GHOST SHIP

by Diane Carey

  His shoulders stiff with his anger growing, he turned toward the exit and flatly said, “I’ll be in engineering.”

  He went, but he went alone. When he was down in engineering, he swept aside each engineer’s offer to assist him or escort him, shrugged off their curious looks when he went into special-access chambers and came out again with computer input chips that no one had given him or pulled up for him. Word spread quickly that the captain was here, doing something for himself and not asking anyone to do it for him, and before long curious eyes peeked at him from a dozen hiding places in the engineering complex. Even in the dimness, he stood out simply because he wasn’t usually here. Eventually the curious junior engineers who saw him lurking about started trying to track his doings secretly on their access panels. They discovered that Captain Picard knew both what he was doing and perfectly well how to keep them from finding out. They discovered they could trace his activities about halfway at each turn before they lost the pattern of his computer use. So they watched, unable to say anything about it because he was the captain, and if this was anybody’s equipment, it was his. They knew there was something going on topside; why wasn’t he up there? They muttered among themselves about reporting to the first officer, but nobody volunteered to do the talking.

  So the engimatic captain of the Enterprise floated around engineering for over an hour, not speaking to anyone, offering only the most ghostly of smiles to those who came too close, lighting here and there like a moth to tamper with the equipment and be suddenly on the move again, and not a living soul dared approach him with a direct question. He was too purposeful in each movement, each pause, each touch.

  Then he was gone. Without a word, without an order. He cradled a few computer tie-in remotes in his elbow, and walked out.

  Once clear of engineering and on his way through the darkened ship by way of ladders and walkways, Picard paused on one of the upper decks and touched the nearest intercom. “Picard to sickbay. Mr. Riker, you still there?”

  Almost immediately Riker’s strong voice answered, “Yes, Captain, still here. No change.”

  Picard looked down at the small bundle of remotes he carried. They seemed innocent as they lay in the crook of his arm, small bundles of circuitry inside casings. But they were deadly.

  “In ten minutes, I want you and LaForge to be on the bridge. This has gone far enough.”

  The words chimed through the ship, right through the cloth of silence and darkness they’d swathed around themselves, saying quite plainly that the phenomenon was going to have to deal with the captain now.

  Before entering the bridge, Picard quietly and privately plugged his remotes into their proper places in the control layout deep within the bridge maintenance loop, a thin corridor of computer access boards behind the actual walls of the bridge itself. Here, new systems were built into the bridge systems, the great hands of the starship, working all the instructions put to it from the gigantic computer core running through the primary hull.

  Picard made use of those access boards now, tying them all in to one single button on the arm of his command chair. He had thought about using a code that he could key in from anywhere on the ship, but at last dismissed the idea and created an actual button to be pushed. And in that one place—the command chair. If he was going to put his finger down on destiny, he would be in his rightful place, at the head of this majestic ship, when he did it.

  He stalked back onto the bridge, noticeably somber, and into the audience of expectant faces. Riker. LaForge. Troi. Wesley Crusher. Worf. And others, especially those manning the positions he might have expected to see Data manning. The Ops controls or Science 2. He missed the gold-leaf face and the gently innocuous expression. He missed it a great deal. His deep rage grew.

  “I’m glad you’re all here,” he said ceremoniously, approaching his command chair. This time, however, he didn’t reach out and casually touch it as he might have otherwise. This time the chair itself was a source of raw power, and he didn’t want to give anything away. “I want to know what you’ve concluded, what our options are, how we can best deal with this invasion. If we have to drain this starship of every last volt and every last moving molecule, we’ll do it. That thing out there has already cost the life of one of us; it will take no more of us. It isn’t going any farther into the galaxy. We’re stopping it here and now.”

