Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic

by David A. McIntee

  “What about a photon flare? There are some in the escape hatches. I don’t think Bok thinks they were usable as weapons.”

  “Perfect. We can use a tricorder to modulate the flare’s output to an anyon flash, and it’ll recharge in a few minutes so we can use it again.”

  “Okay. How do we phase ourselves?”

  “You get to the cloak, adjust its temporal diffraction index to a variance of somewhere between point three and point four-seven nanometers. That should allow it to leak chronitons inside the ship, but not at a level the sensors will detect without being calibrated to look for it specifically. I’ll adjust the transporter’s phase inverter to react with the chronitons. I’ve already told Balis and the others to behave normally. They’re less likely to miss just the two of us.”

  “What about the guards? We’ll be watched.”

  “I doubt they’ll understand what we’re doing, so if they ask, it’s a Jefferies powerloop.”

  “There’s no such thing,” Barclay pointed out.

  “Not in this century . . .”

  “Not in . . . Oh, our people will know.”

  “You want to do what?” Sloe asked Barclay in engineering.

  For once, Barclay wished that he only had a Breen or Klingon mercenary to deal with. He felt confident of lying to one of them and getting away with it, but Sloe was the man who had installed the cloak, and thus had some chance of actually recognizing and understanding what Reg wanted to do with it.

  He decided at last that telling the truth would be the best lie. “I uh, I need to adjust the temporal diffraction index. I’ve been getting interference from it on the sensors.” He showed Sloe a tricorder recording of a reading suggesting that the cloak was leaking chronitons of a detectable level.

  The reading, of course, was false.

  Sloe looked at it, and grumbled, “I thought I’d bloody fixed that.” He shook his head. “Bloody Klingon technology. It just doesn’t have the finesse of a Romulan cloak.”

  “I’m sure you don’t want to be leaving a trail of chronitons across half the sector,” Barclay said sympathetically.

  “No, we don’t.” Sloe looked at the readings again. “It looks to me as if, should we happen to adjust the temporal differential to round about point four, it’ll solve the problem . . .”

  Barclay stepped forward eagerly. “I’ll take care of that, if you like.”

  Sloe held up a hand. “No. I’m sorry, old chap, but you know how it is. I’d best handle it myself . . .” Barclay could hardly believe his luck, and turned away before Sloe saw his grin.

  The transporter section was unmanned when La Forge and his Breen guard arrived. No one had raised any objection to his working on the transporter to fix “the leak” since no one wanted to travel through it anyway.

  He had barely started work on the phase inverter, when Barclay arrived. “That was quick.”

  “Actually I haven’t had to do anything. Mister Sloe insisted on doing the work himself.”

  La Forge grinned. “That makes things easier.”

  Barclay darted his eyes briefly and nervously in the direction of the Breen guard, who had moved to stand beside the transporter’s dish-shaped stage, so as to keep a better watch over La Forge, and not risk stepping into the platform. “And what about . . . ?”

  “What he doesn’t know . . .” La Forge abruptly pushed Barclay to the ground, and threw a switch on the transporter console. A massive electrical spark arced out of the rear wall of the transporter, the parabolic shape of the enclosure focusing the discharge squarely onto the Breen. Before he could even fully raise his rifle, he erupted in sparks and fire, like a flame. “. . . can definitely hurt him.”

  The charred and smoking body hit the floor, and Geordi forced down the vomit. Reg didn’t manage to hold it down.

  La Forge pulled some circuits from the console. Then he handed Barclay a photon flare and a Ferengi communicator, keeping one of each for himself. “It would have been handy if I’d been able to steal a phaser or disruptor as well, but these will have to do.”

  Barclay looked as sick as La Forge felt, but managed a nod. “Won’t they hear us talking on these communicators?”

  “Not once we’re phased. I wasn’t thinking of using them as communicators, but as transporter locks. If we’re in phase with the ship and need to get out of phase in a hurry, these will act as remote triggers that will only de-phase us, rather than everybody on the ship.” He adjusted some more controls. “I’ve locked out the console as a means of controlling the transporter, just in case.”

