by Diane Duane
The counselor went down like a felled tree. “You can have too much of the life of the mind,” she said softly, and reached down to take the counselor under the armpits and drag her in out of sight.
Geordi was still busy with the tricorder. “How much longer?” Deanna said, starting to feel the reaction now to what she had just done, and the nervousness—for other minds were coming toward them, very close. One of them was plainly Picard’s—all stern resolution and an odd pity. In company with it was another, a smothered blaze of excitement and surmise. Another, though, was Picard’s counterpart’s, that icy rage very much in evidence, and they were both getting closer all the time.
“Just a couple more minutes!” Geordi said.
Down the corridor, Deanna heard the turbolift door open.
She peered out most cautiously, hearing the hurrying footsteps, holding the phaser ready—
—and saw the captain and this universe’s Worf coming toward them. All was well with both their minds, there was no sense of compulsion. Her face lit briefly with the smile she hadn’t dared to let out.
“Captain!”
“Counselor,” Picard said, then winced a little and smiled. “Perhaps I might call you Deanna for the moment—I’ve had enough of the counselor for one day.”
“It would seem she has as well,” Worf said as they stepped into the core access room and found the other Troi collapsed on the floor.
Picard raised an eyebrow at this and looked over at Geordi. “Mr. La Forge, how is it going?”
“Almost done, Captain. One more chip.”
“I meant, how are you?”
Geordi smiled, then groaned again. “I feel like elephants have been holding a tap-dancing competition on my body, and the finals are being held in my head. But other than that…”
Picard nodded. Worf was looking around at them, the expressions of relief, the humor, and Deanna got a brief mental image of a hungry man standing outside a window full of food, looking in with longing. “Fellowship,” Worf said. “Honor. This would be a universe worth fighting for.”
“We think so,” Picard said. “But it’s not too late for yours. Mr. Worf, the first officer of an earlier Enterprise of this universe said that the Empire had only two hundred years or so to run. One hundred of those years are gone. It is closer to its fall than ever… and perhaps for reasons that not even your Spock suspected. The Empire is overextending itself, parsec by parsec, day by day. In another—oh, even fifty or sixty years—its forces will be spread so widely through the space it claims to ‘control’ that the control will be a myth. That will be the time for the peoples who have been suppressed to stand up and throw off the yoke. Inevitably, the time will come. If you and your people can be ready for it…”
Worf’s eyes gleamed. “A long time we have dreamed that things might somehow become better. But they were only dreams: no one ever took them seriously or did anything about them. However, to know that the dream is a reality, somewhere, anywhere…”
“The dream is alive, Mr. Worf,” Picard said. “Who knows—maybe in seventy or eighty years, if our Fleet allows, we might put our noses back in to see how you are getting on. Or, if news of this technique for travel between congruent universes gets around, perhaps the Klingons will.” He laughed softly. “I suspect that would make an interesting visit. But this is all conjecture: your worlds’ fates are in your own hands. Just know that we will always wish you well.”
“Damn!” Geordi said. “Lockout! Security protocols are back up. The cores are restoring from backup.”
“Did you get everything?”
“Ninety-eight percent, but if that last two percent was the bit we need… !”
From down the corridor came the sound of the turbolift doors opening, and then the sound of running footsteps.
“No more time,” Picard said. “Get that chip, Mr. La Forge.”
“Mr. Worf,” Deanna said, lifting the phaser. He looked at her in brief shock, then nodded and smiled the ghost of a smile.
She stunned him, and he crumpled to the floor over Troi as the captain touched his badge. “Enterprise,” he said hurriedly, “emergency, three to beam back now!”
They clustered together, Troi with one arm around Geordi, to compensate for the lost transponder, she told herself—but he sagged against her with such alarming weariness that she might have spared herself the excuse. The doorway filled with figures holding phasers, one of them being the other Picard. As the transport effect took them, Deanna caught a last blast of blinding rage from him, saw the face twisted with it, screaming. The phaser beams stitched through them, and as the world dissolved, Deanna heard that other Picard shouting, “Bridge, trace this transport and destroy the source!”
And it all vanished like a bad dream—
CHAPTER 15
—and dissolved into the interior of the shuttlecraft. They stared around them, relieved to be somewhere completely normal, but Picard was unnerved. That ship’s phaser capacity would be back now; it would be easy enough to detect this craft and—
They started to dissolve again. It seemed to take an unconscionable time. But no sooner had the singing whine of the transporter completely washed all other sound away than a sheet of white fire went through the place. Picard watched with a degree of fascination as the walls of the shuttlecraft blew away to nothing around them, the white fire fading to black, then to stars, which faded as well.
Light grew around them again slowly, through the unchanging shimmer, and slowly the transporter room became visible. When the soft singing noise finally dwindled to nothing, Picard and the other members of the away team looked at each other almost in disbelief, and then out at Chief O’Brien, who was bracing himself against his console like a man who needed help in standing up.
He looked at them and said, “I’m glad I handled that one myself, directly from here. If the pattern buffer in the transporter on the Hawking had been—”
Picard shook his head and came down from the platform. “If it had…. Never mind…. Thank you, Chief.”
