“It’s alive?” said Vale.
“I think it could be. Don’t ask me how. This is beyond anything we’ve seen before.”
“Lieutenant Pazlar’s analysis is intriguing,” agreed the avatar, her gaze briefly turning inward. “Starfleet’s databases bring up a number of comparative examples. The mellitus cloud creature, a nonsentient life-form from Alpha Majoris, which exists in either solid or gaseous state. The Shedai, a precursor civilization from the Taurus Reach, capable of reordering the nature of their atomic structure on the particle scale. The—”
“Whatever it is, I think it’s noticed us,” Ranul Keru broke in, standing at Tuvok’s post behind the tactical console. “I’m detecting smaller chunks of the mass disconnecting and moving this way.”
“We should retreat,” White-Blue insisted.
Melora glanced at her commanding officer and wondered what he had to be thinking at that moment. Are Tuvok and the others already dead? Are the remains of the Holiday out there among that slick of wreckage and radiation, or has it already been chewed up by the Null?
But before Riker could utter a word of response, Aili Lavena at the helm called out. “More Sentry ships approaching to our stern. They’re on an attack vector.”
Melora saw four craft of different designs rush past and race into the fray. One of them, a bone-white thing resembling a diving bird, roared in blazing green fire from cannons on its nose. It missed the spinning lash of a Null fragment and banked sharply but not fast enough. The cord of alien matter looped and wound itself around the AI warship, pulling tight and strangling the mechanoid vessel.
Horrified, she watched the process of consumption begin on the science monitor screen. “Molecular conversion,” whispered Fell. “It’s altering the phase state of the ship into line with the rest of the Null. Absorbing it.”
Melora was suddenly struck by disgust and understanding in equal measure. “I’m wrong,” she said aloud. “The Null isn’t a virus. It’s a cancer.”
On the viewscreen, the other new arrivals moved to form an attack pattern with another group of shipframes showing signs of heavy damage. The Elaysian recognized one of them as the rods-and-cylinders shape of the vessel holding the consciousness of Cyan-Gray.
Riker leaned forward in the center seat. “We didn’t come here to turn away.” He looked toward the two women at the science console. “Peya, keep scanning for the shuttle. Melora, work with Ranul. Give him all the data you have.”
“We’re going to lend a hand?” asked Vale.
“Lives are under threat. We won’t stand by and do nothing.” The captain gestured to Lieutenant Lavena. “Helm, take us in, attack pattern April-Bravo-Six.”
“Aye, sir,” replied the Pacifican, and the view on the screen rushed closer as Titan entered the conflict.
Following the Sentry ships in on a sharp upward arc, the Starfleet vessel brought up the rear as the faster, more maneuverable AI craft cut a path through the nest of tendrils surrounding the main mass of the Null. They moved with speeds and motions beyond the tolerances of any manned vessel, able to take punishing high-gravity turns, split-second accelerations, and massive decelerations without need to protect a crew of fragile organic beings.
But they were not fast enough. Null fragments coiled through the dark, serpentine forms becoming ridged blades to chop through nacelles and fuselages, others distending to shapes that resembled bolas, spinning and shredding wherever their razored tips touched metal.
Two Sentry ships, one a saucer-shaped construct, another a spindly thing resembling a solar-sail racer, died within seconds of each other, as lashes of matter threw the first into the second with a violent blast that claimed both craft.
The display canted as the Titan veered through the expanding corona of the explosion, dodging dead wreckage from the refinery on the way. At her station, Lavena unconsciously leaned into the turns, as if the motion of her body would somehow translate directly to the moves of her ship.
The engagement zone was a mess of debris, and for a moment, Melora wondered why the Null was so careless about its attacks. In battle, most enemies would strike a blow and then ensure that they had obliterated their enemy, but the Null’s blunt, brute-force assaults left scrap and wreckage instead of the clouds of plasma or free atoms that were all that remained after an antimatter explosion or disruptor strike.
Then she saw the slow drifts of metal and tripolymer and the cilia that reached out from the main bulk of the Null form to touch them, altering the very nature of each tiny piece of shattered craft before drawing it in. Rager was right; it was consuming what it killed, infecting it, adding its mass to its own.
“Sentry vessel, port high,” called Rager. “It’s being swarmed.”
It was Cyan-Gray’s shipframe. A horde of spinning dashes of Null matter whirled around the craft, nipping at the hull and shearing off great scabs of armor. Antiproton beams sparked in response, but it wasn’t enough.
“Ranul, target the… enemy and open fire,” ordered Riker.
“Engaging,” said the Trill.
A fan of sunfire jetted from the Titan’s emitter bands along the upper surface of the saucer, and it washed through the cloud of Null fragments. Puffs of energetic discharge flashed, and on her scanners, Melora noted the sudden sparkle of particle decay as the pieces were not simply destroyed but dissipated, vanishing as if they had never existed.
