Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [23]
CHAPTER 4
The bridge was running on yellow alert now. Picard had paused by the helm, where the helm officer in rotation, Ensign Redpath, was running a navigations diagnostic in a spare moment. “Anything on sensors?” Picard said to Data.
“Negative at the moment, Captain.”
“We may have some while yet of this,” Picard said. “If what our … guest … has just told us is true, his ship is expecting to pick him up shortly. I desire him to miss that pickup—preferably without the other ship knowing why.”
Picard fingered his lower lip for a moment. “Mr. Data,” he said, and glanced over at the young officer manning the helm, “Ensign Redpath—for the time being, if any vessel whatsoever approaches us, no matter how familiar or unfamiliar, I want you to make us scarce. We need time to consider our options, and at the moment I trust no one, and I don’t care to be seen. I want all sensors on extreme sweep, and confine yourselves as much as possible to passive sensing—nothing that would alert another ship which might be looking for our scan. And I want to know where everything is around us for as many light-years around as you can manage—everything, be it the size of a starship or a bread box. If anything comes near us, I want you to note its location and get us out of what you judge might be its sensor range as quickly as possible—while, at the same time, not losing sight of it entirely ourselves.”
Data and Ensign Redpath blinked at each other. Then Ensign Redpath nodded his dark head, smiled slightly, and said, “Bumpercars.”
It was Picard’s turn to blink now. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Redpath?”
“It’s a negative-feedback program, sir. You program the sensors to have the helm take the ship out of range anytime they sense anything: it’s an analogue of the system your body uses to protect you from pain—burn your hand, it jerks back. Each succeeding contact pushes the ship out of range again. When contact is on the point of being completely lost, the helm is instructed to recoil a little in a direction roughly parallel to the projected course of the object that caused the recoil, so you find it again … just. And then start recoiling again. Even if the target vessel gets anything from us, our close mirroring of its own course changes will make us seem like some kind of sensor ghost.”
“The ship’s course may become quite irregular,” Data said.
Picard nodded. “All the same, that sounds like what I want—and I don’t mind if the Enterprise jumps around like a flea on a hot griddle, as long as she’s not seen. See to it, Ensign.”
“Aye, sir,” Redpath said, and started working at his console.
“I want to be notified the minute anything happens,” Picard said to the bridge at large. “I’ll be in the ready room.”
Heads nodded all around. As Picard was heading up that way, Worf approached him. “Captain, if you have a moment …”
“Of course.”
“Before it became necessary to restrict our scans to passive ones, I found something that you should see. Look.”
Worf showed him the readout at one of the science stations. Far away, at nearly three or four light-years’ distance, the display showed them a tiny, fuzzy shape that Picard would normally have suspected of being sensor artifact. The computer’s sensing of it showed clearly that it was radiating energy.
Worf pointed at one of several waveforms coming from it. “Look, Captain. This pattern closely matches the parameters for the waveform of our transporter carrier.”
Picard stared at it. “Mr. Worf, that is—” He shook his head.
“Barely a meter in length. Yes, sir. As far as I can make out—and Mr. La Forge agrees with my assessment at this point—it is a kind of transporter relay station, with a simple “recording” function built in. Someone begins transport “to” this object: the pattern is caught halfway, then stored in this portable form, if you like, and held to be sent off in another direction. Light-years, parsecs—then, when close enough, and