by Diane Duane
“Possibly even longer,” Data said. “Ship designs aside, there is no guarantee that time is running at the same speed in that universe as in this one, though odds are for it—the congruencies are otherwise generally very close. But in either case, Geordi and I concur. The information is going to have to be obtained from that other ship, one way or another.”
“You think you can get at their communications?” Picard said. “Do you think you can get at their computer remotely?”
“Not a chance, Captain,” Geordi said. “Someone is going to have to go over there.”
Picard saw the set expression on Geordi’s face and was sure he was thinking, Almost certainly me.
“Our situations are near-mirrors of each other, too,” Geordi said. “They want us for something. We can’t say what, now… but there’s a chance that, when we get at their computers, we can find out what they want as well as finding out how to get ourselves home. It’s a risk… but one we can’t afford not to take.”
Picard sat quiet a moment. “I must agree,” he said at last. “We will have to devise a way to put an away team aboard that ship.”
Riker nodded. “Not a large one. Two, maximum. I would think one of them would have to be Mr. La Forge, since the work mostly involves the computer, and that’s chiefly his area of expertise.”
“I concur,” said Picard. “And the other?”
Riker looked reluctant. His eyes slid to Troi. She pursed her lips and nodded.
“We certainly know that I’m there,” she said to Picard, “and that apparently I’m someone to be reckoned with. My empathic sense will certainly be useful as a warning device. For both reasons, it makes sense.”
“Any further choices should probably wait for our first intelligence run,” Data said. “Captain Kirk reported that he ran the crew roster and found differences. Crewmen who were aboard his own Enterprise were missing or had physical differences—others were present who did not exist aboard his own ship. And there were some whom he had simply not met, whom he met there for the first time. We will have to do some analysis of visuals, and ship’s roster if we can get it, to see who is there first.”
Troi looked up. “I could ask our ‘guest,’” she said with a slight glitter in her eye.
Picard looked at her. “Counselor, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you had a very carefully concealed mean streak.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Captain, you do know me better. And the dreadful fear I sense from that man every time I go near him—” She looked sober. “But I would suggest to you at the moment that we need all the tools, or weapons, that we can get. In this particular situation, this is a tool that I wouldn’t be ashamed to use. My range varies, as you know, but I am still trying to shake the effects of our closest brush with that ship. It was a psychic midden. I support us getting out of here for personal reasons as well as the obvious practical ones.”
“As long as those personal reasons don’t contaminate your performance,” Picard said.
She smiled at him ruefully. “I’m in no danger of that as yet. But living a life here, if that ship is typical of the surroundings…” She shuddered. “No, thank you. In any case, I think our guest will tell us what we ask.”
“I wish you could ask him what his ship wants of us,” Picard said.
“I don’t think he’s privy to that, Captain. I got a general sense from him that people in his echelons were not told any more than they needed to be told… and indeed he was rather resentful about that, that he wasn’t warned, or warned thoroughly enough, about what he was going to find when he got here.”
Picard nodded and said to Geordi, “Now, as to method…”
Geordi looked thoughtful. “We could hitch a ride back with our friend’s little device, Captain: the transport platform.”
Picard shook his head. “Can you guarantee that the thing is carrying enough power to store your pattern as well? Are you willing to bet your life on it?”
Geordi looked uncomfortable.
“No,” Picard said. “We’ll do this our way.”
Worf looked up then. “Possibly, if the alternate Ensign Stewart’s original aboard our ship were willing to be sent there in the alternate’s stead…”
Picard considered that very briefly, then shook his head again. “I would not send someone into that situation without most complete preparation, and I doubt he could be prepared completely enough, or, more to the point, that such a course of action would be very fair to him.”
“The honor he would accrue would be considerable,” said Worf.
Picard laughed softly. “Mr. Worf, no doubt it would, but I think we must look in other directions. Mr. La Forge, you and Chief O’Brien are going to have to try to work something out.”
“At least we have the advantage of knowing what their transporter waveform looks like,” O’Brien said. “We won’t trigger their systems when we beam in.”
“Unless they’re suspecting we might try something like this,” Geordi said, “and have changed their waveform, too.”
O’Brien rolled his eyes. “Sure you’re a pessimist. We can arrange a negotiable tuned-band match if you’re worried.”
“See to it,” Picard said before the two of them got involved in one of the technology duels they loved. “Are there any other ramifications to be considered?”
“One more, I believe,” Data said, folding his hands. “While we do not have the same kind of time limit for our intervention that the original Enterprise crew had, we may have another. Some theories of multiuniversal structure hold that the universes in a given ‘sheaf are not held rigidly in place in relationship to one another, like the pages of a book, but that they move with relation to one another, in patterns which may or may not recur, one universe sometimes being ‘closer,’ or easier of access to another given one, sometimes farther away. There is a possibility that this transfer has happened here and now because that other Enterprise was waiting for the congruence to be closer than usual.”
Picard blinked in surprise. “Do you mean they were shadowing us?”
