Cybersong (20 page)

If it is, I should have seen it a while ago.”

Chakotay thought it was better to break in immediately. “I know it’s a child. I talked to it,” he told them.

“How did you talk to it?” Daphne Mandel pursued the subject.

“Why did it talk to you and not me?”

“It’s telepathic,” Kes explained. Chakotay was impressed by the Ocampa’s lack of animosity toward the programmer. Mandel might not be a spy, but she wasn’t good company either.

“A telepathic AI?” she scoffed. “That’s absurd.”

“Not for a telepathic race,” Tom Paris spoke up from the runabout’s controls. “Makes perfect sense.”

“You would think so,” Mandel shot back. “But only because you don’t know anything about it.”

Paris whistled through his teeth and turned his full attention back to the control panel, shaking his head. Chakotay knew that gesture and wished that he could also simply turn away and ignore Daphne Mandel.

“There are certain things you are going to have to accept, Ms. Mandel,” Chakotay said, his voice so even that anyone who knew him would know that he was furious. “This is the only way it all makes sense. You are going to have to deal with this AI, get into its head and figure out how to make it let us go. Because we can pull out a virus once doesn’t mean that we want to be attacked again as we leave.”

Daphne Mandel said nothing in return, just sat and stared at her bitten fingernails. Chakotay turned his attention to other matters. “Kes, which ship is the main one for the AI, do you think?” he asked.

She looked out of the window. From the broad expanse they could see the remains of hundreds of ships, a veritable junkyard of spent hulks that were still there because there was nowhere else for them to go.

“This looks like the place where we picked up Neelix,” Paris commented.

“All these used parts. Too bad to let ‘em go to waste. I know this one used parts dealer …”

“That one,” Kes said.

Chakotay nodded. He had thought the same. They had been dead on the first time. Somehow that one vessel with a tear in its side had become the AI’s favorite ship.

“Oh, no,” Tom Paris said. “I was hoping we’d have some environment this time. Not those lousy suits again.”

The way he said that made both Kes and B’Elanna Torres laugh.

“Fine, you can laugh. You didn’t have to wear them last time,” Paris continued.

“Yes, I did,” Kes replied. “And I managed just fine. But I don’t have the same kind of premonition that someone will need help that I did the last time. That was very odd, as if someone knew what was going to happen and warned us. Only how could an AI have known that there was going to be an explosion?”

“If it caused it,” Torres finished the thought. “If it was planning to destroy those logs but didn’t want to do damage to the people involved—that would make sense.”

“Let’s stop idle speculation, people,” Chakotay said. “We’ll be in a better position to fit ideas together when we have more data. So let’s start getting into the suits while Mr. Paris gets us situated and be ready to move.”

“Do you want me to bring us in closer to the control center, sir?”

Paris asked. “I can set us wherever you want us.”

Chakotay looked out the window at the crippled alien ship. He thought about the child-voice in his head and let the instinct lead him.

“Mr. Paris, did you find any reason to believe that the AI was situated near the bridge?”

“No, sir,” Tom Paris replied. “If anything, we got as much off the bridge as we could before the explosion. I’m not sure there’s anything left there to study anyway. The bridge was pretty much a mess when we left.”

“Take us to the Engineering levels, near their drive,” Chakotay said.

“Do you have some idea of where that would be?”

Paris smiled. “We saw a schematic of the ship while we were here before,” he told them. “I can remember it pretty well. You want Engineering, you got it.”

“And what am I supposed to do?” Daphne Mandel asked, seeming sullen and reluctant to put on her environmental suit.

B’Elanna Torres turned to her. “There should be plenty of good interactive terminals in Engineering. I don’t know a single spaceship design from any sentient species that doesn’t include that feature.

Very prominently.”

That seemed to convince Mandel, or at least she stopped grousing and started getting into the suit.

Chakotay held his helmet and watched as Tom Paris slid the shuttlecraft through the breach in the alien ship and they were again inside what seemed to be a different universe. The tangle of cable and wild debris from the explosion was on the other side of them and receding as Paris maneuvered their craft down the long central rift to the back section where Engineering was located.

