Cybersong (21 page)

But then, the thing that had taken them in thrall, that had destroyed this ship, was of a higher order. It might be able to get them home even if this ship couldn’t. And so she should be looking for it, not at this ship’s systems, fascinating as they were. She even hated the thought of leaving them, of having to turn her attention elsewhere.

Especially to turn it to whatever had caught them here. Whether it was an AI or a biological being, it had overpowered every ship in this large ghost fleet. It must be capable of more, know more and many different forms of travel. Maybe it knew about folding space or traveling through time.

Whichever, B’Elanna Torres didn’t care. She just didn’t know when they’d have a better chance. And that no one else was capable of taking it.

“Commander,” she commed to Chakotay. “I think I’ve found something that could be of use in Voyager’s subsystems. We’ll have to ask them to beam over a few containment canisters, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Even with the interference, the canisters are pretty simple and indestructible.”

“Excellent, Ms. Torres,” Chakotay replied. “Anything else?”

“There’s nothing on this ship that’s going to get us back home.

Not that I can identify,” she admitted. “Except for whatever trapped us all in the first place. That thing might have a few ideas that we could use if I could find it and talk to it. And convince it to help us when all it seems to want to do is destroy whoever shows up here.”

Her voice got fiat and hard with anger as she went on.

Whatever had caught them was not an honorable enemy. It had invaded insidiously, never giving them a chance at a fair fight.

She wanted to take what she could from it, just to show it who was better.

“Don’t make assumptions too quickly,” Chakotay cautioned her, as he so often had. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.

So I’ll authorize your canisters while you get on with your investigation, but don’t assume what you’ll find before you go looking for it.”

“Yes, Commander,” she answered. Her heart wasn’t in complete agreement. She felt that she knew their enemy. It was all over its programming, carefully embedded in its actions. It was sneaky and insidious, but it was not simply a renegade. It was a thing that had never known how to be a decent member of a living species at all.

The canisters appeared. They must have used her comm badge to locate the power supply.

She examined the glowing projections carefully and touched the rough side of one. Nothing. Then she gently touched the pale green glow.

It changed to amber. She touched it again and it became blue. She didn’t know what those things meant, but Torres was excited.

Even if it wasn’t Federation technology, there were probably parts that could be used as spares. A few pieces she recognized and had already figured out how to adapt. That was one thing that had worried B’Elanna more than any other single element of being lost out here. There were no spare parts.

Though their replicator rations had not changed since the rationing system had first been put in place, B’Elanna Torres knew that if they did not find a new energy source soon, there would be no replicators at all. And no rations. She didn’t know how they’d live on just what they could scrounge in the Delta Quadrant. And she hadn’t known how she was going to keep delivering with the energy cells deteriorating.

Until now.

A good jolt would be enough for a couple of good high bursts off the cells and that was all she’d need to replicate the cell structures that were wearing out. Once the new elements were in place, the replicators would have their first charge of new energy since Voyager had left Deep Space Nine. With normal usage and not overstressed the way the entire ship had been when the Caretaker had wrenched them across the galaxy, the cells should function fairly reliably for a long time. Years.

First things first. If she wanted replicators working, the first thing she had to do was fill those canisters. She would simply have to leave the rest of the exploration for later. She turned her attention to the job. Not a very interesting one, to be sure, but something vital. And for some reason it made B’Elanna feel very good to know what she was going to bring home.

Chakotay found a niche far from B’Elanna Torres and Daphne Mandel.

Mandel was abrasive and suspicious, and he didn’t trust her. She might not be a saboteur, but she still wasn’t a person he wanted around. Not now. Not when he was going to try to understand this thing.

An AI, Harry Kim thought it was. In some strange way that made sense to Chakotay. And yet it was useless at the moment. To contact it he had to think of it as alive. Not merely thinking, but living and filled with spirit. If he were going to hunt it down in the spirit places, then he would have to accept it as part of spirit, too.

That was not so difficult. He had already touched it and it felt living to him. Strange, certainly, a mix of willful child and manipulative adult. Strange but not unreachable—not so long as his will remained firm.

Will had never been Chakotay’s problem.

Desire was. He had no desire to contact whatever the alien was again.

The two periods he had been linked with this being had been more than enough for his taste.

It felt—soiled. Childlike, yes, but there were unpleasant children.

Unpleasant people, he thought, as Daphne Mandel crossed in front of the alcove where he had stationed himself. She paid him no attention, and Chakotay was just as glad.

“Ensign,” he called to her. She stopped, turned around. It took her a moment to find him in the shadows. “What are you looking for?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral.

“A terminal I can use, sir,” she answered. “I can’t find anything in this mess. And Ms. Torres has indicated that I am to stay out of the main drive section.”

There was nothing wrong with what she said, but her tone was belligerent and sullen.

“The reports from the first away team indicate that these people were quite large, over two meters tall,” Chakotay told her. “The terminals are appropriately placed. I suggest that you look up.”

Her eyes instinctively went above his head and fixed. Chakotay turned.

There was what appeared to be a workstation, at least from the tricorder specs.

The workstation was not so different from any aboard Voyager, Chakotay thought. There was a single separate piece that he assumed was a built-in chair in front of a smooth area that certainly resembled a screen. Only instead of being dark and glassy it was whitish and opaque, like limestone. Around it and underneath were a forest of control projections, almost all of them dark. Two far overhead shone amber, but the rest seemed dead. The seat was well above his shoulder.

Or maybe it wasn’t a seat at all, he considered. Maybe the aliens stood and leaned.

“Just how do you expect me to get up there?” Mandel asked.

Chakotay’s patience for Ensign Mandel’s nonsense had been gone before she had shown up here. “I expect you to do what any Starfleet officer would do under similar circumstances,” he snapped. “I expect you to climb, Ensign Mandel. And I expect you to complete your assignment.

