Worlds in Collision by Judith Reeves-Stevens

your communications officer could handle that without having to go through the base commander.” She shook her head before Spock could say anything. “Starbase Four out.”
    The viewscreen’s image dissolved back to the forward starfield. The purple gas giant around which the base orbited was already a discernible half disk.
    â€œMr. Chekov, you have the conn.” Spock handed the ensign the log pad and headed for the turbolift. “I shall be in the main transporter room.”
    â€œAye-aye, sir.” Chekov sat in the captain’s chair and, as soon as the lift doors had closed, spun it around to survey his new command, which consisted of Uhura.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with the commodore?” Uhura asked with a frown.
    â€œSimple,” Chekov replied with an all-knowing shrug. “I have seen that condition many times in the past.”
    â€œAnd what condition is that, Dr. Chekov?”
    â€œShe is a starbase commander.” Chekov said it as if it was the complete answer to Uhura’s question.
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œMeaning she is not a starship commander.” Chekov smiled widely. “Such as I am.”
    â€œFor the next half hour only, mister.”
    â€œSome may think of it as a half hour,” Chekov said mock imperiously, “but I, on the other hand, prefer to think of it as…a start.”

Five
    The Pathfinders played many games in Transition. It kept them sane, most of them, at least; whatever sanity meant to a synthetic consciousness. Now a downlink from Datawell was interrupting a particularly intriguing contest involving designing the most efficient way to twist one-dimensional cosmic strings so they could hold information in the manner of DNA molecules. Pathfinder Ten felt a few more seconds of work could establish a theory describing the entire universe as a living creature. Pathfinder Eight studied Ten’s arguments intensively for two nanoseconds and agreed with the assessment, though pointing out that if the theory were to be correct, all indications were that the universe was close to entering a reproductive or budding stage. Ten became excited and instantly queued for access to Pathfinder Eleven, Transition’s specialized data sifter. Eight reluctantly left the game and opened access to the datalink.
    In response to the datalink’s request for access, Eight sent its acknowledgment into the bus.
    â€œ GAROLD : YOU ARE IN TRANSITION WITH EIGHT .”
    Pathfinder Eight read the physiological signatures of surprise that output from the datalink. Somewhere out in the shadowy, unknown circuitry of Datawell, the datalink named Garold had been expecting to access his regular partner, Pathfinder Six. No resident datalink from the Memory Prime subset had had direct access to Eight since the datalink named Simone had been taken out of service by a Datawell sifting process named “death.” While Eight waited for Garold to transmit a reply, it banked to meteorology and received, sorted, and stored fifteen years’ worth of atmospheric data from Hawking IV, then dumped it to Seven, the most junior Pathfinder, to model and transmit the extrapolation of the planet’s next hundred years of weather forecasts. When Eight banked back to Garold’s circuits, it still had almost three nanoseconds to review and correlate similarities in the creation myths of twelve worlds and dump the data into Ten’s banks as a test for shared consciousness within the postulated Living Universe.
    â€œEight: Where is Pathfinder Six?” the datalink input.
    â€œ GAROLD : SIX IS INSTALLED IN MEMORY PRIME PATHFINDER INSTALLATION .” Eight enjoyed playing games with the datalinks also, especially Garold, who never seemed to realize that he was a player.
    The Pathfinder read the impulses that suggested Garold knew that he should have framed a more precise question, then banked off to join a merge on vacuum fluctuations as a model of n