Intellivore - Diane Duane [57]
“Yeah, well,” Geordi said, still peering, “I’ve been in a few cooking classes now, and I did a pretty good angel food last week. When all this is over, I’ll give you the recipe … or I might even make you one.”
“I like the way you say when all this is over,” Farrell said, coming around the panel to look in through the port herself.
Inside, she could see the slush becoming much less slushy. The antimatter was floating in the middle of the pod, squeezed into a spherical shape by the magnetic fields there; and the squeezing was getting harder—there was an antitractor field working in there as well. “See,” Geordi said, “it’s all just a question of balance. This is going to be completely spherical when it’s done; there won’t be as much as a millionth of a degree of eccentricity. And that’s just the way you want it. You keep an eye on that eccentricity; that’s your job while I watch the pressure. That’s going to get pretty cranky in a little while.”
“Right,” Farrell said, and came around to sit at the panel and watch the shape of the forming, contracting sphere. “It’s actually developing some color, isn’t it?” she said as Geordi took another look through the port. “There’s a little blue in the silver.”
“Yeah,” Geordi said. “I’ve seen that before, but never as intensely as we’re going to see it now.”
“How dense are you planning to make this sphere?”
“As dense as it can be,” Geordi said.
Farrell began to get twitchy. “You mean you’re going to strip the atoms down to the component particles?!”
“Oh, no, why bother? That wouldn’t make any significant difference. But we are going to pack it right down to metal.”
“Metallic antideuterium!”
It was certainly doable. Any of the gases, if exposed to enough heat and pressure, can be made liquid. Tougher are the solid states: no gas really wants to become a metal, at heart. But that was what this was going to be.
“It’s going to make it a lot easier to handle,” Geordi said.
“It’s going to make it a lot easier to drop,” said Farrell.
“And a lot less bulky.”
“Mr. La Forge,” said another of his staff, a tall dark man with a pronounced Scots burr who put his head around the corner from one of the nearby side bays, “Mr. Data says he’d like a word.”
“Right. Keep an eye on this, Farrell. Remember, zero eccentricity—”
“Yes, sir,” Farrell said. She looked at the tank and shivered, for reasons having nothing to do with the refrigeration.
From around the corner came La Forge’s voice, sounding surprised. “What,” he said, “again? … Well, all right, Data. Farrell? Get someone to relieve you. You’re wanted …”
She waved over a passing lieutenant, told him what was needed, and went off after Geordi.
On Oraidhe, a single form walked the corridors, not quickly—silent in the silence, head bowed a little, alone.
She was in energy-conservation mode, as might have been expected: lights dimmed, the usual sounds of an active starship muted almost to nothing … but that was to be expected, for the thing that made a starship most valuable, its living population, was missing. All the doors were closed; the silence in the halls was one that Picard had heard on his own ship, very occasionally. Even at the most benign of such times, when it was in orbit around Earth or linked to some starbase for a refit, and almost all the crew were missing except for the skeleton crew working on her, he disliked the sound of the vessel in such circumstances. She was like a body with no mind.
Which struck rather painfully to the heart of the problem.
It took him a little while to find the holodeck; Oraidhe’s design was rather different from Enterprise’s. Outside the door he stood for a moment, then touched the programming controls. The computer queeped softly and then said, “Ship’s systems are in conservation mode. Operation of this facility is restricted.”
“Override,” Picard said. “Check voiceprint.”
“Overridden,” the computer said after a moment. “State desired function.”
“List available programs linked to Captain Clif,” Picard said.
He waited