Federation

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  Picard agreed. The Preserver object about to come into his possession was on the order of the Guardian of Forever in terms of age. And that device had defied all attempts to understand it over the century it had been studied.

  “So the only question remaining,” Picard said, “is how to get the artifact aboard the Enterprise.”

  “Geordi is mapping out the tractor-beam support points in its structure,” Riker said. “At close range, we could probably handle it with our cargo transporters, but Geordi and Data are both concerned about whether or not the artifact’s power supply will remain functioning after transport.”

  Picard understood. There was an entire class of molecules, substances, and devices that could not be transported without having their structure subtly altered. Until his engineer knew exactly what was powering the device, it made good sense to treat it cautiously.

  “Then if Mr. La Forge is considering towing the artifact to our shuttlebay,” Picard said, keeping caution in mind, “I’d recommend using two tractor beams from two shuttlecraft, just so we have the extra factor of safety.”

  “I’m sure Geordi is already planning on that,” Riker said. “But there is one other problem we have to address. Commander Tarl has a ’skeleton’ crew of three hundred and twelve personnel on board. She’s insisting on turning over this vessel to DaiMon Pol as soon as the artifact is off-loaded, so we’ll have to make arrangements for taking all those Romulans back to Legara IV.”

  “For one day we have ample room for that many passengers. I’m sure Mr. Worf can handle the security arrangements. Anything else?”

  Riker looked serious. “Only that we not send word of the Preserver object to Starfleet until after we’re back in friendly waters. Once word gets out about this, I have a feeling a lot of people are going to come looking for it.”

  “If,” Picard emphasized, “it is what we think it is.”

  Riker angled his head questioningly. “Is that Ambassador Sarek speaking again?”

  “Only Jean-Luc Picard,” the captain replied with a shake of his head. “With so much at stake, I prefer to take the conservative approach.”

  Though his excursion to the Romulan ship had been exhilarating, and a welcome change, Picard had no doubt that his proper place was on the bridge of the Enterprise. He sat in his command chair, perfectly at ease, as the great ship pulsed with its own inner life around him. He was glad to be part of it. He felt at home. Here he could deal with any problem the universe presented him, and that included 312 Romulans and what might be the greatest archaeological find of human history.

  La Forge’s voice came over the bridge communications system. “Captain Picard, the Gould and the Cochrane have established tractor-beam linkup with the artifact. We’re ready to bring it aboard.”

  “On visual,” Picard requested. At his Ops station beside Ensign McKnight, Data changed the main screen image. Instead of the two Warbirds, Picard now viewed the interior of Tarl’s hangar deck as seen from the optical sensor Mr. La Forge carried with him there. The presence of two of the Enterprise’s sleek, type-7 shuttlecraft, hovering among the predatory designs of the Romulan Warbird’s parked fighters and shuttles, was incongruous to say the least. But perhaps it was a harbinger of things to come. There would be peace between the Federation and the Romulans one day, Picard was certain. Perhaps this exchange would someday be seen as its starting point.

  “Picard to main shuttlebay,” the captain said. “Are you prepared to receive the artifact?”

  Riker acknowledged.

  “We’re standing by, Mr. La Forge,” Picard confirmed. “ Proceed when ready.”

  On the viewscreen, the two Federation shuttlecraft began to lift even higher off the hangar deck, and the angle of the sensor changed so that Picard could see the Borg artifact, now clear of scaffolding and lights, begin to rise, bathed in the shimmering blue glow of twin tractor beams.

  “We are registering no stress on the artifact,” La Forge reported. “Taking it out.”

  The Gould and the Cochrane and the Borg artifact began to move slowly forward, until they escaped the Warbird’s bright interior lights and were framed by the wide hangar doors.

  “Switch to external viewers,” Picard said.

  The viewscreen image changed again. Gracefully, the two shuttlecraft emerged from the hollow void between the Warbird’s dorsal and ventral planes. The artifact, four to five times the size of each shuttle, trailed easily fifty meters behind them.

  “We’re clear, Captain,” La Forge announced. “I’m beaming back to our main shuttlebay.”

  “Well done, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said.

  “Registering no change in the artifact’s power load,” Data said.

  “After all that artifact has been through,” Picard observed, “I’d be surprised if it reacted at all to this gentle ride.”

  “Captain—La Forge here. I’m back on the Enterprise. Shuttlecraft pilots advise two minutes to landing.”

  Picard felt pleased with himself. Everything was proceeding perfectly, exactly as planned. Sometimes he suspected the Enterprise actually ran herself.

  “Mr. Data,” he said, “once the artifact is stowed, begin the transportation of Commander Tarl’s crew to Shuttlebays Two and Three.” Dr. Crusher had set up the standard refugee-processing centers in those bays. Picard was almost certain the treatment the Romulan crew would receive there would be better than they received in their own quarters on Tarl’s Warbird.

  Data acknowledged the order, then added. “Captain, I am picking up an increased neutrino flux.”

  Picard leaned forward. “Is it coming from the artifact?”

  “Negative, sir. It seems to be emanating from the Ferengi Warbird. The signature is as if the ship were decloaking. But since it already is decloaked, I am at a loss to explain the reading.”

