Dark Mirror (6 page)

“Gladly,” Hwiii said. But his voice still had an uncertain sound to it, almost the sound of a child, abruptly lost in some immensity, and very much wanting some adult to take his hand and tell him things are going to be all right.

Some minutes later, on the bridge, Hwiii was looking critically over Data’s shoulder while he brought up detailed readings of their coordinates. “I’m so embarrassed about that,” Hwiii said quietly to Data. “I don’t usually come all overreligious in moments of crisis.”

“I was going to ask whether there was some specific significance in the passage you were singing,” Data said, “but that will have to wait. Here are our present coordinates, with course projection. Here are the twelve Cepheids within scan, with their spectra. As you see, they all match their nominal ‘fingerprints,’ though RY Antliae is showing about point five percent above its baseline at the moment. Here is the master navigational grid, and as you see, our course is as predicted.”

Picard stepped down to look, too. “Our location at the
moment is exactly what it should be, considering our past course and speed,” he said. “As you can see, the computer confirms the location as well.”

Hwiii laughed at that, an unhappy sound. “Yes, but these instruments don’t know any better since they’re judging by strictly physical guideposts like Cepheid variables.” He looked over at Picard. “Captain, I see the readings, and I can vouch for the validity of the instruments’ readings since I’ve been working so closely with them the last few days. But”—and he swung his tail in one of the delphine gestures of negation, a downward slap—“
we are not where we seem to be
. This is not the way space feels, not the way it felt two hours ago. We are somewhere else that looks like here—if you follow me.”

Picard’s mind abruptly went back to what the Laihe had been saying, or trying to say. “Some kind of—shift—”

Hwiii had made his way up to one of the science stations and was busy at it with his manipulators, reconfiguring it.

“If I understand you correctly,” Picard said slowly, “are you suggesting that we have somehow dislocated ourselves into a congruent universe?”

Hwiii laughed, looking up from the controls for a moment. “Captain, I only wish we had done it ourselves! If we had, we might at least have been prepared for it. I was on my sleep cycle, and everything was fine. Then—can you imagine waking up and suddenly finding yourself in some place that your senses tell you is a strange country, a different planet, even—but one that nonetheless looked exactly the same as where you were before you fell asleep?”

Troi looked over at him. “The effect would be much like that of one kind of psychotic break in a human,” she said. “The sudden loss of familiar associations—or the certainty that where you
were
is not where you
are
. A terrible disorientation.”

“The only problem,” Hwiii said, “is that I have something concrete on which to base the experience.” The
display he had brought up was presently scrolling by in great blocks of a Delphine-based numerical notation, an adapted binary. “It doesn’t mean much this way. Wait a second—”

The silver tentacles of the manipulators danced across the keyboard for a moment, then the display shifted to show something that might have been a very tangled knot or braid.

“This is a very crude representation of the major hyperstring structures in the space where we were about two hours ago,” Hwiii said, “before I took my last set of readings for the day and turned in. Now this”—he worked for a moment again—“is the same space—I’m scanning the same cubic now—but look.”

The second display fitted itself down over the first one. The curves and twists of the bright lines were a close match, very close indeed, but not quite. Here and there some loop or curve stuck out farther than the original, curved differently, crossed another’s path sooner, or later, than its partner in the original scan. “A very close congruence, I would say,” Hwiii said, his voice a blend of triumph and alarm. “Not quite exact—out by about three percent, I’d say off the fin. This isn’t something you have senses for,” he said to Picard, “but I felt it as soon as I woke up—and felt it all over me, a derangement of my people’s most basic sense.” He sounded ashamed again.

“Commander,” Picard said gently, “I think you had reason to be upset. Let it pass; if I woke up suddenly and found myself seeing the world so out of joint as you seem to have, I daresay I might have made some noise myself.” He shook his head. “Yet at the same time, this universe seems overtly physically the same as our own.”

Hwiii swung his head from side to side, the one gesture humans shared with dolphins. “How far the congruences will stretch, Captain, I wouldn’t pretend to know.”

Picard sighed and said, “Well. Now that it’s established that we’re here… how do we get back?”

