Myriad Universes_ Echoes And Refractions Part 41

Crusher raised an eyebrow. Across the room, he caught Sito glancing his way, grinning. He realized he was blushing, and tried to concentrate on the physics of the impossible, with only partial success.

It had been eighteen hours since Captain Picard had ordered Ro Laren to get the Enterprise out of sight, and she had all but exhausted her patience. It was deep into the night watch, but she couldn't imagine sleeping at a time like this. Instead it was a large number of cups of iced raktajino, sitting at the desk in the ready room, and poring over page after page of scrolling data on the captain's computer screen.

Their last attempts to signal the away team had failed, and ops was reporting that a blanket of subs.p.a.ce interference had fallen over the planet Turing, doubtless broadcast by the Romulan warbird in orbit. For the last hour, Ro had been reviewing everything in the Enterprise's databanks about D'deridex-cla.s.s warbirds like the Haakona, but so far hadn't found the magic bullet she'd been looking for. What she had found had given her a considerable respect for the designers of the ma.s.sive cruiser, one of the most advanced vessels in the Romulan fleet. It measured more than twice as long as the Enterprise, stem to stern, with an impressive complement of firepower. In fact, with its three disruptor arrays, torpedo launchers, and cloaking device, it might actually outgun a Galaxy-cla.s.s starship like the Enterprise, but the warbird's offensive capabilities were offset by the fact that its speed was limited by the forced quantum singularity employed as its power source, which also served to make the warbird less maneuverable in combat.

Ro had been searching for some design flaw, some Achilles' heel, that she could use to her advantage, should she find herself in ship-to-ship combat with the Haakona.

Of course, Captain Picard had ordered her to return to Federation s.p.a.ce if she didn't hear from him within twenty-four hours, of which only six remained. And if she followed orders, there seemed little chance of a combat encounter with the Romulans, since the Enterprise could warp out of the system before the Romulans even had a chance to realize that they had been hiding behind the star's far side.

Still, Ro couldn't help reading over again the report from Starfleet Intelligence about experiments using antiproton beams to detect ships employing Romulan cloaking devices, and checking again the design schematics of the D'deridex-cla.s.s, looking for weaknesses in the shield architecture.

Was she intending to follow orders? Or was she intending something else entirely?

Ro wasn't sure of the answer herself, and was wrestling with the question when the ready room's door chimed.

"Who the devil is up this late?" Ro muttered to herself, checking the chronometer. "Or this early, I suppose." Day watch wasn't scheduled to begin for more than an hour yet. She glanced at the door, and in a somewhat louder voice called, "Come."

The door hissed open, and Doctor Dalen Quaice stepped in. "Good morning, Laren," the doctor said with a smile. "Or is it still 'good night'?"

Ro sighed, and turned from the computer screen. Only an android or upload could be that perky at this hour of the morning. "Is there something I can do for you, Doctor?"

Instead of answering, the physician strode across the room to the replicator. "Two cups of green tea, hot," he said.

Ro crossed her arms over her chest, leaning back in the captain's chair. She watched as the doctor retrieved the two cups and came to set them on the desk before her, tactfully pushing the half-finished cup of iced raktajino out of the way with his elbow. "Take it from someone who drank far too many cups of black coffee in medical training, Laren. A cup of raktajino can be a nice way to end one day, and a nice way to begin another, but drinking them to bridge the gap can play h.e.l.l on the digestive system." He sat down in the chair opposite hers, and then slid one of the steaming cups toward her. "I prescribe green tea instead, to settle the stomach and give your body a little chance to catch up."

The doctor picked up the other cup, and took a sip, his little finger held out to the side, daintily. They sat together in silence for a few moments, the only sound that of the doctor's gentle sipping. Ro tried not to think about what would become of the tea once it filtered down through Quaice's artificial body; of course, what happened to food and drink in an organic's body was hardly a pretty picture, either. Still, Ro drank and ate because she had to do so, to avoid thirst and hunger. For the most part, if she could get along without it, she would more than likely do so, aside from the occasional bite of hasperat, for old times' sake.

But the doctor, who didn't need to consume anything at all, went ahead eating and drinking anyway. But why? To remind himself what it was like to be human?

"Tell me, Doctor, does it ever bother you? Not needing to eat and drink and...well..." She waved her hand, unsure of how to continue.

