“Commander,” said Tylith. “That’s not all. The section that detached…” She pointed at the sensor sweep display on her console.
“Show me!” Vale demanded.
The screen flicked from one view to another; suddenly, the weapon arm was there in the middle of the display, floating free. As Vale watched, the structure began to distend and move. Just like the larger craft in the debris field, the weapon platform unfolded, reconfiguring itself. It grew a thruster grid at its stern and a fan of whiskery sensor probes at the bow. The mouth of the green-lit cannon emerged from the mass of the new, vaguely snake-shaped construct. It oriented itself toward the Titan and came after them on a flare of thrust.
“Multivector assault mode,” observed Tuvok. “The modularity of these craft is quite remarkable.”
“Rather not see it up close, though,” ventured Rager.
“Both alien, uh, craft are now on attack courses,” said Y’lira.
“Okay, that didn’t work,” Vale said aloud, grim-faced. “Time for Plan B. Tylith, channel all reserve power into the deflectors. Boost the shields as much as you can. Lavena, get us clear of the debris zone, and go to high warp. Let’s see if these things can keep up…”
The whoop of the alert sirens underscored everything. Riker looked away from the AI unit as his security chief came closer.
“Captain, tell me you’re not seriously considering this. I was there when that thing got into a single computer console, and it took it apart and reprogrammed it in a matter of seconds. We let it reach out to the ship, and there’s no knowing how far it will go or what it will do.” He shook his head. “For all we know, this whole scenario could have been engineered just to get us to this point!”
“Attention,” said White-Blue. “Be advised. Sentry combatant programming is highly goal-oriented. Shipframe has likely designated the Titan as intruder/threat. It will not disengage until target has been neutralized.”
Troi drew a breath. “And by that you mean?”
“Destroyed.”
“If it does that, you’ll be destroyed, too,” insisted Keru.
Riker nodded. “If the Titan goes up, the antimatter explosion will obliterate your core along with all of us.”
“Agreed,” came the reply. “I do not wish my existence to be terminated any more than you do. Therefore, William-Riker, I restate that it is imperative you allow me to interface directly with your ship’s systems so I may call off this attack.” There was a pause, and when White-Blue spoke again, he was sure he heard an edge of real emotion in the words. “Interrogative: Why do you delay? Do you wish to perish?”
After a long moment, Riker shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to take the chance.” He tapped his combadge. “Bridge, disengage and get us out of here.”
“Way ahead of you, sir,” Vale replied, dropping back into the command chair. “Tuvok, report.”
“With Lieutenant Tylith’s assistance, the shields are now holding at fifty-one percent. It should be sufficient to protect us until we can break for warp velocity.”
“Another energy surge!” called Y’lira. “Both ships this time, in synchrony.” Her gemlike eyes narrowed. “The phase patterns are identical… they’re firing!”
“Incoming,” reported Tuvok.
“Evasive,” said Vale, and she saw Lavena’s head bob in answer. The stars on the viewscreen tilted as the Titan pulled away; in a heartbeat more, the starship would be clear of the debris field and the troublesome distortion effect that had hobbled their warp drive.
The two ships fired at once. Invisible muon links had flashed between them in the critical seconds before the shots, each craft communicating with the other, sharing their strategic data in real time, conferencing to determine exactly where and when and how to lay their fire.
The streams of accelerated lethal particles cut toward the retreating rear of the intruder vessel. The unknown ship had refused to answer any beam-comm signals; it had already violated Sentry territory and the termination site of one of their kind. It had proven itself a threat and confirmed that with its unwillingness to surrender.
The scanners confirmed the presence of many wet-minds aboard the craft. Organics were unpredictable, illogical vectors, like errors that would manifest in incorrectly devised programs. It was likely they were scavengers, come to pick over the corpse of the shipframe lost here, and that was an action that could not be allowed to continue. The gathering of the destroyed, the recovery and reuse of such materials, was not for those outside the Coalition.
So they would be terminated, and with the data now collated, that objective would be enacted.
The twin beams lashed out and pierced the Titan’s shield wall with no loss of energy or power. Phased in concert with the Starfleet vessel’s deflector resonance, they tore up along the outside of the starboard engine nacelle, ripping into the glowing blue frame of the intercoolers, shattering warp coils and plasma injectors. Flares of sunhot gases and broken metals vented into the vacuum, and the Titan left a slick of ejecta behind it as the ship lurched under the impact. The razored energy tore on, blowing out the crimson bussard collector at the nacelle’s tip in a final act of violence.
Bits of ship dislodged by the blast tore into the secondary hull, and the Titan rolled over, listing wildly.
“They punched right through the shields!” said Rager. “How can they do that?”
The bridge’s lighting flickered and dimmed, the rusty glow of emergency illumination filling the room. Smoke wreathed the air, and someone lay on the deck, coughing and struggling to get up from where the impact had thrown them.