“The fragments discorporated,” said the avatar, processing the same information. “They have fallen below a critical level of spatiotemporal mass and been drawn back into subspace.”
“That works for the little ones,” said Vale. “It’s their big brother I’m more worried about.”
The main mass of the Null was rotating, flails of energetic material unwinding, questing after the ships that dared to attack it.
Briefly freed of its enemies, Cyan-Gray’s shipframe powered away on a surge of impulse thrust, leaving the Titan a clear line of sight toward the flanks of the main mass. Keru didn’t wait for Riker’s orders and released a salvo of phaser shots and photon torpedoes into the Null. Blooms of black, glassy rubble burst from it where each shot hit, but the seething surface roiled and churned, knitting itself closed over every gaping scar.
Melora’s scans told the story, the sensors picking up the echoes of torn particles as they spilled into the vacuum like blood from a wound. The protomatter metastructure of the Null seemed to exist as much in subspace as it did in this reality. She listened as the avatar explained as much to the bridge crew before interrupting. “Unless we can weaken its ability to exist in both phase states, we won’t be able to contain it.”
“And it will keep expanding,” said Troi. “Consuming all of the wreckage around it, perhaps even the ice world as well.”
“There’s an option,” said Keru. “But I need the authorization of three command-staff officers to deploy it.”
“Go on,” Vale prompted.
“Tricobalt devices. We’ve got eight of them in the torpedo bay, two ready to launch right now.”
“Those weapons are designed for use against static planetary targets,” noted Panyarachun. “They’re little more than dumb-fire missiles.”
Keru nodded. “And we don’t have time to retrofit the warheads to a torpedo-guidance chassis, which means we’d need to get in very close before release.”
“Tricobalt weapons are a Class Three device,” said the avatar, crossing the bridge toward Riker and the others. “They are offensive subspace munitions monitored under the auspices of the Second Khitomer Accords.” Her tone was insistent.
“Which is why I need a consensus to order the use of them,” said Riker. He looked to Melora. “Will it work?”
She thought it through. “There’s a good chance. A tricobalt blast will weaken the barrier between subspace and normal space. It might be enough to dissolve that mass.”
The captain looked at Commander Vale, and the first officer nodded without hesitation. He turned to Deanna. “Wit
h Tuvok absent, the last word’s yours. It needs to be unanimous.”
Troi took a deep breath. “We don’t have much choice, do we?”
“If you possess a weapon that can kill a Null composite, you must use it!” grated White-Blue, coming forward.
Deanna Troi glanced up at Keru. “I agree. You have authorization.”
“No,” said the avatar.
Riker was out of his chair in an instant. “What did you say?”
“I said no.” The hologram’s voice exhibited a slight tremor. “I won’t allow it.”
A sour tone issued from the tactical console. “Torpedoloading mechanism does not answer commands,” reported the Trill. “The firing-tube doors won’t open.”
“I will not have my orders challenged.” Riker’s voice had a dangerous edge to it that Melora had never heard before.
“It’s too risky!” the avatar cried out. “I will need to approach to point-blank range to ensure a solid hit. The probability of critical damage to this vessel is too high. There will be deaths! The ship could be destroyed!”
“You don’t get to make that call,” Riker replied. “I am the captain. The decision is mine. Do you understand that?”
“I—”
“Do you understand?” Riker boomed.
After a long moment, the avatar’s stiff poise fell away, and she looked at the deck.
The tactical console chimed. “Warheads now showing active,” said Keru. “Loaded. Ready to launch.”
Riker never looked away from the hologram. “Lavena, take us in to optimum firing distance. Keru, when you have your target window, take it.”
On the viewscreen, the swirling shape of the Null agglomeration moved to eclipse the dark shape of the icy planetoid behind it.
Lavena’s commands brought the starship up to sixty percent of full impulse speed, the engines still operating below maximum capacity after the attack in deep space. She took the vessel in through shifting slaloms of wreckage, dodging around the great bergs of steel and brass that were now all that remained of the Sentry refinery station. Swaths of vented, unprocessed deuterium slush sheared away in planes of glittering snow as the Titan vectored in, passing the braver AI cruisers that had closed to engage the thicker nest of tendrils exuded from the main bulk of the alien form.
The starship’s deflectors flashed hot as small Null fragments transformed into hard darts of plasmatic metamaterial and flung themselves at the speeding vessel. They spiraled apart where they made glancing hits, one of them opening like a spider to push through the shield envelope and claw at the naked hull beneath. Tritanium shredded, and atmosphere screamed into the darkness, but the ship powered on into the terminal phase of the attack run.
At the last possible second, the Titan executed a sweeping arc that became a rough banking climb, narrowly avoiding a forest of tendrils that exploded upward, reaching for the vessel to crush it. At the nadir of the arc, two dark cylinders ejected from the vessel’s aft torpedo launcher, and now they bored in, pressed on microimpulse drives. Shining like tiny bolts of starlight, the tricobalt warheads crossed the remaining distance to the surface of the main Null mass and collided with it.
