting, to compensate for the disruption. April gave it a few minutes before he started asking for more.
[125] “All decks, report,” he began.
Hart took a deep breath. “Impulse engineering reports instability in the laser tracking system, and slight jumps in power control, but they’re getting it to level off.”
“How are the shields?”
“Holding,” Florida reported, a little surprised to be able to say that. “In fact, the ship’s systems are automatically compensating for the energy drain.”
“What do you think, Bernice?” April asked, swiveling his chair to face the engineering station. “Dare we resume warp drive?”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t know why not, sir. The storm’s not affecting us too badly and it’s certainly not going to get any better.”
“You agree with that, George?”
George came out of a trance induced from staring out the viewer at the remarkable, terrible bea
uty of the storm, and had to think about what he’d been hearing before he could answer. “I’m no engineer,” he said, “but seems to me there’s no sense stalling.”
“I agree,” April concurred. For the first time, George caught a trace of hesitation in the captain’s voice. April touched his intercom. “All personnel, brace for warp speed. Repeat, brace yourselves. This might be tricky.”
He got up from his chair then, as though he didn’t want to be sitting down for this particularly perilous maneuver when others were standing up. He looked into the heart of the ion field that covered their screen with its bright flashes of uncontrolled energy, and the challenge between him and the storm empowered his voice. “Warp factor one, Mr. Florida.”
Florida’s hand trembled slightly as it moved over the controls.
The ship hummed. The ion storm in the viewscreen blew into wicked distortion.
The air turned thick. George tried to move his legs, tried to breathe, but his body was out of his control. He tried to open his mouth to shout an order, to stop the increasing velocity—
He was picked up from the deck, shaken, and thrown backward into the communications console. Around him, bodies were flying. He caught a glimpse of Florida vaulting over the command chair and catching on the rail—April slamming into the turbo-lift door—Drake crushed against the lower deck stairs—Sanawey folded over the edge of the library computer station.
George stretched his hand out along the communications panel. [126] Every movement was torture. His mind bellowed a senseless syllable. Consciousness was crushed away.
Obeying her last orders—warp speed—the starship screamed through space, out of control.
Chapter Ten
JUDGING FROM THE studied lack of glances he got as he stepped onto the bridge, t’Cael knew his presence there wasn’t entirely unanticipated. There was a nearly psychic ripple of tension, as though they all knew for whom the door hissed, and what conditions it trapped on the bridge when it closed again.
Kai was the first, after a pause, to gather himself and address the Field-Primus of the Swarm.
