Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (22 page)

“When you say ready, you had best mean ready to use, not just ready to test.”

“It’s fully functional and fully powered. Or at least as powered up as anything on a vintage beauty like this can be.”

Bok held his gaze for a moment, trying to gauge whether the human was right. He was fairly certain that Sloe wouldn’t lie to him, but he was considerably less certain that the man had the talent and ability to perform such a complicated task right. Sloe nodded slowly, and held out a padd displaying graphics of the cloak’s power flow and status. Bok was no expert, but it looked good to him.

Bok turned and snapped a finger at the mercenary manning the tactical console. “Engage the cloak.”

Sitting in his cabin, comparing one of
Challenger
’s padds to one from
Intrepid,
and trying to work out just how to spin the former as a natural development of the latter, Rasmussen felt a sudden shift in his perception, as if everything suddenly felt slightly queasy, and off-balance. It was like being seasick, and he realized that he could use a drink. Rum, maybe, since that used to be issued to sailors. He supposed it must be good against seasickness.

He ran to the bridge, as internal communications still weren’t working. “What just happened?”

Bok, Sloe, and Grak looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“There was a . . . I just felt this . . .”

“Oh,” Sloe said, “you mean the cloak. We got it working, and it’s pootling away quite nicely now—”

“Is it always like this?”

“You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

La Forge had experienced the feeling only a handful of times, but that was often enough to recognize it for what it was. “We’ve cloaked.” Everyone who had been returned to the mess had clearly understood that, even if they hadn’t experienced it before.

“Will
Challenger
be able to pierce the cloak and find us?” Balis asked.

“If anyone can, it’ll be a ship full of engineers.”

C
hallenger
hurtled through space, speeding toward the center of the Agni Cluster at high warp. On the bridge, Scotty could feel the irritation building in his gut, and he couldn’t help getting up and pacing around lest he end up sitting there twitching with impatience. “Intercept?”

“I have the
Intrepid
’s position marked,” Qat’qa said. “We should be there in a matter of minutes.”

“Good,” Scotty replied.

“Sir,” Nog said, his tone cautious. “I’m not detecting any sign of
Intrepid
. . . There are several indications of possible warp trails.”

“One of them must match
Intrepid
’s engines, lad. Pull up the records on the NX-class warp signature.”

“Checking . . . Yes, sir. There are two warp trails consistent with the NX-class.”

“And I can’t see there having been a visit from another NX ship here, can you?”

“No, sir, I can’t.”

“So they’re trying to fool us. Work out the most probable pursuit course. We need the real NX’s trail.”

“Aye, sir.”

Rasmussen was in the captain’s cabin when Geordi found him. The largest cabin on the ship, it was one-quarter the size of the average modern cabin. “What is it, Geordi? Oh, and congratulations on the sensor work.”

“Thanks.”

“Was there something you wanted to ask me? Or tell me? I can tell from your expression you’ve got one of those rather boring authoritarian lectures in mind.”

La Forge didn’t bother to argue. “Please listen, Rasmussen, and let me tell you something about this partner of yours. The first time the
Enterprise
encountered him, he used a mind controlling device to try to force Captain Picard to fight a battle against the
Enterprise.
Bok did that with the help of an old Starfleet ship he’d found, the
Star-gazer.”

“He knows something about old ships. That’s handy, don’t you think?”

“Bok’s crew didn’t know what he had in mind. They thought he had a straightforward scheme to bring them profit. He was lying to them, not telling them that he really wanted revenge.”

“He’s pretty unusual for a Ferengi, I’ll give you that.”

“The point is, he was lying to the rest of his crew.”

“He was a daimon then. He didn’t have to tell his crew what his motives were. Isn’t that the rule even in Starfleet?” Geordi didn’t want to reply, but his hesitation spoke for him, much to his annoyance. “See. That’s what I thought.”

La Forge clenched a fist, but forced himself to unclench it. He wasn’t a violent man, and this wasn’t a situation where it would do him any good. “The second time
Enterprise
encountered Bok, he had genetically tampered with a boy to make him seem to be Captain Picard’s son.”

