Enigma Ship

by J. Steven York, Christina F. York

  “You don’t have a problem with that?”

  He looked up then, and chuckled sadly. “You’ll probably find me in the thick of it, Corsi. It’s human nature. It’s healthy. It’s not your way of coping apparently, but for your sake, I hope you have some way of releasing the tension. You must be feeling it too, and I need my chief of security functioning at one hundred percent.”

  She nodded. “Yes sir. Thank you for clearing that up for me.” She turned and headed for the inner door.

  “And, Corsi?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “You’re thinking like a senior officer. I like to see that. You could be first-officer material one of these days, maybe even the big seat.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking about, sir.”

  “Sometimes you choose the seat, Corsi. Sometimes the seat chooses you.”

  * * *

  Corsi stepped into the corridor and stopped, considering the captain’s words. She was feeling the pressure, the apprehension of what they might find when they dropped out of warp in a few hours. She tapped her combadge. “Corsi to Stevens.”

  “Stevens here.”

  “Are you busy just now?”

  “I’m in my quarters. I was hoping for a few hours’ sleep before we roll up our sleeves and start working on Enigma.” There was a pause. “Why?”

  Chapter

  5

  “Kieran.”

  The voice came out of darkness. It was a pleasant voice, a voice he liked. It was the message he didn’t like.

  “You’re sleeping, Kieran.”

  It was Sonya’s voice.

  “Resting my eyes.”

  “Well, you snore when you’re resting your eyes. You should have Elizabeth look into that.”

  “I’m going to rest them a little longer.”

  “Can’t. Captain Scott is returning our call.”

  Duffy opened his eyes. He lifted his chin from his fist, which had been propping it up during his “rest,” and looked around the hololab.

  Sonya grinned at him, looking rested and alert. He knew she hadn’t slept any more than he had. Where did that woman get her energy?

  “Look alive, Lieutenant Commander, the boss is on the line.”

  He glanced over at the wall-mounted viewscreen just in time to see the Starfleet logo vanish and be replaced by the image of Captain Scott. “Commander Gomez. Sorry I took so long to return your call. Meetings.” He grimaced, as though the one word explained everything. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sorry to bother you, Captain, but our investigation into Enigma has turned up something that requires your expertise.”

  Scotty brightened. “Well, why didn’t ye say so, lass? What have ye found?”

  Duffy felt awake enough to dive in. “Captain, we’ve been reviewing the sensor logs from the Chinook and the freighter. The Chinook data hasn’t been terribly useful, but the freighter logs are a different matter. The quality is so bad we’ve had to filter and massage it a dozen different ways to get the resolution we needed, but we think we have something.”

  “I’m transmitting a segment of the enhanced and restored visual record,” Gomez said.

  Scott’s image on the screen was replaced by the visual playback. A space-suited figure floated in what seemed to be empty space. The suit was orange, an armored shell topped by a transparent bubble, with a bulky backpack studded with thruster nozzles, and a large toolpack attached to the belt. The man inside the helmet was humanoid and looked about thirty, perhaps younger, in human terms. But he was not human. His bright green skin made that clear.

  Only when one looked closely was it apparent that something was just in front of the man, a discontinuity, like the edge of a soap bubble the size of a moon. He reached for the discontinuity and his hand stopped against the nearly invisible surface, like a mime touching the walls of a make-believe box. Then he reached into the pouch and pulled out an odd looking tool.

  “Computer, freeze playback,” Gomez said. “Do you recognize the tool, Captain Scott?”

  “Well, it’s no human manufacture, but I’d say it’s a magnetic probe o’ some kind.”

  “Right,” said Duffy, “we think that’s exactly what it is. Probably Andorian from the looks of it.”

  “Now, watch,” said Gomez, resuming the playback.

  The suited man pressed the tip of the probe against the discontinuity, and twisted a control. The probe began to disappear inside, which was surprising, since, in this case, inside only looked like more empty space. But as it pierced the surface, it began to disappear. The man withdrew the tool, and adjusted the controls some more. The tip of the probe began to glow. He pressed it against Enigma again.

