15
Thunderbird 7; a new, well-shielded interior cabin-
They had gathered to watch the shifting, boiling thing that struggled in its glowing containment field. Lines of force, projected from the bulkheads like streams of constant lightning, held the thing in mid-chamber.
Fermat had by this time grown too well accustomed to 7's changes to pay much attention to swimming circuitry and flexing walls. Instead, he watched their 'prisoner'.
About the size of a kitchen microwave, it seemed to have no fixed shape. Pseudopods erupted continuously from it bubbling surface, and occasional small explosions rocked the force bubble. Each time this happened, their ship simply drew away the energy and data. Fermat was reminded of a dairy farmer milking a very strangecow. Beside him stood Captain Tracy, his mostly-healed face illuminated by flickering, bluish light.
Gordon and TinTin stood off to one side, together. Alan was nearer to Fermat, leaning in as close to the captured alien as 7 would allow. The deck actually put forth restraints, dragginghim backward. Once, a whipping energy coil gave him the painful equivalent of a reproving wrist-slap.
"Ow!" The teenager groused, grabbing at the numbed limb with his other hand. "Quit it! I wasn't doing anything!"
In the sparking air before Alan appeared the sudden glowing icon of a red hand within a circle, with a bar through it.
"Fine," Alan grumbled. "Be that way. But don't blame me when all this stifled curiosity leads me to, like, experiment with fast cars and alcohol, or something, and then you're sorry, because it's all your fault I turned out wrong. That's okay, though, 'cause I'm gonna find my, like, other self and exchange deep thoughts."
Meanwhile, the probe continued to fight, hissing and raging against its glowing cage. Not sure that 7 would respond, Fermat whispered,
"S- Scan alien… artifact, please."
Almost before he'd finished speaking, a plane of blue light appeared at the top of the containment cell, then began to descend, coursing slowly downward through the agitated probe until it reached the light cell's 'floor'.
Finished scanning, the plane shrank to a line, then a point, then vanished altogether with a bright, pure chime. Encouraged, Fermat pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose and said,
"Display… d- data, please… S- Seven."
He'd expected a screen to appear, or perhaps a line of code. What he got instead was a holographic chunk, a glimmering 3-D cube of data projected before him in midair. The symbols seemed to whirl and swim through their glowing matrix, not confined to alphanumeric order, and Fermat had the curious impression that there was as much information contained in the motion and color of the data bits as in their shape.
The boy gaped, really, seriously wishing that he had Daniel Solomon or Sam Nakamura here… or his father and mother, and John Tracy. Together, any combination of the six minds could have made light work of seeming chaos.
John had even come up with a tangled 3-D holographic signature for himself… but he wasn't here now. None of them were. This puzzle, Fermat was going to have to handle almost alone
The probe gathered itself, literally shrinking to a tiny, dense sphere that sank lower in its force cage, then issued a sudden, toothed maw, like a viciously fanged mouth at the end of a hurled spear. It shot forth, straining the force cage like a hand clawing through plastic wrap, battling to reach Fermat. The boy took a hurried step backward, blurting,
"7, can you convert the data to a conventional, 2-D format?"
The snapping, toothed spear fell short, restrained by its bonds. The holographic data cube vanished, replaced an instant later by a screen that extended up through the overhead, down through the deck, and out both sides of the room.
Fermat sighed.
"Compress file, eliminating redundancies."
7 complied, still leaving him with several hundred encyclopedias worth of information. He began to read, scrolling through the data with slight gestures of each hand.
Beside him, Matt shifted uneasily, eyes never leaving the furiously mutating prisoner.
"Where…" he asked, slowly, "did this thing come from?"
"Earth," Fermat replied, too engrossed in what he was learning to notice Captain Tracy's expression.
Alan did, though. As Matt began backing away, the youngest Tracy put a restraining hand on his arm.
"Listen, Man…" he began, but Matt jerked roughly, silently loose and sped from the room.
"Oh, my g- gosh," Fermat whispered, as reflected alphanumerics scrolled across his glasses. "Oh, no."
He had to reach John.