Dark Mirror (10 page)

“You got
that
in one,” Geordi said softly.

“I would stretch speculation this far,” Data said. “That that other
Enterprise
is likely to be the instrument of our transfer—overpoweringly likely, for there are no planets or space-based facilities anywhere near here from which such a transfer, or transport, could be engineered. And at the very least, the transport would require a considerable amount of power.”

“A starship’s?”

“Probably,” Data said. “Though it would be difficult to say for sure until we understand more about the actual method of transport. And that ship is liable to be the most reliable source of information. Additionally, I would estimate that the odds are at least good that a process of this
sort can be reversed. Certainly that is how the crew of the earlier
Enterprise
managed to make their way back home. We will, of course, have this additional problem: it is possible that the ship and crew which engineered our coming here may not desire us to leave and will not cooperate. Certainly they do not desire us to know much, if anything, about
them
. That they have sent a crewman here covertly would seem to reinforce such a conclusion: otherwise, why did they not contact us openly?”

Picard thought about that for a moment. “Granted. Still, we must be sure of what we’re dealing with. They seem to have managed to get a look at what our ship is like—or some one of our ships. I would like to do the same for them before going any further. Can we manage that?”

Geordi and Worf looked at each other. “We can try,” Geordi said. “The one thing we did notice about them from that one quick contact is that their shields leak a lot of energy. That means their sensors have a lot of spurious signal to put up with when they’re shielded. I think we can either tap their comms directly or put a listener probe very close to them, with enough countermeasures wrapped around it that they’ll mistake it for shield-noise artifact.”

“Were we able to obtain any other pertinent data about that other ship before we backed off?”

“The contact was very fleeting,” Data said. “It is hard to tell as yet what may prove to be pertinent. But one piece of information, an omission rather than a commission: since the other ship knows we are out here somewhere, but has not yet found us, this suggests, further to Mr. La Forge’s observations, that its sensors may not be up to the standard of ours.”

Worf nodded. “Just as Klingon shipbuilding technology, for quite some time, concentrated on weapons capacity rather than sensor sensitivity… since it was considered that the function of a warship was to pursue and destroy, rather than lie quiet and spy.”

“It might just be that they
prefer
to lie quiet and wait for what information their spy sends home,” Picard said. “I wonder if it would have been wise to let him go on thinking himself undetected: it might have bought us time.”

“It might have been the end of us,” Riker said sharply, “depending on what he
did
manage to send. If I put a spy on another ship, it would be to find out about weapons and defense capabilities.”

“That seems to have been what he was after, all right,” Geordi said, “but he didn’t get much, as far as I can tell—mostly information on the phaser and photon torpedo installations.”

“That’s too much as it is,” said Picard, “but I suppose we should be grateful. Meanwhile”—he looked at Data and Geordi—“for our own sakes, we must continue to postulate worst case—that we
won’t
be able to get the information we need from that other ship. What can you work out about how this interuniversal “transport’ was produced?”

Data and Geordi looked at each other helplessly. “Captain,” Geordi said, “I can describe the possibilities to you in general terms—but generalities aren’t theory, let alone the concrete equipment needed to produce the effect. And there are five or six different scholia of thought to consider—and growing out of each of those, literally hundreds of theoretical avenues to explore—any one of which might be right, or wrong: there’s no way to tell without direct experiment. We don’t dare waste the time trying to figure out which experimental pathways are blind. And even if my fairy godmother came down and handed me the theoretical details on a plate, I don’t know that I have the material to build the equipment to make it happen. It may have taken
them
a good while, too—maybe the whole hundred-odd years since these people were last heard of.”

“Possibly even longer,” Data said. “Ship designs aside, there is no guarantee that time is running at the same speed in that universe as in this one, though odds are for it—the
congruencies are otherwise generally very close. But in either case, Geordi and I concur. The information is going to have to be obtained from that other ship, one way or another.”

