III
"I have never seen anything like this," Geordi said.
Chewbacca looked over his shoulder at the Enterprise's chief engineer. The man was staring, openmouthed, at the pit of wires and exposed circuitry that was the Falcon's computer core.
"In our defense, the ship came like that," Chewbacca said. "Han won it in a game of cards from a friend of his. When we tried to hermetically seal this area as a failsafe against damage to the computer, the heat skyrocketed and nearly burnt out the processors. When we tried to install a coolant circuit, the excess power draw shorted out the inertial dampeners. Rerouting that through the auxiliary batteries caused an overflow error in the navicomputer. And so on.
"Eventually we had every system on the ship carefully balanced out… and then, three weeks later, we discovered that with the computer core sealed up, even with the coolant circuit, the excess heat from the quad laser batteries would still burn it out. This happened in the middle of a firefight." Chewbacca shook his head and keened mournfully, which the universal translator left well enough alone. "Sometimes I hate this ship."
"If she's that unreliable, why don't you replace her?" Geordi asked.
"The Falcon is Han's pride and joy," Chewbacca sighed. "If I so much as made the suggestion, I'm sure he'd never speak to me again. And that would be awkward, since I am honor-bound to repay the life-debt I owe him. So I would just have to beat the silence out of him. And that's never fun."
Geordi gave him the kind of weak smile that humans always seemed to find when confronted with tales of offhand Wookiee brutality. "So is there a port I can interface my tricorder with, or…?" he asked.
"I think we've got a universal key plugged in here somewhere," Chewbacca replied. He folded his lanky frame into the cramped confines of the core and rooted around until he found the small black box, festooned with blinking lights. He blew the dust off it and handed it to Geordi. "Try that."
He watched as Geordi began tapping commands into his tricorder device. "Okay," the engineer said, "the systems are syncing up. There's a lot of garbage feedback, though." He furrowed his brow. "Chewbacca, I think your ship just told me to jump out an airlock."
"It doesn't like people it doesn't know," Chewbacca explained in what he thought was a helpful tone.
The look the man gave him suggested it was not.
A few more minutes' tinkering with the tricorder produced slightly better results. "This is interesting," Geordi said. "You actually got some usable data on the interior of the anomaly on your way through. I'll go ahead and send it up to the bridge for analysis."
"Good to hear," Chewbacca observed.
That took another minute. Afterward, Geordi closed his tricorder and looked around, clearly searching for the right words. "So… honestly, it usually takes longer than this to interface with an alien computer. It'll take a while to get the results back, so we have some time to kill."
Chewbacca peeled his lips back slightly, the Wookiee equivalent of pursing them.
"Care for a game of chess?"
Han sat at the bar in Ten-Forward, staring mournfully at the glass in front of him. A young man with an entirely too cheery expression had helpfully informed him that they only served synthehol, which supposedly mimicked the taste of alcohol without any of its detrimental effects.
"I've been lied to," Han muttered under his breath.
"That not to your taste?" someone asked him.
He looked up. A serene, dark-skinned woman with a comically oversized hat stood behind the bar, smiling at him.
"No, it's not," Han said. "I'm stuck on this ship until a bunch of people much smarter than I am can figure out how to do something to the anomaly outside, and I can't even drink myself under the table properly."
The bartender cast a conspiratorial glance around before reaching below the bar and retrieving a large, stoppered bottle of something violently green.
"What the hell is that?" Han asked.
She raised a hairless brow at him. "It's green," she said, sounding offended that he had even asked. "Interested?"
Han carefully weighed the merits of the various options presented to him before deciding on throwing caution to the wind and seeing what green tasted like. "Hit me," he said. She poured him a shot, which he knocked back in one pull.
A moment later he was on the ground, coughing so hard it brought tears to his eyes. Through the blurry haze he could see the bartender looking down at him, her expression quizzical. "Are you alright?" she asked. "I've never seen anybody have quite that strong a reaction before."
