Enigma Ship by J. York (small books to read .TXT) 📕

Duffy stopped what he was doing. “What kind of readings?”

“These tricorders are modified to be especially sensitive to photonic force fields. Kieran, can I borrow the magnetic probe?”

Puzzled, he unhooked the tool from his belt and handed it to her.

“My readings are inconclusive,” she explained. “This is the only way to be sure.”

She activated the probe to a low gain and pushed it through the lighted panel.

Duffy looked around the room, as though seeing it for the first time. “This is all a hologram.”

Gomez nodded. “A much more sophisticated one than we’ve ever seen, but yes.”

“Look at this,” said Pattie, gesturing at a series of flashing green panels along the wall. “These lit up when you pushed the probe through the panel. You may have disrupted something.”

The flashing lights reminded Duffy of something. As he thought of it, he became aware of something else, a tone at the high end of his hearing range, pulsing in time to the lights. “This is an alarm of some kind,” he said.

Just then, a bulkhead at the end of the room irised open, and a floating ball of light passed through.

Corsi’s voice sounded tinnier even than usual over the com-link. “Away team, get out of there. We can’t get a transporter lock with you inside. Move closer to the opening.”

The ball of light stopped in front of Duffy and changed shape, dimming as it did, and taking the form of something froglike, upright, and only vaguely humanoid. The frog-thing considered him with wet, yellow eyes. “This is a class one service area,” it said. “You can’t be here.” It reached out to Duffy with a webbed, many-fingered hand. “Good-bye,” it said.

Duffy faded out of existence.

Chapter8

Captain Gold paced the length of the observation lounge. “I want options.”

Stevens leaned back in his chair, fingertips pressed together. “I can send out more ‘pinger’ torpedoes. The pulse should be detected by the modified tricorders the away team has.”

Gold stopped and looked at him. “What does that do for us?”

“Well, they already know we’re here, and we’re looking for them. It should allow them to get a fix on the pulse. If they’re lost inside and trying to find their way out, it might help.”

Gold nodded. “Sounds good. How long?”

“I’ve got a second torpedo in the tube, two more on the fabrication bench. I think a shot an hour indefinitely.”

“Do it. Pulse every hour, on the hour, ship’s time. A logical schedule will make it easier for them to find the pulses if they need multiple fixes along the way.”

Corsi looked at Gold, her expression dark. “I should have had a team in there with them.”

Gold glared back. “I’m looking for options, not ‘I told you so.’ If your people were in there, we’d be looking for them, too.”

“Options then,” said Corsi, her posture ramrod-straight. “Stevens replicates a half-dozen more of these magnetic probes and shows my people how to use them. Then I lead a team of my people inside that thing, and we start poking holes in holograms until we find our missing people and bring them out.”

Lense cleared her throat. “Enigma has an interior volume of just under half a million cubic kilometers. You could be looking a long time.”

“Then,” said Corsi, “if we can’t find them, we’ll find someone or something that knows where they are.” She scowled at no one in particular.

Gold knew her anger was directed more at herself than anyone else, but that conversation would have to wait. He shook his head. “I think that’s out of the question unless we have some idea where to look.”

“The easiest way to do that,” Abramowitz cut in smoothly, “would be to ask them. Have we learned anything else that might let us communicate with them?”

“Actually,” said Stevens, “some of their tricorder readings from inside Enigma were relayed back to us. Data transmission was slowed by the intervening force fields so we didn’t get everything, but I’d say in those few minutes we learned more about Enigma than the Chinook did during its entire study.” He licked his lips. “I think we can punch a comm signal in that they could translate through their modified tricorders.”

“We need more than a signal.” Corsi was like a belligerent dog with a bone. “We need intelligence. Can you improve the images you have of the interior? Maybe find our people, or at least the Lincoln?”

“We’ve been reviewing the data from the first imaging pulse, but I don’t know there’s much I can do to improve on it. We have a mass of duranium we believe to be the Lincoln. We have various other scattered duranium traces, none of which add up to a hundred-kilometer ship, or anything remotely like it. We have organic concentrations that we believe to be life-forms.”

Gold stopped his pacing, and stared hard at Stevens. “How many, Stevens?”

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty million.” Stevens looked grim.

Corsi’s mouth fell open. “Thirty million people in the crew, and nobody is answering our hails?”

Stevens shrugged. “They could be unconscious, or dead for all we can tell. We could be reading farm animals, or the occupants of a zoo. They could be some other kind of biological concentrations entirely—trees or bioreactors full of bacteria. We just don’t have the resolution to tell. However—” He seemed reluctant to continue.

Gold crossed his arms over his chest. “Spit it out, Stevens.”

“During the first burst, we observed some minor disruption of the holographic matrix. Given that, and our success with the modified magnetic probe, it’s just possible I could come up with a special torpedo to disrupt at least their outer holograms. It might be only be temporary, twenty minutes or so while the fields regenerate, but it would give us a look at what we’re dealing with. It might let us get a direct comm signal in, or beam our people out.”

“How long?”

Stevens punched at the screen of his padd. “We’ll need to run some more analysis on the