Enigma Ship

by J. Steven York, Christina F. York

  “Captain Gold, I’ve been expecting you. My name is Dee Rivers, captain of the Vulpecula. After my first officer disappeared, and those people from the Chinook disappeared, I didn’t know what to expect from that thing, so I pulled the ship back a few million kilometers to wait.”

  “Thank you for staying on station until we arrived.”

  She sighed deeply, and dug at her scalp with nervous fingertips. “Captain, that’s my first officer in there. Pappy’s a damned fool to have tried rescuing those people, but I’d like him back anyway, if you can manage.”

  “We’ll do what we can, Captain Rivers.” Pappy? he wondered, but didn’t ask aloud.

  “We’re a for-profit ship, Captain. I’ve loitered here longer than I can afford, and certainly longer than was safe. I’ve lost my convoy partner, my Federation escort, and there are a lot of raiders between here and Cardassia. I can’t wait here to see how this turns out, but we’ll stop back by after we drop off our cargo.”

  Gold nodded in a manner he hoped was reassuring. “I understand. If necessary, we can arrange transport to return your Number One.”

  “He’s my retirement plan, Captain.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s saving to buy this ship from me, and I’m counting on that to set me up for my declining years, a nice little hut on a beach somewhere. I really need him back.”

  “I see.” Gold felt his tone turn chilly.

  Rivers had turned away from the screen, as though she was about to disconnect, but turned back to look at him. Her shoulders sagged, and something in her seemed to melt, revealing a profound sadness. “He’s a fool, but a good fool, Captain. Bring him back to us. Please.”

  Before Gold could respond to the pain in her voice, Rivers’s image blinked out.

  * * *

  Duffy pulled the gauntlet over his hand and flexed his fingers experimentally in front of his face. “I love this part.”

  Gomez glanced at the panel on her left wrist, punched in the commands to start a space-suit self test, and looked up at Duffy. Like her, he now wore a complete environmental suit, minus the helmet. “Putting on gloves?”

  “Putting on a space suit. Makes me feel like an ancient knight preparing for the joust.” He squirmed his shoulders and arms, testing the fit of the suit.

  She pointed at the rack in the locker room wall behind him. “Excuse me, Sir Talks-a-Lot, but you’re standing between the fair maiden and her lovely helmet.”

  He stepped aside as she plucked two helmets from the rack, handing one to him, and putting the other over her head, twisting it until the molecular seals engaged. She tapped the wrist panel again. “You hear me, Kieran?”

  “Loud and clear, milady.”

  She tapped again. “Gomez to Soloman. Communications check.”

  “I—” Soloman seemed distracted, but not, as she had feared, distressed. “I hear you well, Commander. My module is checked out and ready to fly—I believe.”

  Just then, P8 Blue scuttled through the outer door into the locker room. She stood up on her hind legs, and made an annoyed clicking noise. “Aren’t you ready yet? It must be very bothersome being so sensitive to vacuum.”

  Pattie’s exoskeleton allowed her to endure vacuum with no special gear. All she needed was a special communicator with a pickup inside her breathing cavity, some safety gear, and she was ready to go.

  Gomez grinned. “Not according to Lt. Commander Duffy. He likes the outfit.”

  That annoyed sound again. “Clothing, also something I find difficult to fathom.” She strapped on a simple equipment harness. “I find this confining enough.”

  The locker room had two outer doors. The right-hand one led directly to service airlock two, the other to the shuttlebay. Duffy followed Gomez through the left door.

  One of the Augmented Personnel Modules had been rolled up to the doors on its service stand. The module’s hatch was closed, and Duffy could see Soloman through the cupola windows in the top, his bald head reflecting the blue interior lighting. The module was spindle-shaped and about three meters tall, with a control cupola at the top. The wide midsection was ringed with specialized work arms, the narrow base surrounded by maneuvering thrusters, and tipped with the orange glow of a tiny impulse drive. The module was more spacecraft than space suit.

  Pattie tapped a wall panel, activating the force fields across the main doors. A warning klaxon sounded as the outer doors slid open, revealing the stars beyond.

