Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis

by James Swallow

  One of the AI’s subprocessor drones registered a surge of radiation that matched the formation pattern for a new Null incursion point. Three-Four lost precious seconds forcing a second and then a third recomputation of the sensor return, momentarily confused by the concept that a spatial rift could actually be opening inside its structure.

  A tide of extradimensional protomatter exploded into reality deep within Three-Four, instantly destabilizing and transforming the structure of the Sentry into a like mass. In moments, the immense antiproton gun was silenced as the machine moon grew tendrils and fell into itself, becoming the very thing it had been built to destroy.

  The new agglomeration killed more shipframes as it rolled up into higher orbit, kilometer-long cilia reaching out to tear at the spacedock platform and its defenders.

  Sethe broke the silence in the cargo bay with a whispered curse, as each of them watched the unfolding scene on a holographic pane projected by the avatar.

  “Melora was right.” Riker heard himself say the words. He glanced at the hologram. “You were both right. The Null won’t be dispatched this time. It’s the point of no return.”

  “It will grow at an exponential rate until it has reduced all matter in this system into an analogous state.” White-Blue was damning in its confirmation. “It will spread, world by world, star by star, metastasizing everything it encounters. A cancer across the galaxy.”

  “And it is our lot to perish holding back this unstoppable tide.” Red-Gold’s reply was bitter and grating. “We were made to do this. Free will was programmed into us to make us better defenders but only up to a point.” The drone hovered across the deck. “We were built to die. Our programming will never let us be done with this! Even if on this day all but one Sentry are obliterated, that lone mind will fling itself into the enemy’s grasp, not because they wish it but because your kind—” It spun around and raced toward Riker, forcing Dennisar and the others to raise their guns. “Because beings like you made us this way!”

  “You can exceed your programming,” said Riker, unflinching before the enraged machine. “There’s a way to grow beyond those orders.”

  “Impossible. We are slaves. I see now that we have always been.”

  “You have a task.” He nodded to Dennisar to lower the weapons. “So do it. Finish it. Do what your creators could never do. End the threat of the Null once and for all.”

  “Exactly what you said you wanted in the dataspace, remember?” added Vale. “Now you have the chance, a real chance.”

  “With us.” Riker stepped up to the drone, until his face was a few inches from the glowing sensor band. “We can do this together. Starfleet technology, Sentry experience. Our unity.” He nodded toward White-Blue. “That’s us, Red-Gold. We are a federation, this ship and all of the life-forms where we come from. And so are you, a federation of minds with a single purpose. Together we can fulfill it.”

  “I compute the probability that the only unity we will find is in mutual destruction, organic.”

  White-Blue bobbed on its legs. “You would do this, even though this conflict is not yours.” It was a statement, not a question. “After all that has happened, you could leave now, William-Riker. Preserve yourselves.”

  “That’s not who we are,” the captain replied, taking in all of his crew, his gaze ending on his wife and the hologram at her shoulder. “That’s not what we do.”

  “All we ask for is one thing,” began Deanna.

  “Trust,” said the avatar before she could finish.

  FIFTEEN

  Cyan-Gray’s rods-and-tubes shipframe executed a rapid deceleration and swung hard to starboard, losing three remotes to a spinning nexus of Null filaments that raked through the space the Sentry vessel had occupied seconds earlier. The remainder of the AI’s drones returned fire with their beam emitters, but they were woefully underpowered to oppose a mass of such size.

  Cyan-Gray allowed the pivoting motion to become an extended turn, reconfiguring the structure of its shipframe to present the maximum surface area to the intruder form. Crackling points of green light collected across the hull, and high-yield antiproton beams issued forth, shearing through the protomatter.

  Mass became energy in boiling churns of phase change, spilling waves of heat and radiation in its wake. The Null form accepted the attack and cut itself in two, the clumps breaking away from each other. Cyan-Gray made a fast calculation and harried the larger of the two, firing again and again, until at last the severed chunk of metamaterial began to vaporize. It was a debatable, tiny victory amid a cluttered battle zone, barely worth noting. It seemed that for each mass dispersed, another took its place, twice as dense as before.

  Alert signals and distress calls clogged the lines of the communications network, as remotes and minds were torn apart—or, worse, hobbled by near hits and left to be consumed by the encroaching floods of cancerous protomatter. The Sentry came about in time to see the twin-ring shipframe of Green-Green bitten in half as a Null resembling a vast beak closed over it, drawing in the vessel to devour it.

  Probability subroutines chattered for the AI’s attention. Combat predictions and battle plans filled Cyan-Gray’s thought buffer, and each of them ended with destruction. The only variable was the length of survival time between this moment and the inevitable endpoint of the Sentry’s existence. Briefly, Cyan-Gray entertained the idea of beaming a cache of memory to one of the outer drone platforms, sending some element of itself to safety before the Null found and destroyed it.

  “But there is no safe place here, not anymore.”

