Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [41]
“All right,” Beverly said. “Put him in stasis for the time being: I’ll want to do the autopsy in a while.”
“And what about your sleep?” Jean-Luc said. Beverly opened her mouth, and the captain raised a finger to stop her as he got up. “I need you functional. Physician, heal thyself first.”
She made a wry face at him. “Yes, sir, Captain, sir,” she said as insubordinately as she could. She wished greatly that she could smile at him a bit, but there was no smiling in her at the moment.
“I’ll want a report when you’ve had at least four hours’ sleep. No sooner. That is how long you’re always telling me it takes the body to “do its laundry,” isn’t it?”
Beverly got up. “I would report you for parroting professional advice without a license if I could do it without dropping off in the middle of the report.”
The captain raised an eyebrow at her, then went out, but not without a long, thoughtful gaze at the shape on the diagnostic bed, now wholly shrouded in silver, and very still.
Geordi and O’Brien were going over the last of the schematics at the master display console in engineering when Picard came in. Both of them looked worn, but also excited, and O’Brien’s expression was almost one of triumph.
“Mr. Riker tells me you gentlemen have your options in place,” Picard said. “Report, please.”
“The logistics first,” O’Brien said. “Captain, you wanted some way to get people aboard the other Enterprise that didn’t involve shoving them into that little probe-platform and hoping their pattern comes out all right at the other end.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the basic idea was sound,” O’Brien said, “so I stole it. The problem with the platform was the danger it exposed the subject to. Transporter pattern is really not meant to be stored in such a poorly powered pattern buffer. Well enough. So how about using a regular one?” He grinned. “We take a shuttlecraft, install a transporter pad and complete buffer structure in it.”
Picard blinked. “Is that feasible?” he said to Geordi.
Geordi shrugged. “No reason whatever it can’t be done, with fairly minor alterations to the shuttle’s power systems. Our shuttles are overpowered anyway, the assumption being that they’ll have to serve power and coprocessor needs for mobile research and intervention platforms— planetside installations and so forth.”
“So,” O’Brien said, “the away team takes the shuttle out to the point from which they want to beam over—and does so.”
“What about detection, though?” Picard said, frowning. “No point in this exercise if that other ship notices it happening.”
“Well,” Geordi said, and got a sort of bad-boy grin. “Captain, I think I may have mentioned to you that I had written a couple of research papers for the IEEE Journal on field-phase theory as it affects the Romulan cloaking device.”
“You did mention it,” Picard said, somewhat surprised, “but I wasn’t quite sure that you weren’t joking with me—or that the paper itself wasn’t a joke. You seemed to be implying that you had worked out the theory.”
“I had. But you know how it is, things get busy and I wasn’t able to spend much time building the prototype to test the theoretical assumptions. Well, we’ve had enough encounters with Romulan ships over time, both cloaked and uncloaked, to get a lot of data on the phase shifts inherent in the generated “cloak” field. I don’t say that I’ve duplicated the “proprietary” Romulan cloaking device, but I’ve produced a small, low-level “generic” one. So they won’t be after us for copyright infringement.” Geordi grinned. “It’s mostly a phase-shifted optical redirection field—it looks at the starfield or other background behind you, inverts it, and “redistributes” it forward, adjusting for parallax effects and so forth in whatever’s most likely looking at you. There are also self-cancellative functions built in, so that it seems not to be there, eight milliseconds out of ten, even when you