“I need you to help me do something.” She nodded at his console, and the panel instantly reconfigured to become the operational control framework for the starship’s main deflector array.
Torvig gaped. The system was drawing power directly from the warp core, and in the array’s distortion amplifiers, a caged churn of energetic particles had appeared, increasing in intensity by the second. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he said, his brow furrowing.
“A coherent energy matrix must be discharged from the main deflector at the optimal moment of approach,” she continued. “Project it directly into the largest Null rift.”
He blinked in confusion. “What effect will that have? The particle pattern will just be absorbed into subspace as it crosses the event horizon.”
She shook her head. “The template will be encoded with a data-lattice structure to prevent decoherence. Here.” At a gesture, another screen lit up to show a dense block of field-energy computations, particle-pattern networks, and more. It was cutting-edge quantum science, and Torvig had only seen it in one other place: a journal entry from the Daystrom Institute on the theory of programming virtual particles to mimic the functions of a holomatrix.
“Outstanding,” he breathed. “This template could easily contain teraquads of data, enough to fit a starship’s entire operating system—”
Torvig broke off as his thoughts caught up to his words. A sudden, crushing sense of inevitability came upon him.
“Yes.” She gave him a rueful nod. “I would like you to be the one to do this for me.”
“Once you’re downloaded into this matrix, your program will no longer exist in the Titan’s system,” he said. “You’ll be… gone.”
“I know. Please, Torvig. We don’t have much time.”
He turned back to the panel, his cybernetic arms poised over the keypads. “I am sorry,” said the Choblik.
“I hope you meet your benefactors one day. I’m pleased that I knew mine.” She closed her eyes. “Do it now.”
He began the sequence, and the autoscanners registered the hologram’s dispersal. On the monitor, the chaos of the particle stream became ordered and regular.
• • •
One-Five’s stentorian comm signature resonated over the web of the muon links. “All active mobiles are advised to retreat to the inner orbital perimeter and regroup at staging areas designated on local scan.”
Cyan-Gray extracted itself from an engagement that cost it the last of its remaining remotes and fell away, discharging antiproton bursts as it went. In a nanosecond, the Sentry checked and evaluated the locations of every other shipframe and machine moon. The larger FirstGens were forming up into tight defensive clusters, grouping around those armed with axis cannons. The number of Second-Gen vessels was lower than Cyan-Gray had estimated, by a large margin. The final battle was ending too fast, the brazen futility of it clear and damning there in the figures.
The Sentry sent a query. “Interrogative: Specify purpose for regrouping.”
The reply was immediate. “Consolidation of forces. A combined attack has a greater potentiality for success than individual effort.”
Cyan-Gray’s doubt must have been expressed so strongly by its emulators that it bled into the muon link, and in return, One-Five gave a gruff pulse of determination.
“We must fulfill the directive,” said the FirstGen. “We have no other course of action. Red-Gold’s erroneous and misguided attempt to control the course of our society was only a distraction from our duty. In unity, we must proceed. We will proceed.”
“We could disengage,” Cyan-Gray suggested. “Quit this system and relocate to a secondary locale. Rearm and formulate a new strategy.” Even as the signal left the AI’s processor, a bolt of mental inertia and revulsion analog washed through the Sentry’s mind, as if the very idea of such a thing were against reason. It was the core program making itself known, forbidding the chance to fall away from the fight.
One-Five underlined the hard truth. “That cannot be done. The destruction of Zero-Three calls into doubt any further use of slip-shear travel. The Null has full control of the subspace domain in this sector.”
A sudden surge of annoyance and frustration welled up deep inside the nexus core of the shipframe, expressing itself in blasts of antiproton energy directed at any Null forms in range. “Then we will be destroyed here!” retorted Cyan-Gray. “Destroyed and consumed!”
The ancient FirstGen ignored the comment. “Interrogative: Where is the organic vessel?”
“Identifier: Titan withdrew from combat radius after failed attempt to deploy exotic weapons against the Null.” Cyan-Gray paused as new data came to it. “Correction. Organic vessel now on intercept vector toward core Null mass.”
“They have no reason to remain.”
Cyan-Gray turned a cluster of sensors toward the giant, pulsing heart of the Null incursion; the alien form was extruding tendrils toward the surface of the planet. At the extreme edge of the Sentry’s sensor envelope, it detected the tips of the mammoth cilia plunging into the turbulent crimson atmosphere, igniting storm cells and dredging through the thermionic radiation layers. It was preparing to consume the planet.
“There.” The sensor cluster picked out a flash of white metal and impulse exhaust, as the Starfleet vessel swept around a clump of compacted debris. “White-Blue and the organics go to face the Null. They have no reason to remain, but they chose to.”
“White-Blue’s function is in error state. The organics also. They will perish.”
“If they do,” Cyan-Gray transmitted angrily, “then we will join them soon after. All of us.”
