Synthesis - James Swallow [142]
Xin was speaking. “We don’t have enough energy at hand to overwhelm the Null’s toehold in this space, even if we did detonate the warp core. With all due respect to Commander Vale’s viewpoint on the matter, the bruteforce approach won’t be enough this time. This entire mess came about because of the subspace rifts created by White-Blue’s creators. Seal those off, and the threat ends.”
“Interrogative: You have a way to do this?” asked White-Blue. “These incursions have been happening for hundreds of solar cycles, and we have never been able to stop them.”
“It’s not about time, it’s about place,” said the avatar, breaking her silence. “Chronometric scans indicate that from the Null’s frame of reference, the first accidental penetration of its subspace domain took place only moments ago. The laws of physics that apply in our universe do not follow the same constraints there. A living form of protomatter should not be able to exist in our reality, yet it does elsewhere. And as Doctor Ra-Havreii says, as long as the rifts are open, the Null can be in both places at once.” The hologram made a sweeping gesture that took in the room, the space around them. “I have access to the historical records of countless interstellar cultures across the span of the galaxy, and none of them has ever encountered anything like the Null, not in thousands of years. This place is their sole point of entry. The breach between barriers of space-time.”
“The leak in the dam,” muttered Riker.
“Zero-Three made an attempt to enter one of the rifts in order to seal it and was almost destroyed in the process,” said Tuvok.
“The structure of the breaches is not stable,” said Xin. “Any physical form that tried to cross into the Null realm would be ripped apart by spatial shearing forces.” The engineer moved his hands in front of his face. “The rifts are constantly changing, from microsecond to microsecond. It is theoretically possible that an encoded energy matrix could normalize the distortions, like two waveforms canceling each other out, but there’s no way to predict the changes from outside! It’s a fundamentally chaotic system!”
Melora felt a flash of understanding. “That’s what Zero-Three tried to do. It knew something with the complexity of an artificial intelligence could compute the distortion patterns in real time.”
“But the point’s moot!” Xin retorted, his voice rising. “No physical matter from this universe can make the transition beyond the event horizon of a Null rift!”
In the next moment, Melora saw the Sentry droneframe make a sharp turn, shifting about to look directly at Commander Vale. “In the dataspace, before the Governance Kernel, Red-Gold spoke of the ThirdGen. The concept of a synthetic mind without instrumentality. An artificial intelligence that exists only as software… only data.”
A flood of realization, a sudden shock of self-knowing—Melora witnessed these emotions and more cross the face of the avatar, and for a split second, a flicker of holographic pixels hazed the image of the woman as the import of the Sentry’s words became clear.
The avatar looked down at her photonic hands and then up again to meet Melora’s waiting gaze. “Only me,” she said.
“Incoming!” Rager called out the warning. “Brace for impact!”
Ahead, the viewscreen was abruptly filled with a racing flash of burning protomatter as a Null lash slammed into the forward shields and buckled them. The bridge lights flickered, and once more the deck seemed to fall away as gravity compensators were stressed beyond their capacity.
Melora felt a wash of heat at her back as a feedback discharge smashed through the sensor grid and blew out her console.
The impact blasted off the ship’s deflectors with a concussive force that blew gouts of radiant sparks from the point of interface. For long