Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [30]
Picard looked at her. “Counselor, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you had a very carefully concealed mean streak.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Captain, you do know me better. And the dreadful fear I sense from that man every time I go near him—” She looked sober. “But I would suggest to you at the moment that we need all the tools, or weapons, that we can get. In this particular situation, this is a tool that I wouldn’t be ashamed to use. My range varies, as you know, but I am still trying to shake the effects of our closest brush with that ship. It was a psychic midden. I support us getting out of here for personal reasons as well as the obvious practical ones.”
“As long as those personal reasons don’t contaminate your performance,” Picard said.
She smiled at him ruefully. “I’m in no danger of that as yet. But living a life here, if that ship is typical of the surroundings …” She shuddered. “No, thank you. In any case, I think our guest will tell us what we ask.”
“I wish you could ask him what his ship wants of us,” Picard said.
“I don’t think he’s privy to that, Captain. I got a general sense from him that people in his echelons were not told any more than they needed to be told … and indeed he was rather resentful about that, that he wasn’t warned, or warned thoroughly enough, about what he was going to find when he got here.”
Picard nodded and said to Geordi, “Now, as to method …”
Geordi looked thoughtful. “We could hitch a ride back with our friend’s little device, Captain: the transport platform.”
Picard shook his head. “Can you guarantee that the thing is carrying enough power to store your pattern as well? Are you willing to bet your life on it?”
Geordi looked uncomfortable.
“No,” Picard said. “We’ll do this our way.”
Worf looked up then. “Possibly, if the alternate Ensign Stewart’s original aboard our ship were willing to be sent there in the alternate’s stead …”
Picard considered that very briefly, then shook his head again. “I would not send someone into that situation without most complete preparation, and I doubt he could be prepared completely enough, or, more to the point, that such a course of action would be very fair to him.”
“The honor he would accrue would be considerable,” said Worf.
Picard laughed softly. “Mr. Worf, no doubt it would, but I think we must look in other directions. Mr. La Forge, you and Chief O’Brien are going to have to try to work something out.”
“At least we have the advantage of knowing what their transporter waveform looks like,” O’Brien said. “We won’t trigger their systems when we beam in.”
“Unless they’re suspecting we might try something like this,” Geordi said, “and have changed their waveform, too.”
O’Brien rolled his eyes. “Sure you’re a pessimist. We can arrange a negotiable tuned-band match if you’re worried.”
“See to it,” Picard said before the two of them got involved in one of the technology duels they loved. “Are there any other ramifications to be considered?”
“One more, I believe,” Data said, folding his hands. “While we do not have the same kind of time limit for our intervention that the original Enterprise crew had, we may have another. Some theories of multiuniversal structure hold that the universes in a given “sheaf” are not held rigidly in place in relationship to one another, like the pages of a book, but that they move with relation to one another, in patterns which may or may not recur, one universe sometimes being “closer,” or easier of access to another given one, sometimes farther away. There is a possibility that this transfer has happened here and now because that other Enterprise was waiting for the congruence to be closer than usual.”
Picard blinked in surprise. “Do you mean they were shadowing us?”
“No,” Data said, “merely going about their patrol schedule—since we are in the same “sheaf,” our movements can logically be expected to mirror each other’s much of the time. However, in any case, I would not care to linger here too long—for if the universes move too