String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [54]
“It is impossible to tell,” Seven replied.
“We’ll take them anyway, just in case,” Chakotay said.
“Commander,” Janeway ordered, “assemble your rescue team. I’m sorry we couldn’t make it easier for you, but at least we know where Tuvok is.”
Chakotay had already risen to his feet, presumably expecting this command as soon as Seven made her report about the transporters.
“We’ll be back as soon as we can,” Chakotay nodded assuredly. “Mr. Kim, Mr. Paris, you’re with me.”
As the doors to the turbolift slid shut behind them, the bridge was suddenly bathed in a bright white glow.
Seven was the first to diagnose the situation. “Captain, we are being scanned.”
“By what?” Janeway demanded, shielding her eyes from the blinding light.
“A coherent tetryon beam,” she replied, oblivious of the instinctive alarm this raised in Janeway, and most likely in every member of the crew who had been aboard Voyager the day they were pulled into the Delta Quadrant.
A few seconds later, the beam was extinguished.
“Let’s hope whoever activated that scan liked what they saw,” Janeway observed.
“I believe it is an automated system, Captain,” Seven informed her as she switched the image on the main viewscreen to a multipicture view of several areas of the docking bay.
The bay was lined with dozens of power nodes. Long black cables were wound neatly at the base of each node. As Janeway looked on in awe several of the cables that had been wound innocuously on the walls appeared to unwrap themselves and seek out external ports along Voyager’s hull. Their movement was slow but precise. The eerie dance reminded Janeway of the hypnotic movement of a cobra, charmed from a wicker basket by an Indian shaman. She had never seen the spectacle in person, but Chakotay had shown her a holovid of such a scene, research he had collected after a particularly disturbing vision quest. The only thing missing in the moment was the gentle whistle of the lute that the snake charmer had used to coax and then regulate the motion of the deadly cobra.
With a series of barely audible clicks and hisses, the cables attached themselves to ports along Voyager’s hull.
Janeway called to engineering. “B’Elanna,” she asked, “are you detecting the activity along our hull?”
“Yes, Captain” she replied. “Most of them are power-transfer cables. However, there is also one dataport being compromised. I believe the array’s computer system is attempting to interface and synchronize with ours. Should we attempt to disengage them?”
Janeway was torn. Everything she already knew about the array suggested that this could be an opportunity they might never have again. It had been years since all of their reserve systems had been stocked at maximum levels. But a nagging voice of doubt in the back of her mind persistently reminded her that nothing, even in a society that had eliminated currency, came without a price. She would have preferred to initiate and oversee any power transfers from the array. It appeared, however, that she wouldn’t have that chance.
“Monitor the levels closely, Lieutenant. At the first sign of an overload, disengage them by force if necessary.”
“Understood, Captain,” B’Elanna replied as Janeway moved toward ops and pulled up the same readings that B’Elanna would be seeing in engineering. Within moments the interface procedure completed its operation, and the green bars on the display that indicated Voyager’s reserve supplies began to climb.
As Seven peered over her shoulder Janeway said softly, “It’s amazing, isn’t it? While humans were still wearing animal skins and living in caves, an alien race designed a system that could anticipate the needs of every spacefaring vessel.”
Seven nodded silently.
Once the power transfer was complete, all of the cables with the exception of the data-transfer cable disengaged themselves automatically. Janeway pulled up several different external views of the docking bay, and her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the power cables neatly wrapping themselves up along the walls.
“B