  Deanna Troi let her eyes drift shut, so deep was her relief and gratitude. Picard saw her reaction and understood it so clearly that he might as well have been the Betazoid. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, they were glazed with tears and she was almost smiling—but then the smile dropped away and her eyes filled with perplexity. She saw into his heart now, he could tell, saw the knowledge and the determination that were foremost in his mind, unhidden from her probing thoughts, saw the remotes now engaged into certain circuits that would carry a certain message to a dozen locations in the lower structures of the ship and do the kind of thing captains thought of only in moments of supreme desperation. She stared at him, then looked down, at the arm of the command chair, at the small patch of controls that tied the captain’s own touch into his ship. And that single blue pressure point, like a poker chip. She knew. Picard watched her, without offering either reassurance or a request for her silence. She would be silent, he knew. They understood one another now.

  Riker stepped forward—not exactly a surprise.

  “We’re going to chase it down?” he asked.

  “We’re going to kill it, Mr. Riker.”

  The first officer paused, his lips compressing, then said, “That’s not like you, sir.”

  Picard knew what was behind Riker’s eyes and that dubious tilt to his head, and he looked right at him now. “Isn’t it? Is it more like me to allow that marauder to wander the galaxy freely, sucking up more lives?”

  That moment saw a charge of excitement. Even Riker realized suddenly how long he’d been waiting for something to bring that level of indignation to Picard’s face. The captain’s brown eyes were narrowed, his Roman-relief profile aimed squarely at the viewscreen, his jaw like a rock set upon another rock.

  And even so, straight through the ring of Picard’s words, Riker forced himself to do what was his duty. “What about the Prime Directive? We can’t guard the whole galaxy.”

  “Even the Prime Directive must have its elasticity,” Picard said firmly, and there was no doubt that he had thought about this, had already endured and forded the difficulty of this very question. He paused, and moved forward on his bridge, all eyes on him. “From a distance, this may look like Utopia, Will,” he said, broadly enough for all to hear, “but when you’re staring right at it, it’s something else. It’s a tyrant and demands our grappling with it. There will be no tyranny here,” he said. “Refusing to make a decision is its own kind of cowardice.”

  Riker moved to the captain’s side, and the two men stood before the vast viewscreen and all it held. “You’re that certain?” he asked. He wondered why the rock of resistance still sat in his stomach. He knew perfectly well that Captain Picard was no grandstander, that such a man would turn the ship and run in the other direction if there were a way to avoid using the weapons, yet he still had to make this one last request, that Picard simply say yes, he was certain.

  But the captain said nothing. He merely gazed sidelong at Riker, exercising his command right in that simple silence.

  Riker nodded and backed off a few steps, making his own message clear.

  The captain turned, and standing on the dais with the whole blackness of space as his backdrop, he addressed the faintly lit bridge. “All right, what do you have?”

  “Sir,” Worf began immediately from the opposite stage, “we’ve concluded that it backed away from its first attack on us because it reached its absorption capacity. We’ve calculated its drain on us at the point it moved off, and think it’s possible to overload it.”

  “Risks?”

  “We would have risk if we had possib
ility. Our phasers simply can’t put out enough power to do what must be done. It dissipates its energy faster than we could pump it full.”

  Picard pressed his lips tight and tried to envision such a creature, but all he could do was glare at the undeniable readouts and see that it was true. Behind him, voices buzzed, annoying him as flies annoy a horse. Geordi. Wesley. Geordi. Wesley again, arguing. An exchange of whispers, grating on Picard as he tried to dig out a miracle solution, and finally he spun around, demanding, “Have you two got something to add or not?”

  Both Geordi and Wesley flinched, and Wesley’s cheeks flared red. “Oh . . . no, sir.”

  “Yes, sir,” Geordi contradicted.

  “But it doesn’t work,” Wesley hissed, tugging at Geordi’s sleeve.

  “Data told you how to make it work.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “When you’re going to die, a one-in-a-million chance is better than nothing, Wes!”

  “By the devil!” Picard roared. “What are you talking about?”

  Wesley dropped into self-conscious silence while Geordi fought with himself and won. He approached the captain and said, “Wes has an idea how to increase the ship’s energy output through the phaser systems, sir.”

