Synthesis - James Swallow [24]
After a moment, the firm tones of the Titan’s chief engineer sounded across the chamber. “Melora. We’ve had that conversation about you calling me at the office…”
“This is a work thing, Xin, don’t flatter yourself,” she retorted. “I’m here with Commander Vale and Ensign Fell. Have you had a look at the data from the derelict yet?”
“Oh, of course. I cast an eye over it. Patchy, my dear, very patchy. But I was able to make some assumptions based on what still remains of the craft.” Vale heard him clear his throat. “First, we have what appears to be a rather unusual interstellar drive. Based on what I can see, I would believe the craft is capable of reaching FTL velocities below the Warp Five threshold by actually riding the lines of force radiating from ambient subspace shear effects in this sector. Clever but only useful in a zone laced with heavy distortions.”
“Like this one,” said Vale.
“Deflector technology is subpar,” he continued with a dismissive sniff. “No apparent life-support systems, nothing that appears to be a mechanism for matter-energy transfer…”
“No transporters or replicators,” said Fell.
Vale nodded. “What about weapons systems, Doctor?”
“Ah, now, there it’s a different matter,” he replied. “As Mister Tuvok noted in his initial scans, there’s evidence of extremely high-powered energetic discharge arrays all over the hull. Omnidirectional channels for antiproton radiation, capable of emitting from almost any point on the ship’s fuselage! It’s quite remarkable.”
“No phaser batteries or hard points,” said the commander. “Starfleet Research and Development tried to make that work, but they couldn’t do it. Too much radiation overspill into the ship, too hazardous for the crew.”
“I’ve saved the best for last, as I always do,” said RaHavreii. “The alien ship’s internal data systems are unlike anything I have seen, outside of prototypes at Utopia Planitia. Believe me when I tell you, the boys and girls at the Daystrom Institute would eat their doctorates for a piece of this. It’s almost an order of magnitude more advanced than Starfleet’s standard shipboard computers.”
Fell’s hand ran over her hairless scalp. “That vessel is clearly the product of a very different technological society from the United Federation of Planets.”
“Weapons and computers, not warp drive and transporters,” murmured Vale. “They’re warriors, not explorers.”
“We can’t be certain of that,” said Melora. “We’re still working from parts of a greater whole. We don’t have the full picture yet.”
“Let’s hope so,” said the commander, her eyes returning to the image of the binary stars.
“This is… unprecedented.” Lieutenant Sethe stood in front of the master display screen that filled one wall of the cybernetics lab, his pale hands moving back and forth over the input console. Great streams of data cascaded past in panels of glowing glyphs, and displayed in an inset window, a real-time electromagnetic scan of the nexus core rendered the invisible pulse of code into patches of green and red.
“The number of operational cycles is increasing by the second,” reported Chaka, observing the device closely. “It’s emulating more than nine million kiloquads of processing capacity.” She hesitated. “At least… I believe it is. The sensors are finding it difficult to find a commonality with conventional benchmarks.”
“A tachyon computing system.” Dakal shook his head in amazement. “Until this moment, a curiosity. A theory. But now, there it sits.”
“Depending on the magnitude of the encoding structure, the information stored in there could be the equal of the entire Memory Alpha database.” Sethe was nodding to himself. “I wonder what we will find? The records of a million new cultures?” He grabbed Dakal’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, his tail flicking animatedly. “If we can deconstruct this unit, the things we learn could change the face of computing.”
“I don’t agree,” noted Chaka,