by Gene DeWeese
The glint of a tear in her eye as she momentarily looked away startled him even more than all that had gone before, but before he could respond, it was gone, leaving him to wonder if it had existed only in his mind.
“I shouldn’t have brought this up, Captain,” she said, raising her eyes to meet his. Her voice was once again the way it had always been, her face once again a neutral mask. “There’s nothing you can do, nothing anyone can do, not yet.”
“Perhaps not,” he said earnestly, “but you can at least talk to me about it. I can’t pretend to understand these feelings you say you have, these premonitions or whatever it is that you can see that no one else can. All I know is that, in my experience, there is no problem so frightening that sharing it doesn’t at least make it easier to bear.”
She shook her head almost imperceptibly, then lay a hand lightly on his forearm as if she were comforting him. “You’re most likely right, Captain,” she said with a resigned smile, “but there simply isn’t anything more to share. I’ve already told you virtually everything there is to tell. And there’s nothing I can do, nothing you can do, nothing anyone can do—but wait.”
“Are you positive about that, Guinan? You say Captain Scott is the focus of these ‘feelings,’ so perhaps for once the obvious approach might be worth trying. Tell him what you feel. Find out what he says.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but telling Captain Scott about these feelings is the one thing I know I can’t do.” She grimaced. “I should not even have told you.”
“Is there a reason you can’t tell him?” Picard had long ago learned to trust Guinan’s unexplained intuitions, but there still were times when he couldn’t help but think that she could handle them more…pragmatically. “Or is that restriction part of the ‘feeling’?”
“Something like that, yes.” She shook her head again, sighing faintly.
“Is there anything in your feelings that prohibit me from talking to Captain Scott?”
She was silent a moment, as if listening to some inner voice, then shrugged. “As you wish, Captain.”
He watched her for a moment, half expecting her to change her mind, but she continued to stand silently, enigmatically.
“Captain Scott,” Picard said, tapping his combadge. Scott, though he had protested he was merely a civilian passenger, had been issued his own combadge for the duration of his stay on the Enterprise.
But there was no reply.
As he tried a second time, then a third, Guinan turned to watch him, a frown beginning to narrow her eyes.
“Computer,” he snapped as a fourth attempt went unacknowledged, “locate Captain Scott.”
“Captain Scott is no longer aboard the Enterprise,” the matter-of-fact voice of the computer informed him tonelessly.
Seven
“COMPUTER, HOW and when did Captain Scott leave the Enterprise?” Picard asked, turning abruptly and moving toward the ready room door and the bridge beyond.
“He departed aboard the shuttlecraft Goddard twenty-one-point-three minutes ago,” the computer informed him as the door hissed open.
With Guinan gliding close behind, Picard strode onto the bridge. “Mr. Data, why was I not informed of Captain Scott’s departure?”
Data hesitated—that alone told Picard that something was wrong. “Captain Scott’s departure was on your authorization, sir.”
Riker stood and relinquished the captain’s chair. “I take it you didn’t supply that authorization?”
“No, Number One.”
“The Goddard is no longer within sensor range, Captain,” Data said.
“Display route taken by the Goddard.”
The starfield on the viewscreen blinked out and was replaced by another, this one with the Enterprise at its center and a string-straight, blinking path leading away. A moment later a series of figures appeared along the length of the blinking path, all extracted from the record the starship’s sensors constantly and automatically made of all objects in its vicinity. The Goddard, the figures indicated, had gone into warp drive within seconds of clearing the Enterprise shuttlebay. It had immediately exceeded the shuttlecraft’s design parameters by hitting warp three-point-one.
At a distance of approximately six billion kilometers from its starting point, ten billion from the Enterprise’s current position, the path ended.
But nothing, according to the sensors, was at the end of the path.
The thought that the shuttlecraft might have been destroyed darted through Picard’s mind, but there was no indication of any significant energy release anywhere along the path, certainly not at its end.
Picard turned to Guinan, who had lowered herself gingerly into Counselor Troi’s unoccupied chair on his left. “Guinan? What do your feelings have to say about this?”
“They’re saying the same as before, but even more intensely. Something is happening that—”
“Captain,” Data broke in, “sensors are detecting a subspace variance consistent with a cloaked ship, either Klingon or Romulan, moving at warp speed.”
“Tag its location on the screen,” Picard ordered. A moment later a flickering vector arrow appeared several billion kilometers from the far end of the Goddard’s indicated path. According to the figures that flickered in time with the arrow, it was moving at warp eight.
“Intercept course, maximum warp,” Picard snapped to Ensign Raeger at the conn, then added unnecessarily, “Don’t lose it.” Unless whatever it was, Romulan or Klingon, was employing a brand-new form of cloaking technology, there was little danger it could elude the Enterprise sensors.
He turned again to Guinan. “Does this help clarify anything?” he asked. When she only shook her head, he darted a look around the bridge. “Theories, anyone? Suggestions? Will? Lieutenant Worf?”
“It makes no sense, Captain,” Riker said, still watching the screen, “but it certainly looks as if the Goddard was intercepted by a cloaked Klingon or Romulan ship.”
