Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [132]
Picard looked at Riker. “Get that probe ready. We’re only going to be able to outdistance them for a little while.”
Riker nodded and got up to see about it.
“Mr. La Forge, Commander Hwiii, well done,” Picard said. “We have you to thank for getting us home. Unfortunately we now have another problem.”
There was a brief silence. “They did follow us,” Geordi said.
“They did. We will at least be able to warn Starfleet, however, and pass on to them the information you’ve mastered for us.” All the same, Picard was heartsore. Destroying that ship here would bring down on their home universe the same fate that would have befallen the Empire’s universe. Not in my lifetime, he thought bitterly, but everyone will know at whose door the responsibility for the loss of millions of lives must be laid. Maybe it would have been better to do it there after all.
But if we had, Starfleet would have no warning. “We cannot outrun them,” Picard said. “We can close with them and see them destroyed. That’s all. The crew had best be told.”
“Captain,” Geordi said, “wait! There’s still a possibility.”
“Is it one I can count on?” A silence ensued. “So,” Picard said. “It can’t be helped, gentlemen.”
“Captain,” Hwiii’s voice said, “for your peoples’ sakes, for the Federation’s sake, stretch it out! Hope is thin in the water, but it’s not gone yet.”
“I will not let them take us,” Picard said, “and I will not let them destroy us piecemeal. If we must all die, we will do it cleanly.”
“Fair enough. But buy us some time!”
“All that I can, Commander.” Picard looked at Worf. “Give me allcall.”
Down in engineering, Geordi and Hwiii were bent over the main console arguing, while people ran around them in all directions. Everywhere else on the ship people might be standing still and listening to the amplified voice that spoke to them, but down here, no one had time.
“Attention, all crew. This is the captain. Our situation is as follows …”
“We can’t,” Geordi said.
“We can!” Hwiii said.
“We’ll get blown to kingdom come!”
“It’s going to happen anyway! Wouldn’t you rather take the chance?”
“Listen, you crazy fish—”
“Who’re you calling a fish, you deaf-skinned, round-headed mammal? It will work, it will! Think of the sharks! All those teeth, they’re terrible, yes, but who tries to attack a shark by biting it? You ram it in the gut instead. Better yet, you get it to swim at you as hard as it can, and then you hit it, so vectors add and its velocity turns against it. Get it to cooperate in its own demise, turn its own force back on it.”
“The velocity.” Geordi stared at Hwiii. “And they’re excluded. They’re excluded from their home universe and included in this one, just as we were excluded from this one and included in theirs. We can reverse the procedure! We need a little more time, and a word with the software, and some more power.”
Now it was Hwiii’s turn to stare. “We haven’t got any more power!”
“So what if we got them to give us some?”
“Oh, absolutely, let’s just ask them for a donation!”
“Hwiii, you’ve got herring for brains. The shields are working perfectly well.”
“They won’t be if we let those people near them! Their phasers—”
“—are rated at three terawatts each! Look! We take the shields and do this.”
A brief silence, and then a long, high, thoughtful whistle. “You’re right about my brains. But if we miscalculate, this is going to rip the ship’s skin up like so much seaweed!”
“Not if you invert the skinfield! We barely need the structural field while we’re on impulse.”
“”Barely”! Do you know how many tons—”
“One point five million. Would you like them to keep sticking together in their present form instead of being distributed around as free hydrogen radicals? Good! Invert the skinfield, go for flat nutation on the fields.”
Hwiii sang an excited scale. “Then invert the field supply generators and run the power backwards down into the switchback outphase generator? Yes, of course, and then—”
“Then