Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Twelve
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
Crusher met him at the sickbay doors with a padd in one hand and the expression of a woman who had spent the better part of an hour disagreeing with a patient and had decided, for the moment, to let him win.
"He's dehydrated, exhausted, and he's gone twelve hours in a sealed chamber with a sound that would have broken most people in half that time." Beverly Crusher lowered her voice. "I'd like you to let me keep him overnight. But he's asked to speak to you, Jean-Luc, and I think you should let him."
"Is he lucid?"
"More than he has any right to be." She gave him a short look. "His hearing is normal. His cochlear response is normal. There's nothing wrong with his ears at all. It's the rest of him I'm worried about. He keeps saying it stopped."
"Stopped."
"When Vash pulled the Key. He says the sound stopped for about two seconds. Then it started again in a different key." Crusher shook her head. "I don't know what to do with that."
"Neither do I," Picard said. "Thank you, Beverly."
Varga lay propped against two pillows in the nearest biobed, the foil blanket replaced by a hospital one, a cup of water held in both hands. He looked younger than he had on the skimmer's deck. A stubble of dark hair shadowed his jaw, and his eyes had lost some of their glassy rawness, but they went to the door the moment Picard came in and did not leave his face.
"Captain." His voice was dry as paper. "Thank you for coming."
"Mr. Varga. I am glad you are alive."
"Dev isn't."
"No." Picard drew up a chair. "Commander Worf has arranged to return his body to his family. I will see to it personally."
Varga's jaw worked. He looked down at the cup. "He had a daughter. She's four."
Picard was silent. He had found over the years that sometimes the kindest thing a man could do was wait.
"They told us it was a survey job," Varga said at last. "Maintenance. Check the buoys, clear the silt, confirm the seals. The Recovery Office had filed on the reef sixteen days before, and they needed two divers to establish a presence. That was all. Four thousand credits each, plus a bonus if we got the door open." His mouth twisted. "That's what they call it. A bonus. If you get the thing open."
"Who did you deal with?"
"A handler. Just a voice. Office Nine, they called it. Every Recovery Office has a number. I've worked for three." He finally met Picard's eyes. "I never heard a name above the handler's. They say the Director's a Ferengi, but I couldn't swear to it."
"What else did the handler tell you?"
"Nothing." Varga shook his head. "That's what I'm trying to say. They told us nothing. They had us wear a transmitter on the rebreather, for the status bursts. We were supposed to send one at every slack water. That's all I know. One burst every tide, to a relay on the buoy." He swallowed. "I sent the first one. Before we went in. I don't know whether the second ever went out."
"Where is the transmitter now?"
"On my rig. Your people took it."
"I am grateful." Picard stood. "Mr. Varga, you have my word that you will not be sent back. You will be placed under Starfleet protection. You are a witness, and you are in no danger from me."
"Captain." The man's voice cracked. "They're going to come looking for us."
"Yes," Picard said. "I expect they are."
"It is not a status transmitter," Data said.
The science lab's main display carried a long, dense scroll of symbols in three colors. Data stood at the console with his hands at his sides, reading the scroll the way a man reads a neatly drawn and deeply unpleasant map. Beside him, La Forge had removed his visor to rub the bridge of his nose. Vash sat on the edge of the long table, still in her damp dive rig, a blanket around her shoulders that she had not asked for. Dara stood at the far end, arms folded, her eyes on the display and nowhere else.
"It does transmit position," Data said. "At each tide, it sent a burst to the buoy relay, which routed it to a subspace channel registered to a Vantir brokerage. But the transmitter also carries a secondary function. It monitors the drift radius of the local constants and transmits that figure, to four decimal places, at the same interval."
"It measures the anomaly," Picard said.
"Yes, Captain. The Consortium placed a sensor array inside the buoy, calibrated to the same tolerances as our own. The transmitter relays its readings." Data touched the console. "I have examined the relay's routing. The figure is forwarded to a second account. A financial one."
A window opened beside the scroll. A long table of numbers, bright in the dim lab. Picard studied it, and did not at first understand, and then did.
"Zone Expansion Notes," Data read. "Forty-one outstanding contracts, issued by three brokerage accounts linked to the Vantir Trade Consortium, purchased by an unregistered consortium of investors I have not been able to identify. Each contract is indexed to the drift radius at a named coordinate. Doria Minor. Ke'Thara. Nine others I can identify, from the sectors listed." He paused. "The contracts pay on growth. The larger the drift radius at the measured coordinate, the higher the payout. The figure is capped at an unstated ceiling. The notes were purchased, on average, eleven months ago."