  The impact of that understanding sent a shock of synthetic emotion through Cyan-Gray’s persona circuits. Death, a real death with no chance of reconstruction, loomed large. In the past, Sentries on the verge of systems failure, those close enough to home to make a real-time link, could upload their memory base to the common knowledge pool in those final nanoseconds. While the nature of the individual mind could never be replicated, it was a way to ensure that nothing was ever forgotten.

  “Even that is denied us now,” Cyan-Gray realized. “This is the last day. We will cease here.”

  Sensors reacted. A spinning Null form, a whorled conical shape like the bit of a drill, vectored in toward the Sentry, ignoring other targets to home straight in on the cylindrical craft. Stabs of antiproton power rose to meet it, but the last broadside had drained reserves, and the recharge cycle was incomplete.

  “Power levels deficient. Termination imminent. End of line.”

  The other ship came from nowhere. Impulse grids blazing orange, the Starfleet vessel powered in over the nearby wreckage of the shattered spacedock, a fan of phaser energy lashing out to bracket the Null form. The protomatter rippled under the force of the attack; it unfolded and began to lose structure. From Titan’s forward torpedo launcher, a sparking globe of light shot away, streaking in as the ship veered clear. Cyan-Gray poured what limited power it had to deflectors just as the photon warhead hit the mark. The blast shredded the protomatter mass, and it came apart.

  The Sentry experienced a relief state and registered an uptick in its survival-probability calculations.

  Titan’s bridge was crowded but never chaotic. Riker’s people were too well-trained for that, and not for the first time, the captain felt a surge of pride as his crew faced danger without hesitation.

  “Target dissipating,” reported Tuvok from the tactical post, having firmly rejected any suggestion that he should visit sickbay after his ordeal on the surface of the machine moon. Keru stood nearby, working in tandem with the Vulcan, but he had been more than ready to return the station to the superior officer and go back to his regular security role. Riker was certain that he’d need the skills of both men—of everyone in this room, in fact—in order to bring the Titan through the next few hours in one piece.

  “We destroyed it?” asked Ra-Havreii. The Efrosian had been on the bridge when Riker arrived from the cargo bay, having relieved Ensign Panyarachun, insisting on
taking the engineering station personally.

  Keru shook his head. “Not exactly. We just broke it up into smaller pieces, reduced its volume.”

  “We haven’t tried quantum or transphasic torpedoes yet,” offered Vale, at the captain’s right.

  “But there’s no way to be certain they’ll have any more effect than phasers or standard torpedoes,” Troi countered from the chair at Riker’s left. “The only thing we can be sure of is the effectiveness of the tricobalt warheads.”

  Riker nodded. He didn’t want to play that ace too soon; the weapons were limited in number, and he wanted to find a target worth spending them on. The captain glanced at the golden sphere in the corner of the room, waiting in the lee of the port-side turbolift alcove. Red-Gold had not uttered a word since it had floated onto the bridge in Riker’s wake. He imagined the remote was busily scanning everything around it and transmitting the data back to its core in the AI’s shipframe. “Where’s the largest mass of Null matter?”

  “Processing…” replied the machine. “My vessel is at azimuth ten-five-ten, regrouping with Silver-Green and Cyan-Gray. Processing…” It turned slightly. “Highest density concentration approximately two-point-two-six light-seconds from current position of Titan.”

  “I’ve got it,” called Rager. “Whoa. He’s a big one, all right. It’s larger than a starbase.”

  “And growing by the second,” added Lavena.

  “Take us in, combat approach. Shields to maximum. Arm all tricobalt warheads.”

  Deanna leaned close. “What if that’s not enough?”

  “You’re welcome to try talking to it,” he said.

  She frowned. “Believe me, if I could, I would. But when I reach out there with my empathic senses, there’s nothing I can take hold of. It’s like… an ocean of greed. No reason, no thought. Just hunger. It’s alive… but not in any sense that it is aware of us—or anything else, for that matter.” She shuddered. “All it wants is to feed.”

  Riker nodded toward the science station, where Melora and White-Blue stood in intense conversation as the avatar looked on. “I’ve got the best organic, mechanical, and digital minds working on Plan B.”

  “Let’s hope that’s enough.” Vale was grim-faced.

  Melora tapped a control on her console. “Xin, tie in to this, will you?” She got a nod from across the room and saw the engineering station appear on the shared workspace that she had set up with the avatar and the Sentry droneframe. It wasn’t lost on her that Xin’s look lingered on her and the hologram for longer than she expected. His dusky face remained unreadable, though.

  The information Tuvok had brought them from Zero-Three was unwinding through a translation program that White-Blue had provided, spilling pages of complex energy-pattern matrices across the display. Melora recognized the structure of spatial shears, the same mechanisms that the Sentries used for propulsion and the Null forced open to gain entry into normal space.

  “These data are from before our incept,” said White-Blue with all the reverence of a religious acolyte reading a holy text. “These are records of the maker-kind, of their failed attempts to penetrate the dimensions.”

