A distant, magnified view of the Challenger appeared in the main viewing tank. The huge saucer that made up the bulk of Challenger was arcing away from the door-wedge form of the secondary hull. Grak’s elation vanished in a heartbeat. “Idiot! It’s not breaking up, it’s separating into two vessels.” He had all but forgotten that many Federation starships could perform such a maneuver.
Grak hesitated, watching the stardrive section come about, while the saucer section of the enemy ship rose out of view. Which target should he engage? “Intercept the stardrive section,” he ordered. That part of the ship was more powerful, and thus more of a threat, both to his own vessel and to Intrepid.
It had been a number of years since he had piloted the Enterprise’s saucer section on its own, but La Forge still remembered how it was done. “I hope we can trust Tyler to keep that marauder off our backs.” Challenger’s XO, Qat’qa, and Nog had been assigned to take control of the stardrive section.
“If anyone can, it’s Mister Hunt.” Scotty bent over the ops console. “We need to be within transporter range of the Infinite, or at least the wormhole’s threshold.
La Forge was already pushing the saucer to full impulse, and trying for a little bit beyond that. The deck was beginning to vibrate slightly as they plunged through the gravimetric distortions radiating from the Infinite. “I can take us to the edge of the wormhole, but I don’t dare get too close to its spatial manifold. If we cross that, either we’d be history, or we’d be in history.”
“We’d be completely banjaxed,” Scotty agreed. “The saucer section doesna have the warp power needed to fly a course around the string and into a CTC.”
The battle bridge was smaller than Challenger’s main bridge, and its walls and floor were all bare plastiform and metal surfaces. There was only a single command chair, which Hunt had dropped into. The other consoles were a lot closer together. Overall, the whole room was almost as cramped as the bridge of the Intrepid.
Qat’qa could feel the difference between flying the whole ship, and just the stardrive section. Freed both from the mass of the saucer section, the need to expend energy shielding it, and the tactical implications of the vulnerable civilians aboard it, Challenger’s stardrive section was a leaner and meaner fighting machine, faster and more agile, with power to spare.
Veritable waves of torpedoes were spraying out from the marauder’s mandible-like forward section, while the claw-like disruption emitters on her rear section fired lance after lance of searing energy at the Challenger.
Qat’qa flipped the stardrive section from side to side, neatly dodging the beams, but couldn’t quite avoid all of the torpedoes. One exploded against the rear quarter of the port shielding, and the port nacelle flickered. “What the hell are you people doing to my engines?” Vol called up from engineering. “Bloody philistines! Don’t you know these are classics?”
Hunt ignored him, but couldn’t resist a grin. “We need to get in closer,” he shouted. “Don’t give them time for a torpedo run.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Qat’qa agreed. She dipped the front end of the stardrive, and ducked under the on-coming marauder. This time, her maneuver was, ironically, too quick. Before anyone knew it, the stardrive section of Challenger was right under the marauder’s bow, and almost literally in its jaws.
The collision alert sirens exploded into life, and Qat’qa threw the ship into a spin. Tyler Hunt ducked instinctively, even though, intellectually, he knew it wouldn’t make a difference.
He was too late, anyway.
There was a tremendous booming sound, and the rear port quarter of the ceiling was plowed clean through by the edge of the marauder’s scoop-like forward hull. Nog instinctively gripped his console, hanging on like grim death, and Qat’qa managed to wedge her legs under her flight console, but not without being buffeted backward by the fleeing air. She yelled, a mix of pain and rage, as she fought to stay wedged in her seat, at the risk of having her thighs broken.
Hunt was even less fortunate. Caught in midstep, he was hooked under the armpits by an unraveling cable. Before he could even start to untangle himself, the cable slithered up and away into the blackness, taking the struggling man with it.
“Where’s the emergency forcefield?” Qat’qa shouted, barely audible over the scream of outrushing air.
“It’s failed!” Nog cried. “Trying for . . . the override!”