Or I will make certain that the appropriate disciplinary actions are taken when we return. Is that clear?”

“That is extremely clear, sir,” the ensign answered, her tone still abrasive. She turned away and started studying the workstation.

In fact, there were plenty of projections for her to climb, Chakotay noted. He wondered idly why she tried so hard to avoid them.

Because they could turn something on. The voice came back in his head, the child-voice that had struck him so deeply. It was there, it was back. And it wasn’t paying any attention to what he wanted at all.

“Where are you?” he asked it, trying to keep the habit of command out of his request. “What do you want from us? Why have you trapped us here?”

I’m lonely, the voice said. I want friends.

“Then why did you trap us and destroy our food?” Chakotay tried to reason as he would with a very young child.

To keep you here. Besides, I don’t need all of you. Most of you are boring I only want to keep the fun ones.

Oh, Chakotay thought. The fun ones.

This was not a child. This was possibly an AI, possibly some form of living alien, but which it was did not matter at the moment. What mattered most was that it was not entirely sane.

He could even understand and feel some compassion for it. All these years alone must have twisted its personality. No sentient being could endure that kind of isolation without damage.

I am not crazy, the thing yelled in his mind. I am not crazy. I am the Center, I am Control. Everyone obeys me. I am beyond what any of you living ones can understand. I reprogrammed your primitive computer in seconds, and it took you days before you even knew.

Chakotay could feel the megalomania behind the words and it chilled him.

And then he heard another voice, a familiar one, but one he could not place immediately. “I caught you, though. You thought you were so smart. Well, it was a good program. Elegant. I can appreciate it.

But I found it anyway, and I would have found it sooner if we hadn’t been checking for hardware damage first.”

Daphne Mandel. It was Mandel speaking/-thinking with the AI.

“Mandel,” he cautioned aloud. “Don’t antagonize it.” Her lousy attitude could get them all killed.

“You think you’re so good,” she continued to taunt it. “You can’t even get out of here. You couldn’t get to someplace more interesting. No, I think you aren’t half as smart and powerful as you think you are.”

I can do anything.

“Then do this,” Chakotay thought at the thing. “Send Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant where we came from. Prove to me that you can do this, and you’ll have the whole Federation, to say nothing of the Klingons and the Romulans and the Cardassians and the Dominion, to amuse you. But I don’t think that you’re able to do even that little thing, to send us back home.”

He could feel the alien try to respond. Crystals around him flickered as power moved through ancient paths and found some of them corroded and blocked.

I don’t want to send you anyplace. I want you to stay here. I was bored. This isn’t enough, but it’s better fun than I’ve had ever since these people came. They knew I was a god. They worshipped me. And when I told them to lie down and die they did.

This enemy’s contempt and arrogance made him think of the other times and other enemies—the Cardassians. But he had to remain focused on the now, on this particular adversary. Because if he closed his mind, it would win. His quarry would elude him and steal the prize.

He didn’t know what the prize was, what any of it meant, only that all of the few and broken words he knew in the old language came back to him. He had been thinking in that language, as much as he could. He even amazed himself by how much he could dredge up under extreme pressure, words from a lullaby he remembered his grandmother singing, and the names of different birds. And he could feel the anger growing in the AI, pressing in around him.

Anger and frustration. I don’t understand your words, it screamed in his mind. I know more about language analysis than any being living I have assimilated seven hundred forty-two languages. I could read your computer in minutes, take apart your operating system almost as soon as I contacted it. You cannot think so that I cannot understand. You are not permitted.

Do you hear me?

Chakotay smiled. He continued to think in the language of his grandfathers, the language that most specialists said was one of the most difficult to learn in the galaxy. A language scholars said could not be learned past childhood because the classification systems were both complex and alien to every technological race.

He didn’t know much of it at all, but at least the prayers he had learned he could recite. The one for calling and speaking to the spirit world, the one that he used to call to the shade of his father, the prayer of thanksgiving for clear water and fresh food, the prayer for the family.

Those words were part of him, they were powerful and sacred besides being something the alien AI couldn’t penetrate.

Chakotay felt stronger, more full, more in contact with everything important, as he held the ancient prayers in his mind.

“Well, if you are so smart, then you should be able to understand it, shouldn’t you?” he asked provocatively.

It’s not a real language. I could understand a real language.

It’s made up so that you can make me think that you’ve fooled me, but I know better.

Chakotay had to work not to laugh. This was their great enemy.

The emotional maturity of a spoiled brat with the computational power as large as anything built by the Federation.

“Stop baiting it.”

Daphne Mandel’s voice came clear and protective through whatever strange telepathic link the AI had created.

“Do not give me orders, Ms. Mandel,” Chakotay told her icily.

“I know more about this being than you ever will,” Mandel retorted.

“It is sensitive. It has never encountered a language, either natural or computer, that it could not analyze and translate in nanoseconds.

You’re frustrating it when you should be making diplomatic overtures.

What about your responsibility for first contact and all of that?”

“This is not a first contact situation. This being seems not to be a natural intelligence but an artificial one. It is merely a technological product. It does not have a soul.”

“Oh, and you’re the great expert on spiritual matters,” Mandel sneered.

“Everyone goes to you with all your superior training and all, as if the rest of us didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

But I don’t have a soul, the AI protested soundly. I have been examined, and no race has thought I was alive. I do not have the vulnerabilities of a living creature. I do not fear mortality.

I am not subject to it. The entire spiritual realm was created by mortals of short life spans who needed reassurance that their lives were in fact eternal when it is obvious they are not. I have seen biological beings die. They deteriorate, but there is nothing lost there. Nothing leaves. I have done experiments, I have even been a god.