The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [63]
How could you tell? Barclay wondered. “I’m, um, very familiar with holotechnology,” he volunteered. “I’ll do my b-best to debug this chamber in time for your meeting.”
Lwaxana’s eyes flashed like a phaser set on kill. “You had better.”
The Arabian desert stretched endlessly before them. Crescent-shaped dunes of shifting sand rolled on for kilometers beneath the pitiless sun. Heat waves shimmered above the wind-scoured bones of a lost bedouin. Craggy rock formations jutted from the desert floor. On the horizon, plodding camels carried a merchant caravan toward a far-off oasis, or was the splash of greenery merely a mirage? Dust devils danced in the breeze, while a scorching wind pelted Barclay’s face with grit. A camel brayed in the distance.
” ‘The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped,’ ” Barclay whispered softly to himself. The intense heat, which had to be at least fifty degrees Celsius, instantly dried up his sinuses. The visor on his cap helped shield his eyes from the glare. He could readily imagine joining the caravan for a trek across the boundless sands. Exotic Middle Eastern bazaars called out to him.
“Come again?” Ro asked.
Her puzzled remark brought him back to reality. “Er, nothing.” He scanned the arid landscape with his tricorder. “The simulation appears to be functioning,” he reported. “I’m not detecting any unusual fluctuations in the polarized interference patterns.”
“We already checked for that,” Ubaan said sullenly. The truculent attache was constantly looking over Barclay’s shoulder and second-guessing him, which did nothing to ease Barclay’s mind. “And where did this oppressively hot simulation come from, anyway? This isn’t the Tadigean program.”
“This is one of my personal favorites from the Enterprise,” Barclay explained. “I wanted to determine if the problem was with the holodeck or the Tadigean simulation itself, so I’m running a program that I know has no glitches.” He consulted the readout on his tricorder. “Just to t-test the hardware, you know?”
Ubaan rolled his eyes. “Sounds like a waste of time to me.”
Barclay could practically feel the other man breathing down his neck. Hoping to put a little distance between himself and Ubaan, he strode across the desert toward the horizon—only to bump face-first into an invisible barrier. “Ouch!” He stumbled backward, clutching his nose. Caught by surprise, it took him a moment to realize that he had collided with one of the holodeck’s actual walls.
That’s not supposed to happen, he thought. In theory, the holodeck should have employed a force field treadmill, and constantly scrolling scenery, to create the illusion of unlimited space. Barclay knew that this particular program was capable of simulating vast distances; he had once ridden a camel all the way to Aqaba from this site. Looks like the problem’s with the holodeck itself.
“Are you all right, Lieutenant?” Ro inquired from atop a nearby sand dune. Not an engineer herself, she was along to pilot the shuttle and provide an extra pair of hands as needed. Barclay would have preferred one of his colleagues from engineering, but Geordi had needed the rest of his staff for the soliton wave test. Barclay couldn’t help feeling somewhat expendable. Me and Ro both, I guess.
He checked to make sure his nose wasn’t broken. “I think so, but it looks like we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.” He decided to run a diagnostic on the chamber’s omnidirectional holo diodes next. “Computer, end program.”
Nothing happened. The harsh desert sun continued to beat down upon the three humanoids. Ubaan snickered. “Now you see what we’ve been dealing with for the last few weeks.”
Barclay got the distinct impression that Ubaan would like nothing better than for the Starfleet engineer to fail,