Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (30 page)

“Welcher!” Bok snarled, and tried to backhand Rasmussen in the face. Due to their height difference, it only caught him in the chest. Rasmussen’s eyes widened in surprise and anger at the thudding blow. Rasmussen swung a roundhouse punch into Bok’s ear, and started fighting in earnest.

Bok howled, and kicked out at Rasmussen’s knee, forcing him down. Enraged, Bok fought down the pain in his ear and focused on darting in to repeatedly punch Rasmussen in the gut. Bok was no warrior as such, but he hadn’t survived six years of prison without learning a few things about looking after himself.

Rasmussen, on the other hand, had spent his years in Federation rehabilitation and re-education on a New Zealand farm learning nothing more physical than how to shear a sheep.

La Forge, Barclay, and Sloe lunged forward, trying to pull the pair apart. “What’s the point?” Sloe shouted. “We’re all going the same way anyway!”

If only he knew,
Geordi thought.

“This welcher betrayed us,” Bok shouted. “He left my son to die.”

Rasmussen got in another kick at Bok. “You wanted to kill me!”

In
Challenger
’s transporter room, Scotty was patching Nog’s tactical readout through to Carolan’s transport console.
It looked promising,
the Scotsman thought, as he saw the signal returns from eleven Starfleet combadges on the
Intrepid
. There was no guarantee that their owners were alive, but he wasn’t going to leave them behind.

“There are four signals on the bridge,” Carolan said. “The rest are scattered throughout the ship.”

“Beam the four from the bridge here. The others to transporter room three.”

Carolan set up the targets, and swept a hand over the controls to energize the transporter.

Bok felt a sudden tingling in his hands, and reflexively let go of Rasmussen. Everyone stumbled backward as if they’d let go of a spinning carousel. A whine of energy became louder, and the bridge was suddenly a brighter silver.

Bok and Sloe looked at each other, then darted backward, away from the grasping hands of the Starfleeters.

“No!” Bok shouted.

“There’s interference from the Infinite,” Carolan warned. Scotty leaned past Carolan, adding his hands to the controls to try to stabilize the targeting sensors. “I’ve got them.”

“Aye, and I intend to keep them!”

One moment La Forge was in the middle of a melée, with everyone trying to get leverage over everyone else, and then suddenly he was staggering, as the calmer environment of
the
Challenger
’s transporter room took over. He blinked, hardly daring to believe that he had truly been snatched from the
Intrepid
.

Barclay, Balis, and Rasmussen were on the pad with him, looking around in a mixture of exhausted relief and sheer bafflement.

“The others?” La Forge asked.

“Transporter room three,” Scotty said, “and may I say welcome aboard.” His eyes narrowed as they fell upon Rasmussen. “Except to you. Balis, escort Mister Rasmussen here to the brig. Reg, go help Vol in engineering.”

Scotty looked at Geordi. “The bridge awaits.” They jogged out of the transporter room. “What’s the situation over there?”

“Bok and his scientific adviser are on a preprogrammed course for 2162. Reg and I sabotaged their warp core, but he’s got a pretty smart engineer named Sloe. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they’ve undone our sabotage.”

“Then we’d better see where they’re going.”

Intrepid
was rattling and shaking like a mining cart, but Bok didn’t mind in the slightest. His son was going to be not just protected and safe, but greater than he ever would have been before. He would be the guardian of the Shadow Treasurers’ investments, and a rich man. He would never serve as a daimon on a dangerous expedition.

Bok would, at last, have been the good father he always wished he had been.

Sloe coughed, drawing Bok back to the present. “Our temporal course projection is deviating from the program,” he said apologetically.

“How is that possible?” Bok lunged forward to examine the readings on the helm.

“I don’t really know, to be honest,” Sloe admitted. “But it’s definitely happening. There’s a temporal variance of point zero four thr—”

“What caused the variance?”

“I’m not sure, but the only thing the program didn’t already take into account is the transporter beam when
Challenger
snatched the Starfleeters back.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“It means we’re not going to the year we should be going to,” she said with a shrug.

Bok’s eyes flashed dangerously. “What? How late will we be?”

