Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (15 page)

When the runabout
Clyde
docked with
Intrepid,
he paused before exiting, and slid a padd under a seat cushion, where nobody would look for it. Then he went out into
Challenger
’s shuttlebay, and let the deceptively diminutive security chief run a tricorder scan to be sure he hadn’t pilfered anything. He didn’t mind that they did this, but it amused him all the same.

They thought he still needed to steal things, when, well, things were different now than they had been fifteen years ago. He had told them often enough, but of course he wasn’t believed. He didn’t particularly care whether they believed him or not, because he was having too much fun.

On the cramped bridge, which was pooled with deep shadows, La Forge was for once actually glad to see Rasmussen. He reflected that, for one thing, Rasmussen’s presence on
Intrepid
meant he wasn’t bothering Leah, Guinan, or anyone else on the
Challenger.
For another thing, Geordi had gotten the ship’s computer powered up, but still had no access to its files.

La Forge had a way with modern computers, but this one was so dated that it might as well use punch-cards, and his knowledge simply didn’t go that far back. Rasmussen, on the other hand, would surely see this computer as state of the art, and have more chance of being familiar with how to access its data.

“Mister Rasmussen,” he called out, “I could really use your help here.”

“Really?” Rasmussen sounded delighted. He threaded his way past a couple of ensigns who were fitting the center seat and console panels that the
Clyde
had just brought across.

“Really.” Geordi tapped the top of the master display table that stood at the back of the bridge. “I have computer power, but no way to access the files.”

Rasmussen came over, and looked down at the tabletop screen. “The operating system has probably degraded over time. But if I can get a command prompt . . .” He tapped a long series of instructions into the computer, and its screen went suddenly blank.

“Hey!” La Forge exclaimed. “You’ve shut it down. We need that computer online.”

“It still is.” Rasmussen kept typing, and text began to flicker across the screen. Only one line showed, constantly replaced a new one line, but now Geordi saw what Rasmussen was doing with it, and his momentary sense of panic subsided. “If they used the same file setup as most of the
universities and private industry did, I should be able to navigate to the logs.”

“Any records the captain and crew made would be handy.”

Rasmussen frowned, that high forehead of his creasing up. “I don’t think this is a simple captain’s log.”

Geordi looked at the string of numbers Rasmussen had pulled up. “It looks more like it’s some sort of file dump from elsewhere in the ship’s network. Could be part of their operating system, or anything.”

“Not quite anything. From its position in the computer’s file tree, I’d say it’s most likely sensor logs.”

“Can we decrypt them?” Both men knew he didn’t really mean
we.

“If you can get the workstations online with those new screens and the power grid we already installed, they should replay perfectly well here on
Intrepid.”

“I can do that,” La Forge said firmly, and moved across to the science station, where he began moving circuits around. “The main viewer should be online in a second.” True to his word, the recently repaired screen flickered, buzzed, and then showed the
Challenger,
hovering nearby. “There we go,” he whispered. “Can you feed that log, or whatever it is, through to here?”

“I think so.”

After a moment, the main viewer flashed to static again, and then a man appeared on it. The image was grainy, with pixel artifacts running up and down the recording, but it was unmistakably a blond-haired man in a blue jumpsuit.
“Jason,”
a voice said from somewhere. “
What’s troubling the
Intrepid?”

“That must be Captain Lambert,” Rasmussen said, his astonishment clear in his voice. “And the voice we heard is Admiral Collins.”

“Romulan mines, Admiral,”
Lambert began.
“Lieutenant al-Qatabi is transmitting our position back to you now. We’ve observed the detonation of a Class Four cloaked mine, about thirty thousand clicks away. Harry is looking out to see whether there are any more—”

“They don’t usually go solo,”
Collins said with a sigh.
“There’s probably a field.”

La Forge found he was glued to the screen. It was as if they were really having this conversation right here, and right now. At the same time, he was very glad that this was only a recording, because he already knew how it ended.

