Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [44]
“Excellent,” he said, smiling broadly. “Excellent work, everyone.”
This was the first piece of equipment that they had been able to get functioning with the station’s own power. Using Barclay and O’Connor’s diagnostic program, Data and Geordi had been able to trace the monitor’s power circuits. The problem with those circuits was that like much of the station’s circuitry, the power pathways had been built into the panels, walls, and bulkheads themselves.
As a result, tracing them was extremely difficult. The task was made tougher still by the fact that many of the circuits had been damaged by the power surge.
In the case of this one monitor, at least, they had been able to use jumpers to circumvent the damaged circuitry. With its power supply again intact, the screen was able to access the huge subspace sensor network that, like the circuitry, seemed to be built into the structure of the station. Of course, with so little juice available, neither the monitor nor the sensors should ever have functioned.
At another time, that mystery would have fascinated Geordi. Now it was simply an annoyance. If the alien technology refused to obey the laws of physics as he understood them, how would his team ever get the equipment working well enough to find and retrieve the captain?
As the rest of them watched, the android manipulated the controls on the forward panel. While he worked, the scene on the monitor shifted from one star system to another. Geordi came up behind him. “How are you doing that, Data?”
“I do not believe I am doing it,” Data responded. “As before, there seems to be no correlation between the controls here and the images presented on the monitor. Certainly, there is no direct or quantifiable correlation.”
The android ceased his manipulations and the monitor held an image for a moment—then shifted to another system. “It’s random?” Barclay asked from the rear.
“Possibly,” Data reported. “At any rate, it does not follow any pattern that I can discern.”
“Could any of these have been the captain’s destination?” O’Connor asked next.
“Possibly,” Data said again, taking his tricorder and scanning with it. “There seem to be memory banks built into the system, but they are empty,”
“Wiped clean by the power surge,” Geordi remarked. “We’ll have to count on Commander Riker to come up with some coordinates. But even so, that means we’ll have to be able to retrieve the captain once the Enterprise determines his position. And we don’t have the slightest idea of how this equipment works.”
“Sir,” Barclay said tentatively, “what if we gave up trying to understand the underlying principles here, and just concentrated on finding the operational parameters of the equipment?”
The lieutenant was right, of course. Geordi had spent hours trying to determine why things functioned here, and had come up empty-handed. The monitor was their first success, and it had only arrived when they stopped trying to figure out why it worked and concentrated on simply getting it powered up.
The chief engineer nodded. “Okay, so what do we know so far about the station’s operational parameters?” He asked the question of the group at large.
Data spoke first. “We know that the entire station functions as a subspace field coil. We also know that the station has a number of nodes, such as the one in this immediate area, that further focus the larger subspace field—apparently, for purposes of transport.”
“And we can assume,” O’Connor added, “that this equipment somehow controls this node.”
“All right,” Geordi said, “then our objective should be to trace the power circuits to each of the controls in the room. When we get them all functioning, we can figure out what they do.