Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [30]
“Scanning.”
“On your toes, everyone. And where the devil is-“
“Riker reporting, sir. Sorry for the delay.”
Picard turned toward the turbolift and said, “I want you one hundred percent available the next twenty-four hours, Number One. We don’t know what we’ve stumbled upon and I don’t like riddles. Until we discover what’s going on-“
“At your service, sir, no problem.” Riker landed in his place between the captain and Troi with a faint thud on the carpeted deck. Troi caught his eyes for just an instant, and each had to work hard to keep from speaking out-of-place reassurances to each other. Forcing himself to look away from her, he noticed Yar working more furiously than usual at her tactical station and demanded, “Fill me in, Lieutenant.”
Her pale brow furrowed. “Scanning something on the periphery of sensor range, Mr. Riker, but I can’t get a fix-wait a minute-that … that can’t be right. I’m not getting anything back. No, that can’t be right.”
Picard spun. “Nothing at all? No reaction to the scan at all?”
“No, sir,” Yar complained, “not even readings of surrounding space debris or bodies-” She broke off and slapped her control board like an errant child. She straightened decisively, absolutely sure of what she was seeing on her instruments. “Sir, far’s I can tell, it’s absorbing the sensor scan.”
Picard’s face took on an arrogant disbelief. “That’s the most curious damned thing I’ve ever heard of. Corroborate it with the space sciences lab immediately.”
“They’re already tied in, sir,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “Same report.”
He swung about and bumped his fist against his thigh. “Well, damn that.” With an imperious stride, he approached the starfield before them, his eyes going to slits. “Boost the sensors.”
Yar looked up again. “Sorry?”
“Yes. Put out a high-energy sensor burst over the nominal sensors.”
Yar’s hand leaned ineffectually on her board, and she looked with helplessness to Riker. Her mouth formed her silent question: Boost them?
Riker felt the weight slam onto his shoulders. At least a foot shorter now, he approached Picard. “Sir, could you refresh us on that procedure?”
To everyone’s surprise-relief- Picard merely glanced at him and said, “Of course.” He stepped to the Ops station, where Data had been sitting in silent vigilance all this time, and put one hand to the small tactical access panel on the Ops console, pecking the controls carefully. “It’s more or less an unofficial skill, not something Starfleet engineers approve of … somewhat radical. If it’s done too often it can cause quite a burnout. We’ll have to key in the computer sensors, readjust the energy output for tight-gain/ high-energy bolt, ask for a momentary scan so all the energy is contained, and tell the computer to fire when it’s ready. There you are.”
His hand fell gracefully away from the instruments, leaving them with a surprising clue to his rogue side. Within seconds, sure enough, there was a flush of energy from the bridge sensory systems, and the scanning burst was off, crossing the distances of space with the unfettered speed of pure energy.
“Sir!” Yar jolted at her station. “Definitely reading something now! God! It’s heading directly at us out of interstellar space-it homed in on us! It’ll be here in seventy-eight seconds!”
The captain snapped, “Visual!”
LaForge kept his voice laudibly calm as he reported, “Sir, for visual of these readings, the sensors’ll have to be adjusted twelve points into the gamma-ray spectrum-“
“Just do it, Lieutenant!” Picard roared.
The young blind man grimaced behind his visor, punched in the code, and nailed the engage button, then held his breath as the ship’s systems whined their strain back at him. But the readings began coming in.
“Sensors at maximum output-draining their sources, sir,” LaForge reported over the energy shriek. “Almost got visual-there!”
The starfield blurred before them, sizzled, and reformed into a new pattern-and suddenly the bridge was walled with a gigantic glassy false-color image, undulating and fluxing as it raced at them through open