Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [31]
Picard considered that. “Your point is taken. Speed now becomes of the essence. The sooner we’re out of here, the better—and the better our chances of getting out at all.” He looked around the table and saw nothing but agreement in the faces there.
“Dismissed,” the captain said.
CHAPTER 5
“It’s not going to be easy,” Geordi said.
Soft laughter came from behind him. “If it were,” Eileen said, “you wouldn’t be happy.”
He turned around, surprised to see her coming toward him through the trees. “I thought you were off duty.”
Lieutenant Hessan laughed. “I am. And so are you.”
Geordi shook his head. “Not at the moment, I’m not. The captain has a problem he needs solved.”
She looked around the forest in which Geordi had been strolling: big old pines, towering up a hundred feet at least, and growing closely enough together that they almost shut out the sky. Above them was some summer noontime, but down here, where they walked in silence on soft pine needles, the effect was a cool noncommittal twilight, with only here and there a ray of sunlight lancing down. “Bad one, huh?” she said. “Can’t see the forest for the trees?”
“Huh,” Geordi said, and smiled. “No … I just come here when I need to think, and staring at the status table isn’t helping.”
She fell in beside him. “Tell me about it.”
“Well, you saw the routines I was starting to set up. “Get at their computer,” the captain said. But even in our own ship it wouldn’t be so easy. Over there—there’s no knowing what kind of locks they’re going to have on sensitive material. Or even whether they would be the same areas locked down. So I’ve got to find a way to get into the system that will also take me around the locks. Systems sabotage … it’s the only way.”
“Nasty.”
“More than just that. It’s a bizarre feeling. Usually it’s all I can do to keep things running right around here. Now, to be working out ways to make them go wrong …” Geordi shook his head.
“If I were you, I’d try to enjoy it. Think of the times the computers have gone down right in the middle of something crucial, and how much you wanted to kick them.” Eileen grinned with relish. “Well, now’s your chance. And it won’t even be your own computers you’re kicking. I’d kick them every way I could and run home laughing.”
“It’s the running home that concerns me,” Geordi said ruefully. But a slow smile spread over his face. “You’ve got a point, though.”
“S. Start from the top.”
Geordi nodded, scuffing at a pinecone in front of him and kicking it ahead of them as they walked. “We have three main computer cores,” he said. “Two in the main hull, one in the engineering hull. They update one another every forty-two milliseconds, so that each of them carries all the ship’s data, and any one of them can run the whole ship by itself.”
“The usual protective redundancy,” Hessan said. “So you’ve decided not to get at the computer in an obvious way, by one of the access terminals: you want to get at a core directly. And do what?”
“Fail one of them out of the system, probably by killing the subspace generator in the core, or just making it act up. The other computers would instantly throw the failed one out of the system and shout for help.”
Hessan nodded. “Meaning you. Or the other ship’s version of you.”
Geordi nodded, kicking the pinecone again as they came to it. “I keep thinking about that,” he said softly. “Who am I over there?”
“Don’t let it distract you. Let’s assume that your counterpart is called for, and you or the team with you take him out of commission and get to work. What then?”
Geordi looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded as they walked. “When the core is off-line and put into repair mode, almost all the lower-level security routines are automatically disabled to let the diagnostics work. I can then access a large amount of data and store it down to iso chips.”
“”A large amount,”” Eileen said, smiling