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

He’d hit something. A force field.

Soloman accessed the module’s sensors and scanned the cloud. He read air, and several other exotic breathing mixtures, encased in millions of individual force-field bubbles.

Then he looked up again. He’d missed something the first time, because it blended in with the stars. In fact, it looked like a cluster of stars, but there were far too many of them.

It took him a while to realize there was one star for each bubble.

*     *     *

Captain Newport stared openmouthed at the viewscreen, his face ashen. He turned to look at Gomez and blinked, like a man waking from a dream. “I’ve done something terribly wrong, haven’t I?”

She glanced over at him, still transfixed by the screen. It seemed as if everything that could go wrong had, and yet it was somehow working.

The Chinook crew were safe; the Lincoln was, in more ways than one, free of Enigma; and Enigma’s countless unwilling passengers were still alive, though for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how.

“In the end, Captain, you did the absolute best thing you could do, even if you didn’t know you were doing it.” She glanced at him, trying to look reassuring. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Captain,” said the ops officer. “We’re being hailed by the da Vinci, sir. I’m reading her thirty kilometers off our port bow, though I can’t tell you how she got there, or what happened to Starbase 12. It’s like we jumped thirty light-years in an instant.”

“We didn’t go anywhere, Lieutenant.” Newport looked over at Gomez. “Right, Commander?”

Before Gomez could answer, her combadge chirped. “Sonnie, it’s Kieran. Meet us down at the transporter room. And, ah, bring Captain Newport, if he’s in the mood to come. There’s someone here you really should see.”

*     *     *

Gold ran to the hangar deck. He had to see this with his own eyes.

As the outer doors opened, he saw Enigma, spread out before him, re-forming itself. One by one, the bubbles of air transformed into opaque, golden holographic bubbles, no longer hidden from view.

At first they were scattered, but then they began to cluster together, blending, rebuilding, and reinventing what it had been before.

As the full shape of Enigma began to re-form, Gold saw a dark speck, moving rapidly against the golden mass, a speck that rapidly grew larger and resolved into the sleek form of an Intrepid-class starship.

The U.S.S. Lincoln was back.

His combadge chirped. It was Corsi.

“Captain, the Lincoln is returning hails. Our missing people are on board, safe and sound, and they have the missing freighter crew member and the Chinook personnel as well.”

Despite himself, he broke into a broad smile, and barely kept from laughing. He was glad Corsi wasn’t there to see. At times like this, he wasn’t the most dignified officer in the fleet.

But it seemed she didn’t need to see. “Enjoy the moment, Captain. Corsi out.”

She understood. She was coming along, this Corsi. Like him, she knew it was all over but the shouting. Like him, she knew that apparently, this time at least, he’d done the right thing. And she knew what that meant.

She’s going to make somebody a fine first officer some day, maybe even have a ship of her own.

“Captain Core-Breach,” he said out loud. “It has a nice ring to it.”

*     *     *

Gomez and Newport arrived at the transporter room just as Roth emerged with the Chinook party, looking confused, but unharmed. Roth made hesitant eye-contact with Newport.

“Sorry, Captain,” was all he said.

Newport pushed his lips together and nodded sadly. “You did all right, Roth.” He patted him on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later.”

They stepped into the transporter room to see Duffy and Omthon standing with the holographic Bolian. Newport seemed puzzled.

“Captain,” said Duffy, gesturing at the Bolian, “meet a real alien imposter.”

The Bolian bowed his head in greeting. “We call ourselves the Quanta. We owe you thanks, for waking us from our long sleep. We owe you apology for the trouble we have inadvertently caused yourselves and others we have encountered. It is time you knew our story.”

“You never developed warp drive,” said Duffy.

“We did not know that was unusual until we met you. We encountered other beings with this technology, but by then we were not—lucid. Only in our stories and dreams could we do such things, but we did not give up on our dreams of the stars. One day, some of us determined that we would go, no matter how long it took. But by that time our stories were quite developed. They were what we were, and we brought them with us.”

“Your holoprograms,” said Gomez. “You built your entire ship out of holotechnology, self-powered, self-sustaining.”

“It worked well. We visited many worlds, until we reached the void where stars were far apart. Somewhere, on the edge of that gulf, we fell into our dreams and did not come out. From time to time, we encountered other beings such as yourselves, but by then, our stories had grown stale and repetitive, and we welcomed the new stories these beings brought with them.”

“You were like me,” said Newport, “denying reality, incorporating anything that challenged it into your fantasies.”

“Until,” said the Bolian, “like you, Captain, we were forced to confront reality in a way we could not deny.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Duffy, “is how you and all your ‘passengers’ survived without your holotechnology, or even how you’re maintaining this form. At minimum. Your systems are only now rebooting.”

“Your ship disrupted our independent holographic projectors, the telepathic systems that maintained our ship’s systems and ran our gross simulations. But we have developed our holotechnology over a long time. We are more intimately associated with it than you imagine. Each of us has individual holographic capabilities as well. These forms I have adopted, have aided in communication, but it is time that you saw us as we really are.”

Abruptly the Bolian faded. It brightened into the familiar ball of light,