Sargasso Sector Page 5

  Gold said, “What’s left that we haven’t already checked? And with chance against us, how do we propose to reverse our luck?”

  “Really, Captain,” said Tev. “You’re not seriously suggesting that we proceed on the assumption of ‘bad luck’?”

  “If you have a better suggestion, Tev, I’d like to hear it,” said Gold.

  Tev opened his mouth to speak as the ready room door slid open.

  Mor glasch Tev stepped into the room, saying, “My apologies for being late, Captain.”

  Mor glasch Tev, seated at the conference table, stared in disbelief at himself. “This isn’t right,” he said. “I am never late for meetings.”

  In the resultant uproar, the latecomer Tev appeared to slip, or otherwise disappear from the room, but no one could deny he had been present. If only for a moment.

  “You, sharing the room with yourself is, without question, an impossibility,” declared Soloman. “What better proof do we need that the very essence of probability is being tampered with?”

  The Bynar and Tellarite looked at each other. Tev nodded in agreement.

  “Wait…that’s like saying because three plus three doesn’t equal eight, three plus three must equal eight,” Gomez said.

  “Not at all the same thing, Commander. When you’ve ruled out all that is possible,” said the Tellarite, “the only remaining possible answer is the impossible.”

  “To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes,” Conlon said.

  “Its attribution to a fictitious character does little to diminish its fundamental truth,” said Tev.

  Sonya paced the shuttle bay, deep in thought. She sometimes came down here, to the ship’s largest open space, for room to move when faced with the seemingly insurmountable. That, and it was the place where Elizabeth pronounced Kieran Duffy dead. Coming here made her remember him, and helped her move on from the grief. Her near-death experience on Teneb had done a great deal to help in the latter regard, but she still liked coming here.

  Every now and then, as she walked the length of the bay, back and forth, she found herself stepping over things that shouldn’t be there. Chance had gone haywire, no doubt of that, she thought. Or been made to go haywire. Therefore, the odds of any event happening, no matter how unlikely under normal scientific law, had gone from one in numbers so large even the zeroes couldn’t be counted to pretty much dead even. Like the cartoon cat chasing the cartoon mouse under her feet and out the cargo doors, through the force field and into the vacuum of space to implode into smears of paint. What were the odds of such a thing ever happening?

  As mad as it sounded, Tev was right. It seemed the only possible answer.

  And yet, what could affect so intangible a something as chance? She couldn’t imagine some Yridan Bad-Luck Ray or Romulan Gotcha Beam being responsible. She couldn’t imagine any technology capable of influencing probability.

  And yet, as Bart Faulwell himself had pointed out the day the computer ate his files, “There are more things in heaven and earth…”

  Such things as the universe of tech they were investigating, some of which, no matter how hard she might study it, she would never even begin to wrap her mind around. The theories on which they were conceived and the very logic behind the engineering eluded her, the end product too alien for this culture to ever understand. Some, she believed, operated on transdimensional power, although whether they actually traveled between dimensions or siphoned energy from other-dimensional sources she couldn’t quite determine. Others seemed to rely on tachyon streams or the Uncertainty Principle or, in one case, little more than mineral water.

  But probability?

  Still, what was the Uncertainty Principle but chance? “The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa,” Heisenberg had said. One increased the odds of determining a particle’s position by lowering those on knowing its momentum.

  Which, too, came back to Soloman’s earlier playful proposition that all odds could be boiled down to fifty-fifty. The Uncertainty Principle: you know either a particle’s position or its momentum. Fifty-fifty. The same with Schrödinger’s Cat: was the cat inside the box alive or dead? Fifty-fifty. Maybe here, for whatever reason, that had become, somehow, fundamental truth. There was as much chance of a ship outfitted with a drive that altered probability existing as there was for it not to exist.

  Fifty-fifty.

  She was putting her money on it being out there. And against, appropriately enough, all odds, it had somehow been activated and was screwing with chance.

