Star Trek The Next Generation®

by David A. McIntee

  Scotty saw the danger first. “That’s it, it’s been there long enough. Disconnect everything!”

  “What?” La Forge was momentarily puzzled. Even if the transporter beam had reached the minimum level needed to do its job, what harm was there in leaving it a few moments longer, just to be sure?

  “Disconnect the transporter and tractor beams. The energy will feed back along the string.”

  It was too late. Tentacles of quark-gluon energy, driven by the power of the first and biggest explosion in the universe, lashed out along the beams, and hammered into the Challenger’s saucer.

  Energy shorted out between the transporter pads and the energizing coils in the ceiling, ripping each transporter room to shreds. The transporter consoles exploded, and buckled the transporter room doors that barely managed to contain the explosions.

  On the bridge, lightning crackled across the consoles, shattering the laminated surfaces. Shrapnel scored across everyone in the room, and Scotty was hurled across the bridge, to lie crumpled at the base of the main viewer.

  As the decks tilted, furniture hurtled wildly across the room in Nelson’s, sending shelves of bottles crashing to the floor, and shards of glass into the air. Tables tumbled across the room, one slamming into Guinan and jamming her against the wall.

  Nog and Qat’qa could see the saucer wreathed in crackling energy, and starting to slide out of position.

  “They’re losing power,” Nog said. “Can you dock manually with the saucer?”

  “I have never tried,” Qat’qa replied, in a tone that suggested this was an oversight she had long wanted to rectify. “Secure yourself. This may be as bumpy as my forehead.” She nudged the stardrive section forward.

  “Do you need the tractor beams on or off?”

  “Keep them on!”

  The saucer descending toward the connectors on the stardrive section should have been a reassuring sight, but watching the immense gray-blue surface approach the gaping hole in the ceiling was more nerve-wracking than Nog had expected, especially as it was shuddering and bouncing unpredictably.

  It was hard to read Qat’qa’s expression, as her face was pretty much masked by the concentration required to dock with the saucer at exactly the right rate to engage the locks, and not so quickly that the mass of the stardrive section batted the saucer aside.

  Rasmussen was certain that the ship was about to explode. He had been lifted from one ship about to be torn apart and dumped into another—how unfair was that? He was almost resigned to the idea, when he realized that the forcefield across his cell in the brig had gone out when a power junction exploded.

  Perhaps he was still fated to continue his journey after all. The fates had brought the professor and his time pod to him, then the Enterprise, then Challenger and Intrepid, so why not another ship?

  The shuttlecraft in Challenger’s shuttlebays weren’t that different from the ones in his day, and in fact were almost certainly easier to fly. They were designed to be used by almost anyone.

  Even though he had thought it all through, he was still surprised at how easy it was to steal a shuttlecraft. No one was watching for him, or keeping an eye on the shuttles.

  As he had suspected, the tiny but warp-capable craft was easy to fly, and he had no problems in sweeping out and into space.

  As he oriented the shuttle away from the new nova where the Infinite used to be, he saw that Challenger was complete once more, and beginning to turn. Not wishing to give them the chance to grab him in a tractor beam, he pointed the nose at a random star, and jumped to warp two.

  Challenger’s warp nacelles flared into life, and the ship plunged forward into warp, leaving behind the spreading nebula, and the eruption of elementary particles, which were limited to the speed of light.

  23

  “Are we about done here, or are you still sending me more casualties?” Alyssa Ogawa had rarely been so tired, or seen so many cuts and broken limbs in her sickbay in a single day, even as head nurse on the Enterprise. At least she would have an interesting story to tell Noah when she saw him. More importantly, she was still here to tell it.

  “I think we’re out of the worst of it,” Scotty told her, with a look that said he hoped that was true. He sat, slumped forward to catch his breath, on a biobed, while a medtech prepared a hypo for him.

  “That’s a relief. Most of these injuries are pretty minor, but there are simply so many that I’m running out of space in sickbay. If there are any more casualties I’m going to have to look at finding somewhere else to put them.”