  Picard sat back. “Perhaps the Ferengi have found something else to break on their new ship. Mr. Worf, hail DaiMon Pol.”

  “Coming onscreen, Captain.”

  Picard forced himself to smile as the image of the Ferengi-run. Romulan bridge appeared on the main viewer. “DaiMon Pol,” he began, about to inquire if there was any assistance the Enterprise could once again supply.

  But DaiMon Pol was not in the command chair. Instead, Picard saw two Ferengi rush past behind it. He heard Romulan warning sirens, Ferengi shouts of alarm.

  “DaiMon Pol!” Picard said, getting to his feet. “What is the status of your ship? Mr. Data: Full scan of the 62nd Rule.”

  Then DaiMon Pol lurched into the range of the viewscreen. “They’ve cheated us!” he squealed, high-pitched, full of anger. “None of it works! They’ve—”

  In a burst of static, DaiMon Pol and the Romulan bridge disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a forward view in which Commander Tarl’s vessel still maintained position on the right, but where DaiMon Pol’s vessel had been to the left was nothing more than a rapidly expanding ball of plasma, studded with spinning hullplates.

  “Data …” Picard said in alarm. “What happened? Did they self-destruct somehow … ?”

  But before Data could reply, Picard saw the answer to his question for himself.

  A third Warbird flew through the cloud of destruction that had been the 62nd Rule.

  All phasers blazing, it flew for the Enterprise.

  Part Two

  METAMORPHOSIS

  THORSEN

  Some of them had been doctors once.

  But the Optimum had closed the universities. The Optimum had believed in the survival of the fittest, and medical care was considered a luxury. To the Optimum, those who were too old, unhealthy, incomplete, were little different from those of the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong political beliefs. Doctors were unnecessary because those who were nonoptimal would be cleansed from the Earth by the raging fire of change, of purification, of rebirth.

  But the fire had come to Adrik Thorsen first.

  In the long weeks of his recovery, he remembered little
of how that last night in Battersea had ended. He remembered Cochrane, of course. He remembered how the scientist had mocked him, had lied to him, had dared to touch him.

  He remembered how the scientist had raised his laser, rejecting Thorsen, rejecting the future.

  Cochrane’s light had cut across Thorsen’s face, seared his eye, so that in all the years ever after, whenever he was in darkness, the scintillation of that laser still echoed in what remained of his optic nerve. A flickering shadow, a shimmering souvenir of his first and only meeting with the one man who could have guaranteed a new life for the Earth. The one man who, through his refusal of the Optimum, had brought about all that had followed in the vacuum of the Optimum’s collapse.

  Thorsen had crawled along the turf of Battersea, the laser afterimage burning in his eye, his brain. He had screamed Cochrane’s name as he had crawled, tasting blood, feeling pain, seeking darkness and coolness and relief.

  He had crawled onto concrete, down rough stairs, to a place where cameras had once been installed, when the Battersea Stadium had meant something.

  Then the night had caught fire and he remembered nothing else until they woke him up to scrub the dead skin from his body with wire bristles that found each nerve on his shiny new skin.

  Eventually, the worst of the pain faded, except for the light that would shine forever in his missing eye, and the ache that would haunt his arms and legs.

  Although those who had been doctors explained that he had no arms and legs.

  Adrik Thorsen had been cleansed by fire.

  And been left incomplete.

  Nonoptimal.

  As he lay helpless in his sterile bed, what had happened to Thorsen happened also to his dreams of salvation.

  The mistakes of Khan had been avoided. But new mistakes had been made. The Optimum collapsed. Pilloried by those who had no vision.

  From his sterile bed, Adrik Thorsen called for doctors to make him whole, so he could escape with the others of the cadre. Go into hiding. Learn from their mistakes and try again.

  But those who answered his call were no longer doctors. He had helped see to that. They were interface experts now. And Adrik Thorsen learned firsthand what happened to human nervous tissue when Josephson probes were inserted into the brain.

  When they were through with him, Thorsen was whole, after a fashion. He could walk, he could pick up and manipulate objects, after a fashion. But his new limbs ran on batteries, and every nerve impulse intended to cause movement also triggered intense pain through the crude interface of the Josephson probes.

  Nonoptimal.

  In return for information about those in the cadre who had abandoned him, certain fanatics eager to replace him gave Thorsen passage from the Earth, forcing him to become what he despised most—someone who deserted the homeworld.

  The night he left, another fire ignited round the globe, and when the ashes fell and Earth’s sun shone through the smoke again, and the postatomic horror had exhausted itself and the planet, thirty-seven million corpses shamed those who had survived.

  The inevitable cry went out: This must not happen again.

  And this time, on the colony worlds, that cry was finally heard.

  Something changed in humanity with that last war, because for the first time it was clear even to the masses that no human conflict, even one that could consume a world, could ever be allowed to overshadow or assume more importance than the human race itself.

  There was a universe waiting, and with the infinite possibilities it offered, there came a generation that had no time or need for bigotry, intolerance, and greed.

  Even as enemy soldiers turned to one another to share water on the battlefield once the guns had fallen silent, humanity finally abandoned the old ways and learned the new.

