Cybersong (9 page)

“And that’s the best I can figure out so far. Mechanically, the thing is working just fine. But this is deeper than mechanics.

I have this sense that I’m being lied to.”

Chakotay nodded. He understood the feeling very well, even if attributing it to a computer was not going to get them anywhere.

“Let’s start with something easier,” he said. “How about reconnecting all the station interfaces in Engineering? Do we have enough supplies for that? I don’t want to start the work until we’ve tracked down the bug in the program that’s causing the problem, but we have to be ready.

The captain is going to want us out of here immediately.”

Torres nodded briskly and looked relieved. This, at least, was a problem Chakotay knew she could handle.

“We’ve got the supplies, but the number three phase alignment threads are low on power, and this job is going to take a lot of them. I thought about bleeding power off the residual on the power-down, but that’s at too high a level. It’ll melt the threads.”

She shook her head. “I have this idea that we could tap into that jury-rig contraption that Neelix calls his oven, but I don’t want to deal with the hassles.”

“Or the dinners.” Chakotay’s eyes crinkled up as he shared a warm laugh with B’Elanna.

“Neelix shouldn’t be a problem,” the first officer reassured the engineer. “He knows we’re short on energy, and that oven is very inefficient.”

“I can offer to calibrate it for him, as well as improve the efficiency,” Torres said, smiling. “He won’t know what someone’s doing in there with the tools. And it will work better after we’re done.”

“Problem solved,” Chakotay agreed. But then his smile faded.

“That still doesn’t solve the bigger problem of what went wrong with the computer, and we have to have an answer to it. If the regular diagnostic doesn’t show the problem, can we access the actual code?

Maybe we could isolate whatever was in that burst from the tachyon field. Everything was working just fine until then.”

Torres pursed her lips in thought. “I can try it. But I need the best programmer on this ship. And for my money, that’s Harry Kim.”

“Who’s on the away team,” Chakotay finished for her. The second in command considered the problem. “There’s Ensign Mandel. She may be even better than Harry when it comes to this level of code. I’ll send her down.”

“Oh? What department is she in?” Torres asked.

The engineer couldn’t keep the skepticism out of her voice.

After all, a truly fine programmer would have to be on the engineering team, and she knew the qualifications of every person in her department.

“Stellar Cartography,” Chakotay replied.

Torres nearly snorted. “Figures,” she said. “They always nab the top programmers first. Why didn’t I think of it?”

Chakotay smiled warmly. B’Elanna Torres was the best engineer he had ever worked with, but she was still young, and her people skills could use some improvement.

Though she had come a long way from when she had decked Carey, he thought. She hadn’t done anything even close for months. “You won’t have any trouble with Mandel. Your management skills are improving so much that by the time we get home, you’ll be ready for the Diplomatic Service,” Chakotay said approvingly.

The first officer got up and left B’Elanna to her station. He felt warmed and reassured, even though he hadn’t felt any need for reassurance. Which was curious. Usually he was happiest solving the problems of the day, saddest when he thought about home and all they missed.

Maybe it was solving B’Elanna’s problem of finding a programmer that made him happy, he .thought. In fact, there was no reason why he couldn’t send Mandel down immediately. He used his comm badge to order the ensign to report to Engineering.

But solving the problem in Engineering was only the first item to resolve on this watch. He wanted a lot more done by the time the captain returned home.

***

Ensign Daphne Mandel was not pleased to report to Engineering.

She had other work to do, important work. The kind of thing she had dreamed of doing but had never believed could really happen.

A whole new, unexplored quadrant for her to map.

Oh, if she was lucky, she had once thought, she might eventually get assigned to Deep Space Nine as one of the cartographers working on the Gamma Quadrant. Even with maps from the people there, there was a lot of work to do.

But here—here was all of space before her. No one from their part of the galaxy had ever been here! This was like waking up in her very best dream. Some days Daphne Mandel had to pinch herself to make sure that she was really awake, and this was her job.