  “How about a holodeck?” Barclay suggested, as a nurse applied a boneknitter to his wrist. They looked at him askance. “No, I’m serious. A holodeck can re-create any environment, and the computer can patch internal sensors through to the sickbay computer systems, so the holographic biobeds can function as real ones.”

  “There’d be a bit of a time lag,” Scotty said.

  “Only a couple of nanoseconds. Nothing that would prevent swift action.”

  “From a holographic doctor?” Ogawa asked skeptically.

  “Well, I have a certain influence in those matters,” Barclay said slowly. “If you want—”

  “It’s all right, Reg, I think my medical staff is up to it. Space is the problem, not staffing.”

  “Oh, okay.” They laughed together, and then Ogawa showed Scotty through to her office, where they could have some privacy.

  “All right, lass, give me the bad news.”

  “What makes you think there’s bad news?”

  “I’ve been injured before, and I know how it feels. And I can see it in those concerned eyes of yours.”

  “Well, the bad news isn’t exactly bad news per se. There are a lot of people in here with worse injuries than you’ve sustained. But . . .”

  “But there isn’t another human crewmember of my age,” Scotty said bluntly.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m in any way casting your age as a negative, Captain, but I can’t lie to you either. You’re not going to heal as quickly or as easily as a younger person with comparable injuries. Nor for that matter, will you heal as quickly, or as likely, as someone who didn’t spend eighty years in a transporter buffer. The damage isn’t serious, but it’s a contributing factor.”

  “Don’t worry, Doctor, I can see where you’re going with this.”

  “Where I’m going with this, is that I’m going to need to have you in here for cellular regeneration treatment every forty-eight hours. That spleen of yours took a nasty knock, and it’s not an organ that heals easily in the best of cases.”

  “Every forty-eight hours?”

  “That’s something you’re going to need to think about.” She hesitated, seeing the sadness in his eyes. “There are . . . regulations. I won’t quote them, but sooner or later . . .”

  “Ye mean sooner?”

  “Yes.” She forced a smile. “But for now, I prescribe a good single-malt painkiller, just like I did for Geordi’s cuts, and Guinan’s broken ribs. I gather Guinan has declared Nelson’s a special analgesics dispensary, and that’s fine with me. Go on down to Nelson’s. That’s an order, from the only person aboard who can give you orders.”

  The Split Infinite had stopped expanding. Scotty leaned against one of the big support pillars in Nelson’s and allowed himself a smile. “Well, she’s a beauty now, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” La Forge said, and fell silent. There were a hundred other comments he wanted to make, but just couldn’t, because he could feel his voice starting to tremble too much. “Did we just do what I think we just did?”

  Scotty looked at him, serious reflection vying with eagerness to control his expression. Eventually he let out a sigh. “Who can say, Geordi? Either their warp core breach was swamped by the explosion they were running into, or the warp core breach triggered it. Either way, Bok’s just as dead.”

  “Yeah, but as a eulogy goes, ‘Let there be light’ has a more poetic sound than ‘Give him the severe malk
y’ or whatever.”

  Scotty chuckled. “That’s true enough. But not as appropriate, I think.”

  “What is a malky anyway?”

  “It’s an old Scottish expression that means to do some damage to somebody. Serious harm, I mean.” Scotty looked a little uncomfortable, or, Geordi thought, embarrassed. “Truth to tell, I’m not sure why it’s actually called that.”

  “It’s rhyming slang,” Guinan’s voice came across the restaurant. She walked over to the window gracefully, a twinkle in her eye. Her feline smile broadened as she saw Scotty and Geordi’s surprised and baffled expressions. “Malky is short for Malcolm, and it means Malcolm Frazer—a razor. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, open razors were the preferred weapon of street gangs in Scotland.”

  Scotty and La Forge exchanged a look, their eyebrows raising further in open astonishment.

