Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (43 page)

“Romulans are not in the habit of attracting other species,” Voktra stated flatly.

“Er, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry, that came out a little . . .”

“Strangely?”

“It’s a stressful situation, and my mind is rather preoccupied.”

“Oh, I know exactly what you mean.”

“Good.”

“So,” Barclay continued hesitantly, “what exactly happened when your ship was hit?”

“We were trying to locate and neutralize sabotage set
by one of the chairman’s political rivals. The warp core had been rigged to overload—or overfeed—the singularity.”

Barclay nodded, understanding. Voktra’s story made a lot more sense to him than Qat’qa’s suspicions. He looked at his hands, relieved that they weren’t shaking. “You know, you don’t seem like a Romulan.”

“I’ll try not to take that personally.”

“I meant in a good way.”

“You don’t seem like a Starfleeter.”

“Oh.” He was disappointed. His efforts to uphold the image must have failed.

“You’re not as lazy.”

Barclay beamed.

“I have tested out our maneuvering capabilities,” Qat’qa reported when La Forge and Leah returned to the bridge, slightly refreshed for having eaten. “The power we’re drawing from the runabout is giving me a delay in response to controls, but it is workable.”

“Plot a series of orbital courses we can use, and take us into the best stable orbit you can manage around the attractor.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Once we’re in orbit we should be able to catch our breath and see what kind of shape the
Challenger
is really in, and figure out what to do next.” He turned to Leah. “What kind of sensor readings are we getting from the gravitational attractor?”

“None.”

“None?” That was weird; every high-gravity phenomenon La Forge had heard of put out hard radiation. “Not even X-rays or hard gamma?”

“No, no X-rays, no gamma rays, nothing I’d expect to see from any natural source.”

“Nog, launch a probe toward the attractor. I want to see what it is we’re about to start hanging around with.”

Nog keyed the appropriate command on his console. “Probe away.” After a few moments, Nog reported, “Still no sensor readings from the probe, other than in the visual spectrum. We can see the attractor.”

“What is it?”

Nog hesitated for a heartbeat. “It appears to be a starship.”

“On screen.”

The main body of the ship was the same size and shape as the
Challenger
’s own primary hull. It was lightless, but a faint edge of galactic light picked out the shape. A wedge on one side clamped two nacelles to the disc, while a triangular structure stood above the opposite surface.

“It’s Federation . . .” Qat’qa exclaimed.

“Nebula
-class,” Nog confirmed.

La Forge hardly dared breathe. “Let’s see if the probe can shine some light on her, Nog.”

Nog manipulated more controls, turning on a powerful light source built into the probe. He guided the probe over the upper forward section of the saucer, casting its light over the registry number. “NCC-62006.”

“The
Hera,”
La Forge breathed. His eyes filled with tears. “It’s the
Hera.”

L
a Forge was awestruck, in every sense of the word. It was not just a great joy but an emotional tsunami that crashed over him. “I don’t believe it . . .”

“I thought it was exactly what you were hoping to find,” Leah said, puzzled.

“Hoping is one thing, but I never actually
expected
it. I mean, not to find the
Hera
so intact. It’s like . . .” He didn’t even know what it was like, really. To have come to the end of a personal quest that had been a shadow over his life for so many years, whether he admitted it or not. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail.”

Scotty was delighted for La Forge. The lad deserved his closure, and, in any case, to find the ship all the way out here was something of a miracle.
Enough of one,
Scotty thought,
that anybody in the crew could appreciate.
And this was the massive gravitational attractor? He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that could be the case, but he couldn’t wait to find out. It would beat thinking about how many cellular regeneration treatments he had missed.

“I’ve been in Starfleet for over a century,” he said when he came to the bridge, “and I’ve never seen the like.”

“This is what I joined Starfleet for,” Nog agreed. His voice was filled with amazement.

