17.

Barclay scrubbed some chemical cleansers from his hands in the decontamination section, while La Forge took the chance to perform some maintenance on his eyes. "Something's bothering me about all of this."

"What is it, Reg?"

"Bok . . . he wants to go back in time, right? And he's found a spatial phenomenon that will work as a Tipler object, to enable him to do it without having to worry about acquiring technology that's too well-guarded . . ."

"Yeah, so?"

"Why the Intrepid? Intrepid? I mean, I know Rasmussen is happy with a ship from his time, but what about Bok?" I mean, I know Rasmussen is happy with a ship from his time, but what about Bok?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, he has modern-day ships. A D'Kora D'Kora-cla.s.s marauder, fitted with a Klingon cloak, a K'T'inga-, K'T'inga-, and and Vor'cha Vor'cha-cla.s.s, so . . . So, why is he so bothered about taking this fossil ship back? If he took his own ship back, it would be decades-centuries, even-in advance of everyone else."

"I think because he's paranoid," La Forge said slowly.

"Paranoid?"

"Think about it, Reg: he got this whole idea from Rasmussen, who was able to time travel after stealing a vessel from the future. I think Bok's being very cautious to make sure that the same thing that happened to that twenty-sixth century professor doesn't happen to him."

"His ship being stolen."

"Exactly. The Intrepid Intrepid is from the era he's going to, so it'll blend right in. If he took a modern ship back, there'd be too much risk of someone else using it to mess with the timeline in a way other than what he has in mind. And since he wants to change things with his knowledge, he doesn't need twenty-fourth-century hardware to do that." is from the era he's going to, so it'll blend right in. If he took a modern ship back, there'd be too much risk of someone else using it to mess with the timeline in a way other than what he has in mind. And since he wants to change things with his knowledge, he doesn't need twenty-fourth-century hardware to do that."

"It sounds like all the more reason to-" Barclay looked unhappy, but continued, "all the more reason to stop him."

"There's definitely no time like the present," La Forge said, all too aware of the irony.

"Bok's thugs are right outside, and they seem pretty trigger happy." Barclay paced in an irritating fashion, as he always did when he was thinking something through. La Forge let the irritation slide off of him; anything that helped them work things out was fine with him. "I know it's irrational, but I felt that coming over here was a bad idea."

"Yeah, you did, Reg."

"It's a ghost ship. I remember I said that too."

"Yeah, you did. But Reg . . ." La Forge stopped. Something about that phrase struck a chord.

Ghost ship.

Ghost.

He felt a shiver run through him. He had been a ghost once. Literally so. "That's it! You're a genius, Reg!"

"I am?"

"This is a ghost ship, and it needs some ghosts to haunt it."

Reg looked at him uncertainly. "How . . . do we get some ghosts?"

"Adapt the transporter's phase inverter to produce chroniton interference from the cloak."

"Make ourselves out of phase with the ship?" Barclay grasped the idea at once.

Geordi nodded. "It happened to me once on the Enterprise Enterprise. No one could see or hear me, and I could walk through walls. Ro Laren was with me, and it happened to her too, and to a Romulan. We could interact with each other, but n.o.body else could."

"Isn't that a bit like . . . being consciously dematerialized?" Reg went pale.

"Look on the bright side, Reg: you won't have to worry about remembering to step over those door lintels every time we walk into a room on this ship."

"But how will we get back to being . . . solid?"

Geordi was remembering the event in more detail as he thought about repeating it. "When Ro and I were put out of phase, it took a bombardment of anyon particles to combat the effect of the chronitons and bring us back into phase."

"But we won't be able to touch any consoles, or trigger an anyon bombardment. Unless we already had something like a timer set up. Then we could pre-program it to sweep the ship-"

"And risk being caught in the middle of a wall when the anyon field comes online?" La Forge shook his head. "Uhuh. What we need is a portable device that can itself be phased, which we can carry and use to generate the anyon particles when we're ready."

"Would that work? I mean, if the device was phased already, would it still function?"

"It should. The Romulan who was phased at the same time as us had a disruptor that worked fine, even though it was phased as well. It would only work on phased matter, but that's perfect for our purposes."

"So, what sort of device do we need for the anyon field? A tricorder?"

"I'm not sure a tricorder could generate a dense enough field to bring us back into phase. What we need is a phaser or disruptor that we can modify to fire an anyon beam."

