by Dave Stern
So something had happened along the way. Either that, or…
Archer wouldn’t think about the “or” just now.
Other members of his crew were missing as well. T’Pol. Reed. Travis. Hess and Ryan from engineering. They’d all come to the prison, been on A block until the third day after their arrival. Then all had been marched away, and not heard from—or of—since. Archer had only a rough idea of the prison complex’s size, but it was certainly big enough for them to still be here, somewhere. He intended to find them, if they were here.
“Captain.” O’Neill, dressed in one of the Denari guard uniforms, approached. “We’re ready.”
Archer nodded. They had to move quickly.
“All right, everyone.”
He looked around at his crew.
“You know the plan. Let’s move.”
They took up positions—the “guards” on the walkways above, the prisoners on the corridor below—and began to march.
Two
TRIP COULDN’T GET used to the beard.
It looked strange on him, like a bad prop from a high-school play. The kind teenagers wore when they had to play grown-ups. Obviously fake—even more so considering the tiny flecks of gray that had come in with the dark blond. Gray hair? Him? He was thirty-two. It wasn’t possible. He rubbed it with one hand and shook his head.
Snap out of it, Tucker, he told himself. After these last few weeks, you should know anything is possible.
Trip—Commander Charles Tucker III, late of the Starship Enterprise, currently residing aboard the Guild ship Eclipse—stepped back from the mirror and frowned.
Shave it, he thought. And then…
No. He’d grown it for a reason. Looking at himself in the mirror, he saw that reason still held. He saw it in the way the green and orange Guild uniform hung off his shoulders, in the tendons that stood out in his neck. If he didn’t have the beard, he’d see it even more in the thinness of his face. He was losing weight. A lot of it—more than he could afford.
Losing weight? Ha. Why gild the lily?
He was dying.
Someone knocked at his door.
“Come.”
The door swung open, revealing a man—a human, though dressed in the Guild uniform as well, medium height, square build, in his early seventies, with a halo of frizzy white hair—standing in the entrance.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said.
“Not at all. Come on in.”
The man obliged, smiling and making eye contact as he did so.
Trip met his gaze for a second, and then had to turn away.
He still didn’t know how to deal with his visitor. Who went by the name of Victor Brodesser, who was the exact image of the Victor Brodesser Trip had known a decade ago, the Victor Brodessor who had been a father figure to Trip while the young Lieutenant Tucker had served on the Daedalus project. The exact image physically, but nonetheless…
A different person altogether.
At first Trip had chalked up those differences to the time that had passed since he’d last seen Brodesser. The day of Daedalus’s initial test flight more than ten years earlier, when its experimental ion drive had exploded, and the ship was presumed lost with all hands on board, including the professor.
Now he knew better.
Now he knew that he and this Brodesser were strangers. That they had no previous relationship of any kind, hadn’t even met until Trip had helped the Guild rescue the man from an isolated prison outpost two weeks ago.
It made for a certain awkwardness between them. And a lot of small talk.
“I was in the launch bay,” the man said.
“Heading there myself in a few minutes.”
“I’ve been working on the cloak, of course,” the man said. “Still trying to stabilize the initial field states.”
Trip nodded. The man was talking about the cloaking device on the Suliban cell-ship—the device that had enabled Trip and Enterprise’s communications officer, Ensign Hoshi Sato, to successfully flee the Denari forces that had captured Enterprise. Brodesser—this Brodesser—had managed to duplicate that device more than a week ago. Or so it seemed at the time.
Over the last few days, however, problems had arisen. Problems with the particles emitted by the cloaking device, normally harmless, light-refracting particles that were somehow being transformed—albeit on a very limited, very random scale—into superenergized, highly radioactive, very, very lethal ones. Marshal Kairn—Eclipse’s commander, as well as the Guild’s military leader—had forbidden the device’s use until Brodesser ironed out the problem.
“No luck?”
“In actually replicating the field states? No, I’m afraid not. Very discouraging.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Which he was, but he didn’t know why the man had come here to tell him about it. Was he expecting Trip to offer suggestions? Insight? That just wasn’t going to happen. This man might not be the Victor Brodesser Trip had known, but he was still a genius. Head-and-shoulders above where Trip was, especially when it came to things like advanced field theory. Just like Trip’s Brodesser in that respect. In others, though…
He was indeed very, very different.
It had been on another mission for the Guild—an attempt to kidnap Denari’s leader, the dictator General Sadir—that Trip had learned the reason for those differences in the man’s behavior, his personality, his very memories of the Daedalus project and its tragic outcome. Trip now understood why he was so like—and yet unlike—the man he had idolized.
On that mission Trip had discovered a book—The Song of El Cid—which he and Daedalus’s engineers had given Brodesser. But as he had examined that book closely, he’d seen that in fact it wasn’t the same copy they’d presented to the professor. There were subtle differences—Trip’s own inscription among them. How was such a thing possible? The answer had come to him in a flash—parallel universes.
