O'Brien turned to her. "Freighters, transports... all civilian. None of them Federation ships." As Picard read the specifics on the padd, he frowned.
Tasha got the impression that it meant something almost... personal to him.
"It says," he announced, "that a large spatial anomaly has appeared in the Neutral Zone. In the Devron system."
Worf's response was quick and heated—no surprise, given his racial heritage. The Klingons and the Romulans, once allies, were now the most vicious of enemies.
"Perhaps it is a Romulan trick," he suggested. "A plan to lure ships into the Neutral Zone as an excuse for a military strike."
O'Brien eyed the Klingon. "I don't know about that, sir. But Starfleet's canceling our mission to Farpoint Station and ordering us to the Neutral Zone as soon as we can leave spacedock."
To Tasha, that news wasn't all bad. Sitting here in drydock had made her edgy—irritable. She couldn't wait to put this new ship of theirs through its paces, and as far as she was concerned, the Neutral Zone was as good a place to do that as any.
"No," said the captain.
She looked at him, a little taken aback. "No, sir?"
"That's correct," he told her. "We will not go to the Neutral Zone. We will proceed to Farpoint, as planned."
Tasha looked at him. She began to object—but Worf beat her to it.
"Captain," he blurted, "the security of the Federation may be at stake! How can we—"
Picard silenced him with a glance. "Man your station, Mr. Worf—or I will find someone who can." For an instant, Tasha didn't know whether the Klingon would back down or not. But a moment later, he whirled angrily and returned to the aft science station that he had been working on.
Troi frowned. "Captain, perhaps if we understood your thinking... if you could explain..."
Unflappable, Picard shook his head. "I don't intend to explain anything, Counselor..." Then he turned to Tasha, as if she represented the rest of the crew. "To anyone," he said, completing his sentence. "We will proceed to Farpoint Station, as I indicated."
For what seemed like a long time, nobody moved. There was an air of quiet tension on the bridge that nobody seemed eager to break.
Tasha tried to come to grips with the captain's intransigence. Surely, he could see that a confrontation with the Romulans—even a potential confrontation—wasn't something to be ignored. And their mission at Farpoint was hardly an urgent one.
Now that she thought about it, Picard had been acting strangely almost since she met him. First, she'd caught him staring at her on the shuttle. Then, in the shuttlebay, he'd given the red-alert order even when there was no imminent danger. And finally, in the observation lounge, he'd forgotten that she was chief of security.
She'd chalked up his staring to some distraction connected with his new assignment. The red-alert order... well, at the time, she'd imagined he just wanted to keep them on their toes. And as much as she'd resented the mix-up in protocol, it seemed like an honest mistake —if one that a top-notch officer could be expected to avoid.
Now, however, there was this. A directive to disregard Starfleet orders. An option within the captain's purview, to be sure—but one that was rarely exercised, and only after careful consideration.
Picard turned to O'Brien. "Now, if I'm not mistaken, Chief, we're having some problems with the warp plasma inducers."
O'Brien seemed surprised. "That's right, sir. But how did..."
"I think I know a way to get them back on-line," the captain continued. "You're with me, Chief." To Tasha, he said, "We'll be in main engineering if you need one of us."
She nodded and watched the two of therr, exit into the turbolift. No sooner were they gone than she saw Worf make his way toward her. He came close enough to keep anyone else from hearing what he was saying.
"I do not understand," muttered the Klingon. "The Romulans may be planning an attack, and he does not seem to care." A pause. "Are you certain this is the same man who commanded the Stargazer? Who defeated the Ferengi at Maxia Zeta?"
Tasha shrugged. "As far as I know," she replied.
He grunted. "What are you going to do?"
Indeed, what would she do? Alert Starfleet to Picard's contrary ways? Or follow the instructions he had laid out for them?
"I'm going to do what I'm told," she answered finally. "And prepare to go to Farpoint."
That was obviously not the response Worf wanted to hear. Still, it was the only one she was prepared to make... for now.
Picard sat in the chief engineer's office, at a console, with Miles O'Brien standing beside him. Out in main engineering, in the shadow of the warp reactor, several crewmen were getting the ship ready to go.
But what the captain was doing was even more essential—a job that would have taken many hours, under normal circumstances. Fortunately, he remembered what the problem was—and knew how to take care of it. That was one advantage of having lived in the future.
Handing O'Brien a padd, the captain sat back in his chair. He watched for a moment as the redheaded man looked it over.
"I've bypassed the secondary plasma inducer," Picard explained. "Now I want to begin realigning the power grid to the specifications I've given you. Any questions?"
O'Brien's eyes narrowed as he pondered what the captain was calling for. When he looked up again, there was a certain amount of insecurity in his expression.
"You have to realize, sir... this isn't exactly my area of expertise. The chief engineer should be making these modifications."
"But the chief engineer isn't on board yet," Picard pointed out. "Nor will she be for some time. And even if she were, I asked you to do the job." O'Brien still looked less than confident. He seemed to need a boost of some sort.
Leaning back in his chair, the captain added, "Chief... trust me. I know you can do this. All those years you spent as a child building model starship engines represented time well spent."