  Suddenly, something flared, and a circular opening perhaps two meters across appeared around the tip of the probe. The man leaned forward, looking inside. Little of the interior could be seen, but there was light coming from inside. The man crawled through the opening and disappeared from view, leaving the floating probe in the middle of the opening.

  After a slight delay, he reappeared, grabbed the probe and pulled it inside. The opening narrowed as he did, and he could be seen switching the probe off, at which point the opening vanished completely.

  Captain Scott reappeared on the screen, nodding. “So y’think a magnetic probe can be used to get inside Enigma?”

  “We hope so,” said Duffy. “But we want to understand how it works before we try it ourselves, and that’s why we wanted to talk to you about the magnetic probe.”

  Scott looked puzzled. “What’s to tell? Do you not know all about magnetic probes?”

  A sheepish look crossed Gomez’s face. “Sir, nobody in Starfleet has needed a magnetic probe in fifty years. We assume the freighter has some systems old enough or primitive enough to make one useful, but we’re just not sure.”

  “Well then, lass, I’m nae sure if I should be flattered or insulted, but I can tell you all you need to know. In my day, we used them to work on the magnetic and force field antimatter containment. I once used one to save the Enterprise when we lost control of the antimatter flow.”

  Gomez nodded. “The Kalandan Outpost incident. I’ve read about it in the texts.” She shuddered slightly. “The idea of manually shutting down a runaway antimatter drive using a hand tool seems—forgive me, sir—”

  Scotty grinned. “Insane? Lass, I would have said the same thing, but it’s amazing what a motivated engineer will do to save his ship—as you should know, or have ye forgotten the Sentinel so soon?”

  Duffy had to hide a grin of his own at Gomez’s abashed look. She had, after all, pulled several stunts during the Dominion War during her time serving as chief engineer of the U.S.S. Sentinel. “In any case,” he said, “that’s why we called you. This thing was designed for working on magnetic containment, yet somehow it opened an iris in a holographic force field.”

  Scotty looked surprised. “A hologram, you say?”

  “We don’t know what’s inside Enigma yet, but we’re pretty sure the outside is a holographic projection overlaying a regenerative shield system. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “We knew Enigma wasn’t truly cloaked,” said Gomez. “Cloaking devices generally bend or transfer electromagnetic radiation around or through a ship. Enigma isn’t that well hidden, if you know where to look and look closely enough in the right way. I don’t think it’s meant to sneak up on people—more like camouflage, a system designed to allow it to go unnoticed in the vastness of space. When we see ‘through’ Enigma, we’re actually seeing a holographic representation of what the stars on the other side look like, not the stars themselves. And the really curious thing is that, while Enigma isn’t truly invisible, it’s equally difficult to see in most every wavelength and form of energy known. We’ve tried everything from gravitons to tachyons. There could be thousands of Enigmas wandering through our space, and pretty much the only way we’d ever discover them is by accident.”

  “Like, say, by running int
o one,” added Duffy.

  “So what we need, sir, is the missing link between the magnetic probe and shields. That we don’t find in the books.”

  Scotty considered the problem, idly stroking his mustache with a fingertip as he did. “Tell me, did you ever hear of the Nelscott flip?”

  Gomez blinked. “Sir?”

  “When I was on the asteroid freight run at Deneva, the lads there pulled a wee trick on me. They used a magnetic probe to invert the phase of the gravity generator under my cabin.”

  Duffy chuckled.

  “Aye,” said Scott, “it plastered me to the ceiling until they switched it back again. Some engineer named Nelscott stumbled on the trick, and they pulled it on every new officer aboard.”

  “That makes sense,” said Duffy. “You can’t have shields without gravitron generation, and if you flip the phase, the local fields would repel each other, creating our doorway. We’ve got the ‘can opener’ we were looking for, and now we have a pretty good idea how it works.”

