The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [15]
Kieran came on the link. “We’ve found some of his tools—odd-looking things, must be because of those digits Lense mentioned. And Pattie found a cradle for the device itself—about two meters in diameter. And those diagrams. But not much else.”
“Well, keep looking—something may turn up. Send that journal up here on the double. Fabian, you’re pretty sure this thing doesn’t have the power to punch through shields?”
Fabian spoke up again. “Not a chance. It would have drilled its way through right from the start, if that were the case. No, even if it’s still active and hopping around out there we’re safe from it. And I’d be willing to bet it doesn’t have enough propulsion to exit the atmosphere, so the da Vinci’s fine, too.”
“Some good news, anyway. Okay, keep me posted. Gomez out.” Sonya rubbed a hand over her face and sighed. The bigger threat was gone, at least, but their job wouldn’t be done until they knew exactly what this thing was, why it had wrecked the outpost, and how to prevent any repeats in future. And now it was sounding like that information was all locked away in a book—a book!—that none of them could read. Well, maybe one of them. She hit her combadge. “Mr. Faulwell, please meet me in the observation lounge.”
* * *
Bart Faulwell was excited. He enjoyed his time on the da Vinci, but usually his only involvement was lending a hand in research matters, and sometimes offering suggestions when they were puzzling over the wording of journal entries. To be given the chance to decipher a journal—a handwritten one!—was thrilling. It was like the old days of the Dominion War when he worked for Starfleet Intelligence decoding enemy communications.
A little less thrilling was the fact that the entire S.C.E. crew was waiting on his results. Which meant that—like his superiors at SI—they kept checking on his progress.
“This sort of thing takes time,” he reminded Commander Gomez after her third visit back to the observation lounge. “This isn’t a common language, so it’s not something I can simply translate.”
“No, we don’t have a Syclarian dictionary,” he answered Duffy on his second trip. “The Syclarians are reclusive, first of all, and they tend to use communicators and padds like everyone else. This is actually the first time I’ve seen their written language—and it may be the first time anyone has.”
“Yes, they have an alphabet,” he replied to his roommate Fabian Stevens, on his second time checking in. “Every written language has some kind of structure. But some are for letters, others are for words, others are for images or phrases or even whole ideas—it can vary widely. The first step is to determine what the alphabet is by looking for repeating patterns. Then you figure out what each symbol stands for. Then you can assemble a working translation program, and actually convert the writing into usable information. But it all takes time.”
Privately, in between these little visits, Bart admitted the truth—he had no clue where to begin. Oh, he’d translated languages before, certainly. But usually they were on a tricorder, or in a computer system. He would copy over the files, then run them through his translation programs—the programs would search out any patterns, and compare those with all the languages on file. Often that was all it took—the computer would then recognize the language, and proceed to translate it. Sometimes it would find near-matches, languages with similarities, and Bart would then tweak the match, analyzing the files and extrapolating variants of the ones they’d found until he had a cohesive root structure that fit every instance in the file. Then the computer ran the program. But this! He’d scanned the pages into the computer, of course, but even familiar languages could vary widely between handwriting and programmed text, so he was unsurprised when the computer found no matches. They had very little on the Syclarians to begin with, and what contact they’d had was through standard channels, which meant it was already in their own language and format, not that of the Syclarians.