Dark Mirror (41 page)

“Oh, no way, Hwiii—you have too much trust in machinery! Brewer, come here and keep an eye on those readings. If they vary more than point five percent in either direction, call me. Okay, Hwiii, let’s get on with the main act.”

“Destination in four minutes,” Eileen said, looking down at the main status board. “Engines are beginning to show some variance in the warpfield.”

Geordi and Hwiii looked at each other, shook their heads, and looked down at the main status board again. “Okay,” Geordi said. “There’s 2044. What’s the gravitational field strength?”

“One point eight times ten to the eighty-fourth atts,” said Eileen. “What we expected.”

“All right,” Geordi said. “Hwiii, do we have hyperstring interaction yet?”

“It’s virtual. It will be real when we come out of warp. Virtual strengths are now at”—Hwiii checked one of the instruments that was reading from a piece of his own equipment now built into the inclusion device—“fourteen point six milliwaynes. Increasing with the inverse square of the distance as usual.”

“We’ll need more like twenty, won’t we?”

Hwiii laughed softly. “I’d be happier with fifty, but twenty will do.”

“You talking about fish or field strengths?” Geordi said. “Never mind. That’s half the battle handled. Now we need the rest of it. La Forge to bridge!”

“Here, Mr. La Forge,” said Picard, still sweating.

“
We’re just about ready, Captain,”
La Forge said. “
We’re coming up fast on 2044, and its gravitational field is interacting with our equipment the way it should. Now what we need is some more power.”

“The engineer’s lament,” Riker said. “Usually that’s your department.”

“
Not today, Commander. Captain, the ship has to drop out of warp as soon as she’s within a million kilometers of the dwarf The sudden deceleration is going to cause a lot of the energy in the warpfields to blueshift and go kinetic. It’ll give us some of what we need, but not enough. We need them to fire on our shields and give us the rest… and then they’re going to get the surprise of their lives.”

“How much firing are you going to need?” Riker said.

“
With
their
phasers, not much,”
Geordi said. “
That’s the beauty of it. A couple of minutes will be enough. But you’re going to have to let them get pretty close—that’s the only undesirable facet of this routine.”

“I assure you, Mr. La Forge, it is not the only undesirable aspect. How close?”

“
Two thousand kilometers. Five hundred would be better.”

Picard made a face. “That’s almost whites-of-their-eyes range, Mr. La Forge. Are you sure this is wise?”

“
Captain, none of this is exactly ideal, but at that range you can self-destruct and be relatively sure of taking them with us!”

Picard nodded grimly. “You’re right there.”

“The other
Enterprise
continues to gain,” Data said. “One hundred thousand kilometers now; 2044 Hydri is within a parsec and a half.”

“Prepare for high-speed deceleration,” Picard said. “Picard to all crew! We are about to undergo high-speed deceleration, and as usual in such circumstances the artificial gravity will be subject to fluctuations. Secure yourselves.”

He waited a moment, while the red-alert sirens whooped again in warning, then went silent. “Position of our adversary, Mr. Data.”

“Closing directly behind us at warp nine point seven, Captain.”

Picard smiled just slightly at hearing that. “They may overshoot a little, then.”

“It seems likely, Captain,” Data said, working over his console. “Synchronizing with engineering subsystems now. Commander La Forge.”

“
We’re as ready as we’re gonna be, Data,”
Geordi’s voice came back. “
Go for it!”

“Captain?”

“As planned, Mr. Data. Execute!”

The warpfields shut down.
Enterprise
fell out into normal space, shedding the built-up energy not by gradual deceleration, but in the form of great blasts of radiation and visual light. Inside her, everything rocked and jumped. Picard hung on to the arms of his seat, knowing what the other
Enterprise
would be seeing, a ship suddenly turned into a core of disastrous-looking, searing light, slowing down, plunging toward a dead star.

It may buy us a moment’s confusion,
he thought.
They may think we’ve exploded already. Then they’ll check the mass readings and see that they’re wrong, come in for the kill.
“Status, Mr. La Forge!”

