Chapter 7
"So, planning on filling us in sometime?" Garibaldi asked quietly as the rooftops of Nashville receded behind their jouncing transport.
Sheridan made a startled sound, looking up sharply. "Huh?" He'd been buried in the newspaper in his hands from the moment they'd gotten settled in the back of the small wagon, absorbed by the simple everyday things he was reading there. The fact that they were completely impossible things though, that added an element of interest to even the most mundane story.
"I said, do you plan on filling us in? You look like you've seen a ghost… no, a whole line of ghosts, doing the conga."
With an amused grunt, Sheridan folded the paper, and set it down next to him. "You could say that," he allowed, not looking at Garibaldi, but rather past him, as if still lost in thought. "Just how much do you know about this time period?" His voice was soft – it wouldn't do to have their topic of conversation overheard by their erstwhile driver. He included Crusher in his words, nodding to where she was squeezed in between two large sacks opposite them.
"Not much," Garibaldi admitted in a similarly low tone. "Ancient history was never one of my better subjects back in school."
Crusher shrugged. "I know a little bit more than that. I know what San Francisco was like around 1890 – even got a chance to meet Sam Clemens." She smiled wistfully in recollection, then noticed Sheridan's suddenly piercing stare. "Don't ask," she cautioned with an upraised hand, "it's a very long and confusing story. Back to the matter at hand though, you said earlier that you thought that this was the Confederacy. If that's true, the war must be north of here."
Sheridan managed a half-hearted chuckle at that. "Oh, there's a war up north all right." He handed her the newspaper, pointing out the article that had so stunned him back at the general store, saying, "Read that."
She did, trying to focus on the words despite the rough bouncing of the wooden wagon-wheels over rutted, unpaved road. It didn't take long before she saw exactly what he'd meant. "This can't be right," she finally said, looking back up at him with a frown. She allowed her voice to come out a little louder than before, since at the front of the wagon, Marcus had suddenly struck up a timely conversation with the driver.
"Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?"
Crusher flinched at Garibaldi's sudden question, her nerves on edge from the chilling thoughts running rampant through her mind. Out loud, she read from the paper, "Quebec is in flames once again, following a Canadian revolt against the unlawful occupation of the United States. The army of the United States, behaving with their usual savagery, has commenced nothing less than all-out war against those citizens of the British Empire. Proving that wickedness shall be punished, however, Providence has seen fit that the British have landed in force in the California territory. San Francisco is in ruins, and Sacramento was seized by British regulars, this day, 1871. The days of the domination of the United States upon this continent are over." She handed the paper back to Sheridan, brows knitted. "I've never heard of anything like that," she confessed anxiously. "San Francisco burned? Sacramento captured by the British army?"
"That's because it never happened," Sheridan said, lowering his voice even further. "The Civil War was over by 1865, and yet here we are in 1871, and the Confederacy is alive and well, while the United States has gotten into another war with the British."
"So what happened here?"
"I wish I knew for sure." He sat back in silent thought for a moment, trying to ignore the hot sun beating down on his head, and rough jolting beneath him, that he knew would leave him stiff and sore in all the wrong places. Thankfully, it was only four miles, which should take less than an hour by any estimate. Of course, that left a further eight miles of walking in front of them, but he tried not to think of that. Several minutes passed before he spoke again, the morass of disconnected thoughts running through his mind seeming to crystallize in small ways. "Your Commander Data said something, during the meeting, that's been bothering me," he eventually said to her. "We know that there's something going on with the flow of time in the town we're headed for, only we don't know what. Michael," he went on turning to face the man on his left, "you said that it sounded like there were other time travelers involved here, right?"
Garibaldi nodded grimly, and asked, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Maybe. If what you're thinking about is whether or not this is the first time there's been outside interference here, then definitely. Whatever went on here, it wasn't recent."
"That doesn't make any sense!" Crusher blurted suddenly from beneath the rim of her sunbonnet. "I thought the idea was that Q's son was going to put us in positions where we could maintain the normal flow of time… how can we do that if he put us here too late to make a difference?"
