Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [22]
As the others passed through, McAdams stepped back from the doors and looked up and down the front of the building. Riker paused and overheard her ask the admiral, “Is this the only entrance?”
“Yes. We move equipment in and out with a bulk transporter on the top floor, so there isn’t even a freight entrance.”
“Does anyone else use the building?”
Haftel shook his head. “No. Maddox, Vaslovik and Barclay were alone out here.”
“Isn’t
that a little unusual?” Haftel nodded. “These were unusual circumstances. Most of the work done here at the Annex is theoretical in nature: lots of holographic modeling, very little real engineering. Maddox was trying to actually build something, and there were some dangerous materials involved, so we wanted to make sure they were as far away from everyone else as possible.”
“In other words, no one was anywhere near the building when this happened. Convenient.”
“I suppose,” Haftel agreed. “But, before you make too much of that, it would have been pretty unlikely for anyone to be outside considering the weather conditions, Lieutenant.”
McAdams sighed. “And I’m guessing the security system didn’t catch anything.”
“No,” Haftel said. “The lightning strikes took out the sensors.”
The interior of the building was essentially one large room sliced into work areas with modulated force fields and retractable walls—standard design for labs that had to adapt to a variety of uses. Off to the left there was an office equipped with a library workstation and a variety of computers, but the space was dominated by a holographic imaging tank about three meters on each side. Riker paused to look at the holo tank and noticed that the hardware was stenciled BROCKCEPAK, one of the few manufacturers in the galaxy who produced the bio-neural circuitry used in the Federation’s most advanced computer systems. He pointed out the label to Barclay, who nodded in acknowledgment.
“Vaslovik,” he said by way of explanation. “He commissioned this equipment and had it delivered within weeks of coming onto the project.”
Riker whistled appreciatively. The slow production curve for bio-neural packs was slowing down assembly of starships throughout the sector. It was one of the major concerns with the new technology, especially during the ongoing conflict with the Dominion.
“He had considerable resources at his disposal,” Haftel-said.
“That’s putting it mildly,” La Forge replied.
The larger interior chamber was the primary workroom. A good portion of the floor was destroyed, blown outward, no doubt from the overloaded EPS conduit the admiral had mentioned. The blast had taken out an entire corner of the building, and a large section of the ceiling had caved in, littering the lab with wreckage from the floor above. An array of force-field generators had been set up, presumably to strengthen the building’s weakened structure. “Step carefully and try not to touch anything,” Haftel told the group.
It wasn’t easy to discern from among the broken bits and chunks of rubble, but enough remained that Riker could form a mental picture of how the lab had been arranged. Work lights had hung from the ceiling and a series of low tables had been set up in concentric rings around a three-meter-long black metal slab. Splinters of electronic junk that must have once been diagnostic tools, hologenerators and computer components littered the floor. The central black slab had been overturned and, beneath it, pinned to the broken floor, was a silver humanoid form.
There was no blood, no fluids of any kind, no expression of pain or horror on its blank face, yet, somehow, Riker found the sight of the half-formed thing’s demise to be both horrible and unbearably sad.
The scrawled “DATA” was in a part