  What were the odds she would be soaked in a brief rain shower while standing in the cargo bay of a Starfleet ship with a controlled atmosphere? Infinitesimal, and yet, as her wet hair and uniform attested, no longer impossible.

  “What did you call it?” asked Nancy Conlon.

  “An Uncertainty Drive,” said Gomez. “There was a similar, albeit fictitious drive, put forth in a twentieth-century novel by Douglas Adams. It worked, as I recall, by manipulating the laws of probability to move from place to place. But it was a humorous work, not meant to be taken seriously.”

  “Nobody’s laughing,” said Fabian Stevens.

  “And you’re saying you think that’s what we’re up against here?” asked Captain Gold.

  Gomez shrugged and said, “I’ve eliminated the possible. Look, we’re all agreed that chance is, by it’s very nature, random but not capricious. What I mean is, there are rules. As Soloman said, flip a coin a set number of times and it will come out split evenly between heads and tails, every time. In a game of five-card poker, you stand roughly one chance in thirty-one thousand of holding a royal flush. Head a ship in a specific direction under an established mode of propulsion and it will travel at x-speed toward a fixed destination.

  “But bypass physical propulsion, establish a set of odds for your vessel to simply arrive at a specified destination in a set amount of time, then manipulate the odds to make that arrival a sure bet, and you’ve got—”

  “An Uncertainty Drive,” said Soloman, a bit breathless at the very idea. “But it’s mathematical insanity, Commander Gomez. The amount of processing power is unimaginable, and how would it go about affecting the odds?”

  “It may seem insane,” Gomez said, “but it’s possible. I even have evidence.” She touched a control on the table in front of her. The viewscreen on the far wall lit up with a half-sphere decorated with a moderately ornate panel.

  “That looks familiar,” Stevens said.

  “It should—it was discovered on Deep Space 9 when you were stationed there.”

  Stevens snapped his fingers. “Right! That El-Aurian who opened the gambling joint on the Promenade!”

  Gold looked at Gomez and Stevens. “You want to fill in for the rest of us, Gomez?”

  “The El-Aurian Fabian’s talking about got his hands on a device that altered probabilities.”

  Nodding, Stevens said, “It made all the neutrinos near the station spin the same way—and it made a pig’s ear out of ol’ Doc Bashir’s racquetball game.” He shook his head. “I lost a bundle betting on that game with the chief….”

  Abramowitz shook her head. “I don’t get it. How can a machine make the impossible possible?”

  “Impossibilities are merely things we’ve not yet learned to do,” said Tev. “This very starship, its warp engines, were once thought impossible, as was creating artificial intelligence on par with biological sentience. How many of us come from worlds that once believed the evolution of life on other planets was a statistical impossibility? As one who has himself experienced time travel, another historic ‘impossibility,’ I am inclined to accept that everything we today might think of as impossible just hasn’t happened yet.”

  A chimpanzee in a conservatively cut and particularly dignified military uniform paused in their midst, checked something on the clipboard he was carrying, and continued on his way.

  “That was different,” said Stevens. He
looked up and gave a helpless shrug. “Okay, so we buy the Uncertainty Drive. How do we go about finding it?”

  “Already done,” said Gomez. “I ran a broad spectrum scan, tuned to hunt for frequencies similar to the ones given off by that little doodad from DS9.”

  “And it worked?” asked Gold.

  “What can I tell you?” Gomez smiled. “I got lucky.”

  Chapter

  9

  From the exterior it didn’t look like much.

  Not much larger than the da Vinci’s own length of one hundred and ninety meters, it was an elliptical tube of burnished silver alloy dotted with what appeared to be a random arrangement of portholes. It featured no openings for propulsion units or weapons pods, but then, Soloman thought, the Uncertainty Drive would alleviate the need for either. Simply increase the odds you will arrive at where you wish to be and, against all likelihood, there you will be. Or decrease the odds an assailant will be able to hit you, or increase them that an attacking vessel’s propulsion or weapons system will self-destruct or malfunction, and you really have no need for defensive systems.

