Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (44 page)

“A penny for them?”

“What?”

“Your thoughts,” Scotty explained. “Ye looked a little lost in them.”

“I was just wishing Jadzia Dax was here . . .”

Sela looked out of the viewport of her quarters, and saw only her own reflection. Her mother’s image, which followed her everywhere, haunting her.

She closed her eyes and, when she opened them again, focused on seeing the Romulan standing before her. It was a shame that it wasn’t another Romulan. Or, preferably, a warbird or two.

Reinforcements would have been very useful in her current situation. Very useful indeed.

Scotty and La Forge stood in the circle of consoles in main engineering, running numbers. Vol hovered above them, enjoying the lighter gravity. “There’s an oddity about this gravitational attraction of the
Hera,”
La Forge was saying.

“Apart from the
existence
of a gravity well or the continued existence of the
Hera
in the same space?” Scotty said. “But ye’re right. It doesna’ have the gravitational power that four and a half thousand solar masses would. Maybe the sensors are a wee bit buggered.”

Vol lowered himself, upside down, to peer at the figures. “Well . . . maybe the one oddity is an explanation for the other.”

La Forge looked up at the octopoid’s single eye. “I’m open to ideas. Go ahead.”

“Sensors indicate that the gravity well’s spatial manifold is well inside the
Hera
’s hull. Actually it’s barely fifty meters across, if the readings are reliable.”

“Which they may not be, considering the shape we’re in,” Scotty said.

“And considering the anomalous nature of the . . .”

“Anomaly?” Geordi interrupted. “I think as captain I should outlaw the use of that word.”

“The thingy, then,” Vol suggested. “The point is, though, it means the hull isn’t an absolute event horizon. It should be possible to make physical contact with it, and maybe take samples.”

That,
Geordi thought,
was an interesting idea.
He would have been a liar if he tried to say he hadn’t thought of visiting the
Hera
as soon as he saw it. An away team to the
Hera.
It was an irresistible idea.

“Let’s assemble a team.”

“S
tatus of the transporters?”

“Still offline,” Scotty said apologetically. “We canna spare the power to run them. Though I wouldna recommend using the transporter in any case.”

“If we could beam across to the
Hera
—”

“We’d be beaming onto a spatial manifold, and that’s a one-way trip if ever there was one.”

“If there’s no interior space to beam into, right?” La Forge sighed. “Can we spare one of the shuttles for a trip to the
Hera
?”

Scotty sucked on his teeth. “They’re all tied into the EPS grid now. Maybe if we dropped the internal sensors, and restricted turbolift use . . .” He made a few quick calculations. “Aye, that would do it.”

“Then I’m going across to the
Hera.”

“What makes you think you’re going to lead the away team?” Leah demanded. She had not responded well to his announcement when he spoke to her in his ready room.

“It’s my mission—”

She cut him off with a chopping gesture. “First off, you’re the captain now. That makes it unwise. Secondly, you’re emotionally compromised. Conflict of interest, whatever you want to call it. That makes it extremely unwise. Thirdly, under the circumstances, you’re a lot more necessary to hold things together while we’ve got both damage and a potentially hostile set of guests. That makes it stupid.”

“All those are good rational reasons, but—”

“Do you want an irrational reason?”

“Do I need one?”

“All right, an emotional reason then. I don’t—” She shook her head, almost wincing. “I already know what it’s like to be widowed. I don’t need to repeat the lesson.”

He held her for a moment. “I understand, but . . . I have to go.” He walked out onto the bridge.

Leah followed. “Nog, tell the captain why he shouldn’t lead this away mission.”

“Your leading the away team to a dangerous anomaly is tactically unsound, Captain.”

“See?”

“It’s my decision to make,” La Forge said.

“Is it?” Leah tapped her combadge. “Doctor Brahms to Doctor Ogawa.” Geordi froze, unable to believe that she’d do this to him. “The captain is considering leading an away mission.”

“To his mother’s ship?”
Ogawa’s voice was as concerned as it was disbelieving.

