Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [100]
Now he gazed into the space behind the open panel. Set into the matrix inside it, end-on, were row after row of isolinear chips—thousands of them in each core, hundreds of thousands in the whole ship. At least a third of them, thanks to the captain, would have to be changed. At best, they could keep this ship out of commission for at least four hours while they were being replaced—more if the crew slacked off. And then, of course, the captain’s reserve nanosurgeons would come out of their hiding places and get to work again.
Geordi sighed and got busy doing what he was supposed to be doing, while considering the best way to do what he had really come for. One part of his mind was cautious. He glanced down toward the bottom of the core shaft, a good hundred and fifty feet below him, and considered that this would be a wonderful place to have an “accident,” if any of his work crew weren’t kindly disposed toward him. On the other hand, there was no point in borrowing trouble. So far they all seemed willing enough, especially when the prospect of their not cooperating with or obeying his orders meant it was equally likely that they would all be blown up—or else, when the Empire caught up with a ship that had failed its mission, removed from their posts more or less permanently.
He hooked one arm through the rung of the ladder and turned around, holding his engineering tricorder and reading the bank of chips that lay open to him at the moment. Nine of them were shot in a big patch almost directly in front of him, and another few down several feet farther in the matrix.
He let the tricorder drop to hang from its strap for a moment and reached out to pull one of the isolinears free. Silently, Eileen floated down on one of the floater pads nearest, with her legs hanging over the edge, and a light belt strapping her to the floater. “How many do you want?” she said.
“I can use about a dozen. Look at this.” He put his thumb on the pressure point that would allow the nutef facing to slide off the front of the chip. It came away and was followed almost immediately by a little cloud of brown dust. Geordi coughed and waved his hand in front of his face, thinking, Thorough little monsters: they don’t leave much sticking together, do they? Small bytes. He chuckled at the pun, then, covering, said, “Look at it.”
“Now what the hell does that?” Hessan said.
Geordi shook his head. “Well, there are a few possibilities. Repeated low-level power outages can cause something like this—though usually the pieces that the storage medium falls into are bigger, more granular.” He poked the finely divided fluff, almost like powdery iron filings, with one finger, looked at the finger, then dusted it off against his pants. “Also, I read a paper a couple of years back about how a run of chips had trouble with the FTL field—it accelerated their materials’ aging unusually, and they just fell apart inside.”
Hessan looked at the panel critically. “I guess that could explain why they seem to be going in patches. These have been maintained away from starbase, from replicated stock. But there was a lot of swapping around when we were around Alphacent for the new gadget’s installation.” She raised her eyebrows. “Well, we’ll hear all about it, and how we should have fixed it, when we get home, I guess.”
“Probably.” Geordi started pulling out the chips he had already designated as bad and put them on the floater by Eileen. “Bring me down that dozen and I’ll get started on these. See if you can tell if any other panels on this level have bad ones.” He looked down into the core. “They seem to be pretty evenly scattered around.”
She nodded and floated upward again. While she was gone, Geordi got back to his more covert scanning. Into the slot from which he had removed the bad chip, he slipped his good one, with the search parameters. Then, using his