At both points of impact, the protomatter sheath there had not been rigidized, and the missiles penetrated for several meters before a reflex reaction turned the mass around them into something resembling iron. In response, the weapons detonated.
The tricobalt reaction was immediate and devastating. Twin pockets of unstable spatial energy expanded, eating into the core of the Null. As a form already existing on the tenuous edge of dimensional interphase, the blasts were enough to unravel the threads holding it in place.
With a discharge of luminosity that burned across the sky of the ice world, turning night into brief day, the Null came apart and collapsed in on itself. Structures never meant to exist outside subspace realms were torn and flung screaming back into the dimensional void that had birthed them.
All that remained were the ashes and the destruction.
TEN
Deanna felt the surge of emotion wash across the bridge crew like a chill tide, and in the wake, she had to pause for a moment to bolster her empathic barriers to avoid being distracted by it. She had felt the same ebb and flow of contradictory emotions many times, having faced danger alongside her comrades on several occasions. Each time, when the threat was gone, when the enemy had been defeated, there was the rise of elation, the pure thrill of being alive, of surviving, and then, almost in the same instant, the shocking, giddy fear, the realization of how close they had come to death.
On the main viewscreen, the cloud of sparkling luminosity left behind by the Null’s obliteration faded away into nothing, weak binary starlight catching the drifts of wreckage cast all around the ice world’s orbital space.
“D-did we destroy it?” Peya Fell’s soft voice ended the moment of silence on the Titan’s bridge. “Is it gone?”
“I’m not certain,” said Melora. “There’s no extant mass out there, just particle traces from subspace interaction events. No… remains.”
“Our cognitive-process groups theorize that the Null cannot be destroyed in any literal sense,” announced White-Blue, shifting in place. “It can only be dispatched by overloading its phase state with energy discharges, thereby forcing it to return to its point of origin.”
Deanna’s husband shot the machine a hard look. “Which would be where?”
“Unknown,” replied the AI. “Conjecture: a deep realm of subspace beyond the quantum range of our dimensional membrane.”
For a moment, Deanna found herself thinking of the Betazoid myths she had heard as a child, of great monsters that could never be defeated, only banished back into the darkness that had spawned them. She frowned at the thought, as Christine Vale leaned forward in her chair.
“Tasanee,” she said, brushing hair from her eyes, “what’s our status?”
The engineer looked up from her console. “Damage to the outer hull in sections forty-two and eighteen. It looks like we popped some of the new welds in the nacelles, but no significant damage registered.” Ensign Panyarachun blew out a breath. “The shields and fields held, Commander.”
Standing nearby, her oddly angelic clothing draped limply about her, the avatar nodded to herself. “I was able to modify the deflector flux in real time to resist the final bloom of radiation from the dispersal of the Null mass.” The hologram spoke quietly, and she did not meet the eyes of anyone on the bridge. No one responded to her words.
“Good shooting, Ranul,” said Will. “Have the torpedo crew modify the remainder of the tricobalt warheads with uprated weapon platforms. We might need to deploy them again in a hurry.”
“Way ahead of you, Captain,” said the Trill.
“Can we fabricate more?” said Vale.
Keru’s lips curled. “Normally, I’d say yes, but with all the repairs under way—”
“We may not have the material to spare,” concluded the first officer.
Deanna sensed the tension in her husband as he crossed the bridge toward the conn and ops stations. “Aili, nice work,” he told Lavena, sparing her a touch on the shoulder before turning to Rager at the other console. “Lieutenant, sensors? Any trace of the Holiday?”
Rager shook her head, anticipating the captain’s next words. “No improvement, sir. If anything, the fog’s getting denser.” She gestured at her panel. “Scanners are throwing up a storm of false readings and ghost returns. We’re really in the thick.”
He nodded gravely. “Do what you can.” Will stepped away and turned toward Lieutenant Pazlar “Melora, tie in your processing systems to the main sensors. If you can filter down the noise, we might be able to find our people.”
“Aye, sir,” responded the Elaysian, leaning in to punch out a series of commands.
“We don’t know that Tuvok and the others were still in the engagement zone,” said Deanna, offering a hopeful thought toward her husband’s unspoken question. “They may have
got clear before the Null fully manifested.”
Vale nodded. “Even if they lost the shuttle, they could have made it to the tanker with McCreedy and the tech team.”
Rager turned in her chair before Will could answer. “Captain, we’re being hailed.” A complex string of binary code chattered over the comm channel.
“On speaker,” he ordered.
A familiar mechanical feminine voice issued out. “Unit Identifier: Cyan-Gray. Active mobile. Interrogative: What is your status, Titan?”
“We are…” Will paused. “Our status is nominal,” he concluded.
Deanna thought she detected something like relief in the reply. “Thank you for your assistance, William-Riker. My shipframe sustained severe systemic damage from the Null attack. I estimate my survival rating was less than twenty-four-point-two percent prior to your intervention.”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 22
