Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic

by David A. McIntee

  Geordi tried to remember. “Yeah . . . you know what, I think it did.”

  “Then maybe those sensor logs had a reading like this somewhere,” Barclay suggested.

  La Forge mulled the idea over. “That’s not a bad idea. If I could just get access to them again, I could check.”

  “Which brings us back to access to Challenger’s database.”

  “Yeah, which we haven’t got.”

  Challenger was still at warp, both active and passive sensors searching for even the tiniest glimmer of Intrepid.

  Nog was almost ready to go off-duty and in search of raktajino, when a hiss and a moment’s chatter came and went on the communications sector of his tactical console. “What the . . . ?”

  Scotty twisted around the center seat, his face lighting up with hope. “Something?”

  “I thought I heard a transmission.”

  “From Intrepid? It could be Geordi or Barclay trying to contact us.”

  Nog tried to find the signal again. “It wasn’t directed at us. I think I just caught the edge of the transmission.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I’m not sure. Wait, there it is again.” Nog patched the signal through, a high-pitched squeal. Everybody on the bridge winced, Nog most of all. “It’s highly compressed.” He ran it through a database. “Definitely not of Federation origin.”

  “Can you determine where the transmission is being sent from, or to?” Tyler Hunt asked. “Bok has used probes before, when he tried to make Picard think that boy was his son . . . If this transmission is something to do with him, it could point the way to the Intrepid.”

  Nog worked the console, never taking his eyes or ears off what it was giving him. “I think I can narrow the source of the transmission to within a couple of meters. It’s small. Probably just to a relay station.”

  “That would fit with Bok as well. Pipe its coordinates down to cargo bay two.”

  Hunt rose, calling out, “Commander Hunt to transporter chief Carolan. Meet me in cargo bay two.” He darted into the turbolift, and directed it to the cargo bay. Carolan was already there when he arrived in the enormous chamber, and was powering up the cargo transporter console.

  “I’m ready for whatever it is you want to transport.”

  “Good. Can you get a transporter lock on a cube of space, say four meters wide at these coordinates?” He tapped the display that had been funneled down from Nog’s station.

  “Need you ask?”

  “All right, then, go ahead and beam in everything in that volume of space. Every particle, yeah?” Hunt could feel a buzz in his gut. It was an instinct that this cube would be important.

  “Every particle,” Carolan agreed, operating the controls. After a moment, the familiar transporter whine filled the chamber, and a silvery shimmer rained down in the center of the room, leaving empty air behind. “That’s odd.”

  “Wasn’t there anything there?” The few molecules in such a small volume of empty space would have been as close to nothing as made no difference, but empty space didn’t transmit signals.

  “According to the transporter log, we received one hundred and thirty-six kilograms of matter.” Carolan looked baffled. “It can’t have been a stray singularity, as that would have played havoc with the annular confinement beam.”

  “Not to mention local gravity.” Hunt frowned. That much material couldn’t just disappear. The first officer walked carefully toward the wide transporter pad, picking up a self-sealing stembolt from a crate as he passed it. A meter from the pad, he stopped and tossed the stembolt toward it with a gentle underhand throw.

  The bolt arced gently over the edge of the pad, then bounced off nothing with a solid clang and fell to the deck. Pleased that his instinct was right, Hunt rubbed some stembolt grime from his hands. “Cloaked.”

  “What is it? Some kind of buoy or satellite?” Carolan stretched out a hand to pat the invisible object.

  “Maybe a probe.” He went in search of a phaser. “It’s small enough that a wide, low-power beam should overload its cloak.” He set the phaser to a medium stun setting, and washed the beam across the air above the platform until blue sparks rippled through the air, and then all of a sudden there was a two-meter-wide object sitting on the circular pad. It was a squat, stubby tube about twice the size of a photon torpedo casing, and it was a soft but dense black.

  Hunt and Carolan exchanged a baffled glance. “Well well, what have we here?”