With all the strength in his being, Han pulled himself back onto his barstool. "I guess green is a little stronger than I'm used to," he said. "That stuff's disgusting."
"More?"
"Yeah."
This time Han took a careful sip and found he could stay in his chair, so he said, "Thanks."
"You're welcome." The bartender planted her elbows on the bar and rested her head in her hands, looking at him. "So. You're not from around here."
Han paused, the glass of green halfway to his lips, before saying, "Word travels that fast on this ship?"
"Sort of," she replied. "I'm a friend of the captain. Guinan."
"Han," he told her. "Han Solo."
"So, Captain Solo," Guinan said. "You're not used to being useless, are you?"
That made him start coughing again, but only because the shock of the question made him choke green down the wrong pipe. After he'd caught his breath, Han told her, "No. I'm not. This is kind of a new situation for me."
"I imagine strange anomalies aren't really your area of expertise," Guinan said.
"No. I used to smuggle illegal cargo for whatever crimelord was paying the best rate at the time. Now I'm respectable, and it feels like I die a little more inside every day." Han took another sip of green. "Well, not really. I've got a wife and kids, and I love 'em. But being somebody people look up to and depend on's never been my favorite thing."
"Well, nobody's depending on you right now," Guinan pointed out. "You should be happy, but you're in here, drinking."
Han grimaced. "Yeah. Funny how that works, huh?"
"Oh, I know what you mean," Guinan assured him. "You remind me of an old husband of mine, actually. He was always trying to avoid responsibility too."
That at least made Han chuckle. "Why'd you two split up?" he asked, making the obvious assumption.
"Oh, we didn't split up," Guinan laughed. "He died."
"I'm sorry. What happened?"
"Old age."
It took Han a second to put together what she was saying – the green was apparently quite strong in more ways than just the obvious – but he managed to refrain from doing a double-take. "Oh. I see."
"I'm an El-Aurian," Guinan said. "We're a race of listeners, Captain Solo. And when you've been listening for as long as I have, you start to notice patterns in what people are saying, and what they actually mean."
"Yeah?"
She gave him an enigmatic smile. "Since I'm a bartender, I'll give you a piece of free advice. That husband of mine? He was always happiest when people were relying on him. Even if he didn't feel like he could fulfill their expectations, it made him feel worthwhile just knowing that people needed him."
"That right."
"Yes." Han looked up from his green just in time to see her give him a quick up-and-down look, followed by a wink. "He always was one of my favorites."
Maybe it was the green, but suddenly Han felt a rush of heat to his face. He might as well have been a schoolboy again.
"Enjoy your drink, Captain Solo," Guinan said, topping off his glass before moving away. "It's on me."
There were certain facts Luke had been forced to come to peace with about himself. He couldn't grow a beard to save his life. When he found something hysterically funny, he had an absolutely insane laugh. Sometimes he would remember Leia kissing him on Hoth and not feel quite as repulsed as he knew was right and proper.
He also wasn't very good at meditating.
It was particularly damning for a Jedi Master not to like meditating all that much, but Luke just didn't enjoy it. He could certainly do it, and do it well enough, but he vastly preferred being active to sitting perfectly still in one place and contemplating the mysteries of the universe, especially when he was in a situation like this.
So he was in the technological marvel which the Enterprise computer told him was called a holodeck, sparring with a remote.
It hadn't taken him much finagling to get the computer to recreate the standard training remote. The ship had been less than pleased with him when he'd started swinging his lightsaber around in the confined space of the holodeck, but he knew precisely where the walls were, even after he asked the computer to give him a misty jungle background to evoke memories of Dagobah.
Luke deflected another spray of holographic energy bolts into the distance. "Too easy," he said. "Can you make the projectiles faster and the remote fire them more quickly?"
"Specify parameter increase," the female voice of the computer told him primly.
"I don't know," Luke said, "a hundred percent on both of them?"