“
Deceleration completing, Captain. Entering wide orbit around 2044.”

“The other
Enterprise
has overshot by two point six
three light-years,” Data said. “Coming around now and decelerating in the usual manner. Preparing to drop out of warp, if energy readings are correct.”

“On-screen,” Picard said. Now that the wild maneuvering was done, visuals were of some use again. Far under them turned the brown dwarf—not brown, but a sullen, glowing red with the heat remains of ancient gravitational collapse, not yet finished: an old, tired ember, soon to die out and go black.

“They have dropped out of warp, Captain. Center screen, magnified.”

The dark silver shape was there again, coming about on impulse to meet them, coasting in closer and closer.

“Their shields are up,” Worf said. “They are arming all phaser banks. The power—” He looked at his reading and looked up with an expression of unpleasant surprise. “The power is considerable.”

“Yes, indeed,” Picard said. “Raise our own shields, Mr. La Forge!”

“
We’re getting ready for them, Captain. Thirty more seconds to make fast the ‘connection’ between us and the dwarf.”

“Make it so, Mr. La Forge!”

Slowly they orbited, “standing their ground,” and the other ship came in closer and closer, holding its fire. Picard looked at the dark, cruel shape, lowering at him, and something in the back of his mind said,
The boy stood on the burning deck.

He had to laugh, though just once, as that other ship came closer. Riker looked at him. “Captain?”

Picard shook his head. “Just that I had no idea my brain had retained so much dreadful doggerel as it has produced in the past day or so. No matter, one way or another, I won’t have to bother with it again.”

“They are firing,” Worf said. They saw the phaser beams
lance out: the ship rocked as they hit the shields. The other
Enterprise
came in closer and closer and went by just off their port side, taunting, no more than a thousand kilometers away.

“Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, very unnerved indeed, “was that close enough for you?”

“
We need a couple of more passes, Captain.”

“The line between power drain and shield overload is going to be extremely fine, Commander,” Data said. “A few megajoules in either direction is going to mean the difference between a successful operation and an exploded ship.”

“
Tell me about it, Data! You just keep your eye on the red line. But try not to move until we give you the word! If this works, we won’t need to move at all.”

The ship lurched and rocked again as the phasers hit, this time from behind. “Loss of power to rear shields, fifteen percent,” Worf said. “Some odd readings, however.”

“
That’s us,”
Geordi said. “
Hang on, up there! We have to do some string manipulation just before the balloon goes up.”

“Pull whatever strings you have to, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, “but hurry up about it! We can’t take much more of this phaser fire.”

“
Hwiii, poke that baby, we need more!”

There was a pause. “
Captain, you’ve got to let them shoot at us, we
need
the energy. As much of it as we can get.”

The other
Enterprise
came in again and made another pass. “All phasers firing, Captain,” Worf said, as if Picard needed to be told. This time the ship shook as if a giant had picked it up and rattled it, and the lights went down, and only the emergency lighting came up. “Rear shields down,” Worf said, “damage to decks forty-three and fifty. The other
Enterprise
is coming about again.”

“Mr. La Forge!” Picard said.

“
Just one more time, Captain!”

“It may be all you get,” Picard said, watching on the screen as the great wicked-looking silver-dark shape bore down on them.

In engineering, Hwiii and Geordi were working together over the main status console. “That’s it,” Hwiii said. “The ‘tether’ is in place. One more shot!”

“Here she comes.”

“On automatic,” Hwiii said, touching the last control. “Check it?”

Geordi looked over his shoulder. “The power conduits are holding. Come on, you son of a—”

—and the other
Enterprise
fired, and the whole ship shook—

—not with the phaser impact, though: that was absorbed. Clutching the status board, they watched on the schematics as the dreadful flame of energy channeled down in a searing line from the shields into the inclusion apparatus. All around them the air seemed to vibrate and go thick with power as the gravitational and hyperstring forces they had harnessed to “tether” them to the bracing mass of the brown dwarf now reached back and seized on the target that Geordi and Hwiii had designated. The dwarf was the anchor of one side of a slingshot; the
Enterprise
was the other.
If we can just keep from snapping before it does,
Geordi thought desperately. The vibration got worse. The universe darkened, as if getting ready for a
really
big sneeze this time, and everything and everybody not fastened to something fell down.

