Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [86]
Wesley, he thought. His mind was in such turmoil on the subject of the young man, both here and there, that he hardly knew what to think. But of this he was certain: when he saw his own universe’s Wesley Crusher again, he would have a word or two of exoneration for him.
Carefully Picard opened the container, slipped the wafer into it, and shut it again. He put the whole container on the media-reading spot on his desk and brought up a link between it and his desk terminal.
Now let’s see how much of this I remember, he thought, and started to work. His programming was understandably rusty: captains had computers and programmers to do this kind of work for them as a rule. But he still remembered the rudiments, enough to do quick-and-dirty coding in C50 and Logex and Arian and some of the similar programs designed for directing automated tools. Tools were all these were, after all.
He brought up a visual of the contents of the container, by way of the link built into the contact wafer. There they were—a host of little six-armed creatures with crabby claws. They were one of a surgeon’s most useful tools: tiny hands and manipulators that could stitch together a single nerve fibril as easily and dexterously as a sailor butt-splices a rope. They could cut and join and suture: they could weave muscle and nerve and even bone fiber together as if it were stiff cloth. An average microsurgery replacement of, say, a severed limb, or a patch of diseased brain tissue, might use a hundred, maybe even two hundred of these, depending on the size of the operative site and the amount of work to be done. There were—Picard laid a grid down over the view, using the computer, and then counted—there were about two hundred of them here. Would it be enough? He didn’t know, but it had to be tried.
Some time back, after his ship had started selectively falling apart—after the string of bizarre malfunctions and systems failures— he had read, very carefully, young Ensign Crusher’s science project paper on the care, feeding, education, and breeding of “nanites.” Obviously here there was no time for the breeding. It would take at least a month to engender nanites who had the proper associational links and the number of neuronal connections in their joint neural network to become intelligent and self-aware. If he had such nanites at the moment, he could ask them politely if they would kindly give him a hand and then turn them loose. But the principle would still work for him now and was worthwhile. Until the damage was done, until it was too late, there was no way to detect the tiny microsurgeons loose in your optical network, or in your computer core, cheerfully chowing down on all the components in a starship’s computer that made life worth living—that in fact made life possible to live at all.
Shields, life support, propulsion—and, Picard thought, most particularly, that large set of boxes down in engineering. They looked, if he was any judge of such things, to have their own set of backup computers. But there were ways around that. Chances were very good that they would be backed up to the central cores. Once the cores were out of commission—even one of them—not only would .his chief engineer have an excuse to get at it, but those computers servicing the exclusion apparatus would be left to stand alone. And stand-alone equipment was always vulnerable. But meanwhile, why infect just one core? Geordi only needed one to work on, true, but the cores backed up to each other. He would infect them all.
Now—Picard got busy with his programming. These were still just machines: machines that did what you told them, though that doing might lack the charm of saying “please” to another sentient organism and having that organism say, “Why, certainly, don’t mind if I do.” But even without being intelligent, they were quite capable of “chewing up” and pulling apart bits of the toughest materials, one from another—even the molecules of magnetic storage medium in the cores—and reducing them, with dedication and energy, to finely divided