Beverly smiled at him, and took her place beside him. “Your head is hard, and that probably saved your life,” she said. “But I do need to check the rest of your injuries. And I need to tell the captain that you’re all right.”
“I will,” Deanna said. “He’ll be very pleased to hear it.”
* * *
Several hours later, Picard sank into a chair in Ten-Forward. Commander Will Riker already had a seat at the table. He was staring out the window, at the stars streaking past. His hands were wrapped in light bandages, and his eyes had deep shadows. It looked as if he had lost weight in the last day, and maybe, just maybe, he had.
Guinan came over, a carafe filled with purple liquid in her right hand, two snifters in her left.
“Tea for me, Guinan,” Picard said.
She grinned. “I’ve been saving this Nestafarian brandy for a special occasion. I think defeating the Furies counts, don’t you?”
“I don’t feel like celebrating,” Riker said, his gaze still on the stars.
“I don’t think special occasions are always celebrations,” Guinan said. She put the brandy down between them, poured a centimeter of purple liquid into the bottom of each glass, and pushed them toward her customers. “Sometimes special occasions are the quiet moments when healing can begin.”
She got up, and left them. Picard watched her go. He relied on her wisdom and her strength. She was letting him know that she approved of his action, of the path he had chosen to defeat his fears, and the Furies, all at the same time.
But he didn’t approve. He didn’t feel as if he’d done enough. He wasn’t certain the wormhole was closed forever. And he had lost what promised to be one of Starfleet’s top new officers.
Riker held out his bandaged hands. Picard had never seen anything quite like that before.
“Dr. Crusher doesn’t trust me not to tear off the new skin,” Riker said. “So she bandaged me.”
“You’re off duty, Number One. You can rest, you know.”
Riker nodded. He glanced at the stars. “But I have some practicing to do,” he said softly, almost to himself. “Flying old atmospheric jets in a holodeck program. I have a rematch scheduled. Someday.”
Picard finally understood. Redbay. They were both thinking of the lieutenant, alone on the other side of the wormhole.
With the Furies.
A sacrifice either one of them would have gladly made in his stead. A sacrifice Riker was supposed to make, but circumstances prevented.
In some ways, it was just as hard on this end, knowing that they would never know how—or if—Redbay survived. They only knew that he had done his job.
Now they had to go on. When they had signed up for Starfleet, they knew the risks.
One of those risks was the loss of their own lives.
The other, harder risk, was losing friends.
Picard picked up his snifter, twirled the brandy, and inhaled. It had a spicy, dark scent. “Tell me about Lieutenant Redbay, Will,” Picard said.
Riker stared at Picard for a moment, then took a brandy snifter in one bandaged hand.
“Not the lieutenant I can read about in the records,” Picard said. “I want to know the man.”
Riker nodded, taking a sip. “Lieutenant Redbay?” He glanced out at the stars for a moment, then went on. “Lieutenant Sam Redbay was my friend.”
He lifted his brandy snifter in a silent toast.
Picard joined him.
The Invasion Continues In
BOOK THREE
Time’s Enemy
by
L A. Graf
“It looks like they’re preparing for an invasion,” Jadzia Dax said.
Sisko granted, gazing out at the expanse of darkcrusted cometary ice that formed the natural hull of Starbase 1. Above the curving ice horizon, the blackness of Earth’s Oort cloud should have glittered with bright stars and the barely brighter glow of the distant sun. Instead, what it glittered with were the docking lights of a dozen short-range attack ships—older and more angular versions of the Defiant—as well as the looming bulk of two Galaxy-class starships, the Mukaikubo and the Breedlove. One glance had told Sisko that such a gathering of force couldn’t have been the random result of ship refittings and shore leaves. Starfleet was preparing for a major encounter with someone. He just wished he knew who.
