Star Trek - TNG - 63 - Maximum Warp, Book Two

by Dave Galanter

  Struggling against the grip of the security officers, T'sart was pleading. "But you must see they were making progress, the third attempt succeeded--the ship survived!"

  "The ship? The ship!" Picard bounded out of his chair, his voice a growl. "It's a thing, T'sart. Do you understand the difference between people and things, lives and materials? Or has your life been about your own personal quest for power, and nothing else?"

  T'sart stopped squirming and sneered at Picard. "A man who sits atop a ship so powerful he could carve the stars from the sky, lectures me about power."

  "Not power. Morality," Picard said. "You have none."

  "Captain, we're receiving a communication," Data reported. "Spock, sir. Audio only."

  The captain turned quickly toward the android. "On speakers."

  Static scraped and torn, Spock's voice crackled across the bridge. "Captain, I believe I have a hypothesis worth testing. We must confer immediately."

  "That's the message, sir," Data said.

  "Except he's sent more tactical data again," Chamberlain added. "Right to my console."

  "Input the data," Picard ordered, then turned to Rossi. "Ahead full."

  Her bridge had become a clot of screams, half filled with duty, half with terror as their ship collapsed around them.

  "Inertial dampeners are offline!"

  A chunk of ceiling debris fell next to the command chair.

  "Where are the damage-control teams?"

  Sparks showered from a dangling power conduit that spat voltage like an angry snake.

  "Commander, we have sustained heavy casualties!"

  Someone had died at the engineering station. There was no medic to take him to the medical deck. There was no one to push him out of the way and replace him. Even the doctor was dead.

  How bad off was Medric's ship? Was she giving as good as she got? Sensors couldn't tell them.

  Folan coughed. Smoke was becoming thick. She'd ordered fans online, but they couldn't cope.

  She thought when she was about to die she'd be frightened, but instead she was just very tired. She wanted it to end.

  She closed her eyes, heard the whine that must be death, and welcomed it.

  Picard and a security guard were marching into the transporter room just as the survivors from the Mokluan bridge finished materializing. Folan looked confused and surprised. Both she and Spock looked like they'd been through hell--smudged with soot and smoke, hair sweat-caked, eyes having to adjust to the bright room light.

  "H-how--" she stammered.

  Spock stepped down to Picard and greeted him with an abrupt nod. "Captain."

  "Spock, tell me you have a solution." They both began toward the door.

  "My ship--" Folan said.

  Picard turned back to her as he continued his stride. "Your ship is almost destroyed. Your crew is in one of our cargo bays. But I'd like you to come with us."

  Silently, she followed as Picard, Spock, and the guard sped into the hall.

  "Spock?" the captain prodded.

  "I cannot say with certainty, Captain."

  Picard let out a short sigh as all four of them boarded a lift. "Ignore certainty for now, then. What can you say at all?"

  "There are two alternatives," Spock began. "Control it or destroy it. Returning it to the black hole, as the Tal Shiar wished to do, is not a viable decision."

  "The subspace black hole." Picard nodded. "How do we destroy it?"

  Uncharacteristically, Spock hesitated. "I do not know that we can."

  As the turbolift moved upward, Picard felt the blood drain from his face. He asked the obvious question, but dreaded the answer. "Then how do we control it?"

  "I don't know that we can do that, either," Spock replied gravely.

  "This isn't firming into being a very good solution, Mr. Spock," Picard said dryly.

  The lift doors opened and they spilled out onto the bridge. "My recommendation is this," Spock said. "We must enter the sphere."

  The captain stopped and turned to him. "Mr. Spock, two ships have been destroyed in just attempting to get close enough to scan the object. A third endeavor ended with the vessel's crew either dead and insane. You reported that to us yourself."

  Spock said, "I did not say it would be easy, Captain."

  Picard huffed out a breath. "You have a gift for understatement, Mr. Spock."

  "So I've been told."

  They both stepped to the science station, Folan still silently in tow.

  "What can we do?" Picard asked.

