Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [78]
He headed into the shower, turned it on, then bent briefly over his communicator. “Mr. La Forge,” he whispered, “this is urgent. The “inclusion” apparatus responsible for our being here is in the engine room. Enterprise”—he assumed Geordi would know which one he meant—”must not remain in this locality. Equally urgent: intent is that Enterprise will be restaffed with others, then returned. Also, transport has been noticed. End message. One acknowledgment if you two are all right, two if there’s a problem.”
The badge buzzed once under his fingertips and did nothing else.
There’s a relief, Picard thought, and started stripping out of the uniform, carefully removing the badge and medals. Geordi had been confident enough that this area couldn’t be scanned, but Picard still preferred paranoia: if the sound hadn’t blocked out his words, they themselves might still be fairly confusing to any local listener. He could only hope for the best.
In the shower, he thought hard. He needed a quick way to incapacitate at least one of the ship’s major systems. There was no way to get away with it quietly in engineering: there were simply too many people down there, and he wouldn’t know where to begin. The smartest way would be the back way, the way Geordi had tried. Some different back way, though—not so carefully watched. The trouble was telling which ones were watched, here. Almost everything seemed to be. How any undertaking as colossal as a starship, or a Starfleet, could be sustained in such an atmosphere of profound mistrust … Picard found it difficult to understand.
A couple of hours, Troi had said, until the next phase begins. Not very long. And what next phase? One possibility presented itself: that they were ready to move against the Enterprise, that they intended to batter her into submission, take her, and put their own crew aboard. For the time that ship will be here … until she’s gone, Geordi had said. Picard could find no other way to interpret that. They would take her back to her home universe, with their own crew … and do what? There’s no way they could take on all of Starfleet …
… could they? Perhaps this had been a test to see whether a Starfleet ship could be sucked out of her own universe—”included” into theirs— restaffed with matching crew and sent back … to pass as herself. The pretense couldn’t be kept up forever. But did they mean it to? And did they need it to? On one of these missions such as his Enterprise was running now, far out in the middle of nowhere, how often did a starship actually contact another ship, or planet? They might be out of touch with anything but Starfleet Command for weeks at a time, sometimes, depending on the distance, even months. Eventually the pretense would come apart—they would be ordered back into space where details about the crew were known, back to a starbase or back to Earth, even, for maintenance, for some other mission. Sooner or later someone would detect that crew members weren’t acting the way they should. And indeed that acting would be the worst part of it, for a crew from this universe. Spock’s note to his debriefing document was pertinent: that the only reason his captain and shipmates had survived their experience was because it was easier for a civilized man to pretend to be a barbarian than for a barbarian to pretend to be civilized. But even so, the pretense could be kept up for a good while. And during that time, someone willing to put his mind to it could find out all kinds of things about the Federation from the Enterprise’s computers, and from the regular data downloads from Starfleet Command. What could be done to one ship …
… could be done to more. There had to be more to what they were planning. Just that realization was enough to convince Picard that they had to be stopped, even if it meant destroying this ship with him on it.
But