  But Adrik Thorsen was not of that generation. He would always be a creature of Earth’s past, and in time he fled even the system of his birth, to hide on distant colonies, using his artificial nerve pathways to control machinery and spaceships, finding safety in the oblivion of mindless work.

  And during all his struggles to survive, he seethed with the knowledge that each ship he rode was powered by the genius of Zefram Cochrane.

  He still woke at night screaming Cochrane’s name.

  The laser beam still burned hellishly in what was left of his optic nerve.

  The same energy that had fueled the Optimum now fueled Thorsen and his obsession.

  Hatred.

  He dreamed of revenge. He dreamed of forcing Cochrane to build a warp bomb so powerful whole systems would fall before it. Before him. He knew it could be done. He wore out pens in his mechanical fingers and wrote out the figures and diagrams on endless sheets of paper, on endless display screens, on walls, on sheets, on whatever surface he could find.

  In time, other geniuses created machines into which he could plug his stumps with their artificial pathways to see his work appear on screens as fast as he could think.

  His dreams came alive then, no longer bound by nonoptimal flesh. He only feared that he would die before he had a chance to complete his work. To make Cochrane finally do what he should have done so many years ago. To bow down and submit to his master.

  But the universe held many possibilities.

  And one of them was an alien race called the Grigari.

  Thorsen saw in them his future.

  He was eighty years old now, but flesh itself, he had come to realize, was nonoptimal.

  And the Grigari did not deal in flesh.

  Thorsen paid their price and he was renewed.

  From his exile, he journeyed to Alpha Centauri.

  He set in motion his challenge to Zefram Cochrane—one that would take from the scientist everything he had held dear, just as Cochrane had taken from him.

  His plan was perfect. Cochrane would suffer. And then, because he would be left with no other choice, the scientist would at last be forced to give Thorsen the secret. The warp bomb.

  It did not matter that Thorsen no longer had the armies to use that secret. It only mattered that Thorsen win.

  It would be him against Zefram Cochrane, just as it was meant to be, as if they had met on Titan as history had demanded.

  The challenge began. Cochrane’s wife died at Thorsen’s hand. Cochrane’s students were consumed by fire.

  But then Cochrane the scientist did the unthinkable—what Thorsen the warrior had never considered.

  Cochrane ran.

  Thorsen was stunned Cochrane was supposed to be a genius. A genius would have known. There was no escape from the Optimum.

  Thorsen had not escaped it.

  And neither would Zefram Cochrane.

  ONE

  BONAVENTURE II OUTWARD BOUND

  Earth Standard: ≈ April 2117

  It was over, and Cochrane was glad of it.

  Alpha Centauri was light-years behind him. Stapledon Center, where he was expected in the next month, light-years farther still. And his past life, farthest away of all.

  His small ship hummed along at time-warp factor four. In his first voyages, half a century ago, he had had to drop back to normal space every few days, in order to check his bearings. But now the continuum-distortion fields were so tightly focused that he could see the stars slip past the viewports, and a navigation computer could constantly adjust his course.

  Which was good, because he had no intention of ever again leaving the continuum he had discovered. He would die here, for no other reason than that he had nothing more to do except bring pain to others.

  The ship, a personal yacht with one hundred square meters of living space, luxurious by the standards of the day, was filled with music, a symphony by Brahms. For years he had been haunted by the melody he had heard that first night back at Christopher’s Landing. At the time he had thought that it had sounded like Brahms. But he had never been able to find it again, in any collection of recordings. Almost as if Brahms had dropped into the twenty-first century and written one final piece.<
br />
  But even this music was just background noise now. He had given up his search. He had given up everything.

  His Monica lay in the soil of Centauri B II. His staff and students were at risk. Colonel Adrik Thorsen had returned from the dead. And all because of him. Cochrane no longer felt like fighting. Science and the thrill of discovery had been his life and they had brought him nothing.

  Fame, yes. There were planets named after him.

  Fortune, as much as he wanted, though when actually given the choice, he had realized he wanted very little.

  Admiration. An unconscionable amount.

  The ears of the powerful, the beds of the beautiful, the eyes of the media on a hundred worlds.

  Zefram Cochrane knew that by anyone’s measure, he had been given everything.

  But he had nothing.

  And he didn’t know why.

  What he did know was that the action he took now wasn’t killing himself. He was simply returning to his natural state.

  One of nothing.

  He welcomed oblivion.

  To be free of the selfish loneliness left by Monica’s death, of the unreasoning implacability of Thorsen’s hate, of all the useless regret and self-doubt that had plagued him all his life.

  He watched the stars slipping past him. But it wasn’t the stars that drew him now. It was the void between them.

  Perhaps this was why he had invented the superimpellor. Not to take humanity to other worlds, but so that he could cast himself into nothingness.

  After an unchanging week of travel, sitting passively in his pilot’s web, venturing out only to use the head, Cochrane believed he was beginning to think less often of his past. He found the tedium blessedly healing. Numbing.

  The stars slipped by. Forever.

  The same music recordings played for the twentieth cycle. The fiftieth cycle.