It was like flying through a swamp full of moss and vines hanging off the trees. Only this time the dangling stems were charged and deadly.

Showers of random sparks erupted between points and died just as abruptly as they had begun. It was beautiful, Chakotay thought, but every glorious vision was the result of some deadly discharge.

It would take weeks to explore this hulk properly, and Chakotay wished they had the time to do it. He knew that the captain must be as disappointed as he was that they didn’t have the leisure to indulge their curiosity.

And after this ship, there were all the others. Everything they could learn about so many diverse races on this side of the galaxy from their old spacecraft waited inside like presents inside wrapping. To learn about people who were so different, and yet at heart so much the same, tempted Chakotay deeply. He wanted to see how they had lived, what choices their cultures had taught them were important, how they had come to travel, and what it was that had impelled them into space.

For all he wished to protect his people and to defend those who could not defend themselves, he had to admit that his first desire to join Starfleet had been the pure and simple desire to go. To see things that were stranger than anyone had ever known, to meet peoples as yet uncontacted, to see skies and sunsets that were never part of the experience of any people he had known.

Maybe that was the deepest reason any of them joined Starfleet, he thought.

And so he watched as Paris swept elegantly by meters of crystal engineering, a technology so different from their own that Chakotay wasn’t sure if they would even have enough time to understand any of it. B’Elanna Torres was not going to want to leave this place, he was sure of that.

B’Elanna, himself, the captain—and he was certain that a large portion of the rest of the crew of Voyager would like the option to stay, to study, to learn.

That was not an option they had, he reminded himself immediately.

They were facing a supply crisis that threatened the very life of their own ship. And curiosity could be as good a trap as any, seducing them into outstaying their resources so they ended up like the rest of the dead.

The section they were in now was far different from the area near the bridge. The projections here were much larger and there were fewer of them. Several crystals ran the entire length of the shaft, and many were still glowing in subtle, ghostly colors.

“This really reminds me of a cave,” B’Elanna Torres said. “One of those great limestone caverns carved out by ancient dry rivers. With stalactites and stalagmites and those wonderful formations.

Curtains.

Some of the rock was like curtain, it was so thin you could shine a light through it. I’ll bet these people lived underground.”

“Are we getting this all on the tricorder?” Kes asked.

“Every sensor we’ve got is on record,” Paris assured her as he slid the runabout through what appeared to be an impossibly small crevasse and into a large and reasonably empty bay.

“There seems to be less damage in this part of the ship,” he commented.

“If we’re really lucky, there are still sealed areas where life-support is actually working and we could beam directly there.”

“And get rid of these lousy suits,” Mandel groused.

“Do you have any readings from inside, past the breach, that shows some possibility? Or at least a good target area to use the transporter instead of walking around in this junk?” Chakotay asked.

Paris smiled. “You got it,” he said. “I can even lock on to what looks like the propulsion control center. But I can’t make any promises about the level of life-support. According to the readings, it should be adequate, but that just means oxygen and pressure. It could be very very cold in there.”

“What’s this?” Kes asked. She pointed at a bar that crept across the bottom of the sensor readout.

“That’s temperature,” Paris told her. “It’s rising. It’s getting warmer in there.” His voice was not simply surprised but downright astounded. “As if someone had turned up the heat for our arrival.”

“Nice of them,” Torres commented.

“I’m going in with B’Elanna and Mandel,” Chakotay said. “Kes, I want you and Paris to stay here. If you’re needed, it will be a lot faster and more reliable to beam you to someone who’s injured, or have them beamed back here directly instead of having you tramping around in the rubble. Mr. Paris, you stay here with the shuttlecraft. We may need to leave in a hurry, so keep locked onto our comm signals. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, but we know that it’s dangerous.

And capricious.

“I’ll go first, and then comm back to inform you of conditions before you beam over.”