  The Vulcan slid into the station's seat and began using the computer console. "There is a pattern to the disruptions in space-time. We cannot fully attune our sensors and shield harmonics as the adjustments would be too fast for even our computers to handle. But, we can adjust for every sixty-seventh shift."

  "Yes, yes, that could work," T'sart interjected from

  across the bridge. He was still being held by guards, near the captain's ready room. "This is the data I needed--this is the equipment I needed to use."

  The Romulan was practically ranting now, lurching forward again. He hated being helpless as his "plan" came to fruition.

  Picard was tired of his voice. "Can he help us?" the captain asked, indicating the Romulan with a gesture of his head.

  "I would not, at this point, trust any advice he offered," Spock said.

  "Get him off my bridge," Picard ordered, nodding to the guards.

  Heels dragging as they dragged him into the turbolift, T'sart thrashed about. "No, Captain, I must be present for this. I must! Captain--"

  Already turned away as the lift doors closed, Picard leaned down over the science station. "Spock, in order to turn it off, or stop it, or destroy it--"

  The Vulcan cut him off. "I do not know the answers to any of your questions, Captain. All I can offer you is this." Spock pointed to a screen above them and an enlarged, computer-enhanced view of a dark patch on one section of the sphere.

  "What is it?"

  "An orifice," Spock replied. "An opening, leading ... somewhere."

  Picard rubbed his chin. "Somewhere?"

  "Presumably the interior of the mechanism."

  Continuing to look at the hazy graphic, Picard asked, "Or?"

  Spock's head lowered in his version of a shrug. "We cannot know until we're inside. It could be like the inside of a space dock or it could be the doorway to another time, another dimension, or another universe altogether."

  The captain turned toward Folan. "Do you concur with this?"

  She was startled by the question. Apparently she didn't think her expertise was of use, but Picard knew she was a scientist, and to leave her, after her help, waiting in a cargo bay didn't feel right to him.

  "I--it seems a... logical hypothesis," she said.

  Picard offered a wry smile.

  "Ensign Rossi, set a course for the sphere."

  "Captain, the course has fallen apart. I can't get a heading." Rossi's voice, over the din of what Picard thought must be the sound of hell itself. He squinted through the pain, trying to decipher the voices around him.

  "It is the extra-spatial effect, Captain." Spock? He could barely tell.

  "Pull back!" Picard looked at Spock and Folan. "Can we compensate?" he croaked out, his own voice was twisted and low, but as Enterprise removed itself from the area near the sphere, the whine died and perceptions returned to near normal. Spock turned to Folan. "You told me you were able to navigate well enough to rescue--"

  Booooom!

  An explosion pitched the ship to one side and Picard

  almost lost his footing. Sprinkles of insulation dust fluttered down and the captain waved them away.

  Weapons fire.

  "Captain, we're being hailed." That sounded like Chamberlain.

  "On screen."

  Static played across the viewer as pixels flashed and formed into an angry Romulan visage. "Picard, you are in violation of Romulan--" A sizzle of electric noise disrupted the transmission.
"Never mind. Hear this: I will destroy you if you do not pull back now."

  "We can stop this, Medric," Folan pleaded, stepping toward the view screen. "Listen to them."

  "Traitorous--" Again the connection sputtered and whatever Medric said was lost. "You have her, and you have T'sart, Picard," Medric hissed when the transmission was regained. "But you cannot have this power. Retreat, or be destroyed."

  "Captain?" Spock interrupted, and with his look asked for Picard's special attention.

  Picard nodded to Chamberlain and had him cut off the comm.

  "Our shields," Spock said, "are now specially attuned to the spatial disruptions. We will lose shield cohesion if fired upon."

  "Options?" Picard asked.

  Chamberlain chuckled darkly. "Throw our warp core at him?"

  "Not funny, Fred," La Forge said.

  "No, I fear we'll be needing our warp core, but..." The captain turned to his first officer. "Number One,

  we need a one-shot solution to our Medric problem, and detonating a warp core might overwhelm his shields and shut down his engines."

  "Wouldn't that affect you in the same way?" Folan asked.