  Guinan grinned openly now. “Oh, come on, Geordi! I first met you in nineteenth-century San Francisco.” La Forge realized immediately where she was going with this. He had forgotten that, from her perspective, they technically had first met then. It was all too easy to think that they had both first met each other aboard the Enterprise. “And it never occurred to you that I might have visited other parts of the planet?” They laughed.

  “All right,” Geordi said at last. “I think I ought to go see Leah.”

  “And I need some sleep,” Scotty added.

  Guinan raised her glass. “And I see some more people in need of painkillers.”

  •••

  Guinan was waiting with a drink when Nog reached the bar, but was holding the glass low. Raising a hand any higher than the height of her own nose was agonizing. She forced a smile, because it was her duty. She wasn’t just hostess of Nelson’s, she listened. “Kat tells me your father is the Grand Nagus.”

  “Don’t hold that against him. Or against me.” He grimaced. “I asked her not to tell anyone.”

  “Well, she didn’t exactly tell me. I just listened to the gaps between the words in what she did tell me. You’d be surprised how much you can learn by doing that.”

  “I’m not really interested in—” He cut himself off.

  “Listening? Learning? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Eavesdropping,” he said sourly.

  “Ah.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to use that term. I know it’s not what you were doing, but . . . But I can’t really think of the right word. It comes from growing up with Odo always spying on us.” Nog looked a little nervous. “You’re not going to tell me you know Odo as well?”

  “Okay. Is your father a good Nagus?”

  Nog was somewhat taken aback by the question. “I . . . I guess so. I mean, he has some funny ideas, but when he gets to looking at the economy as an engine, he can see how it ought to work.”

  “As an engine? I’d never really thought of it like that.”

  “Oh, but it is.” Nog was quickly warming to his subject. “You fuel it with investment, it generates a sort of cultural solvency field—”

  Guinan laughed, and this time didn’t notice whether it hurt or not. “You sound like you’ve got a good grasp of it as well.”

  “It’s in the blood.” He paused. “Was your father an engineer?”

  Guinan hadn’t expected the question, and it threw her. “My father . . .”

  “Oh,” Nog said quickly, “you don’t get along. I’m sorry—”

  “It’s all right.” She was genuinely pleased that he had asked. “I suppose he was, in a way.” The thought was a pleasant surprise. “I never really . . .” Got along with him? No, that wasn’t really fair. “I never really thought of him that way.” The pain in her side seemed to fade. “Thank you, Nog. You’re a very perspicacious Ferengi.”

  There was no “who is it?” when La Forge rang the chime on Leah’s door this time. She simply opened it. A new scar above her right eyelid drew his attention, and he couldn’t help feeling that it was a sad thing.

  “Is it that bad?” she asked, catching his gaze.

  “Actually, it just sets off the rest of you even more perfectly.” He paused. Maybe it was a mistake to come here, but he desperately wanted to bring up something else that had been sticking in his mind since she mentioned it. “You said you didn’t want anyone to tell me you were aboard until I already joined. Were you that worried that I’d come knocking on your door first thing?”

  “You did come knocking on my door.”

  “By accident!”

  “I wasn’t worried that you’d come looking to talk to me.” Leah’s expression softened. “I thought if you knew I was here, you’d refuse reassignment.”

  “Why would I do that?” Geordi couldn’t imagine.

  “Because we’ve had issues in the past.”

  “When we worked together, on the Genesis Wave problem, those issues seemed to have fallen behind us.”

  “I did say they were in the past,” she said, and smiled.

  24

  Challenger, her stardrive and saucer sections reunited, and hull damage patched, orbited the new supernova at a safe distance. Every sensor aboard the ship was recording the energies that were blazing out into the universe.

  It was a beautiful sight too, with many different colors shimmering across the flower of light where the Split Infinite used to be. Leah Brahms, sitting in Nelson’s, knew that it was a valuable source of information on the conditions at the beginning of the universe, and that astronomers and physicists would be delighted by the data, but it wasn’t an engine. It was unlikely to impact directly on the development of new starship propulsion, and so, as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t that interesting.