"That was what he said," Garibaldi commented ominously. "I never trusted the little twerp, and now I think he's set us up. But what for?"
Crusher shook her head emphatically. "No, that's not Q's style. He likes to use his powers directly, not lurk at the fringes of things. Other than moving us around, this time, he's leaving us to do everything for ourselves. You wouldn't have noticed, having never met him before, but during that conference we had yesterday, his son did no more than give a few suggestions."
"So?"
"So, that's not like him at all." She shook her head again. "He doesn't give us those kinds of options. He…" she hesitated, searching for the words, "toys with us, treats us like ignorant barbarians… but invariably, he loves playing god. What I'm trying to say, is that he considers us too inferior to figure out things for ourselves, and so he makes a point of telling, or rather showing, us what he wants us to see. Leaving us alone like this, to puzzle things out for ourselves, is… unheard of."
Garibaldi sighed and quirked his lips into a bemused expression. "Have I mentioned yet that I don't like this?"
"Repeatedly."
Hearing the sounds of a conversation beginning behind where he was perched with the driver at the wagon's fore, Marcus decided that the topic of discussion was not something that should be overheard by anyone local. "Just how far are we going?" he asked, with more volume than was strictly necessary, even over the steady clopping of the horse, rattle of the wheels, and ever-present hum of insects.
"My land's only about four miles outside Nashville on this road," Dempsey Eure assured his odd, English passenger. "Shouldn't take more'n hour from here," he hazarded. "What's yer big rush anyway?" he asked neutrally. At least he hoped it sounded that way. He mentally winced, knowing that he'd catch six kinds of hell from Nate and Henry if he said something to make them suspicious.
Marcus realized immediately that he was being sounded out. But was the man's question just that – a curiosity being satisfied – or something more sinister? His reply, when it came, was equally cautious. "Oh, no real hurry. We've just come a long way, though, and we'd rather not prolong it any more than absolutely necessary."
"Is that a fact? It must'a been a real long trip for an Englishman to wind up coming into North Carolina from the west. Where'd you say you were from, anyhow?"
"Didn't, actually." He fell silent, and Dempsey realized he wasn't going to get any more than that.
Changing the subject, if only not to sound more than reasonably curious about their origins, Dempsey looked sidelong at the man next to him, and asked, "That's a nice piece of work there. Must've cost you something fierce. What is it?"
Following the other's gaze, Marcus reached up and fingered his Anla'shok brooch, which he'd affixed to the left breast of his dark outer jacket. Mentally, he shrugged. He could be mostly honest here without compromising anything. "It didn't cost me anything, personally. It was something of a… gift. The stone in the center is called isil'zha, and it's very rare."
"I reckon so. I've ne'er seen anything like it, by God." Dempsey kept talking, slowly tightening the reins in his hands, to slow down the nag pulling the wagon. He hoped that by keeping the other man's attention elsewhere, their slightly lower speed would go unnoticed. "Where'd you get something like that from? Must be awful far away."
"You could say that," Marcus allowed, trying to steer the conversation away from specifics.
Once again, Dempsey felt like he'd hit a brick wall, and once again, was not sure of what to make of it. The Rivington men he'd met during the war had been equally as tight-lipped about their pasts and origins, but none had even attempted to hide the fact that they were one of them. But then, he reflected dourly, they hadn't tried to kill the President and start a war yet. That would be more than enough reason for new Rivington men to keep quiet. "Where're you headed for?" he finally asked. He knew that might be a risky question, but so be it. He intended on finding out something useful to present Nate and Henry when they caught up. "I know these parts; might be able to help ya'll out."
Marcus realized that the conversation in the back of the wagon had finally stilled, so he wasn't needed as a distraction anymore. But it would look strange if he tried to pretend he hadn't heard the question. With a mental shrug, he thought, well, why not? "We're headed north, actually. A town called Ri –"
"Richmond," Sheridan suddenly interjected from the back seat, shooting Marcus a look full of warning. He didn't want to reveal their true destination, if it could be at all avoided. The less information anyone had about them, the better. Garibaldi must be rubbing off on him, he decided with a mental grimace. "We're going to the capitol to see about a land claim we staked out in Okla – er, the Indian Territory."
