by Diane Duane
“Done,” said the computer.
“Set no-warn,” he said, touching the display to silence it as Eileen came down on her floater again. Confirm, the computer flashed on his tricorder screen.
He pulled his own chip out, tucked it away safe, and touched the display to change it back to the scan-for-bad-chips routine.
“Here you go,” Eileen said, coming down level with him, and handed him the replacement chips.
He started replacing them while she pulled out her own tricorder and scanned the lower panels. “This is a little unusual, isn’t it?” she said, looking sideways at him.
“What? The computer falling apart? Damn straight it is.”
“No… I mean, you coming down and working… getting your hands dirty like anybody else.”
Geordi swallowed. “Welllll…” The excuse was near to hand. “Sometimes you have to do strange things to be alone with a pretty girl.”
She briefly gave him a superior look, then burst out laughing. “Is there anyone around here you haven’t tried that on?”
Apparently this was at least one area in which he and his counterpart were similar. “Working my way through the ship, I can only hope…”
“Working your way through upward or downward?” There was a slight twinkle in her eye.
“Which direction do you favor?” he said, sliding a couple more chips into place.
She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Mine.”
Aha, Geordi thought. “Well, I don’t know. I assumed you were hanging around me so that you could get a promotion.”
“Well,” she said mildly, “you do only have three assistant chiefs now… and frankly, they’re all total losses, but I’m sure that’s why you chose them.”
Geordi kept his face straight and swapped another chip. “After all,” Eileen said, “there’s no point in promoting someone who’s seriously going to be a challenge to your job. You have to have assistants, after all, but”—she gave him a wicked smile—“there’s no use in their being too good at the job, is there?”
“You’ve got a point there,” Geordi said, thinking it was hardly the point he would have made. What kind of decent work could get done on a ship when you purposely chose your subordinates not for their talent but for their lack of it? It was no wonder the maintenance in here was so sloppy.
“Well,” he said after a moment, mock-seriously, “I would have to give it due and proper consideration, I suppose. After due and proper evaluation of your work.”
On her floater, she leaned quite close to him, until she was practically breathing in his ear. “I had hoped we could bypass the evaluation.”
“Oh? And use what instead?”
“Bribery?” she said very softly, and breathed in his ear again, more purposefully this time.
Geordi swallowed and tried to get some control of himself. “Ensign, the sooner we get this done, the sooner we can discuss this in more detail.”
She smiled slightly at him. “It’s still a little strange to see you actually interested in working. I suppose I can cope. But some people aren’t going to know what to make of it.”
Geordi made a wry face at her. “Let’s just say that at this point I’m fond of not being turned into so much radioactive dust by whatever’s chasing us out there. Or having someone from”—he “ahemmed” slightly—“‘higher up’ get hold of me.”
“Yes, the counselor has been on the prod the last day or so. Harry thinks she’s nervous about something.”
“The counselor? Nervous?” Geordi thought of that cool regard on the bridge and shook his head, doubting it very much indeed.
“Well, that’s the scuttlebutt… and you know how she is when she gets nervous.”
“Uh-huh,” Geordi said, sounding concerned, as he suspected he was supposed to. “Well, I’m gonna try to stay out of her way. In the meantime, what about those other panels?”
“There are two more bad ones under you there, sort of nine o’clock and six o’clock under.” She studied her tricorder. “Nineteen of the chips have this dry rot.”
“All right. Well, go up and get some more, and we’ll get on with it.”
She ascended gracefully upward and out of sight. He looked down, touched his tricorder. Run complete, it said.
Hallelujah. Geordi instructed it to start displaying file names and sensitive areas that it had found. Swiftly it did. There were hundreds of them, but he had half-expected that. “Total storage,” he said softly.
Eighteen hundred fifty-six terabytes. Geordi frowned, calculating. He was carrying 1700-odd. He would have to lift a few chips from here to make the difference. “Start copy,” he said softly. “Copy to capacity, then notify and hold for replacement of media.”
Working. It would take a while, though not too long.
Eileen came down past him, handing him a box of chips.
