Indistinguishable From Magic Part 28

"Probe away. Crossing the wormhole threshold in three, two, one. Now entering the Infinite."

Scotty ran to the transporter console. "Right, now, let's give that big-eared b.a.s.t.a.r.d the severe Malky," he said aloud, and slid his hand across the controls, energizing the beam to maximum power. "He wants time travel, he's got all the time travel he can handle."

22.

When Scotty and Leah returned to the bridge, waves of gravimetric interference were reaching out like claws to try and drag the saucer into the wormhole. There was enough ma.s.s in the string to form any number of black holes, and that ma.s.s pulled inexorably on the Challenger Challenger.

"We need warp power for a stable position," La Forge reported from the helm. "I don't think impulse is going to be enough."

Scotty took the center seat. "Keep us as steady as you can, regardless, Mister La Forge. I've visited the past enough times in my career."

"I'm trying. I'll rotate the saucer and step up the impulse power, but really, we need that stardrive section back."

"It looks as if the marauder has been destroyed," the ensign at tactical reported. "The stardrive section is returning."

"Thank heavens for small mercies." Scotty punched the communications control. "Mister Hunt, well done. Now I could do with my ship being put back together in one piece. We need your warp power to keep ourselves stable while we're transmitting the annular confinement beam into the Infinite."

Nog and Qat'qa made almost identical grimaces. "Captain," Nog called back, "I'm afraid Mister Hunt is dead."

"Thank you, Mister Nog." Scotty's voice was muted. Scotty's voice was muted. "Are ye able to re-combine with the saucer section?" "Are ye able to re-combine with the saucer section?"

"The automatics are damaged," Nog said. "And, anyway, I don't think there's time for the usual re-combination procedures."

"No time?" Qat'qa echoed. "The very words I live by." She regarded the approaching saucer for a few seconds, then began working her console. "Nog, tractor beam."

"Ah," Nog said with an approving nod. "Good thinking, Kat. Vol, give me tractor power . . ."

The bridge vibration eased slightly, and La Forge suddenly found that the controls were much more responsive. He turned to Scotty. "It's the stardrive section, they've got us in a tractor beam."

"That should help in keeping our position steady." He pressed the communication b.u.t.ton again. "Good work, Mister Nog. Hold us in position. Vol, use the warp engines to counter the gravimetric waves.

"Aye, aye, sir."

On the bridge of the Intrepid, Intrepid, the heavenly light pouring in through the main viewer was no longer the golden hue of pressed latinum. Now it was cold and blue. Bok and Sloe had expected that, as they were beginning to travel back in time, and the light was accelerating toward them. the heavenly light pouring in through the main viewer was no longer the golden hue of pressed latinum. Now it was cold and blue. Bok and Sloe had expected that, as they were beginning to travel back in time, and the light was accelerating toward them.

Sloe cursed suddenly, and Bok immediately looked up. "What's happening?"

"Interference again!"

"What sort of interference?"

"Some kind of transporter signal. An annular confinement beam."

"How is that possible?" Bok couldn't imagine that Challenger Challenger had followed them into the Infinite. had followed them into the Infinite.

"I don't know . . ."

"Is it affecting our course?"

"Yes," Sloe said, with a grim finality.

"We can't keep up the transporter signal indefinitely," Leah warned.

La Forge risked looking away from the helm console for a moment, now that the stardrive section was giving them stability in the face of the gravitational distortions and energy bursts. "We don't have to. The longer Intrepid Intrepid is looping around the string, and the faster she heads back in time, the more effort she'd need to break free of the closed timelike curve." is looping around the string, and the faster she heads back in time, the more effort she'd need to break free of the closed timelike curve."

"Which means we only need to keep altering their course until we pa.s.s the point where they can't get an escape velocity from it?" Leah asked.

"Aye!" Scotty said.

"How long?"

"Not that long." La Forge answered. "Those old engines are nothing like as powerful as modern ones."

Intrepid's bridge was filled with a cacophony of alarms that was agonizing to Ferengi ears. "Radiation alerts, Bok! They're off the scale . . ."