“Actually, not late at all. The variance is dragging us further
back
in time.”

Bok straightened, excited. “How much further?”

“Several decades at least, but the effect is exponential. The longer it lasts, the further back we’ll be going.”

“That means, things will be more primitive, but our knowledge will be even further advanced . . .”

Bok relaxed. In fact he felt a thrill of pleasure. “Grak,” he said into his communicator, “destroy the
Challenger
by whatever means takes your fancy. And farewell, faithful employee. I’m enabling access to your account dated from tomorrow.”

Laughing, Bok sat back to enjoy the flight into yesterday.

S
cotty and Geordi bolted from the turbolift and onto
Challenger
’s bridge. Geordi paused only long enough to grab Leah in a tight hug, to which she didn’t protest, and then dropped into the seat at ops. “I’ll need to know
Intrepid
’s precise heading.”

“Patching it through now, Geordi,” Hunt said.

La Forge glanced at the numbers, then did a double-take. “Hang on a minute, Scotty, these”—he tapped in the numbers he recalled from
Intrepid
’s helm, and a different course projecting was generated—“are the coordinates that
Intrepid
was heading for. They’ve changed.”

Scotty quickly brought up a display of the
Intrepid
’s course, and rechecked the numbers. “You’re right, Geordi, it
has
changed. They’re not quite following their projected course in the wormhole.”

“No, and it’s more than that, Scotty. They’re not following their
programmed
course.”

“They’ve changed their program?”

“Not a chance. Once it was engaged, there was no way even for Bok to change the program. Which means it must be an external factor that’s affecting their course.”

“The gravimetric shear?” Qat’qa offered.

“Their program takes the natural forces in the Infinite into account.”

Scotty snapped his fingers. “The transporter beam . . .”

“What? How?”

“It’s the only other external factor. I don’t know how it could have happened, but it has to be something to do with the transporter.”

La Forge looked at the course projection on his console, and the spiral loop around the cosmic string for some of its length. “It looks like it made her get a shade closer to the string, which means she’ll take longer to come out of the closed timelike curve . . . She’ll be further back in the past! Able to make more changes.”

“Aye, maybe . . .” Scotty seemed surprisingly sanguine about the whole idea, but La Forge couldn’t take it so calmly.

“There’s no maybe about it, Scotty. The further back Bok goes, the more time any ripples from the changes he makes will have to take wider effect.”

“Only if he can get out of the CTC at a point where he can do enough harm . . .” An evil glint appeared in Scotty’s eye.

“What are you talking about?”

“The transporter! If a beamout affected his temporal course, then maybe locking on the annular confinement beam to the
Intrepid
will keep him stuck for even longer.”

“That’s a pretty thin idea.”

“Not at all. We just saw the transporter beam have exactly that effect when we beamed you out.”

“Okay, well, it’s the only idea we’ve got anyway.”

“That’s the spirit, laddie.” Scotty frowned. “But we’ll need a stable position on the edge of the Infinite, and they won’t want to give us that . . .”

“Separate the ship,” La Forge said simply.

“Captain,” Grak’s helmsman called. “Something strange is happening to
Challenger
. It’s as if she’s breaking up.”

Grak felt a moment of exultation. This meant a handsome bonus! “Show me!”

A distant, magnified view of the
Challenger
appeared in the main viewing tank. The huge saucer that made up the bulk of
Challenger
was arcing away from the door-wedge form of the secondary hull. Grak’s elation vanished in a heartbeat. “Idiot! It’s not breaking up, it’s separating into two vessels.” He had all but forgotten that many Federation starships could perform such a maneuver.

Grak hesitated, watching the stardrive section come about, while the saucer section of the enemy ship rose out
of view. Which target should he engage? “Intercept the stardrive section,” he ordered. That part of the ship was more powerful, and thus more of a threat, both to his own vessel and to
Intrepid
.

It had been a number of years since he had piloted the
Enterprise
’s saucer section on its own, but La Forge still remembered how it was done. “I hope we can trust Tyler to keep that marauder off our backs.”
Challenger
’s XO, Qat’qa, and Nog had been assigned to take control of the stardrive section.