“That indicator seems to have the temperature at nineteen degrees Celsius now,” Kes said. “And the air pressure and oxygen readings are up, too, if I’m reading this correctly.”

Tom Paris looked over her shoulder. “You are reading it properly,” he said. “Commander, it looks like our host has brought life-support up to comfortable levels for us.”

“Oh, good,” Mandel said and started pulling off her gauntlets.

“Not so fast,” Chakotay said. “I don’t trust this entity. It could lure us in and pull the plug, plunge us into cold, or even blow out the atmosphere.”

“We take that risk anywhere,” Mandel argued.

Chakotay looked at her for a moment. “Ms. Mandel, you will wear an environmental suit until I tell you take it off. That is a direct order.”

Torres looked at Tom Paris and shook her head microscopically.

Then she turned to Mandel.

“We can’t trust it,” B’Elanna snarled. “The life-support conditions might be a trap just to get us in there unprotected so it can kill us.”

“That doesn’t go with your theory of this lonely child AI,” Mandel whined, but she put her gloves back on.

Chakotay had ignored the entire exchange and took his place in the transporter. He nodded once at Paris and in a sparkle, he was gone.

Then his voice came over the comm. “Looks like we’ve hit the mother lode,” he said. “You can carry your helmets and work without gloves, but I still want you in suits. I don’t trust the integrity of this wreck. Ms. Torres, Ms. Mandel, beam over now.”

***

It was beyond B’Elanna’s most extravagant dreams. She was surrounded by crystal light, energy that moved transparently through the whole of the ship. And the engines! These engines were both familiar and terribly alien. She could happily work for weeks dissecting them, figuring out how they worked and how they were powered.

It reminded her of Christmas at her human grandparents’ house the year she was eight. Unwrapping present after present, first the working model of the ancient aircraft and then the high-speed rail set. And two manuals on passenger spacecraft, too.

It had been hard to know what to play with first, she remembered.

And she felt exactly the same way now. She hadn’t felt that way in all these years in between.

She recognized something that she was certain was a dead warp core.

But the power system was not dilithium, she was certain of that. Even if she couldn’t see the crystals, the relays wouldn’t stand up to the intense fluctuations that dilithium systems sometimes produced when the crystals were stressed.

There were great cylinders and arcs making a semicircle around what she thought was the core. A walkway went between the two, sheltered by something that reminded her of the curtain formation in the cavern she had visited. It was ivory and mineral-like and so very thin, it was translucent. If this was all the protection they needed from whatever went through the rest of the system …

B’Elanna was intrigued.

She unslung her tool bag from her shoulder. She had pared it down to a very few essentials, but wished she had brought over some of her more specialized devices.

Slowly, piece by piece, she began dismantling the dead drive.

No, it was not dilithium powered. But the energy output was in the same power range. And it didn’t look bad.

In fact, it looked more like it had been turned off than it had been damaged or drained. B’Elanna started to get even more excited. If she could just get into the controls here, she could start generating power through this stem. And while she didn’t want to bring the engines back on-line for more than curiosity’s sake, she could probably recharge several of Voyager’s secondary systems with this equipment.

Even a few weeks with unlimited replicator use would be better than none. Though it would be hard to give it up again, B’Elanna acknowledged. She had almost forgotten what real cherry cordials tasted like.

It would mean getting more supplies over from Voyager, which would mean another trip. Or someone fetching the canisters. She hadn’t brought anything that large with her. There had been no reason to suspect that this ship could be brought back to life again, let alone that their energy sources would be so compatible with Voyager’s systems.

She cursed softly.

To have replicators again—the thought was so delicious that B’Elanna could hardly stand to wait. But there was more. There was an entire alien technology here, and maybe there was a way home in there.

Or so Torres told herself. Though in her heart she was certain that if the entire ship used the energy sources she had just found, it was far too little to send Voyager home. Unless there was a transformer somewhere. Or unless the technology was so advanced that it didn’t need high energy in order to make that kind of change.