  "Not if we're not here." Picard rose and pivoted to Spock. "In your report you said Folan found that the zone around the sphere was not normal space--point 'a' didn't lead to point 'b." "

  "It must," Spock said, "but not in the way in which we can perceive it."

  Picard considered that a moment. "If we thrust ourselves into the zone around the sphere, we may appear where? Data?"

  "Difficult to predict, sir. We will not know how well we can navigate until we test the modifications to the sensors' algorithms."

  "But we'll have to enter that area no matter what?"

  "Yes, Captain."

  "How much time do we have, Spock?" Picard was formulating a plan. For the first time in days he felt a cohesive idea forming and he was enjoying the sensation after so much meandering and guesswork. He had Riker, Data, Troi, and Spock all back. T'sart and Lotre were under control, and Kalor was recovering. The only missing element was Parl and his ship. They should have ventured into the system by now.

  "We cannot know at what rate the dead zones are expanding," Spock told Picard, "but I can tell you the disruption in this system alone is increasing at a rate of six percent every hour."

  "No time to waste." Picard made his decision. "Number One, I want to beam one of our shuttle's warp cores directly into space. Ten thousand kilometers off this Medric's bow. Right between us."

  "Aye, sir." Riker nodded and buried himself in his console.

  The captain came up behind the helm and rested his hands on the conn chair's headrest. "Rossi, lay in a course, full impulse, right toward the sphere."

  "That won't be the course we'll end up on," Folan said. Picard looked back at her. She was holding her shoulders as if cold. He had to admire her bravery, standing up to all the powers of her oaths and people, and disregarding them to trust those of an "enemy" government.

  "I'm counting on it," he told her, and tried to give a slight inspirational smile.

  They saw the white bubble in space, then felt the shock wave of the matter-antimatter explosion--but only for a moment. Then it was in the distance. Then halfway close again, and then--they didn't know where.

  The whining was back--the distortion and audio howl that had plagued them when they'd only dipped a toe into the zone near the sphere. It was somewhat better, but not by much.

  "Mr. Spock, I take it this is as much protection as the shields will afford us?"

  "I'm afraid so, sir," Spock said.

  "I'm generating a low warp field for some extra protection, but it won't last long, Captain," La Forge added.

  "Then we'd better hurry," Picard said. "Can we navigate?"

  "I can't make heads or tails, sir--it's--" Suddenly Rossi cried out in pain.

  Picard rushed toward her, grabbing the woman as she fainted and collapsed into his arms.

  "Data, take the helm," he ordered. "Riker, take her."

  The captain handed Rossi off to his first officer, who jabbed at his com badge "Riker to sickbay."

  There was no response.

  "Internal com ms are down, sir," Chamberlain advised.

  "Confirmed," La Forge said. "I just lost contact with engineering. I need to head down there. I'll take her to sickbay on my way."

  The captain nodded to Riker. "Help him, then coordinate all decks to use computer access for communication. Readouts only."

  "Aye, sir," Riker said as he and La Forge took Rossi and quickly escaped into a turbolift.

  As Picard turned, the unignorable hum of the spatial distortion around him grating his nerves, Data called for his attention.

  "Captain, I--I seem to be able to understand this readout."

  Picard's eyes went wide. He'd never heard incredulity from the android's voice, even with his emotion chip. "Data?"

  Spock rose and glided to the helm. "Fascinating."

  "You can plot a course?" Picard asked.

  Data nodded. "I believe so, sir."

  "Captain, I regret I didn't consider this possibility sooner."

  Another shock, first Data, now Spock, saying the most unexpected things. "Explain."

  "Mr. Data is not bound by our natural predilection to a four-dimensional perception."

  Picard sighed and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. "Explain again, Mr. Spock."

  At the helm, Data's hands were now flying over the console. His expression was as a child's on Christmas morning having found his favorite toy under the tree. "I was not even aware I had this ability."

