“So, we could be anywhere in the universe.”
“Aye, lad, that we could. It’d be nice to think we were back in our own galaxy, and there’s maybe a chance of it, with it bein’ so close to where the fold is, but there are no guarantees.” Scotty straightened up with a wince and a grunt. “If somebody would like to take some astronomical readings, maybe we could confirm one way or the other if we’re in our own galaxy.”
“I’ll do it,” Nog said.
While Nog tried to get a fix on their position, and Barclay continued examining the city that had once been the interior of the Hera, the two Romulan soldiers walked away in opposite directions to form the best defensive perimeter they could manage.
Voktra, meanwhile, set her tricorder for an environmental scan. “These readings make no sense,” she complained to no one in particular.
Scotty heard her. “In what way?”
“The amount of heat for one thing.”
“I don’t need a tricorder to see that it’s hot.” Scotty jerked his head in the direction of the horizon, at the visible ripples of heat haze rising from the parched earth.
“Yes, it’s hot, but what I mean is, why is it hot?”
“Aye, that’s a puzzler right enough. There’s no sun in the sky, and no signs of volcanism.”
“All the rock and ground looks old. I’m no geologist, but I don’t think there can have been any seismic or volcanic activity here for years.”
“So, why is this place so hot?”
“I can only think of one answer,” Barclay called from where he was, “and, to be fair, people do sometimes tell me to go there.”
Scotty laughed. “Aye, I know what ye mean. And I can think of at least one Satanic-looking gentleman who’d probably feel right at home here.”
There was more than just rock to the planet. Voktra’s tricorder readings had indicated massive life-form readings. They had found that, outside of the plain where the Hera-city stood, there were dense forests of greenery and yellow.
Since there was no sign of a threat on the plain, and no inhabitants in the starship city, Voktra sent her two soldiers to investigate the edge of the forest.
Watching them walk, Scotty eyed the distance, and judged that the horizon was probably around fifteen miles away, making the planet considerably smaller than Earth. The size of Earth’s moon, or thereabouts, he decided.
Something pulled at the hairs on the back of his hand, and he saw that the patch that was supposed to keep his body’s electrical field in sync had fallen off, expired. With all that had happened over the last couple of days, he had forgotten it, but it reminded him of something else. He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting off the throbbing that was starting to ache in his gut and his chest. He wondered whether he might find a working cellular regenerator and a supply of radiogenic particles somewhere, wherever what used to be the Hera’s sickbay was now.
How many treatments had he missed now? Two? Three? As far as he could remember, it was three, and he was starting to feel it.
There wasn’t much point to moping over the matter. He’d always thought it was better to get on and get things done. “Nog, are ye having any luck?”
“No, sir. If we are in our own galaxy, we must be in the Delta Quadrant, or maybe the far side of the Beta Quadrant, but I can’t say for certain.”
“All right lad.”
“This is an impossible planet, sir,” the Ferengi went on. “It doesn’t fit with anything we know about planetary geology. Not planetary formation, not plate tectonics, not astrophysics . . .”
“Then I suppose we have to live with the notion that we don’t know quite everything about everything yet.”
“I suppose we do.”
“I reckon Starfleet would be largely out of a job if, all of a sudden, there was nothing left to discover any more.”
“There’s a quotation they taught us at the Academy. ‘And Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.’”
Voktra tilted her head to one side, as if listening to the quotation over again. “This Alexander of yours sounds . . . ambitious.”
“That’s puttin’ it mildly,” Scotty murmured.
“There’s a similar saying on Romulus, that I’d heard Proconsul Tomalak use in the past. ‘Pity the man who fulfills all his dreams.’”
“Scotty! Scotty!” Barclay was yelling excitedly as he ran out from behind a corner, and over to the trio. “I’ve found something we’d all better look at.” Scotty set off toward him, Nog and Voktra following.
Barclay led them a short distance, to a bizarrely-oriented wall with now-unusable shelves, which must have once been part of a cabin. Set into the ground at the base of the wall was a viewport. A layer of dust half an inch thick had blown across the viewport, and now there were marks where hands—presumably belonging to Barclay—had wiped most of the dust away.
Scotty knelt at the edge of the viewport, using his hands to lower himself down stiffly. He tilted his head, peering through the thick transparent aluminum set into the ground. His face went white, and he whispered, “In the name o’ the wee man . . .”
Nog leaned forward to see what had such an effect on Scotty. The sight stunned him so much that he almost stumbled and fell onto the viewport.
Instead of showing earth or rock underneath the transparent aluminum, or even the darkness of a cave, the viewport looked down into the blackness of the intergalactic void. A distant spiral galaxy provided the only natural light. Closer in, but still a long way beneath the viewport, the Challenger sailed smoothly along in her orbit. “I know we’ve been saying it alot, but that really is impossible.”
“I only wish it were,” Scotty said quietly.
As they watched, something flickered past behind the Challenger, dwarfing it. It was an utterly alien construction, vaguely shark-like, and it moved with a sinuous motion. “Is that . . .” Nog trailed off.
