The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [13]
“Right,” Fabian said triumphantly. “Good catch, Duff. I did a computer simulation of the lines before, but only linked the holes where the lines matched angles perfectly, so I had lines starting and stopping within the outpost. That was my mistake—the temperatures showed they were continuations of other lines, just not perfectly straight ones. Whatever did this was veering away every time it came near the power station. So either we had an operator directing things, or programming to avoid the risk of explosion.” He resumed the simulation, and they watched again until the last line was formed.
“Okay,” Gold commented, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Maybe I’m just an old man, but what does that tell us?” He frowned. “No, scratch that—I’m just slow today. There’s only one attacker, isn’t there?”
Sonya shot him a surprised glance, as did several of the others, but Fabian just grinned.
“Got it in one, Captain. Each new line doesn’t start until the previous one ends—no overlaps. So we’ve got a single object here, not multiples. And I know how it did all this so quickly.” He keyed in another command. “Watch the screen. I’ve extended each trajectory beyond the first and last hole, until each line touches the one before and after it.” The pattern became a single unbroken line, with sharp reversals at each end. “Notice that those connections all happen the same distance from the buildings.”
“It’s the shields!” That was Corsi, and she looked abashed at her own outburst, but kept going. “This thing was inside, and ricocheting off the shields!”
“Exactly. Until it holed the emitter array here—” Fabian pointed to a hole midway down the last line segment, “and the shields dropped. Then it just kept on going, out past the station.”
“So this thing didn’t bypass the shields, after all,” Sonya commented, fighting an insane urge to giggle—it was a response to the sudden stress release, and she managed to keep it down this time. “It started out inside, and just kept bouncing around. We don’t have a shield-killer on our hands.” Everyone slumped a bit. That had been their single greatest fear—finding out that something or someone had learned how to ignore their shields. Whatever had done this was still dangerous, and still a major threat, but at least it wouldn’t nullify Starfleet’s primary defense.
Fabian was still fiddling with the screen. “It did start inside, Commander—and I can even tell you where.” The screen now showed two holes side by side. “Both of these are shown from the outside—they’re the first and second holes, respectively. Notice the scoring on the inside edge—that diagonal ridge I mentioned.”
Bart Faulwell spoke up. “They’re mirror images, not matches, so it’s reversed on one of them.” Leave it to the linguist to catch the visual cues, Sonya thought. And, of course, that was why Bart and Carol were both in most briefings—they sometimes caught things the engineers didn’t.
Fabian was already agreeing with Bart’s assessment. “Right, it’s spiraling in the opposite direction. Which means this first one isn’t an entrance hole—it’s an exit. And there aren’t any other holes in that room, so whatever did this came from inside there.”
Soloman, who had already downloaded all the station’s records, spoke up. “That’s a workroom for one of the scientists, V’reet D’t Madl’r. He’s a Syclarian and has been assigned to BorSitu Minor for eleven months.”
“One of the bodies was a Syclarian,” Lense said. “They’ve got a distinctive digit structure, tentacles rather than fingers—even after the decomposition the computer identified that.”
“He’s the only one on-station,” Soloman said, “so that would be him.”
Sonya stood up, feeling a warm glow of pride for her people. “Nice work, Fabian. Okay, troops, now we know where it came from and almost what it is. Kieran, get down there and tear that room apart. I want to know anything and everything about this guy, and about what he was working on. Soloman, I want anything and everything you can learn about V’reet D’t Madl’r, both from station records and from our own library. Fabian,