Hwiii looked over at Geordi, who had joined them. “Until we know how we got here,” Geordi said, “that’s hardly a question we can answer.”

“Well, get to work on it,” Picard said. “This is beginning to make me twitch.”

And then they all jumped as the
whoop! whoop! whoop!
of the intruder alarm shattered the quiet of the bridge. Worf hurried to his station, brought up a display, examined it: “There is a security breach in the computer core! At access station two.”

“Get a team down there on the double,” Riker said, “and join them.”

“Aye, sir.” Worf touched his console, spoke a few words, and went out of the bridge at a run.

Give me a shot of access station two,” Riker said to the lieutenant who moved up to take Worf’s console.

“I’m going down there,” Picard said, and headed for the ’lift. Riker opened his mouth and then shut it again, for the security team would beat the captain there by long enough to get their job done. Still, his mouth quirked in a slight smile at the sight of the man leaving the bridge, a man very much in search of answers and unwilling to take “no” for one.

Worf met his team coming out of the ’lift on deck ten, the best of the shift—little slim Ryder, dark Mirish, and tall blue Detaith—his pick for a situation in which there might be physical trouble, for all of them looked unlikely to be able to stop it, and all of them most spectacularly were. “
Mr. Worf—”

“Ready, Commander.” They were standing outside the door to the access station, a little room off the main corridor leading to the cores proper.

“
The captain is on his way.”

“
Intruder’s three meters in on the right as you go in,”
said Lieutenant Mann from the bridge security console. “
He’s using one of the stand-up access padds.”

“Good,” Worf said. “Ryder, you and I at point. Mirish, behind, in brace. Detaith, hold the door. Now.”

Worf touched the door, and he and Ryder went in fast, with weapons ready. They saw a slightly hunched figure in a lieutenant’s uniform, human, dark-haired, tapping at the padd console. He looked up, reacted in angry surprise, fumbled at his side for something.

As his hand came up, Worf kicked it, hard, and the weapon went flying up overhead and across the little room. The man cried out, started to turn back toward Worf, but a second later, Ryder hit him feetfirst in the rib cage, carefully knocking the intruder straight sideways to spare the console and any settings that might remain in it. They went down together, but a second later Ryder had bounced back up to a kneeling position, and the intruder was shouting something pained into the carpet while Ryder, kneeling on the intruder’s back, twisted his wrist backward and up into a position for which nature had never prepared it.

Worf was pleased: a security action in which the team did not have to stretch itself unduly was an efficient one, which the captain would approve. “Get him up,” he said to Ryder. “Keep him restrained.”

Ryder and Mirish hauled the man to his feet. Worf studied the rage-twisted face, but no identification came immediately to mind. He touched his badge. “Mann,” he said, “get me an ID on this crewman.”

“
Working, sir.”

They stood and waited, looking at the man. “Let me go,” he said, struggling. “I can make it worth your while!”

Ryder and Mirish gave each other dubious looks. “What are you doing in this area?” Worf said, frowning.

He was astonished when the crewman actually spat at his feet. “Slave, I don’t have to answer to
you!”

Worf’s eyes narrowed… for
slave
was not a word one used on a Klingon and lived.

“
Lieutenant,”
Mann said from the bridge, “
pictorial record identifies this crewman as Ensign Mark Stewart, assigned to botany and hydroponics.”

“Curious that you should have decided to go so suddenly into computers, Ensign,” Worf said. “A career change?”

“
There’s only one problem,”
said Mann. “
The computer says that Ensign Stewart is on deck nine, in his quarters.”

Worf’s eyebrows went up, and Ryder and Mirish looked at each other as Detaith stepped aside to let the captain through.

“Our intruder,” Picard said, coming up beside Worf.

“Yes, Captain. But we have a problem. Lieutenant Worf to Ensign Stewart.”

There was a brief pause, then a somewhat sleepy voice said out of the air, “
Yes, sir? What can I do for you? I’m off shift right now.”

Worf glanced at Picard. The captain’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back at “Stewart” again. The young man was staring at him with an expression of anger and terror, but otherwise not reacting. Slowly Picard reached out to him. The man tried to flinch away from the touch, but the security staff held him fast. Picard touched the man’s badge: it made no sound.

