“Pretty much. It takes people that way sometimes. The really funny part is, neither of them probably see it themselves yet.”
Nog grunted. “Let’s hope they live to find out.”
La Forge had never found the center seat of a starship less comfortable than now, watching the shuttlecraft with its half dozen occupants coast away from the ship.
As it began to drop toward the Hera, he realized he was digging his fingernails into the armrests of the seat again, out of pure frustration. Leah laid her hand on his, and gently lifted it away.
“I should be going with them,” he said tightly.
“No you shouldn’t.”
Instead of replying, he said to the ensign at ops, “Follow them all the way on the main viewer.”
“Aye, sir.”
As the image on the viewer tracked the shuttle, something suddenly flashed across it. Whatever it was had a triangular section, and was ten times the length of Challenger. “What was that?”
The proximity alerts began to sound. “A vessel has . . . arrived,” the ops ensign squawked.
“Is it going after the shuttle?”
“No, its on the opposite side of the Hera, and outside our orbit. It’s left a trans-slipstream wake where it arrived.”
“Show us the new ship.” The ops ensign worked his console, and the main viewer was filled once more with the enormous and shark-like hull of a design La Forge had never seen before. Narrower at the bow than the aft, it was patterned in zigzag colors, and seemed to flex as it moved.
La Forge had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that it was looking back at him as he watched it. For a moment he wished Deanna Troi was sitting next to him so that he could ask her if he was just imagining things.
“Go back to the shuttle,” he told the ops ensign. The image on the viewer changed immediately to show a closer view of the Hera’s upper surface. There was no sign of the shuttle. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know sir . . .” The ensign looked up helplessly. “The shuttle has disappeared completely. It’s almost as if it’s just been swallowed up by the Hera’s hull plating.”
38
“What is it?” the centurion asked. The Romulan survivors of the Stormcrow who weren’t working on repair crews at the moment were watching the alien vessel through the windows of their quarters.
It looked to Sela like one of the predator fish that her grandfather—her father’s father, of course—had liked to hunt in the western ocean of Romulus. They were a great delicacy and a feared hunter. One had eventually taken his arm, and Sela had long suspected that the enforced retirement from hunting them had been the cause of the broken heart that he eventually died from.
It had been agonizing to watch him wither away, his will to live lost along with his livelihood. Saying goodbye to him, hoping against hope for a response in his uncaring eyes, was the worst thing that Sela could remember from her childhood, short of the night that her mother tried to kidnap her and take her away from her father.
What was it? she asked herself. An alien ship? One of the things that had brought them here?
“It may just be our way home,” she said.
“The Starfleet crew won’t like that idea.”
“I’m not going to ask them to like it. Just to accept the necessity.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They will. One way or the other.”
The centurion grinned wolfishly, and she knew which way he would prefer the Starfleet crew to accept things. He was a good centurion, and that attitude was probably one of the reasons that the Stormcrow’s commander had requested his presence on her crew.
He would enjoy his work, when the time came.
“And the aliens?” he asked.
“An alliance would be to our advantage, I think. We must find a way to contact them.” Trans-slipstream would put the Empire well ahead of the other Alpha Quadrant powers, and allow it to truly dominate the Typhon Pact.
“The Federation people will be doing the same thing.”
“Absolutely, but for different reasons. They have slipstream already. We must be ready when the time comes.” Sela thought quickly. “In fact, perhaps it would be to our advantage for the Federation people to make contact . . .”
“You want to what?” La Forge couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He sat at his ready room desk, the alien ship visible through the window behind him.
“Challenger has no warp power,” Sela was saying, “and the alien ship has some kind of trans-slipstream drive. They could carry us home.”
“Us?”
“All of us. Your crew and mine. We should demand that they take us. It is their responsibility, after all.”
“Demand? We can’t even talk to them yet.”
“Have you tried?”
“All hailing frequencies. Carolan’s been on the communications board for hours.”
“Perhaps you’re saying the wrong things. Why don’t I have my communications officer try?”
“So you can propose some sort of deal?”
“Are you monitoring our—”
“No, I just know you too well, but thanks for confirming it,” La Forge said coolly. Anger flashed across Sela’s face. “We’ll continue to try to establish contact. Don’t worry.”
Hours later, La Forge retired to his quarters. There had been no word from the away team, and the alien vessel remained impassive and silent. It had not remained alone, however, and there were now three of the ships, holding at a distance away from the Hera and the Challenger.
When he slept, he dreamt of giant sharks biting at starships, and Romulans stabbing each other in some sort of coliseum. He dreamt of dead faces of those he knew, and loved: his mother, Scotty, Data, Leah.
When he awoke, Leah was sitting by the bed, watching over him, and at first he thought he was still dreaming. This Leah was alive and vibrant, however, and it was a privilege for him that her face was the first thing he saw when he woke. If anything reassured him that at least some things were still right with the universe, that was it.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“I guess so.”
“You seemed pretty distressed even in your sleep, but I didn’t want to wake you. I think bad sleep is better than none.”
“Sleep I can go without, so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s good or bad. Seeing you . . . That’s what matters.”
