Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [44]
“Mr. La Forge,” Picard said after a moment, “I’m sure you’ll acquit yourself splendidly, regardless of the costume. Or the heat.”
“There’s more than one kind of heat, Captain,” Geordi said, smiling slightly, “but I’ll do my best. What’s the score, Chief?”
O’Brien grinned a little crookedly. “Skin three, uniform nil, I’d say. … Oh, you mean the shuttle,” he added innocently as Geordi threw a mock-threatening look at him. “About another ten minutes, then we’ll start testing cycles. Come on, have a look.”
They went about it, and Picard watched the work crew finish the installation work on the shuttle, seal it up, and then start running diagnostics and beaming test objects in and out. O’Brien, in the right-hand seat of the shuttle, was busying himself with checking the scrambled subspace-radio relays to his own master transport console. “We’ll be monitoring them constantly,” he said to Picard, without turning around, when the captain drifted quietly up behind him at one point. “The doctor has put subcutaneous transponders in each of them. We won’t use the communicator functions unless there’s no choice—the signal generation, even though it’s scrambled, would almost certainly draw unwanted attention to them. But we can still lock on and pull them out in a hurry if we have to.”
“As long as that ship doesn’t raise its shields,” Picard said. That was one thought that had been haunting him.
O’Brien nodded. “If they can just keep from being noticed, they’ll be all right.”
“Quite so,” Picard said, and got out of the shuttle, aware of his own nerves, not desiring to get on any of his people’s. The feeling of helplessness that so often came over him when sending crew into danger was building in him now, much worse than usual. Unknown danger was one thing. Known danger was worse, in its way, and this mixture of the two was worse still. These people are us … but somehow changed—and no way to tell how changed but by putting ourselves, or some of ourselves, in their way. The thought was not even slightly reassuring. Kirk’s notes on the old Enterprise’s experience had been as exhaustive as Geordi had said, and as upsetting. Ambassador Spock’s formal notes regarding the alternate captain and other command crew had been fairly dry, speaking also of an apparent moral inversion and of great emotional lability in the subjects, a tendency toward uncontrolled rages, threats, and attempts at bribery, all of which would normally be distasteful to a Vulcan. But McCoy, then the ship’s surgeon, had covertly (and with some apparent relish) made a note of Spock’s informal, off-record assessment of the counterparts as “brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous … in every way, splendid examples of Homo sapiens; the very flower of humanity.” Picard could not imagine Spock, however young, using those words unless he absolutely meant them and had experienced firsthand evidence of every trait. The thought gave Picard the shudders, for the originals of whom the counterparts were mirrors were all extraordinary people, decorated heroes, professionals of a high caliber, some of the greatest names of the Starfleet of their time. Human beings, yes, and as such inevitably flawed, but still …
He looked up and saw the crew beginning to clear away from the shuttle, packing up their equipment and carrying it away, or guiding it out on floaters. Geordi, O’Brien, and Hwiii were standing off to one side with their heads bent over a padd while Geordi checked the chips he was carrying against it.
The corridor doors opened and Troi walked in—or strode in, rather, her head tilted up, her face cool and neutral. The room went somewhat quiet with people taking in the sight of her—the changed walk, the clothes. Picard, who had seen the recording of the counterpart Troi made earlier, looked at the counselor and thought it wisest not to comment on her style of dress. He did note, though, that she had also seen that recording— probably, to judge