Lambert nodded.
“I wanted to check with you whether there had been any communication from the Rommies that might throw a light on the mines here. For one, how does their presence tie in with the new treaty?”
Rasmussen looked as if he was seeing a ghost.

“Well, under the terms of the armistice, they agreed to disable any mines in disputed territories specified in the treaty, and that certainly includes your location.”
Admiral Collins paused.
“The detonation wasn’t near enough to you to do any damage?”

“No, sir, but it’s still brown trousers time knowing they’re out there.”
La Forge couldn’t disagree with Lambert’s sentiment.

“Sirs,”
a pretty Eurasian girl, presumably al-Qatabi, broke in.
“Some types of mines are given a finite life span, and others have had remote detonators for decommissioning after a conflict. Is it possible that what we’ve seen here is actually part of the process the Romulans are using to disable their mines? We know they’d rather destroy their materiél than let us take it.”

“I’ll have the diplomatic corps see if they can get a response out of the Romulans,”
Collins said,
“as to whether this is actually a decommissioning act.”

“It better be,”
Lambert grumbled.
“We’ve all got enough medals already, and if Johnny Archer earns any more, his dress uniform will collapse under their gravity.”

“I’ll tell him you said that. In the meantime I suggest you mark the limits of the field.”

“I’ll get Harry on to it. Unless you want to send
Enterprise
out here to do it, and we’ll
—” The screen went black so suddenly that La Forge rocked on his heels as if he had felt an impact. He looked across at the other people on the bridge. The other engineers looked as if they’d stepped off a cliff, and Rasmussen was looking pale and shaky.

“Damn,” Rasmussen whispered. “They showed it so many times, on all the news feeds.” He shook his head. “I never watched someone die before they showed that.”

“You didn’t know for sure that he, or anyone else aboard, was dead,” Geordi said reasonably.

“Not intellectually, no,” Rasmussen admitted. “But in our hearts, everyone who saw it knew. Romulans . . .”

“We know it wasn’t the Romulan mine,” Geordi pointed out. “The ship’s still here.”

“I bet they were still behind it somehow.”

When Rasmussen had gone across to the
Intrepid
with the newly replicated replacement parts, Brahms had taken her chance to catch some lunch in Nelson’s. She could have eaten from the replicator in her quarters, but she was hoping to talk to Guinan. It was easy to talk to Guinan, even about things she thought she wouldn’t normally talk about aloud.

“I know Geordi can be a little obsessive, but I never thought he could be vindictive.”

Guinan frowned, a rare and rather sad vision. “Vindictive? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him vindictive.”

“You haven’t seen the way he looks at Rasmussen, or heard the way he talks about him.”

“Ah, Rasmussen . . .” There was a long story in her tone. Leah might not be a Listener like Guinan, but she knew the signs when she heard them.

“You know what I’m talking about?”

Guinan blinked slowly. “Unfortunately I do. I was on the
Enterprise
when Rasmussen visited, and I remember him pretty well.”

“He is a memorable person.”

“In all the wrong ways.”

Brahms was disappointed by Guinan’s tone. Of all the people she thought would understand, Guinan topped the list. “Not you as well?”

“Rasmussen stole from a lot of my friends. He tried to kidnap Commander Data. He pretended he could help save a planet under threat but was refusing to do so.”

“He couldn’t have actually helped.”

“No, he couldn’t, because he wasn’t from the future. He could just have said he didn’t know what happened. Even if he wanted to stick with his story about being from the future, he could have said it wasn’t his field, or the records had been lost, or something. But he seemed to take a great pleasure in giving the appearance of being happy to refuse to use knowledge.”

“You seem to be suggesting that if he had been from the future, and did know what happened, he’d have been right to refuse.”

“Yes, he would. But he wasn’t.”

“Do you think I should stay away from him?”

Guinan hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t think he’s cruel or violent. He’s a thief, but I couldn’t see him deliberately harming anyone.”

“And Commander Data?”

“I’m pretty sure that, from Rasmussen’s perspective, he was stealing, not kidnapping. He just saw Data as an invention, not as a person.”

“Thanks, Guinan.”

“For what?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Leah admitted.