“You see me every day.”
“Seeing you when I first wake,” he specified. “I dunno if I could face today without that.”
“You make yourself sound very dependent.”
“Not every day, Leah. Just this day.”
Sela walked, with a Starfleet escort, along the corridor that led past the battle bridge. As she walked past, on her way to engineering to check up on her people’s work in assisting Challenger’s octopoid engineer, her hand flickered out and stuck something to the wall next to the sealed battle bridge door.
Her Starfleet escort never noticed.
Once in engineering, she took the centurion aside from where he was checking on connections. “I’ve attached a marker to the door of this ship’s auxiliary control center, the so-called battle bridge,” she told him in a low voice. “When the time comes, and it will come, you will go directly there and secure the room.”
“I understand, Commander,” the centurion whispered in response.
Even as Sela was talking to the centurion in engineering, the battle bridge doors opened, and Qat’qa emerged. She stepped out into the corridor, and quickly found the tiny marker.
She nodded to herself. “I knew it.”
39
The gray-blue expanse of the Hera’s saucer section spread out further and further to either side of the approaching shuttle’s underside.
“Ten meters,” Nog reported as he guided the shuttle in. Beside him, Scotty leaned forward in the co-pilot’s seat, his eyes bright with curiosity, and a half smile sheltering under his mustache. “Eight meters
. . . Seven . . .”
Behind them, Barclay spared a nervous glance at Voktra, who was looking out of the forward viewport with tired eyes. She glanced over at him, and nodded slightly. The remaining Starfleet people and Romulans watched the approaching ship stoically. Barclay suspected they were thinking that they could be of more use helping with repairs on Challenger. Or, in the case of the Romulans, perhaps they thought they could be more useful plotting against the Challenger crew. Either way, Barclay was wondering why he volunteered.
Voktra looked at him, and he remembered that this away mission was a vital part of his duty.
“Three meters,” Nog continued. “Two . . . Docking now—”
There was a tremendous boom, and suddenly Barclay was falling. Wind was rushing past his ears, and he realized in horror that it must be the shuttle depressurizing. There was a scream somewhere as he tried to grab hold of the back of the pilot’s seat, which felt like it was a hundred klicks away and that he could never fly so far in order to reach it.
The screaming grew louder, drowning out any alarms that were sounding. He wasn’t sure if it was Voktra, or himself, or the air squeezing through a rupture, or Nog doing that screech Ferengi sometimes did when they were in mortal terror.
The screaming was so loud now that it must surely rupture his eardrums, but somehow it didn’t. Then he was jarred awake, and rolled to a sitting position. His left shoulder, hip, and his whole back felt as if he had been kicked by an elephant.
Barclay got to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain, and satisfied himself that nothing was broken. He was about to call down to sickbay when he realized he was standing in the open air.
There was a night sky above his head, clear, cloudless, and filled with stars. Barclay blinked, confused. Challenger had been thrown into intergalactic space, and there were no stars there. He spun around two or three times, taking in the starlit landscape, and the figures of the rest of the away team. For a moment, he leaned toward Voktra, offering a hand, but she was already on her feet, and he could see Scotty still on the floor beyond her.
Rushing over, Barclay got to him at the same time as a dazed-looking Nog, who clutched a tricorder in a swelling hand. Barclay felt a moment’s guilt about not having immediately gone to check up on the older man.
The pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats grew out of a carpeted platform on the ground. The structural skeleton of the shuttle lay open and naked like the bony fingers of a skeleton’s grasping hand. ODN cables snaked across a field of shattered metal, with collections of optronic circuits dotted like bushes in the scrubland.
“What the hell?” Barclay managed to say, on behalf of everyone.
Scotty walked stiffly to the pilot’s seat and examined it, then turned to the hedge of circuitry lined up in front of the two seats. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have to say that the shuttle has been turned inside-out.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Voktra agreed, “but it’s impossible.”
“Aye, the impact needed to rupture and flatten the shuttle would have been one none of us could have walked away from.”
“Maybe we didn’t,” Barclay suggested. He looked around nervously. “I mean, this definitely isn’t the interior of the Hera. Do you think we could be . . . I mean . . .”
“Don’t be daft, laddie. We’re not dead, if that’s what you’re suggesting. This is a real place. Besides, if we’d crashed, the shuttle wouldn’t just be inside out, it’d be scattered over a piece of real estate the size o’ Belgium.”
“Oh.”
“And this shuttle might be inside out but it’s all together, all in proportion . . .” Scotty reached out and touched a control, but nothing happened. “It’s still assembled right, but inside out.”
“No power, though.”
“Aye, and that’s another puzzle. Why didn’t we explode when warp field containment went?” Nobody seemed to have an answer.
“Sir.” Nog raised a hand. “Could we be in one of the Hera’s holodecks?” He gestured around the group. “Maybe none of this is real, and the shuttle a holographic fake.”
Scotty nodded thoughtfully. “I doubt it could be the Hera’s holodeck, not with that spatial manifold taking up half her decks, but it could certainly be a holodeck.”
