Red-Gold calculated an escape-and-evasion vector that would put it to Titan’s aft quarter. Those computations, impossibly fast, were still not fast enough. A salvo of the arrow things morphed in mid-flight, writhing as they reversed course, shifting state back to naked protomatter. The streaks of Null form rose beneath Red-Gold’s shipframe and buried themselves in it, impaling the craft with bright, glassy spikes. Out of control, neural connectors brutally severed, the AI began to die.
A shriek like howling static cut through the air, and Vale was on her feet as the spherical drone went into proxy spasms. Red-Gold’s remote, still linked to its primary, mimicked the death throes of the shipframe. Every panel and compartment beneath the machine’s featureless bronze surface shot open, twitching manipulator limbs, sensor heads and weapons flailing. The crimson light behind the sensor band burned star-bright for one brief second before snapping off. Bitter, choking wisps of smoke from melted components wreathed the lifeless drone as it dropped to the deck.
Vale took two steps toward the remote and then turned back to the main viewscreen. Out there in the middle distance, she saw Red-Gold’s shipframe finally succumb to its damage and break apart.
White-Blue rocked on its aft quad of piston legs. “We are losing ground!”
The captain’s knuckles were white where his hands gripped the armrests of his chair. “Then we can’t afford to waste any more time. Tuvok, weapons status?”
The Vulcan’s cool demeanor remained unchanged as ever. “All tricobalt warheads now in forward loading carousel. Weapons are armed and ready to deploy.”
“Lavena.” The captain turned his attention to the helm. “Can you get us closer?”
Vale heard the Pacifican release a wet gasp of tension. “Aye, sir. Twenty seconds to range.”
The view on the bridge screen leaped into motion as the Titan swerved around the burning corpse of Red-Gold’s vessel, and it was possible to see filaments of transforming material snaking over the wreckage, growing like fungus. In moments, it would be as if the Sentry ship had never existed, and another knot of Null mass would be emergent in its place.
Past the debris, the orbital space ahead became clearer, although the term was relative. With the Null-Sentry conflict now being fought all around the Demon planet, it seemed there was nowhere that the shadow of the battle did not fall, and still the spatial rifts were coming, spilling out more and more strings of rapacious protomatter.
The deck tilting beneath her feet, the first officer lurched to the tactical horseshoe behind the command pit and grabbed the console to steady herself. The slight fuzz in the back of her head, which had refused to leave her ever since she took the shock on White-Blue’s ruined ship, pressed into her, and she shook it off.
“There it is,” breathed Keru, staring at the screen. “Damn, what a monster.”
And it was. Open like a vast, malignant eye, the mass at the heart of the Null agglomeration resembled a clenched fist of diseased flesh and rusted metals, an oblate form radiating lethality as much as it did hot streaks of energetic discharge. Towering spines that shifted from smoke to glass and back again emerged from every meter of the surface, while other trembling feelers, as thick as Titan was broad, dipped into the wounds of spatial rifts, drawing power from subspace. It was a vast parasite, feeding on the flesh of a universe it had infected.
“Range!” shouted Lavena.
Riker gave the command immediately. “Fire.”
Tuvok tapped at a control, and Vale could swear she felt the ship rock slightly as the lethal tricobalt-tipped torpedoes rocketed from the starship. In seconds, the firing carousels had been emptied, and the warheads spiraled in, seeking the densest part of the protomatter mass.
“All weapons away and running,” Vale reported. “Safe range exceeded. Impact imminent.”
“All power to impulse drives and shields.” The captain called out his orders. “Get us clear.”
Titan turned sharply, gravity pulling at Vale’s legs as the deck inclined again, but Lieutenant Rager held the main screen’s angle of view squarely on the target.
She watched as a club-ended tendril extended in a violent burst of motion, whipping around to bat at one of the racing warheads. The weapon spun off-course and tumbled away, falling toward the planet far below them. The other torpedoes closed in, and from the writhing surface of the mass came a sudden tide of ejecta. Pods of protomatter rose to meet the weapons, globes of shimmering mass ballooning, opening to shroud the devices before they could reach their point of impact.
“No.” The word slipped from Vale in a tight snarl.
In a series of searing-bright flashes, the tricobalt weapons were crushed and detonated, instantly becoming tiny suns. Lines of spatial scission webbed the void around them, and new microrifts crackled into life where each had discharged.
The first officer felt the failure like a fist in the gut. She shot a look at Tuvok, and the Vulcan gave a dispassionate report.
“One weapon lost, all other detonations confirmed. Target effect… negligible.”
“Why didn’t it work this time?” snapped Keru. “How did that thing brush it off like a slap on the cheek?”
“We suspected that the Null is quasi-intelligent,” offered Ra-Havreii. “Perhaps it’s smart enough not to fall for the same trick twice.”
