by Diane Duane
“Not the usual uniform,” Worf said, managing to sound both disturbed and impressed.
“You’re right about that,” Riker said. The only thing this woman’s uniform had in common with Deanna’s usual uniforms was that it was blue. The harness—there was almost too little of it to call it a top, or even a bodice—seemed to be made of woven gold, like the ornamental sashes. More woven metal, blue this time, bordered it, and the bordering met and gathered up at the left shoulder to support the parabola-and-knife insignia. From the gather, over the shoulder, fell several folds of the blue fabric, the gold interwoven with it, down to about waist height. The right shoulder was bare, as was this Troi’s midriff. Then, quite low on the hips, the skirt began—that blue metallic fabric again, gracefully flowing down just past the tops of the above-the-knee boots this Troi wore, but cut right up to the weapons belt at the hip on the right side, leaving a handspan’s space bare between its attachment to the belt at front and back. A phaser hung holstered there, and in a neat sleeve down on the outside of the right-hand boot lived the dagger, which Riker was now beginning to think was standard wear for officers.
Ensign Redpath was staring at all this wide-eyed. Riker could hardly blame him. As they watched, the other Troi made her way down to the command level, looked at the main viewer for a moment, then turned to Riker and simply gazed at him, the kind of look, Riker thought, that a barbarian queen might turn on some jumped-up commoner who dared to sit in her chair.
The other Riker simply leaned back for a moment, looked at her lazily, and smiled slightly. The thought that seemed to live behind that smile actually made Riker go hot with embarrassment: he was irrationally glad that Deanna wasn’t on the bridge. After a moment, the other Riker said something, then tilted his head to one side to watch Troi’s reaction.
She made none: that lovely face seemed frozen. But Riker’s face changed abruptly. He got up out of the center seat in a way that suggested he was trying not to make it look as if he were in a hurry—though he desperately was. Troi watched him get up, let him stand for a moment, just watching him. Their eyes locked again, and once again, the other Riker was the first to look away.
Then Troi stepped forward and sat down in that center seat, like a queen enthroning herself, and looked at the viewscreen for a long moment, then up at Riker.
And smiled—an expression of pleased threat and absolute mastery, an expression like poison over ice.
Riker’s heart seized inside him. The screen went blank. He wanted to say to Data, “Get that back!”—except that he wasn’t really sure he wanted it back.
“Scan discontinued at the other end,” Data said after a moment. “I will try to lock on to another.”
“Who was running that scan, I wonder?” Riker murmured.
Data looked thoughtful. “It is a question I had been considering. Normally surveillance scans are done by personnel superior in rank to those who are being observed. But in this case…” Data shook his head.
Riker breathed out. “How much sleep has the captain had?”
“I would estimate some five hours,” Data said, “assuming he was able to get to sleep.”
“Give him another hour,” Riker said. “Try to get another scan if you can. Then page him.”
“Affirmative.”
Beverly Crusher was sitting wearily at her desk, cleaning up some backed-up work—the evaluation of the anomalous members of a group of routine tissue serologies—when a voice said out of the air, “Ryder to Dr. Crusher.”
She touched her badge absently. “Yes, Brendan, what is it?”
“Doctor, I think we’d better get Stewart back to sickbay.”
“Why?” she said, sitting up straighter. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Well, he was asleep, and I thought his breathing started to sound kind of funny. So I woke him up—or tried to; he wouldn’t wake up, not all the way. He’s lying here looking groggy, and he doesn’t seem able to speak.”
“Bring him straight down!” Beverly said, getting up and heading out of her office. Somehow she found that this occurrence didn’t surprise her at all: she had had one of those edgy feelings all this evening, the sense that something was going to go wrong, or more wrong than it had gone to date. “Bob,” she said to her late-shift nurse, “is Three available again? Pull up Stewart’s readings on it, I want them for a baseline.”
“He’s coming back?” Lieutenant Rawlings said, and moved to the bed. As if in answer the sickbay doors opened and in came Ryder and Detaith, in their haste not even having bothered to break out a floater, but carrying Stewart between them.
