Dark Mirror (23 page)

The main axis of it appeared to run at least halfway
down the primary hull, lined on both sides, on several levels, by rows and rows of paneling, instrumentation, engine-status and shield-status readouts, all the paraphernalia of an engine room. In the middle of it, the “nave” as it were, where the power conduits would branch off to either side and service the warp nacelles, stood the huge tower of the main matter/antimatter exchanger, four times the height of the one on his own ship, piercing upward through several decks and downward through several more. With the ship running on impulse, the throb of the engines was much muted: only the occasional soft, shuddering
boom
ran through the great space. Everything was dimly lit except for various pools of light at workstations, and the light byproduct of the matter/antimatter exchanger. It was a cathedral indeed, a cathedral to Force, on a sheer brutal level that Picard had not thought possible.

“Now where do you think Mr. La Forge will be in all this?” he said to Barclay casually as they walked along.

“Probably down at the main status readouts, Captain,” Barclay said, “or in his office. We’ll look down there first.”

Picard nodded and walked along with him, looking around casually. It was still very odd to be in a version of his ship where you couldn’t tell immediately where someone was—but these people apparently felt that communication was a lesser priority, not a necessity. That by itself was so diagnostic of them…. Talking was not in their style. Bullying, yes; commanding, and then destroying if the orders weren’t obeyed. No discussion, no give-and-take: just take.
Though it’s true, too,
Picard thought ruefully,
that among these people, communications like ours would be dreadfully abused. You could immediately find out where that person was that you wanted to assassinate, track his movements.

Barclay gestured with his chin toward the matter/ antimatter exchanger. “There he is, sir.”

They walked down the great open space through the soft
murmur of machinery and crewmen attending their stations. The main status readout board was an overblown version of Geordi’s main board in engineering, this one positioned just in front of the matter/antimatter exchanger column, and looking uncomfortably like an altar to the great god Power. La Forge was leaning over the board, studying readings. He looked up, saw them coming, and hurried to come to attention and salute.

Picard simply stood and let him hold it for a long second or two before returning the salute, then moved around the board toward him, slowly.

“Well, Mr. La Forge, about that report…”

La Forge stood his ground as Picard drew near and lifted one hand near La Forge’s badge. La Forge actually set his teeth. Picard wagged a finger of the raised hand at him and said, “Be more careful next time. I should dislike losing my chief engineer just as I’ve gotten him broken in.”

La Forge sagged a little. Picard said, “Now. You seem to be studying something here with some interest?”

La Forge looked concerned for a moment, turning his attention back to the panel. “Yes, Captain. I was noticing some odd energy readings over the last couple of hours—fluctuations I’m not sure how to explain.” He added hurriedly, “We’ll find out what they are, no problem.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less of you, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said as mildly as he could, and wandered around the status board, thinking,
They’ve noticed our transports, small as they are. I’ll have to tell Troi and Geordi not to risk any further ones.
He brushed a hand idly over the board as he passed, changing some of the displays until he found one that showed, as the bridge display had, the main power couplings to the nacelles, to ship’s systems and shielding, and to that third source. Here it had a label:
Inclusion Apparatus.

Greatly daring, he tapped that spot on the schematic and said, “How’s this behaving itself?”

“Come and see.” La Forge led him off down the great right-hand corridor leading away from the exchange column, down one of the “transepts.” Picard followed him, not too quickly, with Barclay in tow.

They turned left into a huge bay some twenty meters wide and thirty deep. In the midst of this, connected by optical, computer, and power conduits that vanished under the floor, was an apparatus that seemed to be housed in several great cabinets. It made no sound. Several status boards were erected around it, one at each corner of the installation. The whole thing had a balanced and symmetrical look, and Picard found himself wondering whether that symmetry had something to do with the basic theory of it.

He paused by one of the boards, tapped it a few times to cycle through its available display configurations, and tried desperately to memorize what he was seeing—for Geordi would need this information. He wished Geordi himself were here to make some kind of sense of it.
Just have to do the best I can by myself.
There were references to “chord ingress” and “egress,” “oscillation.” He remembered abruptly that Hwiii had been discussing oscillation in relation to hyperstrings. “Negative sines,” “positive sines.” He shook his head. “It’s a masterwork,” he said, “that much I understand.”

