Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [150]
How do they do it? she asked herself repeatedly. How do they make this monster move?
She had counted no less than thirty-seven interlocking grav fields in the engine chamber alone, allowing every surface to be used as floor, wall, or ceiling depending on where one wished to stand.
At the center of it all, according to her tricorder anyway, cradled by the massive crystal ribs, was a caged singularity-the power source?
Only, if there really was a singularity present, how had she not been pulped against its event horizon? Why was that horizon completely undetectable?
The best she’d come up with was that the material of the ship somehow resonated with the grav fields, regulating their effects by means of some technology she had yet to uncover.
She was close, though. She knew it. Hooking a universal translator into the alien ship’s long-dormant AI had sped things up considerably.
After some abortive attempts at straight conversation-the alien idioms were still giving the UT trouble-B’Elanna was bolstered to find that, as long as she confined her inquiry to technical matters, the responses she received were remarkably succinct.
Even the interface itself was noteworthy. Every facet of the alien ship’s surface did triple duty, functioning as floor or wall or visual display, depending on the user’s desire.
“Present propulsion ratios for interstellar motion,” said B’Elanna. Immediately there was a representation floating before her of the alien vessel-now looking very much like Farley’s reetl fish-swimming through blackness and surrounded by a swarm of symbols and equations.
The symbols she recognized gave her more trouble than the ones she didn’t. The latter were simply meaningless. The former seemed to jog something in her memory, some lost bit of data pertaining to warp bubbles and plus-ten acceleration, that she just couldn’t dredge up.
“Present display of all vessels in proximity,” said B’Elanna, and suddenly she was looking at Voyager as it floated there beside the alien ship. “Isolate congruous propulsion devices.”
As they had been the other ninety times she’d asked for versions of this comparison, Voyager’s warp core, nacelles, and deflector shield generators were highlighted in glowing blue by the AI. More of the alien symbols appeared as well.
Some she thought she had deciphered as relating to field integrity and power levels, but others still remained maddeningly obscure.
More irritating, though it had no observable means of conventional propulsion, the entire alien vessel was subsumed in a halo of neon blue.
“Damn it,” she said after another hour of fruitless consideration. “What the hell do the deflectors have to do with anything?”
“B’Elanna chooses another syntax to gain our true compliance,” said the AI’s deep, choir-like voice.
“Present analogous thrust technologies in cooperative relationship,” said B’Elanna.
“B’Elanna allows the syntax mote called ‘thrust’ to be defined for our true compliance,” said the AI in a chiding tone.
Reminding herself to ignore the AI’s odd conversational manner, she asked for a detailed schematic of the power interface with the engines. What she got was a picture of a system that she had never seen before and that reminded her of something vaguely remembered from an Academy class in field projection.
“Display pathway between presented device and B’Elanna’s current location,” she said, activating another wall facet. A map of relevant tube junctures appeared before her.
She emerged from the transport tube on the far side of the alien ship, in the area where the life sciences team had discovered the alien corpses.
Several of them were still present, wandering the walls and ceilings of the massive chamber, clucking over their own discoveries like excited children. Their voices blurred together into a low background rumble-all but one.
“The Doctor wants scrapings for comparison as soon as he can get them,” said Noah Lessing.