“I thought we came here to deal with a nonmilitary emergency.” In the sweep of transparent aluminum windows, Sisko could see Julian Bashir’s dark reflection glance up from the chair he’d sprawled in after an uninterested glance at the view. Beyond the doctor, the huge conference room was as empty as it had been ten minutes ago when they’d first been escorted into it. “Otherwise, wouldn’t Admiral Hayman have asked us to come in the Defiant instead of a high-speed courier?”
Sisko snorted. “Admirals never ask anything, Doctor. And they never tell you any more than you need to know to carry out their orders efficiently.”
“Especially this admiral,” Dax added, an unexpected note of humor creeping into her voice. Sisko raised an eyebrow at her, then heard a gravelly snort and the simultaneous hiss of the conference-room door opening. He swung around to see a rangy, long-boned figure in ordinary Starfleet coveralls crossing the room toward them. Dax surprised him by promptly stepping forward, hands outstretched in welcome.
“How have you been, Judith?”
“Promoted.” The silver-haired woman’s angular face lit with something approaching a sparkle. “It almost makes up for getting this old.” She clasped Dax’s hands warmly for a moment, then turned her attention to Sisko. “So this is the Benjamin Sisko Curzon told me so much about. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Captain.”
Sisko slanted a wary glance at his science officer. “Um—likewise, I’m sure. Dax?”
The Trill cleared her throat. “Benjamin, allow me to introduce you to Rear Admiral Judith Hayman. She and I—well, she and Curzon, actually—got to know each other on Vulcan during the Klingon peace negotiations several years ago. Judith, this is Captain Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine, and our station’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julian Bashir.”
“Admiral.” Bashir nodded crisply.
“Our orders said this was a Priority One Emergency,” Sisko reminded his superior officer almost as soon as she released his hand. “I assume that means whatever you brought us here to do is urgent.”
Hayman’s strong face lost its smile. “Possibly,” she said. “Although perhaps not urgent in the way we usually think of it.”
Sisko scowled. “Forgive my bluntness, Admiral, but I’ve been dragged from my command station without explanation, ordered not to use my own ship under any circumstances, brought to the oldest and least useful starbase in the Federation”—he made a gesture of reined-in impatience at the bleak cometary landscape outside the windows—“and you’re telling me you’re not sure how urgent this problem is?”
“No one is sure, Captain. That’s part of the reason we brought you here.” The admiral’s voice chilled into something between grimness and exasperation. “What we are sure of is that we could be facing potential disaster.” She reached into the front pocket of her coveralls and tossed two ordinary-looking data chips onto the conference table. “The first thing I need you and your medical officer to do is review these data records.”
“Data records,” Sisko repeated, trying for the noncommittal tone he’d perfected over years of trying to deal with the equally high-handed and inexplicable behavior of Kai Winn.
“Admiral, forgive us, but we assumed this actually was an emergency,” Julian Bashir explained, in such polite bafflement that Sisko guessed he must be emulating Garak’s unctuous demeanor. “If so, we could have reviewed your data records ten hours ago. All you had to do was send them to Deep Space Nine through subspace channels.”
“Too dangerous, even using our most secure codes.” The bleak certainty in Hayman’s voice made Sisko blink in surprise. “And if you were listening, young man, you’d have not
iced that I said this was the first thing I needed you to do. Now, would you please sit down, Captain?”
He took the place she indicated at one of the conference table’s inset data stations, then waited while she settled Bashir at the station on the opposite side. He noticed she made no attempt to seat Dax, although there were other empty stations available.
“This review procedure is not a standard one,” Hayman said, without further preliminaries. “As a control on the validity of some data we’ve recently received, we’re going to ask you to examine ship’s logs and medical records without knowing their origin. We’d like your analysis of them. Computer, start data-review programs Sisko-One and Bashir-One.”
Sisko’s monitor flashed to life, not with pictures but with a thick ribbon of multilayered symbols and abbreviated words, slowly scrolling from left to right. He stared at it for a long, blank moment before a whisper of memory turned it familiar instead of alien. One of the things Starfleet Academy asked cadets to do was determine the last three days of a starship’s voyage when its main computer memory had failed. The solution was to reconstruct computer records from each of the ship’s individual system buffers—records that looked exactly like these.