Rasmussen looked interested. “Some kind of blackmail scheme?”

“Not exactly. He wanted to kill him, to make the Captain feel what Bok felt when he lost his own son.”

“What we’re doing here, Geordi, has nothing to do with Picard or Bok’s son.”

“Everything Bok does has to do with his son! Somewhere, somehow, it’ll lead back to his dead son.”

Rasmussen tilted his head first one way, and then the other. “Maybe, yeah, actually I can see how it could . . . So?”

“He’d lied to the crew of the ship he was using. He crossed them to try to get what—”

“I think I see a pattern developing.”

Geordi gave a curt nod. “It’s bound to repeat itself. What makes you think you can trust Bok—?”

“I don’t trust Bok. At least, not in the way you mean. But I can trust knowing not to trust him. And he can trust not to trust me.”

“The difference is that I doubt you’re planning to double cross him in order to hurt someone else. He will be planning to do that to you. You can’t trust Bok, and he will cross you.”

“I’m flattered that you worry about me, but, really Geordi, you don’t have to.”

Geordi saw a flicker of something in Rasmussen’s eyes. Guilt? Libido? La Forge vaguely recalled that Rasmussen had tried to hit on Deanna, Beverly, and almost every other human female on the ship. “Leah, Guinan, you get on well with them, right? You were making friends?”

“There are plenty more little stars in the galaxy,” Rasmussen said with a smile. “Plenty more.” He looked at his chronometer, “and plenty more sensors to watch them with. You really should be on duty now.” His smile iced slightly. “Really.”

Challenger
slowed to impulse in a system where a red giant had blossomed, swallowing any planets that had once orbited it in its younger days.

“The trail stops here,” Qat’qa announced.

Hunt frowned. “How can it stop if
Intrepid
isn’t here?”

“It cannot, unless she either entered a wormhole—”

“I’m not reading any of the neutrino levels that a wormhole in the area would leave.” Leah frowned. “I have another warp trail, though. A different one. It looks like the signature of a Klingon warp coil to me . . .” She checked the computer’s readings.
“K’t’inga
-class.”

“Bollocks,” Scotty muttered. “We’ve wasted half the day followin’ a bloody decoy!”

“I am setting course for the Agni Cluster,” Qat’qa said quickly. “We should still be able to pick up the other trail when we get there.”

Bok dozed in the center seat on
Intrepid
’s bridge. He had originally intended to claim the largest and, no doubt, most luxurious cabin on the ship, which had previously been the quarters of her original captain. When the door to the captain’s cabin had opened, Bok had felt his heart sink and his
bile rise, passing each other quite uncomfortably on the way. The cabin, far from being spacious and luxurious, was exactly the same size and color as his cell had been at Rog Prison. It wasn’t any more luxurious than his cell had been either.

True, there weren’t three other Ferengi squeezed into it, but it had brought back unpleasant memories all the same. There had been the ignominy of being fleeced for every strip of latinum in the reception tavern when he arrived, and then the weight of debt put upon him as part of the penal servitude. Each day he was in the prison, he was debited a few slips for the cost of his upkeep. It wasn’t much at a time, but of course he had nothing after the inaugural deposit was forced from him, and then the weight and pressure of it built up steadily over time.

The hew-mons had an ancient torture, something called “Chinese water torture,” in which the steady dripping of tiny water drops onto a prisoner’s forehead slowly drove him insane. The accumulation of these debts had the same effect on inmates of the Ferengi prison system.

It was all worth it, of course. No price was too high to pay for making amends for what had happened to his son.

“The NX warp trail ends here.” Qat’qa’s announcement was the last thing Scotty wanted to hear. If he could just build a better bloody sensor . . .

“Another decoy?”

“There’s no other warp trail in the system,” Leah said. “But there’s an increasing distortion in the warp trail we’ve been following.”

Scotty’s breath caught in his throat. Could the distortion have meant a disaster? “What are ye thinking, Leah?”

“I’m thinking the distortion looks like a cloaking field beginning to overlay the warp trail.”

“Ye think she cloaked?” That might be a good sign—the ship laying the false warp trails
hadn’t
left a signature of being cloaked.

