Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [75]
“Aye, Commander,” came Rager’s response. “Course plotted.”
“Engage,” commanded the first officer.
There was something about the way he said it that reminded Ro of Captain Picard. If the prophets were with them, maybe she’d hear that order from the lips of the captain himself before long.
“Cestus Three?” repeated Geordi. “The Cestus Three?”
“That’s right,” confirmed Riker, his voice charged with an excitement that the engineer could feel right through his comm badge. “The world in the Academy simulation. The one where we first ran into the Gorn.”
Data was already seated at the monitor, feeding the information into the console below it. As soon as he was finished, the local computer nexus went to work calculating the distance to the world in question.
It only took a moment to obtain a readout on the bottom of the screen. Armed with this figure as well as the power curve recorded during the captain’s transport, Data was able to distill out of the equation a temporal element—in other words, how far Picard had traveled into the past.
When the android was done, he just sat there for a second or so, his brow wrinkled ever so slightly. Then he looked up at Geordi.
“What is it?” the engineer asked, disturbed by his friend’s expression. “How far back did this thing send him?”
“One hundred and three years, one month, and six days into the past,” answered Data. But he didn’t elaborate any further.
Geordi frowned at the android. “Is there something significant about that date?” Sometimes, dealing with Data was like pulling teeth.
“There is indeed,” came the reply. “It is only a few days before the Gorn invasion of that world, which killed every colonist but one.”
“Lord,” breathed Riker. La Forge had almost forgotten that the first officer was still listening in. “If the captain was really there when the Gorn arrive …”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. They all had a pretty good idea of how it would end—with the death of Jean-Luc Picard. Or maybe, worse, his mangling of the timeline, as hard as he would no doubt fight to prevent it.
And talk about your ironies. To be transported back in time to the incident that opened the way for relations between the Gorn and the Federation—while en route to a meeting that would attempt to preserve those relations. If the situation were not so desperate, Geordi would have managed a smile.
Just then, Barclay and O’Connor entered the room. They’d been working on hooking up the reassembly controls, which required some work out in the corridor. No sooner had they walked in than they realized something was wrong.
“Good news and bad news,” Geordi told them, saving them the trouble of asking. “The good news is we’ve located the captain. The bad news is where we found him.”
Barclay nodded, his brow rippling as he considered the information. O’Connor, who was a good deal less intense than her colleague, just nodded.
Geordi turned to Data. “Think you can do it?” he asked.
The android’s lips formed a straight line. “I can try,” he responded. Then, without any further ado, he bent over the console and applied himself to his task.
Picard knew that he should have left the place as soon as he was able. But he couldn’t do it. Something held him back.
Certainly, it wasn’t the need to hide his comm badge—not anymore. He had safely buried the device nearly an hour ago, out here in the shadow of the almost metallic-looking crags that rose up erratically behind the doomed outpost.
When Captain Kirk landed in another day or so, he would find the Gorn encamped on the other side of the colony, past the armory and the administration center and the now-disabled generator. Kirk would launch plasma grenades at the enemy, keeping them at bay until he could figure out what had happened here.
Some Gorn would be killed in the encounter. Some of their weapons would be damaged or destroyed. But not Picard’s communicator. That would remain intact, so that Commander Riker could find it a hundred years from