"The other demands of the body, Laren? To say nothing of the pleasures? And please, call me Dalen."

Ro gave a tight smile, and a quick shake of her head. Even if the doctor insisted on addressing everyone in the crew by their given name, that didn't mean that she had to do the same. It just didn't seem...appropriate.

If the doctor had noticed her reaction, it didn't show. "But to answer your question, dear, no, I don't miss it in the slightest. This new body of mine might not need to eat or drink, but it can. And while the tasting mechanisms took a little while to get a handle on, now I'm hard pressed even to tell the difference. Since the positronic matrix was fully integrated, and my senses recalibrated to my personal standards, I'm sometimes hard pressed even to remember I'm in an artificial body at all." His smile faded somewhat, as his face took on a wistful expression. "Of course, when I think about...well, when I think about all I've lost, it sometimes doesn't seem worth the bargain."

Quaice sighed, heavily, and Ro felt sure he was remembering his late wife, who had died just before the upload procedure was made public. Ro had lost loved ones herself, and often in circ.u.mstances just as painfully close to aid or rescue. She thought about her father, tortured to death by Carda.s.sians right before her eyes.

Before she realized what she was doing, Ro had reached across the desk and laid her hand atop his. She didn't speak, and didn't have to. The look in her eyes was all the empathy that was needed.

They sat like that for a moment, before the doctor shook off his fugue, and brought the smile back to his face. "Drink your tea before it gets cold, Laren. Doctor's orders."

The corners of Ro's mouth tugged up in a slight smile, and she lifted the cup. "Thank you, Doctor, I suspect I needed this."

The doctor nodded, and while Ro took the first sip, he turned his attention to the padds piled on the corner of the desk, and the data displayed on the computer screen. "Studying up on Romulan ship design, are you?"

Ro swallowed a mouthful of tea, to her surprise feeling already refreshed, and nodded. "I figured it couldn't hurt to know...just in case, you understand."

Quaice nodded, his expression knowing. "How much time is left? Six hours?"

Ro glanced at the chronometer. "Five hours, fifty-six minutes."

The doctor pursed his lips, thoughtfully. "You know, I suppose it would be possible to download the ship's logs into a probe, and send that back toward Federation s.p.a.ce instead. Could be set to transmit a coded message via subs.p.a.ce back to Starfleet as soon as it's clear of the Neutral Zone."

Arching an eyebrow, Ro studied the doctor's expression. "Doctor, are you suggesting that I disobey orders?"

Quaice sipped from his teacup, and smiled. "Oh, dear, no. That would certainly be out of line, wouldn't it? A ship's doctor counseling the acting commanding officer to countermand a direct order?" He shook his head, tsking. "No, no, that would be a most grievous breach of protocols, I'd think." He took another sip of his tea. "Of course, it might not be out of line for a chief medical officer to remind the acting commanding officer that there is sometimes a distinction between following orders, and doing what she knows is right."

"What I 'know' is right?"

The doctor nodded. "It doesn't seem right, does it, leaving the captain and the others-Jaxa, Wesley, Geordi, Isaac-to the tender mercies of the Romulans? To say nothing of the innocent population of Turing."

The doctor was right. She couldn't help thinking about Captain Picard and the away team, left with few defenses in the path of the Romulans. She thought about Sito Jaxa. They weren't really friends-far from it-but she couldn't help feeling that the things they shared in common, the similarities in background if not in temperament, had created a kind of bond between them. Ro had never had a sister, but she imagined that if she had, she'd have been something like Sito.

"No," she answered, her jaw set, "it doesn't. But those are our orders."

"As I said," Quaice replied. "There are orders, and then there is doing right. I'm afraid I've never been very good at following orders, Laren. Just one, I suppose, that instructs me to 'first, do no harm.' But if inaction brings others to harm, then sometimes action is the only answer."

Ro drew a heavy breath and sighed. "That sounds like an old Bajoran proverb my father used to say."

The doctor smiled. "Wise people, you Bajorans. Defiant, too."

"Really?" Ro answered with a smile of her own. "I hadn't noticed."

She took another sip of her green tea, and glanced at the data piled in front of her, all of which translated in her mind into strategies, tactics, and tricks.

"So what are you going to do, Laren?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. But I guess we'll find out in"she glanced at the chronometer"five hours, fifty-three minutes."