  On the bridge, Leah tried everything she could think of that would detect a warp field through a cloak. When none of them worked, she started thinking up new techniques. Something was bound to help find Geordi and the others.

  “There you are . . .” The something was only a few stray protons, but that was all that it needed. “Scotty, I have an energy leakage.”

  “Intrepid?”

  “Definitely a twenty-second-century engine.”

  Scotty sat forward. “Can we tell where they are, and where they’re heading?”

  “If the leakage is to be believed, Intrepid is on a heading of two-four-four mark six-three, at roughly warp three point five. Pretty slow for a getaway.”

  “Aye, lass,” Scotty agreed, “but that’s about warp five on the old scale. Close to Intrepid’s maximum speed.”

  “Old scale?” Nog asked.

  Scotty nodded. “The warp factor scale definitions and method of calculation were changed in 2312. That’s a hundred and fifty years after the Intrepid was originally lost.”

  “Then we can catch him.”

  “Aye, if we can see him. But there’s a better way; if we can plot his course, and work out where he’s going . . .”

  “I think we have enough information to know where Intrepid is headed,” Qat’qa said.

  “Good! Where’s the scunner going?”

  “On a course of two-four-four mark six-three, the only stellar body he can be making for is Delta Five in the Gamma Zeta Alpha group.”

  The name was vaguely familiar to Scotty, but all those alphanumeric designations were infuriatingly familiar without being truly memorable. Names were always better. “Is that a pulsar . . .”

  It was Leah who provided the name he had been trying to remember. “The Split Infinite.” She called up a file image, and put it up on the main screen. A mercurial silver ball slashed open by red and gold power. “The image was taken by a sensor array three parsecs away from the Infinite, nearly two decades ago.”

  “That’s a pretty remarkable stellar phenomenon,” Nog said.

  “Pulsars and neutron stars aren’t that rare.” Qat’qa opined.

  “It’s not the star that’s remarkable,” Leah said, “but the fact that it shares its position with one of the very few cosmic strings whose positions have ever been recorded in normal space. The string intersects with the neutron star, producing a wormhole that could theoretically give direct access to the string—”

  Scotty’s eyes narrowed. “Of course . . . That’s why Rasmussen has come here.”

  “For a rotating cosmic string?” Nog asked.

  “Not such an unlikely idea,” Leah said slowly. “There’s a lot of energy tied up in there, but he doesn’t have the equipment to collect it in any usable form.”

  “He doesna need a collector for what he wants,” Scotty said, his voice leaden. “It’s a natural Tipler cylinder,” Leah said suddenly. “That’s why he’s come here. We’ve all been looking at Bok the wrong way.”

  “In what way?” Nog looked blank.

  “We’ve all viewed Bok as being obsessed with Jean-Luc Picard, and obsessed with revenge. But that’s not it at all. His obsession is with his son’s death.”

  “Caused by Captain Picard.”

  “Yes, but the subsequent obsession with avenging himself on Picard isn’t the actual obsession. It’s just the only thing he thought he could do in relation to his son’s death. A grief he can’t get over.”

  “And now he’s found something he can do about it,”
Scotty said, understanding. “Mister Nog,” Scotty began decisively, “would ye kindly put in a call to the people at the Department of Temporal Investigations. I’d like to think that our friend Rasmussen there is somebody that they will have been takin’ some interest in.”

  15

  Intrepid slowed to impulse power on the outskirts of the Delta Five Gamma Zeta Alpha system. Far ahead, at the system’s heart, a shrunken silver eye burned dully. The poles of the neutron star were visible in most spectra, but the center of it was obscured by far greater energies, which somehow seemed to both originate far beyond the neutron star and blaze out ahead of it.

  Wherever the Intrepid went, the star always looked the same. The two arcs of the neutron star were above and below, providing a frame through which a wormhole vortex was seen. Deep in the heart of the vortex, which itself tore at the star without diminishing it, a blazing serpent twisted madly, spinning thousands of times a second. It spun a web of golden energy, which beamed out from the wormhole, obscuring the rest of the star.

