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

open sensor port through the deflector dish. Beyond the glowing blue of the grid, the sky shimmered in waves of rainbow colors, and multicolored stars streaked past at a furious pace.

Duffy was standing next to her as they were making modifications to the deflector. “Well,” he said, “I’ll say this for Captain Newport, he’s got a vivid imagination. I always wondered what slipstream overdrive travel would be like. Whatever a slipstream overdrive is.”

Gomez and Omthon wrestled a field booster coil into its mounting, as Pattie crawled underneath to secure it in place. Gomez stopped to wipe the sweat off her brow. “I was improvising. I thought I did pretty well, under the circumstances. I even remembered to tell him we wouldn’t need to use the deflector while in slipstream, which makes our work down here a lot easier.” She turned to Omthon. “Thanks for your help. I’m not anxious to involve the Lincoln‘s engineers in our changes here, but getting a message out to the da Vinci is going to be a close thing.”

He smiled. “Nobody wants out of this place more than I do.”

The smile made her blush for some reason, and there was that smell again. “Has anyone ever told you your skin is the color of pistachio ice cream?”

He laughed.

“Or that you smell nice?” That slipped out somehow, and it surprised even her. She glanced over, and saw Duffy giving her the eye.

The smile faded, and he seemed embarrassed. “My grandmother was green Orion. It’s the pheromones. They’re more prominent with the females, but males have them too. I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out if it’s a blessing, or a curse.”

Gomez felt herself blush even more. Idiot, idiot! “Pheromones,” she said, trying to sound professional. Duffy was still looking at her. Well, a little jealousy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Mercifully, Pattie changed the subject. “We’re cutting it close. It will be small satisfaction knowing we saved the Chinook team if millions of sentients die.”

Gomez shook her head. “I’m open to suggestions, but those Cochrane solenoids we installed have to be brought up to working temperature slowly, or the cores will crack. Simulated laws of physics we can monkey with, but this is real equipment, and real physical laws. We aren’t even sure this is going to work.”

“I wish,” said Duffy, “we knew how da Vinci did it. I suspect they used one of Fabe’s modified torpedoes to transmit Soloman-designed software to our tricorders, but we don’t know. We’ll just have to hope our method works.”

Roth emerged into the sensor room, climbing down a ladder from a Jefferies tube.

“Well,” he said, “the captain has it all set. The Chinook personnel are being kept busy at the local Starfleet adjunct’s office until we arrive and can beam them over.” He blinked. “Hey, couldn’t they be here already? This is a simulation, they could be a few hundred yards away.”

“Or tens of kilometers,” replied Gomez, “and even if they are close, we’d never be able to find them and get a transporter lock through all the force fields and holograms.”

“You know,” said Duffy, “if this works, we’ll be punching a narrow-bandwidth EM hole through Enigma to the outside, to get our signal through. You could do the same thing to create a sensor window. Aim it like a searchlight, and you could scan anywhere in Enigma.”

Gomez grunted. “I wish we had an extra day to work on that idea. I wish you’d come up with it before we started our modifications. In fact, I wish you’d come up with it before we got stuck in Enigma in the first place.”

“Sorry,” Duffy said with one of those irritatingly endearing grins of his.

“Well, it’s too late now. As Captain Scott once said to me, ‘Sometimes, lass, you’re just stuck with plan A.’”

*     *     *

Stevens settled the torpedo onto the launch cradle and disconnected the anti-gravs. He checked the torpedo room’s status display, satisfied himself everything was in order, and tapped his combadge.

“Stevens to bridge. I’m ready to fire down here.”

Gold replied, “We’ll need a few minutes to have Soloman pull back to a safe distance. You’re early, Stevens.”

He chuckled. “Somebody named Scott once told me to always pad my repair estimates.”

“I’ll just bet he did. Stand by.”

*     *     *

Though the Lincoln hadn’t yet reached Starbase 12, Duffy and Omthon headed to the transporter room. Depending on how things went, they might need to bring the Chinook people rapidly into their conspiracy.

Pattie stayed behind in the sensor room, to initiate their communications pulse just as soon as the solenoids were ready.

“There’ll be a security team at the transporter room of course,” said Duffy, looking to make sure there was nobody else within earshot, “but Lieutenant Roth is leading it, and he’s handpicked the team.”

Omthon didn’t seem to be listening. “She’s a beautiful woman.”

Duffy managed not to trip over his own feet. He kept looking straight ahead. “Who?”

“Sonya Gomez.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Duffy said glumly.

“It’s a good thing Sonya has been dealing with Captain Newport, Mr. Duffy. You are a very poor liar.”

Duffy considered for a moment. “That smell thing, it doesn’t come in a bottle, does it?”

*     *     *

Commander Gomez loitered off to one side of the Lincoln‘s bridge, pretending to examine the vacant engineering station. A few of the bridge crew gave her the occasional curious glance, but largely, she went unnoticed.

She glanced back at Captain Newport, who sat in the big chair like Zeus on his throne. He rubbed his chin, and stared intently at the main viewer. They’d be dropping out of warp in a few minutes.

She wondered how Pattie was doing. It was impossible to know precisely how much thermal shock the solenoid cores could take, or exactly when they would be ready. At least we’ll save the Chinook people.

But then she had an ugly thought. They were only assuming the simulation would bring back the real Chinook away team in response to Newport’s perceptions.

But what if they were somewhere else, lost in their own simulation?