He started to walk around the installation slowly with Geordi beside him and Barclay bringing up the rear.

“Everything continues to test out normal,” Geordi said. “The local structure of space is continuing to show some slight irregularities, but that’s understandable under the circumstances.”

“You’re sure it won’t produce a problem?” Picard said sharply.

“Oh, no, Captain, not for the time that ship will be here. If it were here too long, there would be growing field disturbances. After all, this universe would have just gotten
heavier by one point five million metric tons. On the macro scale, the universe can absorb that kind of change of mass. On the local scale, though, in median time, say within a few hundred thousand parsecs, things could get pretty shaken up—the space of our universe being closed, after all, and balanced for a certain amount of matter, the amount present at its inception. It’s a good thing there aren’t any stars or planets in this area: they would have reacted adversely by now.”

Picard nodded at all this. His brain was resounding now with the phrase
for the time that ship will be here.
“And when it’s gone?” he said, trailing off.

“Then everything snaps back to normal.”

“Even after—energy discharges, photon torpedoes, and so forth?” He purposely kept his phrasing vague.

“Oh, yes, Captain,” La Forge said. “As long as no matter more than ten to the sixteenth grams is left here, there won’t be any ill effects to our universe.”

That clinched it, then. Picard suddenly knew what was going to happen.
As long as that threshold amount of mass is left here. They’re not, then, merely planning to capture the ship and destroy it. “When it’s gone…” They’re going to send it back. Not with one of our crews. With
theirs… ! That at least seemed perfectly clear. “Mass less than ten to the sixteenth grams….” He thought briefly.
If you took all the weight of all the bodies on the
Enterprise…
let’s see now… average weight per person, say a hundred kilos…
He did the sum in his head. All the human beings and other creatures aboard the
Enterprise
lumped together would be
much
less than ten to the sixteenth grams. And in his mind, Picard saw the sudden image of many, many bodies, floating frozen in space or phasered out of existence…. Matter could neither be created nor destroyed, of course: their component mass would still exist, in other forms. But this universe wouldn’t be harmed. And it wouldn’t matter to these people how his crew died, so long as they did and
left room on the
Enterprise
for their own people, their counterparts.

He nodded and walked on around the great apparatus in its cabinets. At a stroke, he had been deprived of one option he had been considering, in which he had instructed Riker: the option of destroying the
Enterprise
while still in this universe, if they couldn’t get back.
They would have reacted adversely,
La Forge had said. Was he understating? How much? Could hundreds of thousands of parsecs of space
really
be affected by the permanent presence of this extra mass? And if it could—could the destruction of his
Enterprise
here destroy life in
this
universe? He couldn’t imagine the exact mode of the destruction, but somehow he was sure it would happen. So far he had not found a single bright spot about any of this situation:
this
unpalatable prospect wasn’t very likely to be the exception.

Even in this universe—skewed and warped as it seemed—on some of these planets, around some of these stars, there had to be innocent lives, millions of them, people not responsible for this situation, not contributing to it. He would not be their murderer. Yet, at the same time, a cold voice far back in his brain said,
Are you sure this universe wouldn’t profit from being killed? Are you
very
sure?
Look
at it! Is this life?

He thrust that thought resolutely away.
Transporter or no transporter, I must find a way to warn the
Enterprise
about this. At least, I have to get this information to Geordi and Troi. They might be able to devise something.
And he himself would have to devise quickly a way to get Geordi into the core, and some way to incapacitate this ship as thoroughly as possible. Two birds with one stone would be best, if it could be managed.

There was a sound of footsteps, and he and Geordi and Barclay all turned to see Lieutenant Worf approaching them. “Commander Riker sent me to ask whether eighteen
hundred hours will be all right for that briefing you wanted.”

What briefing?
Picard almost said, and caught himself in a hurry. He wondered whether this was some sort of trick, or simply something his counterpart had asked for before going to his quarters. “Briefing,” he said, trying to sound neither too vague nor too certain. “Eighteen hundred will be fine. Though—” He paused for a moment. “Never mind. Was there anything else?”