“You think you can get at their communications?” Picard said. “Do you think you can get at their computer remotely?”

“Not a chance, Captain,” Geordi said. “Someone is going to have to go over there.”

Picard saw the set expression on Geordi’s face and was sure he was thinking,
Almost certainly me
.

“Our situations are near-mirrors of each other, too,” Geordi said. “They want us for something. We can’t say what, now… but there’s a chance that, when we get at their computers, we can find out what they want as well as finding out how to get ourselves home. It’s a risk… but one we can’t afford not to take.”

Picard sat quiet a moment. “I must agree,” he said at last. “We will have to devise a way to put an away team aboard that ship.”

Riker nodded. “Not a large one. Two, maximum. I would think one of them
would
have to be Mr. La Forge, since the work mostly involves the computer, and that’s chiefly his area of expertise.”

“I concur,” said Picard. “And the other?”

Riker looked reluctant. His eyes slid to Troi. She pursed her lips and nodded.

“We certainly know that I’m there,” she said to Picard, “and that apparently I’m someone to be reckoned with. My empathic sense will certainly be useful as a warning device. For both reasons, it makes sense.”

“Any further choices should probably wait for our first intelligence run,” Data said. “Captain Kirk reported that he ran the crew roster and found differences. Crewmen who were aboard his own
Enterprise
were missing or had physical differences—others were present who did not
exist aboard his own ship. And there were some whom he had simply not met, whom he met there for the first time. We will have to do some analysis of visuals, and ship’s roster if we can get it, to see who is there first.”

Troi looked up. “I could ask our ‘guest,’” she said with a slight glitter in her eye.

Picard looked at her. “Counselor, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you had a very carefully concealed mean streak.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Captain, you do know me better. And the dreadful fear I sense from that man every time I go near him—” She looked sober. “But I would suggest to you at the moment that we need all the tools, or weapons, that we can get. In this particular situation, this is a tool that I wouldn’t be ashamed to use. My range varies, as you know, but I am still trying to shake the effects of our closest brush with that ship. It was a psychic midden. I support us getting out of here for personal reasons as well as the obvious practical ones.”

“As long as those personal reasons don’t contaminate your performance,” Picard said.

She smiled at him ruefully. “I’m in no danger of that as yet. But living a life here, if that ship is typical of the surroundings…” She shuddered. “No, thank you. In any case, I think our guest will tell us what we ask.”

“I wish you could ask him what his ship wants of us,” Picard said.

“I don’t think he’s privy to that, Captain. I got a general sense from him that people in his echelons were not told any more than they needed to be told… and indeed he was rather resentful about that, that he wasn’t warned, or warned thoroughly enough, about what he was going to find when he got here.”

Picard nodded and said to Geordi, “Now, as to method…”

Geordi looked thoughtful. “We could hitch a ride back
with our friend’s little device, Captain: the transport platform.”

Picard shook his head. “Can you guarantee that the thing is carrying enough power to store your pattern as well? Are you willing to bet your life on it?”

Geordi looked uncomfortable.

“No,” Picard said. “We’ll do this our way.”

Worf looked up then. “Possibly, if the alternate Ensign Stewart’s original aboard our ship were willing to be sent there in the alternate’s stead…”

Picard considered that very briefly, then shook his head again. “I would not send someone into that situation without most complete preparation, and I doubt he could be prepared completely enough, or, more to the point, that such a course of action would be very fair to him.”

“The honor he would accrue would be considerable,” said Worf.

Picard laughed softly. “Mr. Worf, no doubt it would, but I think we must look in other directions. Mr. La Forge, you and Chief O’Brien are going to have to try to work something out.”

“At least we have the advantage of knowing what their transporter waveform looks like,” O’Brien said. “We won’t trigger
their
systems when we beam in.”

“Unless they’re suspecting we might try something like this,” Geordi said, “and have changed
their
waveform, too.”

