Star Trek: The Next Generation - 115 - The Stuff of Dreams

by James Swallow

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Historian’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Sue, Carole, Darren, and Phil

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  This story takes place in the year 2384, some months after the events of the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Cold Equations #3: The Body Electric.

  1

  There was a quality to the light unlike anything Jean-Luc Picard had ever seen. The peculiarity of its warm and ethereal glow cast soft waves of color across the bridge of the Enterprise and the upturned faces of his crew. He had forgotten about it, in the pitch and moment of the swift journey here, in the work of being captain and all that entailed.

  But now, as he laid eyes upon the phenomenon for the second time in his life, Picard felt something that stirred a little of the poet in his soul. The motion and pace of the object, the way it writhed through space like a windborne pennant of star-stuff . . . It gave him pause to watch it chart its slow, steady passage, and those thoughts grew heavy when he remembered all the suffering and distress that surrounded it.

  Still, the questions that had come to him in that first moment returned. Where did it come from? What confluence of cosmic events had combined to invest such a thing with existence? Does it live in some sense? Is it intelligent in a way we can never perceive? Or is it a device, a tool of minds infinitely superior to ours, now lost and forgotten?

  “Captain?” Worf’s voice broke his reverie, and Picard turned to glance over his shoulder to where his first officer was standing. He and the Klingon were the only ones on the bridge who had seen the phenomenon before, and the silence, the held breath in the throats of the rest of the duty officers, made plain their awe at the alien sight. “What are your orders?” continued the commander. Worf’s stance was stiff and wary; he disliked anything that he couldn’t grasp in a rational manner, and the band of coruscating light was very much that.

  Picard straightened and turned back to the viewscreen. “The nexus,” he said, and giving the energy ribbon its name seemed to break its spell. “Lieutenant Faur, range to object?”

  At the flight control by his side, the woman blinked and nodded at the question. “Four thousand kilometers to the outer phase nimbus, sir. We’re moving in parallel now.”

  “Look sharp,” he offered. “Don’t let it fool you. It’s as dangerous as it is beautiful.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Faur, nodding again.

  Worf glanced at a readout. “Commander La Forge reports no adverse field effects from our proximity to the object. Warp core remains stable.”

  Picard nodded, accepting the information without comment.

  “Sensors are reading the U.S.S. Newton on the far side of the object,” said the Cardassian at ops, the other forward console. “They’re holding outside the engagement perimeter, as per standing orders.” The young exchange officer seemed slightly out of place on the bridge, the only one of them dressed in a non-Starfleet uniform.

  Picard nodded. “Thank you, Glinn Dygan. Maintain course and heading. Lieutenant Chen?” The captain signaled to the woman at the aft systems panel with an incline of his head. “Show me the Newton.”

  “Yes, Captain,” offered the Vulcan female. Her hands danced over the panel, and the main screen shifted to show a Starfleet Nebula-class cruiser.

  The other ship was moving in a slow lockstep with the nexus, the thick upper equipment module at its stern angled to present its full dorsal surface toward the eerie light of the phenomenon. Picard saw dense rows of advanced scanner arrays and whiskery antennae lining the Newton’s sensor pod, all of them active, all drinking in gigaquads of new data every second on every aspect of the energy ribbon.

  Whereas Enterprise was a multirole starship, the Newton was a dedicated science vessel, her interiors filled with laboratories and analysis suites of every conceivable kind. She had a larger than normal contingent of civilians on board, scientists engaged in Starfleet’s offworld research programs, and a crew of some of the Federation’s brightest minds. Picard knew the ship’s captain—a curt fellow named Thom Bryant—by reputation only. Bryant had graduated from the Academy the year before Picard, and his record spoke of an exemplary career as an engineering officer before he rose to a command of his own. This would be Bryant’s show, any questions of seniority notwithstanding, and in truth, Picard was willing to let another officer take the lead here. His experiences with the nexus thirteen years ago at Veridian III had left an indelible mark on him, and he was in no rush to revisit it.

  “The readings coming off that . . . thing . . .” said Dygan, his lined face twisting in a grimace. “If I didn’t know better, I might think I was looking at the start of a catastrophic sensor malfunction.”

  “The nexus doesn’t exist in the same sense as we do.” At the science station, Lieutenant Dina Elfiki offered an explanation. She made a complex shape in the air with her hands. “It’s atemporal, out of phase with our space-time. Transdimensional, even.” She shook her head. “Quite remarkable. And infuriatingly difficult to understand.”

  Picard nodded to himself. The Newton’s presence as the shepherd of the nexus was part of the Federation’s attempt to gather some of that elusive understanding. During the incident with the El-Aurian renegade Tolian Soran, and his ruthless attempts to divert the course of the nexus, Picard had learned of the energy ribbon’s strange qualities through firsthand experience. The nonmatter of the phenomenon was literally psychoactive. It responded to the wants and desires of intelligent minds in direct contact with it. When contained “inside” it, a living being was insulated from the passage of time, suspended in a bubble of unreality that built itself out of the being’s memories. For those within, the nexus was a kind of Elysium. Like being inside joy, Guinan had said.