“This deep in Federation space?”
“I told you it didn’t make sense,” Riker said with a grimace, “but what else could it be?”
“It is Klingon, Captain, not Romulan,” Data spoke up. The flickering vector arrow had been replaced on the screen by a solid dot, which expanded into a tiny but equally solid image of a ship. “It is, in fact, a bird-of-prey.” Data paused, looking from the image on the screen to a host of sensor readouts. “However, it is nearly a century old,” he added. “That model has not been produced since the early twenty-fourth-century.”
“Crazier and crazier,” Riker muttered.
“Open a channel, Mr. Worf,” Picard said.
“No response, Captain,” Worf said a few seconds later. “However, readings indicate their communications system is activated.”
“They’re listening but they aren’t responding?”
“Apparently.”
The tiny image of the bird-of-prey vanished from the viewscreen.
“They have altered the phase of the cloaking field,” Data said. “I am attempting to compensate.”
“Mr. Worf, where would their last known course take them?”
“Directly to the nearest star, Captain,” Worf said. “The Arhennius system is less than three hours away at warp eight. It contains no habitable worlds.”
“And beyond the Arhennius system?”
“The next star on a direct line beyond Arhennius is approximately fifteen days distant, but a bird-of-prey of that vintage could not possibly maintain such a speed for more than a few hours. Anything above warp six was used only for emergencies of short duration.”
“That is not entirely true, Captain,” Data said. “In his memoirs of the House of Gorm, B’ator claims to have maintained warp eight-point-one for three days in order to take part in the final battle of—”
“The House of Gorm,” Worf interrupted scornfully, “is far better known for ‘making claims’ than for the battles it actually fought.”
“Let’s not lose si
ght of our primary goal here, gentlemen,” Picard reminded them, but even as he spoke, the bird-of-prey reappeared on the viewscreen.
“Compensation successful, Captain,” Data said.
“It is still following the same course,” Worf said, “and ignoring our hails.”
“Mr. Data, can we be certain that the Goddard is being transported in the bird-of-prey?”
“We cannot. The altered cloaking field still produces a great deal of distortion. There appears to be a smaller vessel of some kind present, but it is impossible to determine anything further—except that it is completely powered down. No systems are operating.”
“How long until we overtake it?”
Suddenly, Guinan’s hand fell on Picard’s arm, gripping it tightly. “You have to overtake it before it reaches Arhennius, Captain,” she said with quiet emphasis.
Startled, Picard turned toward her. “What is going to happen at Arhennius, Guinan?”
“I don’t know. All I know now is that that is where it all starts. The Enterprise must be there.”
“To stop it? To help it along? What?”
She shook her head, her fingers tightening even more on his arm. “I truly don’t know. But we must be there. That much I do know.”
“And if we aren’t?”
“You’re wasting time, Captain!” she said, a completely uncharacteristic flare of anger in her voice.
Or perhaps fear, Picard thought, a shiver momentarily gripping his own spine. The only time he had heard anything even remotely like this in her voice or seen her demeanor change so radically was when she had encountered Q, the thought of which only intensified his uneasiness. If there was anyone—or any thing—he did not want to ever again be involved with, it was that often childish and always infuriating creature of incalculable power and infinite perversity.
“Will we overtake the Klingon ship in time, Ensign?”
“I can’t be certain, Captain,” Raeger said, not looking up from the controls. “But we won’t be more than a minute behind when it reaches the Arhennius system.”
“Mr. La Forge,” Picard said abruptly, activating the link to engineering, “can you give us any more? Safely?”
“I doubt it, Captain, but I can try to tweak the warp core alignment and possibly the matter-antimatter ratio. Just don’t expect the sort of miracle Captain Scott was famous for on the original Enterprise.”
“Understood, Commander.”
In the end, the chief engineer managed to cut the time to Arhennius by approximately sixty-five seconds, but at the same time the fleeing bird-of-prey inched its own speed up, cutting over forty seconds from its own arrival time.
They would still be twenty seconds behind when Scott reached the Arhennius system.
With Arhennius now a glowing ball on the Enterprise viewscreen, the Klingon ship abruptly deactivated its cloaking field.
“Details, Mr. Data,” Picard snapped a fraction of a second after seeing the image on the viewscreen leap into full clarity.
“Its present course will take it through the solar corona. Its shields may not be enough to protect it. Arhennius is only a quarter more massive than Sol, but it has more than twice the energy output.”
“The Goddard—” Picard began, but Data continued.
“The Goddard is indeed in the bird-of-prey’s cargo hold. It is still powered down. There is a single, humanoid life form on the Klingon ship’s bridge.”
“Not within the Goddard?”
“That is correct, Captain.”
“And no Klingons? Anywhere in either ship?”
“As I said, Captain, there is a single humanoid life form.”
“Captain Scott?”
“His presence would be entirely consistent with the readings,” Data said.
“Then why—Mr. Worf, try again to open a channel.”
“A channel is open, sir, but there is no response.”
“But he can hear us?”
“If he is listening.”
“Very well.” Picard paused, pulling in a breath. “Captain Scott, if you are indeed on board the fleeing bird-of-prey, please respond. This is Captain Picard of the Enterprise. You are welcome to any assistance we can provide.”
