Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (6 page)

BOOK: Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic
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“How long is that likely to take?”

“I’ve no idea,” Picard admitted. “Let’s ask her.”

Doctor Crusher had brought back numerous samples from the
Intrepid
’s bridge, in sealed sterile containers. She didn’t want any of the remains contaminated by exposure to cells floating around in the
Enterprise
’s atmosphere.

She was analyzing a group of samples in the biopsy lab off sickbay when Jean-Luc and Geordi entered. Samples that had already been tested were placed, still in their sterile vials, on a tray to one side of the analytical equipment. “Captain, I was just about to call you.”

“You have results?”

Crusher indicated the sample of fossilized organic material on the tray. “I’ve been able to date the remains.”

“How old are they?”

“Two and a half thousand years.”

Geordi was brought up short. “That’s impossible,” he blurted out. “The ship itself isn’t that old.”

Picard frowned. “Beverly, I thought you said these were the remains of the crew. Are you now suggesting that it was perhaps some more ancient organic samples brought on board and released—”

“No, the DNA matches up with the service records of
Intrepid
’s crew. The biomatter adhering to the walls is their remains.”

“Then the dating must be wrong,” La Forge insisted. “They can’t have been there for ten times longer than the ship.” The very idea was absurd.

“It’s not. I ran a level one diagnostic on the analyzer and
it’s working perfectly. I don’t know how it’s even possible, but these are the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old remains of people who lived and died two hundred years ago.”

“Could they have traveled through time? Could the
Intrepid
have been thrown back in time as we now know that
Columbia
was?” Picard’s voice had become tight, his eyes urgent, and Beverly understood all too well why that would be.
Columbia
’s time travel had, eventually, led to the creation of the Borg, and Jean Luc’s history with the Borg ran deeper than his own blood did.

“I wish I could say, but in this condition, there’s no way to tell. The cellular side-effects of exposure to chronitons just won’t show in such damaged samples. The
Intrepid
itself will hold more clues to that than the remains will.”

“Does that mean I’m clear to go and look?” Geordi asked.

“I think so,” Beverly said. “We’ve identified matter from all of the crew that were on board when
Intrepid
was lost. We still have to decide what to do with the rest of the remains, but if you can test pieces of the ship that don’t have biomatter on them, then I don’t see why not.”

“Believe me, Doctor, I’ll be a lot happier to test parts that don’t have remains on them. Captain?”

“Make it so. Call a senior staff meeting as soon as you have results.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The senior staff meeting was held in the briefing room aft of the bridge. Geordi barely even noticed the golden models of prior vessels named
Enterprise
on most days, but today his eyes were drawn to the simple lines of the first warp-capable
Enterprise
, the NX-01. Today it reminded him of the ship that remained off the
Enterprise
’s port beam.

The past,
Geordi thought,
encroaching on the present. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Picard was already seated at the head of the slightly curved table, Worf beside him. Beverly was opposite Worf. Geordi took a seat as the captain asked, “Mister La Forge, do we have results on the matter of this discrepancy between the ages of the
Intrepid
and the remains of her crew?”

Geordi nodded. “We’ve thoroughly scanned the
Intrepid
’s structure down to the subatomic level, looking mainly for temporal stresses.”

“And?”

“Using a chronotron refraction index.”

“Chronotron?” Picard echoed. “Don’t you mean chroniton?”

Geordi tilted his hand in a so-so gesture. “Sort of. When we pass energy through the chroniton particles it generates chronotron radiation, and its temporal spectrum—”

Worf glowered, and Picard winced, holding up a hand. “Your conclusions will suffice, Mister La Forge.”

The engineer suppressed a smile, feeling a little more at ease about the strange mix of pasts that the samples and scans had revealed. “The stress patterns in the structure of the vessel show that there was definitely a massive failure of the inertial dampening system, and that this seems to have happened around two and a half thousand years ago. It looks like Doctor Crusher was right.”

