Synthesis - James Swallow [72]
Riker studied him for a moment. “Everything about that intelligence is synthetic, Torvig. Ask yourself, can you really be sure of what you’re seeing from it? What if what you and I see is just what it wants us to? What if it is showing us the very thing that will make us trust it?”
The Choblik’s lips pursed. “That’s a possibility,” he admitted. “But I’m certain of this, sir. That intelligence, the avatar, Titan… she’s alone among beings who share no true commonality with her. The closest thing she has to kindred are White-Blue and the other Sentries. If we don’t offer trust, we may drive her away.”
“Right now, trust is a little thin on the ground, Ensign.”
“I know, sir. That’s what concerns me.”
The Holiday fell in toward the ice planet on a swift, fast curve, bleeding off the velocity of its impulse thrust as the frozen world’s gravity took hold of it. Pava sh’Aqabaa’s piloting trended, like that of many Andorians, toward favoring velocity over caution, and she had brought the shuttle across the distance between the Demon-class planet and its frigid neighbor with characteristic forcefulness, at full throttle almost all the way.
The icy sphere was a dirty gray-green, a cracked ball of frozen gases dominated by plains of shiny permafrost and rough escarpments where continent-sized masses had splintered and shifted. Dull light reflected from the distant twin suns made the whisper-thin atmosphere glitter. Like the other worlds in the system, this one had not been spared the attentions of the Sentries. In places, straightedged cuttings lanced deep through the surface, and there were massive slab-size constructs made of coppery metal visible here and there, sheathed in plumes of superheated steam. These were vast tracked mining modules, vehicles the size of small starships trawling across the snow fields, chopping up the ice to drag back to the refinery.
The platform itself was above in synchronous orbit, a single great saucer flat against the sky, with spindly docking gantries extending from its circumference at regular intervals, some ending in moored shipframes, others vacant. Muon-link pulses glowed around them in binary signal codes. Spherical pods clustered on the underside, ringing a thick tether that dropped away toward the surface, there to connect to a construct of similar dimension on the ground. Smaller elevator pods crawled up and down the tether, bringing their cargo into orbit and returning empty.
And distant, low in the sky and barely peeking over the lip of the ice world’s day-night terminator, a bronze moon was rising, dark and sullen.
• • •
Pava glanced up from her controls as the Holiday circled the refinery platform. “I’m not reading any conventional landing beacons, Commander. They’re not exactly opening the door for us.”
Tuvok stared through the canopy and pointed at one of the pylons. “There,” he said. “I believe that is our rendezvous.”
“How can you be sure?”
“It is the most heavily trafficked gantry. There are numerous drones in operation there, far more than would likely be required for this operation.”
Her antennae arched downward. “Security, you think?”
“Probable,” he replied. “Take us in, Lieutenant. Slowly.”
Pava shifted in her seat. She felt uncomfortable in her environment suit, but the commander had insisted that the entire team gear up the moment they got under way. At least she was spared having to wear the helmet, until Tuvok ordered otherwise. Her headgear was slightly taller in aspect than those of the other humanoid crew, tailored with an extra few inches for her twin antennae, but still, she disliked being cramped inside the helmet. When she wore it, the faint sound echo of her voice and her breathing reflected off the inside of the faceplate and back into the tips of each antenna; the effect was like a nagging background buzz that wouldn’t go away.
She was aware of someone