The Garden - Melissa Scott [34]
He caught his breath as he came into the next room, heard Paris swear admiringly under his breath. The room was long and narrow, more like a very wide hallway, and the walls were banded with more strips of metal that alternated with sculptures of strange machinery in bas relief. Then one of the ruddy gold flywheels spun, giving off a hissing whir, and he heard Paris swear again. Kim leveled his tricorder at the nearest sculpted strip, and saw a set of pistons shift, rising and falling in an unfamiliar rhythm before they froze again. They were so well lubricated that they made almost no noise, barely adding to the soft rushing sound he had heard before. The sound was more or less constant, coming from everywhere and nowhere. All the sculptures were movable, he realized, were moving in odd rhythms, first the pieces of one band and then another-they weren't sculptures at all, despite their gleaming beauty, but parts of some much larger machine. A series of antique gears swung into motion, the smallest, about the size of his hand, spinning frantically, teeth blurring, just to move the largest, easily more than a meter in diameter, a few clicks farther on around its circle. All the gears were made of some blue-toned metal, bluer than steel, not as bright as treated titanium, and Kim stared for a moment in fascination before he remembered to check his tricorder. The readings were still inconclusive, power expended to no discernible end, and he shook his head in frustration.
"I wonder what it does."
"If it does anything," Paris said. "That big gear doesn't seem to connect to anything."
"It could be a regulator," Torres began, and then shook her own head. "No, there's no use speculating." From her scowl, Kim thought, she was as annoyed by her own guess as she was by the missing information.
"Is this the power source you've been reading?" Janeway asked. She had been staring curiously at the bands of machinery, but now she turned back to face the engineer.
"No, Captain." Torres shook her head for emphasis. "The source-or at least the highest level of use- is at least another fifty meters west of here."
Kim glanced down the length of the hall, gauging distances. "That's not much beyond the end of this room."
Even as he spoke, a section of the new-copper pink wall faded, and then disappeared, leaving another of the perfect arched doorways. Kim looked automatically at his tricorder, and saw the red spike of a power surge frozen in the time-elapsed display. He touched controls to analyze it, and to his surprise the machine flashed back a recognizable pattern. The energy spike was similar to a transporter beam, though far more primitive. "Captain," he began, and was cut off by a signal from the communicators.
"Chakotay to away team."
Janeway held up her hand to Kim, and touched her communicator. "Janeway here."
"Captain, we just picked up the largest power reading we've received from the surface so far, located less than fifty meters from your position."
"Yes, Chakotay, we know." Improbably, Janeway was smiling, but she sobered quickly. "Someone's just opened another door for us."
"Captain," Kim said again. He could feel the old dread rushing in as he spoke, the fear that he was going too far, interrupting with something that would turn out to be trivial, but stuffed it down again. "The energy we saw is related to our transporter beam."
Janeway looked sharply at him, and he braced
himself for a reprimand. Instead, she touched her communicator again. "Did you hear that, Chakotay?"
"I did, and we can confirm that," Chakotay answered. "Tuvok has just finished the analysis."
"Let me see that," Torres said, at Kim's elbow, and Kim handed her his tricorder. She mated it briefly to her own machine, transferring data,