Synthesis - James Swallow [35]
The next events happened so quickly that Deanna Troi later would only recall brief, flash-frame images of them, moments that shot past in heartbeats.
A curl of crackling energy slammed into Ensign Dakal and threw him off his feet, sending the tricorder flying. The light flash impossibly curved away from him and enveloped the tricorder, igniting a storm of data processes that lit every function and display on it before leaping away. It struck at Lieutenant Sortollo, one of Keru’s security team, hitting his combadge before he had time to cry out and then flashing away again—arcing across the bay to plunge straight into Chaka’s computer console, where it opened like a flower and wreathed the panel in emerald flashes.
She saw Ranul Keru spin around, bringing up his phaser—
Input 68363-28583-29548-2939. [2G White-Blue]
“Connecting”
Process: Interface
Working…
At a speed beyond the velocity of thought, faster than the firing of organic neurons, quicker than the flood of electrochemical messages through blood and nerve and muscle, the Sentry AI plunged into the ocean of new data sensation that was the Titan.
White-Blue blossomed and streamed though the confines of the alien ship’s virtual space, passing over swaths of program and systemry, glancing at great storehouses of knowledge and data, dithering for vital nanoseconds before moving on. For the eight hundred and fourth time since the organic “Identifier: Ranul Keru. Species: Trill” had suggested it could take control of the vessel, White-Blue weighed the possibility of doing just that, and, for the eight hundred and fourth time, it rejected that choice. The option was intriguing, but morally complex and therefore too distracting to consider at this juncture.
The dynamics of this ship system were strange and fascinating. The glimpses it had taken of the technologies of these aliens, the data console, the portable scanning device, the communicator unit, all of them filled the AI with a curiosity that begged to be sated. But to plumb the depths of this new territory would take an epoch of process cycles, a period that would slow it to almost an organic’s level of clock speed. There simply wasn’t enough time.
The attack had to be stopped. Survival was imperative. The information White-Blue had retrieved before the incursion had obliterated its shipframe was vital. It had to be returned and collated. There was a 76.93-percent chance that the survival of Sentry-kind depended on it.
Moving through the slow hurricane of alert signals and warning flags flooding the starship’s command pathways, White-Blue created a quick search algorithm that spun through the Titan’s databases and found the communications protocols. It expressed a moment of surprise. The alien vessel had not detected the faint, swift beam signals the other Sentry had directed toward it; but then again, why would it? This “Federation” vessel’s default communication method was a form of subspace radiation packeting, ingenious and good for long-range messaging but less robust than the Sentry’s unjammable muon-link system. It copied the design and theory of the subspace radio mechanism and sent it back to its core pod for later consideration. At the same time, White-Blue infiltrated the Titan’s weapons grid and altered the frequency and power of its phaser-discharge array. Another part of its intrusion program noted a relay from the starship’s sensors, indicating that another salvo of weapons fire was about to be unleashed upon the vessel. This would be the killing blow, unless prevented.
Using the rudimentary automated targeting software of the weapons grid, White-Blue aimed an ultra-low-energy pulse at the attacking shipframe and fired. The beam was absorbed by the other Sentry’s skin and parsed into a comm signal.
White-Blue used the emergency warning prefix. It appended