Dark Mirror (14 page)

Picard sighed. “Well, that would seem to solve the problem. I would congratulate you, gentlemen—if the success weren’t going to imminently place one of you in even worse danger.” He looked from O’Brien to Geordi again. “But you’re quite sure about the feasibility of this work on the shuttlecraft?”

“Yes, sir,” Geordi said. “It won’t exactly be a stroll down O’Connell Street.”

O’Brien said, “Well,
marginally
simpler. But it can certainly be done. It waits only your order.”

“Then make it so.”

“I’ll get the engineering team down there,” O’Brien said, and went off to see to it.

“Meanwhile,” Picard said, “have you finished preparing your ‘raid’ on the computer core?”

Geordi nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s as complete as I could
make it. Hwiii had a few suggestions, and he’s looking the routines over and making additions even as we speak. By the time we have the shuttlecraft ready, the scan-and-download routine will be complete, and I’ll be ready to go.”

“Good.” Picard sighed, then added, “Commander Riker tells me that a short while ago he got a scan of your counterpart in the other ship. He says your uniform will be ready in an hour or so—he wanted to work with the design team to make sure the tailoring was correct. He describes it, though, as ‘somewhat drafty.’”

Geordi shook his head, bemused, and grinned. “The man’s a perfectionist.”

“Lieutenant,” Picard said somewhat uncomfortably, and Geordi looked at him. “Understand that you are at liberty, even now, to refuse this mission if you feel it cannot be managed, or if the danger is too great. You’ll be needed to implement the information you’re going to fetch. There is no use losing you.”

Geordi shook his head again, slowly this time. “Captain, it’s got to be me. We’ve still got no evidence that Data is there. The counselor can’t handle this… and she’s going to have her hands full, anyway, watching my back for whatever might sneak up behind it. Don’t you worry about me.”

“I always worry, as you well know. Be sure that you take great care.”

After that, work began in earnest down in the main shuttle bay. Picard went down to see the work once it was well in hand and found that O’Brien had been serious when he said that the alterations he planned wouldn’t take long. He had simply had Geordi lend him nearly every engineering crew member on shift at that point, all but those supervising the engine room proper. About sixty people were swarming all over the shuttlecraft
Hawking
, taking
out the extra chairs, flooring, and the other usual fittings, and installing the guts of a transporter array. It was still not a small-time installation, even with the considerable manpower working at it. Right now they had actually taken the side of the shuttlecraft off—the paneling first, then everything right down to the duranium framework—to fit in the two big round “tubs” that held the main and backup pattern buffer tanks, and the biofilter structures. They could have beamed the buffer tubs in, but there was so much work to be done routing the associated optical and other cabling through the body of the shuttle that it was as simple to partially disassemble it. The transporter’s targeting scanners and the energizing and phase-transition coils were already installed against the ceiling of the shuttle. The control console, being modular, had taken the least trouble and had been put in first, slotted into one of the aft auxiliary-control bays. Other crew were busy installing Geordi’s custom screen generators, and the relays by which O’Brien would be controlling the away team’s transports from the
Enterprise
.

“About half an hour till we’re finished, sir,” O’Brien said, “and then about half an hour for testing. Then Mr. La Forge and the counselor can go whenever they’re ready.”

“Very well,” Picard said. “I wouldn’t want to wait much longer than that. I’m having enough trouble understanding our counterparts’ state of mind as it is, but I don’t believe they’ll think it would take us very long to notice”—he frowned—“a dead body. The sooner we get on with this and get our people back, the better I’ll like it.”

“Yes. I’ve installed an extra decontam routine in the biofilter circuits,” O’Brien said quietly, “after what Dr. Crusher told me about Stewart. There’s no telling whether other crew members might be carrying such tailored bugs around inside them—and I wouldn’t want Mr. La Forge or the counselor to bring back copies of their own. We’ll be taking very careful baseline measurements on their transport
out, to make sure we have clean data to compare them against when they come home again.”

Picard nodded approval. Across from them, the doors to the corridor opened, and Commander Hwiii came swimming in on his pad, carrying several isolinear chips in one of his manipulators.

“Captain,” he said as he came up with them, “Chief—how is it going?”