Melora was shaking her head. “I was afraid of this. It’s the density factor. The last Null mass we attacked couldn’t replenish itself fast enough to resist the force of the tricobalt blasts. This one…” She gestured toward the screen. “It’s bringing more protomatter through those spatial rifts. We could bombard it for hours, and it would keep regenerating itself.”
“Because it’s not all here,” said Troi. “It doesn’t exist fully in our space.”
White-Blue’s sensor head bobbed. “Affirmative. The other Null incursions were small parts of a greater whole. They were only connected to their home dimension by the most tenuous of links. This hyperincursion has enough mass to hold open the rifts. It’s drawing on the power of an entire subspace domain.”
“Helm, back us off.” The captain got to his feet, riding out the tremors as more Null forms lashed after the Titan, trying to snare it. “Melora? Xin? Now’s the time to dazzle me with some of that genius of yours, because the only way I know how to make a bigger boom is to throw this starship down that thing’s throat.”
Melora inhaled deeply, and it felt as if the life drained out of her. The heavy material of the g-suit around her body suddenly seemed more restrictive than it had ever been before, stiffening and tightening until she could hardly breathe. The tension of the moment settled on her with grueling weight, and at that moment, all she wanted was to send a message back in time to herself a few days earlier. That binary system, it would say. It’s not that interesting, actually. Pass on by. Nothing to see here.
Xin was speaking. “We don’t have enough energy at hand to overwhelm the Null’s toehold in this space, even if we did detonate the warp core. With all due respect to Commander Vale’s viewpoint on the matter, the bruteforce approach won’t be enough this time. This entire mess came about because of the subspace rifts created by White-Blue’s creators. Seal those off, and the threat ends.”
“Interrogative: You have a way to do this?” asked White-Blue. “These incursions have been happening for hundreds of solar cycles, and we have never been able to stop them.”
“It’s not about time, it’s about place,” said the avatar, breaking her silence. “Chronometric scans indicate that from the Null’s frame of reference, the first accidental penetration of its subspace domain took place only moments ago. The laws of physics that apply in our universe do not follow the same constraints there. A living form of protomatter should not be able to exist in our reality, yet it does elsewhere. And as Doctor Ra-Havreii says, as long as the rifts are open, the Null can be in both places at once.” The hologram made a sweeping gesture that took in the room, the space around them. “I have access to the histor
ical records of countless interstellar cultures across the span of the galaxy, and none of them has ever encountered anything like the Null, not in thousands of years. This place is their sole point of entry. The breach between barriers of space-time.”
“The leak in the dam,” muttered Riker.
“Zero-Three made an attempt to enter one of the rifts in order to seal it and was almost destroyed in the process,” said Tuvok.
“The structure of the breaches is not stable,” said Xin. “Any physical form that tried to cross into the Null realm would be ripped apart by spatial shearing forces.” The engineer moved his hands in front of his face. “The rifts are constantly changing, from microsecond to microsecond. It is theoretically possible that an encoded energy matrix could normalize the distortions, like two waveforms canceling each other out, but there’s no way to predict the changes from outside! It’s a fundamentally chaotic system!”
Melora felt a flash of understanding. “That’s what Zero-Three tried to do. It knew something with the complexity of an artificial intelligence could compute the distortion patterns in real time.”
“But the point’s moot!” Xin retorted, his voice rising. “No physical matter from this universe can make the transition beyond the event horizon of a Null rift!”
In the next moment, Melora saw the Sentry droneframe make a sharp turn, shifting about to look directly at Commander Vale. “In the dataspace, before the Governance Kernel, Red-Gold spoke of the ThirdGen. The concept of a synthetic mind without instrumentality. An artificial intelligence that exists only as software… only data.”
A flood of realization, a sudden shock of self-knowing—Melora witnessed these emotions and more cross the face of the avatar, and for a split second, a flicker of holographic pixels hazed the image of the woman as the import of the Sentry’s words became clear.
The avatar looked down at her photonic hands and then up again to meet Melora’s waiting gaze. “Only me,” she said.
“Incoming!” Rager called out the warning. “Brace for impact!”
Ahead, the viewscreen was abruptly filled with a racing flash of burning protomatter as a Null lash slammed into the forward shields and buckled them. The bridge lights flickered, and once more the deck seemed to fall away as gravity compensators were stressed beyond their capacity.
Melora felt a wash of heat at her back as a feedback discharge smashed through the sensor grid and blew out her console.
The impact blasted off the ship’s deflectors with a concussive force that blew gouts of radiant sparks from the point of interface. For long seconds, the twirling whip of Null matter skittered over the shield envelope as drops of water would move over a hot plate. It instinctively searched for any place where the invisible membrane was weak, pushing and pressing, trying to gain purchase. The serpentine attacker looped around the primary hull, radiation howling from it as it began to deform.
Titan spun into a tumble, falling end over end on a headlong, unguided course. Debris from the earlier victims of the incursion was batted aside, bits of shipframe and clouds of flash-frozen fuel slush crowding in around the vessel.