“Then the
Intrepid
traveled through time before her demise?”

“Not necessarily. All we know for sure is that she experienced a chronological duration of two and a half thousand years in what, to the rest of us, is only two hundred and twenty or so. There are quite a few ways in which that
could have happened, from relativistic effects to interference by the Q.”

“Surely the
Intrepid
’s internal logs would provide a clue,” Beverly suggested.

“They would, but we’ve no way to access them right now. She’s not just a dead ship, she’s . . . fossilized.”

“Speaking of fossilization,” Picard said. “This petrified material on board. The remains of the crew. You suggested the cause of death may have been a failure of the inertial dampeners.”

“The organic matter coating the internal surfaces of the vessel fits with a sudden—instantaneous, in fact—catastrophic failure of the internal inertial dampeners,” Crusher confirmed.

Worf pointed out, “No one would go to warp knowing the inertial dampeners were offline.”

“So, perhaps the failure was as they went to warp. Might something in their power systems have caused a loss of dampeners when they engaged the warp drive? Those vessels didn’t have the degree of multiple redundancies in their systems that we have today.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think they were just making the jump to warp when whatever happened . . . happened. If they were, all the—” La Forge paused, took a breath. “All the remains would have been . . . distributed, on the aft bulkheads. In fact we’re seeing a greater concentration of organic matter on the port side of each occupied room. That would suggest the ship was oriented with the starboard side leading in the direction of travel.”

Picard nodded thoughtfully. “Then the
Intrepid
may have been engaging in maneuvers at what for that era was high warp.”

“Could be,” Geordi agreed. “Then they tried a maneuver
that was too violent for their tolerances, and something gave out.”

“They must have considered their situation to be rather desperate, if they were willing to make such a risky maneuver.”

“It was the era of the Earth-Romulan war,” Worf reminded them. “Perhaps they were engaged in a dogfight, or at least under attack and pursuit.”

La Forge shrugged. “The fact is, we just don’t know. All we know is that the inertial dampeners failed totally, and the ship was being led by its starboard side at the time. Again, we need to access the on board logs to be sure, and that means restoring power over there.”

Picard steepled his fingers “What are the chances of bringing the
Intrepid
’s systems back online?”

“Less than zero, Captain. Our systems just aren’t compatible. It would be like trying to start a steam engine with impulse power.”

“Columbia
’s systems were brought online during her recovery.”

“After several years,” Geordi said pointedly, “and with specialist equipment. There wasn’t as much radiation damage and she was planet-bound. The
Enterprise
just isn’t equipped for that kind of operation. Maybe if Starfleet can send a salvage vessel with equipment calibrated from
Columbia
. . .”

“I’ll notify Starfleet of our discovery, and see if they concur.”

“I hope they do. It would be a shame—actually maybe even a crime—to leave the
Intrepid
out here.”

“I definitely concur with that, Geordi,” Picard said with a nod. He rose. “Now we just have to wait for Starfleet’s response.” That, Geordi knew, would be the hard part. Waiting
instead of doing was never easy, and he could hear in the captain’s tone that he felt the same way.

As they all filed out of the briefing room, La Forge decided that it was time to check in on engineering. If nothing else, at least the heartbeat of the
Enterprise
would make him feel better.

Off-duty, while the
Enterprise
stood watch over
Intrepid,
La Forge didn’t feel in the mood to socialize. The age of
Intrepid
and her crew nagged at him, competing with the melancholy that came with realizing one was walking among the dead.

He had also been working for something like twelve hours straight, and could use sleep more than anything else, so he returned to his quarters, showered, and went to bed.

Geordi had almost fallen asleep when he remembered that he still had that damn message to compose to Tamala on the
Lexington
. He had never been much good at putting his emotions into words, at least not where romantic relationships were concerned, and had the sneaking suspicion that anything he said in his attempt to reassure her that she was foremost in his thoughts would have exactly the opposite effect. It always seemed to be the way, that anything he said or did to make things better between himself and a partner just made things worse instead.