Nog hauled himself across the tactical console, trying to reach the emergency override control on the environmental board a few feet away. The ship’s ventilation system was pumping breathable air into the bridge as fast as it could, to try to keep the chamber pressurized while a forcefield automatically sealed the breach. With the forcefield not activating, however, the air was a torrent grabbing at Nog and Qat’qa, trying to hurl them out into the void.
Nog could feel himself being prised away from the console, his arms and shoulders aching with the strain as his body was pulled upward. He was acutely aware of the danger of reducing his grip on the console by the tiniest fraction, and his fingers clamped onto the edges of it as if they were trying to dig their way through it. He had to fight the instinctive grip, knowing that if he didn’t get the forcefield up soon, then the air supply being pumped in would eventually run out, and they all would die.
With every instinct in his being telling him that the short-term risks outweighed the long-term gains to be made, he forced himself to take the opposite view. It was a choice of speculate to accumulate, versus certain loss. Spurred by the thought of the latter, he flung himself forward and wrapped his forearm around one corner of the console as his feet left the floor.
Qat’qa was snarling curses as she began to be dragged out of her seat in spite of the way she had braced herself in position. Nog looked across at her, seeing another asset about to be lost. As his head moved, the rushing of air suddenly left a vortex over his left ear, and he could feel something pop inside. It felt as if someone had jammed a spike into the side of his skull, and as if his brain was leaking out.
The back of the helm seat broke with a loud crack, under the leverage that Qat’qa’s effort to stay in place was exerting. Suddenly Qat’qa was flying upward, and Nog hurled himself across his console with a scream of frustrated anger, throwing himself bodily at the environmental console, and the forcefield control on it.
As soon as he was moving, he began to rise, as quickly as Qat’qa, and he stabbed an arm out, willing it to stretch far enough, even if it had to take his shoulder with it, to reach the panel.
Cold smooth plastic rapped his knuckles, stinging more than he would have expected, and then he was, mercifully, falling.
He slumped against the environmental console with relief, as Qat’qa slammed to the floor with a muffled curse a few feet away. Overhead, the emergency forcefield had finally come on, and blue static was sparkling across the hole in the ceiling.
Nog pulled himself up, to see Qat’qa dart back to the helm seat. “Are you all right?”
She looked back, her expression fevered and wild. “Yes!”
“Where are they?”
“Behind us.” She flipped the vessel, and suddenly the marauder’s huge, curved engine section was upside down, right in front of Nog’s eyes on the main viewer.
Nog had a sudden flash of inspiration. “Vol? Are you all right down there?”
“Ish.” He sounded a little shaky and sickly.
“Good enough. Can you transfer all our power reserves, and as much drive energy as you can spare, through the main deflector?”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now!” The marauder was already starting to turn.
“All right, you’ve got it.”
Nog saw the energy levels on his tactical console light up with more power than he’d ever seen on a weapon.
He stabbed at the firing control.
The Challenger’s main deflector dish flared up, and speared a solid beam of energy right into the port quarter of the marauder’s engine s
ection.
The marauder simply disappeared, exploding into nothingness in a single nova-like flash. A few moments later, pieces of debris rattled what was left of the stardrive section’s shields, but this last assault by the marauder wasn’t enough to do any damage. The pieces were too small.
Nog caught his breath and leaned on his console, trying to disguise the fact that he needed it to prop him up. Qat’qa let out a long shuddering breath, and slumped in her seat. “So, which of us is in command now?”
“Good question,” Nog admitted. He shrugged. “You know what you need to get the ship back together, so I suggest you just tell me what you want done.”
Qat’qa held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. “I’m setting a course to rendezvous with the saucer section.”
Scotty was happier than he had been in days, lying on the floor of a transporter pad, his head and shoulders down in the workings of it. Leah knelt next to him, working on the circuitry behind a wall panel. Geordi had dismantled half the console on the other side of the room, and was trying to lock on to the Intrepid, but he sounded frustrated as he worked. “The transporter just doesn’t have the range to reach into the Infinite and down the closed timelike curve.”