“No, Captain,” said Worf.

“Good,” La Forge said. “Then get out of here, slave.”

Picard, looking at La Forge, was not entirely surprised to see the flare of jealousy and protectiveness. But this was not just an exaggerated case of what command-level personnel sometimes called “engineer’s disease,” the tendency for engineering personnel to consider their department, and by extension the whole ship, as their personal property, and to treat any intrusion into engineering by anyone, even the captain, as just that—an intrusion. In this La Forge it had a nasty edge to it, and he used it, apparently, as an excuse to express his personal contempt for Worf.

It abruptly became too much for Picard. “Mr. La Forge,” he said, being careful to keep his phrasing neutral, keeping the anger out of his voice, “I will have my senior officers treat my junior officers with due respect.”

La Forge laughed, a single harsh, disbelieving bark. “Him? His people have lost any respect
they
might have ever had.”

Picard glanced sideways toward Worf. He merely looked at La Forge, his eyes surprisingly calm, and said nothing.

“Whatever the case may be regarding that,” Picard said, “he is an officer aboard my ship.” And he looked La Forge thoughtfully in the visor, then down at his badge, and up at his visor again.

“Yes, Captain,” La Forge said, actually through gritted
teeth. “Well, if there’s anything else you need, please call me. I have work to do.” And, undismissed, he stalked away.

He is very certain of his position,
Picard thought,
and of his necessity to what’s going on here. He bears watching.

“I’m sorry about that,” Picard said to Worf. “It seems uncalled for.”

“On the contrary, he’s quite right.” The calm way that Worf put it had some unspoken tragedy at the bottom of it.

“Walk with me, Lieutenant,” Picard said. Together they began to make their way out of engineering, with Barclay behind at a respectful distance. They said little until they were well past the matter/antimatter exchange column and heading down the great main hall toward the exit.

“I do not condone his rudeness,” Picard said. “If discipline and effectiveness are to be maintained…”

Worf shook his head. “Captain, you have not often spoken to me in this mode.”

Picard glanced from left to right and back to Worf again. “Possibly, because the walls seem to have ears around here. I doubt many people on this ship speak what they’re thinking.”

“Indeed not,” Worf said. “To reveal your thoughts to a superior could be suicidal; to reveal them to an equal might alert them too soon to some trap you were laying for them. And as for inferiors, like myself…” He shrugged, and there was no tone of bitterness about the way he said it. “That would betray weakness. No one here betrays weakness and lives long to tell about it.”

Picard recalled an early writer’s description of hell as a bureaucracy run along much the same lines and repressed a shudder. “I should dislike to think that any of my crewmen actually considered themselves to be inferior, Mr. Worf.”

Beside him Worf shook his head slightly as they went out into the corridor. “Captain, when one comes from a race
that has submitted, there is no other way to be perceived by most of the population of Starfleet, or any Starfleet ship. If you are not Earth human, or from one of the Earth-colonized worlds; or if you are not Vulcan, or from one of the Vulcan provincial planets—then you are a second-class citizen. A species that cannot at least fight the Empire to a standstill cannot be considered fit to stand with it in command, in rule. A species that submits or is warred down is good only to ‘hew wood and draw water.’ Slaves at worst—a sort of tame curiosity at best.”

Worf was silent for a moment as they came around a curve in the hallway, and both he and Barclay looked ahead to see who was there. Then Worf said, “After their long war with the Empire, outweaponed and outnumbered as they were, the survivors of my people decided that life was sweeter than honor. By surrender, they thought, they could at least purchase the lives of the noncombatants on the Klingon homeworld. Perhaps they deluded themselves by thinking that at some later date, resistance could begin again and honor could be regained: their descendants would live to fight another day. But a delusion it was. Their descendants have known nothing but the Empire for three generations now. At this point in time, I doubt whether the fighting will happen on any ‘other day’ at all.” He looked at Picard. “They have grown used to their position… perhaps wisely. For who can resist the Empire? Not that there is much of anyone left to try. Otherwise, why would we be here?”