Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis

by James Swallow

  “You’re welcome,” said Troi.

  The machine came forward, rising slightly on its pistons. When it spoke again, the AI seemed emboldened by the choice it had made, to be open with Riker and the others. “Understand this. The Sentries exist to cordon and destroy the Null wherever and whenever it appears. But we have been losing ground with each passing solar cycle, as the enemy comes ever closer to our home. The attack on the refinery was not the first within the confines of our planetary system. It is merely the most recent in a series of brutal and lengthy engagements. In this battle of attrition, the Sentries are being pressed to our very limits. We are unable to improve ourselves fast enough to defeat the Null’s constantly evolving energy matrix.” It glanced at Riker. “You and your crew, William-Riker, have unknowingly placed yourselves in the middle of a conflict that has been going on since before your Federation existed.”

  ELEVEN

  Zurin Dakal walked, and as he did, he tried not to think about the pain. He concentrated on placing one boot in front of the other, measuring out his motion in the hard smacks of his footsteps on the scarred metal ground beneath him. He listened to the hiss of his own breathing and tried very hard not to imagine his right arm plunged into a vat of molten rock, the pale Cardassian flesh burning but unburned, the slow agony never abating.

  Sweat coiled around his eye ridges and trickled down his cheek. He halfheartedly made a motion to his face to wipe it away, then felt foolish as his undamaged hand bumped against the visor of his helmet.

  “Zurin?” Sethe was close by, and the Cygnian gave him a wary look. He spoke to him on a discreet comm channel. “I have painkillers in my suit’s medpack.”

  Dakal shook his head. He had already taken those in his emergency kit, and they had done little but turn the pain down to a dull razor and muddy his thoughts. He didn’t want to blunt his senses any further, not while any moment of inattention could lead to danger. Isolated from the Titan, stranded on an artificial world, every member of the group had to maintain focus. He blinked again and found Commander Tuvok studying him.

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  Without even altering his expression by one iota, the Vulcan nevertheless managed to convey perfectly his lack of belief in the ensign’s statement. “We will rest for a moment.”

  Dakal’s shoulders sank with relief, and he took a long, deep breath of recycled air. He glanced back the way they had come, searching the wilderness for the mouth of the canyon where their interrupted transport had deposited them; he could not see it from there.

  But the great disfigurements in the metal landscape were visible from this slightly higher elevation. Pava had spotted the first of them, walking to the edge of a rent in the ground that was anything but deliberate or constructed. Old, oxidized petals of heat-distorted iron bowed downward, bent flaps of material cored in by the whiplash impact of some incredible force. The edges of the damage were corroded, and they defied coherent analysis by tricorder; all that could be intuited with any degree of certainty was that something like a great roughhewn knife had slashed at the surface of the FirstGen construct some time ago. Sethe had used his suit’s wrist beacon to cast a light into the ragged wound, discovering that the gouge went deep and dark.

  It soon became clear that this scar did not exist alone. They passed more along the way, and Dakal used the distraction of mapping them to keep his mind occupied. He made rough estimates based on length and apparent orientation, and on the tiny screen of his tricorder, an image grew, the image he would have seen if viewing the machine moon from high altitude. Not one scar but a whole skein of them, radial cuts that fanned out from some distant point of impact. The pattern of a claw, he imagined, the claw of some vast and monstrous carrion bird.

  Zurin pressed his teeth together. His mind was wandering. He was becoming overly fanciful. The fault of the medication, perhaps.

  Pava had also discovered the melts, the places where sheets of the metal ground were disordered and slagged, as if they had been superheated, flowed like runny wax, and been left to set again. Like the scars, these blemishes were the marks left behind after some previous battle, and while the heaped slag piles were cold and inert, the spatter of the metal’s recrystallization had provided some answers. Tuvok recognized the aftereffect from the wreckage of White-Blue’s shipframe. FirstGen Zero-Three had, at one point in its existence, been directly bombarded by the Null. How it had survived intact was a question Dakal was very interested in answering.

  They walked on, and after a while, the noises returned. The sound over the communicators came and went without pattern or apparent trigger, forcing itself onto the standby channel that was open between the shuttle survivors. Dakal did not hear the whispers or the giggling that Sethe and Pava claimed to, but he could not ignore the bass thrumming at the low end of the noise. The sound seemed to gather at the bridge of his nose and echo back through his eye sockets.

  He was thinking of this as his downward gaze registered a change in local light levels. He looked up to see that the four of them had at last arrived at their destination, in the shadow of the odd, off-kilter pyramid.

  Dakal’s gaze rose farther and found that what had seemed from a distance like some sort of open entranceway was, in fact, too far off the ground for any of them to reach. The building, if that was what it was, appeared to have been formed by the motion of jagged triangles of steel emerging from the surface of the machine moon. Locked together like some strange three-dimensional puzzle, the plates surrounded something that gave off wavelengths of coherent radiation that were detectable by tricorder scan.