  Duffy stared, trying to decide which of those stars was real, and which was the holographic surface of Enigma. He couldn’t be sure, but he trusted the module’s instruments would get them where they needed to be. He could see Soloman working inside the control cupola, then a series of grab-bars and footholds folded out from the module’s smooth sides.

  Pattie’s voice sounded over everyone’s comm. “Everyone attach your safety lines.” She climbed onto the side of the module.

  Duffy let Gomez go first, then climbed up himself. The force clamps made the footrests feel slightly sticky as he moved his feet. He snapped his safety line into an attachment socket. “I’m secure.”

  “I’m go,” Gomez said.

  “Secure and ready,” said Pattie.

  “Away team to da Vinci, ” said Soloman. “We are ready to disembark.”

  B.J. O’Leary, the engineer on duty at the control gallery, replied, “Ready.”

  As they waited, Duffy could only hear his own heart and breathing, the whir of the suit’s fans, and his comrades’ voices in his helmet speakers.

  “Disengaging artificial gravity,” said O’Leary.

  Duffy felt his stomach jump, and fought the instinct that said he was falling. He looked down to see the tractor beams lift the module from its cradle and sail it smoothly out of the shuttlebay.

  “I still don’t see why we didn’t just beam out,” P8 said over the link. “It really makes much more sense.”

  Duffy manager to catch Gomez’s eye, and winked, though he doubted she could actually see him. “I suppose we could have,” he answered. “But where’s the fun in that?”

  “Lt. Commander Duffy.” Soloman’s voice was tight, a little strained. “I really do not see that a discussion of ‘fun’ is appropriate at this time.”

  Duffy knew when he had pushed far enough. Pattie was right. They could have beamed out, instead of riding the module through the force field. But the sensation of his suit pressurizing as it passed from the atmosphere of the shuttlebay to the vacuum of space was a rare experience, and not one he would pass up easily.

  With Enigma almost impossible to see with the naked eye, Duffy’s gaze was drawn back to the da Vinci. The shuttlebay opened the front of the saucer section like a misplaced grin, the two shuttles just inside reminding him of teeth. The da Vinci, which seemed so small from inside, was huge from out here. The saucer swept out on either side of them, and he could see the warp nacelles and the engineering hull trailing away from them in the distance.

  They climbed above the plane of the saucer section, and he looked down at the bridge, suppressing the urge to wave.

  “You’re doing very well, Soloman,” said Pattie.

  “This is much easier than the simulation,” replied Soloman, his voice calmer now that the tractor beams had released them and he had control of the module. “Nothing is exploding. Nothing is trying to crush us. None of my systems are undergoing cascade failures. My direct computer interface is working.”

  “Better to be overprepared,” said Pattie, “than underprepared.”

  Duffy and Gomez shared a chuckle, and he glanced over at her, her face just visible inside the bubble of her helmet. She grinned bright enough he was sure they could see it back at the ship. She’s loving this too.

  “Stevens to away team.”

  “Gomez here.”

  “Commander, the deflector modifications are done, and we’re ready to take a picture of Enigma.”

  Duffy saw Gomez’s eyes widen. “I thought you wouldn’t
be ready for another two hours, or I would have delayed the mission. Should we head back to the shuttlebay?”

  Stevens chuckled. “Somebody named Scott once told me to always pad my repair estimates. Anyway, no need for you to return to ship, the neutrino flux is harmless, and the direct EM burst from the torpedo will be very localized. In fact, this times out pretty well. Just pull back a couple kilometers and enjoy the show.”

  “Soloman,” ordered Gomez, “get us out of the line of fire.”

  “Yes, Commander. Firing main thruster.”

  Duffy felt a slight push down onto the footrests, and the module began to accelerate away from the da Vinci. The ship grew slightly smaller for several minutes, until they rolled over, and the module braked to a stop.

  “Gomez to Stevens, we’re standing by at a safe distance.”

  “Stand by, we’re almost ready to launch.”

  “Explain to me again,” said Pattie, “what this ‘X-ray’ is?’”