  Picard’s old friend had experienced that timeless paradise, just as Soran had, but Guinan had returned to reality, while Soran never truly did. In the years that followed, the El-Aurian constructed a scheme to return to that place of immortality and perfection—a scheme that exacted a heavy cost, to the very death of suns and worlds . . . and one of Starfleet’s greatest heroes.

  He knew why Soran had done those things. Picard’s memories of the nexus, of the moment when he was subsumed into it, had been buried deep. Now they returned, and he quickly smothered an irrational pang of regret, remembering how hard it had been to break away from his own private, perfect world there.

  Picard’s report to Starfleet Command after the fact and his subsequent debriefing by the Department of Temporal Investigations were the reason why Newton was here; for not only did the nexus possess the capacity to construct synthetic realities out of pure thought, but its atemporal nature had the potential to act as a gateway to anywhere or anywhen. Such power could not be allowed to move through the galaxy unchecked.

  And yet for a time, it had. On a steep elliptical orbit that took it up and out of the galactic plane of the ecliptic, the nexus had been free to drift through the empty void of intergalactic space, monitored only by autonomous probes as it comp
leted its 39.1-year cycle. A massed Borg invasion and a handful of other crises took the Federation’s attention, and the nexus became lost in a sea of troubles as Starfleet fought wars and disasters. The nexus should not have returned until the second decade of the twenty-fifth century; but it was becoming clear that the effect wrought upon the energy ribbon by Soran’s influence had changed it in ways that could not have been predicted. The orbital path of the nexus had been radically altered, and the crew of the Newton was still trying to fathom the degree of those changes. Enterprise was here to assist. Those were Picard’s orders, but he couldn’t escape the sense that there was more lurking beneath them. The thought did not sit well with him.

  A chime sounded from the first officer’s panel, and Worf bent to study it. “We are being hailed,” he announced. “It is Commander Rhonu.”

  “On-screen,” Picard ordered, looking up as the image of the Newton changed to a view of the science vessel’s bridge and the ship’s executive officer, a middle-aged Betazoid woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and the deep black eyes characteristic of her species.

  “Captain Picard, welcome,” she began. “Captain Bryant sends his apologies, but he’s engaged in an experiment down in Lab Six right now and couldn’t be here to greet you.”

  “I understand,” he replied, ignoring the minor breach of protocol. “The Enterprise stands ready to assist, Commander. My astrophysics and engineering teams are at your disposal.”

  Rhonu nodded. “We’re ready to brief them. Your timing is perfect, sir. We’re a day away from proceeding to the last phase of our operations here.”

  “Oh?” Picard exchanged a look with Worf. The commander’s comment had a ring of finality to it. “I don’t follow you.”

  Her smile tightened a little. “It would be best if the captain explained.”

  “Very well. I will beam over with the team leaders. There’s no time like the present.”

  “We’ll be waiting. Newton out.” The image flicked back to the view of local space and Picard turned away.

  “Last phase,” he echoed, as Worf came closer. “Number One, I don’t recall anything in Starfleet’s orders about concluding this research mission.”

  “There was not,” confirmed the Klingon. His lips thinned. “However, our orders were considerably more indefinite than usual.”

  “Yes,” Picard agreed. The phrase captain’s discretion had cropped up a number of times. Neither officer was overly enamored of such vagaries, and Rhonu’s comments had only deepened the captain’s growing concern. “I think we’ll put an end to that.” He tugged his tunic straight. “You have the bridge, Commander. Inform Mister La Forge I’ll be joining him in the transporter room.”

  * * *

  The hatch hissed open and Picard entered Lab Six’s observation room. The compartment was essentially a large balcony extending out over the deck of the wide, two-story chamber. Below, on the lower level, technicians and engineering officers worked at a large holographic projector matrix connected to banks of data stacks, making last-second adjustments with probe-like tools or locking glowing cables into place.

  Thom Bryant stood at a control lectern, peering over it to take in the work of his crew. His attention flicked back and forth between the action beneath him and a data padd in his hand. The Newton’s captain absently brushed a loose curl of ice-gray hair out of his eyes and frowned. “Are we ready to go again?” he called. The man was broad-shouldered, but with a spare frame. Bryant’s oval face was firm and unsmiling, and his gaze betrayed an intensity that his junior officers doubtless saw as intimidating. “I’m reading green across the board here.”

  A Cygnian woman wearing a lieutenant commander’s rank called back up to him. “Aye, sir. On your word.”

  “Begin.” Bryant turned and caught sight of the other captain for the first time. There was a momentary flash of dismay, but he covered it quickly. “Picard. Welcome aboard.”

  “Captain Bryant. I thought it best to speak with you as soon as possible.”

  “Of course.” He beckoned him closer. “Take a look. We’re about to sample the nexus. Virtually, I mean.”