  Gomez nodded. “Thank you, Captain. We couldn’t have figured it out without you.”

  “Any time, lass. Anything else I can do, let me know. Also, since this concerns holograms, there’s a lad you might want to look up. Top man in the field, or so they tell me.”

  “Broccoli!” Duffy said suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You mean Reg Barclay, right?”

  “Aye, that’s the one. He’s at Project Voyager on Jupiter Station.”

  Gomez smiled. “We served with him on the Enterprise, Captain. He’s actually quite a skilled diagnostic engineer—holography’s just what he, ah, established his reputation with. We’ll definitely get in touch with him, though.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Scotty with a dramatic sigh, “I’m due in another blasted meeting. Admirals.” His image flickered out, to be replaced by the Starfleet logo.

  Duffy shook his head. “Haven’t talked to old Broccoli in years. Been meaning to get in touch with him ever since he tracked Voyager down in the Delta Quadrant.”

  “If I remember correctly,” Gomez said with a smile, “Captain Picard gave a cease-and-desist order on that nickname.”

  Laughing, Duffy said, “Like that was gonna stop me. C’mon, let’s put a call in to Jupiter Station. Fabe should talk to him, too. He may have some ideas how to see inside that holographic shell.” He sighed. “Which would help us on our biggest unknown on a list of many. Our can opener should get us in, and in theory, out as well. So if our freighter pilot had the same can opener too, why did he go in, and never come out?”

  * * *

  Abramowitz sat at her cabin’s small workstation, reviewing reports from the other Enigma teams. It seemed as though everyone was making progress but her. The latest development was from Stevens, who, thanks to his consultation with holographic expert Reginald Barclay, thought he had a way of scanning Enigma for life signs. The technique didn’t promise a great deal of accuracy or detail, but it might tell them something about what they were dealing with.

  She pushed her chair back, and stared at Stevens’s report glumly. Just good enough to prove me wrong.

  A movement in the corner of her eye made her look up at her cabin’s open door. She liked working with the door open, a habit she’d developed as a student. Dr. Lense stood in the corridor just outside. Abramowitz could see her lips moving. Lense was clearly unaware Abramowitz couldn’t hear her.

  Abramowitz waved her inside. Lense looked puzzled, stepped through the door, and immediately jammed her index fingers into her ears.

  “Sorry,” said Abramowitz, raising her voice to be heard over the music. “Computer, mute audio!” She hadn’t even been conscious of the music until it was gone. “There’s an audio damping field across the door. Ensign Conlon rigged it up. Probably something to do with her cabin being across the hall.”

  Lense glanced at the door. “Imagine that.” She shook her head as though clearing her ears. “Was that drad music?”

  “Nausicaan tusk opera. It doesn’t sound a thing like drad music.”

  “Sorry, I’m not a connoisseur of pain. It’s all pretty much ‘ouch’ to me.” She took a deep breath, and shifted nervously from one foot to another. “Look, this isn’t starting out well. I just wanted to—and don’t get used to this, because I don’t plan to make it a habit—but I wanted to apologize, both for walking out on you earlier, and for being less than helpful on this assignment.”

  Abramowitz shrugged. “You’ve got other work. I assumed you were getting sickbay ready for possible casualties.”

  Lense shook her head. “Not that much to do really, until we know more. I’ve got Wetzel, Copper, and Emmett,” the last being the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram, “replicating and stockpiling extra medical supplies, but they’re more than capable of handling it.”

  She glanced at the nestlike pod where Abramowitz’s roommate, P8 Blue, slept. The cabin was small, like all the others on da Vinci, and the alien pod made it feel even more cramped. Without waiting for an invitation, Lense sat down on the bunk. “Fact is, I saw things during the Dominion War that nobody should ever see. I thought I had gotten over it, and in a way, I have. I’m ready to handle the obvious nightmares lurking out there: the wreckage, the casualties, the bodies beyond help, the scattered remains that don’t even resemble bodies any more. All that I’m ready for. I can take it. What I can’t take is the nervous laughter of people about to brush shoulders with death.”

