by Diane Duane
“Ready, Commander.” They were standing outside the door to the access station, a little room off the main corridor leading to the cores proper.
“The captain is on his way.”
“Intruder’s three meters in on the right as you go in,” said Lieutenant Mann from the bridge security console. “He’s using one of the stand-up access padds.”
“Good,” Worf said. “Ryder, you and I at point. Mirish, behind, in brace. Detaith, hold the door. Now.”
Worf touched the door, and he and Ryder went in fast, with weapons ready. They saw a slightly hunched figure in a lieutenant’s uniform, human, dark-haired, tapping at the padd console. He looked up, reacted in angry surprise, fumbled at his side for something.
As his hand came up, Worf kicked it, hard, and the weapon went flying up overhead and across the little room. The man cried out, started to turn back toward Worf, but a second later, Ryder hit him feetfirst in the rib cage, carefully knocking the intruder straight sideways to spare the console and any settings that might remain in it. They went down together, but a second later Ryder had bounced back up to a kneeling position, and the intruder was shouting something pained into the carpet while Ryder, kneeling on the intruder’s back, twisted his wrist backward and up into a position for which nature had never prepared it.
Worf was pleased: a security action in which the team did not have to stretch itself unduly was an efficient one, which the captain would approve. “Get him up,” he said to Ryder. “Keep him restrained.”
Ryder and Mirish hauled the man to his feet. Worf studied the rage-twisted face, but no identification came immediately to mind. He touched his badge. “Mann,” he said, “get me an ID on this crewman.”
“Working, sir.”
They stood and waited, looking at the man. “Let me go,” he said, struggling. “I can make it worth your while!”
Ryder and Mirish gave each other dubious looks. “What are you doing in this area?” Worf said, frowning.
He was astonished when the crewman actually spat at his feet. “Slave, I don’t have to answer to you!”
Worf’s eyes narrowed… for slave was not a word one used on a Klingon and lived.
“Lieutenant,” Mann said from the bridge, “pictorial record identifies this crewman as Ensign Mark Stewart, assigned to botany and hydroponics.”
“Curious that you should have decided to go so suddenly into computers, Ensign,” Worf said. “A career change?”
“There’s only one problem,” said Mann. “The computer says that Ensign Stewart is on deck nine, in his quarters.”
Worf’s eyebrows went up, and Ryder and Mirish looked at each other as Detaith stepped aside to let the captain through.
“Our intruder,” Picard said, coming up beside Worf.
“Yes, Captain. But we have a problem. Lieutenant Worf to Ensign Stewart.”
There was a brief pause, then a somewhat sleepy voice said out of the air, “Yes, sir? What can I do for you? I’m off shift right now.”
Worf glanced at Picard. The captain’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back at “Stewart” again. The young man was staring at him with an expression of anger and terror, but otherwise not reacting. Slowly Picard reached out to him. The man tried to flinch away from the touch, but the security staff held him fast. Picard touched the man’s badge: it made no sound.
Worf looked at Picard. “Take him to sickbay,” the captain said. “I want him and everything about him thoroughly examined. After that, he’s to be secured in the brig once I’ve consulted with Doctor Crusher.”
Worf nodded. “Nothing is required of you at this moment, Ensign,” he said to his communicator. “I am sorry to have disturbed your sleep cycle. But would you remain awake for a little while? You may be needed.”
“Of course, sir.” Worf gestured with his head at his people. Ryder and Mirish hustled the man out, with Detaith behind them, his sidearm ready.
“I take it he didn’t put up much of a struggle,” Picard said.
Worf shook his head. “He had no chance. All the same—” He frowned. “I could wish he had. He was… rude.”
“So I heard,” Picard said softly. “Well. We will have answers soon enough… and I suspect he will have leisure to repent his rudeness.”
They headed out together.