  Ingenious and frightening.

  “You’re sure that’s the ship?” the Bynar asked Sonya Gomez.

  “No doubt about it,” she said. “That’s the one.”

  “Odds are,” Tev added.

  “Yes,” Gomez agreed. “Odds are.”

  Captain Gold said, “We scanned this section of the debris field when we first arrived in the sector. How could we have missed it if…oh. Of course. Just bad luck.”

  “And it cost Bart his life,” Gomez said. “If we’d only caught this ship in our initial scans, we might have known to stay clear of it and Bart wouldn’t have had to die.”

  “The ship likely manipulates probability as much as a mode of protection as of propulsion,” Tev pointed out. “No doubt it caused the odds against our sensors picking up its presence to fall to keep itself safe.”

  “Then why let us ‘see’ it now?” Gold said.

  Soloman blinked as Captain Gold became momentarily, and against all odds, a six-foot marble Corinthian column. Sonya and Tev, their backs turned as they continued their scans, saw nothing.

  “Soloman?” the captain said.

  “Ah, yes. Well, perhaps it’s determined that we’re no longer a threat, that the odds have been reduced to such that nothing we do can possibly cause it harm.”

  “Even if that’s true,” Gold said, “why don’t we simply quarantine this sector and just move a light-year or so down the line and create our pass through a section where there isn’t an unlucky ship impeding our every move?”

  Tev shook his head. “We can’t just leave it as is, Captain. Now that we know what we’re looking for it’s plain to see that the area of ill-luck being generated by the Uncertainty Drive is an expanding field. We can’t be certain—if indeed we can be certain of anything while under its influence—where, if ever, the expansion will cease.”

  “You mean this bad luck could engulf the entire sector?”

  “With our luck, worse,” Gomez said.

  “Then what are our options?” the captain asked.

  “Who’s to say?” Soloman absently tapped on the tabletop. “With probability so mutable, we stand as much chance of defeating it with a conventional attack as we do by firing spitballs or by doing absolutely nothing. We don’t even know why or how the Drive, as ancient as it appears to be, became operational after all this time.”

  Tev said, “I’m afraid I have to agree, Captain. When virtually anything is possible at any time, there’s no way to predict anything with any degree of certainty.”

  Gold, Gomez, Soloman, and Tev all fell silent. A glowing blue and red Sarindarian butterfly flitted through the observation lounge, which, for just the blink of an eye, became a smoky, crowded cantina on Intar.

  “Yes, I see,” Gold said.

  A four-hundred-year-old television program about a wacky red-headed housewife replaced the image of the Uncertainty Drive ship on the monitors.

  “Gomez, have you been able to establish communications with the ship?” Gold asked suddenly.

  “I’ve tried, but no luck.”

  Gold smiled without humor. “What are the odds if you tried again, you’d get through this time?”

  She shrugged. “Fifty-fifty, I suppose,” and activated the subspace comlink.

  Soloman shook his head in disbelief and said, “You know, of course, I meant that in jest.”

  Tev gave him a long, hard look. “I suppose, then, the joke is on you.”

  “Captain!” Gomez called out, looking surprised.

  “Greetings, U.S.S. da Vinci,” said a soft, plain voice over the comm. “This is the Minstrel’s Whisper, flag-ship of the Khnndak Empire.”

  Gold smiled. “We have contact!”

  “I am Captain David Gold in command of the U.S.S. da Vinci. We are a scientific expedition representing a Federation of allied planets,” Gold said, now seated in his chair on the bridge. “We come in peace, Minstrel’s Whisper.”

  “Yours is a mission of destruction, da Vinci. Your vessel will be held in an infinite-probability field until you can be taken into custody by the Empire.”