They put him hurriedly but carefully on the diagnostic bed, and Beverly moved in, glancing at the baseline readings, then watching them change. Stewart’s temperature was pushing thirty-nine centigrade, he was pale and clammy with perspiration, his breathing was stertorous enough so that the rasp of it going in and out was audible, and though his eyes were partly open and the pupils were reactive, Stewart was plainly stuporous.
She waved the medipheral over him, watching the readout over the bed. Infection, she thought, but where the hell from? The symptoms looked almost like one of the dreadful old respiratories such as diphtheria or typhus. Even now, such were not wiped out right across known space. Old stocks of one pathogen or another would lie dormant for years or mutate into drug-resistant forms and have to be beaten down all over again.
Beverly swallowed as the diagnostic bed reported the patient’s blood to be teeming with viral organisms. They weren’t there four hours ago! she thought in angry protest, but her anger was doing her patient no good. For the moment, symptomatic treatment was in order, then detailed analysis of the virus or viroid.
Bob had come up beside her with loaded hypos. “Aerosal?”
She nodded, glancing at the hypo he held out. “Double that dosage; I want his temp down fast. Then a broad-spectrum antiviral.” Bob held out a second hypo, loaded with Scopalovir this time. “Right,” she said, “and beam a blood sample out of him, and have Helen analyze that virus and start tailoring antibodies. Then get the immune stimulator on him, too, and start selective fluid transport out of that right lung—it’s congested worse than the other. I’ll be right back.”
She stepped into her office, waiting for the door to close, and touched her badge. “Sickbay to Riker.”
“Riker. What’s up, Doctor?”
“Stewart’s temperature—and a lot of other things are wrong, too. The man’s halfway to congestive heart failure. He’s full of something viral.”
“Life-threatening?”
“I believe so.”
“Contagious?”
“Unknown, but somehow I doubt it.” Her mouth set grim. “Isn’t this about the time his Enterprise was supposed to ‘pick him up’?”
There was a brief silence.
“Damn,” Riker said.
“My thought exactly. Is the captain available? He ought to be informed.”
“He’s just awake now. He was expecting to be on the bridge in about twenty minutes, he said.”
“Better ask him to come down here, then, after you’ve briefed him. This is going to be touch and go.”
“Will do. Out.”
Beverly went back outside and plunged into the fight for Stewart’s life.
Half an hour later, Beverly looked up from her desk viewer to see Picard walk into sickbay. He paused by Stewart’s bed. The man lay there with Rawlings working over him, one of the silver “space” blankets pulled up over him. Rawlings glanced at Picard with a subdued expression. Picard nodded to Rawlings and headed for Beverly’s office.
As the door closed behind him, she glanced up at Jean-Luc with some concern. “Did you get enough sleep?”
He waved the question away, though not as irritably as he might have, and sat down. “I take it that the prognosis isn’t good.”
She shook her head, looked out through the office walls. “What treatment we’re giving him is essentially palliative at this
point. We could keep him on life support indefinitely, of course, but besides the ethical constraints, there would be no point in it: his nervous system is disintegrating.”
Picard blinked. “Is this something secondary to that neural damage you mentioned?”
“No, but that’s making him a lot easier to kill.” She turned her viewer so that he could see the screen. “Look.”
Picard looked at the diagram there: the familiar shell-coat and coiled-DNA interior of a virus. “This is what’s infesting him?”
“This is what he was inoculated with,” Beverly said, once again feeling her insides twist up with loathing at the thought. “This virus is tailored specifically to his genetic structure. Stewart came aboard carrying it. It was hiding inside him, like one of the old ‘slow’ viruses. This one has been instructed to hide inside white blood cells, encapsulated, so as not to trigger either the immune response or our scans.”
“A nasty variation of the ‘purloined-letter’ technique.”
