“Twice?”Garrett leaned over Bulast’s shoulder and stared at his communications display. “Are you sure?”
“There’s no mistake, Captain,” said Bulast. “See, these time indices, here and here? Two distinct signals: a blip on and then off, and now one that’s continuous.”
“Oh, good,” said Stern, who’d been hovering around Garrett’s command chair for the last hour. “Now we’ve got alarms. We lose Halak’s transponder signal in all that radioactive slush out there, but we get alarms.”
Garrett ignored her. “So you’re saying it’s like a door.”
Bulast nodded. “Like a door that opened and closed. Twice. Only the second time, someone left it open.”
“Careless,” said Stern.
“Or maybe,” said Bat-Levi, who’d been studying the same signal at her station, “maybe it’s not that the door’s been left open,but that the alarm hasn’t properly been turned on, or off, to begin with. Captain, I remember my parents had an alarm for their house. Even if your retinal scan matched, the thing let off a little bleep. It was a redundant system. Retinal scan outside, voice print inside. But here was the real catch. If someone, an intruder, were to somehow fake the retinal scan but made a mistake along the way—bungled the match before getting it right, let’s say—the system let him in. But then it sent out a silent alarm, and the alarm stayed on.”
“So as not to alert the intruder.” Garrett looked over at Bulast. “Could that be it? Is it a distress call?”
“Captain, there’s no way of knowing. The first signal reads just like the commander said, as if someone opened the door, maybe tripped an alarm doing it but then disarmedit. Closed the door correctly, maybe, I don’t know. The second reads as if they didn’t bother closing it, or maybe didn’t know they had to. But here’s the other thing that’s peculiar. That signal reads like a general distress only the band is narrow, closer to infrared. So the technology is ancient. Mid-twenty-first century stuff.”
“Damn.” Sighing, Garrett resumed her pacing. She’d been pacing for two hours, too keyed up to sit in her command chair. Probably wearing a groove in the deck.“Damn, why did this have to happen now?”
“Captain,” said Glemoor, “in terms of probabilistic…”
“I think that was an expression, Glemoor,” said Stern. To Garrett: “What do you want to do?”
“What I wantand what I haveto do might be mutually exclusive. What about Halak? Any luck getting his signal back?”
“No,” said Bulast. “We lost him as soon as the T’Poldropped out of warp.”
“But we’ve still got the T’Pol.”
“Not really,” said Glemoor. “We’ve picked up remnants of a warp signature consistent with a Vulcan warpshuttle in this sector. But those remnants are decaying fast in the strong magnetic field of that binary star system out there. Old or new, I have no way of knowing. They could have left this sector and we wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“But they were heading in this general direction,” Stern pointed out. “And there’s nothing leading awayfrom here. So they’re still around.”
“Unless the ship backtracked and exited the system at a point too distant for us to see, perhaps subtending its signal behind the neutron star. If the T’Polelected to swing close to the neutron star, any warp signature would have been distorted, almost like a cloaking device.”
“Couldthe alarm be coming from Halak?” asked Stern.
Bulast spoke up. “Negative on that, not unless he’s jury-rigged something. If he has, you’d assume he’d try to target us, not just blare a general distress.”
“Maybe he didn’t have a choice,” said Stern.
“And risk alerting the Cardassians?” said Garrett. She ran a hand over her forehead. “I don’t think so. And speaking of Cardassians, any sign of them?”
“Not yet,” said Bat-Levi. She didn’t say that might change in the very near future. She didn’t have to.
“What about origination point?” Garrett looked over at Glemoor who was seated at his console to Castillo’s left. “Where’s that alarm coming from?”
“Origination point of the propagation wave appears to be the fourth planet, Captain. I read power emanations and a periodicity that’s different from the general background wash of gamma rays from that neutron star.”
“What type of power is it?”
“That is what is so unusual, Captain. I wasn’t certain of my findings initially, but Commander Bat-Levi has verified. There are actually two signatures: one is something very close to fusion power. But the other is neither nuclear nor thermal. It is not electromagnetic, but it appears to be a highly charged neuromagnetic plasma interface.”
“Neuromagnetic?” Garrett glanced over at Stern, who only shook her head. “You’re saying brain waves?”
“In a manner of speaking. It’s more like a plasma cloud of ionized particles, only in this instance the driving force is neuromagnetic, and not radioactive. Both emanate from deep beneath the planet’s surface. And there’s something else.”
“What? Another power source?”
“Not exactly.” The Naxeran screwed up his face in a way that reminded Garrett of an inquisitive cat. “There’s a biosphere, Captain. That is, I believe there is. We’re still at the extreme limits of sensors.”
“A biosphere?” Garrett was at Glemoor’s station in two strides. “Are there life signs? Did theysend the signal?”
“Negative. The alarm appears to have originated underground.”
“Near that neuromagnetic power source?” And when Glemoor nodded, Garrett continued, “What about ships?”
“At this distance, I can not say for certain if there are ships. Certainly, there are none orbiting the planet. The planet does possess two moons, however.”
“So a ship could hiding behind one.”
“That is a possibility. With all the radiation in the area, it is also just as possible that there is a ship we cannot see.”
Bat-Levi said, “Captain, we have to assume that the alarm’s genuine until we know otherwise. The T’Polcould be anywhere, and we have no way of knowing exactly where, or whether she’s moved off. But distress calls take precedence.”
“Rachel,” said Stern, “you can’t…”
“Doctor,” said Garrett, in a peremptory tone that brooked no debate. “Much as I might like it to be otherwise, Bat-Levi’s right. If that’s a distress call, we have to answer.”
Stern was undeterred. “And if it isn’t? What if it’s some old hunk of junk that’s malfunctioned, or something? You going to gamble Halak’s life on a lousy machine?”
“We don’t know that it isjunk, and we don’t have the luxury of assuming anything.” Garrett blew out a long sigh. “All right, everyone, listen up. This is what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 32
Air.Kaldarren jogged down the tunnel, his helmet banging his right thigh. The air was warm but smelled old and was thick with decay. Kaldarren saw light just ahead. He squinted at his tricorder. Reading an entryway, and this tunnel’s been carved, it’s artificial, there’s plaster on the stone, and that long tunnel to the west, those branch points, this has to be atomb…
For an instant—when he turned into the main burial chamber, with its vaulted ceiling, and saw the dead king and all that wealth spilling over the stone floor and the fabulous mural—Kaldarren forgot everything: Chen-Mai, the portal. Even Jase. Kaldarren let out his breath in a sigh of wonder. It was all here. He’d been right. A xenoarchaeologist’s dream, the find of a lifetime. And the writing on the walls: Hebitian, but with archaic variations different from the script he’d seen, the one officially touted by the Cardassians as proof positive of their descent from the ancient race. But the Hebitians had beenhere, Kaldarren knew now. The Hebitians had been on thisplanet, thousands of years ago.