Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [135]
“Very well.” Picard glanced over at Riker. “If he’s wrong about this, I’m tempted to demote him.”
“You’d have to do it posthumously,” Riker said.
“In both our cases,” Picard said, and his mouth set grim.
“How are those warp coils doing?” Geordi called across to Hwiii.
“Nominal,” Hwiii said. “I’ve increased the frequency offset by about twelve percent—it should be enough to hold things together for the moment.”
“It had better,” Geordi said. “Keep an eye on the balance. We’d look pretty silly if a nacelle fell off in the middle of this.”
“About six minutes to destination,” Eileen said over Geordi’s shoulder. He looked up from his console and found to his distress that he still had some trouble looking at her.
“What’s your problem?” she said. “You look like you have mental indigestion. Is it just stress, or is it something I said?”
“Not you,” Geordi said hurriedly.
“Then who—” And she stared at him. “Oh, no. I was there, too.”
“Not you,” Geordi said, looking down, but finding no refuge there. The computer was still crunching the numbers needed for their close approach and field-anchoring to the brown dwarf. He looked up at her again. “Another you.”
She swallowed. “What did I—what did she do?”
“She was nice to me,” Geordi said after a moment. “But it was mostly because she wanted my job.”
Eileen stared at him, then pursed her lips in indignation. “After we finish all this craziness, I am going to have a fight with you. What would I want your job for? Especially as it’s so much fun watching you bust your butt doing it.” She flounced off to the other side of the console and got busy over one of the screens there. And she looked up at him, making a “mad” face—but there was more kindness in that anger than in all the other Eileen’s smiles.
Geordi found his grin coming back without having to be forced. “How’s the balance?” he said to Hwiii.
“Holding nicely,” said the dolphin from the panel where he was working. “I think we can leave these things to their own devices for the moment.”
“Oh, no way, Hwiii—you have too much trust in machinery! Brewer, come here and keep an eye on those readings. If they vary more than point five percent in either direction, call me. Okay, Hwiii, let’s get on with the main act.”
“Destination in four minutes,” Eileen said, looking down at the main status board. “Engines are beginning to show some variance in the warpfield.”
Geordi and Hwiii looked at each other, shook their heads, and looked down at the main status board again. “Okay,” Geordi said. “There’s 2044. What’s the gravitational field strength?”
“One point eight times ten to the eighty-fourth atts,” said Eileen. “What we expected.”
“All right,” Geordi said. “Hwiii, do we have hyperstring interaction yet?”
“It’s virtual. It will be real when we come out of warp. Virtual strengths are now at”— Hwiii checked one of the instruments that was reading from a piece of his own equipment now built into the inclusion device—”fourteen point six milliwaynes. Increasing with the inverse square of the distance as usual.”
“We’ll need more like twenty, won’t we?”
Hwiii laughed softly. “I’d be happier with fifty, but twenty will do.”
“You talking about fish or field strengths?” Geordi said. “Never mind. That’s half the battle handled. Now we need the rest of it. La Forge to bridge!”
“Here, Mr. La Forge,” said Picard, still sweating.
“We’re just about ready, Captain,” La Forge said. “We’re coming up fast on 2044, and its gravitational field is interacting with our equipment the way it should. Now what we need is some more power.”
“The engineer’s lament,” Riker said. “Usually that’s your department.”
“Not today, Commander. Captain, the ship has to drop out of warp as soon as she’s within a million kilometers of the dwarf. The sudden deceleration is going to cause a lot of the energy in the warpfields to blueshift and go kinetic. It’ll give us some of what we need, but not enough. We need them to fire on our shields and give us the rest … and then they’re going to get the surprise of their