She hated having to interrupt it for anything. Sleeping and eating were minor necessities that she hadn’t quite conquered yet, but given enough time she was certain she’d be able to overcome the need. So far, she had managed to grab food from the line in the galley and bring it up to her station; she really lost only about fifteen minutes a meal. Maybe twenty if someone moved too slowly.

The department was very small—Voyager had not been built as an outbound exploration vessel. But so far as Daphne Mandel was concerned, that meant there were fewer people to make mistakes.

Being unimportant meant they had a cramped suite in a back corridor, nowhere near any of the main functions of this ship.

In Stellar Cartography were two large holotables where all the maps of the quadrant, old and new, could be displayed, compared, and refined.

Sometimes the captain came down to look into the raw mapping to see the larger picture. More often, Cartography simplified the display and shrank it to two dimensions for navigation to display.

At one point in her Academy career, Mandel had been approached by her nav prof to consider a career move in navigation. She had scoffed at it. Nav was only about practical solutions where mathematical elegance was not properly appreciated.

No, Mandel had fallen in love with stellar cartography in her first year at the Academy and since that moment had resented any demands that took time away from her precious specialty. She couldn’t waste minutes in social conversation with her crewmates, let alone whole hours for social life and recreation. She resented the fact that her body required sleep. If she could, she would never ever leave her mapping station, not for a moment.

And now they were asking her for whole hours. And to work on something that was about to get them back. Well, all her work would be useless if it never got back to Federation space, even Mandel acknowledged that. But when she had realized that they were seventy years out, she had been ecstatic. An entire career mapping the unknown, capped by a triumphant return at the end.

And no dealing with her family, with all their anger and expectations and disappointments. She could forget about them forever. By the time Voyager had come home, they would all be dead.

No, she wasn’t pleased to be assigned to work on a problem in Engineering, and she wasn’t comfortable with the chief engineer.

Torres was just like every other engineer Mandel had ever worked with, so much more concerned with tinkering and toys and making things run rather than appreciating the beauty of pure mathematics. In Stellar Cartography, even the computer program knew that this was the most exciting, rewarding work in the entire scope of Starfleet—one of the main reasons for Starfleet’s existence.

That was something Mandel knew that no one in Engineering understood at all. She would bet money on it, if she had ever cared about money.

When she reported to Engineering, Torres was relieved to see her and didn’t bother with preliminaries. “Look at this code and tell me why the computer isn’t accepting navigational data,” the chief engineer said.

Daphne Mandel looked at the screen. It was registering at point zero two percent. There was a lot of code there. She sighed and started.

The sooner she finished here, the sooner she could return to her beloved stars.

***

“There is still some suspicion of tampering,” Tuvok said evenly after Chakotay explained that the diagnostic had turned up nothing useful.

“I would say that the fact that there was no easily identified evidence makes suspicion greater, not lesser.

It is still highly unlikely that some being not from this ship, let alone our sector of the galaxy, could affect our computational system on that level. If there were a large-scale malfunction, it would be more likely our reception of whatever the dense datapack was. But something this fine is not the work of outsiders.”

Chakotay said nothing. He wanted to contradict the Vulcan who stood before him, but he couldn’t. The point was too clear. And yet, he knew that there was something else going on, something that he wasn’t seeing. He was glad for the privacy the ready room afforded them. He could barely acknowledge the reality of such a theory himself. The crew would be affected. And if there were a saboteur aboard, that individual would be alerted.

“You may continue the investigation, Mr. Tuvok,” Chakotay said.

“But remember that we have no real evidence or suspects.”

“I shall be discreet, sir,” Tuvok said. Then the Vulcan left the first officer alone in the ready room.

There was no reason for sabotage here, Chakotay thought angrily.

They were all exiles. And no matter what their background or politics back home, they were united in a single quest to return.

