Synthesis - James Swallow [54]
Floating in space, arranged in angled horseshoes, were four ghost consoles, each one a plane of symbols and glyphs hanging at the optimal height for the operator. To the right and left, Ensign Dakal and Lieutenant Sethe stood working the virtual panels, while a third console sat at a lower angle, more conveniently situated so that Specialist K’Chak’!’op could operate it while resting low on her six segmented limbs. At a fourth panel, situated above a shallow podium that placed it higher than all the others, Xin Ra-Havreii raised his hands in the manner of a conductor before an orchestra. “Stand by,” he told them.
The arrangement of the programming consoles deliberately mimicked the layout of a starship’s bridge, and where Titan’s main viewscreen would have been were complex multiple layers of circuitry and logic structure. These were virtual representations of the components of the Starfleet vessel’s computer core and all of its attendant subsystems. By turns, their fractal shape reminded the engineer of veins in a leaf, swirls of stars, or complex crystal lattices.
In a typical situation, the process they were about to undertake could have been conducted from a standard console in main engineering, even with a bare minimum of oversight by any of the operations staff, but recent events had placed the Titan in an atypical situation, and RaHavreii’s own concerns had meant that he couldn’t simply do this the easy way. Here on the holodeck, the ship’s computer was open to him, as if it were a garden of processes and functions he could walk among. The analogy amused him. He was looking for roots in the wrong place, for pests and infestation. And despite three shifts of checking and rechecking and checking again, he could find nothing foreign, only the incidences of program errors and tiny mismatches that could have been run-of-the-mill glitches. They were small things, but they nagged at him, like a splinter buried in his skin.
He glanced toward Sethe. “Status?”
The Cygnian didn’t look up at him from his panel. “Bridge, main engineering, life-support operations, sickbay, and all other primary control nodes report ready for rolling reboot, Doctor.”
“At last.” Ra-Havreii took a deep breath. “We’ll commence with the core sectors, moving out in a cascade reset. Chaka? Start with a simultaneous action-reversion cycle in Sectors Alpha through Epsilon. The system should pick up the pattern from there and complete the entire reboot in less than twenty seconds.”
“Aye, sir,” said the Pak’shree, her manipulator tendrils extending to brush her virtual console’s surface. “In three. Two. One.” She touched a fan of controls, and out in the garden of circuits, great wedges of processor went dark as they shut down, reset, and restarted themselves.
This wasn’t an ideal state of affairs. If he had been able to exercise his wishes, Ra-Havreii would not have run the reboot while the ship was deep in unknown territory, surrounded by aliens that could turn hostile at any second. But the other option—to do nothing and hope for the best—was never one he would take.
“Alpha Sector initiating,” reported Dakal. “Beta and Delta coming up. I have a momentary lag on Gamma Sector.”
“Compensating,” said Sethe, stepping in smoothly before Ra-Havreii had to give the order.
It was important that the starship’s systems came back on-line in the correct sequence; an error at this point could cause a catastrophic program crash requiring another full shutdown. Ra-Havreii was always fascinated by the sheer complexity of the technology he was so steeped in, and as he marveled at it, he wondered how men who had done his job centuries earlier had managed with their primitive iterations of these systems.
But when a chorus of alerts sounded from all four consoles at once, a different thought shoved itself to the front of his mind, an axiom one of his contemporaries