“All right.” La Forge held up his hands. “I surrender.” Leah slumped in relief, rather than triumph. “I guess it needs someone with a clearer head.”

“I’ll go,” Scotty said. La Forge looked up at him, standing
behind the bridge rail. “I’ve been on more dodgy landing parties than you’ve had hot dinners.”

“Are you sure you want to go?”

“Who else would you trust?”

La Forge didn’t deign to reply to that. He trusted all of his crew, but saying so would have insulted Scotty, and singling him out would have insulted everyone else.

“I’ll join the away team too, with your permission,” Barclay said hurriedly.

“Ye’re welcome to come, Mister Barclay.”

Voktra, who had been assisting Barclay, cleared her throat. “Permission to join the mission?”

Barclay turned. “Are you sure you want to come?”

“You don’t expect us to let you Starfleeters discover the
Hera
’s secrets alone, do you? Chairman Sela will insist on a Romulan presence on any away mission.”

“She has a point, sir,” Nog said. “I volunteer as well. Someone will have to keep an eye on the Romulans.”

“Then we’ll meet in shuttlebay one in an hour,” Scotty declared. “I don’t know about you, but I intend to get a good breakfast before going.”

A safe distance along Nelson’s bar from Barclay and Voktra, Nog related the story of the choice of away team to Guinan.

“I think those two have different motives for going,” he finished.

“From each other?”

“No, that’s the same, I think. From everybody else.”

“Nog,” Guinan said in a mock-warning tone, “You’re not suggesting that Reg is a little sweet on his Romulan counterpart?”

“I think so.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I expected tension between our people and the Romulans, but . . .”

“But not sexual tension.”

“He’s mad,” Nog judged.

“He could be heading for heartbreak,” Guinan agreed, “but stranger things have happened.”

“Humans and Romulans?”

“Just ask Sela about that one.”

“And I thought Father marrying Leeta was weird enough.”

“Leeta?”

“A Bajoran dabo girl.”

Guinan folded her hands and took on a sage-like demeanor. “Sometimes the alien is attractive. There’s a difference between the alien individual and the alien as a collective. One, individually, tends to be admired, or something to aspire to. An outsider who doesn’t have to fit in with the day-to-day life that we’re used to. An outsider who does things differently. Unusual and exotic. But collectively, the alien isn’t exotic, it’s threatening—a wave of threat to the standards and way of life we’re used to.” She looked at Reg and Voktra again. “It all has to do with how we see our own identities. Me as an individual versus me as a member of my society, crashing headlong into the alien as an individual versus the alien as a member of
their
society.”

“You mean when Reg thinks of the Romulans, they’re the enemy and he’s scared of them, but when he thinks of
a
Romulan—”

“That
Romulan.”

“—he finds her exotic and attractive?”

“Pretty much. It takes people that way sometimes. The really funny part is, neither of them probably see it themselves yet.”

Nog grunted. “Let’s hope they live to find out.”

La Forge had never found the center seat of a starship less comfortable than now, watching the shuttlecraft with its half dozen occupants coast away from the ship.

As it began to drop toward the
Hera,
he realized he was digging his fingernails into the armrests of the seat again, out of pure frustration. Leah laid her hand on his, and gently lifted it away.

“I should be going with them,” he said tightly.

“No you shouldn’t.”

Instead of replying, he said to the ensign at ops, “Follow them all the way on the main viewer.”

“Aye, sir.”

As the image on the viewer tracked the shuttle, something suddenly flashed across it. Whatever it was had a triangular section, and was ten times the length of
Challenger
. “What was that?”

The proximity alerts began to sound. “A vessel has . . . arrived,” the ops ensign squawked.

“Is it going after the shuttle?”

“No, its on the opposite side of the
Hera,
and outside our orbit. It’s left a trans-slipstream wake where it arrived.”

“Show us the new ship.” The ops ensign worked his console, and the main viewer was filled once more with the enormous and shark-like hull of a design La Forge had never seen before. Narrower at the bow than the aft, it was patterned in zigzag colors, and seemed to flex as it moved.