O'Brien stared at him as if Picard had just confessed to being a Ferengi on his mother's side. "How did you know that, sir?"
Abruptly, the captain realized that he'd put his foot in his mouth. O'Brien had confided that information to him, he remembered now... but in a conversation that wouldn't take place until years hence.
Picard cleared his throat to cover his reaction. "From… your Starfleet records, of course. Where else could I have learned such a thing?"
The other man looked impressed. "Really, sir? I didn't think anyone studied those things so closely."
"Really," said the captain, relieved that O'Brien seemed to believe him. He would have to be more careful about such things if he was to accomplish anything in this time period. "Now, about that power grid..."
O'Brien smiled. Apparently, he felt a bit more equal to the task, now that his ego had been massaged. "Yes, sir, I'll get right on it." Taking the padd, he headed across the engineering section. Picard watched as the chief recruited several of the other crewmen on duty, taking them away from less important work.
"Fletcher," called O'Brien. "Tell Munoz and Lee to get up here right away. We have to realign the entire power grid. We're all going to be burning the midnight oil on this one."
"That would be inadvisable," came a reply from a part of engineering that the captain couldn't see. Getting up from what would be Geordi La Forge's desk in due time—though it would belong to several others before him--he walked over to the office door and peered around it.
"Ah," he said softly, understanding the remark now that he knew who had made it.
As he looked on, Commander Data approached O'Brien. From the looks of it, they were meeting for the first time.
"Excuse me?" replied the chief.
"If you attempt to ignite a petroleum product on this ship at zero-hundred hours," the android warned him, "it will activate the fire-suppression system, which will seal off this entire compartment."
Picard had forgotten how naive Data had been when he first arrived on the Enterprise... how innocent and literal
. It was amazing how far he had come in the years since.
In the meantime, O'Brien seemed to be at a loss.
"Sir," he ventured, "that was just an expression."
The android looked at him. "An expression of what?"
The redhead groped for a response. "Er... a figure of speech, you know? I was trying to tell Mr. Fletcher here that... we were going to be working late."
Data tilted his head to the side as he absorbed the information. "I see," he replied at last. "Then to 'burn the midnight oil' implies late work?"
O'Brien smiled a little tentatively. "That's right."
"I am curious," said the android. "What is the etymology of that idiom? How did it come to be used in contemporary language?"
The chief recoiled a bit at that one. "I don't believe I know, sir. If you like, I suppose I could..."
Finally, the captain came to O'Brien's rescue.
"Commander Data," he enthused, "welcome aboard. It's good to see you." And it was. Picard smiled at him warmly, genuinely glad to have someone here he could completely rely on.
The android turned and acknowledged the captain's presence. No doubt, thought Picard, he didn't comprehend why this man he had just met was being so friendly to him. But, like a lot of things, he seemed to take it in stride.
"It is... reasonably good to see you, too, sir," Data replied.
The captain indicated a wall panel near the warp core with a tilt of his head. "I could use your assistance with the infusor array. There are a few adjustments I'd like to make." Data's head moved ever so slightly. "Certainly," he said.
Together, they moved to the wall panel and pried it open. Picard pointed to a conduit.
"As you can see, we're having a bit of difficulty here. Something seems not to be working very well, though we've been unable to determine what it is..."
The android scrutinized the mechanism behind the panel. "This will require a completely new field induction subprocessor," he concluded. He turned to the captain. "It appears that we will be required to... ignite the midnight petroleum, sir."
Picard smiled. Data learned quickly, didn't he? Focusing his attention on the mechanism, the captain…
... found himself staring at a darkened monitor.
Looking around, he saw that he was in Beverly's office, back in what he had come to think of as the "present." And as if to emphasize his lack of control over his existence, he was still in his bathrobe.
"Jean-Luc... what's going on?" He turned to see Beverly herself standing at the entrance to the office. Riker was standing behind her, his eyes asking the same question that the doctor had asked out loud.
"It happened again," he told them.
Beverly's brow creased. "A time shift?"
He nodded. "Yes."
She held up a hand. "Don't move," she told him— and disappeared. A moment later, she came back with a medical tricorder and used it to scan Picard's head.
"What happened?" inquired Riker.
The captain sighed. "It's still a little vague... but I can remember more of it this time. I think the more often I shift between time periods, the more memory I retain." He stopped to gather his thoughts. "First, I was in what appeared to be the future... years from now. Then I was in the past again... right before our first mission."
Having finished her scan, Beverly read the results. Her eyes narrowed at something she saw there.
"What is it?" asked the first officer.
The doctor shook her head in disbelief. "I scanned his temporal lobe—and compared it with what I found just a few minutes ago. There's a thirteen percent increase in neurotransmitter activity in his hippocampus." She looked directly at Picard. "Within a matter of minutes, you accumulated over two days' worth of memories."
"Two days?" repeated Riker. "But that's..."
"Impossible?" Picard suggested. He nodded. "Unless you've spent a lot of time somewhere else between ticks of the clock."
He smiled grimly. Finally, they had some proof of what he was experiencing. He wasn't crazy—he was actually traveling through time.
