Dark Mirror (9 page)

He went over to the shelf, scanned the volumes there for a moment, and finally reached for the
Anabasis
, the “Journey of the Ten Thousand”: a good textbook for a man who wasn’t sure where to go or what to do next. Those Greeks had not, either. Marooned in Asia after their battle with a huge Persian force, their officers assassinated, trapped between the Persians and unknown country full of savage tribes, they headed home the long way—walked across a fourth of Eastern Europe as it was in those days—until they found the sea. Nothing had stopped
them, not fear or famine or anything else. Just the thought of their dogged courage in the face of awful odds, and the cool counsel of the man who made himself their leader, Xenophon, was a tonic. Picard sat down and gladly opened the book at random, or not entirely. It fell open at a favorite spot, as so many of his books did—the place where Xenophon addresses the army.
They think that because they have killed our good old general Cleophas that we are helpless. They don’t know that we are a whole army of generals, and we will yet find our home
.

He lost himself for a while in the terrible winter walk, the men marching with rag-wrapped feet through the ice and snow of the mountains, through dreadful hunger, not knowing the way, attacked by savage tribes as they went, until finally, cresting the last mountain, they saw the sea.
Thalassa, thalassa!
they cried, weeping for joy as they shouted, racing down to the beaches, and the breath caught in Picard’s throat—

—and the red-alert sirens went, and he was up out of his chair before his communicator even had time to speak.

He hurried out of the ready room into the bridge. Everyone looked startled, and Troi, in her seat, looked actively upset. “What is it?” he said to Data. The main screen was showing empty space.

“Nothing now,” Data said. “But we have just had a contact—fleeting. The helm took us immediately back out of range, as programmed.”

“What was it?”

“Here, Captain.” The view on the screen flicked. Same starfield—but there was something in the center of it, very distant, that hadn’t been there before: a small steel-gray speck.

“Enlarge ten times,” Picard said. The speck seemed to leap forward.

It was
Enterprise
. But not
his Enterprise
. It was a dark gray, even enlarged, a gunmetal color, cool and unfriendly.

The design was overtly the same—the great sloped disk of the primary hull, the nacelles, the secondary hull, all where they should be. But the secondary hull seemed larger, the nacelles were raked farther forward, and lower. The primary hull’s curve was deeper and now had a frowning look about it. If ships had expressions, this one had its eyes narrowed. It was a cruel look, and intimidating. Just visible, because of the rake of the primary hull, were the characters
ICC 1701-D ISS ENT—
The rest was curved away out of sight.

Picard’s heart seized at the sight of it. In a way, he had been hoping that everything that had happened so far might have some other answer. But the hope, he now saw, was in vain. The proof of the problem had come hunting them. He looked around, seeing the same unhappy look on everyone’s face—and Troi still looked ashen.

“Keep us away from it, Mr. Redpath,” Picard said. “No heroic measures without my orders: maintain your ‘bumpercar’ program for the time being. But I want any radical course changes reported to me immediately. It’s time to make some choices. Mr. Data”—Picard turned to him—“I want you to go through all available Federation records for anything that might be even slightly pertinent to our problem. Contacts with parallel universes, real or purported, duplicate ships or personnel—
anything
, no matter how farfetched. I need a choice of action, and to do that we must have all the pertinent information we can lay our hands on. Then the department heads’ meeting, as scheduled.”

“Aye, sir,” Data said, and went up to one of the science consoles to see about it.

“Counselor?” Picard said. She looked at him with the expression of someone who would like to be sick, but has too much to do.

“That ship,” she said, “emotionally speaking, is a sinkhole.
So much rage and fury and hatred, lust and envy and—” Troi shook her head, plainly finding it hard to find words. “I would say that our extra Mr. Stewart is extremely typical of the people you will find there.”

Picard nodded. “Department heads’ meeting as scheduled,” he said, and left the bridge—possibly, he had to admit to himself, in search of his own composure.

An hour later, in the conference room, it was mostly back in place.

“Reports,” Picard said. “But first of all, how is our ‘guest’?”

“No change, Captain,” Dr. Crusher said. “I might suggest we get him out of my sickbay, as I can use that bed.”

“All right,” Picard said. “Have him put in secure quarters.”

“And by the way,” Crusher said, “I find no indication of any subcutaneous transporter link anywhere on or in him. I checked everything—his bones, even the fillings in his teeth.”

“Fillings?” Geordi said.

“Don’t ask,” Crusher said. “Their dentistry is a touch on the invasive side.”

“All right,” said the captain. He looked at Data. “Report, please.”

Data folded his hands and looked thoughtful. “I have accessed all Federation data regarding parallel universes. Most of the information is either apocryphal or sheerly theoretical. However, there is at least one recorded instance of a Starfleet crew having had personal experience with and in a parallel universe.”

“Where?” Picard said. “When?”

“Where is not necessarily pertinent in this connection and would actually be rather difficult to define,” Data said.

“The when is stardate 4428.9; the personnel involved were members of the command crew of NCC 1701, before any of the additional registry letters were added.”

“That
Enterprise,
” Picard said softly. “Kirk’s
Enterprise
. But this is a tremendous occurrence. How is it that this brush with another universe doesn’t appear in the ship’s formal service record?”

“All details regarding it were classified immediately afterward,” Data said. “Starfleet was apparently concerned about the effects of dissemination of the information: they thought other species might find it either ethically distressing or militarily exploitable.”

Picard found that pair of possibilities an odd one. “Continue.”

“Apparently the event began as a transporter accident,” Data said. “If
accident
is the correct term.”

Chief O’Brien made a slightly pained face. “The transporters in those days didn’t have the fail-safes built in that ours do now,” he said. “In fact, the incident in question caused some fail-safes to be added.
Enterprise
was orbiting omicron Indi III, a planet called Halka. The ship’s mission was to negotiate with the planetary government for permission to start dilithium-crystal mining there. Due to ethical constraints of the Halkans—the fear that the crystals might possibly at some future period, if not immediately, be used for warlike purposes—they had refused permission, and the crew were preparing to beam back to the ship. Space in the area was at that time experiencing an ion storm of severe force nine—”

“I’m amazed they considered using the transporter at all under such circumstances,” Picard said.

O’Brien looked pained again. “The transporter was more of a rough-and-ready business in those days. More powerful than ours, even if not as sophisticated. Among other things, there were still disagreements about some of the theory affecting it—the effects of field phenomena
like ion storms on the transporter, for example. It still wasn’t fully understood how some aspects of it worked, or didn’t work, under such circumstances. But the sheer power of the transporters of that period often managed to successfully bring people through, even in the face of very adverse conditions.”

“However, the conditions in this case were most unusual,” Data said, “as the
Enterprise
crew discovered shortly. It was the first known example of events in another universe directly influencing events in this one.”

Geordi nodded. “I went through the debrief logs made by the four officers in question—Captain Kirk, his chief engineer, the ship’s chief medical officer, and the communications officer. Their debriefs are just exhaustive—apparently they were all absolutely shocked by what they experienced and wanted to make sure that no details were lost. And the chief engineer made sure that the subroutine logs of the transporter during the event were appended to the debrief, which is going to be a big help. Anyway, the
Enterprise
personnel involved worked out that, while they were transporting up from Halka, their counterparts in a very closely associated parallel universe were doing the same thing. The congruence of field-shift densities in two universes so closely neighboring combined with the field-effect shifts caused by the ion storm and the ‘troubled’ nature of the star in question to produce what the chief engineer later referred to in his paper on the subject as an ‘inverlap,’ direct one-to-one matchings of field state, Dirac jumps, even shell frequencies, between the two transporting parties. The people from the
Enterprise
of our universe even arrived
inside the uniforms
of their simultaneously transporting counterparts.” Geordi shook his head like a man who has just seen a pig fly and is still dealing with the unexpected reality. “But then, only a parallel-universe transfer could have caused something like that. And theory says that congruences between closely associated universes
can run much, much closer—which could have had unfortunate effects for the
Enterprise’s
command crew, especially if the universe then running most congruent had been one that looked and felt
no
different from their own. They might have seen and felt nothing wrong or different and proceeded about their next mission… thus marooning themselves there forever. And marooning their counterparts here.”

