Dark Mirror (40 page)

But if we had, Starfleet would have no warning.
“We cannot outrun them,” Picard said. “We can close with them and see them destroyed. That’s all. The crew had best be told.”

“
Captain,”
Geordi said, “
wait! There’s still a possibility.”

“Is it one I can count on?” A silence ensued. “So,” Picard said. “It can’t be helped, gentlemen.”

“
Captain,”
Hwiii’s voice said, “
for your peoples’ sakes, for the Federation’s sake, stretch it out! Hope is thin in the water, but it’s not gone yet.”

“I will not let them take us,” Picard said, “and I will not let them destroy us piecemeal. If we must all die, we will do it cleanly.”

“
Fair enough. But buy us some time!”

“All that I can, Commander.” Picard looked at Worf. “Give me allcall.”

Down in engineering, Geordi and Hwiii were bent over the main console arguing, while people ran around them in all directions. Everywhere else on the ship people might be standing still and listening to the amplified voice that spoke to them, but down here, no one had time.

“
Attention, all crew. This is the captain. Our situation is as follows…”

“We can’t,” Geordi said.

“We can!” Hwiii said.

“We’ll get blown to kingdom come!”

“It’s going to happen anyway! Wouldn’t you rather take the chance?”

“Listen, you crazy fish—”

“Who’re you calling a fish, you deaf-skinned, round-headed mammal? It will work, it
will!
Think of the sharks! All those teeth, they’re terrible, yes, but who tries to attack a shark by biting it? You ram it in the gut instead. Better yet, you get it to swim at you as hard as it can, and
then
you hit it, so vectors add and its velocity turns against it. Get it to cooperate in its own demise, turn its own force back on it.”

“The velocity.” Geordi stared at Hwiii. “And they’re
excluded.
They’re excluded from their home universe and included in this one, just as we were excluded from
this
one and included in
theirs.
We can reverse the procedure! We need a little more time, and a word with the software, and some more power.”

Now it was Hwiii’s turn to stare. “We haven’t got any more power!”

“So what if we got them to give us some?”

“Oh, absolutely, let’s just ask them for a donation!”

“Hwiii, you’ve got herring for brains. The shields are working perfectly well.”

“They won’t be if we let those people near them! Their phasers—”

“—are rated at three terawatts each! Look! We take the shields and do
this.”

A brief silence, and then a long, high, thoughtful whistle. “You’re right about my brains. But if we miscalculate, this is going to rip the ship’s skin up like so much seaweed!”

“Not if you invert the skinfield! We barely need the structural field while we’re on impulse.”

“‘Barely’! Do you know how many tons—”

“One point five million. Would you like them to keep sticking together in their present form instead of being distributed around as free hydrogen radicals? Good! Invert the skinfield, go for flat nutation on the fields.”

Hwiii sang an excited scale. “Then invert the field supply generators and run the power
backwards
down into the switchback outphase generator? Yes, of course, and then—”

“Then all we need is a stable mass of more than ten to the eightieth metric tons within three hundred thousand kilometers.”

“But there’s nothing like that within—” A pause. “Wait a minute.”

“Will this do?” Eileen said from the other side of the console. They both looked up at her in shock; she was pointing to a display.

They hurried over to her. “How did you know to look for that?” Hwiii said.

“It’s in the equations,” Eileen said calmly. “All that mass-relations material. Half of the business of the inclusion apparatus seems to involve ways to get around the mass-anchoring problem. But when you have one handy…” She shrugged. “I started looking just after you two began arguing about the phasers.”

Geordi and Hwiii looked down at the readout. “It’s 2044 Hydri,” Eileen said, “or it used to be. It’s a brown dwarf now. That enough mass for you?”

“Wow,” Geordi said. “More like ten to the ninetieth, that one. Horrific. I wouldn’t want to get too close.”

“Four or five hundred thousand kilometers will be close enough,” Hwiii said. “Where is that thing?”

“About three hundred light-years in the direction of the Galactic south pole,” Eileen said.

Geordi frowned a moment. “At nine point five—twelve minutes. Assuming the warp coils don’t give out first.”