  Pava rocked on the balls of her feet and made some experimental lunges at the opening above them. “The gravity is lighter here but not light enough. Perhaps with a boost, I could make it up there.”

  Sethe sighed. “Maybe we were wrong to come. This could just be some sort of power substation, not even a terminal at all.”

  “It is the only location within scanner range generating any regular energetic output,” Tuvok replied. “We have detected no other signs of life on this construct.”

  Dakal rested against a metal outcropping and considered that for a moment; it wasn’t strictly true, as the nearby lines of power-carrying pylons could also be considered a sign of “life”—but then the idea of following them over the distant horizon to wherever they led did not appeal. Zurin wanted just to rest. To sit down and take off the damned helmet.

  The light shifted again, and for a long second, Dakal stared at the motion without really seeing it. Then the static returned to the comm channel, and this time, it was a heavy rush, like the surging of waves on a shore. He looked up as Pava called out a warning, and he jerked away from the metal wall in shock at what he saw.

  Eight drones had emerged from around the apex of the dark pyramid, some of them floating on glowing thruster coils, others many-legged things that clambered around the iron peak, clinging on with clawed talons. They were made of brass and a strange, nonreflective ceramic that resembled bone. Glassy devices filled with sparking components and slow-turning cog wheels worked their limbs and torsos. Some had heads that were fashioned after blank cubes, others odd knots of cable with deep-set ruby eyes. All trailed festoons of wire from their backs that vanished away behind the pyramid, perhaps into unseen sockets concealed beneath the metal landscape.

  The machines dropped around them in a rough circle, each drone chattering, some babbling to themselves, others beaming light-pulse signals to one another faster than the Cardassian’s eye could follow.

  Tuvok and Pava had their phasers in their hands, pointed toward the ground but equally ready for hostile action. Sethe raised his tricorder and swept it back and forth.

  “Zero-Three,” said Tuvok in a clear and firm voice. “Do you hear us?” One of the drones came closer, and the Vulcan addressed his question directly to it.

  The machine didn’t respond, cocking its head in a quizzical gesture. It moved oddly, in the manner of a person injured or perha
ps the victim of a stroke, favoring one side of its body where a pair of snakelike manipulators hung limp and apparently useless. Closer now, Dakal noted that it also sported blinded lenses among its cache of eyes; in addition, melt marks like those on the fields of iron were visible on its carapace.

  “They all have signs of the same damage,” noted Pava, her thoughts paralleling his.

  A couple of the remotes stumbled when they walked; others bumped into one another and reacted by halting, staring dumbly at nothing. One of the flyers circled in an endless, apparently purposeless loop. Dakal frowned. “I think they might be malfunctioning.”

  Sethe nodded the moment he spoke. “Yes, that could be it. The tricorder is reading the passage of data packets through the systems of this one.” He pointed at the closer drone. “They’re chaotic, repetitive. Some of the routines seem incomplete. If I saw this in a Starfleet computer, I’d say it was suffering from a major systems corruption.”

  “If the damage we’ve seen was caused by a Null attack, is it possible the AI’s mentality was affected as well?” Pava asked, moving to keep her back toward the sheer steel walls and the remotes in her sight line.

  “Like shell shock?” Dakal wondered aloud. “Possibly.”

  Tuvok stood his ground, watching the drones. “If a system has sufficient complexity to achieve sentience, then logically, it could be susceptible to mental impairment, just like an organic intellect.”

  “Brain damage,” muttered Sethe. “Maybe even psychosis? What if that’s the reason this moon is isolated from the others? Because it’s insane?”

  He had barely finished speaking the words before the lopsided drone skipped forward and shot out a triclawed limb. The remote plucked the Starfleet-issue tricorder from the Cygnian’s grip and drew it back before he could react, shambling away. Sethe started after the alien machine, then thought better of it and halted.

  Dakal saw other, smaller manipulators bend in to touch the device, the fine tools at their tips turning and whirring. In seconds, the drone had cracked the tricorder’s shell and taken it apart, dismantling the unit into its smallest components.

  “Oh,” said Pava. “We lose a whole shuttle, and now that? The captain’s going to dock our pay at this rate.”

  The bits of the tricorder vanished into the interior of the drone as it moved away, faltering over its own cables as it retreated.

  Looking up, Dakal saw movement and felt a curious moment of amusement bubble up inside him. He chuckled dryly. “I think it may have wanted an offering,” he noted. “See?” He pointed.

  One whole side of the bent pyramid was moving, the long plane of dark metal sliding back, downward into the ground at their feet. As it fell away, it revealed the interior of the enclosed space, an area as large as a cargo bay, crammed with more cables in a webbed riot around devices that defied any immediate categorization.

