by Diane Duane
“So, Hessan, Gaulgo, Nassainen, you three choose your teams. Hessan, yours will be under me, we’ll take the core down here. Work fast, everybody—once we get one core completely restored, we can restore to all the others from it.” Not that it’ll help, Geordi thought with silent amusement, because the nanites that the captain instructed to remain in reserve will come out and reinfect them within a few hours.
He looked up. “Let’s get that off-line first,” he said, pointing to the display for the inclusion device.
There was some muttering. “After all the trouble it took to get it on-line?” Hessan said pointedly.
Geordi looked at her and shrugged. “Look, you want its computers to get infected by whatever’s in the cores?”
There was even more muttering at the prospect of that, and Hessan shook her head, seeing the point. “Go on,” Geordi said, “somebody physically separate its links to the cores: we can’t take the chance.” Of injuring the thing before I have a chance to get a good look at it and its software!
Two or three of the engineering staff went off to see about it. “Come on, everybody,” Geordi said, “let’s get cracking. Otherwise the captain is going to be real annoyed with us when he gets up from his nap and finds his ship still busted.”
Elsewhere, Barclay was walking with Picard back to his quarters. The lights were dim in the corridors; as they came to his door, the lights brightened briefly again, then once more dimmed down.
“Not going to be a quiet night, is it, sir,” Barclay said, stopping by the door and hitting its switch. It didn’t open.
“No,” Picard said wearily, “I can see that.”
Barclay hit the switch a couple of more times. “Damn machinery,” he said softly. “I never did like anything much more complicated than a knife to begin with. This place has gotten too automated.”
Picard shrugged. “The price of progress, I suppose. I’ll see you later, Mr. Barclay.”
“Not me, Captain. It’ll be Ramirez: it’s his shift. Even chiefs of security have to sleep sometimes.”
“Of course.” Picard smiled at him; he might not entirely trust the man, any more than he entirely trusted anyone else here, but so far Barclay had dealt straightforwardly with him. “Have a good rest.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Picard walked into his quarters. The door slid shut and he had to hit the internal control a couple of times before it would lock. The lights were dimmed, except for one over by the bed. Here too, he thought, resigned. I shouldn’t complain. It means that things are finally working.
He stopped still, staring. Something in the bed moved slightly. It appeared to be a person, sleeping.
Picard stood there a moment, simply flabbergasted, understanding what the Littlest Bear must have felt like. He moved forward softly. The shape in the bed stirred, turned over, looked at him. The long, dark hair fell softly from around the face as she shook her head a bit and blinked.
It was Beverly Crusher. Picard was too astonished to speak for a moment.
Finally, he managed to say—and it almost came out in a croak—“What are you doing here?”
She propped herself up on one elbow, looked at him with some slight confusion. “Oh. Wesley. I suppose you might be concerned…. No. What happened a long time ago was one thing. But this…” She paused and then said rather roughly, “Don’t think my son’s stupidity is going to make me throw away everything I’ve got left.”
He took a couple more steps forward, more uncertain of what to say than he had been in a long time. He had been shaken enough by Troi’s accusation—no, they weren’t accusations; for her they were simple statements of fact. “Beverly…” he said, then sat down in the chair by the bed, unable to look at her or anything else.
One Crusher dead, one Crusher as good as dead, Wesley had said.
She was looking at him curiously now. “You have been behaving very oddly today. Are you all right?”
He could give her no answer that would make any sense, so he merely shook his head.
She looked at him, then got up out of the bed and walked over to the replicator. “Brandy and soda,” she said, “and Armagnac straight up.” She waited while the drinks appeared, then came back, handing him the Armagnac and sitting down on the bed opposite him.
“Are the aftereffects of that stun still bothering you?”
“No, that’s not it.” He got up in great discomfort and walked away, wondering where else in the ship he could possibly go, his one place of safety suddenly betraying him again, as the books had earlier. “I don’t think you should be here.”
Beverly looked at him, her face briefly working back and forth between puzzlement and anger. “Where else should I be? You went through enough trouble to get me here.” It was what he had been afraid of, and the last thing he wanted to hear. It was not I who have done these things, he said to himself desperately. It was someone from a much different life, a different world. But there were parts of his brain that didn’t want to believe it, that were insisting that maybe he himself might do these things, might have done these things, if history in his own world had gone differently.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Beverly said, her voice showing the anger now. “I’m the captain’s woman. Who aboard this ship is going to have anything to do with me? They know you too well. Anyone here who touches me is going to end up like Gonzales all over again.”
“Gonzales?” he said, turning around.
She laughed bitterly. “Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten—not after the public way you killed him. It’s a little late to play the innocent with me. You wander around the ship, making friends with every pretty ensign who crosses your path—you don’t expect me to say a word—and who would dare? But the one time I stray a bit…” She laughed again. “But it’s the pattern, isn’t it? After Jack, you had a reputation to maintain. Anyone who got between you and what you wanted was going to suffer.”