From all around them came the whooping of the red-alert sirens. Picard touched his communicator. “Picard to Number One.”
“Captain,” Riker’s voice said, “forgive me if I say I’m very glad to hear you!”
“Let’s save the rejoicing for the moment,” Picard said. “What’s the situation?”
“The other Enterprise is in restart cycle,” Riker said.
“Looks like they had to shut down the warp engines toward the end of their computer problems, but they didn’t have time to get too cold: we only have a few minutes’ grace.”
“I don’t intend to linger, Number One. Pick a direction and go to warp five immediately. I’ve had enough of this neighborhood.”
“Yes, sir,” Riker said with relish. “Mr. Redpath! Bearing one, two, five, mark eight, warp five, go!”
Picard didn’t hear the response, but he could instantly feel the subtle difference in the ship’s “feel” as she went into warp. Troi was helping Geordi down off the pad; he was still weak and looked pallid. “Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, “my apologies. You’ve suffered worse than anyone else in this operation. And worse yet, we still need you.”
Geordi nodded. “It’s all right, Captain. We’ve got the goods. At least I think we have.”
“Get down to engineering and find out,” Picard said. “Commander Riker! Have a full team prepared to meet Mr. La Forge in engineering.”
“Commander Hwiii is ahead of you, Captain,” said Riker, “literally. He and a team of fifty are waiting. Tell Mr. La Forge that a platform to support the apparatus is built and waiting for him.”
“Acknowledged.” Picard looked over at Troi as Geordi went out. Troi’s face looked odd. Then odder still—and then she sneezed.
Picard laughed a great laugh… and it felt extremely good. “My feelings exactly, Counselor,” he said, looking down at himself. “Let’s get out of here and slip into something more comfortable.”
&nbs
p; Engineering was in havoc when Geordi got there. People were running in all directions, shouting at each other, waving instrumentation, pieces of equipment, padds; the sense of nervousness and excitement in the air was thick enough to taste, let alone cut. Still, as Geordi walked in, there were shouts of approval and cheers, and a few noisy and approving wolf whistles from female crew. When he stopped near the main status board, half to get his breath and half to cope with the reaction, applause broke out all through the section.
He grinned, weakly still, and made his way over toward where great thick cables had been laid down from the main power supply junction, leading off to one side. There, a side bay that had been full of diagnostic boards was suddenly crammed full of three large, square instrumentation pallets. About thirty people were working on them at the moment, wiring in an astonishing assortment of equipment, everything from running tricorders in series and parallel to what seemed a small ion-discharge apparatus. Coasting around one side of it, as if swimming through the air, came Hwiii, whistling hurriedly at someone, “I don’t care how many of them you have to use, just get them hooked in, we don’t have time!”
Geordi grinned. Hwiii laid eyes on him and “swam” over to him at speed, nudging him not too hard under one mostly bare rib, and laughing delphine laughter. “Welcome home! Thrice welcome! We’re ready for you. Quick, where’s the rest of it?”
Geordi handed him the chip. “It’s this or nothing.”
Together they hurried off to one of the status tables on the side that had been installed specifically for the inclusion apparatus and dropped the chip on its reading plate. “Load in,” Geordi said.
They watched the screen together as the information scrolled up. “Perfect,” Hwiii crowed. “This is it, this is the one that didn’t get away!”
“Some of it did. They locked us out. We’re just lucky one of the antiviral protocols didn’t follow the path up and erase the chip.”
Hwiii swung his tail. “Never mind. Look, that’s just what we needed, their replicator settings and everything.”
Geordi was aware of someone looking over his shoulder. He turned and saw Eileen and had to stifle his initial reaction. She was smiling at him: the smile was identical to that other Eileen’s.
“Those the replicator stats?” she said. “Good, we can feed them into ours and have duplicates ready to plug in in a few minutes.”
Their glances rested in one another’s, then Eileen turned away. “Don’t forget to run the protect cycle on them,” Geordi called after her. “We don’t want to find out too late that this stuff is booby-trapped!”
“Was I born yesterday?” Eileen called back, then smiled one of those wicked smiles at Geordi and hurried off, shouting, “Cliff, Donna, Maireid, come on, get these checked!”
Geordi breathed out. “It’s the last two percent that’s missing. It had better not be critical.”
“No point in making yourself crazy over it just now,” Hwiii said, reading. “Let’s be busy understanding what we have.”
Geordi glanced around. “Some pretty heavy-duty cabling you’ve run out there, Commander.”
“Well, Commander, if the thing’s going to pull eight hundred terawatts when it’s running, we had better make sure it’s got enough power feed. Be a shame to stop in the middle of our transfer back home because we blew a fuse.”
Geordi laughed, but the laugh was uneasy. “Eight hundred terawatts is an awful lot to take off this warp engine.”
“I know. That’s why your assistant chiefs and I have been adjusting the matter/antimatter ‘burn’ ratio right upwards. We’ve got engine efficiency up to a hundred and ten percent at the moment, and we’re pushing for one fifteen, maybe one twenty.”