  As well as they could, the stumbling drones closed their circle around the Starfleet officers, forcing them to back toward the growing opening.

  “We could break out past them if we wanted to,” said Pava, her phaser now at the ready, all hesitation gone from her stance.

  Behind his faceplate, Tuvok shook his head. “We came here to learn more. We will not accomplish that by remaining on the surface.” The retreating metal wall ended its fall with a low, hollow booming. “Follow me,” said the Vulcan as he moved inside. “But proceed with caution.”

  Dakal threw a last look at the motley collection of drones and warily followed the commander into the unknown.

  The mood in the observation lounge was grim, a sense of concern and sublimated fear on the faces of everyone around Melora Pazlar. She laid her long-fingered hands flat on the surface of the curved table and glimpsed her own reflection in the polished black surface. I look tired. Old and tired.

  The truth was, the science officer had to think hard for a moment to remember exactly when she had last slept. Melora had disabled the day-night cycle controls in stellar cartography, the subroutine that would slightly dim the lab’s lights in accordance with the circadian mean of the room’s occupants. Elaysians didn’t need as much rest as some humanoids, but they weren’t Vulcans; they couldn’t stay up for days without ill effect. The more she thought about it, the more Melora felt the creeping fatigue descend on her. She wanted to go back to her quarters, shrug off the tight constraints of her g-suit, and drift away in the embrace of zero gravity.

  But not yet, she told herself. Focus on the task at hand.

  Christine Vale was nodding to herself. “So we were on the beam all along,” she said, following the conclusion of the captain’s words in his conversation with White-Blue. “We put our foot in a war, and some of it has stuck to us.”

  Xin Ra-Havreii looked up briefly from the padd in front of him and gave Vale an arch sniff of amusement. “What a delightful metaphor, Commander.” He looked down again without catching Melora’s eye. He hadn’t looked at her since he entered the room, something she firmly refused to let herself be troubled about.

  “At least, now we know we can defend ourselves against this threat,” said the captain. “The tricobalt warheads were the right call, Ranul.”

  The Trill security officer frowned. “Desperate measures, sir. We might be up for a repeat performance, but beyond that I’m not certain. And if the next incursion by the Null is bigger…” He trailed off, leaving the bleak possibility unspoken.

  “We can fabricate a few more warheads,” said Xin in a noncommittal tone, “but there is the issue of subspace stressing to consider.”

  “Go on, Doctor,” prompted Riker.

  Xin continued to talk into the padd, not looking up. “This area of space is already rife with distortion zones. It’s like a sheet of glass webbed by cracks, and they are the conduits that allow the Null to penetrate our dimension—and also give the Sentries their method of interstellar transit. Detonating dozens of tricobalt charges in scattershot fashion will be like pressing down on those fractures. They’ll widen and grow.” He paused for effect. “Implode,” he added. “Frankly, with the Sentries’ insistence on using their shear-slip drive, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. If it does, this entire sector could become a huge subspace anomaly. A great sinkhole into the void, like the whirlpools on the maps of ancient mariners.”

  “And beyond it, there be dragons,” Riker said softly. He glanced at Melora. “What’s your take on this, Commander?”

  Melora took a deep breath, pushing down her frustration. “The data that White-Blue provided me, the information he was compiling about the patterns of Null incursion, well, sir, it’s pretty impenetrable stuff. The baseline of the Sentry sensor tech isn’t anything like ours, and just finding some kind of commonality with the records is taking a while.”

  Riker nodded, but his lips were pressed thin. “Do you think we might be able to predict the point of the next incursion?”

  “It’s possible,” she admitted. “But right now, I’m afraid I’ll still be putting the numbers together when it happens.”

  “I have a suggestion,” said Xin. “I imagine it won’t be a popular one, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up.”

  Vale’s lips curled. “Whenever you talk like that, I know you’re about to come up with something I’m really going to hate.”

  The engineer gave the exec an indulgent look. “Well, I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, Commander.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Riker ordered.

  Melora looked back across the table and found Xin gazing steadily at her. “Titan,” he said. “Or, more accurately, the avatar. She has, for want of a better phrase, the commonality with the Sentry AIs that Melora mentioned. If we give her unfettered access to White-Blue’s data and let her process it herself, without intervention by us, I’m certain she’ll give us the answers we need.”

  “I thought we’d decided to keep things compartmentalized,” said Keru. “For security’s sake.” He glanced at Vale, who nodded in support.

 
Xin made an airy wave with his hand. “Whose security are we talking about?” He snorted. “This isn’t about that. Two points, Captain.” He held up both hands, an index finger on each raised. “One, the avatar can do this for us. Two, it gives her an opportunity to contribute to the mission. A way to feel useful.”

  “So now we’re concerned about making the ship’s computer feel valued?” Vale almost rolled her eyes. “With all due respect, Doctor, that’s a hell of a long way down the list of importance.”