“If I wasn’t seeing this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it,” Scotty breathed.

“That’s exactly what I thought, Scotty,” La Forge agreed. He, Barclay, and Brahms were in the lab that had been set up aboard the runabout
Thames,
reporting on the data recovered from
Intrepid
’s computer core. “In fact I almost wonder if it couldn’t be some kind of modern fake, like Worf thought.”

“Placed there how?
Intrepid
’s files have been bricked for centuries,” Brahms said.

“If Rasmussen was an expert in quantum slipstream mechanics, I’d wonder if he couldn’t have somehow introduced these readings while we were bringing the sensor logs online.”

“But he isn’t.”

“No, and the date stamps all match up perfectly.”

“Slipstream, but not slipstream . . . I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Scotty said. “It could be natural, or it could be artificial . . .”

“Either way, it’s definitely worth thinking about.”

Scotty nodded. “Aye . . . I don’t know which idea is worse, it bein’ natural, or it bein’ artificial. Leah and I worked on the
Vesta
-class test-beds—but if this data truly was artificial, it’d have to be far beyond . . . Is there anything more like this in
Intrepid
’s files?”

“We’re downloading and decoding as much as we can, now that Rasmussen has gotten us into the system, but there are a lot of corrupt files,” La Forge said.

“Do your best.”

Scotty and Barclay left the lab, and La Forge looked at the data again. “It looks like Rasmussen has actually done us some good.”

“Is that so surprising?” Brahms asked. “Starfleet
did
assign him for a reason.”

“I guess they did. I still don’t have to like him, though.”

“He may have been a liar and a thief, but he doesn’t seem violent.”

“He kidnapped my friend at gunpoint,” La Forge said hotly.

“Ineffectually,” she reminded him.

“He didn’t know that. Besides, there’s the matter of how he got that time pod in the first place.”

“How did he get it?”

“I don’t know,” Geordi admitted, “but the implication was that its original owner was in no condition to use it again.”

“You mean he’s dead. Was dead. Will be dead, if he’s from the twenty-sixth century . . .” Brahms groaned and rubbed her temples. “Whichever.”

“I mean there’s a good sized doubt over how Rasmussen came into possession of the pod. There’s a very good chance that he may have murdered that professor from the twenty-sixth century.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“Data thought that Rasmussen was implying it, when he tried to kidnap him. And Data wasn’t prone to flights of fancy.”

Outside, Rasmussen had been about to go in and enjoy the credit for discovering the sensor logs, when he heard the conversation turn to his previous life.

He had never forgotten the professor whose time pod he had inherited, and he never would.

He hadn’t forgotten much about those days.

It wasn’t for want of trying.

T
he leaves were turning red and gold in Trenton, and Berlinghoff Rasmussen was starting to notice a slight chill in the air at nights. The days were still almost warm enough for summer, so he preferred to work in his garage, with the big door rolled open.

That was where he preferred to work, but in general he preferred to be either down in the riverside park, or lunching at
The Hidden Panda,
where the bar was as relaxed and filled with as much variety as the Chinese menu was. As his new molecular cutter sliced through another neoprene square, Rasmussen felt like he was about thirty seconds from going there and drowning his sorrows as well as, hopefully, feeding his muse.

The device was basically a tubular laser-cutter, intended to use a reactive plasma as part of the cutting torch. He had a test object, made of layered steel, neoprene, plastic, and Kevlar, mounted on a frame in the center of the garage. In theory the cutter should slice through the metal only, and not through the materials used in EV suits for space walks. It would therefore be safer to use while wearing an EV suit.

That was the theory. In practice, the damned thing
would cut through anything, and he couldn’t quite figure out how to tune it to the right molecular structures. He tried again, with a new setting and new test object. The cutter burned through it all, and the test object clattered to the floor in two halves.

Rasmussen felt his shoulders slump, and he dropped the cutter back onto the worktop. He wondered whether perhaps he should start calling it the flop-top. He sat down and glared at the prototype. “Lunch. We’ll see what we can do with you after lunch.”