Quinn sat in the Dulcinea’s pilot’s seat, sipped from his mug of reconstituted orange juice, and watched Bridy backpedal into the cockpit. She was paying out the ship’s last few meters of backup optronic cable from a spindle. “That ought to do it,” she said, holding the cable in one hand and casting aside the empty spool.
“Do I even want to know what system you’ve hijacked now?”
Bridy picked up a data slate and reviewed a schematic of the ship’s internal command-and-control network. “The escape pod, I think.”
“Good thinking. Can’t imagine why we’d ever need to use that.”
She tossed the data slate into his lap. “Just walk me through the patch-in.”
He set down his orange juice, picked up the tablet, and enlarged a section of the schematic. “I thought you could do this stuff in your sleep.”
“On systems I know, sure. But these Nalori circuit relays make no sense to me.” Still clutching the cable, she lay down on her back and shimmied through an opening beneath the cockpit’s operations console. “Help me find the transporter controls’ second auxiliary data port.”
“The transporter? Why the hell are we patching into that?”
“We’re just borrowing its logic processor. Now, where’s the port?”
He tapped at the interactive schematic. “Look for the second row of chips perpendicular to the aft end of the panel. There’s a sequence of three red chips, five green chips, and four white chips.”
“I see it.”
“Directly forward of the center green chip.”
“Got it. Patching in now.”
His inner pessimist expected something to short out, catch fire, or explode. At the very least, he expected the lights to flicker and the consoles to go dark. To his relief and surprise, nothing seemed to change as Bridy connected the cable.
She wriggled back out from under the console and stood up. “So far, so good.” She keyed some commands into the operations console. “Five-by-five.”
“All right. Now what?”
“We analyze the data you recovered on that Klingon memory card.” She smiled. “Nicely done, by the way.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m sending Starfleet a bill as soon as we get back.”
“Trust me, they’ll call it money well spent.” She tapped a key on the sensor console. “Let’s see what we have.”
Numbers, mathematical formulas, and bizarre alien symbols Quinn didn’t recognize flooded across several display screens inside the cockpit. The data blurred past, a torrent of information too fast for him to comprehend.
“Whatever we’ve got,” Bridy said, “there’s a lot of it.” She entered more commands on the sensor console. “Let’s apply a few filters. See if we can break this into pieces small enough to study.” Seconds later, the tempest of digits on the screen thinned and slowed. Bridy nodded. “There we go.” Then she scowled. “That’s weird. These are gravimetric waves accelerated by subspatial lensing, but there’s a subspace signal embedded in one of their harmonic subfrequencies.”
“You lost me right after ‘weird.’ Can you tell me in simple English what any of that actually means?”
Bridy looked perplexed. “Um . . . no, I can’t.”
“So, where does that leave us?”
“We could wait for Endeavour to get here and then hand it over to them.”
“And give the Klingons a chance to track us down? No, thanks.”
She sighed. “Good point. The sooner we unravel this, the better.”
He got up and shouldered past her to get a better look at the display. “Can you freeze it a second?” Bridy halted the steady scroll, and Quinn studied the digits and symbols. There was a pattern to it, and it felt familiar to him, though he wasn’t immediately sure why. Several seconds passed while he gazed at the screen, mesmerized by its blizzard of raw intel and lost in his own thoughts.
Then it became clear.
“These are coordinates.” He pointed out strings of numbers. “Look. See how close these sets are? Every eighteen digits, three sets of six.” Entering commands on the console, he continued. “This ain’t meant to be read like a book. This is more of a paint-by-numbers kind of thing.” Keying in the final series of commands, he added, “Your hidden message is software for drawing a starmap.”
The Dulcinea’s astrocartographic matrix engaged and parsed the data in seconds. Quinn reconfigured it to present a graphical representation on the cockpit’s main status monitor. A funnel-like shape appeared on the screen, its throat narrowing rapidly beyond the mouth’s event horizon and then spiraling in tight coils around its central axis as it vanished into an apparent singularity.
Bridy cocked her head at an angle. “A black hole?”
“Don’t think so. Not strong enough, and it’s givin’ off the wrong kinds of radiation. But it’s a gravity well, for damn sure.”
Her eyes widened. “A wormhole!”
“That’d be my guess.”
“No idea.”
“What’s its position?”
“Don’t know that, either. But I think I know how to find out.” Quinn keyed new search factors into the Dulcinea’s sensor matrix. “A wormhole that big’s gonna bend space-time for at least half a light-year. If we search for small, deep-space objects with known trajectories in the sector where the Treana got damaged, we can scan for any that aren’t where they ought to be.”
“And then triangulate the cause of their deviations.”
“You got it, darlin’.” The results of the sensor sweep took shape on his display. He superimposed a number of computer animations detailing the altered vectors of a handful of rogue planetoids, junked satellites, and other small objects that had been previously charted by Starfleet. Seconds later, the computer animation finished plotting the sources of the distorted paths, and more than half a dozen lines intersected at a single coordinate.
Quinn settled into his pilot’s chair and folded his hands behind his head as he reclined. “X marks the spot.”
Bridy shot him a mild glare of teasing reproach. “Show-off.”
“It’s why you keep me around, sweetheart.”
She smiled, took his hand, and led him out of the cockpit. “It’s one reason.”