Elvia stepped back from the maintenance hatch, taking hold of the disruptor hanging at her hip. “All right,” she said, looking over at T’Sil. “Open it.” The lieutenant lowered her scanner and raised her weapon.
T’Sil attached her own disruptor to its place on her hip, then moved over to the hatch. The rectangle of burnished, lightweight metal extended about as broad as her shoulders and half her height. She took hold of the handles on either side of the hatch, facing her reflection in its glossy surface. Her rounded cheekbones, delicate nose—turned slightly upward at its tip—and straight black hair seemed familiar, but the unconcealed look of fear in her eyes did not.
“To the side,” Elvia said, as though T’Sil might have been oblivious of the situation, opening up the entrance to the maintenance connector while staying in the line of fire. T’Sil said nothing, though, as she tightened her closed fists about the handles and pulled. The hatch came free with a pair of metallic clicks, and she swung her body around, flattening her back against the bulkhead. In front of her, Elvia glared into the access port, her disruptor a minatory sight at the end of her outstretched arm. T’Sil tensed as she anticipated the shrill scream of the weapon, waited for blue packets of lethal energy to streak past her and into the maintenance connector.
Instead, Lieutenant Elvia paced across the corridor to the open hatch. She peered inside for a few seconds, then dropped her disruptor to her side. “There’s no one here,” she said. As Elvia moved to hook her scanner and weapon to the waist of her uniform, T’Sil turned and set the hatch down on the decking, leaning it against the bulkhead. “Come with me,” Elvia said to T’Sil, then looked back over her shoulder at Valin. “Stand guard, Sublieutenant.” Valin nodded.
Elvia leaned against the bottom of the hatchway and swung a leg across it, then stooped and climbed inside. As the lieutenant disappeared from view, T’Sil glanced over at Valin, exchanging a look with the stout engineer—a slight shifting of the eyes, a slight raising of the eyebrows—that told her that he felt as uneasy as she did about this duty. Then she followed Elvia through the hatchway.
Inside the small, circular compartment, T’Sil saw the dozen or so equipment conduits accessible here—some high on the bulkhead, some low—and she realized just how many places for concealment Tomedoffered. Elvia moved to one of the conduits and peered into it. She had drawn her disruptor again, T’Sil saw, but she held it at her side, unprepared to fire even if she spied one of the intruders.
T’Sil looked around the enclosed space and saw no evidence that anybody—intruders or crew—had been here recently. “I’ll check the equipment,” she said as Elvia moved from one conduit to another. T’Sil turned to the bulkhead, bent down, and reached for the nearest access plate. Pulling it clear and putting it down on the deck, she studied the layout of circuitry revealed. Nothing seemed amiss, at least not from a visual inspection.
She replaced the panel and moved to the next. She’d examined four equipment configurations when Elvia said, “There’s nobody here.” A mixture of disappointment and relief seemed to lace her voice. T’Sil peered up at her to see that she had circled the compartment, obviously having checked each of the conduits. “What about there?” Elvia said, nodding toward the exposed circuitry.
“No indications of any tampering so far,” T’Sil said. “Not that I can see, anyway.”
“Complete a visual assessment,” Elvia said, waving one finger in a circular motion, clearly indicating all of the access panels within the connector. “If you don’t find anything, we’ll use scanners to do a thorough examination. I’ll assist after I contact the admiral.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” T’Sil said.
She sidled over to the next access plate as Elvia started through the hatchway. Before she’d made it back into the corridor, though, the stern voice of Admiral Vokar suddenly filled the maintenance connector. “Vokar to Elvia,”he said. Not long ago, T’Sil had heard him contact the lieutenant to inform her that the deterioration of the containment field had been slowed, a claim borne out when the predicted moment of its complete failure had come and gone without incident. And yet T’Sil now imagined that he would retract that information, letting the engineers know that they were once again just moments from death.
Still inside the compartment, Elvia sat on the threshold of the hatchway. She reached up and, with a touch, activated the communicator wrapped about her wrist. “This is Elvia,” she said. “I was about to contact you, Admiral. We’ve entered maintenance connector forty-seven and found it empty. We’ve also seen no evidence—”
“Lieutenant, we’ve located at least one of the intruders,”Vokar interrupted. “They’re in transporter room three, and the room has been secured. Proceed there immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” Elvia said, although she seemed less than enthusiastic about the order. “Do you want me to detain the intruders there, or elsewhere?”
“Detain?”Vokar asked, irritation plainly coloring his voice. “I want you tokill them.”
Elvia looked over at T’Sil, stricken. The lieutenant had paled, the yellowish tint of her flesh completely drained away. But she said, “Yes, Admiral.”
“Vokar out.”
Elvia remained motionless on the edge of the hatchway, her face now expressionless, though her dark eyes betrayed the distress she felt. T’Sil thought the lieutenant might talk to her about the orders she had just been given, but she only said, “Keep looking for sabotage. I’ll be back.” Elvia then left the maintenance connector, and T’Sil heard her tell Valin to continue to stand watch in the corridor.
With difficulty, T’Sil returned her attention to her task. She pulled open the next access panel and peered inside the bulkhead at the circuitry there. All appeared as it should, and she covered the equipment back up and started for the next panel. It was bad enough that the ship had been sabotaged and the crew endangered, but to learn that the saboteurs remained on board, and that she and the other two engineers would have to function as security, and even have to—
As she removed the next access panel, T’Sil saw a batch of fiber-optic lines jammed haphazardly inside. The lines clearly did not belong here. She traced a finger along them until she reached their ends, many of which had been broken off, and none of which connected to anything. T’Sil leaned into the panel for a closer look, and spotted fiber-optic fragments protruding from several pieces of equipment. The lines might not have been connected to anything right now, but it appeared that they had been—connected, and then ripped out.
T’Sil carefully grasped the fiber-optic bundle and pulled it toward her, searching for the other ends of the lines. She quickly found them, also not connected to anything, but their perfectly intact tips suggested that they might at some point have been linked to an external device. It occurred to her that some sort of system reconfiguration might have been executed from here. She read the identification markings on the equipment and saw that helm and navigation functions routed through this panel.
The significance of that pushed T’Sil immediately to her feet. Not only had singularity containment been damaged, but the intruders might well have taken control of the ship’s course and velocity. Needing a scanner and other equipment both to determine the extent of what had been done, and then to attempt to effect repairs, she crossed the maintenance connector and maneuvered through the hatchway. In the corridor, she raced up to Sublieutenant Valin, who stood several strides away.
“Alira,” he said, obviously concerned by her agitated manner. “Are you all right?”