Dark Mirror (16 page)

“Within plain sight,” Geordi said. “Take a guess.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Geordi chuckled very softly. “And neither would anybody else but engineering personnel. They’re in the wall behind the science stations, aft of Worf’s console, between the two turbolifts; but because of its positioning, everybody thinks of that area as just another wall. It’s the commonest thing about life on a starship: everybody but engineering assumes, on a day-to-day basis, that everything
that looks like a wall really
is
a wall. I promise you that the access panels are the
last
place most people, and even our own security people, would look… and truly they have the odds in their favor looking in other places, simply because it’s so simple to
go
other places. But the
Enterprise
is a honeycomb, full of interesting opportunities for people who want to get places without using the corridors… and
extremely
full of places to hide. There is, of course, one problem: scan for life-signs.”

Deanna let out a long breath. “I was going to mention that.” And she twitched and blinked a little, for that itching, buzzing feeling was getting stronger. It ran up her body to just above her shoulders. She was neck-height to that red line, and the feeling stopped there; but still the faint sound of buzzing was in her ears as well, as if the sensation were trying to ascend higher.

Geordi shook his head and grinned, but the grin had a slight edge to it. “Not down here. We’ve got a whole lot of duranium framing around us, and a ton of superconducted current and optical signal… and a lot of it’s traveling faster than light. We’re down in the subspace field.”

She stared at him. “Is that safe?”

Geordi looked at her with a slight shrug. “I think it’s safer than getting shot with one of those phasers. What do
you
think?”

She could find no quick answer to that. The surge of Geordi’s own fear was subsiding for the moment: he was in his element, in his own hidey-hole, feeling much better, though still unnerved by how wrong things were going. “And besides,” he said, “I really don’t think they’ll give the room more than a second glance. Our friend is inside the panel, still sleeping the sleep of the just. As long as he doesn’t start snoring, we’ll be fine.”

“But couldn’t they pick
him
up on a scan?”

Geordi shook his head. “I doubt it. I was being extra careful in our case. But the subspace field puts up such a
bloom of
bremmstrahlung
and other radiation that I doubt whether they’ll get more than the faintest buzz from him, and they’ll probably discount it as artifact from being so close to the core. That’s one of the reasons we keep sensor equipment so far away: you can’t be sure of getting a decent reading if you’re even within thirty or forty meters of an FTL-aided core.”

They stood there, poised above the polished abyss for a long while, it seemed to Troi. Geordi was much calmer now, and the interference made by the sudden upsurge of his emotion had gone off. Troi cast her sensitivities back up the little access passage and into the core room they had vacated.

“What did you do with the console?” she said.

Geordi raised his eyebrows. “I fused a very minor component in one of the packet shunt boards. When it’s checked, it’ll look like a routine time-of-life failure… that component looked like it was about five years old anyway.” He shook his head. “Sloppy maintenance. I’d never leave a part in place that long, at least not one that didn’t have four times that long an estimated active life.”

Deanna made a small amused expression at Geordi’s fastidiousness and went back to what she was doing, listening with all of her. Up above them she felt a faint bloom of concern, confusion, curiosity tinged with suspicion, but not tinged too strongly—well mixed with the sense of someone not particularly caring, the vague satisfaction and relief that there was actually nothing here to respond to. The level of emotion here was consonant with someone who did think that the crewman who had been here really had stepped away briefly because of an equipment failure. “I think it may be all right,” Troi said.

“Yeah,” Geordi said, “for about five minutes. And when they find out that that crewman
hasn’t
gone for help and isn’t anywhere to be found…”

“What are we going to do with him?”

Geordi shook his head. “I would beam him over to the
Enterprise,
but I don’t think the captain would thank me for that—and we can’t leave him in the shuttle. And the more beaming around we do, the more likely these people are to notice something, even though the transporter carrier
is
tuned to match their own. I think the guy’s better left here. He’s got another four or five hours’ snoozing left to him, from what the doctor told me about those doses we’re carrying. I’m more concerned about us at the moment.”

That tingling, buzzing feeling appeared to be trying to wrap itself around Troi’s ears. She shook her head. Her eyes were feeling bleary, too, as if she had just awakened early. She said, “Exactly how long is it safe for us to stay down here?”

Geordi shrugged. “I’ve got two answers for that. The practical one is, ‘Twenty seconds after those guys have gone, it’s safe for us to come out and go somewhere else.’ And as to where, I’ll happily entertain your suggestions. If you’re asking me about the physiological effects of a faster-than-light field on the body…”

“That
was
what I had in mind.”

Geordi shook his head with a wry expression. “No one’s done double-blind testing, and when there’s heavy maintenance to do, we shut the field down first. But no one’s ever died of it. Fortunately, the body’s software is used to running at one speed—and even when it can run faster, it tends to stay at the old speed, because it tends not to believe that anything faster is possible. Spend too long in the field, and I think possibly your body might start noticing the possibilities, and trying to take advantage of them—with bad effects when the speed drops down to ‘normal’ again. I’ve spent more time down here sometimes than was wise, I think: the headache—” He shook his head. “But that’s why we usually try to keep our heads up out of the field. More sensitive ‘hardware’ than just the
motor nerves, and more of it. But if we have to stay down here much longer, don’t try to make any fast moves—you may surprise yourself.”

They waited. After a while Deanna felt the typical “slackening” effect of someone who had decided to give up and try something else; then the attenuation of a mind moving away in space as well as intention. “They’re leaving,” she said.

“Just as well… I was starting to get tired of this.”

They went carefully up the ladders again, hoisted themselves up over the edge of the core cylinder, and sat there for a moment, rubbing their legs and getting their composure back. “You feel all right?” Geordi said.

“My head is buzzing a little, but it’s already less than it was a few seconds ago.”