"This is an old ship; the scales probably don't go far."

"According to this, the external temperature is-That's impossible!" Sloe's expression was a mix of horror and awe.

"Impossible?"

"Ambient normal s.p.a.ce temperature outside the CTC is over one billion Kelvin!"

"What?" Bok was no scientist, but even he knew that that was far beyond the temperature at the heart of even the hottest suns.

"And the hydrogen density is over one Earth atmosphere."

"Does the CTC emerge in a star? A gas giant?" He couldn't help asking, even though he knew better.

"No . . ." Sloe raised his hands from the computer in a gesture of helplessness. "Some kind of quark-gluon plasma. I've never seen anything like it."

"Break us free!"

"I can't! We're being held in the CTC by external pressures. That d.a.m.ned transporter beam."

"What's our temporal course?"

Sloe called up a navigational readout. "All it says is 'Primary.' "

"Primary? What use is that? Primary what?" Bok wondered if the ancient ship's computer was failing.

"I don't know. The main something, or the first someth-"

Bok suddenly felt very cold and very sick. The ship rattled around them, the ancient panels clattering at the seams.

"Hydrogen pressure wave! More pressure waves ahead," Sloe proclaimed. "Leptons, hadrons . . ."

"What's a lepton?" asked Bok.

"Elementary particles that filled the universe in the second to tenth seconds after the Big Bang." Sloe's face drained of all color. "Hadrons were mostly created and destroyed in the first second . . ."

Bok slumped back into the command chair. The image of his son was frozen in his mind. A newborn, a new employee, an heir to the family business and an inheritor to the family's profit. A child who would now always be dead. "No . . . It can't be . . ."

". . . of the Big Bang," Sloe finished.

The cosmic string didn't exist yet, and so neither did the closed timelike curve. Freed from it, Intrepid Intrepid's warp core exploded, disintegrating the ship down to the subatomic level in no time at all, because time itself didn't yet exist. Bok would never know that he hadn't had time to even register that fact before everything he had ever known both ended and began.

The Split Infinite wasn't merely split any more, it was ripped asunder, tearing itself apart in an eruption of cosmic energies.

The neutron star that had coalesced so long ago at the poles of the Infinite was already dissipating in a blazing cloud of plasma, while the wormhole turned itself inside out and vomited forth the raw energies of creation in a spectacular blast that looked like it would spread forever. Somewhere inside, Challenger Challenger's sensors claimed, the cosmic string was unraveling, and energy discharges from its contacts with stellar and wormhole matter were sparking still more colossal detonations.

Scotty saw the danger first. "That's it, it's been there long enough. Disconnect everything!"

"What?" La Forge was momentarily puzzled. Even if the transporter beam had reached the minimum level needed to do its job, what harm was there in leaving it a few moments longer, just to be sure?

"Disconnect the transporter and tractor beams. The energy will feed back along the string."

It was too late. Tentacles of quark-gluon energy, driven by the power of the first and biggest explosion in the universe, lashed out along the beams, and hammered into the Challenger Challenger's saucer.

Energy shorted out between the transporter pads and the energizing coils in the ceiling, ripping each transporter room to shreds. The transporter consoles exploded, and buckled the transporter room doors that barely managed to contain the explosions.

On the bridge, lightning crackled across the consoles, shattering the laminated surfaces. Shrapnel scored across everyone in the room, and Scotty was hurled across the bridge, to lie crumpled at the base of the main viewer.

As the decks tilted, furniture hurtled wildly across the room in Nelson's, sending shelves of bottles crashing to the floor, and shards of gla.s.s into the air. Tables tumbled across the room, one slamming into Guinan and jamming her against the wall.

Nog and Qat'qa could see the saucer wreathed in crackling energy, and starting to slide out of position.

"They're losing power," Nog said. "Can you dock manually with the saucer?"

"I have never tried," Qat'qa replied, in a tone that suggested this was an oversight she had long wanted to rectify. "Secure yourself. This may be as b.u.mpy as my forehead." She nudged the stardrive section forward.

"Do you need the tractor beams on or off?"