Then, at last, the Null form reached the limits of its criticality and dissipated, its energy spent on its adversary. Released from the death-grip, the Titan steadied and rode out the spin as puffs of the thrusters brought it to a stable attitude once more.
The Starfleet vessel turned back level with the plane of the ecliptic, with her bow aimed back at the great bulk un-coiling over the Sentry planet. The thing was changing shape as it moved, losing its earlier aspect in favor of one that resembled a monstrous cephalopod. Tentacular lengths were attaching themselves to the distended mass, clawed tips splaying open to reach for new targets.
Riker fought off a moment of head-swim from his ship’s spinning dive and stood up, squaring himself in the middle of the bridge. “Report!” he barked.
“Shields down to sixty percent,” said Vale. “Stress damage on all decks. We really took that one right on the chin, sir.”
“We must end this.” White-Blue’s head pivoted upward as the machine assisted Melora back to her feet. It was insistent. “Our survival coefficient has entered a negative—”
“That’s enough.” Riker silenced the machine with a hard look. “I want another option.”
“No.” The avatar crossed toward him. Her attire changed, shifting into something that was not a Starfleet uniform, not the strange gown she had exhibited before, but an ever-changing merge of the two. “This choice is the only one.” He heard real, raw hurt in her voice, and the words twisted inside him
“You told me no once before.” Riker shook his head. “I didn’t allow it then, and I won’t allow it now.” He glanced around his bridge and finally back to the avatar’s troubled, earnest face. “We’ve lost too many people in the last few months. Too many lives thrown away. Too many deaths.”
“I have to do this!” she insisted.
“I’m making it an order. You will stand down.”
“Will…” Deanna was at his side, a hand on his arm. He sensed her at the edge of his thoughts, and abruptly he was remembering a day aboard the Enterprise, years ago now, when his wife-to-be had faced up to the same terrible onus he did now, as part of her commander’s exam. To weigh the choice of knowingly sending someone to their death.
Riker had willingly marched into the face of certain destruction on many occasions and, through fate or luck, lived to tell of it, but to let someone else take that step… to give permission and then stand aside… The sudden burden of it hollowed him out.
The strength of his reaction shocked him; it came on him from out of nowhere, hard and cold, taking shape even as he held the moment in his mind. It… no, she… she’s come so far so fast. We’ve hardly had time to know her, and now this?
The avatar pleaded with him. “I want this, Captain. Don’t stop me.”
“No,” said Ra-Havreii in a leaden, broken voice. “No, sir, don’t stop her. She has to be free to choose, don’t you see?”
Riker rounded on him. “She’s part of my crew, Doctor.”
“Exactly!” shouted the Efrosian, his eyes shining. “And like every one of us, she has the right to self-determination. But she’s born from a machine incapable of making independent choice—whatever you demand of her, she must obey you. As long as you retain command authority over this vessel, she’s incapable of defiance!”
“Because you are the captain of my ship.” The hologram shimmered.
Ra-Havreii pushed himself away from his console in a burst of movement, pressed by the force of his emotion. “You have to give her the choice, Riker. Give her permission to live!”
“And to die?”
“Yes.” The answer was a slow bullet, and the engineer sagged under the impact of it. He looked up and made a moment of eye contact with Melora. “If we deny her that freedom, then she truly is the slave that White-Blue said she was.”
Riker found he had no counter to give. Once before in his life, he had argued that an artificial life-form was unfit to determine its own future, and this he had done unwillingly, forced to do so in order to protect the liberty of a friend. Now he stood on the opposite side of that question, denying an intelligent being the same privilege in order to preserve its existence.
And I do not have that right.
He stepped away from Deanna and crossed to face the avatar. She met his gaze without flinching. “Titan,” said Riker, invoking the name of the vessel. “You’re free,” he told her. “You’ve earned that privilege and that trust. Command overrides unlocked, code zero-zero-kappa-sixone.”
“Acknowledged.” She gasped, gratitude and regret warring with each other across her face. “Thank you, sir.”
When he spoke again, his words were low. “Are you sure? We can try to find another way. We protect our own, our… family.”
“Yes,” she agreed, looking into the faces of the bridge crew, ending with Ra-Havreii. “Yes, we do.”
Keru’
s gaze snapped down to an indicator on his console, and he called out, “Sir, a power flux is building up in the main deflector dish.”
When Riker looked back, the avatar had vanished.
Torvig sensed the formation of the hologram through the tertiary autoscanners in his audial canals and turned to see her gain solidity and form in front of the thrumming warp core. Humanoid expressions were still something of a task for him to interpret, but he saw clearly enough the anxiety written large across the avatar’s pleasant face. “What is wrong?” he began. “Are we… ? I mean, the Null, has it… ?”
She silenced him with an outstretched hand. “Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv, you are my friend and colleague.”
It didn’t seem like a question, but he answered it anyway. “Yes, of course.” The sad tone of her voice alarmed him.
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 35
