Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  “The effect seems also to have subsided,” said Jaza, who had returned to the bridge only in the last hour. “It’s still present, but preliminary scans show local conditions are approaching normal.”

  “What hit us, Mr. Jaza?” Riker asked.

  “Energy pulse of some kind, but readings are still imprecise. Analysis under way.”

  Riker acknowledged this with a curt nod and listened intently as the voices of his crew flooded in over the comms.

   This is not good, Vale thought. The ship was running exclusively on emergency power; if its condition was the result of an attack, Titanwas ill-equipped to repel or even to run from a second volley.

  “Tactical status, Mr. Tuvok,” she said.

  “Phasers are down,” said the Vulcan. “Photon and quantum torpedoes are online, but targeting systems are unresponsive. Shields are currently at half strength.”

  A figure moved to stand next to Riker. Vale looked up and saw Troi standing beside the captain. Vale hadn’t even noticed her arrival. She caught Deanna’s softly delivered report in her husband’s ear: “A quarter of the crew is in a near panic.”

  Again Riker nodded, and Vale was grateful to see that whatever was going on between them, they both knew when to set it aside. Troi took her station to the left of the center seat, and immediately began coordinating with Keru the support/rescue efforts of their respective staffs.

  “Bridge to sickbay. Status report.”

  “ Ree here. Sickbay systems are operating at less than peak, but while a great many injuries are presenting, they are thus far all relatively minor…”

  While Riker took Dr. Ree’s report, Vale left her seat and crossed the deck to sciences. “Could this be what happened to the other ship?” she whispered to Jaza.

  “I wish I could say,” Jaza said without looking up, his voice tinged with frustration. “So far none of these readings make sense. I’m going to need more time to find the answers, Commander.”

  “We need to know what we’re dealing with, fast,” Vale stressed. “We’re sitting ducks out here, Najem.”

  He glanced at her and flashed a small smile. “Then you need to stop distracting me, Chris.”

   “…We’ll continue to keep you apprised, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Riker out,” the captain said, then followed with, “Bridge to engineering.”

   “Ra-Havreii here,”said the Efrosian’s voice, his normally melodius tones now rife with tension. “This isn’t a good time, Captain, but I’ll have something for you in a few minutes. Engineering out.”

  Riker looked at Vale, almost too surprised to speak. “Did he just dismiss me?”

  Vale’s expression hardened. “I’m on it,” she said, glancing at Troi as she marched toward the turbolift. “Counselor, you’re with me.”

  Main engineering was a hotbed of activity when the two bridge officers arrived. Tool-laden techs scurried everywhere, scrambled up and down gangways, bellowed commands and confirmations back and forth over the noise of other shouts. Some of the activity was due to the ongoing state of emergency, certainly, but there was something else at work, something she couldn’t isolate.

   The pulse didn’t cause all this, she thought, surveying the scene of chaos. These people are stripping the place down to the chips. Unable to spot Ra-Havreii in the bedlam, Vale snagged a passing engineer and asked where his department head had got to.

  “Not present in this moment, Commander,” said Ensign Urgar, a big ursinoid who seemed more concerned with the cycle inverter he had resting on one massive shoulder than in talking to his XO. “Engine master has come and gone.”

  “He was just here,” said Vale, her temperature spiking higher than the considerable ambient heat. “And what’s he got you people doing? It looks like a full overhaul.”

  “The engine master tells and it is for us to do,” said the big engineer. “Though Urgar’s mind is full of questions. This grinding eats too many moments. Why not patch first and then upgrade when all is well, yes?”

  Why not indeed? What the hell was Ra-Havreii doing? This was a damned Red Alert. Titanwas a big metal bucket rolling in the dark right now-slow, stupid, defenseless. This was no time for anybody’s eccentricities.

  Then Troi’s hand was on her arm, tugging her gently away from the scene.

  “I’ll deal with Ra-Havreii,” she said softly, having obviously zeroed in on the inspiration for Vale’s current emotional turmoil. “Can you get this place under control?”