“These are multiple logs of buffer output from individual ship systems, written in standard Starfleet machine code,” he said. Dax made an interested noise and came to stand behind him. “It looks like someone downloaded the last commands given to life-support, shields, helm, and phaser-bank control. There’s another system here, too, but I can’t identify it.”
“Photon-torpedo control?” Dax suggested, leaning over his shoulder to scrutinize it.
“I don’t think so. It might be a sensor buffer.” Sisko scanned the lines of code intently while they scrolled by. He could recognize more of the symbols now, although most of the abbreviations on the fifth line still baffled him. “There’s no sign of navigations, either—the command buffers in those systems may have been destroyed by whatever took out the ship’s main computer.” Sisko grunted as four of the five logs recorded wild fluctuations and then degenerated into solid black lines. “And there goes everything else. Whatever hit this ship crippled it beyond repair.”
Dax nodded. “It looks like some kind of EM pulse took out all of the ship’s circuits—everything lost power except for life-support, and that had to switch to auxiliary circuits.” She glanced up at the admiral. “Is that all the record we have, Admiral? Just those few minutes?”
“It’s all the record we trust,” Hayman said enigmatically. “There are some visual bridge logs that I’ll show you in a minute, but those could have been tampered with. We’re fairly sure the buffer outputs weren’t.” She glanced up at Bashir, whose usual restless energy had focused down to a silent intensity of concentration on his own data screen. “The medical logs we found were much more extensive. You have time to review the buffer outputs again, if you’d like.”
“Please,” Sisko and Dax said in unison.
“Computer, repeat data program Sisko-One.”
Machine code crawled across the screen again, and this time Sisko stopped trying to identify the individual symbols in it. He vaguely remembered one of his Academy professors saying that reconstructing a star-ship’s movements from the individual buffer outputs of its systems was a lot like reading a symphony score. The trick was not to analyze each line individually, but to get a sense of how all of them were functioning in tandem.
“This ship was in a battle,” he said at last. “But I think it was trying to escape, not fight. The phaser banks all show discharge immediately after power fluctuations are recorded for the shields.”
“Defensive action,” Dax agreed, and pointed at the screen. “And look at how much power they had to divert from life-support to keep the shields going. Whatever was after them was big.”
“They’re trying some evasive actions now—” Sisko broke off, seeing something he’d missed the first time in that mysterious fifth line of code. Something that froze his stomach. It was the same Romulan symbol that appeared on his command board every time the cloaking device was engaged on the Defiant.
“This was a cloaked Starfleet vessel!” He swung around to fix the admiral with a fierce look. “My understanding was that only the Defiant had been sanctioned to carry a Romulan cloaking device!”
Hayman met his stare without a ripple showing in her calm competence. “I can assure you that Starfleet isn’t running any unauthorized cloaking devices. Watch the log again, Captain Sisko.”
He swung back to his monitor. “Computer, rerun data program Sisko-One at one-quarter speed,” he said. The five concurrent logs crawled across the screen in slow motion, and this time Sisko focused on the coordinated interactions between the helm and the phaser banks. If he had any hope of identifying the class and generation of this starship, it would be from the tactical maneuvers it could perform.
“Time the helm changes versus the phaser bursts,” Dax suggested from behind him in an unusually quiet voice. Sisko wondered if she was beginning to harbor the same ominous suspicion he was.
“I know.” For the past hundred years, the speed of helm shift versus the speed of phaser refocus had been the basic determining factor of battle tactics. Sisko’s gaze flickered from top line to third, counting off milliseconds by the ticks along the edge of the data record. The phaser refocus rates he found were startlingly fast, but far more chilling was the almost instantaneous response of this starship’s helm in its tactical runs. There was only one ship he knew of that had the kind of overpowered warp engines needed to bring it so dangerously close to the edge of survivable maneuvers. And there was only one commander who had used his spare time to perfect the art of skimming along the edge of that envelope, the way the logs told him this ship’s commander had done.