  Gomez looked up helplessly. “It’s misread our demolition efforts.”

  “Who can blame it?” said Soloman. “What concerns me is that it plans on holding us until its creators come to take us into custody.”

  “That ship’s a million years old if it’s a day,” said Gomez. “The race that built it, let alone the entire Empire, has probably been extinct for millennia.”

  “It’s a computer,” Gold said. “Surely it must operate on a set logic system that we can speak to, reason with.”

  “Look what it’s doing to us, Captain,” the slender Bynar said. “I couldn’t even begin to know how to reach it.”

  “Chance,” said Tev. “It operates on the calculation and implementation of the laws of probability.”

  “Yes, along with the manipulation thereof,” said Soloman. “Which makes it all the more difficult to approach when its ability to affect probability can change, from moment to moment, the very shape of reality.”

  Sonya Gomez threw her hands up in surrender. “Then that’s it? We’ll never know how to communicate with the Drive because its very existence is forever changing how we perceive its communication? It’s Schrödinger’s Cat, all over again.”

  Tev nodded slowly, then said, suddenly, “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  Soloman peered at the Tellarite. “Something?”

  “Yes,” Tev said, a sudden surge of strength returning to his voice. Soloman realized that the S.C.E. second-in-command, like everyone else aboard the da Vinci since being caught up in the influence of the Uncertainty Drive, had been acting somewhat out of character. For Tev that meant a certain hesitancy in his voice and his usually unshakable confidence. The Bynar had been surprised that Tev had so readily accepted the fantastic explanation of an Uncertainty Drive, but now he realized he likely had been desperate for any outside explanation of their situation. Better they were under the sway of some scientific conundrum than that Mor glasch Tev had somehow become fallible.

  “Schrödinger’s Cat is a hypothetical expression of uncertainty,” Tev continued. “A cat is placed in a box with a radioactive atom, a vial of acid, and a Geiger counter. Should the atom decay and the Geiger counter detect an alpha particle, the acid vial will be broken and the cat will die. But before the observer opens the box and observes the cat’s fate—and, by extension, the state of the radioactive atom—they are in superpositions, that is the state of being both dead and alive, or decayed and undecayed, simultaneously. It takes the observer opening the box to ‘observe’ the cat and determine its fate and, again by extension, the fate of the radioactive particle.”

  “And…?” prompted Gomez.

  “And the one piece of the equation that remains unchanged,” said Tev with no hint of smugness, unaware that for several seconds, he had, most improbabl
y, became totally naked, “is the box.”

  Soloman blinked, averted his eyes and then smiled. “The box,” he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “What about the box?” asked Gold.

  “The Drive is the box, Captain,” said Soloman. “Whatever else happens around it, the box remains the box: a six-sided cube with very definite and precisely definable characteristics.”

  Now it was Gomez’s turn to smile. “So the Drive isn’t affected by the skewering of probability.”

  “I don’t see how it could be,” said Soloman. “It would need to operate within a sphere of unaltered probability, if only to serve as a baseline for reestablishing normalcy.”

  “So however bizarre it is here,” Gold said, “the Drive itself should be perfectly normal?”

  “In theory, yes, it should be,” said Soloman. “And that means there’s a good chance I can reason with it.”

  And about as good a chance, he thought uneasily, that the Drive had completely taken leave of its senses.

  Pattie and Soloman walked toward the shuttle Shirley sitting in wait on the docking bay.

  “I’m sorry I can’t go with you,” Pattie said, rising up on her hind legs.

  Soloman shook his head. “Two of us would double the chances of something going wrong.”

  “I understand,” she said, clicking in concern. “I’m just worried, that’s all.”

  “I doubt I’m in serious danger,” Soloman said. “I’ll just be trying to establish a dialogue with the Drive.” As he spoke, the Shirley impossibly became a passenger shuttle that disgorged a host of bipedal beings before closing its doors and sliding down a magnetic track to its next stop.