That definitely made a difference. He immediately whirled his lightsaber in a figure-eight loop about his body, battering aside a hail of red-orange projectiles from the small, round sphere. It began zipping around haphazardly, firing a nonstop spray of bolts at him. Luke gave himself to the Force, letting his awareness extend out from his body into the room around him, letting his conscious thoughts be submerged in the sea of instinct and action.
"Very impressive," a familiar voice sounded.
"Pause the remote," Luke said to the computer, turning to look at Picard. The captain had entered quietly, hands clasped in front of him in a posture which suggested he was sorry to have interrupted. "Captain Picard," he said, deactivating his lightsaber. "What can I do for you?"
"Oh, nothing," Picard replied. "I simply thought I might see how you were doing. Geordi tells me he has downloaded all the data you recorded on the interior of the anomaly and that it should be analyzed within a few hours."
Luke nodded. "That's good. Did you want to use this place? I can go somewhere else."
"No, not at all," Picard assured him. "I wouldn't dream of interrupting. Although…" He looked at the hilt of Luke's lightsaber. "I must admit a certain fascination with your weapon. Might I…?"
"Of course," Luke said, floating the weapon over with the Force. He carefully ensured the hilt landed in Picard's palm with the emitter pointed away from the captain. "The red switch activates it. It's a dead man's trigger, so don't let go of it, or else the blade will deactivate by itself. And be careful – the blade has no weight, so the weapon's difficult to handle."
Picard nodded before carefully holding the hilt away from himself and pressing the switch. The emerald blade sprang forth with its distinctive snap-hiss. "Extraordinary," Picard murmured, giving the weapon a few small, experimental swings. "I've never seen anything quite like this."
"The techniques for making them have been passed down through thousands of generations of Jedi," Luke said. "The most exotic part's the focusing crystal. I'd be willing to bet that the reason you've never seen anything like a lightsaber in this universe is because you don't have crystals with the necessary internal structure."
Picard nodded. "The blade has a peculiar gyroscopic effect," he observed before shutting it off and letting Luke float it out of his hand. "How do you manage to avoid severing your own limbs when you use it?"
"The Force is my ally," Luke replied. "It guides my actions and keeps me safe from harm. I can't explain it much better than that."
"A powerful gift," Picard said grimly.
"Yes. And not without its hazards." Luke returned the lightsaber to his belt. "I wouldn't be whole without it, though. The Force has allowed me to do more good than I ever thought possible. It's been my companion in places where I had none."
Picard gave him a smile that was almost paternal. "You just reminded me of one of my old instructors at the Academy," he said. "Admiral Rogriss. He would wax nostalgic about his first command, the Caliburn. Commanding that ship changed the course of his entire life. He could never explain the peculiar nature of his bond with it, not with words, but when I first commanded a starship…" He closed his eyes for a moment, and Luke could feel a wave of something ineffable emanate from the captain. "I finally understood."
Luke nodded. "I know what you mean." He hesitated, then decided to ask the question that had been on his mind since they'd arrived. "Captain Picard… I know we're concentrating on solving the problem posed by this anomaly, but what if the worst should happen? What if the three of us can't go back?"
He watched consternation furrow Picard's brow. "I'm afraid I'm not entirely sure," the captain finally said. "Certainly we would make every effort to find another method of returning you to your universe, but failing that, I'm sure you would be offered Federation citizenship – homes on Earth, career opportunities, and so forth."
"And what would happen to my connection to the Force?" Luke asked.
Picard looked pained. "I… don't know. I truly am sorry, but these are exceptional circumstances."
"I see." Luke looked up at the computer's rendition of what was supposed to look like Dagobah's night sky. The constellations were out of place, the cloud cover not nearly tempestuous enough. "Well, I'm sure your crew is doing everything they can."
"Of course."
They stood there in silence for a moment before Picard's combadge chirped. "Picard here," he said, tapping it.
"Captain," Data's voice came through. "There is another ship emerging from the anomaly. I suggest you return to the bridge at once, and bring our guests."
"On our way," Picard said, throwing a meaningful glance at Luke.
Luke nodded at him and swept after the captain, leaving the simulation of Dagobah behind.