“It probably must be. The thing that brought us here.”
A second vessel joined the first that he had spotted and, together, they simply vanished. “They must have used the gravity well at the Hera to meet up. That clinches it. There’s only one explanation that makes any kind of sense. And I admit I’m using the word sense in its loosest possible definition. It has to be a toroidal continuum fold that’s intersected with the Hera.”
Barclay paced around, tracing little diagrams in the air, “It can’t be a spatial fold on its own. It has to be a . . . a wormhole of some kind, with the particles that cross over it quantum tunneling through to an end-point within the—or a—galaxy.”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Scotty said with a nod, “but it canna be right or the shuttle would have been brought through whole. And then there’s the gravitational anomalies.”
“Gravity here feels about four fifths of Earth normal.”
“Aye, but what do you get if you scan the Hera’s interior?”
Barclay fumbled his tricorder out of its holder. “Four and a half thousand solar masses?”
“It’s reading the fold, which is swampin’ the true local gravity level.”
“But four and a half thousand solar masses, sir? We’d be squashed like—like—like bugs.”
“That we would. But look.” Scotty took the tricorder and made an adjustment for range. “It’s actually a large gravitational mass a couple of dozen meters under the Hera’s remains.”
“That’s still close enough to—”
“Remember when we scanned the Hera from Challenger.”
“It showed a four and a half thousand solar mass attractor of about a hundred meters across, inside the Hera. Yet there wasn’t that level of actual attraction, was there?”
“No . . .” Reg suddenly became excited. “No, there wasn’t, but that means the mass must have been on the other side of the wormhole, or the manifold, and that means it must be this planet, which isn’t that massive.”
“Aye, and the readings from here show the exact same thing—a huge mas
s on the other side.”
Reg’s jaw dropped. “On the other side, where Challenger is. But we know that isn’t the case. And from that side . . .” He snapped his fingers. “The mass is always on the other side, never on the observer’s side!”
Scotty nodded grimly. “Somehow, and don’t ask me how, it’s always being held in balance. Two sides of a spatial manifold, each with fairly normal gravity for the area, but a supermassive attractor on the other side.”
“Challenger was drawn to the Hera by a genuine gravitational attraction,” Voktra pointed out, “but not such a huge gravity.”
“This planet’s mass, I should think,” Scotty said. “That’s what drew Challenger here, but it’s the false mass of the fold that’s drawing the aliens. That’s why they come here, and that’s how Challenger ended up out there.”
40
On Challenger, everyone who had seen the two alien vessels was talking about nothing else. Guinan had seen them too, and they seemed vaguely familiar, but less so than the way people were talking about them. The hushed tones, the disbelief and uncertainty, they were all present in the same way people reacted when they reported religious experiences.
These were no mythical figures, though, but vast leviathans that easily dwarfed the Challenger.
“There you are,” La Forge said to Sela, watching a replay of the aliens’ arrival and departure on a large screen that had been set up behind the bar in Nelson’s. “You wanted to find out what we were looking for, and I guess that . . . There they are.”
“They’re back.” Guinan pointed toward the windows. True enough, both of the alien vessels, which had left, had now reappeared. Ten times the length of the Challenger, they were covered in multicolored crisscrossing diamond patterns.
Sela’s eyes were wide, and she looked more human than usual. If Geordi didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was afraid. No, he thought again, not afraid, but intimidated, as if she’d bitten off more than she could chew. “I’ve never seen ships like that,” she admitted.
“Neither have I. Which is kind of the point of Starfleet. Nobody’s ever been out here before—”
“Except for the Hera.”
“And no one has met . . . whoever they are.”
“Tell me, Captain La Forge,” Sela began silkily, “have we any idea how far outside the galaxy we are?”
“About half a million light-years.” A quarter of the way to Andromeda, Geordi thought.
“That’s a long way. Even if Challenger’s engines were working.”
“A couple of hundred years, even at maximum warp.”
“And you’re content for it to take that long to get home?”
“We don’t seem to have much of a choice, do we?”
Sela walked over to the windows, her voice trembling slightly. “We have several choices, Captain. They’re all sitting out there, coming and going in the wink of an eye.”
“The alien ships?”
“One brought us here in a matter of minutes. They’re not going to take centuries to travel back into the galaxy.”
“No, they’re not. But they’re not us.” He understood her concern, or thought he did. “It wouldn’t be the first time a starship was stuck far from home, with low energy and a multi-generational trip to look forward to.”
Sela turned back to him again. “You’re referring to Voyager?”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Naturally.” Her arrogance returned, along with the feigned camaraderie. “Actually the Tal Shiar first heard of it several years before it went missing in the Delta Quadrant. At the time we thought the officer who reported the contact had suffered some kind of mental breakdown.”
“Well, the point remains that Voyager faced a journey of seventy thousand light-years, which, considering the limitations of running an engine at maximum, worked out to a seventy-year journey home. But they knuckled down, got on with it, and got home in seven years instead of seventy.”
