Sargasso Sector Read online

  “Well, they’re going to need more tractor beam for the job ahead than the da Vinci’s rated for,” Conlon said. “Figured I should be able to reroute the power feed through the main impulse engines to amp her up to where we need it.”

  “You figured right.”

  “I’m clever that way.” She grinned. “Okay. So, let’s power down for now. We won’t be able to field test this contraption until they’ve cleared the first targets for removal anyway.”

  Hammett gave her a thumbs-up and began to key in the shut down commands. After a few seconds he said, “This is weird.”

  “What is?”

  “The panel’s not responding. I can’t take the new module offline.”

  Conlon squinted over at her suddenly troublesome creation. “Why not?”

  “Good question. There’s nothing wrong with the interface. Scans are still reading optimum.” He paused and scratched at his chin before shrugging. “Must be a bug we missed.”

  Conlon laughed without humor. “Oh, well, it was too much to expect it to work the first time around. I’ll pull the module and we’ll run a new diagnostic, maybe get lucky.”

  Conlon and Hammett both found themselves lunging off balance as the da Vinci surged suddenly forward, as though yanked by a pull on an invisible rope. The chief engineer grabbed on to an overhead hand-hold and looked sharply over at the ensign, who had caught himself on the operations console. “What the hell was that?” she demanded. “Did the engines just kick in?”

  Hammett looked over his readouts. “Negative. Engines are offline and locked down. That wasn’t—” He gasped, his words breaking off in midsentence.

  “What?” Conlon followed his astonished gaze to the console. “Who engaged the tractor beam?”

  “Wasn’t me,” the ensign said, his voice tight as his fingers worked quickly over the controls. The tractor beam had targeted and locked on to one of the derelict ships at the edge of the Sargasso Sector, but without the da Vinci’s engines to provide a counter-force to hold the Starfleet vessel stationary, it acted instead to drag the ship toward the targeted vessel, like a fish reeling in the fisherman.

  “Cut it off,” Conlon instructed. “It’s dragging us on a collision course with that wreck.”

  “Trying, Lieutenant. Damned thing’s not responding.”

  Nancy Conlon swore under her breath and knew what she had to do. The souped-up tractor beam was functioning exactly as designed—except that no one had activated the thing and it was no longer responding to commands. But touching the module while it hummed with energy with a mind to disconnecting it was a short walk to suicide. She hefted a spanner and growled to Hammett, “Cover your eyes!”

  And threw the tool at the module.

  There was a brief flash of energy as the spanner knocked loose a series of interface adapters, severing the connection between the impulse engines and the tractor-beam generator. This was followed by a jolt and the stumbling backward of a couple of steps as the tractor beam released its hold on the distant wreck. The unit powered down.

  “Engineering to bridge,” Conlon said, still breathing hard.

  “Something you want to tell us, Conlon?” Captain Gold’s voice responded tightly.

  “Eventually, sir. Soon as we figure out what just happened. Something went seriously wrong with the tractor-beam modification.”

  “Do we still have impulse power to correct the da Vinci’s drift after our little unauthorized journey?”

  Conlon looked over at Hammett for an answer. “According to the diagnostics, everything’s operating normally, sir.”

  Sonya Gomez’s voice asked the next question. “Nancy, was your glitch human or computer error?”

  Conlon shrugged. “I can’t say for sure till I run a few tests,” she said, “but I rigged that patch myself and I don’t screw up that big.”

  “Not usually, no,” came back Gomez’s dry voice. “Keep us posted.”

  Chapter

  5

  “Can anyone explain this to me?” David Gold asked. “Has the entire crew suddenly turned incompetent, or does this ship have a serious problem?”

  Sonya Gomez, to the right of the captain in the observation lounge, could only frown in frustration. “I seriously doubt the former,” she said, “but can’t find any evidence to support or deny the latter.”

  “How else do you explain it? Major failures in no less than three of our primary systems in only a couple of hours isn’t standard operating procedure.”

  Soloman looked troubled, as though for a sick friend. But considering the Bynar’s near-psychic connection to computers, his ability to communicate with them on an almost intimate level, perhaps humanoid and machine were close in ways his shipmates could never understand. “I have examined the ship’s computers thoroughly, down to her source code,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong that I can detect, certainly nothing of a magnitude that might explain the lock and fire simulation of the weapons system, the communications blackout between the Shirley and the da Vinci, and the unauthorized activation of the tractor beam.”

  “And,” Gomez added, “let’s not forget the complete lack of a record of any of these events in the ship’s internal log.”

  Stevens said, “That’s what I keep coming back to. I mean, the log records everything from the rate of dilithium crystal decay to the different varieties of tea requested of the replicator by the crew, so what are the odds it’s going to miss not one but three fairly substantial malfunctions?”

  “On its own?” Soloman said. “I would venture to say the odds are so high as to be incalculable. But there is no sign of any outside influences on our systems. Whatever is happening is happening from within the da Vinci.”