  Abramowitz turned to face her. It never occurred to her that the doctor would feel that way—especially after how she handled herself on Sherman’s Planet. “I didn’t mean—”

  Lense waved her off. “You didn’t do anything. It’s me. Maybe one day you’ll understand, but for your sake, I hope you never do.”

  They were quiet for a while. Then Lense raised her chin and looked up at Abramowitz. “I’ve been thinking about our question, and I think you’re right. This thing is artificial. A probe, a ship, a robot, something like that. If it were an animal, it would clearly have to be a sophisticated one. Even a space amoeba has a ‘flight or flight’ reflex. This thing doesn’t. It’s not chasing food, and it’s not running away. It’s not defending itself. It’s just hiding, just going about its business, hoping not to be seen, not to be engaged.” She grimaced. “I can relate to that.”

  “Mineral then,” said Abramowitz, avoiding the personal comment. “A ship, or something like it. But a ship would be ‘animal’ too, it would have a crew.”

  Lense shook her head. “Not a conscious one. ‘Fight or flight’ again. Maybe it’s just a probe, but it seems far too big and sophisticated. Too simple-minded even for a robot. Maybe the crew is dead. Maybe they abandoned ship. Maybe this is a sleeper ship, and the crew is in suspended animation.” She considered her last statement. “Yeah, that sounds about right to me. These ‘enigmans,’ whoever they are, whatever they want, they left home a very, very long time ago.”

  Chapter

  6

  Captain Gold reached the bridge just as the da Vinci came out of warp. He slid into the big chair. “Put the Enigma on screen.”

  The beta shift conn officer glanced back at him. The ensign at the post was new, a Betazoid, having just transferred in from the U.S.S. Hood. “It already is on screen, Captain. There just isn’t much to see.”

  Gold wondered if she’d simply anticipated the order, or if she was reading his mind. Stop that. He watched her face for a reaction. No, he didn’t think so. It took a lot of restraint for a Betazoid to function well as a Starfleet officer. The concept of private thoughts didn’t come naturally to them.

  “Ensign—Deo is it?”

  She nodded.

  “Deo, overlay a tactical grid on the object, based on our sensor scans. I’d like to at least know where to look.”

  She tapped her console. A grid of yellow lines appeared, outlining the shape of the object.

  He’d been expecting—well, he wasn’t sure what he’d been ex
pecting. A sphere possibly, or some other geometric shape. Instead Enigma was lumpy and irregular, like a cluster of grapes, or perhaps a bag full of soccer balls. Moreover, even that shape didn’t appear to be static. As he watched, the spherical lumps moved slowly across the surface, even sinking inside to be replaced by others rising to the surface. “Are we getting any sensor readings from inside the object at all?”

  “No sir,” said Deo. “We can detect a bit of displacement at the boundaries that allows us to tell where that boundary is, but when we look deeper, all we see is—uh, whatever’s on the other side.”

  Gold nodded. Stevens’s modifications to the deflector dish couldn’t be performed while they were at warp. It would be several hours before they knew if his plan to probe Enigma would work.

  Deo was still looking at him. Something seemed to be bothering her. “Sir, there is something else. Enigma has a…telepathic component.”

  “The Chinook didn’t report anything like that.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t have any telepaths on board, sir.”

  “Can you read it, communicate?”

  “No sir. I get a sense that it is reading us in some way, and not much more. I can’t even tell you if it’s alive, or if we’re being read by one consciousness or many. The telepathic probe is passive, inert, and very subtle.”

  “If you sense anything more, let me know immediately.”

  From behind him, the beta-shift tactical officer, Ensign Anthony Shabalala, said, “Captain, there’s a ship approaching, and we’re being hailed. It’s the freighter Vulpecula.”

  “Give me visual.”

  The woman who appeared on screen was human, in her fifties, and looked like she hadn’t slept in a long time. Her eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue, and her close-cropped gray hair stood out at odd angles.