Dark Mirror (29 page)

On the bridge, everything had begun to go energetically haywire. Picard was watching it with well-feigned annoyance, stalking around as one system after another began to flicker, falter, go down, then up and then down again, as if the ship were one giant traveling short circuit. He was hard put not to laugh out loud, and he understood better than ever the delight Geordi had started to show at the prospect of purposely failing out the computers; it was hilarious to watch the results, especially when they weren’t
your
responsibility to fix.

“This is becoming extremely annoying,” he said severely to Riker. “What the devil are they doing down in engineering?”

“It’s difficult to tell, Captain, when we don’t seem able to reach them on comms,” Riker said, moving from one station to the other, getting redder and redder with fury.

“Well, do it the old-fashioned way,” Picard said with exaggerated patience. “Send a runner down there. I want La Forge up here to tell me what the problem is, since none of
you
seem able to manage it. And then I want it fixed!”

The volume of the demand brought some heads around, and Picard was slightly relieved.
Good,
he thought,
I’m not
that
much of a shouter here, either, to judge by the reaction. Just as well I couldn’t stand it if I had to rant all the time.

Riker gestured at one of the security men who was standing by the turbolift doors. “You, get down to engineering and bring Mr. La Forge up here.”

“Some diagnostics are running, though patchily, Captain,” Worf said quite calmly, seeming immune to Riker’s performance. “There would appear to be some kind of trouble in the computer cores.”

“Cores
plural?”
Picard said, sounding outraged. “Two of them?
All
of them?”

“All of them, Captain, to judge by these readings.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Uncertain as yet, sir. As I said, the diagnostics are themselves malfunctioning.”

“How very delightful.” Picard stalked up to Worf’s station and looked over his shoulder at the readouts. “What else might go wrong if
all
the redundant systems are contaminated this way? This ship
lives
by those computers.”

“Our mission could be seriously compromised,” the counselor said, getting up from her seat and throwing an obscure glance in Riker’s direction.

“I am very concerned about the mission, Counselor,” Picard said, meaning it entirely, “but I am just as concerned at the moment about the thought that the computers control life support as well, and I don’t care to breathe vacuum, or freeze to death.”

The turbolift doors opened, and the security guard who had gone out now returned with a grim-looking La Forge. He saluted Picard, who returned the salute and said, “Mr. La Forge, you had better come up with some answers for us pretty quickly.”

“Yes, sir,” Geordi said, and went over to the engineering panel and started working at it. At least once it went down on him, so that he swore and smacked it. It came back up immediately, leaving Picard wondering about the malleability of machines in their perceived master’s hands.

“Damn,” Geordi said. “All three cores are compromised. Nonselective holes are developing in the associational
networks. Looks like the subspace field is down, but that alone wouldn’t cause these problems.”

He moved to another panel, touched it; it flickered and went dark. “Captain,” Geordi said, “we’d better unlock these cores while they’re still answering to command. If they go down before we do that, we’ve got problems.”

“Quite right. Counselor?” Picard said. “We’ll need your security code.”

“I should think you might do that yourself,” the counselor said, raising her eyebrows at him, “since you know the code as well as I do.”

“I bow to your primacy in this matter, as I should have bowed in that other. My apologies: I overreacted.”

Picard stood there and tried not to sweat too visibly while starting to recite “The boy stood on the burning deck…” in his head, by way of cover. The counselor studied him for a long moment: there was that feeling of a veil brushing across the face of his mind…. Then she bowed her head to Picard with a slight smile—a queenly gesture, and a condescending one. “And they say chivalry is dead,” she said with another odd glance over at Riker, a different one this time, that left Picard wondering again. “But perhaps the reports of its death were premature.”

She walked over to the engineering console and said, “Computer. This is Lieutenant Commander Troi.”

“Voice ID verified,” said the computer in a voice that cracked and wavered unnervingly.