“We can do some reinforcement,” Hwiii said, heading
off toward the engine control panels. “It won’t last long, but it won’t need to.”

“Hwiii,” Geordi said, going back around to the panel they had first been looking at, “wait a moment! This last part of the initial equation—couldn’t you flip it around
again?”

Hwiii looked over at Geordi in surprise. “What?” He came back to look at the panel.

“Another inversion. More like a subversion, actually. If you take the hyperstring elements here and
force
a change in the elements—even ten percent out of phase would be enough.”

Hwiii’s eyes went wide. “Wouldn’t
that
just put the shark amongst the mullet. You wouldn’t be able to hold it for very long, either.”

“You wouldn’t have to. But once you dropped out of warp again, the string congruencies would be broken. They wouldn’t be able to do
anything.”

“I’ll get on it,” Hwiii said, and turned back to the warp engine control panels. “Tell me what you want done first, though.”

“Better see about reinforcing the warp coils first—they’re what we’re going to need real quick now.” Geordi hit his badge. “La Forge to Captain Picard!”

Picard sat in his seat, watching the other ship slowly gaining on them again, while Mr. Redpath continued his frantic evasive maneuvers. “Are you
sure
this will work, Mr. La Forge? This is not a chance we can afford to mishandle. Much more rides on it than just us.”

“
I understand that, Captain—and this is the best chance we’ve got of coming out of this alive, let alone getting rid of our present problem.”

“You’re quite sure.”

“
We’ll bet our lives on it.”

“You will indeed,” Picard said, thinking. “Very well—I
have no superior options. What is the heading you require?”

“
Two seventy-one mark three, 2044 Hydri. We need to get within about five hundred thousand kilometers. Four hundred thousand, max. That’s a very massive dwarf and we can’t afford to get close enough for the gravitational conditions to start affecting the warp engines. We won’t be in warp toward the end of this, but we’re going to need the power.”

“We’re going to be on
impulse
near a brown dwarf?” Riker said. “Is that safe?”

“
It’s not safe at all, Commander, but it’s the only chance we have to stay alive.”

Survival,
Picard thought.
How strong the urge is.
He glanced at the viewscreen, then over at Redpath.

“Mr. Redpath, you’re showing signs of fatigue. Pass helm control to Mr. Data for the moment.”

“Yes, sir,” Redpath said, sounding both nervous and profoundly relieved.

Picard stood up and pulled his tunic down and smiled and went to stand behind Data. “You are going to have to be our ace in the hole at the moment, Mr. Data. You are one advantage we have over our adversaries: they do not have
you.
Have you had time to internalize the new antithreat routines?”

“Yes, Captain. I acquired most of them while working on them with Commander Riker.”

“Good. You’re going to need them—whatever else those people may be, we cannot count on their being stupid. They can be caught off balance as easily as anyone else, but they learn fast. Set Mr. La Forge’s course and engage.”

“Yes, sir.” The view on the screen changed, going darken there were not many stars down this way.

Picard turned from it after a moment to find Troi looking at him, her face quiet. “You’re still troubled,” she said.

“If we come through this, I will be troubled for a long time, I think.”

She nodded. “You won’t be alone.”

He smiled very slightly. “No advice, Counselor?”

Troi’s expression was wry. “At this moment in time I find my advice badly contaminated by my reactions. Myself, I’m wishing I had hit her harder when I had the chance.” She grimaced. “Not very self-actualized.”

“No, but that place had a tendency to bring out the worst in one…. I suppose it would be foolish to come away from there without expecting some aftereffects.”

“True, Captain. I’m merely concerned about how long they might last.”

“Believe me, Counselor,” Picard said, watching that other ship still slowly drawing closer to them, “so am I. And at the moment I’d prefer that they last quite a long time… rather than have them go away extremely suddenly.”

Troi nodded.

“They continue to close, Captain,” Data said. “They have increased to warp nine point six.”

“Mr. La Forge, can we match the increase?”

“
You’d better not for the moment, Captain,”
came the answer. “
Commander Hwiii is working on the warp coils, and some of the shifts he’s having to make are fairly delicate. Can it wait about two minutes?”