Beverly nodded. “Worse yet, the thing was programmed to go off at a specific time. It’s doable enough—you program a secondary protein casing around the virus that defeats the virus’s attempts to reproduce, then simply tell the coating when to come apart and turn the little monsters loose. It’s actually a variation of a technique that’s used for therapy on intractable cancers in quite a few different species. A perversion of it, rather.”
“I take it,” Picard said, looking over his shoulder for a moment, “Stewart’s time ran out.”
Beverly nodded again, wearily. “By the time the security people noticed that something was wrong with him, the damage was already mostly done. The virus was keyed to attack the myelin sheaths of his nerves—meaning the white matter of his brain as well as the major myelinized conduits in his spinal cord. Cerebellar malfunction follows, along with respiratory dysfunction, coronary insufficiency, not to mention brain damage—his corpus callo-sum is almost fused.”
“He will die, then.”
“He will.” For a moment they were both quiet. “The worst of it,” Beverly said, “is that they never planned to pick him up. Probably they assumed that, if we didn’t find him first, he would start feeling bad and hide himself somewhere—then die quietly in a corner.”
Picard’s face was very still; but he looked up at her without expressing anything more of what he was feeling. “If I know you,” he said very gently, “that is not the worst of it.”
She looked up at him and sighed at her own readability at times like this. “No,” Beverly said finally, “it’s not. What is worst is the probability that it was my counterpart on the other Enterprise who is responsible for this.”
The look of shock on Jean-Luc’s face said that he understood the problem.
“The work has my fingerprints all over it. The structure of the outer coat on the virus, even the spiral-structured flagellum it used to site itself in the lymph nodes—they’re details I’ve built into cancer cures before.” Beverly swallowed. “What kind of universe is it where the usages of medicine allow a practitioner to do such things? What is a doctor here? Or worse—”
“What kind of doctor does such things if the usages of medicine don’t allow them?” Picard said softly.
“Exactly,” Beverly said, and couldn’t bring herself to say anything more.
“Doctor?” said Lieutenant Rawlings, putting his head in the door.
She and Picard both looked up. “Captain,” Bob said. “I’m sorry, Doctor, he’s gone. Even the cortical stimulator couldn’t keep him going any longer. There wasn’t enough myelin left on the bronchial nerves or the coronaries to transmit the stimulus.”
“All right,” Beverly said. “Put him in stasis for the time being: I’ll want to do the autopsy in a while.”
“And what about your sleep?” Jean-Luc said. Beverly opened her mouth, and the captain raised a finger to stop her as he got up. “I need you functional. Physician, heal thyself first.”
She made a wry face at him. “Yes, sir, Captain, sir,” she said as insubordinately as she could. She wished greatly that she could smile at him a bit, but there was no smiling in her at the moment.
“I’ll want a report when you’ve had at least four hours’ sleep. No sooner. That is how long you’re always telling me it takes the body to ‘do its laundry,’ isn’t it?”
Beverly got up. “I would report you for parroting professional advice without a license if I could do it without dropping off in the middle of the report.”
The captain raised an eyebrow at her, then went out, but not without a long, thoughtful gaze at the shape on the diagnostic bed, now wholly shrouded in silver, and very still.
Geordi and O’Brien were going over the last of the schematics at the master display console in engineering when Picard came in. Both of them looked worn, but also excited, and O’Brien’s expression was almost one of triumph.
“Mr. Riker tells me you gentlemen have your options in place,” Picard said. “Report, please.”
“The logistics first,” O’Brien said. “Captain, you wanted some way to get people aboard the other Enterprise that didn’t involve shoving them into that little probe-platform and hoping their pattern comes out all right at the other end.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the basic idea was sound,” O’Brien said, “so I stole it. The problem with the platform was the danger it exposed the subject to. Transporter pattern is really not meant to be stored in such a poorly powered pattern buffer. Well enough. So how about using a regular one?” He grinned. “We take a shuttlecraft, install a transporter pad and complete buffer structure in it.”
Picard blinked. “Is that feasible?” he said to Geordi.
