Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (31 page)

Qat’qa was snarling curses as she began to be dragged out of her seat in spite of the way she had braced herself in position. Nog looked across at her, seeing another asset about to be lost. As his head moved, the rushing of air suddenly left a vortex over his left ear, and he could feel something pop inside. It felt as if someone had jammed a spike into the side of his skull, and as if his brain was leaking out.

The back of the helm seat broke with a loud crack, under the leverage that Qat’qa’s effort to stay in place was exerting. Suddenly Qat’qa was flying upward, and Nog hurled himself across his console with a scream of frustrated anger, throwing himself bodily at the environmental console, and the forcefield control on it.

As soon as he was moving, he began to rise, as quickly as Qat’qa, and he stabbed an arm out, willing it to stretch far enough, even if it had to take his shoulder with it, to reach the panel.

Cold smooth plastic rapped his knuckles, stinging more than he would have expected, and then he was, mercifully, falling.

He slumped against the environmental console with relief, as Qat’qa slammed to the floor with a muffled curse a few feet away. Overhead, the emergency forcefield had finally come on, and blue static was sparkling across the hole in the ceiling.

Nog pulled himself up, to see Qat’qa dart back to the helm seat. “Are you all right?”

She looked back, her expression fevered and wild. “Yes!”

“Where are they?”

“Behind us.” She flipped the vessel, and suddenly the marauder’s huge, curved engine section was upside down, right in front of Nog’s eyes on the main viewer.

Nog had a sudden flash of inspiration. “Vol? Are you all right down there?”

“Ish.”
He sounded a little shaky and sickly.

“Good enough. Can you transfer all our power reserves, and as much drive energy as you can spare, through the main deflector?”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now!” The marauder was already starting to turn.

“All right, you’ve got it.”

Nog saw the energy levels on his tactical console light up with more power than he’d ever seen on a weapon.

He stabbed at the firing control.

The
Challenger
’s main deflector dish flared up, and speared a solid beam of energy right into the port quarter of the marauder’s engine section.

The marauder simply disappeared, exploding into nothingness in a single nova-like flash. A few moments later, pieces of debris rattled what was left of the stardrive section’s shields, but this last assault by the marauder wasn’t enough to do any damage. The pieces were too small.

Nog caught his breath and leaned on his console, trying to disguise the fact that he needed it to prop him up. Qat’qa let out a long shuddering breath, and slumped in her seat. “So, which of us is in command now?”

“Good question,” Nog admitted. He shrugged. “You know what you need to get the ship back together, so I suggest you just tell me what you want done.”

Qat’qa held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. “I’m setting a course to rendezvous with the saucer section.”

Scotty was happier than he had been in days, lying on the floor of a transporter pad, his head and shoulders down in the workings of it. Leah knelt next to him, working on the circuitry behind a wall panel. Geordi had dismantled half the console on the other side of the room, and was trying to lock on to the
Intrepid,
but he sounded frustrated as he worked. “The transporter just doesn’t have the range to reach into the Infinite and down the closed timelike curve.”

Scotty levered himself out of the hatch he was in. “What we need is some kind of booster.”

“Transporter pattern enhancers?”

Scotty scoffed at the idea. “What? Just fire them out of the torpedo tubes or something?”

“A shuttle, then? We could use the shuttle’s transporter system as a relay?”

“It’d be a suicide mission.”

“Actually it’d be a one-way trip, but into the past.”

“That’s worse,” Scotty grumbled. “It’d mean someone else with a chance of changing things. Anyway, a shuttle would never survive the stresses of the Infinite, let alone the trip through the CTC. We need a transporter relay, just like we used to bring Mister Barclay home from the
Voyager
fleet for this mission.”

“You adapted the Pathfinder project to bounce a transporter signal between relays, rather than just compressed data like a holoprogram?” Scotty nodded an affirmative. “And Reg agreed to that?” La Forge was amazed.

“Aye, but he still got beamed through under sedation. Now we need something that can handle a lot of transmission power and bandwidth over a very long range.”

“The Romulan probe,” Leah said slowly. “It is designed to handle a wide range of transmission bands.”