Data looked at the screen. “At this rate, they will be within firing range in two minutes fourteen seconds.”

“Do what you have to, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, beginning to sweat again as that image in the screen continued to grow and grow. “But let us know the minute we can increase speed. How long will the engines hold out at this rate?”

“
I make it another fifteen minutes or so, Captain. By that time we’ll be where we need to be, and we can start decelerating for the drop out of warp.”

Picard was not entirely wild about
that
idea, either. “Are our shields going to be able to handle their phaser output?”

“
Not for long,”
Geordi said, sounding entirely too cheerful, “
but it won’t be necessary.”

Picard nodded and looked over at Troi, then at Riker. “Is that probe ready?”

“Yes, Captain. Waiting your word.”

“Launch it.”

Data touched his console. “Probe away.”

“Keep an eye on it. I want to make sure they don’t spot it and destroy it. Mr. Worf,” Picard said, “copy over the data that went out in the probe to an encrypted packet and send it by subspace to Starfleet immediately.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“The ‘belt and suspenders’ approach,” Riker said.

Picard nodded. “In this case in particular, I’d sooner be safe than sorry.”

“Captain,” Worf said, “subspace is being jammed.” He scowled at his console. “The pursuing vessel is the source of the jamming.”

Now is this just their resourcefulness?
he thought.
Or is this standard equipment for starships in a universe where treason is so commonplace?
The image of what the rest of that Fleet must be like rose up and started to horrify him again. He pushed it aside.

“The probe continues unmolested,” Data said. “They have in fact passed it. Either they are unwilling to break off pursuit to deal with it, or they did not detect it.”

“Probabilities?”

“Uncertain,” Data said. “But it was very thoroughly screened. If they had detected it, I would think they would at least attempt to fire a photon torpedo at it en passant.”

Picard nodded. “All right. We’ll assume it got away—but Mr. Worf, keep trying subspace. Even if we can’t get through, they may detect the effort and assume that we have no other way of getting the news to Starfleet.”

“Aye, sir.” They all sat and watched the ship get closer.

“What’s the word, Mr. La Forge?” Picard said.

“
We’re pretty close to being ready, Captain. By the time we’re in the neighborhood of 2044, I’ll let you know. But there’s no reason this shouldn’t work.”

“Very well.” Picard glanced over at Riker. “If he’s wrong about this, I’m tempted to demote him.”

“You’d have to do it posthumously,” Riker said.

“In both our cases,” Picard said, and his mouth set grim.

“How are those warp coils doing?” Geordi called across to Hwiii.

“Nominal,” Hwiii said. “I’ve increased the frequency offset by about twelve percent—it should be enough to hold things together for the moment.”

“It had better,” Geordi said. “Keep an eye on the balance. We’d look pretty silly if a nacelle fell off in the middle of this.”

“About six minutes to destination,” Eileen said over Geordi’s shoulder. He looked up from his console and found to his distress that he still had some trouble looking at her.

“What’s your problem?” she said. “You look like you have mental indigestion. Is it just stress, or is it something I said?”

“Not you,” Geordi said hurriedly. “Then who—” And she stared at him. “Oh, no. I was there, too.”

“Not
you,”
Geordi said, looking down, but finding no refuge there. The computer was still crunching the numbers needed for their close approach and field-anchoring to the brown dwarf. He looked up at her again. “Another you.”

She swallowed. “What did I—what did she do?”

“She was nice to me,” Geordi said after a moment. “But it was mostly because she wanted my job.”

Eileen stared at him, then pursed her lips in indignation. “After we finish all this craziness, I am going to have a fight
with you. What would I want
your
job for? Especially as it’s so much fun watching you bust your butt doing it.” She flounced off to the other side of the console and got busy over one of the screens there. And she looked up at him, making a “mad” face—but there was more kindness in that anger than in all the other Eileen’s smiles.

Geordi found his grin coming back without having to be forced. “How’s the balance?” he said to Hwiii.

“Holding nicely,” said the dolphin from the panel where he was working. “I think we can leave these things to their own devices for the moment.”