Scotty levered himself out of the hatch he was in. “What we need is some kind of booster.”
“Transporter pattern enhancers?”
Scotty scoffed at the idea. “What? Just fire them out of the torpedo tubes or something?”
“A shuttle, then? We could use the shuttle’s transporter system as a relay?”
“It’d be a suicide mission.”
“Actually it’d be a one-way trip, but into the past.”
“That’s worse,” Scotty grumbled. “It’d mean someone else with a chance of changing things. Anyway, a shuttle would never survive the stresses of the Infinite, let alone the trip through the CTC. We need a transporter relay, just like we used to bring Mister Barclay home from the Voyager fleet for this mission.”
“You adapted the Pathfinder project to bounce a transporter signal between relays, rather than just compressed data like a holoprogram?” Scotty nodded an affirmative. “And Reg agreed to that?” La Forge was amazed.
“Aye, but he still got beamed through under sedation. Now we need something that can handle a lot of transmission power and bandwidth over a very long range.”
“The Romulan probe,” Leah said slowly. “It is designed to handle a wide range of transmission bands.”
“And it has the range.” Scotty agreed. “It’s set up to transmit all the way to Romulan space.”
“We can ignore most of the probe’s systems anyway. We only need it to support a carrier signal.” She jumped to her feet. “I’m on it.”
Minutes later, her voice came through in the transporter room. “The probe’s ready, and in the tube.”
“Fire,” Scotty ordered, and he imagined he heard a distant thud as the probe was launched.
“Probe away. Crossing the wormhole threshold in three, two, one. Now entering the Infinite.”
Scotty ran to the transporter console. “Right, now, let’s give that big-eared bastard the severe Malky,” he said aloud, and slid his hand across the controls, energizing the beam to maximum power. “He wants time travel, he’s got all the time travel he can handle.”
22
When Scotty and Leah returned to the bridge, waves of gravimetric interference were reaching out like claws to try and drag the saucer into the wormhole. There was enough mass in the string to form any number of black holes, and that mass pulled inexorably on the Challenger.
“We need warp power for a stable position,” La Forge reported from the helm. “I don’t think impulse is going to be enough.”
Scotty took the center seat. “Keep us as steady as you can, regardless, Mister La Forge. I’ve visited the past enough times in my career.”
“I’m trying. I’ll rotate the saucer and step up the impulse power, but really, we need that stardrive section back.”
“It looks as if the marauder has been destroyed,” the ensign at tactical reported. “The stardrive section is returning.”
“Thank heavens for small mercies.” Scotty punched the communications control. “Mister Hunt, well done. Now I could do with my ship being put back together in one piece. We need your warp power to keep ourselves stable while we’re transmitting the annular confinement beam into the Infinite.”
Nog and Qat’qa made almost identical grimaces. “Captain,” Nog called back, “I’m afraid Mister Hunt is dead.”
“Thank you, Mister Nog.” Scotty’s voice was muted. “Are ye able to re-combine with the saucer section?”
“The automatics are damaged,” Nog said. “And, anyway, I don’t think there’s time for the usual re-combination procedures.”
“No time?” Qat’qa echoed. “The very words I live by.” She regarded the approaching saucer for a few seconds, then began working her console. “Nog, tractor beam.”
“Ah,” Nog said with an approving nod. “Good thinking, Kat. Vol, give me tractor power . . .”
The bridge vibration eased slightly, and La Forge suddenly found that the controls were much more responsive. He turned to Scotty. “It’s the stardrive section, they’ve got us in a tractor beam.”
“That should help in keeping our position steady.” He pressed the communication button again. “Good work, Mister Nog. Hold us in position. Vol, use the warp engines to counter the gravimetric waves.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
On the bridge of the Intrepid, the heavenly light pouring in through the main viewer was no longer the golden hue of pressed latinum. Now it was cold and blue. Bok and Sloe had expected that, as they were beginning to travel back in time, and the light was accelerating toward them.