“And it has the range.” Scotty agreed. “It’s set up to transmit all the way to Romulan space.”

“We can ignore most of the probe’s systems anyway. We only need it to support a carrier signal.” She jumped to her feet. “I’m on it.”

Minutes later, her voice came through in the transporter room.
“The probe’s ready, and in the tube.”

“Fire,” Scotty ordered, and he imagined he heard a distant thud as the probe was launched.

“Probe away. Crossing the wormhole threshold in three, two, one. Now entering the Infinite.”

Scotty ran to the transporter console. “Right, now, let’s give that big-eared bastard the severe Malky,” he said aloud, and slid his hand across the controls, energizing the beam to maximum power. “He wants time travel, he’s got all the time travel he can handle.”

W
hen Scotty and Leah returned to the bridge, waves of gravimetric interference were reaching out like claws to try and drag the saucer into the wormhole. There was enough mass in the string to form any number of black holes, and that mass pulled inexorably on the
Challenger
.

“We need warp power for a stable position,” La Forge reported from the helm. “I don’t think impulse is going to be enough.”

Scotty took the center seat. “Keep us as steady as you
can, regardless, Mister La Forge. I’ve visited the past enough times in my career.”

“I’m trying. I’ll rotate the saucer and step up the impulse power, but really, we need that stardrive section back.”

“It looks as if the marauder has been destroyed,” the ensign at tactical reported. “The stardrive section is returning.”

“Thank heavens for small mercies.” Scotty punched the communications control. “Mister Hunt, well done. Now I could do with my ship being put back together in one piece. We need your warp power to keep ourselves stable while we’re transmitting the annular confinement beam into the Infinite.”

Nog and Qat’qa made almost identical grimaces. “Captain,” Nog called back, “I’m afraid Mister Hunt is dead.”

“Thank you, Mister Nog.”
Scotty’s voice was muted.
“Are ye able to re-combine with the saucer section?”

“The automatics are damaged,” Nog said. “And, anyway, I don’t think there’s time for the usual re-combination procedures.”

“No time?” Qat’qa echoed. “The very words I live by.” She regarded the approaching saucer for a few seconds, then began working her console. “Nog, tractor beam.”

“Ah,” Nog said with an approving nod. “Good thinking, Kat. Vol, give me tractor power . . .”

The bridge vibration eased slightly, and La Forge suddenly found that the controls were much more responsive. He turned to Scotty. “It’s the stardrive section, they’ve got us in a tractor beam.”

“That should help in keeping our position steady.” He pressed the communication button again. “Good work,
Mister Nog. Hold us in position. Vol, use the warp engines to counter the gravimetric waves.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

On the bridge of the
Intrepid,
the heavenly light pouring in through the main viewer was no longer the golden hue of pressed latinum. Now it was cold and blue. Bok and Sloe had expected that, as they were beginning to travel back in time, and the light was accelerating toward them.

Sloe cursed suddenly, and Bok immediately looked up. “What’s happening?”

“Interference again!”

“What sort of interference?”

“Some kind of transporter signal. An annular confinement beam.”

“How is that possible?” Bok couldn’t imagine that
Challenger
had followed them into the Infinite.

“I don’t know . . .”

“Is it affecting our course?”

“Yes,” Sloe said, with a grim finality.

“We can’t keep up the transporter signal indefinitely,” Leah warned.

La Forge risked looking away from the helm console for a moment, now that the stardrive section was giving them stability in the face of the gravitational distortions and energy bursts. “We don’t have to. The longer
Intrepid
is looping around the string, and the faster she heads back in time, the more effort she’d need to break free of the closed timelike curve.”

“Which means we only need to keep altering their course until we pass the point where they can’t get an escape velocity from it?” Leah asked.

“Aye!” Scotty said.

“How long?”

“Not that long.” La Forge answered. “Those old engines are nothing like as powerful as modern ones.”

Intrepid
’s bridge was filled with a cacophony of alarms that was agonizing to Ferengi ears. “Radiation alerts, Bok! They’re off the scale . . .”