"What about a photon flare? There are some in the escape hatches. I don't think Bok thinks they were usable as weapons."

"Perfect. We can use a tricorder to modulate the flare's output to an anyon flash, and it'll recharge in a few minutes so we can use it again."

"Okay. How do we phase ourselves?"

"You get to the cloak, adjust its temporal diffraction index to a variance of somewhere between point three and point four-seven nanometers. That should allow it to leak chronitons inside the ship, but not at a level the sensors will detect without being calibrated to look for it specifically. I'll adjust the transporter's phase inverter to react with the chronitons. I've already told Balis and the others to behave normally. They're less likely to miss just the two of us."

"What about the guards? We'll be watched."

"I doubt they'll understand what we're doing, so if they ask, it's a Jefferies powerloop."

"There's no such thing," Barclay pointed out.

"Not in this century . . ."

"Not in . . . Oh, our people will know."

"You want to do what?" Sloe asked Barclay in engineering.

For once, Barclay wished that he only had a Breen or Klingon mercenary to deal with. He felt confident of lying to one of them and getting away with it, but Sloe was the man who had installed the cloak, and thus had some chance of actually recognizing and understanding what Reg wanted to do with it.

He decided at last that telling the truth would be the best lie. "I uh, I need to adjust the temporal diffraction index. I've been getting interference from it on the sensors." He showed Sloe a tricorder recording of a reading suggesting that the cloak was leaking chronitons of a detectable level.

The reading, of course, was false.

Sloe looked at it, and grumbled, "I thought I'd b.l.o.o.d.y fixed that." He shook his head. "b.l.o.o.d.y Klingon technology. It just doesn't have the finesse of a Romulan cloak."

"I'm sure you don't want to be leaving a trail of chronitons across half the sector," Barclay said sympathetically.

"No, we don't." Sloe looked at the readings again. "It looks to me as if, should we happen to adjust the temporal differential to round about point four, it'll solve the problem . . ."

Barclay stepped forward eagerly. "I'll take care of that, if you like."

Sloe held up a hand. "No. I'm sorry, old chap, but you know how it is. I'd best handle it myself . . ." Barclay could hardly believe his luck, and turned away before Sloe saw his grin.

The transporter section was unmanned when La Forge and his Breen guard arrived. No one had raised any objection to his working on the transporter to fix "the leak" since no one wanted to travel through it anyway.

He had barely started work on the phase inverter, when Barclay arrived. "That was quick."

"Actually I haven't had to do anything. Mister Sloe insisted on doing the work himself."

La Forge grinned. "That makes things easier."

Barclay darted his eyes briefly and nervously in the direction of the Breen guard, who had moved to stand beside the transporter's dish-shaped stage, so as to keep a better watch over La Forge, and not risk stepping into the platform. "And what about . . . ?"

"What he doesn't know . . ." La Forge abruptly pushed Barclay to the ground, and threw a switch on the transporter console. A ma.s.sive electrical spark arced out of the rear wall of the transporter, the parabolic shape of the enclosure focusing the discharge squarely onto the Breen. Before he could even fully raise his rifle, he erupted in sparks and fire, like a flame. ". . . can definitely hurt him."

The charred and smoking body hit the floor, and Geordi forced down the vomit. Reg didn't manage to hold it down.

La Forge pulled some circuits from the console. Then he handed Barclay a photon flare and a Ferengi communicator, keeping one of each for himself. "It would have been handy if I'd been able to steal a phaser or disruptor as well, but these will have to do."

Barclay looked as sick as La Forge felt, but managed a nod. "Won't they hear us talking on these communicators?"

"Not once we're phased. I wasn't thinking of using them as communicators, but as transporter locks. If we're in phase with the ship and need to get out of phase in a hurry, these will act as remote triggers that will only de-phase us, rather than everybody on the ship." He adjusted some more controls. "I've locked out the console as a means of controlling the transporter, just in case."

Barclay nodded glumly. "Commander . . . Do we really have to use this transporter? It's . . ."

"I know, Reg. Believe me, I don't like it any more than you do." La Forge wished he didn't have to put his friend through this, but this was their best hope of stopping Rasmussen and Bok. He pressed the b.u.t.ton on his communicator. He felt a faint tingling, and a sudden wave of nauseating dizziness.