Beverly Crusher pursed her lips and turned away from the man lying bitterly silent and with closed eyes on the diagnostic bed. Beverly was in a bad mood, for mystery annoyed her except in the abstract. When it turned up in her sickbay, she tended to give it short shrift, preferring revealed fact and clean diagnosis to clinical pictures that remained stubbornly shadowy. Right now, though, the shadows were deep.
She breathed out as she worked over her padd, transferring its readings to the computer, then glanced up at the two security people standing on either side of the bed. “Brendan,” she said to Ryder, “that arm giving you any more trouble?”
He shook his head, smiling slightly. “That last regeneration did the trick.”
“Good. Stop breaking it, now.” She smiled briefly at Mirish and headed for her office, pausing a moment as the sickbay door hissed open. It was Jean-Luc; behind him came Geordi.
“Doctor?” said the captain.
“I’m ready for you, Captain,” she said, and together they went into her office. The doors shut behind them. “Or as ready as I’m going to be, since this is not one of my more cooperative clients.”
She sat down and turned her deskviewer so that they could both see it. “Well,” Picard said. “Obviously, the question becomes, who is he?”
“His DNA fingerprint identifies him as Mark Stewart. There is no mistake about that.”
Picard breathed out. “Unfortunately,” Beverly said, “his body does not confirm that identification.”
Picard looked at her thoughtfully. “In what way?”
Beverly touched the console, sat back, and watched the data scroll. “This is Mark Stewart’s medical record. He’s had some minor troubles.” She paused the display and pointed. “Since he’s one of the ship’s flora specialists, he winds up on a lot of away teams, and he’s picked up the occasional bug planetside. The worst was a bad case of chronic paronychia—it’s a disorder of the nail beds, usually fungal. He picked up an ‘abetter’ organism on a survey to 1212 Muscae IV: the alien mycete chummed up with a more normal fungus, something a lot of us carry in us routinely, and the two potentiated one another and infected his fingernails badly. Took me a while to knock it down. Mark also has an old complex fracture of the ulna, from falling out of a tree while taking samples.” She chuckled. “Seems the tree spoke to him.”
Picard looked surprised. “Delusional?”
“He wasn’t. The tree was, though. But that’s another story. Anyway…” Beverly touched a control; another human-body graphic came up. “This is the scan of the man on the bed out there. He shows signs of the paronychia—just as the first Mark Stewart does; his nails have some additional ridges on them because of trauma to the nail beds. But this man has no trace of the old ulnar fracture… and such things cannot be made to vanish without trace, even with our technology. Properly healed bone always shows some slight sign of the heal, the ‘callus,’ whether you help it with a protoplaser or a splint. More to the point… this man has no appendix; our own Mark Stewart does.” She sighed and sat back again. “So if you’re going to ask me, ‘Is this Mark Stewart?’… then I’m afraid the answer is yes and no.”
She watched Jean-Luc digest that. “Has he said anything?”
“He made a rude remark about having heard about what happens to my guinea pigs, which I took merely clinical note of. But he’s said nothing since: he’s become the classic unresponsive patient, though not withdrawn—I see him peeking out from under those ‘closed’ eyes every now and then. He won’t answer questions, though.”
Picard sat quiet.
“There’s something else I don’t like the look of, though I don’t know quite what to make of it. The neu
ral diagnostic routines turned up some near-systemic damage in our duplicate out there. It’s very low-level stuff—myelin-sheath damage, some minor mononeuropathies, some involvement of dermatomes… and I’m not sure what would cause such a presentation. If the trauma were more serious, I would suspect something like Hansen’s disease, or even neurotransmitter-substance abuse. But it’s not that serious, and I have no diagnosis.”
“Which annoys you,” Picard said, and smiled slightly. She made a wry face. “Doctor, I want some answers out of him.”
Beverly shook her head. “Are you going to ask me for ‘truth serum’? I’m fresh out. Better see what Deanna can do. Ah—”
The door opened; Geordi came in and stood by the desk, holding a tricorder. “Can I dump to your terminal, Doctor? I didn’t want to do it out there… our boy’s watching, though he’s trying not to look it.”