“Look,” he said, “I’m still getting some weird readings off this panel—I want to check the matrix. You go ahead and change those. I’ll be down shortly.”
“Right,” she said, breathing in his ear again as she passed, and sank down into the shaft below him.
The panels Eileen was servicing were on the other side of the shaft, so he had the advantage of having her being both below and facing away from him. About fifteen minutes passed quietly, during which time he slipped chips into the one slot he was using, waited for them to fill, then slipped the full one out and a new empty one in, pretending to take readings in between, and fussing with other chips in the array. Finally he had come to the last of his high-density chips; he filled it and found there was still another eighty terabytes of data to go. He was tempted to just forget it, but there was no way to tell in what area the information lay that might prove to be the most vital, without which everything else would be useless. It had to be all or nothing.
He had just put the last of them in his belt pouch when Eileen came floating up past him, carrying a batch of old chips. “You should see the insides of these things,” she said. “You could powder your nose with them. Want me to take those for you?”
“No, it’s okay, I’ll be up,” Geordi said, desperately trying to sound casual. “I want to get off this thing and stretch my legs.”
“You and me both,” she said, floating up to the top of the access shaft.
Very quietly he took from his pocket one of the tiny transporter tags for the transfer to the shuttle and the Enterprise, smacked it onto the pile of chips, and dropped a spare chip; then, watching it fall, he whispered, “Energize.”
A second later the chips vanished, the transporter whine coinciding neatly with the clatter of the chip hitting the bottom of the shaft. He sat there gritting his teeth, regardless, at how loud the whine was in so small and confined a space. But then it was over.
Eileen looked over the edge at him. “You okay?”
“Dropped one,” Geordi said casually.
“Butterfingers,” said Eileen, and tossed him a clean replacement. He slotted it in. “You coming?”
“Is that professional interest or something else?”
She chuckled. “Come find out.”
Geordi grinned and went after her. He was tremendously relieved to be doing, finally, what he had come here to do. Meantime, there was no reason he shouldn’t enjoy himself a little as well.
Aboard the other Enterprise, Riker’s attention was turned uncomfortably outward. Using passive scans, they had been keeping an eye on their ship’s dark counterpart, and for a long time there had been no change: it had been sailing along quietly enough on impulse, doing nothing unusual—until now. “Power fluctuations,” Data had said, and Riker had peered into the darkness of the viewscreen, straining his eyes looking at the small, dark silver shape, already at the farthest extent of their sensor range.
“What’s the problem seem to be?” Riker said.
Data shook his head. “I am getting indications of variations in the power supply to the impulse engines. A very peculiar power curve indeed:
errors in fuel consumption and injection.”
Riker considered that. “Such as might be caused by a fault in the computer systems?”
Data considered, too. “That is an excellent probability. Though one must not automatically assume it to be the case. One could conjecture, though, that the captain and Mr. La Forge have created an extremely effective distraction.”
Riker nodded and started to turn toward Troi’s chair and started to ask her whether she felt anything at all from the other ship—then caught himself and sighed. It was about the twentieth time that he had done that, and every time he did it, the pain of his concern for her stabbed him hard.
He turned his attention to something closer to hand, on the viewscreen. Just outside the Enterprise, tethered to one of the exterior access ports, a tiny elongated shape floated in the darkness, seeming, as it had for the past hour, to be doing nothing. They had not communicated with Hwiii since he went out: he had asked to be left in silence so that he could concentrate. “Any idea what he’s doing?” Riker said.
Data shook his head. “He was not able to describe it to me in much more detail than to say that he had to ‘go out and listen.’ I think the problem is possibly linguistic: even Delphine is somewhat symbolic about the way it handles the subjects of sensory input. At times there seem to be almost mystical contexts to what we would normally consider simple seeing or hearing. But when you have a species which is almost a living sensor array—to so much greater an extent than other species are, at least—there is bound to be some difference in perception—”
Data was interrupted by a sudden upscaling squeal. He looked at his instruments with concern.
“Enterpriser!” said Hwiii’s voice.
