Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [69]
Picard looked at his fingers. “So I am. It’s not very serious, I’ll stop by sickbay later. In the meantime, you had better accompany me to engineering.”
Picard headed off down the hall, with Ryder close behind him, uncomfortable thought running in the back of his mind, like the trickle of blood, hot and persistent. Toujours l’audace, he thought, somewhat bitterly, as he went. He longed for his own universe, though it should be infested with Romulans and every kind of unknown danger. Better than this dark mirror of his own, where one’s worst fears kept threatening to come true.
CHAPTER 8
Elsewhere, in the darkness, another island of light floated, swept along a wildly varying path; alone in the darkness, trying to stay that way.
Will Riker sat at Picard’s desk in his ready room, staring at the reports coming up on his screen. He hardly saw them; he was afraid. Not for himself: paradoxically, that was something he usually felt most acutely after a crisis. Occasionally, more than occasionally, he had had cause to bless that fact. But there had been no communication from the landing party for an hour now. Not that any had been planned—but the silence was as racking as communication might have been. He didn’t know which to prefer. The thought of his friend, his commander, and Deanna, enduring who knew what over there, all at once, out of help, out of range, was almost more than he could bear.
“Riker to Chief O’Brien.”
“O’Brien here.”
“Any change?”
“No change, Commander. Their life-sign telemetry is coming back just fine.”
There was that to be grateful for, at least. “Very well, Chief. You’ll let me know if there’s any change …”
“Right away, sir. Count on it.” O’Brien’s voice was gentle.
“Thank you, Miles. Ou.” Riker made a grim face at his own uneasiness and turned his attention back to the screen. He had had a bad hour with two sets of data: the first information that Geordi had sent back from the other Enterprise, and Geordi’s own list of the files that Stewart had managed to transfer to that ship. To Riker’s horror, the latter were not only information about the Enterprise’s weapons array, engine capacity, and power, but also almost all of her threat-response files—the computer-managed programs that helped the helm officer and weapons officer “fight” the ship, taking most of the work off them and leaving them free to orchestrate new and different moves that would specifically address an enemy’s weaknesses in the heat of combat. With this information, that other Enterprise’s computers could predict, preempt, almost all the defensive moves and many of the aggressive moves that his own Enterprise might make in a battle situation. To discover that their enemies had this data was, to put it mildly, not good news.
Riker was certain that the only reason they hadn’t been attacked so far was that the computer and crew on board the other Enterprise were busy analyzing this information, and using their own computer to incorporate and invent responses to it. It was a grim certainty, but as far as Riker was concerned, there was no reason that two couldn’t play at that game. For the past hour or so he had had a considerable amount of computer space freed for the business of analyzing and creating threat responses to the weapons array and capabilities of the other ship.
Riker was glad to have the information to work with, but battle with this other vessel was still going to be a nasty prospect. The other Enterprise had nearly 80 percent again their engine capacity and was hideously overweaponed—not only in terms of phasers and photon torpedoes, but in terms of other weapons he had never heard of. No matter, he would prepare his ship as well as he could. They would fight the good fight and make the other Enterprise sorry it had ever started this business.
He allowed himself a grin that he would not have allowed any of the crew to see at that point. If worse came to worst, and if there was any way to manage it, he would make sure that if his own universe was going