“Feel free.”
“Report, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said.
Geordi looked both annoyed and intrigued. “Captain, both his communicator, as you discovered, and his uniform are forgeries. The communicator’s just a dummy, made of base metals, no silicates or transtator components. And the thread in the uniform, though it’s replicated material, has the wrong molecular structure. Or at least, a different one from what’s in our uniforms.” Geordi raised his eyebrows. “More than that—the tailoring’s bad.”
Beverly had to smile. Picard looked momentarily wry. “I assume you’re commenting on something besides the workmanship.”
“Yes, sir. Normally the computer adjusts fit to change with the changes in your body, using your last uniform as a template. But this was a one-off, if I’m any judge. The computer that made it wasn’t sure how to tailor it: it was using some other set of algorithms, and it made a botch of it. What that guy’s got on is definitely not the uniform he usually wears. Whatever that might be.”
“Well. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to get an impostor onto my ship. I intend to get to the bottom of this—preferably humanely, but…” Picard touched his communicator. “Picard to Counselor Troi.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Please access the information presently in Dr. Crusher’s terminal regarding our intruder. Then I would be pleased to see you in sickbay to give us the benefit of your impressions.”
“Right away, sir.”
“One thing first, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said. “The first we knew of this intruder was when we detected his presence in the computer core. Why didn’t we get any alert to the fact that someone had transported aboard?”
“I don’t know, Captain.” Geordi looked embarrassed. “I’m looking into it.”
“I’ll expect answers at the department heads’ meeting later. Meanwhile”—the captain looked out through the glass—“let’s see what the counselor discovers.”
Having reviewed the security tape of Stewart’s capture, and having finished reading Dr. Crusher’s report, Deanna Troi made her way down to sickbay in a state of some unease. She knew Stewart slightly, having met him before in Ten-Forward; he had invited her down with some other crewpeople to see his plant collection, and they had spent a cheerful afternoon in one of the greenhouses. But his medical and psych profiles had always been unremarkable. He was simply a good steady crewman, not an under-achiever or overachiever; interested in research—he had been doing some extremely delicate work on one of the more impenetrable alien DNA-analogues. The image of this crewman trying to break into the computer was ridiculous… but she already knew it wasn’t him. There was no other way to read the data, no matter how impossible it seemed.
She was uneasy, though, at the appearance of this sudden extra persona wearing a body she had thought she was familiar with. As usual when she was uneasy, Deanna had “managed it away”—had gotten right down into the unease, experienced it sufficiently for it to no longer feel actively uncomfortable, and then had sealed it over temporarily. Unfortunately there had been no time to indulge herself in enough self-work to feel completely at rest. The taut sound of the captain’s voice had made it plain that time was of the essence. But she still found herself wondering what she was going to find when she went into sickbay.
She paused for a long moment outside the doors, seeing what she felt. There was a knot of tight concentration that she felt sure was the captain, Geordi, and Beverly, for it came in three different flavors—one quite fierce and concentrated, one cool and thoughtful, the third holding itself in check only with difficulty. As always, she could almost, almost hear thoughts moving on the edges of the emotions, but not quite. She had long since given up being frustrated about such things.
There was another source of emotion in the room besides the two security men—their minds, alert and a bit suspicious, she could clearly distinguish. The other—it was certainly not Stewart. Even if she hadn’t had an evaluation of his physical condition to go by, she would have known that immediately. Mark had never had such a core of suppressed fury in him. And overlaid on that was bitterness, a dreadful sense of betrayal, and a boiling desire for revenge—but all balked, all frustrated because the person having the feelings knew that there was nothing he could do about any of these things. He was trapped, he had failed somehow, and he was frightened for himself. She could feel his mind moving restlessly like a caged beast, trying to find a way out, finding nothing, repeating the motions because there was no hope, and nothing else to do.
All right, she said to herself, there’s your baseline. What are you waiting for? Still, it took Deanna a few seconds before she could make herself go in.