“Release computer core security controls in all three cores. Code fourteen nine twelve twelve A.”

“Code correct. Core security controls released.”

“Thanks, Counselor,” Geordi said. “Oops—”

For the console went dark again, and around the bridge, various telltales and lights that never went dark now vanished. Only the main viewer remained functional, and the image on it was stitched with signal artifact, normally
filtered out, now making a nuisance of itself. “I’d better get down there. Counselor, will you release me some security people as well, to act as runners? We’re going to need them, with comms down. I’ll pull three teams from engineering.”

“Go on, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said. “Time’s wasting, and we have a mission that won’t wait.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Geordi said, understanding perfectly, and made for the ’lift in a hurry, with the security guard behind him.

The bridge crew watched him go. After a moment, Picard said, “Well, it’s late in my shift, and I can do little here until we’re operational again. I’ll be in my quarters getting some rest.” He looked over at Riker. “Number One, please send a runner immediately when we start to get any results with the cores.”

“Yes, sir.”

Picard nodded and headed for the ’lift, his pulse racing.
And but the booming shots replied, and fast the flames rolled on.
He could feel the counselor looking at his back as the doors shut.

Geordi headed into engineering at high speed, which was probably just as well. Though he had seen the schematics of the place, stopping to gawk at the sheer wonderfulness of it would probably have been a bad move at the moment. He made his way down the great central hallway toward the matter/antimatter exchanger in a hurry, with the security man behind him, and shouted, “Okay, people, we’ve got trouble, let’s have a meeting!”

There were curious looks directed down at him from some of the crewmen up in the galleries, but obediently enough they started heading for the lifters and ladders that would take them down to the bottom level. While waiting for them to gather, Geordi did a quick cruise around the main status table, wondering at the differences of it, and
noticing particularly the indications of the third main power conduit, the one leading off to something big and power hungry down on the right-hand side.
Buddha on a bicycle,
he thought,
eight
hundred
terawatts; you could boil a small ocean over that if you had a pot big enough!

Engineering crew began to gather around him. He recognized them all, though on his own ship many of them were people who were assigned to science. It said uncomfortable things about the state of theoretical research and labwork on this ship, but he didn’t have time to be overly concerned with that right now. At least he knew these people’s capability: they could do the job—
and they’ll need to, the poor kids: I still remember the nuisance it took us to fix the nanites in
our
core.
He simply hoped he could depend on them, for there were the differences in personalities to cope with as well: any one of these people could be assumed to be gunning for his job. Not a pretty prospect at the moment—especially if any one of them should guess his real intentions. They would take themselves off to the counselor like a shot.

He finished his circuit of the table, looked up, and was not shocked, but was nonetheless disturbed, to see Eileen Hessan gazing thoughtfully at him from behind a few other people.
Are we friendly here? he
wondered.
Well, no harm in being cordial, anyway.

“I need two big parties and one smaller one,” he said. “Two for the main cores in the primary hull and the engineering hull, and one for the secondary one in the main hull. We don’t have a lot of time to sit around doing diagnostics, so we’re going to just pull the affected media and replace them with new chips from stores. Analysis can wait until we have something to analyze
with.
We’re going to have to start doing a selective purge of the isolinear chips in each core. Fortunately”—he pointed to the schematics now showing on the status table—“different parts of each
core seem to be affected, so that we should be able to selectively restore to clean media from the other cores. But it’s going to take a lot of running around with chips because we don’t dare do it by optical conduit—they look like they’ve been compromised, too—and anyway, the backup protocols need to have at least one core running FTL. None of them are, just now: all the subspace generators are down. At least we don’t have to worry about frying our brains.” There were some covertly amused looks among the engineering staff: apparently there were some of them who wouldn’t particularly mind seeing others’ brains fried. That they made no secret of the fact bothered Geordi, but he ignored it for the moment, while wondering in the back of his mind what their accident rates were like here.

