Spectre

by William Shatner

  "And you are alive," Kirk said. "How about you, Spock?"

  "I am . . ." He looked up at the ceiling as if searching there for the proper word. "Impressed," he said at last. "Though, like T'Val, I am also concerned about your intellectual wellbeing. To face down a Sovereign-class vessel in a runabout requires extraordinarily large—"

  "Motivation," Kirk said. There was no need to get personal. He spun his chair back to Scott, aware that be was suddenly ravenous, as he had never been on Chal. Facing death did that to him. Awakened all his senses, his appreciation of life. "All right, Mr. Scott, Lay in a course for Chal."

  "I . . . might have another suggestion, Captain."

  But Kirk wasn't interested. "We're going after whoever has Teilani. Lay in that course."

  But Scott kept his hands off the controls. "If ye'd listen to me for a moment, I might have something interesting to tell ye."

  Kirk leaned back in his chair, impatient, but trying not to let ego rule him in the the way it had affected the Cardassian's judgment. "All right, I'm listening." He looked at the time readout. "For one minute."

  "The Sovereign was under orders to search for the warp trail of the Enterprise and the mirror Voyager."

  "Warp trails that had been cloaked somehow," Kirk said. "Which makes me think it was an order from a counterpart spy in Starfleet to engage the Sovereign in a useless assignment, and deny her to the rest of the Fleet."

  "Then again, p'raps not. Ye see, to prepare for that search, all the sensors on all the ship's shuttles and even the runabouts were recalibrated to look for the quantum signature of the Voyager's warp particles. And look—" Scott tapped on a sensor display screen. "—here they are."

  Kirk read the display. "That's hardly surprising, Mr. Scott. The Enterprise was on patrol in the discontinuity when it found the mirror Voyager. It follows that the Voyager's warp trail would be detected in here as well,"

  "No, no, look," Scott insisted. He adjusted some controls and the image on the sensor screen expanded until, Kirk saw, the graphic representation of the warp particles' trail split in two.

  "Two trails?" Kirk asked. "Is there another mirror-universe ship in here?"

  Scott gave him a measuring look. "Captain, a warp particle is a wee beastie, and under normal conditions, it decays fairly quickly. So in another day or two, they'll nae be here to see. And under the conditions within this region, we really shouldna be picking them up at all."

  "But we are."

  "Aye, because their quantum signature is different, they don't decay as rapidly in our space-time, so they stick out like a sore antenna on an Andorian. We'd never find a trail of the Enterprise's warp particles in here. The quantum signature from those would be smeared all to Edinburgh and back. But the particles from the Voyager . . . well, sir, that ship might just as well be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs."

  Kirk braced himself for the inevitable, looked back at Spock.

  But Spock reassured him. "I am familiar with the legend of Hansel and Gretel, Captain. However, I do confess I also do not understand the significance of a double trail."

  "Och, will ye two look at the orientation of the particles' spin," Scott said. "It's obvious. One trail was created as the mirror Voyager came out of the plasma storms. And the other trail—"

  Kirk saw it in a flash. "Was left behind when the Voyager returned!"

  Scott nodded. "Ye did it yourself when ye settled the runabout down on the Sovereign's spine. Hiding in plain sight."

  Kirk immediately understood the implications of Scott's discovery. "Spock, if the Voyager exited the Goldin Discontinuity at any other point along its boundary, could it be detected?"

  "Without question. We are deep within Federation space. The mirror Voyager would show up on any number of deepspace tracking networks, especially now that a concerted search is in progress."

  "So," Kirk said, "at least ten days after the Enterprise found her, we can be certain she hasn't come out. And while half of Starfleet is scouring the rest of space, trying to find out where the Voyager went, probably taking the Enterprise with it, we're the only ones who know she came back here."

  Scott raised a cautionary finger. "Aye, but if anyone on the Sovereign runs a sensor sweep in here and picks up the double trail, they're going to know it, too, as quickly as we did."

  "The Sovereign's under enemy control," Kirk said. "I have no doubt Admiral Nechayev and Glinn Arkat already know exactly what happened to Voyager."

