Dark Mirror (24 page)

Picard’s mind had begun to run in small circles.
The Klingons here… not allies, but a conquered race? He
could barely imagine such a thing.
What kind of power did the Empire have to reduce them to this?
And then, more dreadful still, the words
No one left to try. Why else would we be here?

There were a hundred questions Picard wanted to ask
about that phrase, and none that he dared utter just now. “Mr. Worf, all this is very old history. How does it affect your honor here and now?”

“Captain, it hardly matters. My whole planet was ‘discommended’ nearly a century ago now, when the Earth fleets first beat our own spaceforce back into our own space, cutting us off from our ally worlds and then destroying them. It was the last time our fate was in our hands, and we threw it away.” Worf looked dreadfully resigned: it was the face of a man discussing a cause lost before he was born, and unlikely ever to be found. “It hardly matters now.”

“It matters very much,” Picard said. “Especially insofar as it affects your… efficiency.”

Worf looked at him rather oddly. “I serve and am content to do that. And mostly I am left alone, and that contents me as well.” The resignation and the pain again… it was almost more than Picard could bear. “But I thank you for your show of concern, Captain. It is very—” He actually stumbled over the word, as if it was one he had never considered saying to the man he spoke with. “Very kind of you.”

“A matter of efficiency only, Mr. Worf,” Picard said as briskly as he could. But he was lying, and he knew from the look on Worf’s face that Worf knew he was—and that something was going on in the captain’s mind that had never been suspected there before. “You’re dismissed.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Worf said, and plainly meant it.

He strode ahead, making for the turbolift.

Picard watched him go and swallowed hard. The determination in him was growing to do something,
something
about all this… something to put it right.

But what?

“Mr. Barclay,” Picard said as they came to the turbolift, “I don’t know about you, but assassination attempts make me sweat. I wouldn’t mind a shower and a change.”

“Yes, sir,” Barclay said as they stepped into the ’lift. “Deck eleven.”

The ’lift took off. Barclay eyed the scratch on Picard’s chin. “You were lucky to get away with so little, sir.
Please
be more careful.”

Picard’s mood was not entirely sanguine. “Is that strictly professional concern? Is there anybody on this ship who would really care dreadfully if I died?”

“
We
wouldn’t like to lose you, Captain.”

“Ah, but you get perks for taking care of me. Isn’t that so?”

“Captain, you’ve never been less than generous. Some people say you’ve been more generous than you had to be.”

A virtue at last?
Picard thought sourly.
Or just my counterpart making sure he gets value for his money?

“And then there’s Dr. Crusher, of course,” said Barclay as they stepped out of the ’lift.

Picard nodded. Here as in his own
Enterprise,
old family connections, old tragedies, got talked about just as everything else. If there was anything he was certain these two ships would have in common, gossip was it. “Yes, of course. Well, never mind. At the moment, I guess we should be grateful there aren’t more attempts—eh, Mr. Barclay?”

“Yes, sir,” Barclay said ruefully. “But that’s what we’re here for… we’re as much of a deterrent as anything else.”

“Point taken,” Picard said as they came to his quarters. “Keep guard, will you, Mr. Barclay? I don’t care to be disturbed just now.”

“Yes, sir.” Barclay stationed himself by the doorway. Picard walked in, paused, touched the control to lock the door as it shut.
Interesting,
he thought,
that he didn’t check this space out before he let me in. Apparently the captain’s quarters are expected to be secure. Or else someone has them under scan.
The thought made his hair rise again. Could everything that had happened so far be an act, masking the fact that someone had seen the snatch of this ship’s Picard happen and was just biding time, waiting for the right moment to take
him
out of circulation? Could it mean—But no. He shook his head. There was such a thing as being
too
paranoid, even here.

He headed into the shower, turned it on, then bent briefly over his communicator. “Mr. La Forge,” he whispered, “this is urgent. The ‘inclusion’ apparatus responsible for our being here is in the engine room.
Enterprise”
—he assumed Geordi would know which one he meant—“must
not
remain in this locality. Equally urgent: intent is that
Enterprise
will be restaffed with others, then returned. Also, transport has been noticed. End message. One acknowledgment if you two are all right, two if there’s a problem.”