“So, Hessan, Gaulgo, Nassainen, you three choose your teams. Hessan, yours will be under me, we’ll take the core down here. Work fast, everybody—once we get one core completely restored, we can restore to all the others from it.”
Not that it’ll help,
Geordi thought with silent amusement,
because the nanites that the captain instructed to remain in reserve will come out and reinfect them within a few hours.

He looked up. “Let’s get
that
off-line first,” he said, pointing to the display for the inclusion device.

There was some muttering. “After all the trouble it took to get it
on
-line?” Hessan said pointedly.

Geordi looked at her and shrugged. “Look, you want its computers to get infected by whatever’s in the cores?”

There was even more muttering at the prospect of
that,
and Hessan shook her head, seeing the point. “Go on,” Geordi said, “somebody physically separate its links to the cores: we can’t take the chance.”
Of injuring the thing before I have a chance to get a good look at it and its software!

Two or three of the engineering staff went off to see about
it. “Come on, everybody,” Geordi said, “let’s get cracking. Otherwise the captain is going to be
real
annoyed with us when he gets up from his nap and finds his ship still busted.”

Elsewhere, Barclay was walking with Picard back to his quarters. The lights were dim in the corridors; as they came to his door, the lights brightened briefly again, then once more dimmed down.

“Not going to be a quiet night, is it, sir,” Barclay said, stopping by the door and hitting its switch. It didn’t open.

“No,” Picard said wearily, “I can see that.”

Barclay hit the switch a couple of more times. “Damn machinery,” he said softly. “I never did like anything much more complicated than a knife to begin with. This place has gotten too automated.”

Picard shrugged. “The price of progress, I suppose. I’ll see you later, Mr. Barclay.”

“Not me, Captain. It’ll be Ramirez: it’s his shift. Even chiefs of security have to sleep sometimes.”

“Of course.” Picard smiled at him; he might not entirely trust the man, any more than he entirely trusted anyone else here, but so far Barclay had dealt straightforwardly with him. “Have a good rest.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Picard walked into his quarters. The door slid shut and he had to hit the internal control a couple of times before it would lock. The lights were dimmed, except for one over by the bed.
Here too,
he thought, resigned.
I shouldn’t complain. It means that things are finally working.

He stopped still, staring. Something in the bed moved slightly. It appeared to be a person, sleeping.

Picard stood there a moment, simply flabbergasted, understanding what the Littlest Bear must have felt like. He moved forward softly. The shape in the bed stirred,
turned over, looked at him. The long, dark hair fell softly from around the face as she shook her head a bit and blinked.

It was Beverly Crusher. Picard was too astonished to speak for a moment.

Finally, he managed to say—and it almost came out in a croak—“What are you doing here?”

She propped herself up on one elbow, looked at him with some slight confusion. “Oh. Wesley. I suppose you might be concerned…. No. What happened a long time ago was one thing. But this…” She paused and then said rather roughly, “Don’t think my son’s stupidity is going to make me throw away everything I’ve got left.”

He took a couple more steps forward, more uncertain of what to say than he had been in a long time. He had been shaken enough by Troi’s accusation—no, they weren’t accusations; for her they were simple statements of fact. “Beverly…” he said, then sat down in the chair by the bed, unable to look at her or anything else.

One Crusher dead, one Crusher as good as dead,
Wesley had said.

She was looking at him curiously now. “You have been behaving very oddly today. Are you all right?”

He could give her no answer that would make any sense, so he merely shook his head.

She looked at him, then got up out of the bed and walked over to the replicator. “Brandy and soda,” she said, “and Armagnac straight up.” She waited while the drinks appeared, then came back, handing him the Armagnac and sitting down on the bed opposite him.

“Are the aftereffects of that stun still bothering you?”

“No, that’s not it.” He got up in great discomfort and walked away, wondering where else in the ship he could possibly go, his one place of safety suddenly betraying him again, as the books had earlier. “I don’t think you should be here.”