  Close to the star and its anomalies, the stony remnants of planets had formed several crossed bands, dancing between each other under the effects of tremendous gravitational forces.

  The silver and golden light cast from the anomalous star played out from the main viewer and across the faces and furnishings on Intrepid’s bridge. Bok, standing in front of the screen, gazed at the light playing across his hand, and felt his heart skip a beat. His hand looked as if it were made of gold-pressed latinum, shining and powerful. “Impressive,” he murmured.

  “The stuff that dreams are made of,” Rasmussen agreed. He flexed his fingers.

  “It’s beautiful,” Barclay whispered. His expression was somehow as muted and hushed as his tone. He and La Forge were, under the watchful gaze of a Breen guard, monitoring the master systems table at the rear of the bridge, and were just as affected by the sight on the main viewer.

  “La Forge had seen a lot of beautiful and strange astronomical phenomena over the years, but none quite as radiant a jewel as this. “The energy readings coming out of there are like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  “What about planets?” Rasmussen asked.

  Geordi shook his head. “The level of gravimetric forces centered on the star is whole . . . levels of magnitude greater than anything a planet could withstand. They’re just so much rubble now.”

  “Most neutron stars have a few dead planets orbiting them,” Reg said.

  “Most neutron stars don’t have all that other stuff pouring out of them.” Geordi indicated the figures scrolling across the tabletop screen. “Elevated neutrino and chroniton readings. . . . It’s a wormhole, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”

  Barclay made a few calculations on another screen. “I think it just loops round and goes to where it already is, but that can’t account for the gravitational power we’re seeing.”

  “What is that at the center of the star? Beyond the wormhole.”

  “I suppose . . . No, it’s impossible.”

  “In my experience most of what we think is impossible are just things we haven’t come across yet. Go ahead, Reg, what are you thinking?”

  “Readings suggest a cosmic string, but its throwing off kinetoplasmadynamic readings like nobody’s business.”

  “It’s moving?” Geordi was surprised.

  “Spinning, I think. Incredibly quickly too.”

  “A cosmic string?” Geordi tried the thought out for size. “Intersecting with a neutron star . . .” The thought was disturbing, on too many levels. Between radiation and gravitational instability, this was not a good system to be in.

  “And the gravimetric interference patterns between them create a wormhole link from point to point, allowing energy to come off the string . . .” Reg’s eyes widened. “The Split Infinite!”

  La Forge could have kicked himself. “Right! I knew the system designation was familiar.” How could he not have remembered the name?

  “The radiation levels are off the scale,” Reg went on. “Only a gamma ray burst could flood the system more.”

  “Yeah, which makes me wonder . . .” La Forge lowered his voice further. “What the hell are Bok and Rasmussen doing here?”

  Reg shrugged. “Wait . . . Bok is obsessed with getting revenge on Captain Picard, and Rasmussen wants to steal technology and claim the credit for it . . .”

  “Right. But what could they want that they could get here?” La Forge asked.

  “The radiogenic particles flooding out of it could be collected, I suppose . . . used for fuel?”

  “Or as a weapon.”

  “But neither Intrepid nor their marauder is equipped for that sort of energy collection.”

  “It would take some really specialized equipment to harvest the particles or the energy, Reg. So . . . they’d have to wait for it.”

  “Wait?”

  “Yeah, Reg. A rendezvous is the only reason I can think of for someone to come here. Whether it’s a rendezvous with something to collect the energy coming out of the Infinite, or just with another ship for smuggling or to pass along the Intrepid to a private collector of antiquities I don’t know.”

  “Scientific study?” Barclay offered.

  “Rasmussen may be a scientist of sorts, but Bok doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who’s that much interested in scientific research.”

  Bok suddenly turned his attention to the two Starfleet engineers. “You don’t know why we’re here? That’s disappointing, coming from two of Starfleet’s finest engineers.”

  “Maybe you’d like to gloat as you tell us,” Geordi said sourly.