Barclay obviously felt it too, because he reached out a hand to steady himself against the iron-gray wall, and his hand went clean through it. He pulled it back as if bitten, and looked at Geordi in horror. "It worked."

"Yeah, this takes me back, all right."

"What should we do first?"

"Let's find out what's in those crates that Bok brought on board. If it's a weapons supply, it'll make re-taking the ship a lot easier."

Reaching the armory was easy. La Forge found that not having to lift his feet over the old-style door lintels was a relief. They walked clean through the forcefield that protected Bok's mysterious crates. La Forge instinctively reached out to open one, and cursed as his hand went deep into it with nothing more to show for the effort than a vague buzzing sensation. "I guess it's time to test the anyon flares," he told Barclay.

Geordi triggered his flare, and felt a slap of exhausting nausea ripple through his body. He fell to his knees, which hit the ancient deck plates with a strangely rea.s.suring solid pain. As he and Reg struggled to their feet, they found that the crate wouldn't open, but there was a pry-bar within reach.

Glancing around one more time and half certain that somebody would come in at any second, La Forge made another attempt to free the lid. This time it popped loose, with a sound that Geordi was sure had been heard all the way to the bridge.

Barclay moved the lid aside and whistled softly. "Commander . . . look at this." He scooped up a handful of gold bars, feeling the slight motion of the liquid latinum within them. "Gold pressed latinum. I've never seen so much in one place."

"And if that other crate contains the same . . . Maybe Bok wants to disprove the idea that you can't take it with you."

"It doesn't make much sense, taking today's currency back into the past."

"Doesn't it?" Geordi hefted a few bars. "There are a lot of civilizations that use compound interest. Deposit an amount in, say, 2180, and multiply your money a dozen times by today."

"But surely today's money, even Ferengi money, wouldn't be accepted in the past. It'd be dated wrongly."

Geordi examined the bar. "I don't think Ferengi money goes by dates, just by purity of the latinum. And there are always going to be places to invest precious stones or minerals, especially in a pre-replicator era."

"What are you two doing here?" Rasmussen was standing in the doorway. He came over and used a handheld device to turn off the forcefield. "How did you get in here, anyway?"

Barclay shot a guilty glance at his tricorder, but La Forge blocked Rasmussen's view of him. "Rasmussen, listen. I don't know Bok that well, and I don't know the Shadow Treasury at all, but I do know that neither of them will want to leave us around to either interfere with their part of the scheme, or tell anybody about it."

"If you're trying to tell me there's no honor among thieves, that's all right, I already know."

"I'm trying to tell you that as soon as you're through that Split Infinite, there are going to be no living humans on this ship."

Rasmussen grinned and waggled a finger at him. "Ah, come on now, Geordi. You can't kid a kidder. Do you think I don't recognize a divide and conquer scenario when I see it?"

Geordi bit down on the frustration that was building up in him. "Right now I'm thinking you wouldn't recognize a one-way street if it hit you in the face. Which is exactly what it's about to do!"

Barclay by now had half-dismantled a communicator and a tricorder, and was using some tools to cross-connect them together.

"Listen to this," Barclay said. "I've managed to unscramble Bok's private channel to the marauder."

"Grak," Bok's voice said, Bok's voice said, "remember the schedule. At entry minus five thirty minutes, I'll have the prisoners, and Ras-mew-son, executed, and then the rest of the crew will "remember the schedule. At entry minus five thirty minutes, I'll have the prisoners, and Ras-mew-son, executed, and then the rest of the crew will evacuate to your ship. I will proceed through the Infinite alone." evacuate to your ship. I will proceed through the Infinite alone."

"Understood, Daimon. Will you need any extra personnel to take care of the hew-mons?"

"No. The Starfleeters are under guard, and Ras-mew-son still thinks he's going home."

Rasmussen's eyes widened, and La Forge pointed to Barclay's makeshift descrambler. "All right, so you won't believe me when I tell you that Bok will cross you. Will you believe it from him?"

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" Rasmussen squawked.

La Forge nodded. If you want to live longer than another couple of hours, you're going to have to help us."

"We were supposed to be partners!"

"Let me guess. He told you that whatever you invented, he'd use the Ferengi Commerce Authority to sell it across the galaxy, not just on Earth?"