Quantum theory held that the space-time continuum was filled with all possible realities. The explosion that had crippled Enterprise, that had led to its capture, had also catapulted the starship into an alternate universe. One where Victor Brodesser and Daedalus had survived, where that vessel, crippled by the explosion of its ion drive, had arrived in the Denari system only to be seized by then-Colonel Sadir, who then used Starfleet technology to overthrow his planet’s government.
A reality, more importantly, that Trip and his shipmates were physically unable to tolerate. One that was responsible for the wasting away of his body and would soon be responsible for his death and the death of everyone else who had crossed the boundary between universes with him.
Trip needed to find Enterprise and escape this reality before that happened. He’d been spending every one of his days—and many of his nights—over the last week in Eclipse’s launch bay, in the war room that had been set up there, trying to find a way back. He needed to get back to that search right now.
He didn’t have time to waste with Brodesser.
“Something I can do for you, Professor?” he asked.
The edge in his voice must have come through. The man glared at him momentarily, and for a second Trip thought he was going to respond in kind. That was what the real Brodesser—his Brodesser—would have done: given Trip his attitude right back, and spoken exactly what was on his mind.
Not this man, though. This man was more politic. Calculating. More concerned with getting what he wanted than having his say.
His glare softened, and he spoke.
“Yes. I hope so. I hope so indeed.” Brodesser clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace.
“I know you have plans for the cell-ship, Trip, once you find Enterprise.”
“That’s right.” The second he found news of his ship, in fact, he and Hoshi were going to take that little vessel and find a way to rescue her.
“But in the interim…” Brodesser looked up and met his eyes. “I was wondering if I could have your permission to disass
emble the cloaking device entirely.”
“No.” Trip didn’t even need to think about it. “Absolutely not.”
“Trip, it’s the only way for me to find out what I’m doing wrong. Compare my device to the original—at the component level.”
Trip shook his head. He understood the professor’s problem—knew on one level that the man was absolutely right. Every device aboard the cell-ship, cloak included, was black-box technology to them. They knew what it did, could even access and control its functions through the cell-ship software, but as far as understanding the principles behind its operation…
They were all entirely in the dark. It made sense to try and penetrate the mystery behind the cloak’s function to figure out what they were doing wrong.
But Trip was afraid that if he let Brodesser pull the cloak apart, the man might not be able to put it back together again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it.
“Trip, that cloaking device, if we can get it working, could make the difference between the Guild’s survival and defeat.”
“And it might also be the only way Hoshi and I can get to Enterprise and rescue her.”
“Perhaps,” Brodesser said, a slightly condescending smile on his face that all at once made Trip angry, “but think about it this way. A working cloaking device could enable the Guild to actually win the war. You’d have no need to rescue Enterprise. It would be yours—ours—by right of victory.”
“After how long? Do you know how many ships Sadir’s army has? Even with cloaks on every functioning Guild ship”—which there weren’t that many of anyway—“it could take months to win a war. Me and Hoshi and the Enterprise crew, we don’t have months.”
“All right.” The man nodded, tight-lipped. “Then help me. You must know something more about how the ship functions. If I understood the relationship between the cloak and the ship’s power source better, how the device’s initial field states are generated…”
Brodesser looked to Trip expectantly.
Trip just sighed.
What could he say to that? That the function of almost every component on that vessel was a mystery to him, that it was technology hundreds of years in advance of Starfleet science, that it had come to them courtesy of time-traveling aliens who hadn’t bothered to provide an instruction manual?
No. He couldn’t say that. He couldn’t even let on that such a thing as time travel was possible. And he didn’t want Brodesser to start pulling the ship apart trying to understand its power source, because if the man found out the vessel ran off an ion drive…
Trip’s permission or not, he’d crack that ship open in a flash.
“I can’t help you.”
“I see.” Brodesser’s expression was still unreadable, but Trip could hear the tension in his voice. “Perhaps I should speak to Marshal Kairn about this.”
“You think he’ll give you the go-ahead to rip the cell-ship apart?”
“He might.”
Trip met Brodesser’s eyes, and frowned.
There was a chance, he realized, that the professor was correct. If Brodesser presented the idea to Kairn the right way, the marshal might indeed decide that the prospect of a working cloaking device for his forces overrode all other considerations—even given all that Trip had done for him and the Guild over the last few weeks.
The Guild was in the middle of a war, after all. Trip couldn’t say for sure he wouldn’t order exactly the same thing, were their positions reversed.
He sighed. “All right, Professor. Let me think about it. Okay?”
“Of course.” Brodesser nodded, but didn’t look as happy about his little victory as Trip would have thought. “We’re on the same side in this, Trip. I wish we could find a way to work together again.”