  “All right,” Picard said then, “I’m listening. Keep it short.”

  “Wesley, tell him.”

  Wesley licked his lips and brought his narrow form up beside Geordi. “Well, sir, it’s a phaser intensification system that pulls more firepower with less base energy by breaking down the first phasing cycle into increment frequencies, then reintegrating the phasing all at once in the final cycle. Mr. Data gave me some clues that should make it work, and Geordi thinks we can—”

  “The point is, sir,” Geordi interrupted, speaking just as fast as Picard had asked for, “if we could modify the ship’s phasers to this theory, we could fill that thing up with about five times the energy it got when it—”

  “Yes, I understand the science, Lieutenant. That’s very radical, what you’re describing.” Picard stepped down from the viewscreen bank and strode between them. “But these are radical moments.” With that he touched the intercom, while all breaths held. “Picard to engineering. Argyle and MacDougal, gather your primary staff and meet me in the engineering briefing room in three minutes. Ensign Crusher, I want you to describe your theory to the engineers and let them decide if it can be implemented.”

  “Sir,” the teenager blurted, “I can build the crystal focusing system myself just as well as any of them.”

  The captain glared at him. “We’re going to let the professionals handle it, Mr. Crusher. What you’re describing will take pure antimatter feed, and that’s nothing to play with.”

  He stepped away, but Wesley followed, slipping out of Geordi’s grasp at the last second. He snapped the words out like spitballs. “You always treat me like a kid, even though I’m on the bridge.”

  The captain turned. His voice took on an iron resonance.

  “You’re on the bridge,” he said, “because I chose to put you here, not because you earned it. Your ability exceeds your wisdom, young man. You’ll eventually learn the unforgiving lesson that the people around you are worth more in their experience than you are in your gifts, and you shall, like everyone else, have to wait your turn. Now mind your place, close your mouth, and follow me to engineering, where you will put your gift to use and let others do the same.”

  Wesley was understandably subdued thereafter, give or take the minutes it took him to spell out the phasing idea. The engineers gawked at him, frowned, rolled their eyes, squinted—it looked like a cornea convention. By the time they filed down to the main phaser reactor room, they already had half the mechanics and most of the formulae worked out in their heads, and Picard stood back to watch the machine of intelligence at work. He watched too as Wesley caught a first glimpse through his own brilliance and youthful smugness of the resourcefulness and conceptual ability of experienced engineers. The boy’s face lit up with both amazement and humility each time the engineers shot him a question as part of a discussion that had simply left him behind. Picard could tell from Wesley’s expression that the young man didn’t even know why the engineers had to know some of the things they were asking. And for every question asked, there were two more problems to be solved that he hadn’t thought of. After a time he began to catch a glimpse of why his own idea seemed so foreign. The engineers weren’t looking at the phasing unit as a unit. They saw it as part of the whole ship, all the intricate systems, lines, circuits, energies, fluxes, coils, and capacitors, each affecting all the others. It wasn’t enough for the phasing unit to work; it had to work in concert with a thousand other units.

  As soon as the engineers understood his idea, they were at work troubleshooting it. After several false starts, and even a complete rebuilding of the strange new system, all the theoreticals became applicables. Problems Wesley had never foreseen were discovered, then sidestepped or solved on the spot. The harmonics hummed, the antimatter feed had its safeties hooked up, and all in less time than it had taken Wesley to build his original mock-up. He circled the new contraption, a hulking unit attached directly to the main phaser couplings, and shook his head. It looked like nothing he’d imagined. He could see what parts did which duty, but it simply didn’t look the way he thought it would look.

  Picard liked that look on a young face. He liked the look of growth.

  Finally the chief of phaser engineering came toward the captain and Wesley, wiping his hands on his worksuit, and shrugged. “Good as it’s gonna get, Captain.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Can’t tell you that, sir. Half of it’s theory and the other half’s guesswork. All the systems hook up cleanly, it’s got power, it’s got antimatter flow, and it’s got safeties. As for working, only testing can tell.”

