Enigma Ship - J. Steven York [14]
After a slight delay, he reappeared, grabbed the probe and pulled it inside. The opening narrowed as he did, and he could be seen switching the probe off, at which point the opening vanished completely.
Captain Scott reappeared on the screen, nodding. “So y’think a magnetic probe can be used to get inside Enigma?”
“We hope so,” said Duffy. “But we want to understand how it works before we try it ourselves, and that’s why we wanted to talk to you about the magnetic probe.”
Scott looked puzzled. “What’s to tell? Do you not know all about magnetic probes?”
A sheepish look crossed Gomez’s face. “Sir, nobody in Starfleet has needed a magnetic probe in fifty years. We assume the freighter has some systems old enough or primitive enough to make one useful, but we’re just not sure.”
“Well then, lass, I’m nae sure if I should be flattered or insulted, but I can tell you all you need to know. In my day, we used them to work on the magnetic and force field antimatter containment. I once used one to save the Enterprise when we lost control of the antimatter flow.”
Gomez nodded. “The Kalandan Outpost incident. I’ve read about it in the texts.” She shuddered slightly. “The idea of manually shutting down a runaway antimatter drive using a hand tool seems—forgive me, sir—”
Scotty grinned. “Insane? Lass, I would have said the same thing, but it’s amazing what a motivated engineer will do to save his ship—as you should know, or have ye forgotten the Sentinel so soon?”
Duffy had to hide a grin of his own at Gomez’s abashed look. She had, after all, pulled several stunts during the Dominion War during her time serving as chief engineer of the U.S.S. Sentinel. “In any case,” he said, “that’s why we called you. This thing was designed for working on magnetic containment, yet somehow it opened an iris in a holographic force field.”
Scotty looked surprised. “A hologram, you say?”
“We don’t know what’s inside Enigma yet, but we’re pretty sure the outside is a holographic projection overlaying a regenerative shield system. We’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We knew Enigma wasn’t truly cloaked,” said Gomez. “Cloaking devices generally bend or transfer electromagnetic radiation around or through a ship. Enigma isn’t that well hidden, if you know where to look and look closely enough in the right way. I don’t think it’s meant to sneak up on people—more like camouflage, a system designed to allow it to go unnoticed in the vastness of space. When we see ‘through’ Enigma, we’re actually seeing a holographic representation of what the stars on the other side look like, not the stars themselves. And the really curious thing is that, while Enigma isn’t truly invisible, it’s equally difficult to see in most every wavelength and form of energy known. We’ve tried everything from gravitons to tachyons. There could be thousands of Enigmas wandering through our space, and pretty much the only way we’d ever discover them is by accident.”
“Like, say, by running into one,” added Duffy.
“So what we need, sir, is the missing link between the magnetic probe and shields. That we don’t find in the books.”
Scotty considered the problem, idly stroking his mustache with a fingertip as he did. “Tell me, did you ever hear of the Nelscott flip?”
Gomez blinked. “Sir?”
“When I was on the asteroid freight run at Deneva, the lads there pulled a wee trick on me. They used a magnetic probe to invert the phase of the gravity generator under my cabin.”
Duffy chuckled.
“Aye,” said Scott, “it plastered me to the ceiling until they switched it back again. Some engineer named Nelscott stumbled on the trick, and they pulled it on every new officer aboard.”
“That makes sense,” said Duffy. “You can’t have shields without gravitron