  "Until now, you may not have," Spock told him, then turned back to Picard. "There was never a frame of perception under which it could develop. Humanoids are unable to perceive more than the common four dimensions, length, width, height, and time. But mathematically we postulate higher dimensions. Commander Data is a being of mathematical precision--"

  "Thank you, sir," Data said.

  Spock continued. "He is not bound by our more limited, biological perceptions."

  Picard nodded and turned to pace toward the upper deck and back. "The Edo ... a culture with whom we came into contact soon after the Enterprise-D was commissioned. They had a--what they called a god, but was some sort of higher-dimensional group of beings. Their vessel was in space, and also not."

  "In space, and in unperceived space," Folan corrected, drawing Picard's attention and stopping him in his gait.

  "Yes," he nodded his acceptance of his mistake.

  "Sir, I have a course," Data reported. They all looked to him, then to the helm console and the gibberish which infested it.

  The captain motioned for Spock and Folan to take seats, and he took to his command chair as well.

  "Mr. Data," he said. "Engage."

  Chapter Nineteen

  reality melted, congealing into globs of matter that bounced and bubbled and mocked Picard's senses. He looked across the bridge and space itself seemed to poke through the bulkheads around the edges of the main viewer.

  Spock was saying something but it was distorted. Everything was deformed and twisted. Data's head turned toward the captain--or maybe just space did, and Data did nothing himself to cause that appearance.

  Noise without tone crushed down on them. Picard covered his ears, but this was no vibration that rode the air. There was nothing to keep out, as the sound was the vibration of everything--without and within.

  He was screaming in pain now, or so he thought--it wasn't as if he heard his own voice. He heard everything else, everywhere, his perception told him.

  Picard fell back into his command chair, and then down onto the deck. He forced himself to focus, not on his perceptions, but on raw thought. What was happening? He needed to reason it out and concentrate on that.

  Higher-dimensional--" Aaarggh!"

  He couldn't think--the pain was too much. He just wanted it to end--life itself, if not the agony.

  And the
n, it did--the agony, at least. It was as if he'd been wired to an electric chair and someone finally cut the power. Exhausted, aching, and sore, Picard struggled to pull himself into the command chair again. His eyes slowly opened, and Spock stood before him.

  "Are you all right, Captain?" The Vulcan offered him a helping hand.

  Gladly, he accepted it and rose to his feet. "I think so, Mr. Spock. Are you?"

  Looking no different than fifteen minutes before, Spock said, "I am recovering."

  Picard moved toward the helm, limping a bit. "Data?"

  The android turned back to him, the oddest, most satisfied smile on his face. "We are inside the sphere, sir."

  The captain spun to look at the forward viewer. "Inside" Picard breathed, taking in the vast starscape across it. He moved to the ops panel and punched up a few different sensor views, looking port, then starboard, then aft. "There's only space outside. What's happened to the sphere? What have we managed to do?"

  "I believe, sir, what we're seeing is a graphical representation, but I cannot be sure." Data rose from the helm and strode up to the science station. Spock and

  Picard followed. Folan still seemed to be recovering in her chair before the console.

  "Graphical? A representation of what?" Picard asked.

  "This star system." Data checked one readout, then another, and another. "Sensors are functioning completely now, sir. Distortions continue outside, but we are not affected. We are, however, able to scan outside. Apparently, the interior is a gigantic astrometrics projection system, though I do not detect any such technology at play."

  The captain shook his head, awed. "Data, how did you manage it?"

  "I am unable to explain it, sir," the android admitted. "To me, the path seemed relatively clear."

  Picard leaned down to him, placing a hand on Data's shoulder. "What did it look like to you?"

  Brows swung upward innocently, Data shook his head. "I do not think I can accurately describe it, sir. It was ... more, is the best way to explain it."

  "More what, Data?"

  "More space, sir."

  Picard thought about that, and struggled to remember elementary physics discussions about higher dimensions: how a theoretical two-dimensional man would be imprisoned within a circle the same way a 3D man would be so entrapped by a sealed cube. A 3D man would not be ensnared by a circle--because he had the luxury of more space. He could step over the same prison walls a 2D man could not.