The Garden - Melissa Scott [71]
And that was a distinct possibility, Torres thought, looking around the room. It was an enormous space, a good fifteen meters on each side, but every available space was crammed with machinery, the same gleaming, attenuated shapes she had seen when they first arrived, and the moving parts were as strangely exposed as they had been in the hall. It seemed impossible that anything could function without interfering with all of its neighbors, and in spite of herself she stepped closer, only to see the faint glow of the fields that separated each component. It seemed like an incredible waste of power, and totally at odds with the readings they had gotten from the planet, and she turned to Silver-Hammer, speaking before she thought.
"How do you keep all those forcefields lit? We don't read enough power to run a light source, much less something like this."
Silver-Hammer smiled. "You can't expect me to answer that, surely."
Torres felt herself blush-the question had been naive-but decided to bluff it through. "Well, I'll need to know about your power capability to give you
a proper analysis of the transporter system. Obviously you have more to spare than I would have thought." "True." Silver-Hammer nodded, grave, the smile abruptly gone. "The planet's core is the primary source. The world is young and hot enough to give power to spare." "But you shield it."
Silver-Hammer nodded again. "Otherwise it might become vulnerable. The Andirrim are certainly clever enough to make that a focus of their attacks."
Torres felt a sudden chill at the thought. Core taps were an excellent source of heat and therefore of power, but they were also inherently vulnerable, and an accident at one could be devastating. "You have a lot of trouble with the Andirrim."
"Enough," Silver-Hammer answered. "Som etimes they come to trade, and bring enough metal that there's no choice but to do business, but that's only when they need supplies themselves. Mostly they come to raid."
"I hope they don't show up any time soon," Torres said.
"If they do, it will probably be to trade," Silver-Hammer answered. "They were driven back last time, and took little with them."
"Good." Torres suppressed the rest of what she would have said-Starfleet training was right, you had to be very careful taking sides in local disputes- and reached for her tricorder. "Will you show me your system?"
Silver-Hammer hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then pointed to a block in the center of the room. "There."
Torres moved cautiously toward it, unslinging her tricorder as she went. The block had the massy, dull look of lead, but metal tubing-gold and silver, rose
and pink and every shade of red as well-coiled across its surface, emerging from the sides and corners to knot around each other, passing through spheres with strange, multi-petaled surfaces, and then diving again below the surface. There was an oddly organic look to it all, a wet slickness to the surface, but when she trained her tricorder on it, the readings were definitely mechanical. Or at least nonorganic she amended. The entire assembly was enclosed in a powerful forcefield. She adjusted the tricorder's sensors to penetrate it, and saw that the contained radiation was almost off the scale a self-contained power source, she wondered, or just Kirse engineering?
"This is the power source?" she asked, and Silver-Hammer moved to join her, peering curiously at the tricorder's screen. Torres repressed the instinctive desire to snatch it away, and instead pressed the control that blanked the screen. The Kirse gave her a startled, disapproving look, and Torres met it with her most stolid stare.
"This is the heart of it, yes," Silver-Hammer answered, after an instant's pause, and Torres switched the tricorder back on, taking a few carefully casual steps toward the shielded block as she did so. To her relief, Silver-Hammer didn't follow, and she made herself concentrate on the displays. The waveforms were only vaguely familiar, the usual patterns overlaid