  Then Kirk checked the main sensor display. Nothing but static. He noted that Scott had set the mass detector to maximum sensitivity. The Sovereign would trigger it the moment she closed within fifty thousand kilometers—more than enough of a safety zone to allow escape.

  He turned back to the two Spocks and McCoy, to T'Val and Janeway. The idea he was considering was unlikely, but served to coalesce all that happened into one underlying, connected whole. Five minutes ago, he would never have considered the possibility of delaying his departure to Chal. But if the idea he had just had turned out to be possible . . .

  "Let's say I'm Jean-Luc Picard," Kirk began.

  "That is not as unlikely a supposition to make as you may think," Spock observed. "Indeed, you share many similarities, including—"

  "I'm trying to form a hypothesis, Spock."

  Spock stopped talking. "Please, continue."

  "I'm Jean-Luc Picard. I'm on patrol in the Goldin Discontinuity and . . ." Kirk stopped as he noticed the stares of Janeway and T'Val. "What is it?"

  "Is it true Jean-Luc Picard is a starship captain in this universe?" Janeway asked.

  "He's the captain of the Enterprise," Kirk said. "And a friend."

  Janeway and T'Val exchanged a look of shocked amazement. Kirk could guess why.

  "I take it there's a Picard in your universe, as well."

  "You would not consider him a friend," the mirror Spock said. "Please, continue with your hypothesis."

  Kirk tabled his curiosity about the mirror Picard. Once again, Janeway and T'Val reacted to the name with almost the same reaction as they had shown to the name Tiberius.

  "Suddenly," Kirk went on, "I find the Voyager. A missing starship. Back home at last. Probably, I make contact with someone on board who's known to be a Voyager crew member. They're in trouble. Need help at once. I waive security procedures, beam them all over at once. These are colleagues in trouble. Heroes for having survived all they've been through." Pausing, Kirk considered the emotion of that moment, the thrill of discovery, the relief of knowing that no matter the odds, sometimes space could give up her dead. "I would have done the same thing," he said truthfully.

  "But, of course," Spock said, "it was not the real Voyager. The crew members, at least those who made contact, were counterparts. . . ."

  "And," Kirk continued, "I would have beamed a boarding party of Klingons and Cardassians onto my ship."

  "Captain, I can't believe that a ship as sophisticated as the new Enterprise could be taken over by anything as simple as a boarding party. The new computer lockout systems are designed to take weeks to work around."

  "Maybe the boarding party was led by your counterpart, Scotty."

  The engineer nodded thoughtfully, as if he agreed that the best security systems of Starfleet would, in the end, offer no challenge to him, or anyone like him. "Ah, I see your point."

  Kirk hid his smile, went on with his scenario. "So, Picard's neutralized. Now, let's look at it from the other side. I'm the leader of an Alliance commando team—and I have two starships. What do I want with them?"

  "The same thing we do," Janeway said. "Take them back home. To win the war. Or, to defeat the resistance."

  "But you just want the building plans," Kirk said. "You can take those home with a transporter and build your own ships, the way the Terran resistance built a duplicate of the Defiant. But for me to take the ships back, and save all that time and effort, I need a wormhole."

  Spock looked perplexed. "Why?"

  Kirk remembered tha
t Spock had been otherwise engaged when he and Scott had discussed the various methods of crossing between the universes. "Only two ways to cross over, Spock. Small masses can be transported with specially modified equipment. Large objects, like this runabout, require a wormhole."

  Spock looked troubled. "I suspect there is a flaw in that logic."

  "Let me know when you find it," Kirk said. He turned his attention back to the others. "So, the questions remains. If everything I've said is true, or close to the truth, why here? Why did the mirror Voyager appear in the Goidin Discontinuity? And why did she return here?"

  T'Val stated the obvious, logical conclusion. "Because the wormhole is here."

  "Och, no, lassie. I've been having this argument with Starfleet for years, now. Ye cannae have a stable wormhole in such an unstable region of space. Nearby, perhaps, the way the Bajoran wormhole is near to the Badlands. But not in the Badlands themselves."