“Yes.”

Hunt frowned. “Were any NXs equipped with cloaks? Those were the days before the Treaty of Algeron.”

“No. But there’s no reason why one couldn’t be fitted.”

“The ship that attacked us was Klingon, with a cloak. So, if they had a spare . . .”

“Any of us could fit a cloak to a starship if we had one to spare. The first thing we need to do is penetrate the type of cloak they’re using.”

“Cloaking technology is always evolving,” Qat’qa said. “It is one of the shortest-lived technologies, actually. Anyone who has served on a Klingon vessel can tell you that.”

“Aye, lass, that it is. It was straightforward enough back in my day, if not easy. The Klingons had cloaks on their Birds-of-Prey, and the Romulans had cloaks on theirs.” He shook his head. “Nowadays, everybody and his granny has some kind of cloaking technology, and they all need a different countermeasure. And that’s even if the cloak we’re facin’ isna a new variety.”

“It won’t be,” Nog said confidently.

“Why not?”

“Because Bok is Ferengi. The cloaks on his ships will be ones that he has
bought.”
Nog grimaced. “Secondhand goods.” He seemed to pull himself up slightly “He wouldn’t pay market value, so any cloaks he bought were old models.”

Qat’qa grunted. “That still leaves a lot of different possibilites.”

“Unless one of our prisoners knows where he got them,” Nog said.

“D’you think any of them might be willing to tell?” Scotty asked.

“I think I might be able to persuade them. With your permission, sir?” Scotty nodded, and Nog went to change into his best suit again. Since the Ferengi prisoners would only talk to the son of the Nagus, that was how he would go to them.

“T
hat’s weird . . .” La Forge was looking through the
Intrepid
’s original sensor logs, in what had become the Starfleet pen, the meeting area behind the center seat.

“Commander?”

“Reg, take a look at this. What does it look like to you?”

“If I didn’t know better . . . No, it’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s really impossible, Reg. What if you didn’t know better? Pretend you don’t.”

“Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say the upper band of this subspace signature looked as if it had been disturbed by something like a slipstream drive.”

“That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t believe it either. Thanks for the second opinion.”

“But this reading was taken two hundred years ago . . . Nobody used slipstream drive then.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before too . . . And like I said before, nobody that we know of. But there are a lot of civilizations out there that we don’t know of.”

“The rest of the readings don’t look like any slipstream signature I’ve ever seen, though.”

“No, but they do look familiar somehow. I wish I had
access to the
Hera
’s data banks. We could compare these sensor readings with everything in the Starfleet rec—” He stopped as he noticed the baffled expression on Barclay’s face. “Reg? What’s up?”

“You said . . . I’m sorry, Geordi, maybe I misheard.”

“I said what?”

Reg looked uncomfortable. “You just said you wished we could access the
Hera
’s database. Not
Challenger.”

“I did?” Geordi was surprised. He hadn’t thought about the
Hera
in a while, and couldn’t imagine why he’d have thought of it now.

Reg nodded solemnly. “The
Hera
disappeared years ago. Did you know anyone on her?”

“My mother was the captain . . .”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Commander, I didn’t mean to . . . well, to bring back any bad memories.”

“No worries, Reg. It was a long time ago. Why would I think about the
Hera
now? Except I wasn’t thinking about it, so maybe I mean what is my subconscious trying to tell me?”

“Maybe it’s something to do with these sensor readings. Do they remind you of the
Hera
?”

“Not consciously . . .” Geordi sat back in thought. “When the
Hera
originally disappeared, I was so certain that it was still in one piece . . . She had to be still in one piece because that way my mother would be still in charge, and, well, still alive.”

“That’s understandable,” Barclay said quietly.

“So, I wanted to find her, and I thought I knew where to look. But to be sure, I got ahold of everything I could about the
Hera
’s most recent movements . . . All the telemetry that Starfleet received before her disappearance.”

Reg looked at the display doubtfully. “The
Hera
was
Nebula
-class, wasn’t she?” Geordi nodded. “I can’t see a
Nebula
-class ship having put out telemetry like this, no matter what kind of engine modifications were installed.”