“If anyone can, it’s Mister Hunt.” Scotty bent over the ops console. “We need to be within transporter range of the Infinite, or at least the wormhole’s threshold.

La Forge was already pushing the saucer to full impulse, and trying for a little bit beyond that. The deck was beginning to vibrate slightly as they plunged through the gravimetric distortions radiating from the Infinite. “I can take us to the edge of the wormhole, but I don’t dare get too close to its spatial manifold. If we cross that, either we’d be history, or we’d be
in
history.”

“We’d be completely banjaxed,” Scotty agreed. “The saucer section doesna have the warp power needed to fly a course around the string and into a CTC.”

The battle bridge was smaller than
Challenger
’s main bridge, and its walls and floor were all bare plastiform and metal surfaces. There was only a single command chair, which Hunt had dropped into. The other consoles were a lot closer together. Overall, the whole room was almost as cramped as the bridge of the
Intrepid
.

Qat’qa could feel the difference between flying the whole ship, and just the stardrive section. Freed both from
the mass of the saucer section, the need to expend energy shielding it, and the tactical implications of the vulnerable civilians aboard it,
Challenger
’s stardrive section was a leaner and meaner fighting machine, faster and more agile, with power to spare.

Veritable waves of torpedoes were spraying out from the marauder’s mandible-like forward section, while the claw-like disruption emitters on her rear section fired lance after lance of searing energy at the
Challenger
.

Qat’qa flipped the stardrive section from side to side, neatly dodging the beams, but couldn’t quite avoid all of the torpedoes. One exploded against the rear quarter of the port shielding, and the port nacelle flickered.
“What the hell are you people doing to my engines?”
Vol called up from engineering.
“Bloody philistines! Don’t you know these are classics?”

Hunt ignored him, but couldn’t resist a grin. “We need to get in closer,” he shouted. “Don’t give them time for a torpedo run.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Qat’qa agreed. She dipped the front end of the stardrive, and ducked under the on-coming marauder. This time, her maneuver was, ironically, too quick. Before anyone knew it, the stardrive section of
Challenger
was right under the marauder’s bow, and almost literally in its jaws.

The collision alert sirens exploded into life, and Qat’qa threw the ship into a spin. Tyler Hunt ducked instinctively, even though, intellectually, he knew it wouldn’t make a difference.

He was too late, anyway.

There was a tremendous booming sound, and the rear port quarter of the ceiling was plowed clean through by the edge of the marauder’s scoop-like forward hull. Nog
instinctively gripped his console, hanging on like grim death, and Qat’qa managed to wedge her legs under her flight console, but not without being buffeted backward by the fleeing air. She yelled, a mix of pain and rage, as she fought to stay wedged in her seat, at the risk of having her thighs broken.

Hunt was even less fortunate. Caught in midstep, he was hooked under the armpits by an unraveling cable. Before he could even start to untangle himself, the cable slithered up and away into the blackness, taking the struggling man with it.

“Where’s the emergency forcefield?” Qat’qa shouted, barely audible over the scream of outrushing air.

“It’s failed!” Nog cried. “Trying for . . . the override!”

Nog hauled himself across the tactical console, trying to reach the emergency override control on the environmental board a few feet away. The ship’s ventilation system was pumping breathable air into the bridge as fast as it could, to try to keep the chamber pressurized while a forcefield automatically sealed the breach. With the forcefield not activating, however, the air was a torrent grabbing at Nog and Qat’qa, trying to hurl them out into the void.

Nog could feel himself being prised away from the console, his arms and shoulders aching with the strain as his body was pulled upward. He was acutely aware of the danger of reducing his grip on the console by the tiniest fraction, and his fingers clamped onto the edges of it as if they were trying to dig their way through it. He had to fight the instinctive grip, knowing that if he didn’t get the forcefield up soon, then the air supply being pumped in would eventually run out, and they all would die.

With every instinct in his being telling him that the short-term risks outweighed the long-term gains to be
made, he forced himself to take the opposite view. It was a choice of speculate to accumulate, versus certain loss. Spurred by the thought of the latter, he flung himself forward and wrapped his forearm around one corner of the console as his feet left the floor.