  Gold rubbed a weary hand across his forehead and looked around the table at the concerned faces of his crew. This was supposed to have been an easy one, a simple—if not delicate and vastly fascinating—job of clearing alien wreckage from a newly opened space lane. Each and every member of this crew was among the very best in their fields. Alone and as a group, they had encountered and solved more life and death problems than he cared to even think about, saving many lives—his own included—in the process on more than one occasion. But here they now sat, stymied by what appeared to be a computer glitch. He had to again ask the question that Gomez had glossed over at the opening of the meeting. “So can we rule out human error?”

  Tev, uncharacteristically silent up until now, said, “Absent any evidence to the contrary, I would tend to think we can, Captain.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Tev,” Stevens said, surprised to hear the Tellarite take anyone’s side but his own.

  Tev looked at Stevens without expression. “It is no such thing, Specialist. I can merely conclude that since there has been a series of near calamitous events of which I was involved in but one, and knowing that all my actions were proper and by the book, that the others, too, must be the result of some other cause as well.”

  Stevens winked at Conlon. “Nice to know our backs are covered, isn’t it?”

  “All right,” Gold said. “Our priority remains, as always, the successful completion of our mission. We’ve still got a tight schedule to maintain, which means everybody will be working twice as hard to do that and find and correct this problem. Whatever it is.”

  There were nods all around the table.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” the captain said, rising. “And in the process, let’s be careful, shall we?”

  Carol Abramowitz was, she decided, as close to heaven as she had ever been…at least in terms of her professional life. The da Vinci’s cultural specialist kept coming back to the phrase “as happy as a kid in a candy store” to describe herself as she brought each new alien vessel’s image up on her screen. Like the previous twenty or thirty ships—she had lost count—she had catalogued since beginning her shift on the second day in the Sargasso Sector, this one was unlike any she had ever encountered in any of her studies. Unlike any t
he da Vinci’s vast database of ships, comprised of records dating back to the dawn of human space flight, could match.

  Her latest find lay four hundred meters long by three hundred meters wide…or, she thought with a smile, it could have been the other way around since the bizarre alien construction gave her human perspective no point of reference for top or bottom, fore or aft. To her eyes, it appeared to be made up of countless squares and rectangles of varying compositions, squished together into an angular whole that possessed a strange beauty all its own. Each boxy unit was marked with a different set of glyphs that might or might not have belonged to the same language.

  “Fascinating,” she breathed, unaware that she had spoken out loud.

  “I’ll say,” said Language and Cryptography Specialist Bart Faulwell from his station near Carol. “By the time we’re done here, the Federation’s database of dead and lost languages is probably going to increase by tenfold.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for a look at the culture of even a fraction of the civilizations that created these ships,” Carol said.

  “Soloman told me the older the ship, the less the chance of finding anything usable in their computer records. No matter how sophisticated their technology, a few million years is going to degrade just about any storage medium to uselessness, and, if it hasn’t, it’s not likely to be anything with which our technology can interface.”

  Carol laughed but her eyes remained fixed on her screen. “It’s something, isn’t it? Here we are, hundreds of light-years from our planet of origin aboard a ship capable of traveling from one end of the quadrant to the other, and the stuff we’re finding here makes me feel like a chimp trying to understand the works of Shakespeare.”

  “That’s a coincidence, your mentioning the Bard,” he said. “I was just thinking of the line from Hamlet, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”

  “ ‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!’ ”

  Carol and Bart glanced up as Sonya Gomez walked into earshot, quoting the line that proceeded Bart’s in Shakespeare’s famous work. “And never more appropriate than under these circumstances,” Sonya said.

  “Hey, Sonya,” Carol said. “How goes the engineering survey?”

  Sonya’s grin threatened to split her face. “Amazing. The range of ships we’re cataloguing are, literally, mind-boggling. There are vessels out there from races that must have gone extinct before humanity was even an evolutionary glimmer on Earth. Subwarp solid fuel rockets, nuclear powered ships, impulse drives, black hole drives….” Her grin did not fade even as she shook her head in wonder and confusion. “…Including what may be at least a dozen variations on a transdimensional drive. There’s stuff going on out there that none of us can even guess at.

  “Of course, there’s the rub,” she said with a grin as she quoted Hamlet again. “Without knowing what ninety-five percent of those ships are, or were, we’re faced with the possibility of disaster on a cosmic scale. All it takes is one energy source reacting adversely with another, or some previously unknown variety of particle or wave to be released and…boom! There goes the neighborhood, and maybe a solar system or two along with it.”

  Carol shuddered. “Ugh! I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Good thing I’m too excited to sleep or that would keep me up at night.”

  “Rest assured,” Sonya said, “we’re playing it extra safe. Anything we’ve moved we’ve been keeping in the same relative proximity to other vessels as it had been in the Sargasso. Anything we’re not one hundred percent sure of, we’re leaving where it is, and I’ve come up with what I think is a positively brilliant scheme to—”

  Sonya Gomez’s explanation was cut short by an urgent chirping tone from Bart’s console. “Oh, for—” he blurted out, biting off an expletive before it could pass his lips. “I don’t believe this!”

  “Problem?” asked Carol.