"Keep them on!"

The saucer descending toward the connectors on the stardrive section should have been a rea.s.suring sight, but watching the immense gray-blue surface approach the gaping hole in the ceiling was more nerve-wracking than Nog had expected, especially as it was shuddering and bouncing unpredictably.

It was hard to read Qat'qa's expression, as her face was pretty much masked by the concentration required to dock with the saucer at exactly the right rate to engage the locks, and not so quickly that the ma.s.s of the stardrive section batted the saucer aside.

Rasmussen was certain that the ship was about to explode. He had been lifted from one ship about to be torn apart and dumped into another-how unfair was that? He was almost resigned to the idea, when he realized that the forcefield across his cell in the brig had gone out when a power junction exploded.

Perhaps he was still fated to continue his journey after all. The fates had brought the professor and his time pod to him, then the Enterprise, Enterprise, then then Challenger Challenger and and Intrepid, Intrepid, so why not another ship? so why not another ship?

The shuttlecraft in Challenger Challenger's shuttlebays weren't that different from the ones in his day, and in fact were almost certainly easier to fly. They were designed to be used by almost anyone.

Even though he had thought it all through, he was still surprised at how easy it was to steal a shuttlecraft. No one was watching for him, or keeping an eye on the shuttles.

As he had suspected, the tiny but warp-capable craft was easy to fly, and he had no problems in sweeping out and into s.p.a.ce.

As he oriented the shuttle away from the new nova where the Infinite used to be, he saw that Challenger Challenger was complete once more, and beginning to turn. Not wishing to give them the chance to grab him in a tractor beam, he pointed the nose at a random star, and jumped to warp two. was complete once more, and beginning to turn. Not wishing to give them the chance to grab him in a tractor beam, he pointed the nose at a random star, and jumped to warp two.

Challenger's warp nacelles flared into life, and the ship plunged forward into warp, leaving behind the spreading nebula, and the eruption of elementary particles, which were limited to the speed of light.

23.

"Are we about done here, or are you still sending me more casualties?" Alyssa Ogawa had rarely been so tired, or seen so many cuts and broken limbs in her sickbay in a single day, even as head nurse on the Enterprise Enterprise. At least she would have an interesting story to tell Noah when she saw him. More importantly, she was still here to tell it.

"I think we're out of the worst of it," Scotty told her, with a look that said he hoped that was true. He sat, slumped forward to catch his breath, on a biobed, while a medtech prepared a hypo for him.

"That's a relief. Most of these injuries are pretty minor, but there are simply so many that I'm running out of s.p.a.ce in sickbay. If there are any more casualties I'm going to have to look at finding somewhere else to put them."

"How about a holodeck?" Barclay suggested, as a nurse applied a boneknitter to his wrist. They looked at him askance. "No, I'm serious. A holodeck can re-create any environment, and the computer can patch internal sensors through to the sickbay computer systems, so the holographic biobeds can function as real ones."

"There'd be a bit of a time lag," Scotty said.

"Only a couple of nanoseconds. Nothing that would prevent swift action."

"From a holographic doctor?" Ogawa asked skeptically.

"Well, I have a certain influence in those matters," Barclay said slowly. "If you want-"

"It's all right, Reg, I think my medical staff is up to it. s.p.a.ce is the problem, not staffing."

"Oh, okay." They laughed together, and then Ogawa showed Scotty through to her office, where they could have some privacy.

"All right, la.s.s, give me the bad news."

"What makes you think there's bad news?"

"I've been injured before, and I know how it feels. And I can see it in those concerned eyes of yours."

"Well, the bad news isn't exactly bad news per se. There are a lot of people in here with worse injuries than you've sustained. But . . ."

"But there isn't another human crewmember of my age," Scotty said bluntly.

"I don't want you to think I'm in any way casting your age as a negative, Captain, but I can't lie to you either. You're not going to heal as quickly or as easily as a younger person with comparable injuries. Nor for that matter, will you heal as quickly, or as likely, as someone who didn't spend eighty years in a transporter buffer. The damage isn't serious, but it's a contributing factor."