The badge buzzed once under his fingertips and did nothing else.

There’s a relief,
Picard thought, and started stripping out of the uniform, carefully removing the badge and medals. Geordi had been confident enough that this area couldn’t be scanned, but Picard still preferred paranoia: if the sound hadn’t blocked out his words, they themselves might still be fairly confusing to any local listener. He could only hope for the best.

In the shower, he thought hard. He needed a quick way to incapacitate at least one of the ship’s major systems. There was no way to get away with it quietly in engineering: there were simply too many people down there, and he wouldn’t know where to begin. The smartest way would be the back way, the way Geordi had tried. Some different back way, though—not so carefully watched. The trouble was telling which ones were watched, here. Almost everything seemed to be. How any undertaking as colossal as a starship, or a Starfleet, could be sustained in such an atmosphere of profound mistrust… Picard found it difficult to understand.

A couple of hours,
Troi had said,
until the next phase begins.
Not very long.
And what next phase?
One possibility presented itself: that they were ready to move against the
Enterprise,
that they intended to batter her into submission, take her, and put their own crew aboard.
For the time that ship will be here… until she’s gone,
Geordi had said. Picard could find no other way to interpret that. They would take her back to her home universe, with their own crew… and do what?
There’s no way they could take on all of Starfleet…

… could they?
Perhaps this had been a test to see whether a Starfleet ship could be sucked out of her own universe—“included” into theirs—restaffed with matching crew and sent back… to pass as herself. The pretense couldn’t be kept up forever. But did they mean it to? And did they need it to? On one of these missions such as his
Enterprise
was running now, far out in the middle of
nowhere, how often did a starship actually contact another ship, or planet? They might be out of touch with anything but Starfleet Command for weeks at a time, sometimes, depending on the distance, even months. Eventually the pretense would come apart—they would be ordered back into space where details about the crew were known, back to a starbase or back to Earth, even, for maintenance, for some other mission. Sooner or later someone would detect that crew members weren’t acting the way they should. And indeed that acting would be the worst part of it, for a crew from this universe. Spock’s note to his debriefing document was pertinent: that the only reason his captain and shipmates had survived their experience was because it was easier for a civilized man to pretend to be a barbarian than for a barbarian to pretend to be civilized. But even so, the pretense could be kept up for a good while. And during that time, someone willing to put his mind to it could find out all kinds of things about the Federation from the
Enterprise’s
computers, and from the regular data downloads from Starfleet Command. What could be done to one ship…

… could be done to more. There had to be more to what they were planning. Just that realization was enough to convince Picard that they had to be stopped, even if it meant destroying this ship with him on it.

But that might not be enough. If the
Enterprise
didn’t manage to get a warning home to its own universe, it would all happen again, at some other time, with some other ship, and heaven only knew what the end would be.

He got out of the shower, put on another uniform matching the one he had been wearing, reapplied the badge and medals, then went back into the room and just stood there a moment, trying to calm himself. An idea would come, if he could just keep calm. Something always came.

He looked around, trying briefly to identify any small differences between his own quarters and these. But every
thing seemed unnervingly as it ought to be. Bed made, furnishings just as in his own quarters, nothing out of place.

His eye fell on the bookshelf. It was exactly as his old friends at home had warned him: there was no such thing as keeping “just a few books,” not even here on a starship, the most space-conscious and weight-conscious of environments. Still the books bred, no matter how carefully he tried to choose them: people gave him books as presents, or books leapt into his hands when he was on leave on strange worlds, as if they knew a sympathetic reader. Now he looked at the books suspiciously—but they were the same, just the same.

