Synthesis - James Swallow [17]
“Sir!” Dakal cried out as a fan of steel-colored petals emerged from the conduit walls and came together in an iris, sealing off the passage. He turned to see the same happening ahead of them, but these panels seemed to be malfunctioning, and they moved in fits and starts.
“Forward!” snapped the security officer. “We can’t let them seal us in!”
Dakal pushed off, and Meldok came with him. The ready fear on the engineer’s pallid face was the first emotional response he’d ever seen from the dour Benzite.
Dennisar looked up from the digital chronograph on his suit’s wrist pad and called out to her. “Commander Vale?”
“I’m watching the clock, Chief,” she told him, moving slowly toward the end of the blue-lit conduit.
“I don’t doubt it, ma’am,” said the Orion in a tone that suggested he did. “It’s just that I’m questioning how we’re going to get out of here.” He jerked a thumb toward the hatch that had sealed shut behind them as they left the open chamber where the drone had attacked Ensign Fell.
“One problem at a time,” she retorted. She glanced at the Deltan woman, who moved close by, now connected between Dennisar and Vale by means of a safety tether.
Fell must have sensed her scrutiny. She gave a weak smile. “I think my vision’s coming back. That is, if everything around me is made out of felt—” A chime sounded, and she fumbled with her tricorder. “I reset this to audio mode,” she noted as the machine burbled quietly to her. “It’s reading a coherent energy trace, up ahead, very close.”
Vale checked her own suit’s integral tricorder and saw the same reading. “There’s another compartment.”
Dennisar moved past her, gently pushing her aside. “I’ll go first.”
She followed him into a spherical chamber of similar dimension to the previous one. Vale’s first impression was of a mechanical rendition of a heart, as if some machine artist had reconstructed the impression of an organic being’s internal structure. Her eye was immediately drawn to the center of the chamber, where a stubby drum of dense crystalline circuitry no larger than a cargo pod was leaning at an angle, whiplike connector cables tethering it to the walls in some places, in others hanging free where they had been explosively severed. She imagined the central unit had been knocked askew in its mounting during the attack on the vessel; a pulsing glow of multicolored light issued from it in faint flickers, like a dying candle.
Dennisar pointed up with his phaser, and Vale followed his line of sight. Across what was the “ceiling” from their point of views, another ragged wound was ripped open, a massive cut through the levels of the ship’s hull that went all the way out. Vale saw stars between the fingers of torn metal. Great gray-black scorch marks discolored the intricate machinery, and more debris floated around them in slow clumps.
“Commander.” The chief’s voice held a warning. He was aiming at a familiar flask-shaped object amid the drifts, apparently inert. “There’s a lot of them in here.”
“Right.” The more Vale’s eyes became used to the murk of the chamber, the more she became aware of dozens of the drones, all moving in lazy, silent orbits. “Look sharp.”
Fell was listening intently to her tricorder, the faint synthetic voice of the readout barely registering across her helmet communicator. “I think this may be a core element of the alien ship’s central computer,” she offered. “The scanner says almost all of the command pathways throughout the structure converge on this point.”
Vale let herself fall closer toward the cylindrical construct. Her tricorder presented her with a stream of data that she could interpret only on the most basic of levels—she would be the first to admit that xenotechnology wasn’t her strong suit—but she knew enough to recognize the configuration of a high-density data unit. “Peya’s right,” she said aloud. “Let’s see if we can talk to this thing.” Vale programmed her tricorder to beam an interrogative binary pulse into the cylinder.
“Commander,” said Dennisar in