He looked at her, expressionless, not daring to react. It must have looked like a stone face to her, for she turned away again, with one of those soft, bitter laughs. “So it ends here, is that it? With no explanations.” She got up, pulling the blanket about her, and began to pace. “And you never even told me exactly why it was that you decided to take me away from Jack, one way or another.”
Beverly looked at him now, seemingly expecting an answer. Finding none, she returned to her pacing. “He told me once that you would praise me to him, then wait to see if he agreed. He said he thought you were trying to find out if I would be amenable to a little something on the side. Not that I was. And then the baby came, and that stopped for a while, didn’t it? Everything was fine for a few years… until that day you chose the landing party and sent them out.”
She sat down quietly on the bed again. “I never did understand. Oh, I saw it—that grim look on your face when you went to get the body back. Some last touch of remorse?” She looked at him. It would have been an expression of challenge were it not so dull, so weary with old hopeless thought. “Some last moment of regret at having had to kill your old friend? But friendship was never that much for you. Your blood ran too cold: friendship was too fragile a thing for you to get your teeth into. Domination, though…”
Picard sat very still. “Beverly,” he said, just wanting her to stop and not knowing how to make her. “This isn’t the time.”
“No, with your ship coming to pieces around you, I should think not.” There was some slight humor about that observation. “Find it difficult to bear, don’t you? You were always fonder of the ship, half the time, than of the people who rode in her. Cut her, and you bleed. Shields go down, and your composure falls off. Well it might, in this situation. If we fail at this mission, most of our lives won’t be worth much—certainly no one in command is going to survive unless they try pretty hard. Riker will just live to prove that this is all your fault somehow, all these things going wrong.”
“And doubtless Counselor Troi will help him,” Picard said thoug
htfully, glad of anything that would turn the conversation away from him and Beverly for the moment.
Beverly laughed. “She wouldn’t miss the chance for anything. They may hate each other like poison, but she can’t do without him, and he can’t do without her. I’ve had to doctor the marks sometimes after one of their more… mixed… evenings together.” She smiled, looking rueful. “We haven’t had many of those nights together lately ourselves, have we? Found something new to keep your attention. The other woman.”
Beverly looked out the window into the starry night. “It’s been driving you wild ever since they dropped this project in your lap. The idea of an Enterprise you don’t control—that you could.”
“Ships of that name tend to be jealous mistresses,” Picard said softly. “But then, as you say, you know that.”
“You’d like me to think that, anyway,” she said, looking at him for a moment from under the beginnings of a frown. “Could I actually be looking too close to my own nose to see the truth? Could it actually be another woman?”
He stood up and started to pace. “Do you suppose I wouldn’t tell you if it were?” he said roughly.
She laughed at him again. “Nice try! As if you ever tell anyone anything. That old cold, calculating mind, turning in circles on itself the same as always—even trying to imitate intimacy when it serves its purpose. Just another way to hurt me. The old pattern hasn’t changed.” She leaned back against the bedstead. “You still like to put a pin into me, every now and then, or a knife if you can, to see how I react. The way you did after Jack. I was supposed to have had the perspicacity to immediately drop him when you expressed interest in me. I didn’t. So you punished me the simplest way. You took him away, killed him practically under my nose. That was good for a few years’ pain.”
Her voice was quite steady, but the tears were showing in her eyes, ever so slightly. “Then you engineered that business with the Lagos mission—pretty setup, that. I could have been cashiered, despite the fact that I was following your orders. But you defended me to Starfleet and made it plain enough what the price was. I got to come out of ‘retirement’ for your amusement, whether I liked it or not. The knife again. So what will it be this time? I wonder. Wesley, perhaps?” She smiled at him. “If you think so, you misjudged. You’ll have to do a lot better than that to hurt me at this point.”
“I would think,” he said, choosing his words with some care, “that having been a”—he could barely bring himself to say it—“captain’s woman for this long, you might have developed a thicker skin.”
“That’s the problem. I would have thought so, too. The trouble is, you keep doing unexpected things. Like that.” She gestured with her chin at the canvas on the other side of the room, covered over again, for Picard hadn’t been able to bear looking at it. “Every now and then you do something that seems to break the pattern, and I almost forgive you… almost let it go. That’s a hell of a thing.” She looked him straight in the eye for the first time in a while. “To actually forgive the man who killed your husband in cold blood. And then the pattern reasserts itself, and the knife goes in again, and I realize I’ve been manipulated again and curse myself for a fool… because you ride relationships the way you ride your vessels: to destruction.”
She watched him watching her. Silence was the best defense, Troi had told him often enough. Now he simply stood and watched her. She watched back.
The silence got heavy. It had to be broken, he had no choice: “I think for the time being, you’re going to have to sleep elsewhere. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She gave him such a look as a mother might give a child caught in a substandard lie. “That’s all you’ve done since you saw me and decided you wanted me and took me. But that’s mostly what you do to everyone—just to make sure you’re still alive. You put the knife in and listen for the scream. Did you never think that someone might put the knife in you? Apparently not, to judge by this afternoon.”