  Vale nodded curtly. Troi was back in the lift an instant later, her mission set. Vale took a breath, turned back to the theater of pandemonium.

  “Attention,” she said, shouting to be heard over the cacophony of voices. After her third try and smacking a spanner against the bulkhead, they stopped and looked her way. “All hands are to belay every order that doesn’t include getting this ship back online ASAP. If it’s patchable, patch it. No unnecessary swaps, no upgrades that aren’t one hundred percent required. Understood?”

  It was. From their faces she could tell that some of them were even relieved to be given an order they could comprehend. Ra-Havreii was definitely off the map this time.

  “We’ll need a separate team in each of the nacelle conduits,” said Xin Ra-Havreii to a very tense-looking Ensign Rossini. The latter was doing his best to keep pace with the Efrosian’s longer strides while simultaneously entering the senior officer’s orders into his padd. “There won’t be time to replace the flow couplings once the core is back online.”

  He would have gone on-there was a lot more to do, more than anyone knew-but he found himself struck speechless by the dark cloud hovering near his quarters.

  “That will be all for now, Ensign,” he said, dismissing the grateful Rossini without a glance. “Well, Counselor Troi, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “This isn’t a social call, Doctor,” said Troi in a glacial tone. “Your conduct has become too erratic to ignore.”

  “Ah,” said Ra-Havreii, managing what Troi supposed was meant to be a wry grin. “If we’re going to talk about me, might I suggest we do it inside my quarters?”

  “We’re in the middle of a Red Alert, Commander-” Troi began.

  “Precisely,” said the engineer as the doors to his quarters parted. “Let’s talk inside.”

  He was across the threshold before she could respond, and while his tone was upbeat, there was another emotion comet-trailing off him that raised her concerns even higher. Seeing little alternative, she followed him in.

  Ra-Havreii’s quarters were more Spartan than Troi expected. Contained in the three small rooms with their regulation-issue off-white walls were a regulation couch, regulation desk and chair, regulation dining table, and in the much-discussed Ra-Havreii sleeping area, a simple standard-issue bed.

   Titanhad been out of the dock for months. Ra-Havreii had been aboard nearly all that time, and yet he had not moved in. There was not one personal modification to his regulation personal space.

  Under the strictest conditions even a Vulcan could be expected to display an IDIC symbol or construct a meditation shrine. Xin Ra-Havreii, Titan’s most notorious hedonist, had nothing. That, coupled with the thick aura-what was that, guilt? melancholy?-that emanated from him, made the hackles on Troi’s neck stand at attention.

  “ Luna 80102, Second Model in D Minor,” said Ra-Havreii as he dropped into the chair. Immediately the room was filled with the sounds of a string sextet playing what sounded like a combination of Terran music-classical Japanese-and a Romulan lute chorus. For several moments Troi was fascinated in spite of herself. The melody was quite lovely, the interplay of sounds both delicate and somehow powerful, but a couple of discordant notes snapped her back to reality.

  Ra-Havreii hushed her first two attempts to engage him, seeming lost in the complex interplay of sounds.

  “Hm?” he said at last, coming back from wherever he’d been. “Did you say something, Counselor?”

  “You can’t continue this way, Xin,” said Troi. “You’re using your job to exorcise your personal demons.”

  “I am?”

  “I saw what was going on in engineering,” said Troi. “You were supposed to be getting Titanrunning properly again as quickly as possible. Instead, you had your people performing what looked to me like a complete overhaul.”

  “And by this you gleaned I was somehow working out feelings I’ve been sublimating about my past mistakes.” He paused to listen to a particularly complex refrain before going on. “Is that it?”

  “Close enough,” she said.

  “Let’s assume you’re right,” he said. “Isn’t it best to let the patient cure himself whenever possible?”

  “Sadly,” she said, “that’s not always how it works.”

  “I’m the engineer,” he said as the music swelled around them. “Shouldn’t I be telling you how things work?”

  There was another discordant note. Ra-Havreii cocked his head to one side, listening, as the note became a progression of jumbled sounds quite unlike the rest of the admittedly unusual piece.

