Synthesis - James Swallow [41]
Sethe put down the padd and folded his arms, his tail flicking. “This refers to quads zero six hundred to zero one thousand. I haven’t been anywhere near the zero-buffer sectors since the orders came down from Captain Riker. As you demanded, I’ve been concentrating on the two-series buffer sectors. Feel free to check with Lieutenant Rager on the bridge. She gave me the go-ahead to take those processors off-line.”
Ra-Havreii’s lips twitched. “Don’t cover for yourself. It’s foolish. Admit it, and we can go on with fixing the problem, not the blame.”
“I think perhaps you misread the display,” Sethe said, turning. “Sir.”
The Efrosian engineer swept up the padd. “No, it’s quite clear.” He highlighted two of the data modules, deep-core, low-priority memory spaces that were usually used for redundant storage. “The process functions of these have been altered since I accessed them and certified them errorfree two hours ago. As you’re the only person with clearance to that sector, it had to be you. Why did you alter it?”
“I didn’t alter anything,” Sethe insisted. “Perhaps if the alien—”
“There’s no sign of outside interference.” Ra-Havreii snorted and walked away. “That thing never even came close to this section of the ship’s memory.”
Sethe shot him an acid glare. “It is a very complex system, Doctor. Perhaps it is a program artifact of some sort.”
“Of course it isn’t.” Vanishing out of the room, he laughed harshly, as if such an idea was the height of stupidity. “Because the ship isn’t capable of reprogramming itself.”
FIVE
The strange patterns of subspace melted away as the Sentry vessel dropped back into normal space. The transition was smooth and untroubled; the machine-mind Cyan-Gray had moved through the sector with ease and precision, avoiding any chance of its course intersecting with another of the distortion zones that Titan had run afoul of.
Without ceremony, the AI starship collapsed the extended transit field it had looped around the Federation vessel and cut power to the tractor beam holding the craft to its belly. Cyan-Gray’s shipframe rolled away and came to a gentle stop, holding station off and ahead in Titan’s port forward quarter.
It sent a terse subspace message—“Follow me”—and moved off again, this time at sublight power, threading the orbit of the outermost world of the double-star system.
Titan’s crew warily obeyed, matching speed and course and turning every available sensor grid to gather as much information as possible on their new surroundings.
The star system was nameless, designated only by a string of coding in the Federation astronomical database: NFC 828–90–223. It resembled the Sirius complex, with a large Type A star sharing its orbital space with a far smaller white dwarf. The cold polar light cast across the system touched worlds that were largely balls of radiation-bleached stone, dense chemical ice, or gas giants. Artifacts were visible even at a distance on the surface of some of the planets; the sensors registered huge continent-sized mine works, great open-cast scars that plunged miles into the crust of the airless rim worlds.
Closer in, the populace of System 223 made itself more obvious. There were craft of countless configurations, some smaller than a shuttle pod, others larger than a Galaxy-class cruiser, all bound on errands that took them back and forth between the planets or to drifting platforms arranged at points of gravitational stability.
Cyan-Gray’s shipframe was joined by minnowlike craft, small things that shifted and darted around the AI vessel and its Starfleet charge. The little ships never came close, instead remaining beyond an exclusion zone several kilometers out, but still they danced and followed the pair all the way in, trailing in the Titan’s wake like curious children pacing a strange new arrival. Muon communication beams flashed among the group as they scanned the aliens