  Bok smiled tightly. “I think I prefer enjoying the fruits of my labors over talking about them.”

  “You’re expecting to make a profit?” That was the Ferengi way, though La Forge couldn’t see where profit would come from here.

  “Oh yes, La Forge. More profit than you can dream of.”

  “Nobody in Starfleet dreams about profit. It’s not why we join the service.”

  “Perhaps, then, I should say more profit than Ras-mew-son dreams of.”

  “I think Rasmussen can dream of quite a lot,” said La Forge.

  Bok laughed. “I’m sure he does. But he doesn’t think of what you would call the big picture.”

  “You mean your plan’s a little different than his.” La Forge had expected as much. It was Bok’s way.

  Bok scowled, glancing back at the entranced Rasmussen. “That is not what I said.”

  “Does he know that you’re thinking of a bigger picture?”

  “He knows what he needs to know.”

  “I guess that’s a ‘no’ then.”

  “What we are doing originated with him. This began with his plan.”

  “But it ends with your plan, right?”

  Bok grabbed Geordi by the collar and shoved him against the wall. Barclay moved forward as if to intervene, but the Breen guard stuck the barrel of his rifle into Reg’s gut, none too gently. “Don’t think for one second that you understand me, hew-mon!”

  “Maybe you can explain,” La Forge gasped.

  Bok’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, you’re trying to rile me? Make me let something slip? This isn’t a game of tongo, La Forge.”

  “Whoever you’re waiting for here—”

  “Waiting for? You’re in for a great surprise.” He shoved La Forge aside, and turned away. Bok paused to speak to Rasmussen for a moment before leaving the bridge. La Forge considered whether this was a suitable moment to try to take some action to remedy the situation they were in, but the guards were taking even more interest in them now. He decided to wait. This ancient bridge was dark enough to make misinterpretations of movements all too easy, and he didn’t want to get shot for scratching an itch. Fighting smarter, rather than harder, was always for the best. He couldn’t sabotage Bok’s scheme before knowing what that scheme was, or how it was supposed to work.

  “Commander,” Reg said cautiously, “I’ve bee
n thinking about string. I mean, the string. It’s spinning, right, and also a cosmic string is the only thing we know of that can be infinitely long. Or at least, can stretch across the length of the universe’s timeline . . .

  Ice seemed to be crystallizing around La Forge’s back, and he felt goose bumps rise on his skin. “That gives me a really nasty idea, and I hope it’s not the idea that Bok and Rasmussen have had.”

  “The string is spinning, and if it’s long enough . . .”

  “It could act as a Tipler cylinder.”

  “A doorway into the past.”

  “Yeah . . . That would fit with Rasmussen’s being here. He might see it as a way home. But Bok . . . ?”

  “I dread to think what Bok might do in the past.” La Forge stepped away from the table, and stepped up to address Rasmussen, who slouched in the center seat. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want to take Intrepid through time. Enter through the wormhole, and fly a spiral course back along the string, at warp.”

  Rasmussen applauded. “I knew you’d figure it out! Now, be honest, Geordi, it gives you a buzz to have worked out the right answer yourself, even if it’s an answer you’d rather not have?”

  La Forge didn’t want to make himself a liar, so, dodging the question, he said, “Intrepid wasn’t built to be a time machine. She’s not designed for expeditions to grab future technology or to take it to the past.”

  Rasmussen shrugged. “All I intend to do is take Intrepid home.”

  “That’s where she would be going anyway. We’ll fly her back to Earth—”

  “No, Geordi, you don’t get it. I intend to take her properly home.” La Forge felt the blood drain from his face, and a pit open in his stomach. “Next stop, 2162.”

  “So, all this is just another scam to take back future technology into the past so that you can ‘invent’ it and get rich?”

  “The Intrepid isn’t future technology,” Rasmussen protested. “It’s a ship from my time that wasn’t destroyed as the authorities thought it was.”

  “It’s also got a twenty-fourth-century Klingon cloak aboard, not to mention all the upgrades and tools we brought over from Challenger.”