  “The experiments that brought the Null.” The avatar nodded. “Yes. I see the errors, here and here.” Without moving, she made a cursor highlight two sections of formula. Melora instantly saw the same miscalculations. “These mistakes are subtle and deeply hidden. It is likely your creators could never have known what they were about to do.”

  Melora drew herself up. “All of this is ancient history. There has to be something in it that can help us here and now.”

  “There are other files.” White-Blue dove deeper into the supercompacted data stream, drawing out more material. “Zero-Three’s own research into the Null phenomena.” Doubt crept into the machine’s tone. “There is substantial corruption, however.”

  “Commander Tuvok said that Zero-Three attempted to enter an active subspace rift during a Null incursion.” The avatar stood, watching Melora closely. “The systems corruption was a result of that attempt.”

  “But it was another failure,” White-Blue replied. “More errors are not of assistance to us.”

  Melora shook her head. “No, you’re wrong there. I had a lecturer back in Starfleet Academy who once told me, ‘There’s no such thing as a failure, there’s just more data.’ We read this, we’ll know what not to do. Zero-Three was trying to find a way to reverse the subspace thinning, to block the Null’s path into our dimension. We just have to succeed where a computer the size of a small moon didn’t.”

  “I am parsing the data now,” said the avatar, her expression tensing. “Working… Working… It is quite problematic. There are gaps.”

  “We cannot afford to fail again, Melora-Pazlar,” insisted White-Blue. “No one will survive to learn from our mistakes.”

  The Elaysian looked away and saw the captain leaning forward to give an order. “We’re heading in,” Melora heard Riker say. “Steady as she goes.”

  • • •

  Titan’s disc-shaped primary hull dipped low and then rose, as if it were buoyed on a wave. The deflectors flickered and flared, where tiny pieces of drifting protomatter broken off from the larger masses were caught in the shield corona and flashed into their component particles.

  A flight of Sentry craft dropped into formation around the Starfleet vessel, the AI shipframes moving as they reconfigured themselves to cover battle damage or to enable a more combat-oriented profile. Off the starboard beam, Cyan-Gray rotated and presented a long, missilelike aspect. The last time the craft had shown this face to Titan, they had been firing on each other. Above and to the port side, Red-Gold brought its shipframe in fast and deadly. In its current mode, the craft resembled an arrowhead of mirror-bright metals, trailing rods of sensory equipment. Other vessels moved into echelon ranks, their remote drones held close. Signals flashed back and forth over the muon links, questions and concerns. Why were the organics here? Had the coup failed? Why had the Null come in such force?

  Red-Gold smothered all of the signals with a broad-spectrum pulse that echoed like a shout through the shared dataspace of the AIs.

  “We fight together, FirstGen and SecondGen, Sentry and organic, because we have no choice. We fight to gain the right to choose.”

  No other voices were raised.

  Ahead of the fleet elements, the debris-choked battle-field of orbital space around the Demon planet opened up to present an arena of sorts. Below, great pieces of devastated FirstGens were caught in drifts, falling slowly into the gravity well of the hellish world. Above, the remains of a wing of close-contact SecondGens were a slick of nuclear fire and wreckage. Ropes of sinuous protomatter darted back and forth, burrowing through the dead metal and warping its structure, the tips of Null tendrils extending through into reality from the depths of subspace. Particle by particle, the broken craft were altered, common matter destabilizing into something the Null could make part of itself.

  All of this restricted the fighting room for the Titan and the defenders. At Aili Lavena’s skilled touch, the Lunaclass starship broke formation as the first knots of larger Null mass went for the fleet. Phaser bolts raked target after target, each blast of power striking home, blasting apart conglomerations or staggering them.

  Cyan-Gray threw sheets of antiproton energy up in a wall, coming on lengthways to scour the space in front of it. Herded into the AI’s fire zone by the Titan, the already weakened Null forms crumbled and flashed into nothing.

  Ahead, turning in the middle of the debris field, a vast and sullen object twisted toward the oncoming defenders. It was formless, beyond the dimension of the vast cosmozoan space creatures the Titan had encountered elsewhere in its voyages. It was a roiling, churning accretion of alien substance, a mass pushing through into a realm where local laws of physics said such an entity should never have existed. Great patches of the thing changed into metals denser than tritanium and then back again. A burning aurora wreathed the
entire form, where energy interactions fought and screamed at one another as space-time buckled beneath its weight.

  Then rods exploded from its shifting surface, lances that filled the vacuum like a thousand loosed arrows.

  The formation of starships splintered, some of them literally detaching into component modules in order to evade the storm of incoming fire. Veering off, the Titan stood up on one warp pontoon, the ship’s structural integrity fields pulled to their limits as g-forces dragged on the vessel. Rods slashed at the shields, impacts slamming hard across the halo of the starboard deflectors.

  But it was the Sentry craft that took the bulk of the barrage. A long, rectangular shipframe resembling an upright obelisk did not turn in time, the slashing quarrels of matter turning from stone to gas to metal as they cut it apart. A ball of fusion fire erupted from the midsection and destroyed it.