“Good. I was afraid we might get more of the experience than we wanted.”

Deanna smiled at him. “I guess you’ll just have to write a paper on this.”

“It was that,” he said with a grin, “or write a paper on being dead. Now what?”

“I don’t much like the thought of trying to make our way out through those corridors at the moment. And the shaft-and-access tunnel method is going to take too much time—of which we have very little. I would think it’s going to have to be intraship beaming.”

Geordi nodded. “I agree. We’d better send a note home and tell them so—I agree with Chief O’Brien: I don’t want to use even scrambled communicators unless we absolutely have to.” He picked up an isolinear chip. “This one’s configured for voice. They’ll beam it in and slap it straight into a reader. I’ll flag it to the captain’s attention—the computer will transfer the audio straight to him. Go on, Counselor.”

“Captain, we have a problem…” Succinctly she described their present location and the events of the last
twenty minutes. “We need to be beamed away from here, but not off the ship, unless you feel it necessary. Someplace safe from scan, and preferably someplace where we stand some chance of not being disturbed.”

“Other problems,” Geordi said. Quickly he spelled out their difficulty with getting into the computer core. “The information we need requires voiceprint and authorization codes from the security officer or the captain. The counselor has at best one chance in five of getting the right one without instantly alerting the system, and almost certainly her counterpart as well. But the captain could order the security officer to release those codes… I think.”

Troi looked at him, opened her mouth, and shut it again at what he was suggesting. That Captain Picard should beam over here as well…

“We have
no
other chance of getting the material we need out of the computer,” Geordi said. “The thing’s security protocols are phenomenal—there are blocks all up and down the line. If you want to pull us out, we’ll come home. But my guess is that once they realize for certain that a crewman has gone missing, they’ll raise their shields, and after that no one will be able to transport in or out. So you’ve got about five minutes to make the call or pull us out of here. Awaiting orders. Out.”

He touched the control on the isolinear pad, put it down: it vanished in transporter effect.

They stared at the spot where it had lain and waited.

Picard was sitting in his ready room—that being as good a place as any to be nervous and keep the fact more or less private. His tea had gone cold, forgotten in the face of the material that the away team had beamed over a short while ago. The sociological and historical analysis teams were already working on it, but he could hardly afford the luxury of waiting to see what they said: he had pulled the Starfleet historical material and was skimming it. Picard was terrified
by it, and fascinated at the same time—fascinated by the strangeness of it, terrified that he didn’t know where to set to work on it that would do the most good. The feeling wouldn’t go away that there was some vital piece of information buried in it that would make all the difference to his own ship’s problem. And all the while, the continuing silence of the away team had brought the hair up on the nape of his neck again and again, even though he had ordered it, even though it meant they were still all right.

He sighed and turned his attention back to the history of the alternate Starfleet. It was already compulsive reading—and horrific. Its roots appeared to be founded in the chaos surrounding the Eugenics Wars. Khan Noonian Singh and his genetically engineered companions had not been overthrown and driven out in this universe, but rose to command several empires spread over several continents before finally turning on one another in territorial and dynastic warfare, and wiping one another out—not to mention large numbers of other people—with nuclear weapons. The delivery systems for the weapons were not missiles, against which all sides had adequate protection, but large, slow ion-drive craft adapted from the DY-100 “sleepers,” which were maneuverable enough to dodge any antimissile or particle beam fired at them on their way to target. Numerous improvements were made in the ion propulsion systems by the admittedly brilliant science teams of the various warring factions. When the dust settled over the graves of the victors and the vanquished, the technology remained—a propulsion system good enough to push spacecraft into local space travel—even into relativistic travel, dead end though it might be.

Picard reflexively reached for his tea, found it colder than ever, drank some anyway as he read. The cultures that had pulled themselves together out of the radioactive ashes of the downfall of the Engineered never quite lost the
memory of their little empires, of a time when people were ruled for their own good by men and women of power. Their later, slowly assembled governments became empires, too, finally just one Empire, nostalgically harking back to those “good old days,” seen as better by far than their present post-Holocaust world, a blasted place where everything must be tightly controlled so that everyone who lived would have enough to eat, a place to live and work. Slowly the earth greened again, starting to heal itself, nature proving, one more time, to be more powerful than those whose thoughtlessness threatened her—at least insofar as she had much more time to work with than they did. But though the world greened again, the hearts of the people who lived in her stayed sere and cold, not trusting the new spring. And the rulers of that world looked out at space, considering that they had had a very close call. They looked into the darkness and saw, not a silent wonder to explore, but a replacement home, a way to make sure that they would never almost be wiped out again.

Serious intrasystem space travel began. Mars was terraformed over the space of forty years—Picard rubbed his forehead at the casual reports of the Martian artifacts, the great ancient buried sculptures in the caves and the writing laid down deep for preservation in the sandstone strata, all gone—blasted away in the casual leveling of mountain ranges, the excavations of new seabeds. Millions of people relocated to the new world when it was ready—many of them being relocated by force. After all, reasoned the government of the Empire of Earth, didn’t a planet need enough colonists to make it self-sufficient—then productive enough to send minerals and so forth home to the mother planet? And when Mars was well settled, the government looked out farther yet. After all,
one
extra planet wasn’t enough, was it? What if something happened to the sun? Humanity’s survival must be assured—and
indeed that had become their watchword, the motto of the new Empire, appearing in its arms, while they still bothered with such things:
We Survive.

Research in long-distance ships that would push toward the edges of the relativistic envelope began in earnest. The late twenty-first century and the beginning of the twenty-second saw the first large sleeper and colony ships built and launched, but they were overtaken—literally—by the development, by Zephram Cochrane and his team, of the first warpfields and warp engines, enabling the colonization of Alphacent and various planets of the other nearer stars.