CHAPTER 9
The habak was a rectangular room in a high tower, which served the Indians of Darvon V as a ceremonial chamber. The only way to enter it was via a wooden ladder that came through a hole in the floor. Another ladder led through a hole in the ceiling, which opened the place to the long, pale rays of the sun.
There was also a firepit. Though it hadn't been used for several days, it still gave off a thick, acrid smell of burned wood.
Wesley Crusher had spent the morning studying the sacred hangings that decorated the walls of the habak.
He had studied them before; he would study them many more times before his journey—or this part of it—was done.
And the funny thing was, as many times as he scrutinized the woven wall hangings and the colorful symbols that populated them, he never grew bored. There always seemed to be some level of meaning he hadn't conternplated yet... some subtle, new wisdom to be discovered in them.
"Wesley?"
The young man turned and saw that the Traveler had joined him in the chamber. Wes hadn't seen him enter, but that was nothing unusual. The Traveler didn't come and go as normal people did.
More and more as time went on, neither did Wesley himself. As he practiced translating himself into other planes of existence, he was gradually eliminating the need to walk anywhere... or, in this case, to climb a ladder.
Of course, most of the time, he walked and climbed anyway. It just felt better. And a part of him hoped that it always would.
"Yes, Traveler?" he replied.
The being from Tau Ceti eyed him with an intensity that surprised him. "Do you not sense it?" he asked.
Sense... it? Wesley shook his head. "No… I don't. What is it I'm supposed to sense?"
Rather than answer out loud, the Traveler moved to one of the wall hangings and pointed. The young man followed his teacher's finger to a picture of something bright and multicolored—something Wesley couldn't readily identify. What's more, he was reasonably certain that the image hadn't been there before.
Opening his mind to it, he wove himself into the picture's reality—inspecting it not only on this plane, but on several others. He was intrigued to see how pervasive it was, how it seemed to transcend every layer of existence he touched.
Then, urged by an instinct he couldn't name or pretend to understand, he turned to another image near it. This one was more easily recognizable. It was the Enterprise. But like the burst of color, he found, it existed on more than one plane.
Suddenly, Wesley got it. When he turned back to the Traveler, it was with a weight on his heart. "No," he said. "I can't let it happen."
"It is already happening," his teacher advised him.
"Then I've got to stop it," he said.
The Traveler smiled benignly at him. "Then you believe it is wise for you to intervene?"
The young man's mouth went dry as dust. "Traveler... they're my friends. My family. How can I fail to intervene?"
His teacher continued to smile. "Not so long ago, it appeared that there would be violence in this village. Do you remember?"
Wesley nodded. How could he forget? The Indians who lived here had made prisoners of some Cardassians, and Captain Picard had been duty-bound to free them. For a few tense moments, the Federation security team had squared off against the villagers, and it seemed like a good bet that there would be blood spilled before the day was out.
He had wanted to do something back then—but the Traveler had convinced him not to. He'd said, "They must find their own destinies, Wesley. It is not our place to interfere." And then: "Have faith in their abilities to solve their problems on their own." Sure enough, the captain found a way to avoid disaster that day. But was it sheer luck that things had worked out... or did the Traveler know in advance that it would happen that way? Even after all his studies, Wesley still wasn't entirely sure.
"Is it like... the Prime Directire?" he asked out l
oud. "Are we forbidden to get involved?"
His teacher shrugged a bit. "There are always laws, Wesley. Some are self-imposed, and others are imposed upon us--but they are laws nonetheless."
The human frowned as he glanced again at the burst of color. "But aren't there times when a law needs to be broken? Aren't there exceptions?"
The Traveler tilted his head in a way that made him look a little like Data. "Perhaps. But to whom should we entrust that decision? Who has the wisdom to know when we should make an exception?"
Wesley sighed. It was like the Prime Directive. "Then I can't do a thing to help them? To tell them what's going on?"
His teacher gazed at him sympathetically. "If I were you," he replied finally, "I would not interfere... even if it were within my power."
The human walked over to the bench that was built into the western wall and sat down heavily. Running his fingers through his hair, he breathed a ragged breath.
"Morn..." he whispered.
Riker shook his head as he sat in his customary place at the observation lounge's dark, reflective table, surrounded by the ship's other senior officers. He'd seen his share of fantastic phenomena, but this one took the cake.
The idea that the captain was traveling through time, the victim of some capricious agency as yet beyond their understanding... it was bizarre, to say the least. And more than a little unsettling.
As the first officer gazed at Picard, he had the feeling that the captain might pop in and out of their reality at any time—an entire journey, perhaps two or three days' worth, completed in the space of an eyeblink.
Still, it wasn't anyone's imagination. It was happening. Dr. Crusher had shown him proof of that—and they'd had their run-ins with Time before, so they all knew that temporal travel was possible.
Riker might have felt better if they'd had a little more to go on—some data they could sink their collective teeth into. Unfortunately, they had nothing of the kind.
But then, that was the purpose of this meeting, wasn't it? To see what they could nail down with regard to Picard's time-shifting. And then to see what—if anything—they could do about it.
Star Trek - [TNG] - All Good Things... Page 6