Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [70]
It was not exactly the way he had hoped to leave the colony. Apparently, the old saw was correct: beggars could not be choosers. And for all intents and purposes, he had been a beggar these last few days, depending on the kindness of others.
No more. Now he was on his own—in more ways than one. He still hadn’t concocted a method of contacting Will Riker. Nor, given the pace he’d have to keep up in order to stay out of the commodore’s clutches, was he likely to again have the luxury of pondering the problem at his leisure.
Maybe you’re approaching this the wrong way, he mused. Up until now, you’ve been looking at the problem from your end. Put yourself in Will’s position instead. If it were you looking for the captain now, not vice versa, what type of signal would you be watching for?
Once more, his thoughts returned to his communicator. Disgusted with himself, he attempted to tear them away again, but they kept veering in that direction. This is ridiculous, he told himself. Will would know that the damned thing couldn’t maintain its signal into the next century. He would reject that line of inquiry and try a …
No. Wait. Picard stopped himself short. There was a way to signal his officers with his communicator. Not the way it was normally done, but effectively nonetheless.
All along, he had been thinking of his comm badge as only an active signaling device, and therefore having no value here. But it could also be a passive signaling device—because terillium, one of the metals that enabled it to operate over long distances, was an alloy that would not be developed for another fifty years!
Will would know that. And even if it didn’t occur to him right away, someone else would point it out. Then all he would have to do is conduct a long-range sensor scan for terillium—knowing that when he found it, he would find Picard, because no undeveloped planet would possess it naturally.
That would lead him to Cestus III. By nucleonic dating, he would determine how old the alloy was. And then he would know approximately how far back in time the captain had been tossed. Of course, it wouldn’t provide a precise fix, but Picard hoped that Geordi could take it from there.
Why hadn’t he thought of this before? It was so … so obvious. Or anyway, it should have been. Perhaps if he had not been disoriented to such a degree, he would have come up with the solution days—
Suddenly, the captain’s mouth went as dry as the dirt beneath his feet. His jubilation turned into a cold and cloying fear. True, the terillium in his communicator would serve as a red flag to Riker—but only if it wasn’t destroyed in the interim.
Picard looked about him, at the gentle slopes that rolled higher and higher as they left the colony behind, eventually piling one on top of the other like playful lion cubs until they became full-fledged mountains. These were the hills that Captain Kirk would bombard shortly after his arrival. And before he would finish chasing the Gorn back to their ships, the entire area would be an explosion-pocked mess.
Rocks would be pulverized into dust, dust would be ground into finer dust. And what were the odds, in the midst of that complete and sweeping devastation, of a single terillium element remaining intact? Or at least, intact enough to be discerned by a starship’s sensor array one hundred years later?
What’s more, the communicator might not even last until Kirk arrived. After all, the reason Kirk had trained his phasers on this area in the first place was because this was where the Gorn were entrenched. It didn’t stretch the imagination much to picture one of them stumbling on something round and shiny, picking it up, and taking it with him when he fled.
The captain’s teeth ground together purposefully. He had to locate