  Barclay nodded glumly. “Commander . . . Do we really have to use this transporter? It’s . . .”

  “I know, Reg. Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.” La Forge wished he didn’t have to put his friend through this, but this was their best hope of stopping Rasmussen and Bok. He pressed the button on his communicator. He felt a faint tingling, and a sudden wave of nauseating dizziness.

  Barclay obviously felt it too, because he reached out a hand to steady himself against the iron-gray wall, and his hand went clean through it. He pulled it back as if bitten, and looked at Geordi in horror. “It worked.”

  “Yeah, this takes me back, all right.”

  “What should we do first?”

  “Let’s find out what’s in those crates that Bok brought on board. If it’s a weapons supply, it’ll make re-taking the ship a lot easier.”

  Reaching the armory was easy. La Forge found that not having to lift his feet over the old-style door lintels was a relief. They walked clean through the forcefield that protected Bok’s mysterious crates. La Forge instinctively reached out to open one, and cursed as his hand went deep into it with nothing more to show for the effort than a vague buzzing sensation. “I guess it’s time to test the anyon flares,” he told Barclay.

  Geordi triggered his flare, and felt a slap of exhausting nausea ripple through his body. He fell to his knees, which hit the ancient deck plates with a strangely reassuring solid pain. As he and Reg struggled to their feet, they found that the crate wouldn’t open, but there was a pry-bar within reach.

  Glancing around one more time and half certain that somebody would come in at any second, La Forge made another attempt to free the lid. This time it popped loose, with a sound that Geordi was sure had been heard all the way to the bridge.

  Barclay moved the lid aside and whistled softly. “Commander . . . look at this.” He scooped up a handful of gold bars, feeling the slight motion of the liquid latinum within them. “Gold pressed latinum. I’ve never seen so much in one place.”

  “And if that other crate contains the same . . . Maybe Bok wants to disprove the idea that you can’t take it with you.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense, taking today’s currency back into the past.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Geordi hefted a few bars. “There are a lot of civilizations that use compound interest. Deposit an amount in, say, 2180, and multiply your money a dozen times by today.”

  “But surely today’s money, even Ferengi money, wouldn’t be accepted in the past. It’d be dated wrongly.”

  Geordi examined the bar. “I don’t think Ferengi money goes by dates, just by purity of the latinum. And there are always going to be places to invest precious stones or minerals, especially in a pre-replicator era.”

  “What are you two doing here?” Rasmussen was standing in the doorway. He came over and used a handheld device to turn off the forcefield. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

  Barclay shot a guilty glance at his tricorder, but La Forge blocked Rasmussen’s view of him. “Rasmussen, listen. I don’t know Bok that well, and I don’t know the Shadow Treasury at all, but I do know that neither of them will want to leave us around to either interfere with their part of the scheme, or tell anybody about it.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me there’s no honor among thieves, that’s all right, I already know.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that as soon as yo
u’re through that Split Infinite, there are going to be no living humans on this ship.”

  Rasmussen grinned and waggled a finger at him. “Ah, come on now, Geordi. You can’t kid a kidder. Do you think I don’t recognize a divide and conquer scenario when I see it?”

  Geordi bit down on the frustration that was building up in him. “Right now I’m thinking you wouldn’t recognize a one-way street if it hit you in the face. Which is exactly what it’s about to do!”

  Barclay by now had half-dismantled a communicator and a tricorder, and was using some tools to cross-connect them together.

  “Listen to this,” Barclay said. “I’ve managed to unscramble Bok’s private channel to the marauder.”

  “Grak,” Bok’s voice said, “remember the schedule. At entry minus five thirty minutes, I’ll have the prisoners, and Ras-mew-son, executed, and then the rest of the crew will evacuate to your ship. I will proceed through the Infinite alone.”

  “Understood, Daimon. Will you need any extra personnel to take care of the hew-mons?”