Or so he thought. He wandered over to gaze at them. Some of them were very much what you might expect in a limited collection of someone native to Earth: the complete Shakespeare, and the ancient King James Bible, there, he cheerfully admitted, more for the antique beauty of its language than for most of the contents: a pairing that Admiral Parry-Smyth had laughed at, when she had last visited, making an obscure reference to something called “Desert Island Discs.” The rest of the collection was suitably—possibly, the admiral had claimed, pathologically—eclectic: the three original-edition Dixon Hill books, of course:
Murder in Camera, The Knowing Look,
and
Under the Sun.
Then two of the venerable old hardcover Everyman editions of Kipling,
Barrack Room Ballads
and
Kim.
One of the first Centauri Press editions, a reprint of Glocken’s
The Stars out of Joint;
various others—a book of Restoration poets, Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
in the long-lost Cordwainer Smith translation, along with Rouse’s prose
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
and Hamilton’s peerless translations of Aristotle and the great comedies of Aristophanes. The Oxford University Press hardcover of Eddison’s
Eriks Saga,
next to a weary, broken-spined trade paperback of
Little, Big;
and so many others…. There
was even a very late addition to the collection, a present from Will Riker just a month ago on his return from a leave trip to Hay-on-Wye—the Eyre and Spottiswoode edition of Colin Watson’s droll and acute
Snobbery with Violence,
the best (and, appropriately, the least snobbish) analysis ever done of the early Terran detective novelists. Everything here, all accounted for.

He found that this shook him as badly as everything else, the whole barbaric world outside the doors of his quarters.
Who am I here,
he thought,
that what I see here can so completely match what exists back on the—back home?

“Computer,” he said softly. It chirped. “Read out record of present command,” he said, his mouth dry.

“Picard, Jean-Luc,” the computer said. “Assumed command ICC 1701-D
Enterprise
on stardate 41124, after destruction of previous command, ICC 2055
Stargazer,
subsequent to victory at Battle of Maxia, stardate 33070. First action: destruction of Farpoint Station due to attack on ship by alien spacegoing life-form. Second action: enforcement action on planet Ligon II. Third action—”

“Stop. Nature of enforcement action on Ligon II.”

“South continent of Ligon II rendered uninhabitable by high-gamma fission-producing devices to induce planetary government to provide vaccine necessary to control plague on planet Stryris IV.”

They irradiated
—we
irradiated a whole continent?
“How many casualties?” he whispered.

“Neutralizations estimated in excess of thirty million,” the computer said calmly.

The choice of words said everything. “Continue,” Picard said, and not because he wanted to.

“Third action: neutralization of Tarellian plague ship attempting to make landfall on Haven. Fourth action: recovery of stolen T-9 energy converter from Ferengii Alliance ship. Fifth action: prejudicial terraforming and
orbital reconfiguration of Ferengii home planet. Sixth action—”

What did we do to them?
Picard thought, shocked. While not exactly fond of the Ferengii, he felt that they had as much right to live untroubled as anyone else. He swallowed. “Computer—clarify intervention at Ferengii home planet.”

“Planet surface was cleansed of alien life-forms; later relocated to orbit around gamma Cephei prior to resettlement by approved species.”

He swallowed again. “Go on.”

“Sixth action: excision of hostile alien life-form on Rubicon III and incorporation of native species into Empire. Seventh action…”

It went on and on that way, and he made himself sit still and listen to it: the destruction of the Jaradan species, the murder of the intelligent inorganic life-form on Velara III so that the terraforming of that planet could continue, the punitive decimation of the Aldeans after their attempt to abduct
Enterprise
crew…. It was a long recitation, and when the computer finally fell silent, Picard was shaking with horror and rage.

He got up and started to pace, unable to keep himself still.
At least,
he thought, trying to force himself to calm,
we should be thankful for small favors: they’ve never met Q. Or the Borg.
Though he found himself wondering whether a meeting with the Borg might not have been good for these people—for this Empire as a whole—if the catalog of
Enterprise’s
pillagings, slaughters, planetary destructions, and other horrific actions was typical of this universe’s Starfleet.
The Borg might even be beneficent by comparison,
he thought bitterly.
They might be cold and inhuman, but they aren’t sadistic or purposefully cruel.