  “Sure,” said Duffy. “It’s an internal imaging technique we used to use on Earth. Radiation was directed through a solid object onto some kind of sensitive receptor or film that could create a shadow image. It was used to test metals for cracks, even image people for medical purposes.”

  “Bombarding living beings with radiation just to examine their insides? My people never developed such a thing.”

  Duffy chuckled. “Not likely you would. All your bones are on the outside where you can just look at them. Anyway, Doc Lense mentioned this to me, and that gave me the idea on how to take a peek inside. See, the problem is that Enigma’s broad-spectrum holograms fool all our sensors. They seem to know when they’re being scanned and increase their resolution. The closer we look, the more realistic their holograms. Our sensors are too good. We hope if we take a big, crude, fast, shadow picture of Enigma, it will overwhelm their ability to cloak themselves. Instead of radiation, though, we’ll use a torpedo modified to produce an intense burst of neutrinos, and we’ve modified our deflector dish to be the image pickup.”

  Duffy looked up as he spoke and saw the port over the da Vinci‘s forward torpedo launch slide open. “They’re getting ready to fire.”

  “Stand by,” Stevens’s voice came through his speakers. “Fire torpedo on my mark.” A pause. “Mark.”

  A bright object, the torpedo all but hidden behind its own thruster flare, shot from the tube, running in a straight line only long enough to clear the ship, then curving around the bulk of Enigma. They couldn’t see the hidden ship, but the curve of the torpedo’s course, for the first time, gave them a sense of its size. Duffy found himself whistling.

  Intellectually, he had known it was big, but that was much different than having a feel for the thing. It reminded him of the time he’d first walked the wooden deck of the restored Brooklyn Bridge in New York, back on Earth, and imagined building those stone towers using nothing but steam and muscle. Then, as now, Duffy had suddenly felt very small.

  He was surprised that he could tell when the torpedo crossed Enigma’s “horizon” and continued around its back side. At that point, something about the torpedo looked different in a way he couldn’t define. Perhaps the speed and brightness of the torpedo were already overwhelming Enigma’s holograms in some subtle way that the eye, an amazingly sophisticated instrument in its own right, could detect.

  Then came the explosion.

  There was no sound, of course, and his helmet visor automatically compensated for the glare. But the flash was brief, and his visor almost instantly reverted to a normal view. In that moment, he could swear he saw the stars behind Enigma shimmer slightly, as though the hologram had momentarily become unstable. Then it was gone, and Enigma was hidden in its cloak of secrecy. Almost.

  “Away team,” said Stevens, “we’ve got good data on the dish over here. We’re analyzing it right now. Getting some gross readings. There’s a lot of Starfleet-issue duranium alloy in there, consistent with the mass of the Lincoln. “

  Duffy felt a tightness in his chest. Of course the duranium was in there, but in what form? The seconds ticked by.

  “Away team, we’re—She’s intact! The Lincoln‘s still in one piece!” In the background audio, Duffy could hear cheers. He surprised himself by letting out a whoop and pumping his fist at the stars. He surprised himself even more when he leaned over and gave Gomez an awkward hug. More surprising yet, she hugged back, laughing all the while.

  “What,” said Pattie, a puzzled tone in her voice, “was all that about?”

  “Elation,” said Soloman. “A release of accumulated emotional tension. A human thing, perhaps, but I felt some of it myself. Our comrades are quite possibly alive.”

  P8’s pickup transmitted an odd, tinkling sound. “Our orders were always to proceed on that assumption.”

  “Sorry, Pattie,” said Duffy. “Humans can’t just be ordered to be optimistic. There’s hope, and there’s justified hope, and most of the crew just crossed from the former to the latter.”

  “Gold to away team.”

  Duffy was surprised to hear the captain’s voice. He quickly let go of Gomez’s waist and tried to put himself back into professional mode.

  “You heard the man,” the captain continued. “If there was ever a doubt, this is now definitely a rescue mission. Get us inside.”

  “Aye, sir,” responded Gomez. “Soloman, take us in.”

  Chapter

  7

  Dr. Lense leaned over Stevens’s shoulder and stared at the console. “How much do you trust this data?”

