Synthesis - James Swallow [93]
“One does not require a full understanding of a system in order to interfere with its operation, Lieutenant. But your statement raises some pertinent questions.”
The Andorian beckoned the others, and Dakal and Sethe began to climb the incline toward them. “Right now, I’d just settle for knowing where we are.”
“I have a hypothesis,” said the Vulcan, moving off up the long, wide ramp.
He heard Sethe puffing over the suit communicator link. “We… we’re not going to remain here, then?”
“No.”
“Sir, I thought protocols state that in the event of a crash landing, you remain at the impact site and wait for rescue. Granted, we didn’t exactly crash, but the circumstances are almost the same.”
“If we don’t know where ‘here’ is, we can’t expect the Titan to know, either,” said Dakal. Tuvok heard the Cardassian swallow hard. “For all we know, we could have been pulled into a subspace realm by those Null things.”
“Unlikely,” said the commander. “Our quantum signatures are in synchrony with the environment around us. We have not left our universe behind.”
“Only our reason,” muttered Sethe.
Pava shot the Cygnian a hard look. “You’d rather wait down there?” She pointed back into the canyon. “Counting off the seconds until your breather runs out of air?”
“We’d starve before that happened,” Dakal noted glumly. There was a vestigial atmosphere around them—Tuvok had detected its presence moments after they had materialized—but it was so thin and so toxic that to open the seals on their suits would be a death sentence, a fiftyfifty chance they would either suffocate or be poisoned within seconds.
Pava continued, ignoring the Cardassian’s comment. “I didn’t bring a kella deck with me, so I’d rather pass the time another way, if it’s all the same to you.”
The ramp’s angle became shallower, and Tuvok dropped into a crouch as the group approached the upper edge. The others quieted, copying his motions.
Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa moved up alongside the Vulcan. “Are we expecting hostiles, sir?”
Tuvok didn’t look at her, instead studying the garbled readings on his tricorder. “I am uncertain what we should expect, Lieutenant,” he replied. After a moment, he beckoned. “Follow me.”
Together, the four officers crested the lip of the canyon and found themselves standing on the edge of a wilderness of dark steel fields, lined in dirty orange where rivers of rust reached away toward a gently curved horizon. In the distance, skeletal derricks stood in serried rows with nests of fat cables strung between them, weak flickers of lightning fizzing around blackened ceramic connectors. There were what appeared to be the remains of minarets and other narrow towers, each ruined at the same height, some bent over, others broken and shed into piles of corroded rings. There were other canyons, too, cut into the carbon-scored landscape, some lit with a volcanic glow that reminded Tuvok of ancient Mount Tarhana on his homeworld, others dark and solemn caverns where no light fell.
The sky over their heads was black and starless, but now, as they stood in the clear, the illusion of total darkness was broken by a halo of stars visible at the edges of the skein of night. A huge shadow blotted out almost everything; they were in the lee of a larger planetary body, one orbiting between them and the nearest sun. Tuvok’s eyes narrowed, and he pointed upward. “There,” he said.
“I see it.” Pava gave a brusque nod. Visible in the corona of deflected light around the edge of the night side was a glittering rain of shards that twinkled and shone. She looked to him for confirmation. “Wreckage?”
“Indeed. It would seem my hypothesis has been proven correct.”
Sethe’s pale face fell as he made the same connection. He glanced around, blinking behind his helmet visor. “This is… This is one of them, isn’t it? The one we saw in orbit beyond the refinery. We’re actually standing on a… a…”
“A machine,” finished Dakal. “A computer.”
“As I suspected, we did not travel far from our intended destination.” He glanced at the dark ice world