“The attackers were able to compute our shield modulations,” Tuvok replied flatly.
“Out of a billion possible combinations?” Y’lira shot back. “That’s unlikely.”
“But not impossible,” said the Vulcan as he stabbed at the tactical console. “I am initiating a rotating shield-frequency sequence to prevent another strike.”
“Status?” Vale heard a groan in her own voice. She had rocked forward and banged her head against the chair with the whiplash. “Tylith?”
The Kasheetan dragged herself off the deck, one arm dangling limply. Her face was dark with thick blood. “Warp drive is off-line. Power systems are struggling to… to compensate.” She staggered, unsteady on her large clawed feet. “I… I’m sorry, I’m having trouble focusing…”
“Someone get her down to sickbay,” Vale ordered. “Are we still in the fight, Tuvok?”
“It would seem we have few other options,” he replied.
“The alien ships are recombining,” said Y’lira. On the forward screen, the smaller unit was turning to slot back into a vacant space at the stern of the larger craft. It began to change shape again, this time shifting into a vague crescent form.
Vale’s jaw set hard. “Arm photon torpedoes, and prepare to fire,” she ordered. “Maximum yield.”
Belowdecks, the aftershock of the hit was echoing through the vessel, as Titan’s power systems went into emergency mode. Critical pathways and conduits were automatically sealed, electroplasma channels were locked and rerouted, and the ship’s central computer erected forcefields around sections of the ship that had vented to space. The crew recoiled from the enemy attack, their training taking over as they raced to their crisis stations. Down in the cargo bay, a different kind of crisis was reaching its criticality.
The bay’s lights came back up at half-power. Deanna felt for her husband’s arm and grabbed it, just for the certainty of him, allowing herself a brief second to be sure he was still there, by her side.
She felt his fear mesh with hers, all of it forming into a single word: Tasha? Their daughter was two decks up, in the ship’s crèche with T’Pel, and Deanna felt a flash of ice-cold dread shoot through her; but in the same moment, there was the heat of relief as she sensed the knot of thought life that was her daughter, still alive, unharmed—but very much afraid.
Immediately, she was torn bet
ween the task at hand and her child. Deanna knew that if she asked the question of her husband, he would let her go, let her race away to the crèche. But could she do it? Put her daughter before the mission, before the lives of everyone aboard the ship? Her duty was to stay here, and even as part of her railed at the thought, hated herself for the choice she made, she drew herself up.
“What is the reason for this attack?” she demanded, facing the AI. In the low dimness of the emergency lights, the lab was a mess of flickering displays and wary, shadowed figures.
“The Titan has been computed as a threat vector,” replied the machine-mind. “The attack will continue until this vessel is neutralized. I must take steps to ensure that this goes no further.”
The words had an ominous ring to them. “What does that mean?” said Will.
“The interface must be made.”
“Captain?” Keru raised his phaser, sensing the same threat in the air.
Dakal had a tricorder in his hand, and his eyes widened, showing white. “Power surge from within the nexus core!”
The Cardassian did not finish his sentence; instead, the air was ripped by a shriek as a column of green light stabbed out of White-Blue’s cylindrical form, phasing through the forcefield barrier with the same ease that the attacking ship had ignored the Titan’s deflector shields.
The next events happened so quickly that Deanna Troi later would only recall brief, flash-frame images of them, moments that shot past in heartbeats.
A curl of crackling energy slammed into Ensign Dakal and threw him off his feet, sending the tricorder flying. The light flash impossibly curved away from him and enveloped the tricorder, igniting a storm of data processes that lit every function and display on it before leaping away. It struck at Lieutenant Sortollo, one of Keru’s security team, hitting his combadge before he had time to cry out and then flashing away again—arcing across the bay to plunge straight into Chaka’s computer console, where it opened like a flower and wreathed the panel in emerald flashes.
She saw Ranul Keru spin around, bringing up his phaser—
Input 68363-28583-29548-2939. [2G White-Blue]
“Connecting”
Process: Interface
Working…
At a speed beyond the velocity of thought, faster than the firing of organic neurons, quicker than the flood of electrochemical messages through blood and nerve and muscle, the Sentry AI plunged into the ocean of new data sensation that was the Titan.
White-Blue blossomed and streamed though the confines of the alien ship’s virtual space, passing over swaths of program and systemry, glancing at great storehouses of knowledge and data, dithering for vital nanoseconds before moving on. For the eight hundred and fourth time since the organic “Identifier: Ranul Keru. Species: Trill” had suggested it could take control of the vessel, White-Blue weighed the possibility of doing just that, and, for the eight hundred and fourth time, it rejected that choice. The option was intriguing, but morally complex and therefore too distracting to consider at this juncture.
