Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [58]
Travers looked from one of his officers to the next, taking them all in. Only Santos showed any faith at all that the stranger wasn’t up to no good—and even she didn’t seem so sure of it. Finally, the commodore turned back to Picard himself.
“I’m not entirely sure that I buy this spy story,” he decided. “For one thing, you could have gone to more trouble to secure a believable identity.” He shook his head. “But whoever you are, I don’t trust you one little bit.” Without looking at his security officer, he said, “Hans?”
Schmitter straightened. “The brig, sir?”
“The brig,” Travers confirmed. “At least until we can get a starship out here to take him into custody. After that, he’s Starfleet’s problem.”
“I’ve got another one,” Barclay announced proudly.
Geordi turned away from his own work below a denuded control console to look at the lieutenant, who was standing in front of a similar console on the other side of the room. Barclay’s fingers were running over the pads and keys on his control board while he eyed the monitor above it.
Data and O’Connor had popped their heads out as well. O’Connor looked hopeful; the android was as emotionless as ever, at least on the outside.
“Good going, Reg,” said the chief engineer. “Any idea what it is?”
La Forge tried his best to keep the strain out of his voice. After all, Barclay was high-strung enough as it was. The last thing he needed was a stepped-up sense of urgency.
“Don’t know,” said the thin man, his eyes flickering across the screen. His lips pressed together as he concentrated. “Not for sure, anyway. But …” Suddenly, he cast a glance in Geordi’s direction. “I wonder if this could be … their retrieval beam!”
The chief engineer cursed softly. So far, working like demons, they had coaxed a number of systems into operation—even if they hadn’t the slightest idea how they worked.
First, there had been the sensor-access monitor, which was virtually useless as a search tool without its associated memory banks. Then they’d gotten something similar to an annular confinement beam up and running. Next, they had restored what appeared to be a transporter lock. And most recently, they’d added a time-space adjustment device, which allowed for the passage of planets through space.
After all, any given world could move tens of millions of kilometers in as little as half a solar year. If the transporter couldn’t adjust for this, it might only send people and things to a world’s current location, as opposed to the position it occupied at a designated point in the past. The result? It would be beaming its transportees into the void, which would hardly be to their liking.
In any case, with all these systems purring contentedly, they could now lock on to a subject—provided they knew where it was—and by virtue of the monitor, actually see what they had locked on to. Then, with the help of the time-space adjuster and the confinement beam analog, they could establish a path through space and time for the subject’s atoms to travel along.
Now Barclay thought he had gotten the retrieval system going. If he was right, they had everything they needed to bring the captain back. Except for two little items, of course. One was the ability to reassemble Captain Picard’s atoms once they were drawn back into the station. The other was a set of coordinates describing where and when he was.
But first things first. If they really had a working retrieval system, it would be simple enough to prove it. And if not, at least they would know where they stood.
“Reg,” Geordi ventured, “can you get your system working in tandem with the others?”
Barclay’s brow creased as he attempted to comply. A moment later, he recoiled a couple of inches. Then he looked to his superior and shrugged.
“Apparently,” he explained, in his characteristic start-and-stop way, “the system’s beaten me to it. I mean, it’s working in tandem with the other routines already. I guess that’s how it was designed.”
Geordi felt grateful for the small favor. At least something was going right.