“Go ahead, Commander,” Riker said, glancing at Data.
“Commander Riker, beam me aboard, quickly!”
The tone was more jubilant than afraid.
“Is there a problem?”
Delphine laughter chattered in their ears.
“Problem? Problem, no, just beam me inboard, hurry!”
“Transporter room!” Riker said. “Beam Commander Hwiii in on the double!”
“Aye, sir,” O’Brien’s voice said. “Transporting now.”
“Now what’s his problem?” Riker said.
“I do not know, Commander,” Data said. “I was monitoring his life-signs as you requested, and nothing was amiss.”
“Come on,” Riker said, “let’s see what the fuss is. Mr. Worf, with me.”
* * *
In the transporter room they found Hwiii resting on the platform, with his helmet off—O’Brien had just pulled it off him—though he was still in his space suit. Riker looked at it and was tempted to laugh: it was well emblazoned with commemorative patches, from the Utopia Planitia Yards patch on down through reproductions of such antiques as the NASA and ESA patches, so that the suit looked more like a spacegoing billboard than anything else.
Hwiii was wriggling and talking to O’Brien a mile a minute, half in speech, half in song. Now, as Riker and Worf came in, Hwiii looked at them with delight.
“I heard it!” he sang, deafening and triumphant, like a trumpet pitched five octaves too high, sounding the charge. “I heard it, I heard it, the one pure note! It oscillates! It does oscillate! It moves, it moves, eppur s! muove!!”
“I thought you said he had not heard about opera,” Worf said to Riker, puzzled.
“I didn’t think he had,” Riker said, though the dolphin’s song reminded him suddenly of the innocent Marguerite’s victorious cry to heaven at the end of Faust. “But never mind. Hwiii! What is it? If you’ve got good news, believe me, I wouldn’t mind hearing some.”
“I heard it,” Hwiii said, almost gasping with the excitement as he struggled out of his suit. “Oh, for Sea’s sake, are your arms broken, give me a hand with this thing, I’m in a hurry!”
Bemused, they leaned forward and helped O’Brien wrestle Hwiii out of his space suit.
“It was the other Enterprise,” he said, wriggling out and onto his waiting floater pad. “I heard her. Something happened aboard that ship: there was a big energy discharge, the shields went up and down.”
Riker looked at him in surprise. “They did? How could you tell?”
“I felt it, I tell you, I felt it on my skin! I explained all this to you before. I went out to see what I could feel. Nothing, nothing at all for a good while: this part of space is good for that at least, the hyperstrings are sparse. But then I felt the knot, and it was as fat a knot as you get from a small planet. A great energy source all tied close and tight. And there was a fluctuation in the power source serving it, and I felt the knot loosen, then tighten again, and the whole string twanged!” The trumpets sang again in Hwiii’s voice. “It oscillated, I felt the oscillation, its direction, its amplitude, the length of the hyperstring, what’s wrapped around it, where it’s headed!”
Worf looked at Riker, who asked, “Are you sure it was not something aboard the Enterprise that you sensed?”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Hwiii said, laughing as someone might laugh at a child making a ridiculous but adorable suggestion. “I could feel her quite clearly, the great fat whale that she is, and there’s been no such power fluctuation, nor has she anything capable of generating as much as nine hundred terawatts for any one single function—has she?”
Riker shook his head. Great fat whale? “I wish. She certainly hasn’t.”
“But that does,” Hwiii said, wriggling his tail into the generator for his fluid-field suit. “I can hear it from here, I can feel it, you don’t need sensors anymore to find them: shut them down! Or rather, I’ll link the passive sensors to my hyperstring-sensing equipment, and you can trail the other Enterprise where you like without fear of detection… until you’re ready to let her detect you. Then there will be trouble.” Hwiii dropped his jaw in a grin, and Riker suddenly, as if for the first time, became aware of the teeth in those jaws, small and needle-sharp, in great number.
“We will go hunting,” Hwiii said. “I have a good idea of the nature of the weapon she used on us: I’ll start work on the remedy. Mr. La Forge will get us the details, the equations: he’ll know which ones we’ll need, he can’t mistake them. We will build the same apparatus that the other ship carries. And then we will go hunt us a shark.”
