Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [137]
“Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, very unnerved indeed, “was that close enough for you?”
“We need a couple of more passes, Captain.”
“The line between power drain and shield overload is going to be extremely fine, Commander,” Data said. “A few megajoules in either direction is going to mean the difference between a successful operation and an exploded ship.”
“Tell me about it, Data! You just keep your eye on the red line. But try not to move until we give you the word! If this works, we won’t need to move at all.”
The ship lurched and rocked again as the phasers hit, this time from behind. “Loss of power to rear shields, fifteen percent,” Worf said. “Some odd readings, however.”
“That’s us,” Geordi said. “Hang on, up there! We have to do some string manipulation just before the balloon goes up.”
“Pull whatever strings you have to, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, “but hurry up about it! We can’t take much more of this phaser fire.”
“Hwiii, poke that baby, we need more!”
There was a pause. “Captain, you’ve got to let them shoot at us, we need the energy. As much of it as we can get.”
The other Enterprise came in again and made another pass. “All phasers firing, Captain,” Worf said, as if Picard needed to be told. This time the ship shook as if a giant had picked it up and rattled it, and the lights went down, and only the emergency lighting came up. “Rear shields down,” Worf said, “damage to decks forty-three and fifty. The other Enterprise is coming about again.”
“Mr. La Forge!” Picard said.
“Just one more time, Captain!”
“It may be all you get,” Picard said, watching on the screen as the great wicked-looking silver-dark shape bore down on them.
In engineering, Hwiii and Geordi were working together over the main status console. “That’s it,” Hwiii said. “The “tether” is in place. One more shot!”
“Here she comes.”
“On automatic,” Hwiii said, touching the last control. “Check it?”
Geordi looked over his shoulder. “The power conduits are holding. Come on, you son of a—”
—and the other Enterprise fired, and the whole ship shook—
—not with the phaser impact, though: that was absorbed. Clutching the status board, they watched on the schematics as the dreadful flame of energy channeled down in a searing line from the shields into the inclusion apparatus. All around them the air seemed to vibrate and go thick with power as the gravitational and hyperstring forces they had harnessed to “tether” them to the bracing mass of the brown dwarf now reached back and seized on the target that Geordi and Hwiii had designated. The dwarf was the anchor of one side of a slingshot; the Enterprise was the other. If we can just keep from snapping before it does, Geordi thought desperately. The vibration got worse. The universe darkened, as if getting ready for a really big sneeze this time, and everything and everybody not fastened to something fell down.
On the bridge, Picard watched the other Enterprise fire at them point-blank. He fully expected to see what he had seen in the shuttlecraft, the bloom of fire, the walls blasting outward, fragmented, into darkness. But instead everything went thick and dim with a huge buzzing feel of power in the air, and everything shook—
—and that other ship abruptly went away from them, without moving. It did not so much get small, as simply become more distant—impossibly distant for something that had been moving on impulse. Yet it was not going into warp, either—the usual chromatic aberration was absent. It simply went farther and farther away … and then was gone entirely.
“Mr. Data,” Picard said, looking at Riker and Troi; they looked as stunned as he felt. “Evaluation.”
“The ship is gone, Captain,” Data said. “It was not destroyed—but rather dislocated from our space without changing local location.”
“Engineering!” Picard said. At first the unrestrained noise he heard frightened him. Then he realized it wasn’t screaming, or rather, not screams of pain, but of joy: cheering, hoots and howls