Maybe,
he thought,
I should try making things worse and see if that actually makes things better.

He wondered what Tamala would have made of the
Intrepid
and her crew. She was in the medical division, so the remains would have been of more interest to her, he supposed. Maybe he should tell her about them in his message? Tell her about the inertial dampeners, and the age of the
structure of the ship, and how amazing it was to walk in the starship architecture of a bygone age, and feel the switches between thumb and forefinger.

He was out of bed before he even realized that he intended to get up, and in a few minutes he was in an EV suit and beaming across to
Intrepid.

He materialized on the bridge, which was exactly as he had left it earlier. It felt like standing in a tomb, not as a grave robber, but as the explorer. This must have been how Howard Carter felt when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.

Carter had said he could see “wonderful things” when the tomb was first opened, and Geordi, casting his light around the
Intrepid
’s bridge, thought that the buttons, switches, and handholds were, in their own way, wonderful things. They were wonderful because they had survived.

There was a discolored patch on the wall directly below the main viewer. It was a dull bronze rectangle, and Geordi realized after a moment that it was the ship’s dedication plaque. Another wonderful thing. He knelt down by it, and rubbed the petrified remains aside with as much care and respect as he could.

The plaque read
Intrepid. NX-07. San Francisco, Earth. Per Ardua Ad Astra
. Through hardship, to the stars. It suited the ship, as she had certainly undergone untold hardships, and yet remained among the stars, with her crew.

The gray matter stuck to the fingertips of his EV suit’s glove, and he was glad he was wearing it; the thought of having the remains of the crew rubbing on his skin was repulsive. In a weird way, the fact that the organic matter had faded and gone gray somehow felt worse. It was as if it had been some alien spore growing over anything, rather than the remains of the crew, which at least would be something he could make a connection with.

The longer he looked at the grayness on his gloves, the more creeped-out he felt. Was all the organic material on his gloves from one person, or was it a composite of particles from everyone on the bridge that had drifted since the ship’s gravity failed, and eventually settled in a homogenous layer? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Worf was right about one thing,”
Picard’s voice said, startlingly loud in his helmet speakers. Geordi jumped, and saw that the captain was standing next to the helm console, in his own EV suit. Geordi hadn’t even noticed him beam in.
“It’s an irresistible lure. One I freely admit I couldn’t pass up.”

“I was just thinking about Howard Carter, and Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

“Ah, ‘wonderful things.’”

“Exactly,” Geordi chuckled.

“So . . . what brings you back across here while you’re off duty?”

“I couldn’t sleep, and, to be honest, something about this ship . . . I dunno, it’s like it’s under my skin. The wonderful things, I mean, not the crew’s remains.”

“Sometimes,”
Picard said,
“it’s not just the treasures that draw us to the past, but a human connection. When we view the artifacts of Tutankhamen we don’t just admire the artistry and ingenuity of the people who created them, but we also pay our respects to who they were. We remember them.”

La Forge looked at the remains on the walls. Some of it had been removed for analysis and identification, but that just meant that more fragments of uniform were exposed to his light. Blue cloth with occasional red or yellow piping. “I think a lot more people will be remembering the crew of
Intrepid
.”

“Indeed they will.”
Picard stepped closer, looking at the dedication plaque.
“Being able to step into that which we ordinarily
just read in history texts is marvelous enough, but to be able to add a new page . . . That’s a special thing, Geordi.”

“I guess it is.”

“We’re standing in our own pasts, so to speak, only that past isn’t the past we thought it was.”

“Now we just have to work out what past it actually is.”

Picard gave a little chuckle.
“That, I’m content to let Starfleet work out.”

3

L
a Forge awoke to the insistent chime of his alarm call from the ship’s computer, and felt surprisingly refreshed considering how late he had eventually gone to sleep after returning from his visit to
Intrepid
.

BOOK: Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic
7.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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