Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [149]
Center for power-up, she thought. That’s what the nested hexagons mean. The seven-pointed star symbol on the left is for output and the inverted version on the right means dampers. But what’s the top symbol? Is it even a symbol at all? Are any of them? Am I just imposing what I want to see on this thing?
One way to find out.
She touched the uppermost symbol gently and was startled to feel a very slight vibration. She smiled at the quaver in her own nerves. The place had gotten to her too.
She traced her finger down to the nested hexagons, still feeling the same delicate tremor, and thought, All right, baby. Let’s see what you’ve got.
The first quake ripped through the alien construct like a tidal wave, slapping the fleeing explorers into walls and floors like rag dolls caught in some massive centrifuge. Gravitic distortions played havoc with the com-signals, and for a moment all B’Elanna heard was what sounded too much like her people screaming from some impossible distance.
The second quake brought the lights with it and, with them, a return to something like normalcy. Coms came back online and everyone checked in okay, though they were reporting all manner of bizarre phenomena-voices from inside the walls, movement from tunnel branches that had scanned vacant only moments before. Cobb even swore he heard someone singing.
Before she could ask about Voyager’s status, the third quake hit them and the question became moot.
“B’Elanna,” said Janeway’s voice suddenly in her ear, as clear as if the captain were standing right beside her. “What the hell are you doing over there?”
The repairs to Voyager were completed within a day of B’Elanna’s dispersing of the subspace disruptions.
On the second day it was discovered that, now that it had shaken off its second skin, it was possible to beam directly from Voyager to the artifact’s outer decks.
By the third day the place was teeming with engineers, biologists, physicists, and even a couple of linguists who found the inscriptions embedded in nearly every surface intriguing.
By the fourth, it was clear to everyone that the artifact was a ship after all, but of kind that no one had ever encountered.
Still, despite the wholly alien nature of the thing, the teams were quick to discover analogues to many of Voyager’s departments and much of its technology. This was fairly common among spacefaring cultures. Function really did dictate form in most cases.
Many of the tunnels they’d had such trouble navigating turned out to be part of a gravitic sluice system, which, once activated, would shunt an occupant from chamber to chamber at dizzying speeds, depositing them shaken but safe at their destination.
It was no wonder the Doctor couldn’t set foot in the place. All those interlocking grav fields played havoc with his holographic matrix.
Many were also struck by the extreme levels of interconnectivity exhibited by the ship’s various systems, quickly learning that no component could be removed from one area of the alien vessel without causing the shutdown of others in other parts.
There was one awful moment when a team of xenobiologists, running down the source of Noah Lessing’s earlier life-form readings, came upon a chamber containing a host of new and incomprehensible devices as well as five alien bodies.
Though they were as different from one another as they were from their discoverers, the alien forms had one defining characteristic in common. They had all been dead for a long time.
Still, the Doctor, restored to normal function the second he was reactivated on Voyager, ordered every one of the bodies returned to the ship for autopsy. Even corpses, it seemed, had secrets to tell.
Not that any of that mattered to B’Elanna, or that she even knew of it. Despite entreaties from everyone but Captain Janeway herself, she hadn’t left the alien vessel’s engine chamber since she’d turned on the lights.
Being half-Klingon had its perks.