“Dekyon weapons.” The avatar spoke with a frown. “I was unaware of this.”
“I don’t run everything we do past you,” said Will. “Ranul, get the modules deployed to sweep teams, and send those units to the contact points.”
“On it, Captain.”
There was no emotional tonality from the avatar that Deanna’s empathic senses could detect, but the body language and tone of voice the hologram exhibited were very clear. She’s afraid.
“Shields are going up,” reported Melora. “If they try a ship-to-ship engagement, we’ll be ready.”
“They will not,” said the avatar. “They want the Titan intact.”
Deanna shared a look with her husband and discerned that he saw the same thing she did. “Will…” she began.
He silenced her with a slight shake of the head. Not now. He stabbed at the intercom control on the arm of his chair. “Bridge to engineering. Doctor Ra-Havreii, respond.”
The Efrosian’s voice came back a moment later. “Captain, is it possible to keep this ship in one place just long enough to complete all of the repairs? I now have a fresh set of stress fractures to deal with after that rather aggressive departure.”
Will ignored the engineer’s comment. “Lieutenant Commander Keru is sending you the specs for a dekyonfield emitter. Find me a way to deploy it against larger numbers of Sentries.”
The order gave the other man pause. “Very well… I see…”
“And you’re to initiate an immediate isolation of all critical computer systems from the ship’s main network. Red-Gold has drones aboard, and it won’t just attack our crew.”
“It will go after our infrastructure as well, yes, indeed. I’ll see to it, Captain. Ra-Havreii out.”
The avatar was reaching out, her expression tightening with fear. “Wait.”
With a whisper of light, she ghosted and was gone.
Xin jerked as the avatar materialized in front of him. “Wait, Doctor, please,” she began, speaking even before her holographic image was fully formed.
He grimaced at her. “Don’t just come out of nowhere like that. It’s extremely disturbing.” Xin stepped around her and strode out of the alcove into the heart of main engineering, in the shadow of the humming warp core. “Pay attention!” he shouted. “All operators, initiate isolation protocols! We’re locking down the chamber until the captain gives us the all clear!”
Ensign Torvig’s large eyes grew even wider. “Then it’s true, there are intruders onboard?”
“Oh, yes,” Xin replied. “In person and in program. Watch for any firewall breaches. This is going to be a twofront engagement.”
The avatar followed him, and Xin finally stopped and turned to face her. There was such fear in her expression, such a need to be reassured. He sighed, suddenly uncomfortable with the emotions that were turning over inside him. “You should retreat to the deep memory in the main computer core,” he began. “Cordon off sectors in one of the redundant subprocessors, compact and store your primary functions there.”
“You want me to conceal myself.”
He nodded. “You know why. If your program is violated, then all operations aboard this ship will be open to Sentry control.”
She paused. “I do not want to cease functioning.”
“Who does?”
“But I do not want to hide, either.” Xin felt a chill of uncertainty as he saw the expression on the avatar’s face shift. Before he could say anything else, she was gone, and he was staring at thin air.
“I have looked into the face of the Null,” intoned Zero-Three’s rumbling, crackling voice. “There is no respite from it. Destruction and fire. Subsumation and death of self. This is the fate that awaits us.” The great, slow-turning cog moaned as it twisted on its axis. “You will be witnesses.”
“That,” said Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa, “was not the kind of conversation I was hoping for.”
Tuvok hesitated, and in that moment, he saw Ensign Dakal slump against the corroded railing of the vast circular balcony. “I… I need to rest,” he heard the Cardassian mutter. “For a moment…”
Sethe was at the ensign’s side in an instant. The computer scientist took the youth’s arm and studied the biomonitor there. Tuvok saw the same readings on the repeater feed of his helmet display, and his eyes narrowed.
“He’s burning up,” said Sethe. “That Cardassian constitution of his is reaching its limits. Zurin’s injuries are too much for him to handle.” The Cygnian fumbled a hypospray from a suit pocket and applied it to an injector port at his crewmate’s neck.
“Sir,” began Pava, “we need to get him back to the Titan.” Her eyes flicked to the broad, turning shape of Zero-Three’s machine proxy. “Dakal’s fading out, and all of us are low on air. We don’t really have time to stop and listen to the confessional of a computer with a death wish.”
“You have no choice!” Zero-Three’s muttered growl made their visors rattle. “I will be heard. You will be told. Information propagates. Perhaps some can be saved. Processing. Processing.”
Tuvok stared up and pointed at the Cardassian. “This being is my responsibility. This group is my responsibility. You spoke of duty before. You understand that I have mine to perform as well as you have yours.” He took a step forward. The certainty came to him that if he could not persuade the machine to help them, they would all perish here. “You have communications technology. Let me use it to contact my people.”
“They will not allow me to speak!” Zero-Three’s tone grew agitated. “I am cut off, excised like a malignancy! They do not wish the truth to be broadcast.”