Isaac came to awareness gradually, his mind fogged with discordant sensation. Was this what organics called "pain"?

He was surrounded by darkness. Or so he thought, until he realized that his visual sensors were just now coming back online. Little by little his visual acuity returned.

His sensors were confused, his processing muddled, but he deduced that he was lying flat on his back on some hard surface. Kinesthetic information was confused, and he had trouble processing data about the atmospheric pressure on his epidermis, the pull of gravity, or ambient temperatures.

A dark shape above him resolved into a Romulan shock trooper, armed with a disruptor. At his side, an organic Romulan officer ran a sensor over Isaac's chest cavity. As near as Isaac was able to determine, his body was intact, still in one piece, but he had the impression that some of his ports and access panels had been opened.

"Excuse me," Isaac said, his voice sounding strained in his own auditory receptors. He managed to turn his head fractionally to one side, and saw two other bodies lying beside him. "May I ask where I am?"

In response, the shock trooper simply pointed the disruptor at Isaac and fired, and the world disappeared once more in pain and darkness.

9.

In one of the recessed alcoves along the ten-sided perimeter of the control chamber, a gateway no larger than the palm of Sito's hand hung in midair, just at eye level, and she peered through it like a child at a keyhole, or an ancient submarine commander at a periscope.

"No sign of Isaac and the others," she reported. She glanced over her shoulder at the hairless android by the controls. "Change target-gateway orientation ninety degrees along the y-axis, thirty degrees along the x-axis."

"Acknowledged," the android said with precision.

"Now watch what happens," Crusher told La Forge, both of them hunched over a tricorder. "See how the sine wave alters amplitude when he changes the orientation? That's the gravitational constant changing."

Sito saw the look on La Forge's face. "Wes, that's impossible," the first officer said.

Crusher shrugged, and pointed to the miniature gateway hanging in front of Sito. "And that just spells 'possible' to you? Come on, Geordi, it's the only explanation."

Sito smirked. She'd known Crusher since the academy, and the fact that, on the outside, he looked more or less like a regular guy led her sometimes to forget what a freak of nature he was underneath. In their warp theory cla.s.ses, Crusher had intuitively grasped concepts that even their instructors still had difficulty wrapping their heads around, and it was whispered when Crusher wasn't around that he might well be a genius of geniuses, another Einstein, or Cochrane, or Soong. Of course, in a fleet filled with genius-level Soong-type androids, even an Einstein might find it difficult to stand out, and so it was perhaps not such a surprise that instead of rewriting the laws of physics from some ivory tower, Crusher had instead ended up in the engineering section of a starship. But Sito knew that there was nowhere that Crusher would rather be. The Enterprise was home to him in a way that no place could ever be for her, the place where he'd had so many formative experiences as a child, and the place where he finally became an adult.

But it might well be a home to which none of them would ever return again, if they didn't find a way out of this.

"Report, Lieutenant," Picard called, snapping Sito out of her reverie.

"There are now some hundred Romulan android troopers in the city, Captain," Sito said, turning from the miniature gateway. "There appear to have been isolated conflicts between the Turing populace and the troopers, but the anti-positronic disruptors have given the Romulans the upper hand."

"And no sign of Commander Isaac or Data?"

Sito shook her head sadly, her lips pressed together.

"d.a.m.n," Picard said under his breath. "Keep at it, Lieutenant."

The other end of the gateway had been reoriented, providing a different vantage of the streets below. Sito's idea about using small openings for observation was working even better than she'd expected, the tiny gateways all but invisible a hundred or so meters up in the air, pointing downward to give an un.o.bstructed view of the city. Unfortunately, though, their goal of locating their missing crewman, and the two androids he'd been with when the Romulans had opened fire, had so far been frustratingly unrealized.

Lal was standing a few meters away at another tiny gateway, employing a similar strategy. "Close gateway and reinitiate with same dimensions three meters overhead in common room three, one centimeter from south-facing wall," she called to the android at the controls.

"Acknowledged," the operator responded.

While Sito was getting a bird's-eye view, Lal was attempting something more like a fly on the wall, checking each of the rooms in the city in turn, one after another. But she appeared to be having no more luck than was Sito.