  Stevens shrugged. “I’m guessing maybe seventy percent accuracy. All our information is inferred, and Enigma was trying to mask our pulse.”

  On a viewscreen to Stevens’s right, a tall, nervous-looking officer with a high forehead looked on. Lense understood that his name was Barclay, and he was some kind of expert on holotechnology.

  Barclay shook his head in wonder. “A neutrino hologram. I—I wouldn’t even have thought it was possible.”

  Stevens looked up at the screen and smiled wryly. “They haven’t seen anything like this in the Delta Quadrant, Lieutenant?”

  “Voyager has encountered some amazing things. But nothing like this.”

  “So you’re saying Enigma represents a more advanced technology than ours?” Stevens said.

  Barclay seemed hesitant to commit. “In some ways, but there’s no sign of warp drive. You’re familiar with Principles of Parallel Technologies?”

  Stevens nodded. “It’s already come up several times since this mission started. You think this is exception that proves the rule?”

  Barclay’s eyebrows lifted. “Technically, the exception can never prove the rule, but it’s possible this is an exception of some sort. Waldport thought the urge to explore and to seek simulated experiences, through storytelling, or more advanced technologies like holodecks, were interrelated. Perhaps that might lead the occasional civilization down a different—different technological path.”

  Lense squinted at the readouts. “I’m not an engineer, but how different are they? I mean, the ship hypothesis is mine, but shouldn’t there be more metal in there?”

  Stevens shrugged. “Given the resolution of this method, we pretty much had to know what we were looking for, so there could be lots of nonduranium alloys inside there that aren’t showing. But we do show plenty of carbon-organic signatures, and only a small number of them correspond to the Lincoln crew. If we assume those are living creatures, and not corpses or somebody’s food supply, then it still looks like a ship.”

  “There’s—there’s something else that’s bothering me,” said Barclay. “You said that Enigma showed some sign of—telepathic capabilities?”

  Lense nodded. “According to our Betazoid crewmember, yes. Why does that bother you?”

  “If we assume the crew have some telepathic abilities she’s picking up, then probably not. But if it comes from the holographic systems, possibly. Starfleet Intelligence, years ago, did some studies of a tel
epathic hologram feedback system. A system like that is capable of showing a viewer exactly what they expect to see, and that feedback can be quite—powerful.”

  “Holodiction,” said Lense.

  The very word made Barclay squirm in a way Lense found intriguing. She’d have to ask Gomez or Duffy, who served with him in the past, about his background sometime.

  “No, not holodiction—though it could lead to that, I suppose. What we’re talking about is an absolute suspension of disbelief, about hyperreality. The mind providing the source of the illusion is hypnotized—seduced by the illusion, until they find it almost impossible not to accept as reality.”

  * * *

  P8 Blue looked up from her tricorder, antenna waving excitedly. Her voice sounded over Duffy’s com-link. “I think I have an idea how the Lincoln survived the impact.”

  Duffy, who floated at the end of his safety line several meters away, grunted in response. His attention was focused on the magnetic probe they’d only recently replicated, based on seventy-year-old Starfleet blueprints. Of course, they’d added some modifications: a long-duration power supply, extra field strength, and a whole suite of telemetry sensors that would provide data to the highly modified tricorders that they also carried. Still, some small part of his mind was listening to Pattie. “Do tell,” he finally said.

  “The interstellar medium is rather thin out here, but Enigma is still sweeping a wide swath though interstellar gas and dust. I’ve observed several microparticle dust impacts while you’ve been working. Enigma doesn’t sweep them away with a deflector, like a Federation starship, and there’s been no energy release consistent with an impact. I believe Enigma uses some combination of force fields and gravity control to gently brake objects it encounters. Meanwhile, it should leave a ‘hole’ in the interstellar medium which would be possible to follow, but it does not. That means that it’s leaving a trail of dust and gas behind as it moves.”

  “Like,” said Gomez, “soldiers covering their tracks to avoid detection.”

  “Exactly,” said Pattie. “But the composition has been subtly altered. Enigma is using the objects and gas it collects as raw materials, and ejecting waste products.”