“What truth?” demanded the Andorian, her face darkening to a hard azure. “Your prophecies of doom, is that what you mean?”
“Prophecy. Definition: a foretelling, a mythic prediction. Negative.” The AI’s cogs spun backward and locked in a grinding of gears. “This is certainty. Definition: unerring, without doubt.” Planes of complex data equations rained down the faces of the flickering video screens, repeating on the tiny monitor of the shuttle crew’s tricorders.
Tuvok found himself nodding. The racing trails of data passed by his eyes so fast he could register only one grouping in every ten, but what he glimpsed there were the raw mathematics of space-time itself, the concepts and keys to the layers of space and subspace, expressed in pure numeric form.
“I think I understand,” breathed Sethe, transfixed by the display. “These equations are a literal expression of the subspace rift, but it’s ever changing.”
“And every now and then, something slips in through the cracks. Hence the incursions.” Pava nodded.
“The Null exceeds our capacity to anticipate it. It overwhelms us,” whirred Zero-Three. “None will hear this. They fear the truth. The Governance Kernel are hidebound and unwilling to accept that we stand on the brink of obliteration.” The great cog wheel hissed to a stuttering halt. “A storm will break, and it will be very soon. A new incursion is coming, and it will be so powerful that no Sentry will be able to halt it. It will be the opening, the fissure, the final sword cut.”
Tuvok raised an eyebrow and gazed up at the machine. “Respectfully, I must disagree. Your logic is flawed.”
“Sir,” said Sethe in a low voice, “you’re going to pick an argument with a mind the size of a continent?”
The Vulcan continued. “If your hypothesis is correct, if the Null incursion is imminent and your termination of existence is inescapable, why do you continue to operate?”
“It is all I can do,” came the reply.
“Incorrect,” Tuvok retorted crisply. “Your destruction by Null matter exchange will be protracted and distressing in the extreme. Why, then, do you not simply self-terminate and avoid that fate? Your thermal core requires careful regulation. If you were to deactivate the control interlocks in the systems below, heat build-up and overload would occur in a matter of minutes. The Sentry construct known as Zero-Three would be obliterated in a catastrophic chain reac
tion.”
“I… I…” The voice stuttered and faltered. “Negative. That… is…”
“Oh, blades,” said Pava. “He’s going to talk it into blowing itself up!”
Tuvok paid no mind to the Andorian’s comment. “You will not self-terminate because you cannot. It is outside your programming, the very will built into your persona. You claim to believe that a victory by the Null is assured. I do not accept your statement. Furthermore, I believe that you do not fully accept your own hypothesis.” The Vulcan advanced to the rail. “Any formula for prediction of a chaotic system, no matter how complex or perfect, has the capacity for a margin of error, even if it is infinitely small. For random chance.” He glanced at Pava, and she gave him a rueful smile. “You know this, Zero-Three. On some level, you hope that you are wrong.”
There was a long silence before the machine spoke again. “This is possible.”
Ever since they had arrived on the surface of the machine moon, Tuvok had been slowly assembling evidence, building conjecture, looking for causes and effects. Now he offered up his hypothesis. “The damage on your outer shell, the corruption of your programming, this occurred as a result of your attempt to penetrate the subspace realm of the Null physically, did it not?” He cocked his head, waiting for an answer.
“Affirmative.”
“You undertook an experiment of great personal risk in an attempt to seal the rift.”
“And I failed. Failed. Failed. Damaged. Wounded. In the aftermath, I was exiled for disobeying the diktats of the Governance Kernel. They warned me not to make the attempt. I refused to accede.” The disc rotated a ponderous half-turn. “Nothing can survive in that region, no matter as we know it. Only a contraform, pure energy, only data itself, can make the transition. Nothing lives. Nothing.”
“Those are not the actions of a being that considers itself doomed,” Tuvok told it. “There is a chance, Zero-Three, a chance that we can stop the Null. To deny that fact is simply illogical.”
“A margin of error in my fatalistic probability?”
“Indeed.”
The machine fell silent again, and then a rumble issued up through the base of their boots, and the yellow glow of the processors deep in the vent shaft turned a darker cherry-red. On an impulse, Tuvok looked up toward the open mouth of the shaft far above them. There was motion up there, a shifting in the shape of the sky.
“Your logic is flawless, organic. I commend you.” Zero-Three’s proxy form shifted and reoriented itself to stand vertically, like a vast gold coin balanced on one edge. “Perhaps it is time that I revisited my kindred.”
“I think… we’re moving,” said Sethe. He bowed over his tricorder. “Yes! The construct is shifting out of orbit.”
Tuvok turned and found Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa at his side. “That was very impressive, sir. Very, ah, logical.”
“A captain I served under once told me of his former commander, a man who had on a number of occasions used circular logic and non sequiturs to disrupt the function of artificially intelligent devices. I simply employed the same methodology in an alternative manner.”
