Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [102]
“There are two more bad ones under you there, sort of nine o’clock and six o’clock under.” She studied her tricorder. “Nineteen of the chips have this dry rot.”
“All right. Well, go up and get some more, and we’ll get on with it.”
She ascended gracefully upward and out of sight. He looked down, touched his tricorder. Run complete, it said.
Hallelujah. Geordi instructed it to start displaying file names and sensitive areas that it had found. Swiftly it did. There were hundreds of them, but he had half-expected that. “Total storage,” he said softly.
Eighteen hundred fifty-six terabytes. Geordi frowned, calculating. He was carrying 1700-odd. He would have to lift a few chips from here to make the difference. “Start copy,” he said softly. “Copy to capacity, then notify and hold for replacement of media.”
Working. It would take a while, though not too long.
Eileen came down past him, handing him a box of chips.
“Look,” he said, “I’m still getting some weird readings off this panel—I want to check the matrix. You go ahead and change those. I’ll be down shortly.”
“Right,” she said, breathing in his ear again as she passed, and sank down into the shaft below him.
The panels Eileen was servicing were on the other side of the shaft, so he had the advantage of having her being both below and facing away from him. About fifteen minutes passed quietly, during which time he slipped chips into the one slot he was using, waited for them to fill, then slipped the full one out and a new empty one in, pretending to take readings in between, and fussing with other chips in the array. Finally he had come to the last of his high-density chips; he filled it and found there was still another eighty terabytes of data to go. He was tempted to just forget it, but there was no way to tell in what area the information lay that might prove to be the most vital, without which everything else would be useless. It had to be all or nothing.
He had just put the last of them in his belt pouch when Eileen came floating up past him, carrying a batch of old chips. “You should see the insides of these things,” she said. “You could powder your nose with them. Want me to take those for you?”
“No, it’s okay, I’ll be up,” Geordi said, desperately trying to sound casual. “I want to get off this thing and stretch my legs.”
“You and me both,” she said, floating up to the top of the access shaft.
Very quietly he took from his pocket one of the tiny transporter tags for the transfer to the shuttle and the Enterprise, smacked it onto the pile of chips, and dropped a spare chip; then, watching it fall, he whispered, “Energize.”
A second later the chips vanished, the transporter whine coinciding neatly with the clatter of the chip hitting the bottom of the shaft. He sat there gritting his teeth, regardless, at how loud the whine was in so small and confined a space. But then it was over.
Eileen looked over the edge at him. “You okay?”
“Dropped one,” Geordi said casually.
“Butterfingers,” said Eileen, and tossed him a clean replacement. He slotted it in. “You coming?”
“Is that professional interest or something else?”
She chuckled. “Come find out.”
Geordi grinned and went after her. He was tremendously relieved to be doing, finally, what he had come here to do. Meantime, there was no reason he shouldn’t enjoy himself a little as well.
Aboard the other Enterprise, Riker’s attention was turned uncomfortably outward. Using passive scans, they had been keeping an eye on their ship’s dark counterpart, and for a long time there had been no change: it had been sailing along quietly enough on impulse, doing nothing unusual —until now. “Power fluctuations,” Data had said, and Riker had peered into the darkness of the viewscreen, straining his eyes looking at the small, dark silver shape, already at the farthest extent of their sensor range.
“What’s the problem seem to be?” Riker said.
Data shook his head. “I am getting indications of variations in the power supply to the impulse engines. A very peculiar power curve indeed: