Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (26 page)

“At least, you don’t think so.”

“There’s an old quotation that ‘Time is like a river.’ In the Nexus, I learned the river can change course. In the Nexus, it can flow uphill.”

“I always thought—” Leah was interrupted as the Red Alert klaxon began to blare, cutting through Nelson’s like phaser fire, and sending everyone out of their seats.

“Senior staff to the bridge,”
Carolan’s voice called.

Leah and Guinan could see what the source of the alert was. Hurtling right towards Nelson’s huge bay windows, the first torpedo was already blazing in the direction of the
Challenger.

Intrepid
gleamed as it heeled around, turning its dorsal surfaces toward the rippling late glow of the Split Infinite. She had spent several hours moving away from the Infinite, in a tireless search pattern.

La Forge ignored the beauty on the main viewer, concentrating on the sensors. He was using a low-band active sensor, and directing as much power to the lateral arrays as possible without being noticed. It was probably too much to hope that the sensors would be detected by
Challenger,
but a slim hope was always better than none.

Something pinged on the monitor he was using. He was disappointed to see what it was. He considered not calling it out, but Sloe was moving toward the monitor anyway, so he announced, “Sensor contact off the port bow! Seven thousand kilometers.”

“Sloe?” Bok asked.

Sloe nudged La Forge out of the way and double-checked the reading. “Whatever it is isn’t generating any energy, but it is about two meters long and its composition matches that of our probe.”

“Beam it aboard,” Bok ordered hungrily.

“Klingon battle-cruiser decloaking! Firing torpedoes!”

Scotty couldn’t help feeling that Tyler Hunt’s words were something of a blast from the past, and immediately regretted it as the first shattering photon torpedo exploded under the saucer section, rocking the ship upward like a boxer on the receiving end of an uppercut. The shields held, but Scotty knew there would be more than bruises on the forward decks.

Nog and Qat’qa ran in, relieving their beta-shift counterparts, who immediately went to standby consoles at
the rear of the bridge, to give support to any section that needed it.

“It must be the one Kren told us about,” Nog said.

“No kid gloves this time, Nog. Try to disable them, but if ye have to destroy them, do it.”

“Understood,” Nog acknowledged solemnly.

Qat’qa had already thrown the
Challenger
into a wide barrel-roll, neatly dodging the second and third torpedoes.

Nog couldn’t quite get a bead on any vital systems, so he settled for testing their shields with a selection of phaser blasts as they passed. The enemy shields were quick to react. “Kat, their shields seem to be weakest below the neck section.”

“I will line you up.”

Challenger
side-slipped under the enemy ship as it tried to come around for another attack run, and Nog let rip with full phasers and torpedoes, concentrating on the underside of the long neck-boom. The mercenary ship’s shields flared and dropped. “Shields are down. I’ll try Odo’s trick again.” Nog reached for the link to the transporter controls, but they didn’t work. “They’ve got a transporter inhibitor running.”

“Ye know the best way to kill a snake,” Scotty said, pointing at the Klingon vessel on screen. “Cut off the head, and the body will die.”

Qat’qa looked around at him, and grinned like a jungle cat at the watering hole. Scott ordered, “Nog, treble the strength of the forward shields. Use power from the ventral and aft shields if you have to.”

“Sir, you’re not thinking of . . . ?”

“Aye, lad,” Scotty said, with a look to match Kat’s. “That I am!”

The Klingon ship started to roll, her shields flickering back to minimal life, but too late. Her crew doubtless expected another phaser exchange, and perhaps an attempt at capture.

They did not expect the leading edge of
Challenger
’s saucer to hurtle toward their ship’s neck like a guillotine blade.

Leah, Guinan, and the few other people in Nelson’s leapt for whatever cover they could find, knowing that it wouldn’t do them any good if the shields failed, but they were unable to stop themselves from taking the action anyway.

Grabbing on to whatever was fixed down, and holding on for dear life, they had a first-rate view of the approaching flame-painted neck section of the enemy craft. Searing phaser fire stabbed out from above and below the windows, and a couple of burning torpedoes soared up from below, converging on the neck of the Klingon battlecruiser.

The Klingon’s shields flickered out, and hull plates began to peel off, hurled toward Nelson’s by spreading explosions. Then the burning gases dissipated into the vacuum as
Challenger
’s triple-strength forward shields punched into the exposed corridors and conduits.

Their shields flared white hot, blinding them for a moment. Then structural spars and charred corpses flew above and below the windows, as
Challenger
severed the other ship’s command section from its larger secondary hull.

Then there were stars in front of the windows again, and Leah could scarcely believe that she, and everyone else, was unharmed.

The ancient twenty-second-century transporter sparkled and spat, whining as it tried to bring something on board for the first time in centuries. Barclay shuddered. He had just about gotten over his transporter phobia, but such an ancient machine was quite likely to bring on a relapse.

After several agonizing seconds, a cylindrical shape materialized on the pad. It was cold and dark, but recognizably the same probe they had so recently launched.

Bok approached cautiously, tracing his finger over the signature he had carved into it. “It
is
the same probe . . .”

Sloe opened an access panel on the surface, then removed and examined the probe’s internal chronometer. “The internal chronometer records that the probe was active for forty-seven standard years, and ceased to function some hundred and twenty years ago.”

“Perfect! It’s here—still here at the correct time!” Bok exclaimed as Rasmussen whooped for joy.

“It works! It works!”

“As soon as the nonessentials are removed back to the marauder, we can make the transit ourselves.”

Rasmussen let the thought wash over him, bathing in its beauty. “It’s time to go home.”

B
arclay scrubbed some chemical cleansers from his hands in the decontamination section, while La Forge took the chance to perform some maintenance on his eyes. “Something’s bothering me about all of this.”

“What is it, Reg?”

“Bok . . . he wants to go back in time, right? And he’s
found a spatial phenomenon that will work as a Tipler object, to enable him to do it without having to worry about acquiring technology that’s too well-guarded . . .”

“Yeah, so?”

“Why the
Intrepid?
I mean, I know Rasmussen is happy with a ship from his time, but what about Bok?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he has modern-day ships. A
D’Kora
-class marauder, fitted with a Klingon cloak, a
K’T’inga-,
and
Vor’cha
-class, so . . . So, why is he so bothered about taking this fossil ship back? If he took his own ship back, it would be decades—centuries, even—in advance of everyone else.”

“I think because he’s paranoid,” La Forge said slowly.

“Paranoid?”

“Think about it, Reg: he got this whole idea from Rasmussen, who was able to time travel after stealing a vessel from the future. I think Bok’s being very cautious to make sure that the same thing that happened to that twenty-sixth century professor doesn’t happen to him.”

“His ship being stolen.”

“Exactly. The
Intrepid
is from the era he’s going to, so it’ll blend right in. If he took a modern ship back, there’d be too much risk of someone else using it to mess with the timeline in a way other than what he has in mind. And since he wants to change things with his knowledge, he doesn’t need twenty-fourth-century hardware to do that.”

“It sounds like all the more reason to—” Barclay looked unhappy, but continued, “all the more reason to stop him.”

“There’s definitely no time like the present,” La Forge said, all too aware of the irony.

“Bok’s thugs are right outside, and they seem pretty trigger happy.” Barclay paced in an irritating fashion, as
he always did when he was thinking something through. La Forge let the irritation slide off of him; anything that helped them work things out was fine with him. “I know it’s irrational, but I felt that coming over here was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, you did, Reg.”

“It’s a ghost ship. I remember I said that too.”

“Yeah, you did. But Reg . . .” La Forge stopped. Something about that phrase struck a chord.

Ghost ship.

Ghost.

He felt a shiver run through him. He had been a ghost once. Literally so. “That’s it! You’re a genius, Reg!”

“I am?”

“This is a ghost ship, and it needs some ghosts to haunt it.”

Reg looked at him uncertainly. “How . . . do we get some ghosts?”

“Adapt the transporter’s phase inverter to produce chroniton interference from the cloak.”

“Make ourselves out of phase with the ship?” Barclay grasped the idea at once.