This time when Sisko swung around to confront Judith Hayman, his concern had condensed into cold, sure knowledge. “Where did you find these records, Admiral?”
She shook her head. “Your analysis first, Captain. I need your unbiased opinion before I answer any questions or show you the visual logs. Otherwise, we’ll never know for sure if these data can be trusted.”
Sisko blew out a breath, trying to find words for conclusions he wasn’t even sure he believed. “This ship—it wasn’t just cloaked like the Defiant. It actually was the Defiant” He heard Dax’s indrawn breath. “And when it was destroyed in battle, the man commanding it was me.”
* * *
The advantage of having several lifetimes of experience to draw on, Jadzia Dax often thought, was that there wasn’t much left in the universe that could surprise you. The disadvantage was that you no longer remembered how to cope with surprise. In particular, she’d forgotten the sensation of facing a reality so improbable that logic insisted it could not exist while all your senses told you it did.
Like finding out that the mechanical death throes you had just seen were those of your very own starship.
“Thank you, Captain Sisko,” Admiral Hayman said. “That confirms what we suspected.”
“But how can it?” Dax straightened to frown at the older woman. “Admiral, if these records are real and not computer constructs—then they must have somehow come from our future!”
“Or from an alternate reality,” Sisko pointed out. He swung the chair of his data station around with the kind of controlled force he usually reserved for the command chair of the Defiant. “Just where in space were these transmissions picked up, Admiral?”
Hayman’s mouth quirked, an expression Jadzia found unreadable but which Curzon’s memories interpreted as rueful. “They weren’t—at least not as transmissions. What you’re seeing there, Captain, are—”
“—actual records.”
It took Dax a moment to realize that those unexpected words had been spoken by Julian Bashir. The elegant human accent was unmistakably his, but the grim tone was not.
“What are you talking about, Doctor?” Sisko demanded.
“These are actu
al records, taken directly from the Defiant.” From here, all Dax could see of him was the intent curve of his head and neck as he leaned over his data station. “Medical logs in my own style, made for my own personal use. There’s no reason to transmit medical data in this form.”
The unfamiliar numbness of surprise was fading at last, and Dax found it replaced by an equally strong curiosity. She skirted the table to join him. “What kind of medical data are they, Julian?”
He threw her a startled upward glance, almost as if he’d forgotten she was there, then scrambled out of his chair to face her. “Confidential patient records,” he said, blocking her view of the screen. “I don’t think you should see them.”
The Dax symbiont might have accepted that explanation, but Jadzia knew the young human doctor too well. The troubled expression on his face wasn’t put there by professional ethics. “Are they my records?” she asked, then patted his arm when he winced. “I expected you to find them, Julian. If this was our Defiant, then we were probably all on it when it was—I mean, when it will be—destroyed.”
“What I don’t understand,” Sisko said with crisp impatience, “is how we can have actual records preserved from an event that hasn’t happened yet.”
Admiral Hayman snorted. “No one understands that, Captain Sisko—which is why Starfleet Command thought this might be an elaborate forgery.” Her piercing gaze slid to Bashir. “Doctor, are you convinced that the man who wrote those medical logs was a future you? They’re not pastiches put together from bits and pieces of your old records, in order to fool us?”
Bashir shook his head, vehemently. “What these medical logs say that I did—no past records of mine could have been altered enough to mimic that. They have to have been written by a future me.” He gave Dax another distressed look. “Although it’s a future that I hope to hell never comes true.”
“That’s a wish the entire Federation is going to share, now that we know these records are genuine.” Hayman thumped herself into the head chair at the conference table, and touched the control panel in front of it. One of the windows on the opposite wall obediently blanked into a viewscreen. “Let me show you why.”
The Soldiers Of Fear Page 18