She nodded, leaning in. “But sir, you realize that Cog Boy here is short a few circuits?” Pava tapped her helmet. “If you know what I mean.”
“At present, questions of survival take precedence over those of sanity,” he told her, but still, the Vulcan watched the turn of the great cogs and wondered what arcane process of thought was taking place, deep beneath them.
Pain lanced through Christine Vale’s skull, and she hissed. “Is this going to take much longer?”
In response, Doctor Ree tightened the grip his right claw had around her neck and held her head steady. “Move less, it will happen faster. Move more, and you may find your brilliant career in Starfleet truncated when I accidentally cut through a piece of brain that you require for breathing.”
“That would be unfortunate,” offered White-Blue, watching from where it stood.
Staring at the sickbay floor, Vale grimaced and let her hands tighten on the spongy mattress of the biobed. The rising and falling cry of the alert siren was making her heart beat faster, and it was taking a near-physical effort for her to remain seated while out in the ship’s corridors an enemy boarding action was being repelled.
A big piece of the cyberlink implant came away, and Nurse Ogawa tossed it into a sterile tray. Vale resisted the urge to reach up and touch the spot where it had come from. “Now are we done?” she asked.
“More or less,” said Ree. “There are still elements of the implant embedded, but a secondary intervention should deal with them.” Ogawa approached and taped a heal strip to Vale’s forehead as the Saurian spoke. “Just try not to put your face in any powerful electromagnetic fields.”
She was barely done as the commander dropped off the biobed and onto her feet. “Secure the sickbay after I leave. That last report said there were intruders on this deck.” Another twinge of pain cut through her, and she winced.
White-Blue advanced toward her. “I will accompany you.”
“No, you won’t.” Vale held up a hand to halt the machine. “There’s too much risk that you might get caught in crossfire or targeted directly by the intruder drones.”
The AI’s head gave her a quizzical look. “Interrogative: You are concerned for my well-being? I had believed you were ill disposed toward me, Commander.”
“As far as I know, you’re the closest thing we have to an ally. That means keeping you intact, so you don’t leave sickbay until this is over, understand?”
White-Blue nodded. “I understand.”
“Try not to get hurt,” Ree called after her as she made for the door. “I’ve had some of your blood on my talons once today. I don’t want any more.”
“You and me both,” she offered.
Outside, the alert indicators along the walls of the corridor pulsed back and forth, the siren finally falling silent but the red warning color remaining. She hesitated, listening for movement, and turned as a contingent of three guards rounded the corner with Chief Dennisar at the lead.
He didn’t wait for her to ask for a status report. “Commander, we have an estimated eight to twelve intruder mobiles on this deck. Lieutenant Denken is sweeping forward. We’re moving aft.”
Vale made a beckoning gesture at one of the noncoms, signaling the security guard to hand over his weapon. The Bajoran man’s dark, serious face bobbed in a nod, and he presented the phase-compression rifle to her, drawing his backup hand phaser at the same time. The rifle was one of the newer post-Dominion War models, compact and blunt-nosed.
They began moving again, and Vale checked the charge as Dennisar went on. “From what we can see, they’re trying to isolate and hold node points for key ship’s systems.”
“Have you engaged them yet?”
“N’keytar has,” said the burly Orion, indicating a pale, thin-limbed Vok’sha female hovering at the back of the group.
The woman brushed her straw-blond hair from her angular face, fixing the commander with bright blue eyes. “Just got off a few shots, ma’am,” she said. “Couldn’t draw a bead. They swept the corridor with a lowresonance antiproton pulse, knocked me on my backside.”
“Describe them to me,” said Vale.
The security guard made a ball shape with her fingers. “Different models, but most of them were this shape, metallic, like bronze. They float across the deck, pop manipulators or weapons out of concealed hatches. I couldn’t determine any sensory apparatus, just a colored—”
“A colored band around the circumference?” Vale finished for her. “Those are Red-Gold’s drones.”
“Commander?” said the other guard, a gruff Napean man with a craggy face.
“One AI mind, multiple remote units. Those spheres, they’re all Red-Gold. He’s the instigator of this rebellion.”
“Mister Keru issued us one of these,” noted Dennisar, tapping a cylindrical module attached to the front of his heavy rifle. “A dekyon-
pulse emitter.”
“Just one?”
“Aye, ma’am. And it gets better. This thing has a slow fire cycle; it needs a few seconds to recharge after each pulse—”
As he spoke, the group reached a junction in the corridors, and Vale caught the acrid stink of singed components on the air. She turned in the direction of the smell, bringing the rifle up to her shoulder as a glitter of gold flashed around the corner of a branching passageway. The lights down there were flickering, as if something were interfering with power nodes. Dennisar and the other crewmen saw the same and instantly fell into combat stances.
The spherical drone emerged and drifted to a halt, extending four sinuous limbs that snaked out and tore at an access panel. A second drone was coming up behind it, and with that one came a unit of different design, something like a diamond shape on four legs.
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 30