Geordi whistled. “We’re not going to be able to hold that for long.”
“We won’t have to. Just long enough to get home. Just enough time to snap the right string.”
“True enough.”
“But once there,” Hwiii said, “we’re going to have another problem.”
Geordi looked at him.
“What makes you think we’re going to be alone?” said the dolphin. Geordi blinked, then nodded.
“Now, I’m not suggesting that we alter the equipment…”
Geordi burst out laughing. “We haven’t even finished building it! And as for testing it…”
Hwiii gave him a sly look. “We’ll do what we have to. But I was simply going to suggest that we may be able to use it in ways they won’t think of. We may not have an engine the size of theirs, but we have a resource they haven’t.”
“A resident specialist in hyperstring theory,” Geordi said, giving Hwiii the sly look back in kind. “The string vibrates both ways… eh, Hwiii?”
“We have the best engineer in Starfleet,” Hwiii said, dropping his jaw, “and one with a nasty, inventive mind.”
“The ‘nasty’ I’ll leave to others. But between us, I suspect we can come up with something.”
Hwiii glanced down at the console. “Look there—Mr. Data has finished the abstracting.”
“Good. Come on. I want a look at those couplings—then we’ll start getting the replicated boards in place and have a fast look at those abstracts.”
“Very fast. Somehow I doubt those people are going to coast around out there just fanning their fins.”
Hurriedly the two of them squeezed or swam into the equipment bay, past bits and pieces of open matrix-layout, like huge open-celled honeycombs, and chips and boards being slotted into other boards for fitting into the matrix. One piece of equipment, standing off to one side, Geordi didn’t recognize: a bucket. He looked down into it… then laughed at the sight of the fresh, shiny mackerel and went after Hwiii.
It was about fifteen minutes before Picard saw his own bridge again. He stopped long enough for a shower, wanting to wash the dust of that other Enterprise off him, literally and figuratively. And when he swung into the bridge at last, it was such a relief to have eyes turned on him with welcoming looks; no salutes, but people who stood to greet him because they wanted to, not because he would kill them if they didn’t.
“Status, Number One,” he said, and made for his chair.
“Proceeding away from the other Enterprise at warp five,” Riker said. “No sign of pursuit as yet.”
“Good. I want to have a look at the log entries for the period of my absence.”
“On your screen in the ready room, Captain.”
Picard went in there and sat down in his chair with profound relief, touching the screen to bring up the log extracts. Riker had come quietly in behind him; the door shut.
Picard looked up and smiled briefly. “Nervous, Number One? You’ve got the right one, never fear.”
Riker grinned briefly as well, but his eyes were somber. “You were very lucky, Captain,” he said quietly.
Picard shrugged at him. “Now what was I supposed to have done? I did what was required of me. As you did; as we’ve both done a thousand times before and will keep doing. But when we get home”—he touched the screen again to page down—“Troi and La Forge are due for a couple of more commendations. They both comported themselves with great courage and panache. Mr. La Forge in particular suffered a great deal to obtain the information we’re now processing.”
“There’s a problem with that, Captain.” Picard looked at Riker sharply. “It’s the ‘when’ in ‘when we get home.’ Do you know that that vessel has all our threat routines?”
“I had assumed it. You’ll have been preparing counter-measures, I know.”
“Yes, Captain. But there’s always the off chance that we will not make it home. Or that we will and will be destroyed on our side of things. In that case, we have an overriding responsibility to make sure that this information gets back to Starfleet Command, one way or another.”
“I agree, Number One. Though I very much hope these people will not be so foolish as to destroy us here. Since it would in the long run doom this whole area of space.” Picard frowned.
“Though I would not lay great odds, I grant you, on them caring much about the long run.”
“Neither would I. There’s also a question of power requirements for that device. As presently installing, we may not be able to successfully support it. Eight hundred terawatts is a big fraction of our power output… and it may not be possible to get the thing to work without draining power from every nonessential system in the ship, and some essential ones. We might find that we simply can’t get out. In which case something else must.”
Picard nodded. “Go on.”
“Commander Hwiii tells me that he thinks the device can be used at much lower power to push something from our ship—a probe, for example—back home into our own universe. I think we should load all the information we have about what’s happened, this device, and the threat these people pose, into a probe and have it ready to send ahead of us if we can’t get home. Starfleet has to be warned.”
It was a problem that Picard had been turning over in his mind; he was glad to hear that there was at least this much of a solution to it “Very well, make it so. It will, of course, then be our duty—should it come to that—to fight enough of a holding action so that probe can get away. Destroying ourselves, if necessary, to guarantee its escape.”
“And the other ship?”
Picard looked up at Riker thoughtfully. “I confess to curiosity, about what would happen if one Galaxy-class starship rammed another broadside.”
“The other ship is closer to Dreadnought-class. Not a close comparison.”
“Pedant,” Picard said mildly, and went on reading his logs. “But it can’t be allowed to follow the probe over… can it, Number One?”
Riker shook his head.
“Better have Mr. Data get started on the probe,” Picard said. “And get a projection from Mr. La Forge on when he’ll have the inclusion device ready for testing.”