Dempsey looked over his shoulder, not bothering to hide his confusion. "Why didn'tcha settle your claim with the land grant people already out there? I'm thinkin' too that you oughta be making for Washington. The Indian Territory belongs to them, last I heard about it."
Sheridan managed to hide a wince at that. Damn. So much for fitting in and avoiding suspicion.
To his surprise, it was Marcus who managed to rearrange their hasty cover story. The Ranger hadn't heard their conversation in the back, and didn't know much more than when they'd first arrived, but he seemed to have pieced together the important bits from what he'd heard and seen. "The border there is a little... vague, if you catch my drift," he said smoothly, adding enough guilty triumph to his expression to look utterly convincing. "No one's going to notice if their claim is just a touch north of where it should be. What's a few miles between neighbors, eh?"
Even more to his surprise, their driver was suddenly nodding with increasing enthusiasm. The idea of putting one over on the United States, no matter how minor in scale, obviously appealed to him. "And if the yankee cavalry's a bit too busy with you English, up in Canada, no one'll notice a few square miles here or there," Dempsey trailed off, grinning.
"Quite right," Marcus said approvingly. The other man had practically furnished his cover story for him. "As you might guess, things are a little complicated…"
"And we'd figured that'd go more smoothly if went straight to the top," Garibaldi finished, having taken to the story immediately.
"Not to mention that we'd like to see off our dear friend Mr. Cole here," Crusher chimed in expansively, "before his ship sails."
Dempsey had turned back curiously, and Sheridan stifled a guffaw as the doctor ducked her head and batted her eyelashes at him. Garibaldi's mouth was twisting oddly, as he fought back a smile with pure will. Crusher's voice had gotten very soft, and begun to drawl, which was a complete departure from the clipped, no-nonsense person who'd threatened to sedate him the day before.
Crusher's smile widened when their driver flushed, and turned back to the reins in his hand with forced attention in response to her outrageous flirting. Yep, still got it, she thought smugly.
*****
"Have you heard anything yet?"
Worf's deep sigh started somewhere down by his feet, and worked its way up to join the irritation in his eyes. He willed himself to keep his gaze on the viewscreen, in an effort to resist the temptation to do something Jadzia would have considered… irrational. "Commander," he said after a long, significant moment, "I have already told you – repeatedly – that I would inform you the moment we received word from the away team."
"I know, I know." Susan Ivanova's pacing was wearing a path in the carpet immediately behind Defiant's command chair, and she knew she was driving them all up the wall, but that was not foremost on her mind. "It's been four hours since they went down there, and we've heard nothing. Not so much as a 'hey, we're still alive down here!' Something must have happened."
"We would know if a problem had arisen," Worf said softly, working overtime to convince himself that throwing her bodily off the bridge would have poor consequences for the rapport developing between the two crews. He wasn't having much luck, and his hands twitched involuntarily. It was the sort of twitch that had every junior officer on the bridge attempting to blend in with their consoles.
Ivanova crossed her arms and glared at his back. "Oh would we now?" Abruptly shifting her attention, she continued, almost to herself, "This is just like those three. We'd be more likely to get a ransom demand for them than a call admitting that they'd gotten into trouble. It's the three of them," she complained to no-one in particular, "They all have a hero complex. If I weren't so used to it by now, it'd drive me crazy." Worf agreed with that last assessment, though he only permitted himself a noncommittal grunt. "And here I am, stuck up here twiddling my thumbs while they have all the fun. God, it's a good thing I'm Russian, or this would start to depress me."
Taking the opportunity to cut in on her running monologue, a voice made itself known from the back of the bridge. "Then it's a good thing that Doctor Crusher is down there with them."
Whirling, Ivanova found herself facing Picard's first officer, who grinned disarmingly. "Why's that?"
