Star Trek: Oaths (Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers) by Glenn Hauman

Author:Glenn Hauman [Hauman, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2002-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

5

The doors to sickbay opened, and Fabian poked his head in. He saw that Dr. Lense was running between tables and screens and cultures, with Emmett following behind trying to keep up, but moving slowly and jerkily, like an internal motor was misfiring. “Hi, Doc. Can I play through, or is this a bad time?”

“Is there any way in which this could be construed as a good time, Fabian?”

“Hey, you’ve still got your health …” Fabian winced at his own stupid comment.

“Shut up. What do you need?”

“I need to put monitoring taps on Emmett’s program. I’m worried about the load on his system, what with his database being accessed by a thousand different people. The degradation could get bad.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed a lag in his performance too. Isn’t there anything that can be done about that?”

“Not yet. The problem is the constant file synching, and Emmett just wasn’t designed for it. In theory, the main computers on the planet are better equipped, but they’re short-handed—”

“Yes, yes. Do whatever you have to. Take processing power from all the other systems; we’re the only ones up here and what we’re doing is more important.” She went back to staring at the screen, glancing over at flasks that Fabian could only conjecture about.

But it wasn’t his concern. His was getting Emmett’s program to scale upward so he could surpass his design specs by a thousandfold. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d already cut back on every drain of excess CPU cycles he could think of. The da Vinci was practically running on a hamster on a wheel at this point.

“How goes the battle?” he asked.

“Badly. This thing is brutal. It’d be tough to design a more perfect pathogen against any humanoid race.”

“That bad?”

“Worse. This thing attacks any organism that uses a nucleic acid as its genetic basis. Doesn’t matter if it’s DNA, RNA, or some of the more exotic forms, this virus has proteins that integrate into them all. And our vain hope that Pattie, Soloman, and the other nonhumans would be immune is fading. They’re probably all just as vulnerable.”

Fabian smiled wryly. “Wow. The holy grail of computing.”

“Pardon me?”

“Sorry. Old computer problem, how to integrate data between nonstandard systems.”

“How do computer engineers solve the problem?”

“Wait two years and upgrade the entire system.”

“We don’t have two years to wait here.”

“Well, computer viruses don’t give you the option either.”

“Whatever.” Lense went back to her monitor. She started muttering, probably to herself, though Fabian couldn’t help overhear. “The hell of it is, I know that the virus would probably burn itself out in a week if it didn’t have a live host—but that’s every human on the planet.”

Fabian piped up. “Shouldn’t the transporter biofilters be taking the viruses out?”

Lense just kept staring at the screen and tapping. Fabian was sure he heard a growl.

“No, I guess not,” Fabian said, after thinking about it a moment. “We could take out the airborne viruses, I suppose, but we couldn’t do anything for the viruses already

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