Synthesis - James Swallow [15]
“We’ll break up,” Vale decided. “Keru, Meldok, Dakal, you three proceed aft. Ensign Fell, you and Chief Dennisar will head toward the bow with me.”
Dakal pointed up the conduit. “Do we know which end of this ship is which?”
“I made an executive decision,” Vale replied dryly. “Move out, and watch your dosimeters. I don’t want anyone coming back to Titan cooked.”
Keru glanced back at her as he floated away. “We’ll keep a comm channel open.”
Zurin tried not to bump his helmet against the lumpy, uneven walls of the conduit. Without any visual cues to keep his sense of balance centered, it was hard for him to picture the cable-wreathed tunnel as a vertical plane; instead, his mind insisted on perceiving the distended tube as a well he was slowly falling into, extending away into the gloom. Hardly any ambient light came from the wreck, barring the insipid glow of an occasional illuminator panel here and there.
Meldok drifted past him, working his way by one hand along the far side, occasionally returning to the heavyduty sciences tricorder tethered to his belt. “Compensating for the radiation wash, I am detecting very few open internal spaces beyond the bulkheads. Certainly, nothing large enough for any one of us to navigate.”
“We’ll contact Titan and ask them to send someone smaller, then,” said Keru.
Zurin peered at Meldok’s scans. “I think even Doctor Huilan might find it a tight fit, sir,” he noted, referring to the ship’s diminutive S’ti’ach counselor. “This vessel does not resemble any conventional starship that I am aware of.”
Meldok’s bald blue pate bobbed behind his faceplate. “I have yet to detect even a trace of atmospheric gases anywhere. Also, while there is evidence of structural integrity-field generators, there appears to be no sign of any internal artificial-gravity matrix.”
“Perhaps whoever built this doesn’t have that technology,” said Keru.
“Or perhaps the crew don’t need it,” Zurin added, warming to the idea.
The Benzite continued. “The craft appears to be a mass of decentralized subsystems with multiple redundancies and a high degree of internal automation. From an engineering standpoint, the closest analogies I am aware of are the modularity of design in vessels of Suliban, Borg, or Breen origin.”
Zurin’s skin prickled reflexively, and he saw the Trill security chief stiffen. “This ship isn’t any of those,” said Keru, and he made the statement sound like an order.
The Cardassian swallowed hard, feeling uncomfortably chilled all of a sudden. “Whatever this craft is,” he found himself saying, “it wasn’t built for beings like us.”
Drifting downship, Zurin reached out to steady himself, and his fingers brushed one of the black, glassy panels. Moving as he did, the ensign missed the soft pulse of light that rose and fell across the screen in the wake of his passage.
“What do you think this is for?” said Dennisar, swinging his weapon right and left, letting the spot lamp mounted under the barrel cast a disc of cold white light across the walls.
“Storage chamber?” offered Fell.
Vale drifted in after them. The open space was the largest they had encountered so far, a spherical room where the maintenance conduit terminated. She could see other dark entryways around the radius of the chamber, doubtless connecting to more conduits leading deeper into the wreck. The room was no bigger than the Titan’s bridge, but the dark and the depth of it gave a false illusion of volume. In the zero gravity of the room, the three of them were forced to move slowly. The open space was filled with fragments of machinery and broken hardware, much of it stained carbon-black by some powerful but fleeting discharge of energy. The commander moved closer to one of the curved walls and saw small, peculiar cages lined around the equator, some open, some closed. In one of the sealed compartments was a device that resembled a flask made of turned metal, with a dull