Geordi shrugged. “No reason whatever it can’t be done, with fairly minor alterations to the shuttle’s power systems. Our shuttles are overpowered anyway, the assumption being that they’ll have to serve power and coprocessor needs for mobile research and intervention platforms—planetside installations and so forth.”
“So,” O’Brien said, “the away team takes the shuttle out to the point from which they want to beam over—and does so.”
“What about detection, though?” Picard said, frowning. “No point in this exercise if that other ship notices it happening.”
“Well,” Geordi said, and got a sort of bad-boy grin. “Captain, I think I may have mentioned to you that I had written a couple of research papers for the IEEE Journal on field-phase theory as it affects the Romulan cloaking device.”
“You did mention it,” Picard said, somewhat surprised, “but I wasn’t quite sure that you weren’t joking with me—or that the paper itself wasn’t a joke. You seemed to be implying that you had worked out the theory.”
“I had. But you know how it is, things get busy and I wasn’t able to spend much time building the prototype to test the theoretical assumptions. Well, we’ve had enough encounters with Romulan ships over time, both cloaked and uncloaked, to get a lot of data on the phase shifts inherent in the generated ‘cloak’ field. I don’t say that I’ve duplicated the ‘proprietary’ Romulan cloaking device, but I’ve produced a small, low-level ‘generic’ one. So they won’t be after us for copyright infringement.” Geordi grinned. “It’s mostly a phase-shifted optical redirection field—it looks at the starfield or other background behind you, inverts it, and ‘redistributes’ it forward, adjusting for parallax effects and so forth in whatever’s most likely looking at you. There are also self-cancellative functions built in, so that it seems not to be there, eight milliseconds out often, even when you scan specifically for it. It doesn’t do what the real Romulan cloak does in terms of energy output—damping down shield and propulsion artifact—but for a shuttlecraft, it won’t have to: that shielding can be managed mechanically.”
“What about mass sensing?” Picard said.
Geordi smiled. “I did a little tinkering. The field is doubled with a graviton mirroring field on its inside. Gravitons are only half of the way we sens
e mass, but they’re the important half: it’s the ‘particulate’ component of gravity that triggers our mass sensors, and I’m betting theirs are the same. The field can be collapsed for millisecond periods to keep graviton-buildup anomalies from becoming a problem.”
Picard sighed. “Well, that would seem to solve the problem. I would congratulate you, gentlemen—if the success weren’t going to imminently place one of you in even worse danger.” He looked from O’Brien to Geordi again. “But you’re quite sure about the feasibility of this work on the shuttlecraft?”
“Yes, sir,” Geordi said. “It won’t exactly be a stroll down O’Connell Street.”
O’Brien said, “Well, marginally simpler. But it can certainly be done. It waits only your order.”
“Then make it so.”
“I’ll get the engineering team down there,” O’Brien said, and went off to see to it.
“Meanwhile,” Picard said, “have you finished preparing your ‘raid’ on the computer core?”
Geordi nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s as complete as I could make it. Hwiii had a few suggestions, and he’s looking the routines over and making additions even as we speak. By the time we have the shuttlecraft ready, the scan-and-download routine will be complete, and I’ll be ready to go.”
“Good.” Picard sighed, then added, “Commander Riker tells me that a short while ago he got a scan of your counterpart in the other ship. He says your uniform will be ready in an hour or so—he wanted to work with the design team to make sure the tailoring was correct. He describes it, though, as ‘somewhat drafty.’”
Geordi shook his head, bemused, and grinned. “The man’s a perfectionist.”
“Lieutenant,” Picard said somewhat uncomfortably, and Geordi looked at him. “Understand that you are at liberty, even now, to refuse this mission if you feel it cannot be managed, or if the danger is too great. You’ll be needed to implement the information you’re going to fetch. There is no use losing you.”
Geordi shook his head again, slowly this time. “Captain, it’s got to be me. We’ve still got no evidence that Data is there. The counselor can’t handle this… and she’s going to have her hands full, anyway, watching my back for whatever might sneak up behind it. Don’t you worry about me.”