"She's a doctor," Riker shrugged. "Heroic stuff always involves a chance of someone getting hurt, so she won't let them. She gets overprotective at times, but I think that's how you can tell a good doctor from a bad one."
Ivanova's mind flashed back on Stephen Franklin – at least the way he had been before the stims took over. "I bet she doesn't put you on forced diets," she muttered.
Riker's smiled widened imperceptibly. "Sounds like you know the type." Changing the subject, he went on, "I assume you've gotten the grand tour already?"
"Yeah," Ivanova replied, forcibly turning her mind from the darker thoughts of a moment ago. "Short orange guy, big ears? Didn't seem like his mind was on it, so I cut him loose."
"Nog's been pretty preoccupied since we left DS9," Ezri piped up from her station a few paces away on the other side of the bridge. "He's been spending an awful lot of time in his quarters, and something seems to be bugging him. As our ship's counselor though, I'm making a point of finding out, Commander."
Riker frowned, then shrugged. It wasn't any of his business. "So did you have the chance to see much of the ship before you… cut him loose?"
Ivanova could tell he was trying to distract her, and at the moment, welcomed a little diversion. Besides, she usually could tell when the captain and Garibaldi had gotten themselves in too deep… the hairs on the back of her neck would stand up. Whether it was first officer's instinct, woman's intuition, or a result of her extremely limited telepathic ability, she neither knew nor cared. "Well, let me see," she told Riker, "I saw a big blue pulsating column, a hanger bay with a couple of smaller ships in it, a mess hall, and a torpedo room. Your Lieutenant was a little sparse on the details, but I expected as much."
"Why do you say that?"
"We all got tossed together by a damned teenager three days ago," Ivanova pointed out, "which just happens to be the first time any of us knew that there even was such a thing as an alternate universe. I don't trust you, so it only makes sense that you don't trust us."
"Why shouldn't we trust each other?" Riker asked, surprised. From what he'd seen, the two crews had the same basic principles, and they all had the same vested interest in their current circumstances. "Captain Picard is trusting you enough that only one of our people is on that away team, and she's our Chief Medical Officer."
Ivanova's lips quirked and her eyes narrowed. "Yes, there is that," she said neutrally. "But I also noticed just how vague you've been about the specifics of your ships. I mean, this one here can turn invisible, but that somehow was skipped out on the tour. Meanwhile, as we speak, a couple of your people are over on the White Star with Lennier, practically tearing it apart from the inside out to see how it works."
Riker coughed into his palm, suddenly seeing her point. "Though to be fair," he said aloud, "your Mr. Lennier spent most of the last day buried so deeply in our engineering section, I thought we were going to have to use the transporters to get him out."
"Well that's great," she said, philosophically, "they know all about both our ships, but none of us do. Hell, I guess that's only fair, I don't know what half the systems on the White Star are, let alone what they do."
"How could you not know about your own ship?" Riker asked disapprovingly. He knew he didn't have anywhere near the expertise of the lowliest of Enterprise's engineering staff, but he knew the basics of every system on the ship, had made sure of that both on Farpoint Station, waiting for his new assignment to arrive, and again in the interval between the destruction of that ship and the commissioning of this new Enterprise.
"Well…" Ivanova dragged out with an almost guilty pleasure, "it's not exactly our ship. It was sort of a present."
Riker blinked, trying to digest that. "A present? Commander, I might have missed something during the briefing, but I'm pretty sure that people who've seceded from their own government generally aren't rewarded with free starships."
Now it was Ivanova's turn to blink in confusion. "You mean you thought that the White Star was one of our ships?" She snorted that idea off. "The White Star belongs to the Minbari. Although I get the impression that it's a bit of a secret among them too, and that they had help from the Vorlons."
"Vorlons?"
"Never mind, if you'd ever met one, you'd understand," she said reassuringly. At least it was supposed to sound that way.
"So the ship isn't really yours."