  "Then what brings them here?" Kirk asked. If he was going to have any chance at all of defeating the Alliance agents in this universe, he had to understand their strategy.

  The mirror Spock seemed to make a difficult decision. "Captain Kirk, in sickbay, when I appeared to answer Admiral Nechayev's questions about the Vulcan resistance, everything I said was a deliberate misstatement. Except for my role as figurehead."

  "No," T'Val said emphatically. "You are our leader."

  The mirror Spock did not acknowledge his daughter. "But what I am going to tell you now is true, and potentially dangerous to our ongoing efforts to overthrow the Alliance. Should we be captured . . ."

  "Understood," Kirk said. Whatever secret he was about to learn would die with him.

  "The Terran resistance cell operating near Bajor has its base in the Badlands."

  "In our universe," Spock said, "the rebels known as the Maquis did the same. The masking effects of the plasma storms make the region impenetrable to sensors, thus an eminently logical place to hide."

  "So," Kirk said, "we can assume that the Alliance faction we're facing has chosen this region for their secret base for the same reason—assuming the Goldin Discontinuity exists in your universe."

  The mirror Spock nodded. "It does, by the same name, as well."

  Kirk turned to look out the forward viewports. The view reminded him of low-orbital passes over Jupiter—colorful swirls and whorls beyond any identifiable scale, churning in constant motion, lit from within by unceasing discharges of energy.

  Yet, for all its violent beauty, this place was a sanctuary.

  A place for the Alliance to transfer ships.

  To hide.

  To plot their strategy against their enemies at home.

  And if it was all those things, then what if it was one other?

  "Kate?" Kirk said, without taking his eyes off the shifting grandeur before him. "When you were in the Alliance prison camp, where was it?"

  "Alpha Centauri IV," Janeway said. "New Montana. It used to be a big Earth colony. The Alliance left most of it intact. They were always digging through the facilities. I never knew what they were looking for, though."

  Kirk frowned. He had been hoping to hear of a prison camp Where the sky was on fire with twisting sheets of incandescent plasma.

  "But the labor camp . . ." Janeway said softly, as if she had suddenly realized what Kirk was after. "Where they were going to send me after your Kathryn Janeway was declared lost . . ."

  Kirk looked back at her, waiting for the words that could determine what he would do next. That could determine if they would live or die.

  "They gave me a discharge suit," she said. "Made me put it on." She closed her eyes briefly as she relived the moment.

  "You're sure that's what they called it?" Kirk asked. Discharge suits had been around for centuries, and he could think of no reason why the mirror universe wouldn't share the technology. Early in the history of warp flight, it was discovered that spacecraft moving through clouds of interstellar dust could pick up powerful electrostatic charges impossible to dissipate in ordinary vacuum. On stations without forcefield technology to bleed off those charges, maintenance workers had to wear insulating suits that would protect them from powerful electrical discharges should they touch conductive parts of the craft.

  Janeway nodded. "They told me I had to wear it for the labor camp. Otherwise, I could die."

  For Kirk, the final piece of the puzzle slipped into place.

  "You were coming here," he said.

  "I can't be sure," Janeway told him. "I escaped at the transfer station at Lake Riker."

  "Where's that?" Kirk asked.

  "Outside New Montana. Where the spaceport is."

  Kirk knew the main spaceport on Alpha Centauri IV. "In our universe, it's called Lake Sloane."

  Kirk saw Spock react with interest, but let it pass.

  He was convinced he had uncovered the one fact that made sense of all the other questions.

  Why the Voyager had appeared here.

  Why the Enterprise had disappeared here.

  And why Admiral Nechayev's Sovereign had been assigned to conduct the search for the Enterprise in every region of space except for here.

  "There's a labor camp in the discontinuity," he told the others. "Probably two—one in each universe."

  "For what purpose?" Spock asked.

  Kirk turned back to his console and called up the main sensor configuration controls. "We're going to find transporters, Spock—hundreds of pads, maybe thousands. And the prisoners, they take apart the starships and they transfer them through, piece by piece."

  Kirk was prepared for Scott's hoot of disbelief. "Captain, that'd take years, even if ye could cut up hull metal in such small pieces and have a hope of rejoining them all later."

