Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [35]
“More?” Riker said. They reviewed all the best ones—first that evening at the Paris Opera in 1960 when the fighting started in the middle of a performance of Parsifal, something to do with an accusation about the tenor and what was going on out of sight in the bottom of one of the swan boats; then the great Metropolitan Opera Riot of 2002, when the holographic special effects malfunctioned in the middle of the new production of the Ring, and the critic from the Times was tracked down and spray-painted by enthusiasts unknown shortly after the appearance of the morning edition containing his review; then the cloned-Bernstein revival of West Side Story on Alphacent in 2238, at which the composer’s clone, gone insane from unnoticed single-bit DNA errors, started firing a phaser into the audience in his outrage at having been revived.
“I think I can do better than that,” Worf said, and began instructing the computer to retrieve the hard-video storage of the 28844 production of Xandally, in which the soprano had declared her family in a blood feud with the tenor’s due to a salary dispute and had killed k’Kharis onstage, before his aria was finished (etiquette usually mandated letting the performance end first).
“Sounds like a good one,” Riker said.
“There were three days of street fighting, and the government fell,” Worf said with some relish. “And then—”
“Data to Commander Riker.”
Riker looked at Worf with a resigned expression and shrugged. “Riker here, Mr. Data.”
“Our probe is within range of the other Enterprise,” Data said, “and we are receiving signal leakage per Mr. La Forge’s prediction. I think you will want to see this.”
“We’re on our way.”
When they came onto the bridge, everyone else on it who could possibly spare an eye from his or her duty was gazing at the main viewscreen with expressions ranging from horror through frightened fascination. Riker swung down to where Data sat at his console, working carefully over the controls. “You’re recording all this, of course.”
Data nodded, glanced up at the screen again. It had been showing a corridor, empty when Riker came in, looking no different from one of their own corridors. Now the view shifted to show a different hallway, with some crewmen in it, going about their business. Their uniforms were odd— one-piece uniforms, more or less duplicating the look of the familiar two-piecers, but the collars were cut uncomfortably high for Riker’s tastes, and the uniforms’ colors were extremely somber, the maroon gone a dark blood-russet, the green gone green-brown. Some few crewmen wore sashes of some silver or gold material around their waists, an odd and barbaric splash of brilliance against the darkness. But odder, and more ominous to Riker, he noticed that every one of the passing crewmen was armed. Phasers mostly, particularly large and threatening-looking ones. But there were a few knives, as well, and one crewman, a gray-skinned hominid from some species Riker didn’t immediately recognize, went by wearing at his waist, unsheathed, something that most closely resembled a machete.
“Naturally we cannot read directly from ship’s optical-fiber communications with the present equipment,” Data said to Riker as he worked, “but the comms system RF backups are running concurrently, and even quite marginal leakage from them can be read without too much trouble—though that will change if the ship’s shields go up.”
“That they’re not up now,” Riker said with some relief, “would seem to imply that they feel themselves