Hwiii smiled meaningfully at Riker and at Worf, and Worf, caught in the spirit of the moment, grinned back, also showing teeth. “My people are gentle, by and large,” Hwiii said, “but as was true on your Earth, sharks are our great enemies, and we hate them. They have more teeth than we have, swim faster, live longer. But even the great whites have no defense when we hit them amidships at thirty knots.” Hwiii smiled, more sweetly, but wicked-eyed. “They rupture wonderfully. I know where their ‘amidships’ is, now. We’ll start building the beak to hit them there. Come on!”
It had taken Picard a good while to prepare himself for the sleep he knew he needed. He had forced himself to it finally, done the various small exercises that he had learned over many years, setting the “mental alarm clock” to wake him after four hours. Then he lay down, in a bed that to his mind still felt slightly warm from the body of Beverly Crusher. It was almost certainly an illusion, but he couldn’t get rid of the image.
And still sleep eluded him. After a while, he got up and went over to the desk, sat down, and brought up his terminal there.
His own computer was one of the installations that he had required the nanites to spare. He had had some questions to which he had not yet found answers. Some answers Picard had guessed and wanted corroboration for; about others, he had no idea.
“Scan for records on Spock, Commander, Starfleet,” he had said.
“Spock, Commander,” said the computer, and began reading out a service record that sounded like that of someone who had entered wholeheartedly enough into what the Enterprise of that time was doing: intimidation, plunder, destruction. A long time it went on, then something odd happened. After a given
stardate, that Spock was transferred off the Enterprise, at his own request; but the record said the transfer was “prejudicial”—meaning that someone on the ship wanted to get rid of him. Picard could guess who. That universe’s Kirk had come back, found the secret of his great weapon—an alien device called the Tantalus Field, useful for making people vanish abruptly—had been compromised; in fact, given to Spock. As well, to judge from his own Kirk’s debriefing, that other Kirk’s “captain’s woman” had suffered something of a change of loyalties.
Picard sat there with his chin on his fist, considering the ramifications. He still remembered, quoted verbatim, Kirk’s final conversation with that Spock, daring him to be the “one man with a vision” who could change the brutality of the Empire before its victims finally rose up and destroyed it. Spock, according to Kirk, had estimated it would take two hundred-odd years for that to happen, and Kirk had invoked “the illogic of waste” as his reason for Spock to try to stop the present-day slaughter and to try to change the Empire into something more benevolent. The Vulcan to whom Kirk had spoken had been profoundly skeptical about the possibilities and had said only, “I will consider it.”
To judge by this record, he had done more than consider it. He became a power in Starfleet, and in other ways as well. For a short time, people who frustrated his drive toward increased personal power vanished abruptly. He began to move—covertly at first, Picard suspected, then overtly, as confirmed by the documentation—to try to change the Empire’s methods of dealing with subject species, conquered worlds, arguing that, logically, power benefits from benevolent use. For a while there was an uncomfortable shift and wash of opinion around him at Starfleet, like the tide just before ebb or flow. Spock pressed his advantage in Starfleet Command, rising to the Admiralty. There was a period of some months when he seemed to drop out of notice—the records merely stated that he had been posted to a desk job—something affiliated with his father, the Vulcan ambassador. And then…
Picard shook his head. It seemed as if he pushed something, someone, too hard. His living quarters at Starfleet were raided; evidence was found there, the records said barely, of treason. No detail was given on what might have been considered treasonable. Was something planted on him? Picard wondered. Or did someone decide they had better use for the Tantalus Field than he had? And there was the enmity of his old captain to be dealt with as well—an old unhealed sore of disaffection and rage that had been festering since Spock left the Enterprise. Indications were that Kirk, embittered by his former first officer’s rise to power, may have been behind the charges, trumped-up or otherwise, that sent Spock to his death. He was court-martialed and executed some twelve years after another Kirk had dared him to be the one man with a vision.
