Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [104]
“I felt it, I tell you, I felt it on my skin! I explained all this to you before. I went out to see what I could feel. Nothing, nothing at all for a good while: this part of space is good for that at least, the hyperstrings are sparse. But then I felt the knot, and it was as fat a knot as you get from a small planet. A great energy source all tied close and tight. And there was a fluctuation in the power source serving it, and I felt the knot loosen, then tighten again, and the whole string twanged!” The trumpets sang again in Hwiii’s voice. “It oscillated, I felt the oscillation, its direction, its amplitude, the length of the hyperstring, what’s wrapped around it, where it’s headed!”
Worf looked at Riker, who asked, “Are you sure it was not something aboard the Enterprise that you sensed?”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Hwiii said, laughing as someone might laugh at a child making a ridiculous but adorable suggestion. “I could feel her quite clearly, the great fat whale that she is, and there’s been no such power fluctuation, nor has she anything capable of generating as much as nine hundred terawatts for any one single function— has she?”
Riker shook his head. Great fat whale? “I wish. She certainly hasn’t.”
“But that does,” Hwiii said, wriggling his tail into the generator for his fluid-field suit. “I can hear it from here, I can feel it, you don’t need sensors anymore to find them: shut them down! Or rather, I’ll link the passive sensors to my hyperstring-sensing equipment, and you can trail the other Enterprise where you like without fear of detection … until you’re ready to let her detect you. Then there will be trouble.” Hwiii dropped his jaw in a grin, and Riker suddenly, as if for the first time, became aware of the teeth in those jaws, small and needle-sharp, in great number.
“We will go hunting,” Hwiii said. “I have a good idea of the nature of the weapon she used on us: I’ll start work on the remedy. Mr. La Forge will get us the details, the equations: he’ll know which ones we’ll need, he can’t mistake them. We will build the same apparatus that the other ship carries. And then we will go hunt us a shark.”
Hwiii smiled meaningfully at Riker and at Worf, and Worf, caught in the spirit of the moment, grinned back, also showing teeth. “My people are gentle, by and large,” Hwiii said, “but as was true on your Earth, sharks are our great enemies, and we hate them. They have more teeth than we have, swim faster, live longer. But even the great whites have no defense when we hit them amidships at thirty knots.” Hwiii smiled, more sweetly, but wicked-eyed. “They rupture wonderfully. I know where their “amidships” is, now. We’ll start building the beak to hit them there. Come on!”
It had taken Picard a good while to prepare himself for the sleep he knew he needed. He had forced himself to it finally, done the various small exercises that he had learned over many years, setting the “mental alarm clock” to wake him after four hours. Then he lay down, in a bed that to his mind still felt slightly warm from the body of Beverly Crusher. It was almost certainly an illusion, but he couldn’t get rid of the image.
And still sleep eluded him. After a while, he got up and went over to the desk, sat down, and brought up his terminal there.
His own computer was one of the installations that he had required the nanites to spare. He had had some questions to which he had not yet found answers. Some answers Picard had guessed and wanted corroboration for; about others, he had no idea.
“Scan for records on Spock, Commander, Starfleet,” he had said.
“Spock, Commander,” said the computer, and began reading out a service record that sounded like that of someone who had entered wholeheartedly enough into what the Enterprise of that time was doing: intimidation, plunder, destruction. A long time it went on, then something odd happened. After a given stardate, that Spock was transferred off the Enterprise, at his own request; but the record said the transfer was “prejudicial”—meaning that someone on the ship wanted to get rid of