There was still no response. Data glanced up from the ops station readouts. “The life form’s pulse has accelerated to an unacceptable level.”
“Captain Scott, will you at least explain what you are hoping to accomplish? Our sensors show your ship heading directly into the star’s corona. It is doubtful that your shields can protect you.”
Still no response.
“The ship is once again accelerating,” Data announced. “It will be entering the star’s corona in—”
“You must follow him, Captain!” Guinan said abruptly.
“We are following him, Guinan. As soon as we’re within transporter range, we’ll beam him out.”
“You don’t understand! You won’t get the chance. Arhennius itself is his goal. He intends to use its gravity well to slingshot back in time.”
Picard blinked. Suddenly he saw Scott’s earlier actions in a whole new light, particularly his seemingly nostalgic accessing of the logs of previous incarnations of the Enterprise. Those logs, Picard realized belatedly, contained not just the logs of the Enterprise itself but those of all Enterprise personnel—even when they served on other ships!
Including the Bounty, the Klingon ship that had carried Scott and Kirk and the others back to the twentieth century.
The Bounty, a bird-of-prey very much like the one Scott was at this moment piloting.
Guinan was right.
Scott was intending to go back in time, just as he had done before, when the alien probe had almost destroyed Earth because of the extinction of the whales. Using Spock’s on-the-fly calculations, Scott and the others had sent the Bounty whipping through Sol’s gravity well and back in time to when whales had still existed. And the calculations Spock had used to make the jump would have been included in at least one of the logs Scott had accessed!
But why was he doing it now?
And where in time was he going? Had he decided he couldn’t catch up with the seventy-five years of new technology he’d missed out on? Had he decided he would sooner try to go back to a time when his knowledge was state of the art, not hopelessly outdated?
Unlikely. Despite some bad moments immediately after his rescue from the Jenolen, Scott was no quitter. And he certainly wouldn’t risk upsetting the entire timestream for such a purely personal goal.
“Mr. Scott!” Picard said, his tone filled with as much authority as he could muster. “I order you to stop!”
“His communications system has shut down, Captain,” Data said. “All power is being diverted to the warp drive and the shields. He did not hear your order.”
“He didn’t want to hear it,” Riker muttered.
The Klingon ship was bulleting toward the Arhennius corona, once again accelerating despite the fact that it was already far exceeding its design specs. Picard half expected it to fly to pieces at any instant.
“Follow him,” Guinan said, coming as close to shouting as he had ever heard her do. “If you ever trusted me, Captain, trust me now!”
He shook his head sharply. “Two ships will only disrupt the timestream even more than one. And we can’t follow him precisely, not without knowing a hundred times more than what the sensors can tell us. By the time we reach Arhennius—”
“Sensors are detecting increasing amounts of chronometric radiation, Captain,” Data announced, bringing a sudden hush to the bridge.
“Origin?”
“Impossible to say, sir. There is no discrete source. It is simply there—and growing at an exponential rate.”
“The radiation is there because the timestream is already changing, Captain!” Guinan said with even more intensity. “You must follow him—now! Before we all forget that it has even changed!”
For a moment, Picard’s mind seemed to spin out of control. Even
the image of Arhennius on the viewscreen shimmered and shifted as the Klingon ship accelerated directly into the corona. The ever-increasing warping of space caused by the ship’s drive was, he knew, clashing ever more violently with the spatial distortion caused by the immense gravity of the star. Soon, the clash between the two essentially irresistible forces would literally squeeze the ship out of the here and now, sending it careening through time itself like a rocket shot up out of a planet’s atmosphere, not into orbit but into a suborbital trajectory that would bring it plunging back like a meteor.
But these ships—the Klingon bird-of-prey and, if he heeded Guinan’s desperate plea, the Enterprise—would be propelled not out of a planet’s atmosphere but out of the entire space-time continuum, into a jagged arc through the unknown, an arc that would bring it plunging back at some distant time that only the most precise measurements and calculations could determine.
Measurements and calculations they had no time to make.
They could find themselves years or centuries distant from their own time.
If they survived at all!
Suddenly, the chronometric radiation intensified a hundredfold, setting off a klaxon-like alarm on the bridge, and Picard felt the universe—his memory of the universe—begin to shift like windblown desert sand.
With his last rational thought, he barked out the order that sent the Enterprise plunging into the Arhennius corona only seconds behind Scott and the Klingon ship. But even as the Enterprise shuddered under the strain, new images began to appear on the viewscreen, images beyond the corona they were shooting through at impossible speeds.
Images of a solid phalanx of Borg cubes.
Then that universe winked out and there was only the terrible shuddering of the Enterprise as the conflicting forces of the straining warp drive and the intense gravity field of Arhennius battered at each other and at the ship caught in the titanic crossfire. Finally, after microseconds that seemed to stretch into minutes, as if the Enterprise and its crew were relativistic particles descending the last few millimeters before plunging through a black hole’s event horizon, the fabric of space-time was ruptured for the second time in less than a minute, and the Enterprise was sent hurtling through time.