“No,” Data said, “merely going about their patrol schedule—since we are in the same ‘sheaf,’ our movements can logically be expected to mirror each other’s much of the time. However, in any case, I would not care to linger here too long—for if the universes move too far apart, the transfer might become more difficult, more dangerous—or even impossible until the present pattern moves into place again. And we have no way of knowing when that might be.”
Picard considered that. “Your point is taken. Speed now becomes of the essence. The sooner we’re out of here, the better—and the better our chances of getting out at all.” He looked around the table and saw nothing but agreement in the faces there.
“Dismissed,” the captain said.
CHAPTER 5
“It’s not going to be easy,” Geordi said.
Soft laughter came from behind him. “If it were,” Eileen said, “you wouldn’t be happy.”
He turned around, surprised to see her coming toward him through the trees. “I thought you were off duty.”
Lieutenant Hessan laughed. “I am. And so are you.”
Geordi shook his head. “Not at the moment, I’m not. The captain has a problem he needs solved.”
She looked around the forest in which Geordi had been strolling: big old pines, towering up a hundred feet at least, and growing closely enough together that they almost shut out the sky. Above them was some summer noontime, but down here, where they walked in silence on soft pine needles, the effect was a cool noncommittal twilight, with only here and there a ray of sunlight lancing down. “Bad one, huh?” she said. “Can’t see the forest for the trees?”
“Huh,” Geordi said, and smiled. “No… I just come here when I need to think, and staring at the status table isn’t helping.”
She fell in beside him. “Tell me about it.”
“Well, you saw the routines I was starting to set up. ‘Get at their
computer,’ the captain said. But even in our own ship it wouldn’t be so easy. Over there—there’s no knowing what kind of locks they’re going to have on sensitive material. Or even whether they would be the same areas locked down. So I’ve got to find a way to get into the system that will also take me around the locks. Systems sabotage… it’s the only way.”
“Nasty.”
“More than just that. It’s a bizarre feeling. Usually it’s all I can do to keep things running right around here. Now, to be working out ways to make them go wrong…” Geordi shook his head.
“If I were you, I’d try to enjoy it. Think of the times the computers have gone down right in the middle of something crucial, and how much you wanted to kick them.” Eileen grinned with relish. “Well, now’s your chance. And it won’t even be your own computers you’re kicking. I’d kick them every way I could and run home laughing.”
“It’s the running home that concerns me,” Geordi said ruefully. But a slow smile spread over his face. “You’ve got a point, though.”
“So. Start from the top.”
Geordi nodded, scuffing at a pinecone in front of him and kicking it ahead of them as they walked. “We have three main computer cores,” he said. “Two in the main hull, one in the engineering hull. They update one another every forty-two milliseconds, so that each of them carries all the ship’s data, and any one of them can run the whole ship by itself.”
“The usual protective redundancy,” Hessan said. “So you’ve decided not to get at the computer in an obvious way, by one of the access terminals: you want to get at a core directly. And do what?”
“Fail one of them out of the system, probably by killing the subspace generator in the core, or just making it act up. The other computers would instantly throw the failed one out of the system and shout for help.”
Hessan nodded. “Meaning you. Or the other ship’s version of you.”
Geordi nodded, kicking the pinecone again as they came to it. “I keep thinking about that,” he said softly. “Who am I over there?”
“Don’t let it distract you. Let’s assume that your counterpart is called for, and you or the team with you take him out of commission and get to work. What then?”
Geordi looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded as they walked. “When the core is off-line and put into repair mode, almost all the lower-level security routines are automatically disabled to let the diagnostics work. I can then access a large amount of data and store it down to iso chips.”
“‘A large amount,’” Eileen said, smiling grimly. “How many chips can you carry, Geordi? You’ve got 256 banks of 144 chips each in that core. And how are you going to know which data to download?”
“That’s the main problem. I’ve got the computer working on an ‘expert’ scan-for program: looking for loaded contexts and phraseology, certain kinds of mathematical and physics statements. Hwiii has made some suggestions and so has Data. Stuff in the program, squirt it into the core, get a fast reading of how many files have multiple matches of text—then do a hands-on assessment.”
“That’s where you’re going to lose most of your time. How long are you planning to spend at this? How long are you going to be able to keep your counterpart on ice?”
“How long do we dare?” Geordi said, pausing to watch a black admiral butterfly soar by, leisurely and unconcerned. “But I have to get as much as I can—winnow it out, then squirt it out, probably. And as soon as I do that, the game’s up. I’ll have to get away however I can, meet the rest of the team.”
“You don’t think you’re going to make it,” Hessan said softly.
Geordi stopped, kicking gently at the pinecone again, scuffing it away and not going after it. “It’s bizarre. I’d be less scared to go aboard a Borg ship than I feel about going aboard this one. Because it’s familiar. Because it should be us—and it’s not Whatever we are over there—we’re not what we ought to be, or so it seems.”