  “Looks like. Hold on a second.” His face clouded with anger. “Computer, what’s the problem with my file?”

  Another chirp, and the soft, comforting feminine voice of the da Vinci’s computer replied, “Please state the file name.”

  “The one I’ve been working with for the last six hours,” he said. “Sargasso, day two, linguistics.”

  “There is no file by that name,” the computer replied.

  His eyes wide with disbelief, Bart stared at the console. “This isn’t possible,” he said. “Check again for file ‘Sargasso, day two, linguistics.’ ”

  “There is no file by that name.”

  During Bart’s exchange with the computer, Abramowitz quickly verified the safety of her own files, immediately dumping the contents onto her padd for backup and safekeeping.

  “We’ve got serious computer issues, people,” Sonya said in a tight voice. “Right when we need to be able to count on it most.”

  “Right now, I wouldn’t trust it to count to ten,” Bart said, slumping in his seat.

  “Right now, I’m beginning to wonder if it even can,” said Carol.

  Chapter

  6

  Sonya Gomez was nervous.

  In general, things had been going seriously wrong every which way she turned. What she wasn’t forgetting she was losing and what she wasn’t losing was breaking. And it wasn’t just her, either. Everyone aboard the da Vinci was feeling it, all of them quivering bundles of nerves forced to juggle eggs.

  She and her crew had suffered a few near-misses and project failures since starting the clearing of the Sargasso Sector. Tools and machines weren’t working right. People weren’t working right. A few crew members had taken to carrying good luck charms, although they all kept them out of her sight since she chewed out an ensign for rubbing a laminated three-leaf clover for luck. She felt bad, really, taking out her own frustrations on the unfortunate man, but they were supposed to be scientists and there was no room for voodoo in their line of work. She’d already disproved the so-called “curse of Sarindar” during her solo mission to the Nalori Republic last year, she wasn’t about to succumb to this one.

  So, yes, she was nervous, because here she was aboard the da Vinci and there—some two thousand meters away—was the object of the very delicate operation Sonya was about to attempt.

  During any other mission, on any other day of her career, she would have been eager and, at most, cautious. Today she was just plain nervous. She had devised a fast and, more importantly, safe way to clear a substantial area of wreckage using a found resource that was proving far more abundant than initially suspected: Black holes.

  A total of thirty-one ships within sensor range were powered by some sort of singularity-based technology, all, to Pattie’s experienced eye, the handiwork of the same culture, if across an expanse of time. At some point in the past, a civilization near or adjacent to these parts developed black-hole technology similar to that used by the Romulans, and this was all that was left of them.

  Each ship was equipped with from one to three chunky chambers holding its infinity-massed cargo in what appeared to be a sophisticated antigravity web. The study of how the engines managed to extract energy from this source would have to wait, but the singularities themselves, well, they were about to be pressed into service in an entirely different function.

  “Engineering. Status?” Sonya said.

  “Conlon here. Standing by on main tractor beam.”

  “Thank you. Transporter room, are you go?”

  “Coordinates locked and standing by, Commander,” said Transporter Chief Poynter.

  This was a tricky maneuver under the best of conditions. They were playing with a black hole, packed in a containment device constructed by unknown beings at least seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago. So many things could go wrong.

  And lately, Murphy’s Law—that everything that could go wrong would go wrong—had become the law of the land. Not that the law wasn’t part and parcel of the S.C.E.’s daily existence, but this was going to
new extremes. If something went wrong with the extraction, the da Vinci and everyone on it would wind up with their mass stretched across infinity and devoured by the singularity. The only upside was that at this distance, given the limits of the tractor beam’s effectiveness as a surgical instrument, it would all be over too fast for anyone to realize it was happening.

  Which, she thought with bitter amusement, is a hell of a pitiful upside.

  “Fabian?” she said to the crewperson temporarily taking Piotrowski’s place at the bridge’s tactical station.

  Fabian Stevens, unusually serious, took a moment to crack his knuckles and shake out his right hand. “Ready,” he said, taking hold of the joystick with which he was to direct a pencil-thin tractor beam.

  “Very well, people,” she said after one last deep breath, “let’s begin. Transporter room, energize.”

  “Energizing.”

  The result of that order was played out on the ship’s screen, on a strangely amorphous ship that seemed to undulate even though hanging motionless in space. Its pastel-streaked milky white surface looked more like cheap plastic than anything designed to survive the rigors of space. But here it was, by their dating techniques some three quarters of a million years after it had been built. Surviving.

  Somewhere near the midpoint of the misshapen derelict, the transporter reached out and grabbed the molecules of a fifteen-foot-around section of hull. Unseen, it did the same thing to a series of bulkheads and decks, opening a tunnel for the tractor beam to follow to the containment unit. Transporting a singularity, even one as small as the nick of a pin contained in a null-gravitational state, was risky business at best, even if the vagaries of physics didn’t make the amount of energy required to dismantle the singularity’s near-infinite mass into transportable particles too great for the da Vinci to provide. So they were instead transporting the derelict piece by piece out of the way of the tractor beam.