Focusing on a Plan ((Kent))

[Samantha_Kent 0]

Sam sat at the engineering console, flexing her fingers gently against the touchpads, her mind racing, but not in the directions it needed to go.

 

Phoenix...it seemed so obvious now, of course. Twenty-twenty hindsight and all that; she could see it as clear as day. His behavior on the Saint-Epoch had been nothing if not cordial but there had been that nervousness to it; that same blasted uncertainty that she had seen with Brian, and with Malik, maybe even with Josh so many months back. She should have recognized it but she had been distracted, confused, concerned for other things and it had slipped under the radar. Naïveté had triumphed once again.

 

And now he had gone to Aether, to this "pleasure center," and created a version of her with motives no one had been able to figure out yet, except that this fake “Sam-Kent” creation wanted to destroy an entire civilization. Sam told herself that her concern for this situation was an entirely practical one, concern for the people of Aether and for the integrity of those two huge stars hanging, dying, outside of Arcadia's hull. She wanted to pretend she was preoccupied by scientific curiosity, by the eternal question of "Why?" that always fascinated her -- why did this intelligence want the suns destroyed? How did her mechanisms work and how could they be stopped?

 

But that was not what was on her mind now; she was preoccupied by a sense of humiliation stronger than any she had felt in recent memory. Commander Marx had all but shouted the situation to the entire bridge; he and Eagle acted as if it was common knowledge. How much of her personal life was open to the conversation of the command staff? How much of a fool did she look, with the third man in as many months apparently following at her heels? She could feel herself coloring as she stared at the console, trying to focus on the LCARS displays.

 

Focus...focus...it doesn't matter...do your job...do your job...please...

 

She stabbed her fingers down firmly into the LCARS, watching the display open up into a diagram of the deflector array. Eagle had instructed her to attempt a reconstruction of the array as a giant field coil, in the hopes of creating enough power to overload that other Kent's systems. The trouble was, Sam was not an engineer, and if this Sam-Kent entity could absorb the power of an entire sun, as she was doing her damnedest to do, then the deflector array would seem like a pinprick in comparison.

 

At any rate, to interfere with the power flow entirely seemed inadvisable; Aether and its component forcefields would simply cease to exist, which to say the least would be unpleasant for those living there. In addition, Sam-Kent had all the cards here; she had the Aether technology at her disposal, and the added knowledge no doubt provided by her Starfleet captives. It seemed likely that she was the only one involved in the situation with the capability to halt the approaching nova, or at least the only one who could do it on their rapidly tightening time frame. Whatever Arcadia did now had to be delicate; Sam-Kent's control (such an odd thing, to speak of herself in the third person like that) had to be halted at the source without destroying her and especially not the surrounding power architecture.

 

Years of scientific work had taught Sam that it was always easiest (nay, imperative) to look at what was established about a situation before trying to build new bits upon it, and she fought to focus on that now. What did they have? A floating city made to function by the use of pure energy-to-matter manipulation and neural interfaces. A city-wide computer network infected, controlled, and inhabited by a malicious program.

 

But if Sam-Kent had control over the entire city, why had she closed off the section where Commander Alces had just been taken? There was an entire enclosed perimeter of the city where the AI had set up camp, around the Aether’s Caress facility that had started this whole mess; Sam-Kent had to still be centered in the Caress mainframes or why would she have gone to so much trouble to protect it? Clearly that was where they had to strike if they wanted to force her to relinquish her control.

 

So they had to get people inside the perimeter, engineers who, given the proper access, could interfere with Sam-Kent’s systems and take back control of the city. It would take far too long to break into the mainframes where Sam-Kent’s highest security would be, but Arcadia’s computers, perhaps with the help of Aether’s own people, could probably get access to the more remote mechanisms – the city network, the neural interfaces. And if they could do that…

 

If they could use the neural interfaces they could create people in the Caress, just as the pleasure center’s employees had.

 

"People" in the loosest sense of the word, of course – more or less holograms, neurally linked to Arcadia officers -- but it was something, it would get them in behind enemy lines. Hacking the computers would take a better engineer than Sam was by a long shot; Jordan Black would have to be retrieved from the induction center. Sam seemed to remember that one of the others trapped with Archie and Daena was also an engineer...Torre Ze’Rea, that was it, a good strong Bajoran name. Perhaps she would know something to speed the process, and Medical might be able to help set up the neural feed.

 

As the idea began to take shape, Sam's pulse began to race. They had to move fast but it could work. They could get people into the heart of Sam-Kent’s operation, access her mainframe from the inside, force her to release the city from her hold. It was a possibility, it was a plan, and it was all she had to offer.

 

She spun in her chair, turning to face Commander Marx and Lieutenant Eagle at the rear of the bridge. "Sir!"