Synthesis - James Swallow [28]
She chewed her lip, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Troi shift slightly in her seat; but he didn’t need his wife’s empathic skills to know that Vale had more to say. He nodded and gave her the permission she wanted.
“Captain, I know you and counselor served aboard the Enterprise in the company of an artificially intelligent being…”
“So did you, for nearly four years,” noted Troi.
“As a fellow officer,” admitted the commander. “But I didn’t know Data as well as you did. I wasn’t close to him. And I respect the fact that he was your colleague.”
“He was much more than that,” Troi said softly. “He was a dear friend.”
Riker considered his first officer. “You think our former association with an android means we’re going to give that device more leeway than it deserves? You know us better than that.”
Vale looked him in the eye. “I wouldn’t be a good XO if I didn’t air the thought.”
“Damn right,” Riker agreed. “And your point is well taken. But by the same token, we can’t automatically distrust an alien life-form just because it’s based on circuitry instead of meat and bone.” He stood up, tugging his uniform tunic straight. “We’ll take this one step at a time, as we always do. This kind of thing is the reason we’re out here.”
Vale stood up and nodded. “All the same, I’ll keep Keru with his finger on the button. Just in case.”
Deanna took in the long, wide chamber as the cargo bay doors sealed shut behind her. The room was more open than she’d seen it before, the materials stored inside shifted elsewhere so that this unique meeting could take place. Equally, though, it had been done to ensure that Keru’s team of security guards all had uncluttered sight lines from their positions around the bay’s perimeter. Keru had not been pleased when Deanna had insisted his staff keep their weapons holstered, but this had become a diplomatic matter now—and on that, she had the authority.
There was an air of tension around her. Deanna’s empathic senses drew it close. Anticipation and an edge of fear, hanging there like smoke. In the center of the space, a halo of flickering blue light surrounded the alien device where it lay, resting on a support frame. The glow issued from a portable forcefield generator on the deck. Christine Vale had told her in passing that the shield was enough to block all but the most powerful of energetic discharges. She hoped that it wouldn’t be put to the test.
The alien device pulsed and throbbed with odd combinations of light and motion. They reminded her of flames dancing in a fireplace or patterns of ripples on water. Am I watching it think? she wondered. It was a delicate-looking thing, at odds with the mass of it, according to Vale. It had an engineered, constructed look to it, but it didn’t lack elegance in its design. The nexus core seemed more than just a functional object—there was almost an art to it, like a beautiful building or a sleekly lined starship.
She noticed the blinking indicators on a series of transponder tags attached to the base of the support frame. A short distance down the corridor, Lieutenant Radowski was standing sentinel at a transporter, ready to beam the alien device off the Titan at the first sign of trouble. Deanna noted that Ranul Keru was hovering close to a control pad on the far wall. He had already programmed in a macro to vent the entire cargo bay to space, should Radowski be unable to deal with the problem. Finger on the button, indeed, she thought.
A few meters away, Chaka, Dakal, and Sethe worked at a set of standalone consoles, completing their final checks. The panel the alien computer had interfaced with was off to one side, isolated, its service plates open. Inside, she saw the same pulse and glow the cylinder exhibited.
“Lieutenant, are we ready for this?” Will asked, moving up behind her.
Sethe stepped away and gave the captain a nod. “Aye, sir. At your discretion.”
“Proceed.”
Dakal activated a device that resembled an optical telescope on a tripod. It emitted a thin thread of red