Intellivore - Diane Duane [63]
And the world flickered—
On the Enterprise, Data heard the tolling.
The earlier parts of the experience, leaving aside the basic danger of the situation, had been pleasant. It was a little unusual to be the ship, to feel power and signal flowing through him, inputs and outputs chasing around after one another. He had wondered briefly if having a nervous system felt like this.
Data could sense the slight creak in the hull and the support structures as velocity changed, as skin fields and stress fields remolded themselves, changing their geometry to better suit the new speed. The sensation of this huge, powerful body, taking care of itself, was quite intriguing.
The only thing to mar it was what he must use that “body” to pursue. The sense of that huge, deep voice, slurred, untranslatable as yet, was far back in his mind at the moment. It was a good question whether he was hearing it through his own positronic networks or through the ship; for there was a kind of resonance between the electronics of the ship and of the planet which was growing bigger and bigger in the viewscreens.
He watched it come. At one level, with a great clinical detachment, he was impressed by the technology that could produce so steady and well behaved a warpfield; the planet’s oceans, what was left of them, were staying mostly in their beds, though there was some understandable turbulence which even gravitic dampers would not be able to handle. But it was surprising.
Then, though— “Here it comes, Mr. Data!” said Captain Maisel, seemingly inside him. The two ships were still data-streamed together. Hearing the warning, on which he and Maisel had earlier agreed, he cut the link between the two ships. He would not need it for what he was about to do.
The milliseconds ticked away; in the ship’s bones, they did the same. Data plunged forward, feeling space bending around him, atoms shattering into their component particles against the forward-curving skin of his warpfield, sleeted around him, trailed away behind. There was a burning in his chest: the matter-antimatter reaction pumping the warp flux through into the engines like blood on fire. Ahead of him, Marignano trailed what became, in sensor view, a luminous track of particulate and plasma vent as she dove toward the planet.
Data watched. For him and for the ship, at the experience speed they shared, it was less a dive than a slow snowflake fall. Behind Marignano, starlit, the boss of its north polar cap now swinging around into line, came the planet, the intellivore.
Data and the Enterprise were no more than two hundred thousand miles away at the moment. The intellivore planet had dropped out of warp now and was decelerating. He could see the gossamer shimmer of space bending around the planet, striving to cope with the suddenly present mass: local gravitic influences being warped all awry, the delicate lines of force burst through as carelessly as cobwebs, stinging against Enterprise’s shields like hair-fine wires as they broke and lashed their way down into lower energy states. In his mind, as if in his hand, Data held the control codes for Marignano: a key, ready to be used. He reached out, fitted the key into the matrix lock that was waiting for it, and turned it.
The code flashed from Enterprise to Marignano on the covert channels—
—and the key stuck, and would not turn.
He re-sent the code, turned the key again. But the door did not open; there was no response. There should have been a flood of information for him, released scan from Marignano. Nothing came. Something was blocking it at its source.
Marignano and the planet were very close, no more than thirty thousand kilometers now. Twenty—
“Captain Maisel,” Data said down the comm link. “Captain Maisel, please respond.”
No response.