Hessan sighed and strolled over to the pinecone. “How many chips, do you think?”
“Two hundred fifty-six terabytes per chip.” He raised his eyebrows. “Ten or fifteen.”
“You could piggyback them. A little surgery: they can take parallel architecture. Tell the replicator to sandwich on another layer of storage solid, with an intervening layer of nutef, or some other insulator. That would bring the chips up to five hundred twelve ters each, and you could still take fifteen if you felt the need. But you’re going to want to transmit everything, you said.”
Geordi nodded. “I’m bringing a small sealed-squirt transponder. I can hook it into the subspace generators in the core and lock onto a securable frequency—then narrow the squirt down so it’ll pierce even erected shields, encrypt it, and blast the whole business back home in a matter of a few seconds.”
Hessan nodded. “Better let someone else do the encryption key.”
Geordi looked at her in surprise. “Why?”
She shrugged. “If the you over there is really like you, he might be able to figure it out, if you devised it. Whereas if I do it…”
Geordi smiled at her. “Now I understand why Commander Riker’s been following you around.”
She blushed, and he saw the bloom of infrared quite clearly and refused to comment.
“Oh, yeah?” she said quite coolly.
“Yeah. Because you like to manage… but you make it look nurturing.” He grinned, and slowly, she did, too.
“What do you mean ‘look’ nurturing? I nurture just fine.”
“Yeah,” Geordi said innocently. “I heard you with the warp engines last week. ‘Is Mummy’s naughty little antimatter generator having a tummyache in its matter inlet conditioner? Now, now, have a nice stream of deuterium and everything will be—’”
Eileen clouted Geordi upside the head, not hard enough to unseat his visor, but hard enough to make him see stars that weren’t the usual ones. “When I was finished,” Eileen inquired sweetly, “did it work?”
“Absolutely it worked, would it have dared not to?” Geordi said, enthusiastic, and half-choked with laughter.
“Well, then,” Eileen said, and leaned against the nearest pine tree with her arms folded and a satisfied expression on her face. “I’ll do you a crypt key and store it in the computer for you. Don’t peek at it.”
Geordi nodded. “Can you do that tonight?”
“Only after you come down to Ten-Forward with me and have a cup of coffee or something before you go back to work. I refuse to leave you out here getting lost in the woods and worrying yourself.”
From off in the depths of the forest came a long, low howl, almost an amused sound. Geordi grinned at Eileen’s sudden reflexive look of alarm. “Arch,” he said. The gateway into the corridor appeared, and he headed over that way. “Come on, Lieutenant… you can come back later with a picnic basket if you like. Grandma’s house is just down that path.”
Eileen hit him again, from behind, though not very hard. Chuckling, Geordi headed out into the hall and out of range.
* * *
Will Riker had long since learned that, most especially when he was nervous, micromanaging his people was no good. In any case, the captain knew they were doing their best and had gone off to get what sleep he could—so that was one worry off Riker’s mind, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, the ball was in Mr. La Forge’s court now, and hanging over his shoulder wouldn’t help… no matter how much Riker wished it would. He had therefore taken himself out of the way for at least the next few hours and had made himself busy micromanaging someone else: Worf.
Since bringing the extra Stewart to sickbay, Worf had clearly been looking for something to shoot, damage, or otherwise work out his concern on. Riker knew this mood in him of old and had some practice in dealing with it before it got out of hand. Now, therefore, when the door to Worf’s quarters opened at his signal, he put his head in and said, “Come on, I want you to see this.”
“What is ‘this’?” Worf was sitting behind his desk, lo
oking distressed. Riker strolled around and looked: Worf was rerunning a display of the seizure of Stewart.
“Problems?”
Worf frowned. “I am not sure we acted with maximum efficiency.”
Riker laughed out loud. “Worf, are you kidding? You acted exactly correctly. You’re just upset about this new threat to the ship. A big threat, and you can’t do anything about it.”
“It is a considerable danger. I desire to anticipate—”
“You don’t have enough data. Leave it be. I want you to come see a riot.”
Worf looked up at Riker quizzically. “On board this ship?” he said, getting up. “And there have been no reports—”
“Come on,” Riker said, and headed for the door. “Deck eleven,” he said as they got into the turbolift.
A few moments later they stepped out and made their way down the hallway toward one of the main holodecks.
“What is this about?” Worf said, sounding suspicious.
“Another installment of our opera studies,” Riker said mildly. Riker had been so fascinated that Klingons had opera at all that Worf had some time ago begun broadening his experience of it, tutoring Riker through the contextual barbed-wire tangles of the Old School classics such as The Warrior’s Revenge and Tl-Hahkh’s Way, as well as the more modern, outré, and accessible works such as X and Y. In return, Riker had started introducing Worf to some of the older Terran works (though he had been slightly startled to find that Worf considered such works as Pique Dame and Der fliegende Holländer “easy listening” and had lately been finding profound meaning in the Viennese operettas, which Riker had always found more provocative of high blood sugar than anything else.