“Again? We never worked together before.” The words came out before Trip could call them back. Came out harsher than he’d intended them to as well.
For an instant, anger—and perhaps, a touch of indignation—crossed Brodesser’s face. Then it was gone.
“I’m sorry,” Trip said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just—”
“It’s all right.” Brodesser’s expression was again opaque, unreadable. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure.”
He walked to the door and paused.
“I’ll look forward to talking to you again—shortly.”
And with that, he was gone.
Trip frowned after him.
I could have handled that better, he thought.
Brodesser was right about the pressure he was feeling. It wasn’t just that though. These last few nights, he hadn’t slept well at all. Cramps in his stomach, and last night in his legs as well. He’d talk to Neesa about it later, after he checked this morning’s intercepts.
He’d taken two steps toward the door when the com buzzed.
“Trant to Commander Tucker.”
Trip smiled. Speak of the devil…
He punched open a channel.
“Doctor. It’s good to hear your voice.”
Trant was Doctor Trant Neesa, Eclipse’s physician. In public, he called her “doctor,” and she called him “commander.” In private, they’d been lovers for two weeks now.
A fact they were hiding for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Trant was married. Normally that would have stopped Trip from getting involved in the first place. Except in this case, her husband—a former government official named Ferik Reeve—was no longer aware that the two of them were man and wife. Was no longer aware of much of anything, in fact. Ferik had been tortured by General Sadir, his mind and memories sifted through until he was a shadow of his former self. Neesa couldn’t be expected to live her life celibate because of what had happened. As for Trip…
His time with Neesa was just about the only bright spot in his world right now. He was too busy enjoying it to feel remorse.
“I’m glad I found you as well, Commander,” Trant said. “Can you come to the medical ward?”
Trip frowned. She sounded anything but glad.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I just want to run a few tests.”
“More tests?” Trip sighed. “Didn’t we just go through that?”
“We did. Just a few discrepancies I’d like to clear up.”
“I’ll come by later. I need to go through the day’s intercepts first.”
“Later when?”
“This afternoon.”
“Early this afternoon.”
“All right. Early this afternoon.” He paused a second. “Are you sure nothing’s the matter?”
She hesitated before answering. “I’m not sure. That’s why I want you to come back in, do those tests. You’re eating the pisarko, aren’t you?”
His eyes went to the refrigerator in the corner of the room. It was filled with an odd-tasting, odd-smelling grain product called pisarko that, more than anything else, resembled burnt scrambled eggs.
Trip shuddered at the thought of it.
“I had some for dinner last night.” He’d had some, in fact, for every meal this past week. And with the last of the ration packs from Enterprise gone, it was all Trip would be eating until he got back to his ship. Because he was violently allergic to almost every other food aboard the Denari ship. Not to the foods themselves, actually, but to certain compounds within them. A specific class of proteins that his body couldn’t absorb. Proteins that were an essential part of the basic building blocks of life in this universe.
Pisarko gave him calories to live off, fuel to burn, but none of those nutrients. Without them, his body was breaking down. Hence the weight loss, the cramping in his legs, and other, less visible—for the moment, at least—indicators of malnutrition.
Which Trant would no doubt enumerate for him later.
“What about breakfast?” she asked.
“No. Not yet.”
“Trip…”
“All right. I’ll have some.”
He closed the channel and turned to the refrigerator.
For a second, he thought about the stasis units aboard Enterprise. The steaks Chef had stored in them—he’d given Trip a tour once. Row upon row of meat. Grade A. Top choice. And then Chef had shown him the cheeses—a wheel of cheddar the size of one of the antimatter pods. His mouth watered. Food. Honest-to-God food.
Another reason to find his ship as soon as humanly possible.
It was all he could do to force down two bites of the pisarko before setting down his spoon and heading for the launch bay, where he could continue his search.
Three
“GOOD,” ARCHER SAID, his laser pistol still pressed firmly to the side of Gastornis’s head. “That was well done.”
“Thank you.” The colonel—Rava One’s commander—swallowed visibly. “So you can lower your weapon now…yes?”
Archer locked eyes with the man.
He didn’t want to lower the weapon. For what Gastornis had done to T’Pol…
He wanted to squeeze the trigger and exact a pound of flesh. But they might need the colonel again, to do something similar to what he’d just done—broadcast a very convincing SOS to the nearest military vessel. Tell them that all was not well inside prison satellite Rava One—systems failing, repairs impossible, send help ASAP. A task the man had performed quickly and convincingly. Gastornis was an excellent liar.
“It wasn’t my idea, you know,” the colonel said. Archer could see the fear in his eyes. “To do those things to your crewmate. The Vulcan. The order came from the Kresh—from General Elson himself. Find out what she knows.”
“I see.” Archer’s gaze bored into the man. “And that makes it right?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know—I was just trying to explain why…” Gastornis searched for the word.