  “We’ll test it in combat,” Picard said ruefully. “We seem to have little choice. We can’t—”

  “Riker to captain! Emergency!”

  Picard snapped at the nearest intercom. “Picard. What?”

  “It’s here, sir! Our grace period just ran out.”

  It had, in spades. When Picard and Wesley spun from the lift and charged onto the bridge, it was no longer dark. Red alert lights bled from every wall, but the main lights hadn’t come up. The forward viewer wavered and crackled with the enhanced blue-red false-color image of the entity at its most awful. The port monitors, starboard, aft—every monitor showed this pulsing threat in a great broken circle of electrical light around the bridge.

  The bridge crew stared at the monitors, swiveling from one to the other as though looking for a doorway that hadn’t been guarded, a single route that would provide escape from the prison, but they knew they were looking at the thing’s backup tactic, the one to be used when all else failed.

  Picard paused in the upper ramp. “Is it in the machinery?”

  Riker whirled past Troi on the lower deck and stepped toward him. “No, sir, it’s surrounding us. Contracting approximately twelve thousand miles per minute.”

  “It hasn’t found us, then?”

  “It’s using this new pattern to find us. It knows we’re here somewhere within a specific radius, and it’s surrounded the whole area, gas giant, asteroids, and all. It’s closing in on us. Obviously, it’s a lot bigger than we first perceived.”

  “Size now?”

  Worf straightened up at Picard’s right. “Roughly three-point-one AUs in diameter, sir, and contracting.”

  “My God,” Picard snarled. He understood the picture now; they were inside a gigantic fist—and it was closing on them. “Worf, estimation. Can we fire on it?”

  A terrible scowl came over Worf’s already fierce features. He hated his own answer as he said, “Not while it’s in this form, sir. It dissipates energy in direct proportion to its surface area. We couldn’t pump enough energy into it fast enough to overload it.”

  Picard rounded on the tactical station
and stood beside Tasha Yar. “Then we’re going to have to force it to compact again. Where’s that gas giant?”

  Yar shook herself and bent over her console. “Bearing point-seven-nine mark three-four, sir.”

  “Head toward it.”

  Riker came aft on the lower deck and asked, “Your plan, sir?”

  “We’re going to hide behind a tree, Mr. Riker,” the captain said, moving down the ramp with his hand tracing the shape of the bridge horseshoe. The strange light across the monitors cast a bloody purple glow on his face. “It won’t be able to absorb all the energy inside a level-ten gas giant a half million miles across. It’s going to have to decide to come around one way or the other. When it does, there’ll be a standoff.”

  Riker turned immediately and said, “Geordi, point-five-zero sublight to the gas giant, tight orbit.”

  “Point-five-zero, aye,” Geordi repeated, avoiding a glance at the Ops position, where Wesley had slipped into Data’s seat.

  Picard kept his voice steady. “Prepare an emergency warning dispatch to Starfleet, single-pulse and high-warp. If we don’t make it, I want to be sure the Federation’s ready for this. Shields at maximum,” he added, holding a hand up to shade his eyes from the sizzling screens.

  “Shields up,” Yar said shakily. “Maximum energy available for defensive—” She stopped, glaring at her readouts, and almost instantly had to gasp, “Sir, it’s moving in!”

  “Keep tight to the gas giant. Tighter, LaForge!”

  “Trying, sir . . . ”

  Across the Enterprise’s shields crashed the punishing force of the phenomenon. It knew where the starship was, but discovered it had found two things—a starship, and a massive planet that was virtually a ball of twisting energy. No matter how it contracted, no matter how it closed its fist, the planet confounded every effort to devour the starship. Every time the thing tried to contract upon its quarry, it was driven back by the energy put out by the gas giant. Spasms of electrical energy pounded the ship and flooded through the gas giant’s churning atmosphere. The ship defied the attack, shimmying with every pulse of energy that flogged the shields, draining them moment by moment.