  "You said it yourself, Scotty. If there can't be a stable wormhole in here, transporters are the only way to go. And since the mirror Voyager made it into our universe, we know whatever system they're using works."

  Scotty looked dismayed. "Aye, ye've got me there."

  Kirk finished setting all sensors to maximum sensitivity for quantum-signature detection. "Follow that trail, Scotty. Wherever the mirror Voyager went, that's where we're going."

  McCoy was completely lost. "But Jim, what about Chal? What about Teilani?"

  Kirk stared into the writhing madness of the tortured plasma. Whatever forces of nature were at work there remained beyond his understanding, and that of the best minds of Starfleet.

  But he was ready to risk them to do what his heart demanded.

  "If I'm right, Bones, Teilani is a lot closer than we think."

  "What happens if you're wrong?"

  As the St. Lawrence plunged deeper into the storm, Kirk didn't answer.

  Because if he was wrong, then Teilani would die.

  And nothing would ever matter again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Picard awoke in a cloud of pain.

  Every muscle, every nerve, every memory protested the agony that engulfed him.

  But he forced himself up from the cot.

  This was the day.

  The day he would live. Or he would die.

  He would not turn away from his duty, his responsibility.

  Beverly Crusher was beside him, kneeling in the narrow walkway, cradling his head, speaking softly to him as she held a weak brew of something that passed for nutrient soup in this dark and humid hellhole.

  "Drink this, Jean-Luc," she said. Then she looked around furtively.

  Picard followed her gaze, even as the putrid fluid scalded his tongue and his throat.

  There were at least one hundred other cots in the dismal, filth-strewn barracks. Half were filled with fitfully sleeping gamma-shift workers. Most were human. A handful were alien. And some were from the Enterprise.

  The miserable occupants of the other half of the cots, other workers, the delta shift, were sitting up groggily, all, without exception, shifting uncomfortably in the constricting pressure of the discharge suits they wore, the sui
ts they could not remove without facing death.

  Picard, like everyone else, despised his.

  It was sickly green-black in color, rubbery in texture, thick and impervious to sweat, except through a number of small fabric-covered slits cut into the sides of the chest piece, back, and upper leg segments. The hateful garment stretched from his neck down over his entire body, leaving only his head and face and hands uncovered. Picard had already learned that a mere half-hour of heavy labor in the suit was enough to make its inner surface slip and chafe against his skin as the fabric lining became sodden with sweat. The insufferable heat dizzied him.

  He had seen more than one fully-suited wretch succumb to that heat by passing out in the middle of the shift.

  Some were so far gone that even the excruciating assault of the overseers' agonizers would not be enough to shock them back to consciousness.

  Picard, like the others, had heard, among the rumors that swept through this camp, that the overseers allowed each new prisoner three bouts of fainting in the first month—what they considered to be a period of acclimatization. This rumor, however, appeared to be fact. After a month, or after the fourth collapse, offending workers disappeared.

  Rumor also had it they were recycled into the nutrient broth which was all there was to eat or drink.

  But to refuse the salty broth was to guarantee collapse, and Picard had let his captured crew know that it was his order that they all drink it, whenever it was offered. And he did so now, without protest.

  They all needed to be strong for the escape attempt.

  And that attempt was to be today.

  "How are the others?" Picard whispered, as he took the nutrient cup from Beverly and dutifully swallowed the disgusting brew.

  "Will has the alpha shift ready to move at shift break. Geordi has briefed the beta shift."

  Beverly pulled out her medical tricorder—one of the few implements the captured crew of the Enterprise had been allowed to keep. She scanned Picard with it.

  Picard looked at the flickering lights on the tricorder "You're certain that's functioning properly?"

  The tricorder was their only hope in launching an operation to reclaim their ship. The Enterprise's own computer identification systems had been fooled by up to five counterparts. Picard had seen his own counterpart face-to-face. He guessed that dozens, if not hundreds, of other Enterprise crew had counterparts from the mirror universe, as well. All it would take was one of them infiltrating a shift team, and Picard's careful plan would be exposed.