Picard put his eyebrows up. “I wonder,” he said. “Korzybski would ask whether a difference that makes no difference is no difference.”

“But the differences in that other universe might have been perceptible only later, Captain. Imagine, for example, making such an exchange yourself—but later finding that the ‘not different’ universe you’ve beamed into doesn’t contain, for example, some member of your family… or the place where you grew up.”

“It’s a frightening thought,” Picard said. “However, it would seem that the
Enterprise
crew found differences enough.”

“Yes, sir, they did. They report that they all felt the abnormal transport during its duration—and that’s unusual, too. When transport was finished, they found themselves in an equivalent transporter room, but in an ISS 1701—an Imperial starship.” Geordi made a face. “You’ll want to review the debriefs yourself, Captain. The descriptions that Captain Kirk left, the details—they’re very unpleasant.”

“In what way?”

Data looked thoughtful again. “There seemed to have been—it is perhaps imprecise to call it a ‘moral inversion,’ but what was clear was that this Empire, which still contained a Starfleet, was run along much different ethical guidelines, with different moral values, from those which our group of humanoid species take for granted. The captain describes the crewmen as ‘savage, brutal, unprincipled.’
The command structure of the ship seemed to be run, not on a rank or merit system, but by a system of the strong preying on the weak—‘survival of the fittest,’ or at least of the cleverest and least principled. Assassination was considered an acceptable way to move up through the ranks. Uniforms had changed, become barbaric, flamboyant. Numerous higher officers had personal guards. There were other changes. Access to many ship’s functions had to be cleared by a security officer, whose main function seemed to be ensuring the crew’s loyalty and obedience to the Empire and to the present command—however long it might last. This officer seemed to play somewhat the same role as did the ‘political officers’ on warships of the larger totalitarian regimes in Earth’s late twentieth century. Such a security officer might be required, according to Captain Kirk’s report, to kill a senior officer who did not carry out Imperial orders correctly—even to move into that officer’s position.”

Picard felt like shuddering. “I’ll look into those records in full,” he said. “Meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile,” said Data, “the
Enterprise
crew from our universe quickly understood what had happened to them, but also quickly found themselves in an increasingly untenable position. Captain Kirk’s counterpart was under orders to destroy the Halkan civilization if they refused to comply with the demand of the Empire that they be allowed to mine dilithium crystals there. Captain Kirk was forced to stall for time—and the stalling tactics nearly cost him his life in more than one assassination attempt—while his chief engineer worked out how to duplicate the effect and get them back home before the local field densities shifted back to normal and made the retransfer impossible. Kirk’s science officer, faced with the presence of the crewpeople from the Imperial universe, also worked out what had happened and saw to it that his shipmates’ counterparts were in the transporter waiting for the transfer
when it happened. It was apparently a very close call, but everyone made it back to their appropriate universes in the end.”

Picard shook his head. “And now,” he said, “we find ourselves in what seems to be our universe—except it’s not, exactly; and nearby, another
Enterprise
. Except it’s not… exactly. It would seem to rule out coincidence.” He looked at Data and Geordi. “Speculation?”

“It would appear that someone in that other universe has worked out how to reproduce the accident,” Data said. “But at will, and on a different basis—not a transfer, but something more like genuine transporter function—controlled from one end, rather than induced accidentally at both.”

“To what purpose?” Picard said.

“Even speculation about that would be difficult at this point,” Data said. “But having read the
Enterprise
crew’s reports, their descriptions of the aggressive and acquisitive nature of the Empire and its version of Starfleet—I would suggest that the motives of that other ship are very unlikely to involve either the desire for pure scientific knowledge or any spirit of altruism.”