Synthesis - James Swallow [138]
“We destroyed it?” asked Ra-Havreii. The Efrosian had been on the bridge when Riker arrived from the cargo bay, having relieved Ensign Panyarachun, insisting on taking the engineering station personally.
Keru shook his head. “Not exactly. We just broke it up into smaller pieces, reduced its volume.”
“We haven’t tried quantum or transphasic torpedoes yet,” offered Vale, at the captain’s right.
“But there’s no way to be certain they’ll have any more effect than phasers or standard torpedoes,” Troi countered from the chair at Riker’s left. “The only thing we can be sure of is the effectiveness of the tricobalt warheads.”
Riker nodded. He didn’t want to play that ace too soon; the weapons were limited in number, and he wanted to find a target worth spending them on. The captain glanced at the golden sphere in the corner of the room, waiting in the lee of the port-side turbolift alcove. Red-Gold had not uttered a word since it had floated onto the bridge in Riker’s wake. He imagined the remote was busily scanning everything around it and transmitting the data back to its core in the AI’s shipframe. “Where’s the largest mass of Null matter?”
“Processing…” replied the machine. “My vessel is at azimuth ten-five-ten, regrouping with Silver-Green and Cyan-Gray. Processing…” It turned slightly. “Highest density concentration approximately two-point-two-six light-seconds from current position of Titan.”
“I’ve got it,” called Rager. “Whoa. He’s a big one, all right. It’s larger than a starbase.”
“And growing by the second,” added Lavena.
“Take us in, combat approach. Shields to maximum. Arm all tricobalt warheads.”
Deanna leaned close. “What if that’s not enough?”
“You’re welcome to try talking to it,” he said.
She frowned. “Believe me, if I could, I would. But when I reach out there with my empathic senses, there’s nothing I can take hold of. It’s like… an ocean of greed. No reason, no thought. Just hunger. It’s alive… but not in any sense that it is aware of us—or anything else, for that matter.” She shuddered. “All it wants is to feed.”
Riker nodded toward the science station, where Melora and White-Blue stood in intense conversation as the avatar looked on. “I’ve got the best organic, mechanical, and digital minds working on Plan B.”
“Let’s hope that’s enough.” Vale was grim-faced.
Melora tapped a control on her console. “Xin, tie in to this, will you?” She got a nod from across the room and saw the engineering station appear on the shared workspace that she had set up with the avatar and the Sentry droneframe. It wasn’t lost on her that Xin’s look lingered on her and the hologram for longer than she expected. His dusky face remained unreadable, though.
The information Tuvok had brought them from Zero-Three was unwinding through a translation program that White-Blue had provided, spilling pages of complex energy-pattern matrices across the display. Melora recognized the structure of spatial shears, the same mechanisms that the Sentries used for propulsion and the Null forced open to gain entry into normal space.
“These data are from before our incept,” said White-Blue with all the reverence of a religious acolyte reading a holy text. “These are records of the maker-kind, of their failed attempts to penetrate the dimensions.”
“The experiments that brought the Null.” The avatar nodded. “Yes. I see the errors, here and here.” Without moving, she made a cursor highlight two sections of formula. Melora instantly saw the same miscalculations. “These mistakes are subtle and deeply hidden. It is likely your creators could never have known what they were about to do.”
Melora drew herself up. “All of this is ancient history. There has to be something in it that can help us here