Geordi nodded. “It happened to me once on the
Enterprise
. No one could see or hear me, and I could walk through walls. Ro Laren was with me, and it happened to her too, and to a Romulan. We could interact with each other, but nobody else could.”

“Isn’t that a bit like . . . being consciously dematerialized?” Reg went pale.

“Look on the bright side, Reg: you won’t have to worry about remembering to step over those door lintels every time we walk into a room on this ship.”

“But how will we get back to being . . . solid?”

Geordi was remembering the event in more detail as he thought about repeating it. “When Ro and I were put out of phase, it took a bombardment of anyon particles to combat the effect of the chronitons and bring us back into phase.”

“But we won’t be able to touch any consoles, or trigger an anyon bombardment. Unless we already had something like a timer set up. Then we could pre-program it to sweep the ship—”

“And risk being caught in the middle of a wall when the anyon field comes online?” La Forge shook his head. “Uhuh. What we need is a portable device that can itself be phased, which we can carry and use to generate the anyon particles when we’re ready.”

“Would that work? I mean, if the device was phased already, would it still function?”

“It should. The Romulan who was phased at the same time as us had a disruptor that worked fine, even though it was phased as well. It would only work on phased matter, but that’s perfect for our purposes.”

“So, what sort of device do we need for the anyon field? A tricorder?”

“I’m not sure a tricorder could generate a dense enough field to bring us back into phase. What we need is a phaser or disruptor that we can modify to fire an anyon beam.”

“What about a photon flare? There are some in the escape hatches. I don’t think Bok thinks they were usable as weapons.”

“Perfect. We can use a tricorder to modulate the flare’s output to an anyon flash, and it’ll recharge in a few minutes so we can use it again.”

“Okay. How do we phase ourselves?”

“You get to the cloak, adjust its temporal diffraction index to a variance of somewhere between point three and
point four-seven nanometers. That should allow it to leak chronitons inside the ship, but not at a level the sensors will detect without being calibrated to look for it specifically. I’ll adjust the transporter’s phase inverter to react with the chronitons. I’ve already told Balis and the others to behave normally. They’re less likely to miss just the two of us.”

“What about the guards? We’ll be watched.”

“I doubt they’ll understand what we’re doing, so if they ask, it’s a Jefferies powerloop.”

“There’s no such thing,” Barclay pointed out.

“Not in this century . . .”

“Not in . . . Oh, our people will know.”

“You want to do what?” Sloe asked Barclay in engineering.

For once, Barclay wished that he only had a Breen or Klingon mercenary to deal with. He felt confident of lying to one of them and getting away with it, but Sloe was the man who had installed the cloak, and thus had some chance of actually recognizing and understanding what Reg wanted to do with it.

He decided at last that telling the truth would be the best lie. “I uh, I need to adjust the temporal diffraction index. I’ve been getting interference from it on the sensors.” He showed Sloe a tricorder recording of a reading suggesting that the cloak was leaking chronitons of a detectable level.

The reading, of course, was false.

Sloe looked at it, and grumbled, “I thought I’d bloody fixed that.” He shook his head. “Bloody Klingon technology. It just doesn’t have the finesse of a Romulan cloak.”

“I’m sure you don’t want to be leaving a trail of chronitons across half the sector,” Barclay said sympathetically.

“No, we don’t.” Sloe looked at the readings again. “It looks
to me as if, should we happen to adjust the temporal differential to round about point four, it’ll solve the problem . . .”

Barclay stepped forward eagerly. “I’ll take care of that, if you like.”

Sloe held up a hand. “No. I’m sorry, old chap, but you know how it is. I’d best handle it myself . . .” Barclay could hardly believe his luck, and turned away before Sloe saw his grin.

The transporter section was unmanned when La Forge and his Breen guard arrived. No one had raised any objection to his working on the transporter to fix “the leak” since no one wanted to travel through it anyway.

He had barely started work on the phase inverter, when Barclay arrived. “That was quick.”

“Actually I haven’t had to do anything. Mister Sloe insisted on doing the work himself.”

La Forge grinned. “That makes things easier.”