"Patrol squadrons in the area have been alerted to look out for the Arcturus Sunfire," Surella continues. From the image on the viewscreen, it looks like she's on the bridge of the Beauregard... I don't think Starfleet regs will let her claim it as a prize, though. "We have downloaded all surviving records from the Beauregard's logs... I am inclined, frankly, to let Captain Quon and the rest of her band of inept pirates go, at this point."
"Oh?" I look at her quizzically.
"Dupes of this Premaratne, nothing more. And I have already had polite inquiries from the Symbiosis Commission." Surella pulls a face. "These joined Trills have a formidable network, and if we hold on to Quon, we will gain additional trouble and inconvenience, and nothing more. I intend to tow her to Starbase 114 and then release her and her crew."
"Tow her? Is her ship too damaged?"
"I am sure it can be repaired, eventually," says Surella, and shrugs. "I am equally sure that it is not our problem. Captain Quon has played with fire, and been duly burned. Her friends amongst the symbiotes can attend to her problems."
"I suppose that's sensible. I'd rather not have the Symbiosis Commission too mad at us. Not when we have to dig into the background of a multi-billionaire as well."
"Yes, sir. I concur. Mr. Vansittaert's arrival is entirely too opportune. If we can take Premaratne and establish a link between them -"
"We'd be in a position to accuse a billionaire philanthropist of attacking Orion research and commercial interests. I'm not sure that's a comfortable position either, but - well, we need to know." I sigh. "You've got our list of possible locations, see if you can track Arcturus Sunfire and Premaratne at one of them."
"I will try, sir. But, of course, we went to the most probable choice first -"
"I understand. We have more data now, partly from Vansittaert - I'll see if we can narrow the search area down a bit. Even so, I know it's a big job. Still. Carry on, Captain Surella."
"Yes, sir. Amphicyon out."
The screen goes blank. I sigh, and scratch behind my ear with my claw. Things are - not right. There is a pulsing pressure behind my eyes, like the premonition of a thunderstorm, or a headache. I can't shake a feeling that something is wrong, somewhere.
I stand up, pick up a PADD, and make my way out of the ready room and down the corridor to Conference Room One. We've partitioned some of the empty space on the Madagascar, creating something a bit more like a standard Starfleet interior. Marya Kothe, Sumal Jetuz and Pearl are waiting for me when I walk in. Around them, holo-displays and screens glow with the data and the documents provided by Vansittaert.
"All right," I say, without preamble, "is any of this making any sense to anyone?"
"Arguably," says Sumal. "The data seems to be consistent with, ah, Professor Karabadian's triaxial hypothesis."
"Uh-huh." The triaxial hypothesis is a new one on me. Essentially, it proposes that there is no unified theory that will encompass classical quantum gravity, subspace, and the highly unpredictable psionic field. "Karabadian - have you looked into his credentials, then?"
"The University of Spitak is mostly an online creation," says Sumal. "There is an educational establishment at that location - the place was tectonically stabilized in the twenty-second century - but it is little more than an accommodation address. The University itself holds third-class accreditation in psionic studies from the Vulcan Science Academy."
The VSA dishes out provisional third-class accreditation to any institution making a genuine attempt to study psionics, on the grounds that even crackpots can turn up useful data sometimes. "OK," I say, "so Karabadian is, at best, an enthusiastic amateur.... What interests me is that T'Shal is taking the triaxial hypothesis stuff seriously. I've read some of her papers on subspace field integration, and she, at least, is a genuine scientist."
"This would suggest that Karabadian might be on the right track," says Pearl.
"Or that Vansittaert thinks he is, and T'Shal doesn't want to contradict him," I mutter. "This is the problem with billionaires like him... eventually, they surround themselves with people who won't say no to them. Like those creepy holographic yes-men. When someone disagrees with them, they can just fire them and get someone who won't... even if they're honest, people still feel too nervous to contradict them. So they get to believing all their ideas are good ones, that they can do anything.... Sometimes they decide to do the darnedest things, and it's not easy to stop them. What was the name of that corrupt incompetent plutocrat who took over North America one time?"
"Uh, which one, sir?" asks Marya.
"I guess it's not important." I sigh. "The thing is, Vansittaert's science can't be trusted. It's skewed towards getting the results he wants. Not to mention his view of the consequences.... Ordinary replicators are bad enough, sometimes, never mind Vansittaert's magic wishing machines. Remember the Talsevia incident?"
"I don't believe I do, sir," says Pearl.
"Oh. Yes, you wouldn't have had to sit through all the rudimentary 'Introduction to the Prime Directive' stuff at the Academy.... There was a war brewing between Talsevia III and the Strator system, back in the twenty-two-hundreds. The Stratorians had a rigid militaristic totalitarian state, but the Talsevians had replicator technology."
"So the Talsevians managed to produce more weapons?" Pearl asks.
"Hardly. They just sent in a squadron on a low-atmospheric pass, randomly transported twenty thousand self-contained replicator units to the surface of Strator, and sat back and waited for the Stratorian culture to implode. It's the reason Talsevia isn't part of the Federation, even today. Can't trust a culture that'll do something like that." I shake my head. "And Vansittaert's machine would probably do something like that to the Federation. Get anything you want, just by wanting it? Can you imagine how many different ways that might go wrong?"
"I'd rather not, sir," says Pearl. "Though it all seems predicated on Vansittaert's team's work being right, and -" She shakes her head, in a very human gesture. "I'm not trained or programmed for this sort of science, sir. I can't make any consistent sense out of these data sets."
The pressure behind my eyes seems worse, now. "I know. There's a whole lot of extrapolation, mostly from Shemosh, about how a Sokek object will behave under Karabadian's sets of stimuli. And I haven't been able to make any sense of it, either."
"I'm not sure Vansittaert and his team have all the data they need, anyway," says Marya. She touches a console, and an image of the Andrew Carnegie forms in the air. "That ship's been modified. Specifically, this mission pod here." Her fingers brush the console again, and a roughly spherical shape near the stern of the ship begins to pulse with light. "It's almost the same size as the hole in the centre of GO4704, and it's a compatible shape, and I think it's detachable. Like they were planning to drop it into the middle of the anomaly, and see what it's like from the inside."
"Inside a Sokek object," I say, and then, "Wait."
They wait. The pressure in my head is a pain, now, without a doubt, but I concentrate, try to push through it.
"GO4704 is a toroid," I say, eventually.
"Yes, sir?" Sumal sounds doubtful.
"A contorted toroid, but, topologically, a doughnut shape. Once it's smoothed out. But -" I take a deep breath. It worries me, too, that it's hard to think about these things. "Should be obvious. Right under our noses. What's a Sokek object?" Before anyone answers, I plough on. "Hawking hypothesized that a black hole singularity would vanish in a burst of radiation once the evaporative process brought it to zero mass. Sokek explored the hypothesis that the singularity would remain.... But a Sokek object is a black hole, regardless. What shape is a black hole? The gravitational force overrides everything. It's spherical. It can only be spherical." My voice is getting sharper and clearer, now. "And a sphere is distinct, topologically, from a torus. GO4704 can't be a Sokek object, it's the wrong shape."
"But -" Sumal looks blank. "Professor T'Shal must surely have seen this. Mustn't she?"
"But she hasn't. And I nearly didn't. All of this data - all Vansittaert's team's work - it's all got to be wrong. Founded on a wrong assumption. But why didn't they spot it?" I gaze in bewilderment at the screens full of graphs, tables, equations -
"Something is very wrong here."
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