“We’ll be ready shortly,” O’Brien said.

Picard reached out, curious at the different look of the chips. “Ah,” he said, turning one over in his hands, “these are the new high-density chips.”

“That’s right,” Hwiii said, “five hundred twelve terabytes each. Mr. La Forge should be able to pack a fair amount of what he needs into these, assuming that
this
does what we intend.” He held one of them up.

“The search routines,” Picard said.

Hwiii swung his tail in agreement. “He asked me to add what I could. The one thing I feel sure of, Captain, is that what’s happened to us has something to do with the odd way that the hyperstring structure was behaving in our home space, just before we swapped over into this one. Besides Mr. La Forge’s searches on crew information, history, and engineering science, I’ve added search parameters for everything that would seem to pertain to hyperstring theory in conjunction with engine performance, shield function, warpfield, and transporter theory—you sing it, it’s here.” Hwiii looked resigned. “The best I can manage. Nothing to do now but sound a few notes in the One’s waters and hope for the best.”

Picard felt more or less the same way. “Thank you, Commander,” he said.

“Don’t say it, Eileen!” came Geordi’s voice from the doorway, sounding annoyed—though the annoyance still had a cheerful sound to it. Picard turned, saw him coming, and had to school his face to stillness.

“‘Drafty,’” he said to Geordi as the chief engineer of the
Enterprise
came up to them, his expression a study in rueful amusement. “I think Mr. Riker may have been understating somewhat.”

Geordi spread his well-muscled arms for a moment in a helpless gesture, then let them drop. There was no doubt about the quality of their musculature, for the top half of the uniform he was wearing was more of that gold-mesh material, cut as an open-fronted vest. The rest of it was a matching sash at the waist, and black breeches that looked to have been sprayed onto him, the ensemble completed by high black boots and another of the officer-level knives.

Geordi was plainly caught between outrage and laughter. “This isn’t an engineer’s uniform, it’s a stoker’s jacket! What have they got in that ship, solid-fuel engines? ‘Motors’? How hot does it
get
over there?” He waved his arms and laughed again, thoroughly embarrassed.

Picard had to cover his mouth, for the vest was skimpy, and while it showed off Geordi’s physique to good advantage, it was no protection against anything whatsoever. The pants were as bad. Picard considered that he would have been nervous of bending over in breeches that looked like those—or even just wearing them, designed as they were to reinforce others’ impression of the wearer’s muscular, or other, puissance.

“Mr. La Forge,” Picard said after a moment, “I’m sure you’ll acquit yourself splendidly, regardless of the costume. Or the heat.”

“There’s more than one kind of heat, Captain,” Geordi said, smiling slightly, “but I’ll do my best. What’s the score, Chief?”

O’Brien grinned a little crookedly. “Skin three, uniform nil, I’d say…. Oh, you mean the
shuttle,
” he added innocently as Geordi threw a mock-threatening look at him. “About another ten minutes, then we’ll start testing cycles. Come on, have a look.”

They went about it, and Picard watched the work crew finish the installation work on the shuttle, seal it up, and then start running diagnostics and beaming test objects in and out. O’Brien, in the right-hand seat of the shuttle, was busying himself with checking the scrambled subspace-radio relays to his own master transport console. “We’ll be monitoring them constantly,” he said to Picard, without turning around, when the captain drifted quietly up behind him at one point. “The doctor has put subcutaneous transponders in each of them. We won’t use the communicator functions unless there’s no choice—the signal generation, even though it’s scrambled, would almost certainly draw unwanted attention to them. But we can still lock on and pull them out in a hurry if we have to.”

“As long as that ship doesn’t raise its shields,” Picard said. That was one thought that had been haunting him.

O’Brien nodded. “If they can just keep from being noticed, they’ll be all right.”