Sela watched the probe’s telemetry on a screen in her quarters. The sight was impressive, but the only thing that she could think was this couldn’t possibly be a
coincidence. La Forge’s mother’s ship, brought here by the trans-slipstream wakes years before they were supposedly discovered by Starfleet?

She didn’t believe a word of it. She knew Saldis wouldn’t have believed it either.

“So,” she said to her junior officers, who were gathered around. “This is proof that the Federation has been experimenting with the trans-slipstream technology all along.”

“It seems obvious,” one of them, an eager young centurion agreed.

Sela didn’t reply.
I wonder if they sacrificed his mother, the way they sacrificed mine?

“Captain La Forge, can I see you in private?”

Guinan’s request was sufficiently unusual that La Forge immediately responded. She wasn’t in Nelson’s but in her quarters. The cabin was hung with silken drapes, and filled with incense. For the first time ever, La Forge saw her without a hat.

“What is it, Guinan?”

“I needed to talk to you about what’s happening, and what’s about to happen. And about why I came aboard the
Challenger.”

“Back on Starbase 410, you said you wanted to give your engineer friends your time.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Maybe you’re thinking about it too much.”

“There’s something about the way you’ve been watching, and talking. It’s as if you’re waiting for something. Or someone,” La Forge said.

“Maybe I am.”

“Who, or what?”

“I don’t know yet. But it’s why I needed to talk to you.”

“You’re waiting for someone or something that you don’t even know?”

“That’s right. It’s happened a lot in my life, actually. At least for the past hundred years.”

“Hundred years? Since you were pulled out of the Nexus?”

Guinan nodded. “Sometimes I just know that I ought to be in a particular place at a particular time, because something important will happen there, or then.”

“Your connection with the Nexus tells you these things?” La Forge supposed.

“Tells is too strong a word. Hints would be more like it. Or maybe suggests, guides, arranges behind my back.”

“But if you were beamed out of the Nexus a hundred years ago, how can it still have an effect on you? Was it that strong an experience, or . . . Did you see an expanse of future history—”

For once, she looked serious. “It was the strongest experience of any kind I’ve ever had. Stronger and more real than anything in what, for want of a better word, I’ll call my real life. But it wasn’t a matter of just seeing some display of prophecy and trying to remember all the dates and places. It’s a far more vague, and deeper, connection.”

“Like a Vulcan mind meld?” La Forge offered.

“Yes, that sounds not too far off. But it’s not a meld with another person, or with the energies of the Nexus itself. It’s more like a mind meld with my own shadow. With a memory of myself.”

“What sort of memory?”

“When I was beamed out of the Nexus, I fought to stay there. I willed myself not to go, not to give in to the transport beam. And something of me did stay behind. An echo,
a shadow . . . Whether it’s because I so desperately wanted to stay there, or whether the Nexus does that to everyone who enters it, or some mix of both and the energy of the transporter . . . I don’t know. I just know that to my . . . shadow, all time is one, and it feels that I should be here on the
Challenger.”

“Because something important will happen?”

“I guess so. But the definition of important may vary. It could be saving the universe from invading aliens, or discovering the perfect cocktail recipe that uses
kanar.”
Her eyes twinkled. “There must be something that
kanar’
s good for.”

“I’ll take your word for that.” La Forge let himself relax. Guinan had deftly turned the conversation around, and he was grateful, because he didn’t really want to pursue anything too deep right now. “If you find it, they’ll probably inaugurate an all-new culinary Z Magnees Prize just for that.”

C
hallenger
swung gently into a distant orbit around the
Hera,
settling into a stable course, that was no longer under acceleration, so the gravity had stabilized back to half a
g.

“Nog,” La Forge asked, “has there been any communications traffic from the
Hera
?”

“None, Captain.”

“Not even a distress signal?”

“Nothing. They’re completely signal-dark.” Nog spread his hands helplessly. “Their power may be as dead as
Intrepid
’s was.”

“A starship’s automated distress signal has a separate
power source just in case of exactly that kind of total power loss. It should be able to keep transmitting for decades.” La Forge gritted his teeth, frustrated. “It’s been a dozen years since the
Hera
went missing, but the automated distress call should still be running.”