Nog immediately straightened. “Computer, end program.” He maintained his expectant expression for about five seconds. Barclay hoped that might work, but he knew in his heart that it wouldn’t. This wasn’t a holodeck, because if it was, he would have known. He would have felt the old thrill and the old reassurance, and he would have noted the little giveaways that years of training and experience—both on and off duty—had given him.
“It could still be a holodeck,” Scotty said, “but there’s no guarantee that it’s a Federation one, or that a computer running it would understand Federation Standard, or have a universal translator built in.”
Scotty led the group away from the inside-out shuttle, and up a low ridge that opened out onto a plain. They stopped and spread out along the edge of the ridge, everyone taking scans of what they saw there. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like we’re not in Kansas any more . . .”
There was a city of sorts spread out before them. Stacked arrangements of rooms and corridors were all open to the air. Towering beams of some metallic elements curved upward and over the junctions of metal-floored roads and sidewalks.
The starlight glittered on the pseudo-city, giving just enough light to make it clear that the place was constructed by an advanced people out of recognizable and advanced technology, but not enough to lay it all open to easy inspection from a distance. Even so, Scotty could see fixtures, fittings, and even materials that were all very familiar to him. None of it left him in any doubt where the materials, or even the whole parts, had come from.
Walking down into the outskirts of the city, hands on tricorders and weapons, everyone had wide eyes and nervous twitches. Even walking this short distance had drenched everyone in sweat. It might be nighttime on this planet, but it was as hot as a mid-summer day in the Sahara.
Barclay directed his tricorder toward a curving metal arm that stretched heavenward, wrapped in a rocky growth that grew all around it. “This is pretty odd, Scotty. The main column is an alloy of tritanium and duranium. The growth around it isn’t growth, it’s aluminum crystalfoam, and polyduranide. I’m reading molybdenum in the mix too, sir.”
“That’s a familiar sounding mixture, don’t you think, Mister Barclay?”
“It sounds like the structure materials used in most Federation starships over the past several decades. Uh, specifically the Excelsior, Galaxy, Nebula, and Akira-classes.”
“And the Hera was a Nebula-class ship.”
The conclusion was inescapable. “It’s the Hera.” Barclay shivered, visibly. It was, in retrospect, obvious. The walls were made of the same materials and in the same colors as Challenger’s, and the Galaxy and Nebula-classes shared their main saucer design and manufacturing. “Someone must have spent years dismantling the pieces of the interior, and then using them to build this.” Barclay was impressed. The skills required to dismantle the complete interior of a starship and then rebuild it in such a perfect working form on the surface of a planet were almost beyond his imagining. Whoever had done it, he would like to shake them by the hand, if they had hands.
“No,” Scotty said. “They didn’t.”
“They didn’t?” Barclay couldn’t believe his ears. The citadel was right there, and . . . “It didn’t just appear like that!”
“Ah, but it did, Reg. That’s the thing of it. It did just appear like that. Just the same as the interior of our shuttle appeared when we docked.” Scotty kept walking, puffing a little as he tried to walk and talk in the thin air. Barclay didn’t like the sound of it, but supposed it was unavoidable.
“You mean this is the Hera’s interior, just turned inside-out?”
“Just as our shuttle was, aye.”
“How is that e
ven possible?” It was totally ludicrous, as far as Barclay knew.
“It isn’t, as far as I know. Which means I don’t know everything, and that’s a relief.”
Voktra raised both of her eyebrows this time, looking, Barclay thought, surprisingly innocent in the process. “It’s a good thing to not know things?”
“If I knew everything there’d be no point coming out here, would there? We’d all be as well retiring en masse to Norpin Five and vegetatin’ for the rest of time.”
“Sounds like a fate worse than death,” Voktra opined.
“Speaking from experience, you’re right, it is.” Scotty reached up to touch the dark rock that was wrapped around the lower half of the nearest metal spar. “This rock that’s encrusting the spar . . . What is it?”
Barclay scanned it quickly. “According to my tricorder, a simple basalt.”
“Then, if this is the interior of the Hera, how come this rock has already made so many inroads?”
“The ship must have materialized partly inside some rock outcroppings.”
“I don’t think so . . .” Scotty stepped down from the rock, brushing the dust off his hands. “We’re definitely not in a holodeck.”
“Then where are we? There were no planets within sensor range,” Nog said.
“Laddie, ye must have noticed that we’re a lot further away than sensor range.” Scotty pointed upward. “We’re in the galaxy.”
“We’re in a galaxy,” Voktra said quietly. Barclay looked at her in horror, wishing she hadn’t thought of that. “Another wake?” he asked.
Scotty grimaced. “I don’t think so. A wake would have cracked the shuttle like an eggshell, and not had it so neatly turned inside out.”
“Where then?”
“If I were to think, dare I even use the word, logically, I think I’d have to assume we’re on the other side of that spatial manifold.”
Reg’s gut turned to ice, crushed in a frozen fist. “How?”
“I hav’nae a clue, but the interior of the Hera is here with us.” Scotty paced around for a moment, then knelt to start scribbling equations in the dust. “If it were a toroidal continuum fold, that might do the trick . . .”
Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic Page 35