“Quite so,” Picard said, and got out of the shuttle, aware of his own nerves, not desiring to get on any of his people’s. The feeling of helplessness that so often came over him when sending crew into danger was building in him now, much worse than usual. Unknown danger was one thing.
Known
danger was worse, in its way, and this mixture of the two was worse still.
These people are us… but somehow changed—and no way to tell
how
changed but by putting ourselves, or some of ourselves, in their way
. The thought was not even slightly reassuring. Kirk’s notes on the old
Enterprise’s
experience had been as exhaustive as Geordi had said, and as upsetting. Ambassador Spock’s formal notes regarding the alternate captain and other command crew had been fairly dry, speaking also of an apparent moral inversion and of great emotional lability in the subjects, a tendency toward uncontrolled rages, threats, and attempts at bribery, all of which would normally be distasteful to a Vulcan. But McCoy, then the ship’s surgeon,
had covertly (and with some apparent relish) made a note of Spock’s informal, off-record assessment of the counterparts as “brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous… in every way, splendid examples of
Homo sapiens;
the very flower of humanity.” Picard could not imagine Spock, however young, using those words unless he absolutely meant them and had experienced firsthand evidence of every trait. The thought gave Picard the shudders, for the originals of whom the counterparts were mirrors were all extraordinary people, decorated heroes, professionals of a high caliber, some of the greatest names of the Starfleet of their time. Human beings, yes, and as such inevitably flawed, but still…

He looked up and saw the crew beginning to clear away from the shuttle, packing up their equipment and carrying it away, or guiding it out on floaters. Geordi, O’Brien, and Hwiii were standing off to one side with their heads bent over a padd while Geordi checked the chips he was carrying against it.

The corridor doors opened and Troi walked in—or strode in, rather, her head tilted up, her face cool and neutral. The room went somewhat quiet with people taking in the sight of her—the changed walk, the clothes. Picard, who had seen the recording of the counterpart Troi made earlier, looked at the counselor and thought it wisest not to comment on her style of dress. He did note, though, that she had also seen that recording—probably, to judge by her gait, numerous times. She looked taller: it was not just that more of her was showing than usual. Picard began, right then, in a small way, to be afraid for her. A walk, an attitude, was one thing to mimic. But he could not imagine Deanna Troi’s face wearing the cold, hard look that the other’s had worn.
And she’s going to
have
to learn to wear it, quickly, or else
.

Geordi blinked at the sight of her, then grinned widely. “Counselor, I’m
envious
. You’ve got more on than I have!”

Troi smiled. “Probably just by a few percentage points, I think. I take it we’re about ready?”

Geordi nodded. “We’re loading in some provisions—we had to strip the replicator out: no room for it. Everything else is aboard.”

“I brought a copy of this,” Troi said, holding up a chip. “The view we got of the other Troi, and the other La Forge. We’ll have about an hour or so on impulse before we reach the beam-in point?” Geordi nodded. “A little more time to spend studying these, then.”

“Very well,” Picard said. Behind him the corridor doors opened again. Riker came in and stood quietly behind Picard, but Picard knew where Riker’s attention was turned and found it completely understandable.

“It seems inadequate to wish you luck,” Picard said. “But I do. Complete your mission and come back safely, as quickly as you can.”

They nodded and got into the shuttlecraft; its door sealed down, and the whisper of the maneuvering system came up softly as it began to warm toward ready. The engineering crew headed quickly out of the shuttle bay, until only Picard, Riker, O’Brien, and Hwiii remained, watching. Then Picard turned toward the doorway.

“Number One,” he said, to spare Will the pain of remaining the extra few seconds, and headed off for the bridge, the others following him, the doors shutting softly behind them.

There was no sound in the shuttlecraft but the soft hum of its impulse engines and a different small sound, one Troi had never noticed before, made by the transporter: a tiny, soft, continuous “shimmer” of sound that mirrored the larger sound made during transport. Deanna sat and listened to it, using the slight, soft phasing she heard in the sound as a focus to help keep herself centered and calm. It needed a fair amount of doing.

Beside her, Geordi was gazing at the screen, watching the brief recording of his counterpart in the other
Enterprise’s
engine room. “I don’t see much difference, Counselor,” he said, glancing up at Deanna.

“There is some, though. Computer, stop. Reverse to”—she eyed the display—“44002.2.” The image raced backward, blurred, then froze on the other Geordi, standing over the master engineering console. He swung away from it after a moment, walked into one of the ancillary bays, and leaned over one of his staff working there. “He swaggers a little,” Deanna said. “Look at the extra arm movement. Computer, repeat.”