O’Brien rolled his eyes. “Sure you’re a pessimist. We can arrange a negotiable tuned-band match if you’re worried.”

“See to it,” Picard said before the two of them got involved in one of the technology duels they loved. “Are there any other ramifications to be considered?”

“One more, I believe,” Data said, folding his hands. “While we do not have the same kind of time limit for our intervention that the original
Enterprise
crew had, we may have another. Some theories of multiuniversal structure
hold that the universes in a given ‘sheaf are not held rigidly in place in relationship to one another, like the pages of a book, but that they move with relation to one another, in patterns which may or may not recur, one universe sometimes being ‘closer,’ or easier of access to another given one, sometimes farther away. There is a possibility that this transfer has happened here and now because that other
Enterprise
was waiting for the congruence to be closer than usual.”

Picard blinked in surprise. “Do you mean they were shadowing us?”

“No,” Data said, “merely going about their patrol schedule—since we are in the same ‘sheaf,’ our movements can logically be expected to mirror each other’s much of the time. However, in any case, I would not care to linger here too long—for if the universes move too far apart, the transfer might become more difficult, more dangerous—or even impossible until the present pattern moves into place again. And we have no way of knowing when that might be.”

Picard considered that. “Your point is taken. Speed now becomes of the essence. The sooner we’re out of here, the better—and the better our chances of getting out at all.” He looked around the table and saw nothing but agreement in the faces there.

“Dismissed,” the captain said.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Geordi said.

Soft laughter came from behind him. “If it were,” Eileen said, “you wouldn’t be happy.”

He turned around, surprised to see her coming toward him through the trees. “I thought you were off duty.”

Lieutenant Hessan laughed. “I am. And so are you.”

Geordi shook his head. “Not at the moment, I’m not. The captain has a problem he needs solved.”

She looked around the forest in which Geordi had been strolling: big old pines, towering up a hundred feet at least, and growing closely enough together that they almost shut out the sky. Above them was some summer noontime, but down here, where they walked in silence on soft pine needles, the effect was a cool noncommittal twilight, with only here and there a ray of sunlight lancing down. “Bad one, huh?” she said. “Can’t see the forest for the trees?”

“Huh,” Geordi said, and smiled. “No… I just come here when I need to think, and staring at the status table isn’t helping.”

She fell in beside him. “Tell me about it.”

“Well, you saw the routines I was starting to set up. ‘Get at their computer,’ the captain said. But even in our own ship it wouldn’t be so easy. Over there—there’s no knowing what kind of locks they’re going to have on sensitive material. Or even whether they would be the same areas locked down. So I’ve got to find a way to get into the system that will also take me around the locks. Systems sabotage… it’s the only way.”

“Nasty.”

“More than just that. It’s a bizarre feeling. Usually it’s all I can do to keep things running
right
around here. Now, to be working out ways to make them go wrong…” Geordi shook his head.

“If I were you, I’d try to enjoy it. Think of the times the computers have gone down right in the middle of something crucial, and how much you wanted to kick them.” Eileen grinned with relish. “Well, now’s your chance. And it won’t even be your own computers you’re kicking. I’d kick them every way I could and run home laughing.”

“It’s the running home that concerns me,” Geordi said ruefully. But a slow smile spread over his face. “You’ve got a point, though.”

“So. Start from the top.”

Geordi nodded, scuffing at a pinecone in front of him and kicking it ahead of them as they walked. “We have three main computer cores,” he said. “Two in the main hull, one in the engineering hull. They update one another every forty-two milliseconds, so that each of them carries all the ship’s data, and any one of them can run the whole ship by itself.”

“The usual protective redundancy,” Hessan said. “So you’ve decided not to get at the computer in an obvious way, by one of the access terminals: you want to get at a core directly. And do what?”

“Fail one of them out of the system, probably by killing the subspace generator in the core, or just making it act up.
The other computers would instantly throw the failed one out of the system and shout for help.”