The silence in the lab was hushed.
"Eleven months," Vash said.
"Yes."
"They knew," she said. "They knew this was coming eleven months before I broke into that room."
"They knew something was coming." Picard kept his voice level. "I doubt they knew what. But someone with access to the Makers' work was confident enough to sell it."
"They are being paid for the catastrophe," La Forge said. He sounded, for the first time since Picard had known him, shocked. "Every centimeter the drift grows is money. And they've got a sensor sitting next to every one of these things, reading it out to the penny."
"Which is why," Vash said slowly, "they put divers into the dome with a cutter."
"Indeed." Data's head tilted. "I believe the Recovery Offices were not sent to secure the sites. They were sent to open them."
Picard felt the thing settle in his chest, cold and dense, that he had felt only a few times in a long career. The recognition of a problem larger than the one he had been handed, and of people who had seen it coming and had chosen, for a fee, to help it along.
"Mister Data. The Key."
"Yes, Captain."
They set it on the lab's central bench in a containment cradle, its rings hanging in their own small gravity field. The silver fracture down its flank had spread in the last hours into a web as fine as frost. It was quiet. It gave off no heat. Picard found he could not look at it for long.
"I've mapped the ring pattern," Data said. "The Key is a lattice of seven nested rings, each one a separate phrase of the score Ms. Liang transcribed. The configuration is not random. When the rings are rotated to their intended positions, they form a coordinate set." He paused. "The next site is Cirrus Station. A derelict orbital platform, forty hours' travel at high warp."
"Forty hours." La Forge checked a figure. "That's most of our clock."
"Yes. The Key's function, however, remains unresolved." Data turned to the lab's central display, where a schematic of the containment bay two decks below glowed in soft blue. The orb sat in its small field at the center, sphere within sphere. "I propose an experiment. If the Key is a component of the orb's mechanism, we may observe a change in the orb's behavior when the two are brought into proximity."
"It could be dangerous," Picard said.
"It could be very informative."
"I'd like to see the numbers first."
La Forge ran the test on a scaled model. The Key's cradle moved down the conduit between the two rooms, a slow, cautious crawl, and Picard watched the display with his hands clasped behind his back. At thirty meters, the tone deepened. At twenty, the drift-radius reading ticked upward by a fraction of a percent. At ten meters it had climbed to two point one percent above baseline, and the tone in the lab had risen to a chord. Not one note but two, close together, each slightly flat against the other.
"Stop," Picard said.
La Forge stopped it. The reading hung there, trembling.
"That's an accelerant," La Forge said quietly. "Sir, that's the same signature we've been seeing from the orb, only faster. The Key's feeding it."
"It's damaged." Dara had stepped forward. Her voice was quiet and very clear. "The crack is distorting the reading. You can't judge what it does by what it does broken. If anything, I think the two ring patterns are trying to harmonize. The orb's frequency is pulling the Key toward its own. You're measuring the strain, not the function."
"The drift increased," La Forge said.
"Yes. As any system would, when you force two mismatched resonators together." She turned to Picard, and there was nothing in her face but earnest, exhausted reason. "Captain, I'm not suggesting we bring them closer. I'm suggesting we don't draw conclusions from a cracked part. If it's a brake, it's a brake that's been ruined. If it's an accelerant, it's one we've already weakened. Either way, what we have is a fragment. We need the other Keys before we know what any of them are for."
It was a good argument. It was, Picard thought, exactly the argument he would have made himself, in the same tone, with the same care. He realized that he was nodding. He realized that his hands, clasped behind him, had begun to relax.
He stopped nodding.
"That is a reasonable position, Ms. Liang," he said. "I will consider it. Mister La Forge, hold the Key where it is for now. I would like to know whether the reading keeps climbing."
"Aye, sir."
He watched Dara nod and step back. He watched her glance at Vash, who was looking at Dara with a puzzled, tired loyalty. He filed the moment, carefully, in the place where he now kept his impressions of her, and was aware that the file had grown thicker than he liked.
Geordi found her in Cargo Bay Four an hour later, standing at the edge of the containment field with a cold cup of coffee in both hands and the expression of a woman who had been looking at something for too long to see it.
The bay had been remade. Two decks of cargo had been stripped to the frame, the old tie-downs cut away, and the whole volume wrapped in a lattice of dampers that hummed like a hive. At the center, in a sphere of faint blue field twelve meters across, the orb hung in its own small night. It was dark. It gave off no light. But the air around it moved, very slightly, like air above a road in summer.