La Forge had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that it was looking back at him as he watched it. For a moment he wished Deanna Troi was sitting next to him so that he could ask her if he was just imagining things.

“Go back to the shuttle,” he told the ops ensign. The image on the viewer changed immediately to show a closer
view of the
Hera
’s upper surface. There was no sign of the shuttle. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know sir . . .” The ensign looked up helplessly. “The shuttle has disappeared completely. It’s almost as if it’s just been swallowed up by the
Hera
’s hull plating.”

“W
hat is it?” the centurion asked. The Romulan survivors of the
Stormcrow
who weren’t working on repair crews at the moment were watching the alien vessel through the windows of their quarters.

It looked to Sela like one of the predator fish that her grandfather—her father’s father, of course—had liked to hunt in the western ocean of Romulus. They were a great delicacy and a feared hunter. One had eventually taken his arm, and Sela had long suspected that the enforced retirement from hunting them had been the cause of the broken heart that he eventually died from.

It had been agonizing to watch him wither away, his will to live lost along with his livelihood. Saying goodbye to him, hoping against hope for a response in his uncaring eyes, was the worst thing that Sela could remember from her childhood, short of the night that her mother tried to kidnap her and take her away from her father.

What was it?
she asked herself.
An alien ship? One of the things that had brought them here?

“It may just be our way home,” she said.

“The Starfleet crew won’t like that idea.”

“I’m not going to ask them to like it. Just to accept the necessity.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They will. One way or the other.”

The centurion grinned wolfishly, and she knew which way he would prefer the Starfleet crew to accept things. He was a good centurion, and that attitude was probably one of the reasons that the
Stormcrow
’s commander had requested his presence on her crew.

He would enjoy his work, when the time came.

“And the aliens?” he asked.

“An alliance would be to our advantage, I think. We must find a way to contact them.” Trans-slipstream would put the Empire well ahead of the other Alpha Quadrant powers, and allow it to truly dominate the Typhon Pact.

“The Federation people will be doing the same thing.”

“Absolutely, but for different reasons. They have slipstream already. We must be ready when the time comes.” Sela thought quickly. “In fact, perhaps it would be to our advantage for the Federation people to make contact . . .”

“You want to
what
?” La Forge couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He sat at his ready room desk, the alien ship visible through the window behind him.

“Challenger
has no warp power,” Sela was saying, “and the alien ship has some kind of trans-slipstream drive. They could carry us home.”

“Us?”

“All of us. Your crew and mine. We should demand that they take us. It is their responsibility, after all.”

“Demand? We can’t even talk to them yet.”

“Have you tried?”

“All hailing frequencies. Carolan’s been on the communications board for hours.”

“Perhaps you’re saying the wrong things. Why don’t I have my communications officer try?”

“So you can propose some sort of deal?”

“Are you monitoring our—”

“No, I just know you too well, but thanks for confirming it,” La Forge said coolly. Anger flashed across Sela’s face. “We’ll continue to try to establish contact. Don’t worry.”

Hours later, La Forge retired to his quarters. There had been no word from the away team, and the alien vessel remained impassive and silent. It had not remained alone, however, and there were now three of the ships, holding at a distance away from the
Hera
and the
Challenger
.

When he slept, he dreamt of giant sharks biting at starships, and Romulans stabbing each other in some sort of coliseum. He dreamt of dead faces of those he knew, and loved: his mother, Scotty, Data, Leah.

When he awoke, Leah was sitting by the bed, watching over him, and at first he thought he was still dreaming. This Leah was alive and vibrant, however, and it was a privilege for him that her face was the first thing he saw when he woke. If anything reassured him that at least some things were still right with the universe, that was it.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“You seemed pretty distressed even in your sleep, but I didn’t want to wake you. I think bad sleep is better than none.”

“Sleep I can go without, so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s good or bad. Seeing you . . . That’s what matters.”

“You see me every day.”