On the bridge, Picard watched the other
Enterprise
fire at them point-blank. He fully expected to see what he had seen in the shuttlecraft, the bloom of fire, the walls blasting outward, fragmented, into darkness. But instead everything
went thick and dim with a huge buzzing feel of power in the air, and everything shook—

—and that other ship abruptly went
away
from them, without moving. It did not so much get small, as simply become more distant—impossibly distant for something that had been moving on impulse. Yet it was not going into warp, either—the usual chromatic aberration was absent. It simply went farther and farther
away
… and then was gone entirely.

“Mr. Data,” Picard said, looking at Riker and Troi; they looked as stunned as he felt. “Evaluation.”

“The ship is gone, Captain,” Data said. “It was not destroyed—but rather dislocated from our space without changing local location.”

“Engineering!” Picard said. At first the unrestrained noise he heard frightened him. Then he realized it wasn’t screaming, or rather, not screams of pain, but of joy: cheering, hoots and howls of applause.

“
La Forge here,”
Geordi’s voice almost sang. “
Owl Cut it out, Hwiii, I’m still sore there!”

“Report, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, unable to suppress the smile now.

“
They’re gone, Captain,
“Geordi said. “
Right back where they came from! And it was their own hyperstring residue that let us do it, the same way that we used our own to bring us back home again. But we’re not done yet.”
He still sounded surprisingly urgent through the triumph. “
Hwiii is busy doing another permutation on the string structure hereabouts—meaning
ours.
As soon as he’s ready, we—”

“
Now!”
Hwiii whistled from the background. “
We need to head out of here at about warp nine, Captain, so that our inherent hyperstring association changes enough that they can’t follow us back again.”

“Warp nine,
now,
if you please, Mr. Redpath,” Picard said.

The ship leapt forward; Picard looked with great satisfaction
at the viewscreen in front of him, flowing with stars again. “For how long, Mr. La Forge?”

“
An hour or so will make it impossible for them to latch on to us again without a major retool of their own readings, Captain… which they won’t be able to get because we will be a
long
way thataway, on a course they can’t predict.”

“Very good, Mr. La Forge. Mr. Redpath,” Picard said to the helm officer, “amuse yourself. Make sure ‘they’ couldn’t
possibly
predict our course.”

“Yes, sir!”

Picard stood up and pulled his tunic down and smiled. “I am going down to my quarters. You and I, of course,” Picard said to Troi, “will need to do debriefs for Starfleet, and for the… edification, if that’s the word… of our fellow officers. I want Mr. La Forge to stop in sickbay, however, before he bothers with his—he’s had a bad enough day.”

“I’ll take care of it, Captain,” Troi said.

“Very good. Meanwhile, I would appreciate a department heads’ meeting this evening, though when things have quieted down a little and we’ve all had some rest. Anything else?”

He looked around the bridge. People looked back at him with expressions of satisfaction, and Riker said, “Welcome home, Captain.”

Picard nodded and went out.

Down in his quarters, when the door shut behind him, he simply stood there for a moment and looked around him. Off to one side, covered, the easel stood. He went to it, tossed back the cover. The wood in the Luberon looked back at him, the shafts of downstriking sunlight, the tiny scrap of fluttering light. Odd, though, how much more prominent the shadows in that landscape seemed, the dark places under the trees.

He turned away and walked over to the bookshelf. Everything in place, everything looking as it should—
though that had been deceptive, not so long ago. He reached out for the Shakespeare again, weighed it in his hand, flipped it open.

It fell open where it always did. He looked down the column. There he found Portia where she should be, mercy all in place, and the gentle rain from heaven, and further down, Nerissa’s joke about the ring, the teasing wives, and the love at the end.

He closed the book and looked over at the painting again. The little scrap of light fluttered there among the trees, against the shadow. It needed the darkness to make that tiny bit of life look so bright: it would not have shown, otherwise.