  “No. The Starfleeters are under guard, and Ras-mew-son still thinks he’s going home.”

  Rasmussen’s eyes widened, and La Forge pointed to Barclay’s makeshift descrambler. “All right, so you won’t believe me when I tell you that Bok will cross you. Will you believe it from him?”

  “The bastard!” Rasmussen squawked.

  La Forge nodded. If you want to live longer than another couple of hours, you’re going to have to help us.”

  “We were supposed to be partners!”

  “Let me guess. He told you that whatever you invented, he’d use the Ferengi Commerce Authority to sell it across the galaxy, not just on Earth?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “What’s his interest in going to 2162?”

  “Who even says he actually has 2162 in mind?” Barclay pointed out. “I mean, this ship wouldn’t be out of place any time between 2155 and 2220 or so.”

  La Forge shivered. “That’s a good point. We don’t really know for sure where he’d want to go back to, or why.” He frowned, as that thought reminded him of a question he had meant to ask earlier. “How did you ever get mixed up with Bok anyway?”

  Rasmussen sighed. “After my visit to the Enterprise I was sent to a rehabilitation colony. It was all very civilized, much nicer than prison would have been in the twenty-second century, but one thing it shared with historical prisons is the opportunity to network.”

  “Network?”

  “You see, every day while in prison—sorry, rehab—I’d meet someone who knew something interesting. Mostly, of course, it was just about everyday life in the late twenty-fourth century. Stuff the historians’ files in the time pod didn’t cover. It stopped me feeling too homesick, and helped me adjust.”

  “That’s pretty much the point of rehab.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is, and I’m just as sure that most of those people were sent my way for exactly that reason. And don’t think I’m not grateful to Starfleet for putting me there, because I adjusted to this century a lot quicker than I would have on my own.”

  “Again, that’s pretty much the point.”

  “Exactly. But there were other stories, and other conversations. Ones that maybe were less encouraged.”

  “Such as?”

  “There would be the occasional smuggler, or whatever, who’d talk about the deals she’d done, or the jobs he’d performed for certain individuals or organizations. The Orion Syndicate, the Shadow Treasurers, the Nausicaan cartels, that kind of thing. Names would be mentioned.”

  “Contacts?”

  “Contacts,” Rasmussen confirmed. “So, when I was released, I already had a pretty good idea of how things worked, but also who to talk to about what I could do when I got out, both honestly and otherwise.”

  “A shame you didn’t get such an idea of who to trust. It sounds to me like Bok’s left you with a clear choice of you or him.”

  Rasmussen scowled. “You better believe it’s not going to be me.”

  That was what Geordi was waiting for. “Then help us stop him. I know you don’t like living in this century, but at least it is living.”

  Rasmussen hesitated. “I’ll . . . I’m not sure what to do, actually. Insurgency isn’t really my field.”

  “What do you know about the ship’s security systems? Intruder control?”

  “There’ll be the standard motion sensors and anaesthetic gas . . . But I don’t know if the gas will have survived the time Intrepid has been drifting. Unless you replaced it?”

  “No, and it wouldn’t do any good against the Breen anyway.”

  “There is a sonic disruption field available. That should knock out Ferengi, the Klingons, and the Breen. As well as humans, obviously.”

  La Forge nodded. “Okay, then, Rasmussen. If you can tell us how to activate the disruption field . . .”

  “I can do better than that.” Rasmussen drew a quick diagram of the appropriate controls on a padd and gave it to Geordi.

  “All right. You get stimulants from a medical kit, ready to wake up the rest of our people, and Reg and I will trigger the field.”

  “Won’t you need ear protection or something?”

  “Trust me, we’ll be immune,” La Forge said, enjoying Rasmussen’s mystification. “Now, go on ahead of us. We’ll follow you out.” He pushed Rasmussen gently toward the door, and out. As soon as the door closed again, Geordi used his stolen communicator to de-phase himself and Barclay. “Nice work, Reg,” he said, when he recovered from the stomach-churning transition.

  “Thanks, Commander.”