“And your point is? That if we all behave like nice little Starfleet drones, and maybe get lucky enough to stumble across an old transwarp conduit or two, we might get home in only a couple of decades instead of a couple of centuries?” She shook her head sharply. “I’m sorry, but that is most definitely not an option.”
“I wasn’t really discussing practical options yet.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I was just pointing out that being far removed from our home quadrant, or even our home galaxy, doesn’t automatically mean certain doom.”
“I never thought it did. I just happen to think that we need another ship, unless you have a means to attract Starfleet’s attention all the way out here.”
“We have a ship, in case you hadn’t noticed. The one we’re currently aboard.”
Sela chuckled lightly, a surprisingly pleasant sound. “We’re standing in a vessel, Captain La Forge, yes. But I don’t think I’d exaggerate things by calling it a ship as such. Ships have engines, and take you to places. This is just a sheltered space station right now.”
“We’re working on getting engine power back up to sustainable levels. Leah and Vol are pulling double shifts—”
“And it’s not going to do any good. They know that, you know that, and I know that. Even if we lived long enough to make it all the way home to our own galaxy, do you think for a moment that Challenger is in any shape to make it through the energy barrier?”
“That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it.”
“That’s a bridge we’ll never reach, Captain. This vessel is done as a transport. We all know it.”
“So, what’s your alternative?”
“Take control of one of the alien vessels.”
La Forge laughed out loud. “Are you kidding? You must have noticed how far ahead of our technology they are.”
“Believe me, I’ve noticed that, yes.”
“Okay, and have you considered that maybe their weapons technology is just as far ahead? And if it is, there’s very likely to be nothing you, or I, could do to hurt them, and probably a lot they could do to hurt us.”
“Or maybe they rely on their speed to keep out of trouble, and are as vulnerable to weapons fire as anyone else.”
“Do you want to risk all our lives on that gamble?” Seeing her expression, La Forge held up a hand to cut her off. “Or, let me put that another way: do you want to risk your life on that gamble?” She didn’t answer. “I didn’t think so. So far they haven’t shown any hostile intent, and I have no intention of provoking them to do otherwise.”
“Have you considered the possibility that maybe the reason why they haven’t shown any signs of hostility is because they don’t have the means to do so?” she countered.
“So, you think the Challenger is pretty much out of commission as a ship, but you think it’s up to taking on an unknown alien vessel that was capable of dragging us here?”
“If we compact the power requirements, yes. We still have our sensor readings of what happened, and we’ve shared the readings from Challenger’s sensors.”
“And how would you plan to compact the power?” La Forge asked.
“By sacrificing the saucer section.”
“What?”
She leaned forward in a comradely fashion eerily reminiscent of Tasha Yar. “If we only have the stardrive section to worry about, we can use a lot more of our available power for shields, weapons, and maneuvering.”
“Chairman, we have no idea what their capabilities are. What do we do if they trash the stardrive section? Retire to the saucer and live out our lives in the dark?”
Sela had no answer to that. Not yet, anyway.
As Geordi and Sela spoke, more of the alien ships were arriving. Already there were over a dozen, and, although they were keeping their distance, they were still making Guinan nervous.
Guinan wasn’t used to feeling nervous, and she didn’t like it. Pain was one thing, because it represented physical damage, but nervousness was a wh
ole other matter entirely.
The worst thing about it was that she didn’t know why. She couldn’t remember ever seeing anything like this before. And then it hit her. She wasn’t remembering something from her past, but from the Nexus. A mental image of a distraught La Forge, a Galaxy-class ship, and a gigantic alien vessel that prowled the void; these were the half-remembered Nexus dreams that had drawn her to join the Challenger in the first place.
With that realization, Guinan passed out.
She woke up with Alyssa Ogawa bending over her. “What happened?”
“Geordi says you just keeled over.” Alyssa was scanning her with a tricorder. “I think it’s just a mild allergic reaction to the painkiller I prescribed for your ribs. We’ll switch to a different one, and you’ll be okay.”
On the bridge, Carolan was in the center seat, supervising the beta shift crew at their posts. “Can we get any readings of the interior of the alien vessels? Especially life signs?”
“Nothing, Commander,” the junior lieutenant at ops said. “They’re totally blank to our sensors. Like ghosts. Maybe they really are Flying Dutchmen or something.”
“Somehow I doubt it,” Carolan said. Flying Dutchmen, she thought. It’s as good a designation as any. “Keep scanning our Flying Dutchmen, and record everything.”
41
Despite the hours they had spent on the planet, there was no sign of sunrise yet, and Scotty wasn’t even sure that it would have one, as the stars above hadn’t changed, which suggested that the planet wasn’t rotating.
The Romulans had returned with news that they had found another settlement on the fringes of a moss forest, and that this one had proper, if makeshift, buildings.
Scotty couldn’t move too quickly, but they managed to walk to the settlement in about three hours, with rest stops to catch their—or at least Scotty’s—breath on the way.
The settlement was a fort, of sorts. The walls were about three meters high, and made from wall panels taken from a starship, silver and metallic on the outside, tan on the inside. Since there were no other starships around, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they had come from the Hera.
Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic Page 36
