Synthesis - James Swallow [23]
“I know!” Zurin said, enthusiasm creeping up on him in a broad grin. “But there it is!” He pressed the padd into Chaka’s manipulators, and Sethe crowded in to take a look. “Isn’t that fascinating?”
“He might be correct,” the Pak’shree said carefully. “At the very least, it’s worth taking a look. Wouldn’t you say so, sir?”
Whatever tension had been building in the lab dissipated instantly in the face of a shared intellectual challenge. “I do,” agreed Sethe, a thin smile on his lips. “Let’s get to work.”
Behind them, the nexus core continued to run itself, the pulse of silent, faint color within it ever changing, never repeating.
Vale entered stellar cartography and got that same slight giddy sensation she always did, as if she were stepping out into a crow’s nest atop the mast of an ancient sailing vessel; only in here, the sea was made of stars and worlds and nebulae. Resting just outside the gravity envelope of the walkway and control pulpit, Melora Pazlar turned and offered the commander an airy wave. Vale, however, was more interested in the other person in the room.
“Ensign Fell,” she said firmly. “What are you doing here?”
The Deltan girl hesitated, gesturing with her tricorder but not speaking. Across her eyes she wore a pair of solar shades, the kind issued to away teams deployed to worlds with bright suns. Vale tried not to frown when she saw the red patch on the ensign’s face from her own phaser shot.
“I wanted to get my data to Lieutenant Commander Pazlar as soon as possible, ma’am,” Fell managed, after a moment.
“It’s my understanding that Doctor Ree discharged you on the agreement that you would go back to your quarters and get some rest. In the dark.”
Melora gave Vale a smirk. “Didn’t Ree say something similar to you, too?” Before she could reply, the Elaysian went on. “Anyway, I dimmed all of the illumination in here. It’s positively romantic.”
Fell gave Vale an imploring look. “Commander… I haven’t been on a lot of away missions, and I kind of felt like I botched this one a little. I’m just trying to make up for that.”
“You did fine,” Vale insisted. “If anyone screwed up, it was me.”
“Great,” said Melora. “Now that we’re certain that you’re both equally bad at your jobs, how about you let me do mine?” She floated away from the podium, and Vale watched her go. The holographic display around them was a sectorwide view of the area around the Titan.
Vale looked for and found the binary star pair Pazlar had first brought to her attention. Overlaid across it and the space surrounding the cluster were more zones of color—the subspace distortions.
“Working from the data Peya has here, I’m getting some correlations between the areas of spatial flux and a number of ambient energy traces found on the wreckage. The uniformity between them is very strong.”
“You’re saying that ship passed through these zones?”
“Very likely,” noted Fell. “But the trace density is even higher than you would expect from that. It’s more like… like the distortion marked the ship.”
Melora pointed to the areas one by one, highlighting them with a free-floating cursor. “In abstract, they resemble the fallout zones that occur after a thermonuclear detonation in a planetary atmosphere. But unlike those, there’s no clear pattern of dispersal. Just the vaguest impression of an epicenter.”
“Let me guess,” said Vale, and she pointed at the double star. “Right there?”
“Nice to see that electric shock didn’t destroy too many brain cells. Yes, that’s the locus, and we think it might also be the origin of the starship.”
“All well and good, but I’m not hearing anything about what it was that took a bite out of our derelict friend.”
Fell’s bald head dipped. “I have nothing for you, Commander. Perhaps if we can decrypt whatever data are inside the device we recovered, we may have a better idea.” She sighed. “All I can say is that deep analysis of the wreck has thrown up more anomalies than answers.”
“Let’s see if we can do better than that.” Melora worked her virtual