Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [96]
Engineering crew began to gather around him. He recognized them all, though on his own ship many of them were people who were assigned to science. It said uncomfortable things about the state of theoretical research and labwork on this ship, but he didn’t have time to be overly concerned with that right now. At least he knew these people’s capability: they could do the job—and they’ll need to, the poor kids: I still remember the nuisance it took us to fix the nanites in our core. He simply hoped he could depend on them, for there were the differences in personalities to cope with as well: any one of these people could be assumed to be gunning for his job. Not a pretty prospect at the moment—especially if any one of them should guess his real intentions. They would take themselves off to the counselor like a shot.
He finished his circuit of the table, looked up, and was not shocked, but was nonetheless disturbed, to see Eileen Hessan gazing thoughtfully at him from behind a few other people. Are we friendly here? he wondered. Well, no harm in being cordial, anyway.
“I need two big parties and one smaller one,” he said. “Two for the main cores in the primary hull and the engineering hull, and one for the secondary one in the main hull. We don’t have a lot of time to sit around doing diagnostics, so we’re going to just pull the affected media and replace them with new chips from stores. Analysis can wait until we have something to analyze with. We’re going to have to start doing a selective purge of the isolinear chips in each core. Fortunately”—he pointed to the schematics now showing on the status table— “different parts of each core seem to be affected, so that we should be able to selectively restore to clean media from the other cores. But it’s going to take a lot of running around with chips because we don’t dare do it by optical conduit—they look like they’ve been compromised, too—and anyway, the backup protocols need to have at least one core running FTL. None of them are, just now: all the subspace generators are down. At least we don’t have to worry about frying our brains.” There were some covertly amused looks among the engineering staff: apparently there were some of them who wouldn’t particularly mind seeing others’ brains fried. That they made no secret of the fact bothered Geordi, but he ignored it for the moment, while wondering in the back of his mind what their accident rates were like here.
“So, Hessan, Gaulgo, Nassainen, you three choose your teams. Hessan, yours will be under me, we’ll take the core down here. Work fast, everybody—once we get one core completely restored, we can restore to all the others from it.” Not that it’ll help, Geordi thought with silent amusement, because the nanites that the captain instructed to remain in reserve will come out and reinfect them within a few hours.
He looked up. “Let’s get that off-line first,” he said, pointing to the display for the inclusion device.
There was some muttering. “After all the trouble it took to get it on’-line?” Hessan said pointedly.
Geordi looked at her and shrugged. “Look, you want its computers to get infected by whatever’s in the cores?”
There was even more muttering at the prospect of that, and Hessan shook her head, seeing the point. “Go on,” Geordi said, “somebody physically separate its links to the cores: we can’t take the chance.” Of injuring the thing before I have a chance to get a good look at it and its software!
Two or three of the engineering staff went off to see about it. “Come on, everybody,” Geordi said, “let’s get cracking. Otherwise the captain is going to be real annoyed with us when he gets up from his nap and finds his ship still busted.”
Elsewhere, Barclay was walking with Picard back to his quarters. The lights were dim in the corridors; as they came to his door, the lights brightened