Dark Mirror

Captain Jean-Luc Picard moved carefully through the sinister duplicate of the
Starship Enterprise
.…

He stepped through a door, his phaser ready. A foot came shooting out, caught the phaser in his hand, and kicked it far away.

Picard grabbed the foot and yanked sideways, hard. There was a crash, and Picard threw himself in the direction of the sound. He felt a body, found a throat, seized it, and looked into the face of his attacker.

The face was a dark mirror of his own.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1993 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-79438-8
ISBN: 978-0-6717-9438-5
eISBN: 978-0-7434-2064-8

First Pocket Books paperback printing November 1994

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

For Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda,
the men behind the curtain
—but especially for Rick, friend of many years

Thanks to the staff of Independent Pizza in South Anne Street, Dublin, where this novel was conceived in October 1991 over a large with extra cheese, extra sauce, pepperoni, and hot chilies, and a medium with extra cheese, double garlic, hot chilies, and onions, along with two bottles of Orvieto Secco and a whole lot of Ballygowan water.

Thanks also to Dave Stern, who returns unexpected phone calls from overexcited people standing in phone booths outside pizzerias.

This novel takes place sometime during the fourth season of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms
.

—
Pascal

There are some parts of space where even the human heart, eternally optimistic, finds it hard to feel itself welcome. At those outer fringes of the Galaxy that the humanities have just begun to reach, the starfield, which elsewhere lies in such rich streams and billows of brightness between the inhabited worlds, thins away and goes chill and pale. Here the starlight is only indefinite, faintly glowing—the million points of light near the heartworlds now dimmed by terrible distance and the clouds of dark matter between the stars to a vague cool fog, hardly to be seen except when one looks away from it. Usually the onlooker finds it hard to look away, forced by the sight to think how small even a galaxy is in the vastness, how tiny even the Local Group is compared to the darkness holding it, and all the other galactic clumps and supergalaxies; and which, beyond the bounds of mere spatial integrity, probably holds other whole universes as well, numberless, all of them subsumed into the greatest dark—that of entropy—which broods and bides its time.

In these, the deserts of space, the oases are few and far between. Once in a half a million cubic parsecs you might
find a star that had struggled to bring forth planets in the barrenness and managed it—but for daunting distances around it, there will still be nothing but emptiness, and as background, only the shimmer of light that indicates the hearths of the crowded worlds. In the face of such contrasts that light becomes almost somber, speaking of its impermanence and newness in a universe where for unknown time unnameable darkness gestated, holding the light in it unborn, until the first great laugh, the outburst of newborn power and matter into the old thoughtful void.