"Don't stand that close," Geordi said. "Not that I think it'll hurt you. I just don't think it likes being stared at."
"Does it like anything?"
"I'll tell you when I find out." He came up beside her and set a padd on a crate. He had taken off his visor, and was turning it over in one hand, and without it his eyes were a pale, tired, human brown, mildly unfocused. "I wanted to show you something. I haven't shown anybody. I'm not sure it counts as a finding."
"Is it going to make me feel worse?"
"I don't know yet. You tell me."
He put the visor back on. She watched his face change, the small settling of a man who has stopped looking and begun to see.
"Okay," Geordi said. "You know what I do, mostly. People think it's the engines. It's not. It's listening. Fifteen years on this ship, I've listened to a warp core the way a mechanic listens to a car. I know its moods. I know what it sounds like when it's happy, when it's sick, when it's lying to me." He nodded at the field. "That thing's not lying. It's not anything. It's just in a different key than I'm used to. The visor picks it up as light. All of it. Every ripple in the field comes through as color and motion."
"What does it look like?"
"A heartbeat. Sort of. A pulse, running out in rings. That's what the others see on the scopes." He tilted his head. "But if you go very fine, if you filter out everything bigger than a few hundred microns and everything faster than a hundredth of a second, there's something underneath. It's tiny. It's at the very edge of what the visor can resolve. I've looked at it eleven times and I keep telling myself it's noise."
"Show me."
"I can't show you. That's the problem. You can't see it on a scope. You'd have to be wearing my head." He grimaced. "I'll describe it. It's a spiral. It runs out from the center, very slowly, the way a wave runs out from a stone. But it doesn't stay a spiral. Halfway out, it turns back on itself. And inside the turn, there's a smaller spiral. And inside that, a smaller one. It's like a pattern with a pattern in it."
Vash had stopped breathing. She was aware of her own pulse in her fingertips.
"It repeats?" she said.
"Every time. Same shape. Same rate. I thought it was a calibration artifact. The visor's got a feedback loop in the old cortical interface, it's famous for throwing up ghosts. But I ran it on three different units, and a tricorder, and I got the same thing." He shook his head. "I logged it as instrumental. I've been feeling guilty for six hours."
"Geordi."
"Yeah?"
"Say that last part again."
"A pattern with a pattern in it." Geordi studied her face. "You've seen something like it."
"I don't know." She frowned. It was there at the edge of her mind, like a word on the tip of the tongue, and when she turned to look at it, it slid away. "A pattern in a pattern. It reminds me of something. I can't think what."
"Well, I'm not going to say it's anything."
"No."
"I'm going to say it's weird that it's the same shape every time." He raised an eyebrow, with the faint dry humor of a man who has been awake for thirty hours. "I'm also going to say that if it turns out I spent six hours feeling guilty about something that mattered, I'm going to want a lot of credit."
"You'll have it."
"Good." He took off the visor again and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'll write it up properly. Not as noise. As an observation, with a question mark."
"Don't lose it," Vash said.
Worf found him on the bridge an hour later.
The Enterprise had broken orbit. The reef was a white smear on the aft viewscreen, dwindling behind them. Riker, in the command chair, looked over his shoulder as the Klingon crossed the bridge and held out a padd.
"Captain. Data has found something."
"Go ahead."
"On the passive scans, as we left the system." Worf's voice was flat, which meant it was serious. "A gravitational shadow. Faint. At the outer edge, two hundred thousand kilometers aft, matching our course."
"A ship?"
"There is no ship. There is no hull, no drive signature, no emission of any kind." Worf's mouth set. "But the shadow moves as a ship moves, and it carries a mass of approximately six thousand tons. Mister Data believes it is a cloaked vessel. Its cloak is imperfect. The drift from the orb's field has made it visible."
"Romulan," Riker said.
"It is the only power with a cloak of that class within fifty light-years." Worf handed over the padd. "Data's logs show the same shadow at the edge of our scans at Doria Minor. We did not know to look."
Picard looked at the display. A small, gray, barely perceptible smudge against the starfield, keeping pace at the very edge of sensor range. Not close enough to threaten. Close enough to watch.
He thought of Sorokin, and the five names in her room. He thought of a leak that had reached a Ferengi brokerage and a mercenary captain and now, apparently, the Empire. He thought of a woman in a wetsuit who had sung a dead language into a wall and come out smiling.
"Number One," he said. "Plot us a course for Cirrus Station. Maximum warp."
"Aye, sir." Riker turned to the helm. "And our friend?"
"Let him follow," Picard said. "For now, I would like to know who else is listening."