Security - Keith R. A. DeCandido [29]
Fabian shot a look at Sonya. Sonya just smiled and said, “Okay, now we have a better idea of what it does—the question is, can we find out what happened to the runabout?”
“My best hypothesis is that the runabout did not detect the anomaly,” Tev said.
“Yeah,” Fabian said, “we only saw it at all because we slowed down after finding the fragment. If they weren’t looking, the Missouri could’ve barreled right into it.”
Suddenly the lights in the ship dimmed. Half a second later, the red alert klaxon blared.
“I’ve lost probe telemetry,” Pattie said.
“We’re moving,” Sonya said as she felt the vibration of the deckplates through her boots. “Backing off at one-quarter impulse.”
“A wise precuation,” Tev said.
“Gold to science lab. Reassure an old man, Gomez, that my ship, it won’t get blown to bits.”
Sonya walked back to the console she’d been using to verify her readings. “Probe’s been destroyed, sir. As far as we’ve been able to determine, the anomaly is caused by a small spherical object that’s altering space around it.”
Tapping his combadge while hunched over his own console, Fabian said, “Sir, I’ve just verified that every time it changes the fabric of space, not only does the size of the area it alters vary, but each time it does, the space has a different quantum signature.”
“In English, Stevens.”
Sonya and Tev both verified what Fabian just said. “Confirmed,” Tev said. “This device is a gateway to parallel universes, akin to the one we communed with on Empok Nor.”
“The current configuration,” Fabian said, “is a diameter of about two hundred meters.” He looked up. “If it was this big, there’d be no way the Missouri could miss it.”
“What are you saying, Stevens?” Gold asked.
Sonya gritted her teeth. “It means that the effect of this device is expanding.”
A tinkling noise was followed by: “I found something!”
Dashing back over to where Pattie sat, Sonya asked. “What is it?”
“I was going over what we got from the probe. Take a look.” With three of her pincers, she pointed at the screen.
Sonya saw what she did—they had detected another fragment of duranium, one that matched that of the material that made up the Missouri.
As David Gold sat down in the observation lounge, he said without preamble, “Tell me we have some way of getting Lense and Bashir out of that mess.”
“Working on it, sir,” Gomez said as she took her seat to Gold’s right. Tev sat on his left, with Soloman next to him. Stevens took his seat next to Gomez, Corsi next to him. Gold noted that Corsi and Stevens came in together and sat together naturally, moving almost as one. Blue was at her specially modified seat at the other end.
“Talk to me. We’ve lost too many people off this ship already, I’m not standing for it happening again.”
“Sir,” Tev said, “I feel constrained to point out that we have no empirical proof that either of the passengers aboard the runabout are still alive, nor that the runabout is still intact.”
Quickly, Gomez added, “Having said that, at least we now have a working theory about what happened.”
Gold nodded. Over the past year, he’d learned to trust Sonya Gomez’s working theories a lot better than most people’s facts.
Touching a control in front of her caused the viewer on the wall to light up with a sensor scan. In red was a spherical object. Random shapes appeared around it, one yellow, then replaced with a differently shaped blue, with a third shape in green, and so on.
“The sphere in the middle is the device that’s causing all this. It’s opening up a gateway between quantum realities.”
“Before it was destroyed by the device’s expanding field,” Tev said, “the probe was able to scan the surface of the device, but not penetrate its interior workings. The technology is unfamiliar.”
Stevens put in, “But it probably opens up quantum fissures somehow. Back when he was in Starfleet, Ambassador Worf encountered a natural fissure that sent him on a joyride through about a dozen quantum realities. This thing probably does artificially what that fissure did naturally.”
Although he was listening, Gold