  “Leah?” It was Geordi. “I thought I’d bring you something to cheer you up.”

  He slid a padd across the table to her, along with a Cardassian Sunrise.

  She picked up the padd with a faint smile, which broadened as its subject matter caught her attention. “Where did you get this?”

  “From Intrepid’s sensor logs. Reg and I have been working to restore them, and I think we’ve got most of the degradation cleared up now, so we should be able to examine them for any signs of either the Romulan mine that supposedly destroyed the ship, or”—he raised his glass—“for this new subspace distortion, which I think you’ll agree looks a like a slipstream wake.”

  Leah studied the padd, feeling an uneasy familiarity. There was a similarity in the padd’s display to results she’d seen during the design of the Vesta-class, but it was also different, and chillingly alien. “You’re right, it does . . .”

  “Then, after you drink up, I’d like to show you something in the conference room.”

  Intrigued, Leah followed Geordi up to the briefing room, where he brought up a display on the tabletop hologram. Scott, Barclay, and Vol were already there too. “Something seemed really familiar about this slipstream signature, and I just knew I’d seen it somewhere before. So, I ran a computer cross-reference, and similar readings have been detected over the years, and . . . Look at this.” He brought up the first wavefront analysis on the padd. Data scrolled past, while a three-dimensional image of a waveform rotated below it. “This is a reading from the sensor logs that Reg and I cleaned up from Intrepid’s computer. “It shows what seems to be a quantum slipstream effect in subspace, only it’s way beyond the parameters of any slipstream technology we know.”

  “Not so much slipstream as . . . Trans-slipstream?” Barclay suggested.

  “It’s as good a phrase as any. And this reading is one of the last things picked up by Intrepid’s sensors before every system on the ship went offline.”

  Leah looked doubtful. “To be honest with you, I’m fairly surprised Intrepid’s sensors were even capable of picking it up. Her sensors are hardly better than a ship’s telescope, compared to what we have today.”

  “I’m not,” La Forge said. “The question isn’t whether the event was of a magnitude to be registered, which it obviously
was, but whether the Intrepid’s computers—or any of her crew—could have interpreted it.”

  “They’d have just seen it as a massive subspace disturbance without being able to understand what caused it,” said Scotty.

  “Which we still don’t know for sure,” Geordi admitted, “despite all our theorizing. Nor do we know what it represented in terms of technical advancement.”

  Vol blinked slowly. “All right, so this trans-slipstream wavefront hit Intrepid at G-231, and knocked her all the way over to the Agni Cluster?” Vol asked.

  “It certainly had enough power behind it,” Barclay said, admiration in his voice as he looked at the data.

  “And the Romulan minefield?” asked Vol.

  “What would happen if this magnitude of a wavefront hit a mine?” prompted Scotty.

  Leah shrugged. “A mine has less mass than a starship. If the wavefront could carry Intrepid, it would have carried the mines as well, farther and more easily. Except that they’d have detonated in the process.”

  La Forge snapped his fingers. “That’s what mines are designed for, isn’t it? To go off when disturbed. So, let’s imagine that this trans-slipstream wavefront hits the mines, detonating them as it rips them out of their positions, and then hits Intrepid, throwing her from G-231 to the Agni Cluster through subspace by way of a subspace gravity inversion in the Bolus reach.”

  Leah walked around the display. “Between the impact of the wave and the energy from the mine detonations, the Intrepid’s inertial dampeners are totally—” She caught herself. “Irrelevant, against those kinds of energies.”

  “Cool,” Vol said. “Well, now that that’s cleared up—”

  “It isn’t,” La Forge said. “All right, so now we know what knocked out Intrepid’s inertial dampening and killed the crew, but we don’t know what caused the trans-slipstream wave.”

  Leah waved a hand toward the numbers showing the magnitude of the wave. “Could it be some kind of natural phenomenon? Numbers like that pretty much suggest a stellar cause.”