Intellivore - Diane Duane [64]
He had a plan ready for such an eventuality, as much at Maisel’s insistence as at Captain Picard’s; they had known that the intellivore might be too powerful for even their best plan to deal with, and that there might therefore be no scan result. He would have to pick a likely spot on the planet, use phasers and photon torpedoes to dig a hole in it, then plant the bomb and run. And it might not be effective. If it failed—
He shifted course, plunging not directly toward the planet now but in a wide arc around it: an orbit at two hundred thousand miles. His own scan would not be terribly effective at this distance, but it would have to do. He began calculating the trajectory at which he would emerge from his scan pattern, and reached inside himself for the codes that would arm the device.
—and, as promised, the world went gray and chill. That kindly presence faded away, and Ileen Maisel found herself staring at the glowing, growing presence of the planet in her front viewscreen. There, whispered the voice in her mind. Remember what you must do. Help us, save us …
She reached out to the console to help the sad voice. It would never be sad again.
And in the back of her brain, like a tickle, something said, Chicken … Only a whisper, weak—
As if it were the last thing she would ever have a chance to do, she threw herself at the conn, hammered in a new course setting, implemented it. The ship wrenched violently off to one side, and shook and rattled and shrieked as she flung it back into warp, out into the dark again.
Pickup and McGrady were slumped by their posts. “Oh, dammit, dammit,” Ileen muttered, but there was no time for them right this second. She staggered back to the comm console, hammered on it. “Mr. Data!”
“Captain Maisel!” he said.
Maisel had never heard emotion in his voice; what she heard now was at least considerable urgency. She pounded in new settings on the comm board, implemented them. “Here’s that scan. Good old stubborn software, it got it all even when that bloody cue ball was trying to interfere with it!”
“I thought we had lost you, Captain.”
“I thought you did, too.”
“Are the thought screens holding?”
“Just. We had a field flicker—it had us for a moment, knew it was going to lose us … but it was sure it would get us again. That arrogant— Never mind.” The feeling of the sneeze was still tickling at the back of her mind. “I don’t have time for analysis, you’re going to have to do it.”
“Analyzing data now, Captain. Originally a very standard planetary structure, except that there have been extensive and unusual modifications to the planet over—”
He stopped.
“Mr. Data? Mr. Data!”
He saw what the ship saw, what Marignano’s sensors had seen. Strange to be reading his own sensors at the moment, and also reading Marignano’s, two sets of eyes looking through two different sets of vision at the same object—
The upper crust of the planet was riddled with tunnels—mighty diggings, very old to judge by the sensor readings, caverns artificially extended, galleries, halls and passageways a mile wide, through which huge conduits passed.
Some of them were carrying antimatter.
There were engines. They were made of no substance that Data recognized. Where did this planet come from? he found himself wondering.
Old did not begin to describe it. The planet was ancient, even as the most ancient species of this galaxy would reckon such things. And built into it was a warp engine, or rather a system of warp engines, of a size and structure that Data had never seen or even imagined. He could detect little in the way of detail—there had been no time—but the gross detail, warp coils, the shape of the warpfield, the way it was generated—of all those things he took note. He noted the gigantic pools of antimatter trapped inside the body of the planet/vessel, storage pods like the Enterprise’s but far more massive. They were scattered under the crust in what were probably the most stable configurations that could be found, reinforced with more of