“Oh, I think about it.”
“But you don’t believe it. As far as you’re concerned, everything you do is right. It’s always been the way… it’s probably why you’re so successful in this fleet. People only fail here when their scruples get in the way. You haven’t had a scruple for years.”
She stood up with the blanket gathered gracefully around her. “I’ll take to my own side of the quarters for the time being.” She made for the door at the far side of Picard’s quarters. “There’s no injuring your dignity—you might as well try to injure a glacier. As for me, I still have mine, and I’ll keep it intact.”
She paused by the door. “But one thing.” In the dark, her eyes were indistinct, but they were narrowed, and the cast of her face went suddenly ugly. “If it is simply another woman… she’d better not get sick. It will be a short illness.”
Beverly went through the door and it shut behind her, and Picard heard the extra cheep of the lock on her side.
CHAPTER 12
Standing on the ladder, Geordi gave a soft grunt as the third of the access panels in the core shaft came away. “Coming up, Eileen,” he said, touching the control on the floater he had attached to the panel. It levitated gently upward past him, and Eileen, up in the crawlway that met the access shaft, caught it and put it aside, taking the floater pad off it. Two other engineering staff came floating down past him, carrying pouches full of isolinear chips. Geordi smiled slightly. The situation had this advantage at least: he would hardly stand out, now, for the sake of what he himself was carrying. For the sake of his own peace of mind, he had carefully applied a small scratch to the upper left corner of each of the chips he had brought with him, the high-density ones.
Now he gazed into the space behind the open panel. Set into the matrix inside it, end-on, were row after row of isolinear chips—thousands of them in each core, hundreds of thousands in the whole ship. At least a third of them, thanks to the captain, would have to be changed. At best, they could keep this ship out of commission for at least four hours while they were being replaced—more if the crew slacked off. And then, of course, the captain’s reserve nanosurgeons would come out of their hiding places and get to work again.
Geordi sighed and got busy doing what he was supposed to be doing, while considering the best way to do what he had really come for. One part of his mind was cautious. He glanced down toward the bottom of the core shaft, a good hundred and fifty feet below him, and considered that this would be a wonderful place to have an “accident,” if any of his work crew weren’t kindly disposed toward him. On the other hand, there was no point in borrowing trouble. So far they all seemed willing enough, especially when the prospect of their not cooperating with or obeying his orders meant it was equally likely that they would all be blown up—or else, when the Empire caught up with a ship that had failed its mission, removed from their posts more or less permanently.
He hooked one arm through the rung of the ladder and turned around, holding his engineering tricorder and reading the bank of chips that lay open to him at the moment. Nine of them were shot in a big patch almost directly in front of him, and another few down several feet farther in the matrix.
He let the tricorder drop to hang from its strap for a moment and reached out to pull one of the isolinears free. Silently, Eileen floated down on one of the floater pads nearest, with her legs hanging over the edge, and a light belt strapping her to the floater. “How many do you want?” she said.
“I can use about a dozen. Look at this.” He put his thumb on the pressure point that would allow the nutef facing to slide off the front of the chip. It came away and was followed almost immediately by a little cloud of brown dust. Geordi coughed and waved his hand in front of his face, thinking, Thorough little monsters: they don’t leave much sticking together, do they? Small bytes. He chuckled at the pun, then, covering, said, “Look at it.”
“Now what the hell does that?” Hessan said.
Geordi shook his head. “Well, there are a few possibilities. Repeat
ed low-level power outages can cause something like this—though usually the pieces that the storage medium falls into are bigger, more granular.” He poked the finely divided fluff, almost like powdery iron filings, with one finger, looked at the finger, then dusted it off against his pants. “Also, I read a paper a couple of years back about how a run of chips had trouble with the FTL field—it accelerated their materials’ aging unusually, and they just fell apart inside.”
Hessan looked at the panel critically. “I guess that could explain why they seem to be going in patches. These have been maintained away from starbase, from replicated stock. But there was a lot of swapping around when we were around Alphacent for the new gadget’s installation.” She raised her eyebrows. “Well, we’ll hear all about it, and how we should have fixed it, when we get home, I guess.”
“Probably.” Geordi started pulling out the chips he had already designated as bad and put them on the floater by Eileen. “Bring me down that dozen and I’ll get started on these. See if you can tell if any other panels on this level have bad ones.” He looked down into the core. “They seem to be pretty evenly scattered around.”
She nodded and floated upward again. While she was gone, Geordi got back to his more covert scanning. Into the slot from which he had removed the bad chip, he slipped his good one, with the search parameters. Then, using his tricorder, he instructed the computer locator program that was still functioning—the captain having carefully spared it—as to the memory location and address of the chip he had just installed. “Read program Search One,” he said.
“Done,” said the computer.
“Run.”
“Executing,” it said.
He breathed out a long breath. “Store three times randomly in other locations,” he said softly, watching the top of the shaft to see if Eileen was coming down.