“Unless it was deactivated manually,” Leah suggested.

Nog agreed. “Maybe they abandoned ship and went somewhere else. They wouldn’t need the distress signal to be running if they thought they were safe.”

“Where could they have gone? Kat, are there any planetary systems within sensor range?”

“Nothing, Captain. No stars, no planets. Just whatever gravitational attractor was pulling us in the direction of the
Hera
. I can’t even seem to get a reading on the interior of the
Hera.”

“No life signs?”

“No. I read the usual physical makeup of a
Nebula-
class hull, with tritanium, duranium, and so on, but I get no sensor readings at all beyond the hull substrate. It’s as if . . . It’s as if there is no interior. Or the interior is cloaked.”

“You’re right, that is odd.” La Forge thought for a moment. “Keep trying, but modulate the sensor wavebands you’re using. Scan for anything that might show signs of a malfunctioning cloak on board, just in case.”

“A cloak,” Leah asked, “on a Federation starship?”

“Do we have enough power restored to run the astrometrics lab?” La Forge asked.

Leah nodded. “Just about.”

“Then we might get a few answers.”

Challenger
’s astrometrics lab was a holodeck, with a ramp jutting out into a three-hundred-and-sixty degree space.
Projections were displayed into the interior of the room, giving a true display of space.

“Is this just a pretext to get me alone?” Leah asked as she and La Forge entered.

“Believe me, that’s the last thing on my mind.”

“I was joking, Geordi.”

“Sorry.” He brought up a display of local space, showing
Challenger
orbiting
Hera
. “What we need is a projection of the gravitational effect we’re under. Something that shows the position of the center of the gravity well.”

“I’ve got readings from when the sensors came online, and at regular intervals until now.”

“We know we’ve been pulled in this direction since we arrived in this region. We know the gravitational force has gotten a little stronger, so we should be able to project the source.” Nothing new appeared in the display, but the
Hera
swelled slightly. “That’s impossible. It’s showing as no further away than the
Hera.”

“Unless . . . could it be the
Hera
herself?”

“I don’t see how. Maybe if it were a Romulan ship, the singularity in their warp core could have begun to consume matter and grow, but I can’t think of any way a Starfleet warp reactor could react that way. Can you?”

Leah barely suppressed a laugh. “I’ve been designing warp engines for a long time now, and I’ve never seen anything artificial that could generate a gravitational field of that magnitude. No matter how far something went wrong.”

La Forge could feel a tightness in his kidneys, and a spreading chill. “All right, I don’t doubt for a moment that you’re right and it’s impossible, but . . .” He touched a console button. “La Forge to Nog.”

“Nog here, Captain.”

“Can you give me a sensor reading on the
Hera
’s mass?”

One moment . . .” There was a slight gasp, almost a squeak.
“Captain! It’s impossible, but . . .”

“I kind of expected it would be, Nog. What’s the mass of the
Hera
? I’m guessing it’s not the three million metric tonnes that it should be.”

“Forty-seven hundred . . . solar masses.”

Leah and Geordi exchanged a look. “Impossible!” Leah exclaimed. “There wouldn’t be a ship there. Only a supermassive black hole could have a mass like that. And its attraction would be a hell of a lot greater than it is.”

“I wish Data were here,” La Forge said with feeling as they returned to the bridge. The android could run numbers quicker than any living man and had a decidedly non-mechanistic instinct for having and playing hunches. La Forge could have used that kind of ability right about now.

Scotty sympathized entirely with Geordi’s thought. He had been quite impressed with the android officer aboard
Enterprise
, and was saddened to hear of his death. At least Spock was still alive, but it was a damned shame that there was no way to get hold of him and bring him out here.

If they could have done that, he reflected, they wouldn’t actually need to. It was a frustrating paradox, and one of too many that Scotty had experienced over the years. He stepped around the bridge rail to stand beside Nog.