  “Don’t joke,” she said, ignoring the noise.

  “Just a moment, Counselor,” said Ra-Havreii, clearly annoyed by her interruption. “Stop, resume playback at the beginning of the last phrase.”

  The music returned, its lilting melody permeating the room for a few seconds until the dischord reappeared. Again Ra-Havreii’s aspect hovered somewhere between aggravation and curiosity, and Troi was at a loss to find the line between them.

  Something was burning inside the engineer; that was obvious. She could feel his turmoil almost as acutely as she did her own, though, as usual, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact source. If this odd musical interlude was an attempt to soothe himself, it didn’t seem to be working.

  “I’d thought you’d agreed we would discuss any recurrence in your feelings about the Lunaincident,” said Troi eventually.

  “What do you mean by that, Counselor?” he asked.

  “You said the title of this piece was Luna, didn’t you?” she said. “And I know how serious threats to Titansometimes cause you to relive certain aspects of the Lunadisaster.”

  “Yes, well,” said Ra-Havreii, still seemingly a bit distracted. “I’m sure I will always carry some baggage from that…event.”

  “Don’t you think it might be helpful to work on putting that baggage away?”

  “There’s away, Madame Troi,” said Ra-Havreii as the music resumed its normal pleasant strains, “and there’s away. In either case, I assure you, I have myself, my baggage, and my demons well in hand.”

   Why do they always lie?thought Troi. They have to know that I’ll know.

  She could sense, despite his serene exterior, that he was hanging on to his composure by his fingernails. If anything, listening to this music seemed somehow to make matters worse.

  “There’s no need to put up a front with me, Xin,” said Troi, trying to navigate another way into the Efrosian’s psyche. “You know I can feel when you’re-”

  “Stop,” he said, rising. It was only when the music evaporated without returning that Troi realized he hadn’t meant her.

  She watched as he gathered up his padd, tapped in some commands, and rose to go. Red emergency lighting spilled in from the corridor beyond, casting the engineer’s sinuous frame into a stark black silhouette.

  “Are you coming, Counselor?”

  “Commander Vale has engineering under control, Xin,” she said. “I think we should get to the bottom of what’s happening with you.”

  “What’s happening, Madame Troi,” said Ra-Havreii, “is that I’ve just discovered precisely what knocked Titanout of warp and is currently running roughshod over her systems. I would like to inform the captain of my findings, as I’m sure he’d consider them to be of great interest. However, if you believe the ship and crew would be better served by my sitting here with you and discussing my feelings, I will be happy to oblige.”

  Aside from Dr. Ree, who tended to be chipper even under the most trying circumstances, and thus eager as ever for small talk, the forward observation lounge on deck one was silent as a crypt. Vale studied the room’s occupants with interest as they awaited the captain’s arrival.

  Troi sat to the left of the table’s head, directly opposite Vale. She seemed deeply focused on the activity of her hands, which were folded in front of her on the tabletop. No eye contact. No comment. No innocuous conversation. Whenever not focused on a task, it seemed, she withdrew into herself, storm cloud waiting to burst.

  Beside her sat Tuvok, still tapping some last-minute input into his padd, his placid exterior betraying nothing of his inner workings. Next came Jaza, standing before the viewports, his back to the room, his hands folded behind him in apparent repose as he gazed out at the surrounding void.

  At the foot of the table was Ree, cheerful Ree, burbling on about how the remarkable Dr. Bralik had missed her calling by going into geology.

  “She has a bedside manner most physicians would eviscerate their own offspring to possess,” he said. “She hasn’t left Pazlar’s side since she arrived in sickbay.”

  “She’s not underfoot?” said Vale.

  “Far from it,” said Ree. “In addition to her own work, she has managed to be quite helpful as some of my staff were injured in the pulse. An exceptional creature.”

  “Where is Captain Riker?” said Ra-Havreii. He too aped the appearance of someone in repose. His eyes were closed, his long fingers forming a pyramid in front of his face. Framed by his mane of silver-white hair, his face was grimly set. Xin Ra-Havreii the libertine was gone. This was Dr. Ra-Havreii, one of the Federation’s most apt pupils in the study of warp physics.