Worf looked at Picard. “Take him to sickbay,” the captain said. “I want him and everything about him thoroughly examined. After that, he’s to be secured in the brig once I’ve consulted with Doctor Crusher.”

Worf nodded. “Nothing is required of you at this moment, Ensign,” he said to his communicator. “I am sorry to have disturbed your sleep cycle. But would you remain awake for a little while? You may be needed.”

“
Of course, sir.”
Worf gestured with his head at his
people. Ryder and Mirish hustled the man out, with Detaith behind them, his sidearm ready.

“I take it he didn’t put up much of a struggle,” Picard said.

Worf shook his head. “He had no chance. All the same—” He frowned. “I could wish he had. He was… rude.”

“So I heard,” Picard said softly. “Well. We will have answers soon enough… and I suspect he will have leisure to repent his rudeness.”

They headed out together.

Beverly Crusher pursed her lips and turned away from the man lying bitterly silent and with closed eyes on the diagnostic bed. Beverly was in a bad mood, for mystery annoyed her except in the abstract. When it turned up in her sickbay, she tended to give it short shrift, preferring revealed fact and clean diagnosis to clinical pictures that remained stubbornly shadowy. Right now, though, the shadows were deep.

She breathed out as she worked over her padd, transferring its readings to the computer, then glanced up at the two security people standing on either side of the bed. “Brendan,” she said to Ryder, “that arm giving you any more trouble?”

He shook his head, smiling slightly. “That last regeneration did the trick.”

“Good. Stop breaking it, now.” She smiled briefly at Mirish and headed for her office, pausing a moment as the sickbay door hissed open. It was Jean-Luc; behind him came Geordi.

“Doctor?” said the captain.

“I’m ready for you, Captain,” she said, and together they went into her office. The doors shut behind them. “Or as ready as I’m going to be, since this is not one of my more cooperative clients.”

She sat down and turned her deskviewer so that they could both see it. “Well,” Picard said. “Obviously, the question becomes, who is he?”

“His DNA fingerprint identifies him as Mark Stewart. There is no mistake about that.”

Picard breathed out. “Unfortunately,” Beverly said, “his
body
does not confirm that identification.”

Picard looked at her thoughtfully. “In what way?”

Beverly touched the console, sat back, and watched the data scroll. “This is Mark Stewart’s medical record. He’s had some minor troubles.” She paused the display and pointed. “Since he’s one of the ship’s flora specialists, he winds up on a lot of away teams, and he’s picked up the occasional bug planetside. The worst was a bad case of chronic paronychia—it’s a disorder of the nail beds, usually fungal. He picked up an ‘abetter’ organism on a survey to 1212 Muscae IV: the alien mycete chummed up with a more normal fungus, something a lot of us carry in us routinely, and the two potentiated one another and infected his fingernails badly. Took me a while to knock it down. Mark also has an old complex fracture of the ulna, from falling out of a tree while taking samples.” She chuckled. “Seems the tree spoke to him.”

Picard looked surprised. “Delusional?”

“
He
wasn’t. The
tree
was, though. But that’s another story. Anyway…” Beverly touched a control; another human-body graphic came up. “This is the scan of the man on the bed out there. He shows signs of the paronychia—just as the first Mark Stewart does; his nails have some additional ridges on them because of trauma to the nail beds. But
this
man has no trace of the old ulnar fracture… and such things cannot be made to vanish without trace, even with our technology. Properly healed bone always shows some slight sign of the heal, the ‘callus,’ whether you help it with a protoplaser or a splint. More to
the point… this man has no appendix; our own Mark Stewart does.” She sighed and sat back again. “So if you’re going to ask me, ‘Is this Mark Stewart?’… then I’m afraid the answer is yes and no.”

She watched Jean-Luc digest that. “Has he said anything?”

“He made a rude remark about having heard about what happens to my guinea pigs, which I took merely clinical note of. But he’s said nothing since: he’s become the classic unresponsive patient, though not withdrawn—I see him peeking out from under those ‘closed’ eyes every now and then. He won’t answer questions, though.”