"Captain," Lal called over to Picard as the gateway cycled closed and open. "Should this search prove fruitless, there is another alternative. If the subs.p.a.ce communications network could be reestablished, we could triangulate the position of my father and the others."

Picard was thoughtful. "Even if they're no longer on the planet's surface?"

Lal c.o.c.ked her head to one side. "Is it your opinion that they may have been transported to another location?"

Picard nodded. "It would be in line with Romulan operating procedures to relocate key prisoners to their ship in orbit." He frowned. "I don't see how they would have been able to communicate through the subs.p.a.ce interference any better than we can, though."

Sito had a thought. "Captain? If I were the Romulans, I'd have kept a particular subs.p.a.ce band clear, while blocking all the others. That way they can continue to send and receive while everyone else eats static."

"Mmm." Picard rubbed his lower lip with his index finger. "Is it possible to locate that channel and use it for our own purposes?"

Sito shook her head. "We might be able to find it, but if the Romulans are smart..."

"Which we can a.s.sume that they are," Picard put in. "The idea of an 'unintelligent Romulan' is almost an oxymoron."

"Right," Sito answered. "Well, that being the case, they'd likely be cycling the clear channel at regular brief intervals. Their communicators would all be set to switch to the new channel at the same time. Even if we could find the clear channel, it would probably drop back to interference again almost immediately. Maybe even a matter of nanoseconds, and almost certainly too short a time to triangulate their position. And unless we knew the cycling sequence-which we probably couldn't guess in a million years-we'd be right back where we started."

"Understood, Lieutenant," Picard said.

"Captain?" La Forge called from the control console.

"What is it, Number One?"

"You might want to take a look at this, sir." He motioned to the tricorder in Crusher's hands.

The captain moved over to join them.

"I think," Crusher said, with some reluctance, "that we may have just worked out the science behind the gateways."

Picard arched an eyebrow.

"We still need to check a few things," Crusher hastened to add, "but if my theory is correct, we should be able to reverse-engineer the entire gateway network. With a little time, we might even work out a way to create a new gateway mechanism from scratch."

A faint smile shadowed Picard's face. "Keep at it, Mister Crusher. That may well end up being an invaluable piece of information." He crossed his arms across his chest, and surveyed the room thoughtfully. "d.a.m.n," he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else. "This is still taking too long." He paused, then turned to the android at the controls. "Is it possible to open a gateway onto my ship? a.s.suming my tactical officer parked the Enterprise as ordered, we should have a fair idea at what coordinates the ship can be found."

The android nodded. "It is possible."

"Mister La Forge," Picard said, "could you provide the necessary information?"

The first officer wore a confused expression, but shrugged. "Yes, Captain."

So it was that a few moments later, another small gateway appeared, this one about a meter square, hovering at shoulder height in one of the unused alcoves. Beyond could be seen the bridge of the Enterprise, with Ro Laren in the captain's chair, and Doctor Quaice sitting at her side.

"Captain?" Ro said, surprised but obviously pleased. Sito could hear her voice as clearly as if she were talking through an open doorway from another room.

"Commander," Picard said, "it appears that our plans have changed."

The captain outlined their situation in brief, and then told Ro the role he had planned for the Enterprise.

Sito saw the smile spread across Ro's face. "Captain," she said, with a sly glance at Doctor Quaice, "I think you may have just saved me from a court-martial. I was about to do that anyway, and your orders be d.a.m.ned."

Picard chuckled. "And that is why I left you in command."

One by one Isaac's senses began to process information again, in fits and starts, and while his processes were still clouded by the discordant impressions engendered by the disruptor, he found that he was able to complete entire cogitations once more.

He was not alone.

The room in which he found himself was a cube roughly three meters on a side. He and the other two Soong-types, Data and Lore, had evidently been dumped unceremoniously on the cube's floor, if their att.i.tudes and postures were any indication. Harsh lights glared from panels overhead, and aside from the sealed and locked door along one wall, the room was featureless.

Isaac searched his memory banks, but was able to produce only confused and conflicting images of the interval between the moment the Romulans opened fire with their disruptors in the concourse and the moment he found himself with the others in this featureless room. He had vague recollections of returning to awareness once or twice, only to be shocked back into pained senselessness by disruptor fire.

Isaac attempted to initiate contact via the subs.p.a.ce transceiver in his head, but received only static in response. Wherever they were was still blanketed in interference.