  “The captain will be here when he’s ready to begin the meeting, Commander,” Vale said in a warning tone. The Efrosian nodded his head slightly and was quiet again.

  She might have felt better about that small victory over the engineer, but the hairs standing at attention on her forearms told Vale they were about to be treated to another of Will Riker’s patented improvisations. Wonderful. Under these circumstances, that should go over about as well as a tribble at a Klingon wedding.

  “The Prophets have deemed patience one of the five necessary aspects, Xin,” said Jaza, his back still to the room.

  “Considering their relationship to Bajor, Mr. Jaza,” said the engineer, “that is small wonder.”

  “Why would you say that?” asked Jaza.

  “It seems reasonable to assume, when one party is sufficiently superior to another, the former must exert inordinate amounts of patience if only to maintain sanity.”

  “The Prophets teach that there are no such things as superior and inferior,” said Jaza. “Only those minds that open and those that don’t.”

  “Yes,” said Ra-Havreii. “That sounds exactly like something the superior would tell the inf-”

  “All right, that’s about enough from both of you,” said Vale, her own patience having reached its limit.

  “Your pardon, Commander,” Jaza said.

  “My apologies,” said Ra-Havreii.

  The silence was almost worse than the verbal sparring. It made the tension more palpable, if that were possible. Too thick for a thin blade, as her mother might have said. Much of the tension seemed to orbit Ra-Havreii, and after her recent duty in engineering, Vale could understand why. The man was infuriating. Genius could only deflect so much.

  Vale wondered how she looked to them. Did any of her own disquiet show on her face? Was her anxiety over the slow, top-down dissolution of Will Riker’s grand experiment as obvious and powerful as it felt? She hoped not.

  “All right,” Riker said as the doors parted and he strode into the room. He’d been on his feet for more than a day, coordinating departments, pitching in with repairs, ensuring that his ship and his crew were as secure as possible under the circumstances. You’d never know it to look at him. Best poker face in two quadrants. “Let’s get to it.”

  There were two women with him-the taller one was a gold-skinned Selenean ensign. Her name was Eera Maren or Arda Oden-something like that. Vale had a vague recollection that she was in communications or a related department. The shorter female was an Antaran, thick boned and sullen eyed for some reason. She looked sturdy enough. Both ensigns wore service yellow. Why Riker felt their presence was necessary was a mystery.

  She caught Jaza looking at the Selenean with the queerest expression on his face. He seemed to be trying to work something out. The ensign only smiled back at him politely as he took his seat.

  “I trust you’ve had time to peruse my report,” said Ra-Havreii, coming out of his faux trance.

  “ Titanwas hit by some kind of massive energetic pulse,” said Riker, taking his place at the head of the table. The ensigns, without available seats, were content to hover by the door.

  “A massive warp pulse, to be precise, Captain,” said Ra-Havreii.

  Jaza gave a derisive snort.

  “You have a problem with Dr. Ra-Havreii’s findings, Mr. Jaza?” said Riker. There was ice in his voice that Jaza failed to notice. Even the captain was on the jagged edge of something and in no mood for squabbling.

  “No, sir,” said the science officer, his tone betraying that his true meaning was the reverse. “But it’s a fairly large leap to classify all this as the result of a warp pulse-a warp pulse intense enough to disrupt Titan’s systems, no less-without any sign of the ship that created it.”

  “It needn’t have come from a ship,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “Unless there’s a secret trinary pulsar around here that no one has seen,” said Jaza. “It had to be someone’s version of a ship.”

  “Perhaps the ship was cloaked,” offered Ree.

  “No,” said Jaza, frowning. “Local conditions would disrupt a cloak just as they have all of Titan’s energetic systems.”

  “In fact, there are a number of devices that could generate such a pulse,” Ra-Havreii said. “I’ve invented some of them myself.”