Ivanova shrugged. "Not exactly. Delenn's pretty tight-lipped about it, but I think it has to do with the Rangers. It's odd though, because the Rangers seem like a pretty big organization, much too big for one little ship," she mused aloud. Catching Riker's expression, she shrugged again, helplessly. "Hell, this is my first extended trip on the thing." She paused, turning to stare once again out at Earth's surface swimming silently past on the viewscreen at the front of the bridge. "Okay," she said finally, giving him a sidelong glance. "I told you what I know, now out with it."
He squinted at her, and she ignored it, never taking her eyes off the planet below. She sure doesn't pull any punches. "Alright," he began, "what is it you want to know?"
"Well, for starters, how can this ship turn invisible?" She was facing him again, her eyes watching his piercingly. "I mean, on our old targeting systems, Minbari stealth makes it hard enough to see so much as a profile until you're in spitting range… but this, this goes way beyond that. Even with the overhauled defense grid and targeting scanners, we didn't see this ship sitting practically right outside the hull."
"Defiant here has the distinction of having its own cloaking device. It can render the ship essentially invisible to the naked eye, as well as most forms of sensors. It was part of an exchange program with the Romulans, where we got one of their cloaks, and one of their officers to keep an eye on it."
"That was the previous Defiant, Commander," Worf cut in from his seat at the center of the bridge, without looking back at them. "The cloak installed on this vessel is Klingon, a gift from Chancellor Martok."
"I stand corrected," Riker said. He didn't add anything more – it was harmless enough for Ivanova to know that the ship had a cloaking device, but he wasn't about to detail it's weaknesses, nor the fact that the tachyon sensors her people seemed to use could be easily modified to see through it.
After a moment's consideration, Ivanova nodded sharply. "The power drain must be enormous. Can you even still fight while that thing's on?"
At that, Worf turned, watching Riker as the first officer tried to school his expression back to something a little less surprised. Obviously, he hadn't been circumspect enough. "What makes you say that?" he asked a little blandly.
"Stands to reason," she told him. "If I had a machine that could turn my ship invisible, I'd leave it on most of the time, if I could. But when we ran into the Shadows back at Babylon 4, you weren't using it. So, I figure that there must be some kind of drawback."
Shifting uncomfortably, Riker nodded, eyebrows raised. He wasn't quite sure how to reply to that. The weaknesses of most cloaking devices were well known to every race in the Alpha Quadrant, but he wasn't quite ready to lay all his cards on the table. Ruefully, he had to admit to himself that Ivanova had a point – he really didn't trust them quite yet. Not that far, anyway. Well, she's figured out this much already. No need to do any more than confirm this much. "That's about the size of it," he admitted to her. "You can run the cloak for days at a time without too much trouble, but you can basically rule out fighting anything at the same time."
Determined not to let anything else slip like that, he assumed his best poker face – which by his own admission wasn't that good, his regular poker partners including an android who could instantly count every card in the deck and calculated absurd probabilities, an empath who could tell when people were lying (even though she swore up and down that she never took advantage of her abilities like that), and a Chief Engineer who could literally see the physiological signs of a calculated bluff.
"You said that was your first question. What's your other one?" His tone suggested that there had better only be one other question. Given her perceptive analysis of the cloaking device, he wasn't willing to be faced with the minefield of difficult queries building behind her eyes.
Ivanova naturally saw that in his expression, and just as naturally, steamrollered over it. "All right then, secondly; what's with the registration numbers on your ships?"
Riker had been concentrating so hard on not giving away any state secrets, that her abruptly disconnected question threw him momentarily off balance. Talking with Ivanova was like the verbal equivalent of an out-of-body experience. Shaking his head resignedly, he realized that she was still waiting for an answer – and none too patiently. "What about the registration numbers don't you get? They build them, and then slap a number on them when they commission them. I assume you must have the same kind of setup in Earthforce."
"I know how that works," she said with a touch of asperity, "what I mean is that yours don't make sense. Both of them start with 'NCC,'"
"Naval Construction Contract," Riker filled in.