  Picard took in the systems display in front of him, grasping the nature of the experiment immediately. “Holographic mapping. You’re trying to scan a portion of the ribbon down to the molecular scale and build a digital simulacrum.”

  “That’s the idea.” Bryant glowered at the padd, then indicated the Cygnian. “My chief engineer, Tanna Vetro, and I collaborated on the design of the modeling matrix.” He paused. “It’s been a challenge.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” The holograph activated as the words left his mouth, and suddenly the empty air over the projector unit rippled with floods of false-color pixels. Tiny motes of light converged and coalesced into something resembling a truncated section of the nexus phenomenon; but the image was unstable, dropping in and out of focus. Picard glanced at the display and saw a torrent of information flooding through the simulator matrix as it tried to duplicate the form of the energy ribbon.

  Red warning flags bloomed across the screen, one after another, and Bryant cursed under his breath. “Vetro!” he snapped. “Increase the processor speed to compensate. We’re going to lose parity in twenty seconds!”

  The engineer’s body language spoke for her, the stiffening of her shoulders making her annoyance clear. “No good, Captain,” she reported. “It’s coming through faster than we can compensate. Same as before. The fractal structure is just too dense.”

  The holo-image shimmered and burst like a firework in one moment of brilliant destruction before it vanished. A pane of text replaced it, turning slowly; on it were the words Automatic Shutdown Initiated.

  Picard felt the tension vent from the lab, to be replaced by a sullen silence. Bryant let the padd drop to the panel and let out a breath through his teeth. “All right,” he said, addressing his staff. “Confirm failure. Salvage what you can and we’ll look again at trying another reset.” He eyed Vetro. “Lieutenant Commander, report to me when you’re ready for the next attempt.”

  “Like trying to catch lightning in a bottle,” offered Picard.

  Bryant nodded. “It’s incredible. But then you’d know better than I, you’ve been inside.” Before Picard could reply, the other captain went on. “I had hoped we’d be able to get something—even a snapshot of the ribbon’s form—but we’re working in the dark. The outer structure is just too complex for the ship’s computers to simulate, even fractionally.” He sighed. “Whoever built it was a lot smarter than us.”

  “You think the nexus is an engineered artifact?”

  “Don’t you?” Bryant snorted. “I don’t believe in deities or coincidence, Picard. The nexus is simply too intricate to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Someone made it—they just forgot to leave the operating manual where we could find it.”

  Picard folded his arms behind his back. “Captain. My orders were to bring Enterprise to the nexus to assist you in your research. But Commander Rhonu intimated that isn’t the case.”

  The other man looked away, running a hand through his hair. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  * * *

  The Newton had a small observation lounge on the ventral side of the hull, a line of wide and low windows looking out toward the nexus. The compartment was empty, and Bryant led Picard through it to a table before the magnificent view.

  “Two years we’ve been here now,” he said. “Shadowing that thing through empty space, running every kind of test in the book on it, even making up new ones along the way. Do you know what we’ve learned?” Again, Bryant didn’t wait for an answer. “That we are like cavemen poking at the innards of a warp engine. The scans alone will take decades to decipher. Understanding them could take generations.”

  “That’s the mission,” noted Picard. “To seek out.”

  “I’m aware.” Bryant’s reply was brusque. “But now we don’t have that luxury anymore. As much as we want to remain explorers, circums
tances force us into different roles.”

  “What do you mean?” The other captain sounded troubled.

  Bryant answered quietly, “The Newton continually tracks the orbit of the nexus in real time. For some months we’ve seen an increasing trend toward a path that will take it outside its previous thirty-nine-year orbit and on to a totally new trajectory. Right now, we’re in empty, unclaimed territory. But in less than a month, the nexus will exit this region and cross into a zone claimed as sovereign space by the Holy Order of the Kinshaya.”

  Picard’s blood ran cold. He didn’t need to ask Bryant if he was certain; the Newton’s captain wasn’t the kind of man to make such a statement without having triple-checked the facts personally. Although the Kinshaya theocracy’s militaristic bent had softened in recent times, they were still considered by the Federation to be a potential antagonist state—and it was rumored that hard-line factions within the Order were vying for a chance to return to their earlier superiority. But more than that, as a member nation of the Typhon Pact, what fell into Kinshaya hands could also become a tool of that interstellar rival to the United Federation of Planets.

  Bryant read Picard’s train of thought in his eyes. “Now you know why the orders were vague. Starfleet’s trying to keep a tight lid on this, and we don’t want word of our intentions leaking out to any Pact spies who might be listening. If they take control of the nexus, if they figure out how it works, they’ll have a free ticket to rewrite history. A single operative, properly briefed, could stop the Federation from existing . . .”

  Picard folded his arms. “I’m not sure the nexus would let that happen.” He said the words before he was aware of them.

  “No?” Bryant eyed him. “Weren’t you the one who used it to change history?”

  “What I did was small . . . on a cosmic scale.”

  Bryant pointed at the ribbon. “Look at that thing. Can you tell me it works on any scale that we understand?”