  “There’s no ship,” said Jaza. “There’s no pulsar. There is nothing detectable out there that could have caused this. With Titan’s enhanced sensors, that means there’s nothing out there.”

  “Yet Titanwas definitely hit by a warp pulse,” said Ra-Havreii. “What is your explanation?”

  “Still collating,” said Jaza, clearly unhappy about the admission.

  “A warp pulse is consistent with my findings as well,” said Tuvok. “Though it fails to account for the remaining distortion of quantum synchronicity in the region.”

  “Exactly,” Jaza said. “A warp pulse doesn’t cause that sort of distortion and certainly nothing as sustained as what we’re experiencing.”

  “Did you notice the Cochrane valences are in flux?” said the engineer.

  “Of course we did, Ra-Havreii,” snapped Jaza. “We’re not idiots.”

  “Quantum synchronicity? Cochrane valences?” said Vale, attempting to keep the lid on. “We’re not all scientists here, people. Keep it simple.”

  “In lay terms, it means the subatomic particles in this region have had their properties scrambled,” said Jaza. “It’s like sucking the O ₂away from a fire. The reactions that power the warp core, those that allow us to create and sustain a warp bubble around Titan, can’t progress.”

  “What about impulse power?”

  “We have enough to keep the lights on but little else,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “Becalmed,” said Riker thoughtfully. Then, when he noticed the confusion on the faces of the others, he added, “It’s how ancient Terran sailors described a ship being unable to catch the wind.”

  “It is an apt analogy, Captain,” said Tuvok. “ Titancannot move until we counteract the ongoing effect.”

  “It will be difficult to do that if we’re hit by another pulse,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “You think that’s likely?” said Riker.

  “Though I’ve never heard of an occurrence on this scale, quantum disruptions are common with primitive warp devices, Captain,” said Ra-Havreii. “Whoever is using such low-end technology almost certainly has no idea of its grander effect. Thus they have no reason to stop.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re so sure that the pulse was caused by sentients,” said Troi. “I’m not sensing anything in this area outside of Titan’s crew.”

  “If you’ll allow us, ma’am,” said a low voice from behind them. “I think we can answer that.”

  Everyone’s head turned toward the two ensigns who had been standing nearby, apparently awaiting the opportunity to speak.

  “For those of you who are unfamiliar with them,” Riker said, “these are Ensigns Loolooa Tareshini and Y’lira Modan. It seems, while all of us were trying to keep the ship in one piece, the ensigns found our culprits.”

  “Well,” said Modan, stepping forward, her partner now obviously a little too nervous to go on. “We found their footprints at least.” Her thick braids shifted ever so slightly as her gaze swiveled between the faces of her superiors.

  “Footprints?” said Ree. “What does that mean?”

  “We’re cryptolinguists,” said Tareshini, chiming in again. “Whenever Titanencounters anything that could be classified as a signal of sentient origin, all relevant data is automatically cross-linked with our work stations.”

  “Signal of sentient origin,” Jaza repeated. “By that I take it you mean something other than the Starfleet signal we were investigating.”

  “No, sir,” said Tareshini nervously. “I mean, yes, sir. But there’s more. A lot more.”

  “The Starfleet signal was affected by the same distortion that we understand corrupted your mapping of Occultus Ora,” said Modan. Jaza looked about to interject something but instead leaned back in his seat, letting the younger woman go on. “You were so occupied trying to salvage the damage caused by the quantum ripples, you didn’t give the ripples themselves more than a cursory look. We did.”

  “What prompted you to look at all?” said Ra-Havreii.

  “Candidly, sir, we didn’t know what we were seeing,” said Tareshini. “The computer kept informing us of a pattern being present, but it took us all this time to isolate it. And, of course, the pulse didn’t help.”

  “And what is that pattern, Ensign?” said Tuvok. He had left off his note taking and had fixed Tareshini with that penetrating stare for which his people were famous.

  “Each of the quantum ripples contains signal information,” said Tareshini. “This information corresponds to the same sort of signal bleed we’d detect from broadcasts coming off a planetary civilization with class K technological development or better.”