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

still an engineering problem, and perhaps I put you in the middle of engineering problems too often. There are times that’s necessary and appropriate, but I don’t see that this is one of them.” He watched her frown deepen. “When you’re put in the middle of an engineering problem, Corsi, I sometimes wonder if it compromises the engineering, and if it compromises the security concerns as well. Let the individual teams handle the engineering matters.”

“Even when I know they’ll be putting themselves in danger?”

“I said you know your job, Corsi. Be watchful, keep them safe, but give them the space to work. You’re a professional, but so are they. Trust them as you trust yourself.”

“Bridge to captain.” It was Lieutenant Ina, at ops. “We have an incoming transmission from the Chinook. “

He could still read doubt in Corsi’s face, though she’d never question his orders. He smiled reassuringly. “Let’s try something different this time. It could be good. You never know.”

As Gold stepped back onto the bridge, his smile faded, and he slipped back into business mode. “On screen, Lieutenant.”

It had been a number of years since their last encounter, but he recognized Christa Otis, captain of the Chinook. He tried to remember the circumstances. Some casual gathering of senior officers on Starbase 96? He was twenty years Christa’s senior, which still made her a seasoned officer by most standards. Still, he felt a certain fatherly affection for her. He briefly considered making small talk, but something in her expression told him this wasn’t the time. Worry lines wrinkled her forehead, and her skin seemed pallid.

“David. I didn’t know they were sending you, but I’m glad. Right now it means a lot to me that I’m turning this situation over to someone I trust.”

“What’s wrong, Chris?”

Her jaw clinched, and she looked away from the screen. “I’ve got orders to get under way to Salem II, David, maximum warp. Unless we can stop the blight there immediately, three hundred million people are going to starve come harvest time. There’s no choice at all.”

“Chris—”

“I’m leaving without two of my people, David. They were setting navigation buoys around the thing when they, and the buoys, just vanished.” Gold could see the effort it took for her to control her anger, in the tight line of her jaw, and her ramrod-straight posture. “It got bigger, just swallowed them up, and there’s not a blasted thing I can do about it.”

Gold glanced over at Corsi, who, despite her best efforts at restraint, was giving him the “I told you so” face.

Chapter3

“How,” asked Carol Abramowitz, grunting as she slammed a handball off the far wall of the court, “did I get this assignment?”

Dr. Lense dashed to intercept the ball, smashed it with rocketlike power. It bounced off the wall and was past Abramowitz before she could react. Lense recovered the ball and bounced it against the floor so that it snapped back into her hand. “As I recall, ‘this assignment’ was your idea. ‘Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral, that is the question.’”

Abramowitz sighed and wiped the sweat off her upper lip. “I know that, but I’m a cultural specialist. None of those really fall into my area.”

“I’m a doctor, and the captain asked me to assist. That makes even less sense, if you want to think about it that way. I’d say he wants a couple of intelligent people not locked into some fixed technical or scientific viewpoint. This doesn’t fit into any neat categories. Maybe trying to make it fit is what threw the Chinook off.”

Abramowitz sighed again, lifting her short black hair off her neck. “What’s the score?”

“I’m winning,” said Lense.

“I don’t doubt it, but what’s the score?”

“I play to win. I’m winning.”

“But the score?”

“I’m not keeping score, I’m just winning.”

“You’re not keeping score?”

“Don’t need to. If you want to, you keep score.”

“I don’t know how. I’ve never played handball. I swat this ball against the wall until I miss, that’s all I know. Why are we playing handball?”

“You want my help? I think better while breaking a sweat.”

“That makes one of us.” She plopped down in the corner, her back against the glass observation wall.

Lense put her hands on her hips and frowned. “You’re no fun at all.” She waited to see if Abramowitz reacted, which she didn’t. “I’ve got the rec room for thirty more minutes. The computer can shift things around and we can play something else. Racquetball, roto-goal, Bolian squash—there’s a ping-pong table that pops out of the floor.”

“I don’t play any of those, or Aztec basketball either.”

“What? Oh, never mind. What do you play?”

“Golf.”

“Golf?” She looked around the room.

“The walls don’t move that far, trust me.”

It was Dr. Lense’s turn to sigh. She shuffled over and sat down facing Abramowitz. “Animal,” she said.

“What?”

“Animal, that’s my answer. The Enigma is some kind of space-dwelling organism, like the space amoeba.”

Abramowitz looked up and brushed a strand of damp hair out of her eyes. “You’re making that up.”

Lense shook her head. “It’s the subject of many a trick question at Starfleet Medical. In 2268 the Enterprise, A or B or X or something—I don’t remember which one—encountered an eighteen-thousand-kilometer-long space-dwelling amoeba that consumed an entire star system before they could stop it.”

Abramowitz shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”

“Anyway, Enigma hasn’t shown signs of intelligence, and it doesn’t have warp drive. It does have camouflage, and it does ingest things, possibly as food. Ergo, animal.”

“Mineral,” Abramowitz said suddenly. “Or mechanical anyway. It’s some kind of probe, or maybe a cloaked ship on autopilot, the crew long dead. They could have lost warp drive in deep space, and couldn’t fix it. The crew died of old age, or they just ran out of food and air, but the ship is still going its merry way, running on autopilot.”

“So why does it keep swallowing things up?”

Abramowitz took a deep breath, considering the problem. “If it’s a probe, it could be taking samples, or collecting specimens. Maybe