None of the rest of it mattered. Chakotay looked at the pad in his lap and rubbed his eyes in resignation.

The logical loop in all this was making him weary. Some coffee would have been nice. If they’d had any. Not that coffee would help clarify the problem. He’d have to rely upon the away team for that.

But somehow he thought that whatever they found would only make the problem bigger. That was the way it usually went. Something was very simple at the core, but discovering it empirically was often frustrating. He remembered an example from a children’s book he had once read of a three-dimensional cone trying to explain itself to a two-dimensional plane.

Then again, who knew? he comforted himself. Maybe the away team had downloaded an entire alien archive that would explain it all in words of one syllable.

Nah, I wouldn’t bet two credits on that one. Chakotay smiled.

Probably a good thing that Tom Paris was on the away team.

“This isn’t where we came in, Captain,” Kim said, looking at the corridor they found themselves in.

“No, Mr. Kim, it certainly isn’t. And that’s probably a good thing,” Janeway said, taking the lead, striding down the middle of the passage.

The hallway looked like nothing on Voyager. The bulkheads were curved, and there was no distinct joint between the walls and the ceiling or the floor. They all merged together in a rough ovoid.

A few projections hung from the ceiling, and these were dark and dead.

The whole felt like the interior of a rock cavern or an abandoned mine.

About halfway down they came to a darkened vestibule with a blank screen set well above their heads. The captain climbed the wall projections as if they were an elegant staircase back home. She turned her suit light on the screen. From the floor below, both Paris and Kim could see that it was a schematic of the ship.

From this distance it was hard to make out what would have been the bridge and what was Engineering, or cargo, but that was less important than knowing where they were.

There was a single white dot amid the flat blues and oranges of the schematic. Presumably the dot represented the away team’s current position. With the damage done to the hulk, even if the map had been easy to decipher, it would no longer match the present configuration.

Still, Janeway was able to make a few educated guesses as to what was where.

The captain climbed down and selected one of the thick, flat nodes off the wall. She touched it and it opened into yet another cavernous hallway, this one looked just a bit brighter, busier, and better maintained than the one that had brought them to the holodeck. An entire series of flat amber projections glowed in a neat serpentine down one side of the floor. There were a lot more projections here.

They looked like broken crystals, long and jagged with internal illumination in pink and pale green and a soft white that turned purple at the edges.

Several doors led off this passageway. Tom Paris assigned himself the point position and touched each of them gingerly.

Two opened. The others were sealed with age and disuse, not intent.

The first area he explored was a small chamber with only a few projections. He brushed his gloved fingers over the crystals.

Only one or two glittered at his presence. He could make out nothing.

The other room was larger. He hadn’t really looked in when he called the others to come see. Then he turned, and the area brightened, the colored ceiling crystals flickering in a manner he had almost begun to see as normal.

Suddenly, Janeway pointed to the center of the room and strode in that direction. In the center, on tatters of some kind of heavy patterned fabric, lay—a body. It was maybe four meters in length with six limbs arranged in death. The skin was grayish green in the odd light, but Janeway didn’t know whether that was the alien’s true skin color or if death had changed it.

She looked at its face for a moment, a face not at all humanoid but distinctly expressive. It had no hair at all, and its closed eyes were merely a slit. But for all that, Janeway thought she could see expression and intelligence in that visage. It reminded her of the dinosaur holograms she played with as a child, the ones in the basic math and reading programs with their warm, oversize claws and their bright cheerful smiles. Only this alien wasn’t smiling. Its large lipless mouth must have smiled once and laughed, and there was something delicate and refined in the high bones in the cheeks and the definition of the jaw.

“Frozen. Too cold for even the internal bacteria to decompose the corpse. If there are internal bacteria,” the captain said as she viewed the alien’s remains.

“What killed it?” Tom Paris asked. “The cold? It looks like it was planned. I mean, it was just left lying here like this. And there aren’t any marks on the body.”