Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [28]
Picard shook his head. “And now,” he said, “we find ourselves in what seems to be our universe—except it’s not, exactly; and nearby, another Enterprise. Except it’s not … exactly. It would seem to rule out coincidence.” He looked at Data and Geordi. “Speculation?”
“It would appear that someone in that other universe has worked out how to reproduce the accident,” Data said. “But at will, and on a different basis—not a transfer, but something more like genuine transporter function—controlled from one end, rather than induced accidentally at both.”
“To what purpose?” Picard said.
“Even speculation about that would be difficult at this point,” Data said. “But having read the Enterprise crew’s reports, their descriptions of the aggressive and acquisitive nature of the Empire and its version of Starfleet —I would suggest that the motives of that other ship are very unlikely to involve either the desire for pure scientific knowledge or any spirit of altruism.”
“You got that in one,” Geordi said softly.
“I would stretch speculation this far,” Data said. “That that other Enterprise is likely to be the instrument of our transfer—overpoweringly likely, for there are no planets or space-based facilities anywhere near here from which such a transfer, or transport, could be engineered. And at the very least, the transport would require a considerable amount of power.”
“A starship’s?”
“Probably,” Data said. “Though it would be difficult to say for sure until we understand more about the actual method of transport. And that ship is liable to be the most reliable source of information. Additionally, I would estimate that the odds are at least good that a process of this sort can be reversed. Certainly that is how the crew of the earlier Enterprise managed to make their way back home. We will, of course, have this additional problem: it is possible that the ship and crew which engineered our coming here may not desire us to leave and will not cooperate. Certainly they do not desire us to know much, if anything, about them. That they have sent a crewman here covertly would seem to reinforce such a conclusion: otherwise, why did they not contact us openly?”
Picard thought about that for a moment. “Granted. Still, we must be sure of what we’re dealing with. They seem to have managed to get a look at what our ship is like—or some one of our ships. I would like to do the same for them before going any further. Can we manage that?”
Geordi and Worf looked at each other. “We can try,” Geordi said. “The one thing we did notice about them from that one quick contact is that their shields leak a lot of energy. That means their sensors have a lot of spurious signal to put up with when they’re shielded. I think we can either tap their comms directly or put a listener probe very close to them, with enough countermeasures wrapped around it that they’ll mistake it for shield-noise artifact.”
“Were we able to obtain any other pertinent data about that other ship before we backed off?”
“The contact was very fleeting,” Data said. “It is hard to tell as yet what may prove to be pertinent. But one piece of information, an omission rather than a commission: since the other ship knows we are out here somewhere, but has not yet found us, this suggests, further to Mr. La Forge’s observations, that its sensors may not be up to the standard of ours.”
Worf nodded. “Just as Klingon shipbuilding technology, for quite some time, concentrated on weapons capacity