The dynamics of this ship system were strange and fascinating. The glimpses it had taken of the technologies of these aliens, the data console, the portable scanning device, the communicator unit, all of them filled the AI with a curiosity that begged to be sated. But to plumb the depths of this new territory would take an epoch of process cycles, a period that would slow it to almost an organic’s level of clock speed. There simply wasn’t enough time.
The attack had to be stopped. Survival was imperative. The information White-Blue had retrieved before the incursion had obliterated its shipframe was vital. It had to be returned and collated. There was a 76.93-percent chance that the survival of Sentry-kind depended on it.
Moving through the slow hurricane of alert signals and warning flags flooding the starship’s command pathways, White-Blue created a quick search algorithm that spun through the Titan’s databases and found the communications protocols. It expressed a moment of surprise. The alien vessel had not detected the faint, swift beam signals the other Sentry had directed toward it; but then again, why would it? This “Federation” vessel’s default communication method was a form of subspace radiation packeting, ingenious and good for long-range messaging but less robust than the Sentry’s unjammable muon-link system. It copied the design and theory of the subspace radio mechanism and sent it back to its core pod for later consideration. At the same time, White-Blue infiltrated the Titan’s weapons grid and altered the frequency and power of its phaser-discharge array. Another part of its intrusion program noted a relay from the starship’s sensors, indicating that another salvo of weapons fire was about to be unleashed upon the vessel. This would be the killing blow, unless prevented.
Using the rudimentary automated targeting software of the weapons grid, White-Blue aimed an ultra-low-energy pulse at the attacking shipframe and fired. The beam was absorbed by the other Sentry’s skin and parsed into a comm signal.
White-Blue used the emergency warning prefix. It appended an excerpt from its internal logs, noting the incident that led to the loss of its own shipframe, the arrival of the organics, the subsequent transfer to this vessel, and the ponderously slow conversation it had undertaken with the Titan’s crew. As an afterthought, it added a supplemental data stream with information on the subspace radio system, to ensure that any future communications would not go unheard. White-Blue allowed itself to experience an emotional analog that an organic would have labeled “appreciation of ironic/tragic circumstance.” This situation would not have occurred at all had both parties been able to converse directly with each other.
Ending the message with a final authenticator to prove its identity and preclude any possibility of coercion or hostile reprogramming, White-Blue began the withdrawal from the systems it had infiltrated, taking care to retreat back down the same pathways, working to ensure that it did not disturb what could be the vital functions of the ship.
Many clock cycles had passed, but the task had been completed, the interface conducted with success despite the unorthodox methodology used to initiate it. The Sentry AI exhibited high confidence that the aggression program in its sister-mind would be annulled by the data it had provided. It expressed a moment of regret analog that it had been forced by the organics to make such a proactive choice, but White-Blue had been left with little option. It was likely that its nexus core could have survived relatively intact if the Titan were destroyed, but the concept of such loss of sentient life over a misunderstanding caused jags of disruptive sensation across its thought centers. It was foolish, wasteful—and in the time since it had first encountered this odd grouping of disparate life-forms, White-Blue’s interest in them had grown geometrically.
Then, from nowhere, came the touch.
White-Blue almost missed it as it rolled back in on itself, as a spark of lightning might be missed amid the chaos of a planetwide storm. It paused for long ticks of its internal clock and extended its senses. In the dataspace, it listened, and it heard.
A dull, sluggish touch brushed the perimeter of White-Blue’s synthetic consciousness, a pressure moving in upon it with glacial slowness. It was questioning, demanding. Why was the Sentry here? What right did it have to invade this system?
For a moment, the AI believed it was being assailed by some unsophisticated guardian program, something roused from its slumber by the Sentry’s passing. But no, this was not simply some automatic string of code, moving and patrolling the borders of its system. White-Blue sensed the faintest glimmer of intelligence in there, the undeveloped shape and form of a reasoning mentality in the image of its own. But it was a pale ghost, faint and barely detectable—little more than the potential echo of a mind.
White-Blue experienced surprise and astonishment. It reached out, unfurled a fraction of itself over the other mind. It pushed in, dipping beneath the surface.
“Can you hear me?”
A reply made of confused images and sensations returned, and the Sentry exper
ienced concern. Immediately, a decision was made.
“Let me help you.”
White-Blue ignored the warning call of the clock and reached deeper, making connections, breaking down barriers.
But in the next moment, the contact was severed, and it found itself inside its core once again, looking out at the organics ranged around it.
Riker saw Keru pivot and bring up his phaser as the jumping-jack energy pulse flashed across the chamber. The Trill aimed and put a streak of fire into Dakal’s fallen tricorder, turning it to molten slag. Immediately, the humming feedback from Sortollo’s combadge and the screaming cascade of data blazing through Chaka’s console ceased. The Sentry core pulsed brightly, before settling back into its stately fire-glow glimmer once more.
“What happened?” said Deanna.
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 9
