The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [74]
“So much for that annoying toad,” Lwaxana said, wiping her hands against each other. She smirked at Barclay. “I hope you don’t mind that I rescued myself.”
He couldn’t helping feeling a little upstaged. Well, sure. Her branch stays solid. He tossed aside his own useless weapon, even as the engineer in him considered the possible implications of this latest malfunction. The three-dimensional image of the branch had remained intact, but the replicated matter had evaporated. Maybe the visual and tactile systems really were interfering with each other in some way?
“N-not at all,” he lied. “But we can’t stay here.” Povz and the other Tadigeans were already on their way. He hastily consulted his tricorder; according to the readings, the control panel was not far away. “Just a little bit farther, I promise.”
“You don’t need to coddle me, Lieutenant. I’ll have you know that I once walked the Pilgrimage of a Thousand Steps barefoot, wearing nothing but a large floral hat. Of course, I was much younger then…” She reclaimed the Sacred Chalice from the soggy ground at her feet. “Lead on, Mister Barclay.”
Keeping one step (or hop) ahead of their pursuers, they continued their trek through the seemingly endless swamp. We have to come across the wall with the control panel eventually, Barclay thought, following the sensor readings, which led them to a natural levee along the shore of a slowly moving stream. Tall grass and skunk cabbage carpeted the slope. A bed of pink carnivorous plants, resembling a Vegan weeping flytrap, snapped at unwary insects. According to the tricorder, the concealed panel was right above the voracious flytraps.
Naturally, Barclay thought. Why not a nest of Denebian slime devils, too?
The hungry plants nipped at his ankles as he approached the apparent location of the control panel. Their high-pitched screeches hurt Barclay’s ears. His finger stabbed the empty air—and the panel materialized before his eyes. Eureka! Now he just had to figure out how to fix the defective holodeck before Povz and his venomous colleagues caught up with them. What could be simpler?
Barclay opened the panel to expose a complicated array of isolinear chips. He ran his hand through his thinning brown hair, daunted by the challenge before him. The weepers biting his ankles didn’t make it any easier to concentrate on the problem at hand. Boy, he thought, could I use some of that Cytherian super-intelligence now.
Almost a year ago, an alien species had artificially enhanced his intellect for their own purposes. For a brief interval, his IQ had exceeded 1200, but that augmented intelligence had completely faded away over time.
Or had it?
Was any of that incredible genius still lurking somewhere in his brain cells? Sending his mind back to those heady days aboard the Enterprise, when he had effortlessly thrown together a revolutionary new warp propulsion system, Barclay tried to call up what it had felt like to have all that sheer intellectual power at his command. His brow furrowed in concentration as he sought to squeeze just one more burst of inspiration from his straining gray matter. Maybe if he just pretended he was still a supergenius?
Let’s start with trying to reactivate the voice controls, he decided. He began rearranging the isolinear chips in hopes of bypassing the bug in the system. Diagnostic lights flashed green, giving his confidence a much-needed boost. Yes! Now we’re getting somewhere. He began to transfer the verbal recognition codes to one of the auxiliary subprocessors. This should do the trick.
He realigned the final chip—and the entire program crashed.
The sheltering swamp, with its many secluded nooks and crannies, vanished before their eyes, instantly replaced by the wide-open space of the dormant holodeck. Barclay and Lwaxana found themselves abruptly exposed to view, as were Povz and his murderous cohorts.
The stunned Tadigeans looked about the empty chamber in confusion.