"Whatever. Your ship though, has a four digit number, one seven oh one, followed by the letter 'E.' This ship though, has a five digit number, seven four two oh five. Don't tell me you only started building ships a few years ago, and are already up to seventy thousand!"
Wondering how she remembered those numbers after only a brief glimpse of the ships themselves when they'd first appeared, Riker explained. "The Enterprise has something of a legacy in Starfleet. One of them from even before the Federation itself existed, was our first real exploration starship. But the one after that – that was the famous one, and the first one with the seventeen oh one registry. When that one was finally destroyed almost a hundred years ago, they recommissioned another ship of the same class as the Enterprise-A. Since then, it's been something of a tradition, and unofficially, we're the flagship of the fleet." He couldn't help a proud smile from surfacing as he revealed that.
Ivanova digested that. "So how come this ship doesn't have an 'A' at the end of the registration? According to what he just said," she motioned at Worf's hunched back, "this is the second ship called Defiant."
Riker paused, confounded. "You know something?" he admitted after beat, "I have no idea. Worf, do you?"
Worf looked up from the small panel of screens helpfully situation beside the captain's chair. "No," he said bluntly, "Klingon designations are far more practical."
From up by the science station, Ezri spun her chair around with a pained sigh. "I know, if no one else does." No one else volunteered, so she continued at Ivanova's expectant look. "There were actually three ships in Starfleet called Defiant."
Riker snapped his fingers suddenly. "That's right; it was one of the original Constitution-class ships, right? I thought she was destroyed more than a hundred years ago?"
"She wasn't," Ezri said, "and that's why our designation doesn't seem to fit. According to the logs of Captain Kirk's ship… Enterprise," she added hastily, remembering that Kirk's name would mean nothing to the Earthforce commander, "the Defiant vanished into a dimension called interphase. So officially, she's listed as missing, not destroyed or retired, so her registry number was never stricken. When the boys in Starfleet HQ decided to name our ship the Defiant, they had to give it a new registry number."
Now even Worf looked curious. Riker said, "That still doesn't explain this ship's registry, Lieutenant."
"I believe I can explain that, Commanders," Worf rumbled, swiveling in his seat to face them. "When the first Defiant was destroyed by the Breen, during the war, we were forced to abandon ship. But the spaceframe remained partially intact. When the Klingon fleet drove the Breen from the system, Starfleet salvage operations recovered the original Defiant's commissioning plaque from the wreckage."
Nodding, Riker agreed. "She was a tough li… ship," he finished lamely.
Worf gave him the evil eye, then grunted softly in what sounded like grim amusement. "When Starfleet had this vessel, which was launched as the Sao Paulo, renamed to Defiant, Captain Sisko insisted that the original bridge plaque be installed on this ship. His human sensibilities compelled him to have Starfleet change the registry on the hull to match the plaque." Another amused snort told them what he thought of that idea.
Ezri shrugged and gestured to Worf. "That's basically it."
Ivanova nodded, and gave a noncommittal, "Hmmph," before crossing her arms and turning back to glare at the viewscreen.
Her penetrating gaze no longer on him, Riker let out very quiet sigh of relief. That was certainly something to file away for future notice; Ivanova could be very perceptive, and wasn't hesitant to get right to the heart of the matter with incisive questions – but give her too much information, and she lost interest. I wonder if that has something to do with how she remembered the registry numbers so easily. If I remembered things that well, I'd probably want to avoid long-winded explanations too.
It wasn't long before Riker found himself staring at the viewscreen as well. He'd never admit it, least of all to his counterpart, but the tension was wearing on him as well, and he found himself hoping that the away team would call very soon, before he too wore a hole in the Defiant's bridge carpet.
Worf also turned back to the screen, but growled under his breath. He'd surreptitiously asked Commander Riker to come over to the Defiant, and do what he could to pry their visitor out of the room. He could feel her eyes on the back of his head, and it frankly bothered him. Now, he found that those pair of eyes had just gained a companion set, and the level of grim anticipation had just doubled. It was going to be a very long watch.