Ryder and Detaith looked at her as she came in, smiled at her, and moved aside to let her have easier access to the diagnostic bed. The man on it didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes—or at least didn’t seem to. At the sound of the door, he jumped internally—then, hearing the footsteps pause by his bed, he kept himself very still, a waiting feeling.
Deanna decided to take the initiative: “Hello, Mr. Stewart. Or is that really who you are?”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Picard, Crusher, and Geordi watching through the glass doors of the doctor’s office, saw them react as the man’s eyes flew open. She had little attention to spare them, though. She was too busy bracing herself against the abrupt, desperate wash of fear that came blasting out of the man, directed squarely at her.
He was physically holding himself still, and a feeling came to Deanna that translated into the image of a small creature being very quiet, quiet for its life’s sake, under the pitiless eye of a predator. He stared at her, opened his mouth, and closed it again. Inside him, utter dread and anguish fought with each other. If the emotions had words, they would have been something like, Oh, God, oh, no, they never told me.
Deanna fought for her own balance. It was poor technique to say something simply in order to alter the other’s emotions in favor of your own comfort. She was sorely tempted, but she put the urge resolutely aside. “I think you have some explaining to do,” she said, purposely holding her body in a nonthreatening position, arms by her side, so as not to encourage him into any response that he didn’t generate himself. The line was “nonguiding,” too, a good one for giving whatever free-floating anxiety was about a chance to express itself.
“As if you need explanations,” Stewart said. His tone had some bravado about it, but the bravado was frightened and ineffective. He despaired of convincing her; he certainly didn’t convince himself.
“Suppose you tell me what you were doing trying to get into the computer core.”
Stewart stared at her. He was trembling now. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Picard stand up in the next room, looking uncomprehendingly from her to the man on the diagnostic bed. Stewart began to sit up. Ryder and Detaith moved a little closer. Deanna waved them back. “No, it’s all right. I want to hear what he has to say.”
“So it was all a trick then,” Stewart said. “The whole thing. Maybe this, too. A holodeck simulation?” He stared around him, then looked back at Troi, winc
ing as if it badly frightened him to look at her directly. “Why me?” he burst out. “What have I done wrong? I’ve always been loyal.”
“Exactly how would you say you’ve been tricked?” Deanna was having a hard time keeping herself from trembling now. The man’s fear was only partly for this situation, this place; most of it was of her specifically. She could get no clear sense of why he was so afraid, but there were shapes moving in the back of his mind, lowering, something worse than just dying, worse than just torture, worse than—Deanna shied away from the inchoate images, they were so frightening. In any case, she couldn’t make them out clearly, and clarity was needed here, if nothing else.
Stewart gulped. “They told me, ‘We’re going to beam you over to another Enterprise. It’s going to look like our Enterprise, but it’s not. You’re not to speak to any of the people you meet there.’” Stewart looked away, his face crumpling. “I’m dead already.”
“Not yet,” Troi said consolingly, but the look of stark terror the man turned on her…
“Please, no,” he cried, “please, Counselor, I’m telling you—”
And again that wash of fear, and fear of her, as if she were Death standing by the bed, inescapable. She held her face quite still and nodded to him to continue.
He gulped. “They said, ‘Get into the computer core,’ and they gave me some codes, and they said, ‘These’ll get you first-level access, get these files…’” He rattled off a long string of file names.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Geordi bending over the doctor’s terminal, making notes. Deanna shook her head when he had finished. “They.”
“Commander Riker,” Stewart said, “and Mr. La Forge.”
“All right. What else?”
He looked at her mistrustfully, and all his emotions roiled in him: a man seeing someone behaving most uncharacteristically, not knowing what to make of it, and still deadly afraid.
“They said, ‘Here’s a transmitter to get out the data we want. As you access the data, it’ll feed to this—when it’s finished, just go back out into the ship and just wait. We’ll pick you up, beam you back in about six hours.’” He gulped again. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he moaned. “I did my best, I tried—I did the transmission! Why am I going to be punished now!”