  “I didn’t think Bok would be crazy enough to discuss his plans over a channel like that, but I’m glad he did.”

  “Actually, Commander, there’s something I should tell you . . . The descrambler doesn’t work.”

  “What?”

  “My tricorder was still recording when Bok came aboard, and I kept it running. All I had to do was re-edit his words together, if you see what I mean.” He gave a sly grin, which La Forge matched.

  “That’s beautiful, Reg!” Barclay managed a bashful but grateful expression. “Come on, let’s get to intruder control.”

  Intrepid had made good time closing in to the Split Infinite after the probe test had proved successful. Bok stood in front of Intrepid’s main screen, watching the heavenly fires that swirled ahead.

  His son would have found a good market for something like this, he reflected. Tourism, energy collection, or something else Bok couldn’t even imagine. Someday, in his future but the galaxy’s past, his son would come here and admire what he had done.

  Let Picard kill a thousand Ferengi sons, who then wouldn’t be competition for his son’s pursuit of profit.

  “Entering the Infinite’s outer neutrino band now,” Sloe announced, interrupting his reverie. As if in response to the words, the consoles and control boxes all around the bridge began to rattle and shake.

  “Polarize the hull plating.”

  “Also, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid I’m picking up a distress signal from Harga’s ship.” Bok spun around angrily, eyes wide. “The ship has broken up, and Challenger is on its way.”

  “Have Grak lay an ambush between our position and the Challenger’s vector.” He had promised himself he would do whatever it took to preserve his son’s life, and if the destruction of Kren’s ship, Harga’s ship, and the Challenger was what it took, then it would be a well-spent investment.

  The Intrepid was clattering and rattling so raucously that Barclay was certain it was going to fly apart at any second. The ship, as Scotty would no doubt say, just couldn’t take the strain. He tried to lean against the wall and grab hold of a pillar to catch his breath and steady his nerves, but had forgotten that he couldn’t. He stumbled, his shoulder and hand disappearing into a structural buttress. Luckily they came out apparently unharmed.

  “We must be entering the Infinite,” La Forge murmured. “We nee
d to be quick.”

  Barclay nodded, turned the corner, and almost walked straight through a Ferengi, who was clearly as shocked at the encounter as Barclay was. The Ferengi yelped, and quick-drew a phaser. Reg had no time to dodge as the beam lanced clean through him.

  He didn’t even feel it.

  The Ferengi obviously felt something, and it looked very much like mortal terror. He screamed, firing again and again, but the repeated shots passed as harmlessly through Reg as the first had done, and burned into a bulkhead at the far end of the corridor.

  Finally regaining control of his limbs, Reg darted sideways, through the corridor wall. Geordi came through a second later. “What happened?”

  “A Ferengi saw me!”

  “The phasing effect must be more limited further away from the transporter. The targeting scanners are pretty old . . .”

  “Now you tell me!” An alarm began to blare throughout the ship, echoing through the corridors as Barclay and La Forge ran into intruder control. It was a cramped and dark room filled with monitors and security control panels.

  “Let’s just hope Rasmussen’s diagram is accurate.”

  “What’s happening?” Bok demanded. Even the silent Breen helmsman looked up.

  “I saw a ghost,” a Ferengi mercenary was saying. “It was the hew-mon, Barclay, and he went through the wall!”

  “Ghost my lobes,” Bok snarled, slapping the other Ferengi. “More likely a hologram.”

  “None are on board,” Sloe pointed out. Comprehension dawned slowly on his face. “The cloak’s temporal differential variance . . .”

  “What?”

  “He said . . . Dammit, he tricked me. That’s no ghost, it’s some phase trickery!”

  “Find him and kill him!” Bok was almost purple with rage. “In fact kill all the Starfleet prisoners, right . . . now . . .” He winced, as something seemed to buzz around his head. “What is . . .” His vision was blurring, and he couldn’t tell the difference between Sloe and the Breen helmsman.

  The person standing nearest to him suddenly toppled to the floor, and Bok wasn’t long in following him.