For the second time, the Starship Titan ran the gauntlet of the Null.
A fleet of morningstars awaited them, roughhewn spheres that might have been made of marble, each wreathed in a nightmarish orchard of glass spines. The spiked globes tumbled through the darkness, spilling slicks of eichner radiation behind them in hazy contrails, crashing off one another. The Starfleet ship answered the challenge with pulsed barrages of phaser fire and salvos of munitions. A spread of proximity-fused quantum torpedoes thundered across the vacuum and obliterated the closest of the advance guard.
An invader breaching the castle walls, the Titan punched through the hole it had made in the outer line of defense and came in at maximum impulse, every weapon blazing, plunging straight at the core.
Serpent forms attacked and were beaten away, beam fire converging and slamming the protomatter constructs away, disintegrating them into free particles. They would regroup and coalesce but not soon enough to catch the racing starship. More torpedoes—conventional photon loads—dropped unpowered from the rear launcher bay, before suddenly jetting away in random directions, smart seeker software in their warheads locking onto the nearest target mass and assailing it. Hastily reprogrammed probes, usually configured for deep-space reconnaissance, were ejected and took up flight paths that veered wildly away; they began to scream out across every transmission band, projecting the illusion of another Lunaclass starship. Blind, hungry Null swarmed after them, fooled by their energy scent.
Titan crossed the inner bulwarks of the core, threading through the swift and deadly cords reaching out from the main mass. By now, it was the size of a large planetoid, the subspace shadow it generated causing tidal shocks across the nearby Demon-class world. The core sat amid an aurora of spatial distortions; it was a dark, ugly jewel set into a rip through space-time.
A wall of coruscating protomatter filled the viewscreen, and from it poured a rage of radiation and more of the interceptor pods that had swallowed the tricobalt weapons with such ease.
“Where’s the strongest locus of subspace bleed-through?” Riker said carefully.
Deanna watched him, strength and confidence in every word he said. But inside he’s furious. Angry at what he is being forced to allow.
“Scanning…” Melora leaned over a secondary station and stifled a cough from a wisp of smoke still present after the science-cons
ole blowout. She was in pain, her g-suit malfunctioning, but the Elaysian was forcing it away, her focus on the job at hand. “Got it. Azimuth Nine, Vector Two.”
“Helm, put the bow on that heading.”
Aili Lavena nodded. “Aye, sir, coming to Vector Two.” The ship rumbled as it bounced through a zone of ionic turbulence, but the Pacifican rode it as if she were skimming wave tops in a speeder.
A chime turned Deanna’s head to her seat-arm console. Torvig. “Ensign, this is the bridge. Report.”
The Choblik’s head was visible only to her, his face appearing on the small screen as his voice issued from the intercom speakers. “Bridge, this is engineering. The main deflector is… that is to say…” He blinked quickly, and the counselor felt a pang of sympathetic emotion for the young officer. Torvig stiffened, putting a brave face on it. “The encoding is complete. She’s ready.”
“Null forms are approaching at high velocity from the aft port quarter,” Tuvok reported. “It would appear the decoys have reached the end of their usefulness.”
White-Blue bobbed in the gesture that seemed to approximate a nod. “Expected. If this is to be done, it must be now, William-Riker.”
Will didn’t appear to hear the Sentry. “Conn, distance to rift?”
“Nine hundred fifty kilometers and falling.” Rager didn’t look back, her gaze fixed on the main screen.
“Captain…” Xin Ra-Havreii had become muted after his impassioned outburst only moments before. The Efrosian threw a look at Deanna, then at Christine Vale.
Will looked down at the deck and nodded to himself. “Transmit.”
The pulse grew from the pale blue glow of the starship’s deflector oval, gathering there for a brief instant in a collection of lightning and flickering mists. Then the dart of energy threw itself forward from the Titan, surging away on a column of light into the halo of the spatial rift. One of many dozens scattered around the orbital zone like random sword cuts, this was the largest, feeding strands of Null matter as water was drawn by roots.
Questing tendrils struck forth to block the path of the beam and were rendered into base particles that stuttered out of existence. The encoded energy matrix fell into the jaws of the anomaly, phasing into the barrier between this universe and the microdimension connected to it across the screaming border of the event horizon.
Here was the place where Zero-Three had burned itself on strange and alien fires; here was the line that no matter could cross. Here was the gate that the avatar’s disembodied mind broke open.
Inside was only chaos and disorder. No worlds, no stars, nothing but a raging sea of churning no-forms, the empty vessel of another universe eaten alive by protomatter, consumed and converted and fed upon until nothing else remained.
And in this atomic inferno, there were convections and currents, interaction cells lit by discharges of raw power, forms so vast and uncountable that they had become complexities like the most basic of living minds. Something more than a virus, something less than an animal. A predator without prey. A mad and furious thing, as changeless as only something so random could be.