“This is an old ship; the scales probably don’t go far.”

“According to this, the external temperature is—That’s impossible!” Sloe’s expression was a mix of horror and awe.

“Impossible?”

“Ambient normal space temperature outside the CTC is over one billion Kelvin!”

“What?” Bok was no scientist, but even he knew that that was far beyond the temperature at the heart of even the hottest suns.

“And the hydrogen density is over one Earth atmosphere.”

“Does the CTC emerge in a star? A gas giant?” He couldn’t help asking, even though he knew better.

“No . . .” Sloe raised his hands from the computer in a gesture of helplessness. “Some kind of quark-gluon plasma. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Break us free!”

“I can’t! We’re being held in the CTC by external pressures. That damned transporter beam.”

“What’s our temporal course?”

Sloe called up a navigational readout. “All it says is ‘Primary.’ ”

“Primary? What use is that? Primary what?” Bok wondered if the ancient ship’s computer was failing.

“I don’t know. The main something, or the first someth—”

Bok suddenly felt very cold and very sick. The ship rattled around them, the ancient panels clattering at the seams.

“Hydrogen pressure wave! More pressure waves ahead,” Sloe proclaimed. “Leptons, hadrons . . .”

“What’s a lepton?” asked Bok.

“Elementary particles that filled the universe in the second to tenth seconds after the Big Bang.” Sloe’s face drained of all color. “Hadrons were mostly created and destroyed in the first second . . .”

Bok slumped back into the command chair. The image of his son was frozen in his mind. A newborn, a new employee, an heir to the family business and an inheritor to the family’s profit. A child who would now always be dead. “No . . . It can’t be . . .”

“. . . of the Big Bang,” Sloe finished.

The cosmic string didn’t exist yet, and so neither did the closed timelike curve. Freed from it,
Intrepid
’s warp core exploded, disintegrating the ship down to the subatomic level in no time at all, because time itself didn’t yet exist. Bok would never know that he hadn’t had time to even register that fact before everything he had ever known both ended and began.

The Split Infinite wasn’t merely split any more, it was ripped asunder, tearing itself apart in an eruption of cosmic energies.

The neutron star that had coalesced so long ago at the poles of the Infinite was already dissipating in a blazing cloud of plasma, while the wormhole turned itself inside out and vomited forth the raw energies of creation in a spectacular blast that looked like it would spread forever. Somewhere inside,
Challenger
’s sensors claimed, the cosmic string was unraveling, and energy discharges from its contacts
with stellar and wormhole matter were sparking still more colossal detonations.

Scotty saw the danger first. “That’s it, it’s been there long enough. Disconnect everything!”

“What?” La Forge was momentarily puzzled. Even if the transporter beam had reached the minimum level needed to do its job, what harm was there in leaving it a few moments longer, just to be sure?

“Disconnect the transporter and tractor beams. The energy will feed back along the string.”

It was too late. Tentacles of quark-gluon energy, driven by the power of the first and biggest explosion in the universe, lashed out along the beams, and hammered into the
Challenger
’s saucer.

Energy shorted out between the transporter pads and the energizing coils in the ceiling, ripping each transporter room to shreds. The transporter consoles exploded, and buckled the transporter room doors that barely managed to contain the explosions.

On the bridge, lightning crackled across the consoles, shattering the laminated surfaces. Shrapnel scored across everyone in the room, and Scotty was hurled across the bridge, to lie crumpled at the base of the main viewer.

As the decks tilted, furniture hurtled wildly across the room in Nelson’s, sending shelves of bottles crashing to the floor, and shards of glass into the air. Tables tumbled across the room, one slamming into Guinan and jamming her against the wall.

Nog and Qat’qa could see the saucer wreathed in crackling energy, and starting to slide out of position.

“They’re losing power,” Nog said. “Can you dock manually with the saucer?”

“I have never tried,” Qat’qa replied, in a tone that suggested this was an oversight she had long wanted to rectify. “Secure yourself. This may be as bumpy as my forehead.” She nudged the stardrive section forward.

“Do you need the tractor beams on or off?”

“Keep them on!”