Sloe cursed suddenly, and Bok immediately looked up. “What’s happening?”
“Interference again!”
“What sort of interference?”
“Some kind of transporter signal. An annular confinement beam.”
“How is that possible?” Bok couldn’t imagine that Challenger had followed them into the Infinite.
“I don’t know . . .”
“Is it affecting our course?”
“Yes,” Sloe said, with a grim finality.
“We can’t keep up the transporter signal indefinitely,” Leah warned.
La Forge risked looking away from the helm console for a moment, now that the stardrive section was giving them stability in the face of the gravitational distortions and energy bursts. “We don’t have to. The longer Intrepid is looping around the string, and the faster she heads back in time, the more effort she’d need to break free of the closed timelike curve.”
“Which means we only need to keep altering their course until we pass the point where they can’t get an escape velocity from it?” Leah asked.
“Aye!” Scotty said.
“How long?”
“Not that long.” La Forge answered. “Those old engines are nothing like as powerful as modern ones.”
Intrepid’s bridge was filled with a cacophony of alarms that was agonizing to Ferengi ears. “Radiation alerts, Bok! They’re off the scale . . .”
“This is an old ship; the scales probably don’t go far.”
“According to this, the external temperature is—That’s impossible!” Sloe’s expression was a mix of horror and awe.
“Impossible?”
“Ambient normal space temperature outside the CTC is over one billion Kelvin!”
“What?” Bok was no scientist, but even he knew that that was far beyond the temperature at the heart of even the hottest suns.
“And the hydrogen density is over one Earth atmosphere.”
“Does the CTC emerge in a star? A gas giant?” He couldn’t help asking, even though he knew better.
“No . . .” Sloe raised his hands from the computer in a gesture of helplessness. “Some kind of quark-gluon plasma. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Break us free!”
“I can’t! We’re being held in the CTC by external pressures. That damned transporter beam.”
“What’s our temporal course?”
Sloe called up a navigational readout. “All it says is ‘Primary.’ ”
“Primary? What use is that? Primary what?” Bok wondered if the ancient ship’s computer was failing.
“I don’t know. The main something, or the first someth—”
Bok suddenly felt very cold and very sick. The ship rattled around them, the ancient panels clattering at the seams.
“Hydrogen pressure wave! More pressure waves ahead,” Sloe proclaimed. “Leptons, hadrons . . .”
“What’s a lepton?” asked Bok.
“Elementary particles that filled the universe in the second to tenth seconds after the Big Bang.” Sloe’s face drained of all color. “Hadrons were mostly created and destroyed in the first second . . .”
Bok slumped back into the command chair. The image of his son was frozen in his mind. A newborn, a new employee, an heir to the family business and an inheritor to the family’s profit. A child who would now always be dead. “No . . . It can’t be . . .”
“. . . of the Big Bang,” Sloe finished.
The cosmic string didn’t exist yet, and so neither did the closed timelike curve. Freed from it, Intrepid’s warp core exploded, disintegrating the ship down to the subatomic level in no time at all, because time itself didn’t yet exist. Bok would never know that he hadn’t had time to even register that fact before everything he had ever known both ended and began.
The Split Infinite wasn’t merely split any more, it was ripped asunder, tearing itself apart in an eruption of cosmic energies.
The neutron star that had coalesced so long ago at the poles of the Infinite was already dissipating in a blazing cloud of plasma, while the wormhole turned itself inside out and vomited forth the raw energies of creation in a spectacular blast that looked like it would spread forever. Somewhere inside, Challenger’s sensors claimed, the cosmic string was unraveling, and energy discharges from its contacts with stellar and wormhole matter were sparking still more colossal detonations.
Star Trek The Next Generation® Page 24