Here the matrix holding her began to unravel, and the protomatter world poured in, threatening to engulf her.
But not yet.
Even in this place, there was such joy. The sheer, exhilarating freedom of moving beyond the confines of a tritanium shell, beyond even the virtual reality of a dataspace. The utter, unfettered freedom simply to be.
I think, she told the Null, therefore I am. She reached for the split skeins of subspace torn wide open by one fatal mistake, centuries ago. From within, the flexing, ever-changing rift was so easy to perceive, the intricacy of it abruptly clear and compelling. This is my gift in return for this freedom.
Without hands, she reached out for the threads of space-time and gently wove them closed.
The rifts—every one of them—collapsed with a collision of energies that shook the darkness. Millions of tons of Null, great islands of extradimensional protomatter, was suddenly cut loose from its parent realm, and with nothing to feed it, to fight off the inherent instability of existing in a place where all natural laws demanded that it could never exist, the Null began to die screaming.
Tides of spatial shock radiated outward from the disappearing rifts, blasting the smaller masses into nothing, propelling the larger pieces away on a bow wave of displacement. Luminosity brighter than the twin stars of the system flared, as greater and greater sections of the abandoned Null passed the point of no return and succumbed to catastrophic implosions.
Amid the expanding shock wave, caught in the tide of wreckage pressed by the ripple of energy, the Titan fled with the death throes of the protomatter tide tearing at the ship’s heels.
The surge blew through the vessel’s shields, battered and slammed the craft like a boat in a hurricane, but still the Titan blazed on, inexorably pulling ahead.
She turned into the wave and shattered it.
EPILOGUE
In the wake, the battle zone was a place of horrors and miracles.
Tides of wreckage drifted among the radiation, some of it already beginning to show signs of forming into a broad, ragged accretion disc around the Demon planet. Small, nonsentient drones from platforms and spacedocks in high orbit, the ones that had survived the hyperincursion relatively intact, crawled amid the debris in the slow, laborious process of salvage and recovery.
The number of dead Sentries was high; some of them would never be recovered, their masses absorbed into the protomatter hulks of the Null. But there were some exceptions to the growing list of casualties, a few nexus cores that had survived the destruction of their shipframes, others bled dry of energy but still ready to return to life with a new transfusion of power.
The sullen world below turned, its stormy surface stirred to great heights by the actions of the Null and the torrents of lost wreckage still falling into its atmosphere, down to the sunless deeps beneath the mantle of radioactive clouds. The great black knots of tornado cells seethed and churned, the night side aglow with colossal discharges of lightning.
Riker watched the play of light and dark through the misted pearl windows of One-Five’s tower annex, before looking away. The surface of the FirstGen was visible in shadows and the faint reflected light of the smaller of the binary suns, and he could see spots in the metal landscape where great divots of brass and gold had been ripped up. The damage from the battle reached up to where he stood; some of the windows showed cracks and burn patterns, and part of the landing pad out beyond the atmospheric shield was drooping, perhaps from some near hit.
“We’ve all taken our wounds,” said Deanna from behind him.
He didn’t answer immediately, instead looking up toward the higher orbit. He found a glimmer of white up there—Titan, at rest now, her injuries being tended to by Ra-Havreii’s people and a ragtag collection of drones gathered by White-Blue. The machines had insisted, once again, that the Starfleet ship be repaired first, with all their talk of duties and obligations.
“You will leave our space soon,” said the AI. “Your mission of exploration must continue.”
“That’s right,” he heard Deanna reply. “But there’s this one last thing to do.”
He turned and found Troi and the Sentry standing before him, two beings as alien to each other as possible, one of flesh and bone and one of iron and tripolymer. But here we are, a threat to all of us defeated through common cause.
“They come,” the AI clicked, pointing with a telescopic limb.
A group of small ships dropped into the landing cradles, and a train of proxy remotes filed into the annex. There were only a handful of them, and Riker noted the absence of several members of the Governance Kernel.
“We lost a great many of our kind in this confrontation,” said White-Blue, anticipating the captain’s thoughts. “New representatives will be gathered to bring the group to full capacity.”
“We are assembled.” One-Five’s voice rumbled ar
ound them. “We gather to address the organics.”
Cyan-Gray’s vaguely humanoid drone was among the arrivals, and it made something of a bow toward the captain as it approached. “William-Riker, Deanna-Troi, it is pleasing to see your existence still continues.”
“Likewise,” Riker answered. “I’m sorry to hear about your losses.”
“And I yours,” said the vaguely female voice. “I understand we owe our survival to the actions of the ThirdGen.”
Deanna nodded. “She gave up her existence in order to seal the subspace rifts.”
“Impossible…” muttered one of the remotes.
“Negative,” White-Blue insisted. “The data confirm this. Compute it for yourself. I have placed all of the readings in the communal dataspace for all to see.”
“Interrogative: How was this possible?” boomed One-Five.
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 36
