Lost Time by Ilsa J. Bick Page B

information in a general sense and compares what it reads to what’s stored in the buffer. Otherwise, I rematerialize with my arm hanging out of my ear.”
    “Wait a minute,” said Nog, and Gomez heard the ah-hah in his voice. “Commander, you think your transporter beam snagged some information in a datastream and then compared it to what’s already there. In the Kwolek. And…”
    “And the transporter came up with Duffy,” said Gomez. Hearing it again, out loud, set off this little electric jolt zipping through her heart. “Not the Kieran Duffy that we knew, obviously, but another Kieran. As the temporal distortions here increase, the temporal signatures of the universes must be momentarily synchronized, allowing for vacant time-space to be briefly occupied by reassimilated energy.”
    “In other words, that Commander Duffy filled a vacant space in this universe.” Conlon’s eyes held that faraway look she always got when she was thinking really hard about something. “And the da Vinci? You think that when I activated the deflectors, we pushed da Vinci into a time-space bubble, or into the other universe altogether?”
    “I think so. We won’t know until we bring down the deflectors.”
    Hawkins said, “Wait a sec. If you snagged hold of Duffy and we’ve got everyone’s patterns on file, can we, I dunno, put the transporter on a continuous receptive mode? You know, catch pieces of them in a datastream and then have them rematerialize here?”
    Gomez shook her head. “I thought of that. There are two problems: Casual directionality is one. If Duffy was a book, then his life has been written up to this point. Bringing that Duffy here—even if we could do it—is like bringing in another chapter by another author and plunking it right smack dab into the middle of a book. It won’t make any sense to him, and he sure as heck won’t make any sense here. ”
    “And there’s conservation of matter and energy to think about,” said Conlon. “The only reason Duffy almost materialized here is because we’ve wrapped space-time around us. Eventually, we’ll have to take down the deflectors, and the hole will collapse. But if we bring energy into this system that we can’t release or get rid of, then, theoretically, there’s this big ka-boom. Think of it the same way you do when matter and antimatter collide. Kind of defeats the purpose.”
    “But that does imply there’s an energy imbalance somewhere,” said Gomez. “Maybe on both sides of the equation. It’s like we’re trading information to make up for gaps, and they’ve activated a search program that’s trying to compensate. The problem is to figure out what’s missing from there that they could possibly want here.”
    Nog held up his tricorder. “Why don’t we just ask them?”

    “You’re a million kilometers away.” Gomez frowned over at Duffy. They were recalibrating the plasma injectors. “Something on your mind?”
    “Me?” Duffy grinned, shook his head. “Just…thinking.”
    “About what happened during transport?” Duffy had told her about catching a glimpse of her in an EVA suit but she figured stress, had to be. On the run all the time, people shooting at you. Bound to have an effect. So she’d dismissed it. “That still bothering you?”
    “A little. It was weird, Sonnie, like a vision of the future, or something. I dunno.”
    “Wishful thinking, you ask my opinion. You saw me on a Cardassian station. Well, isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to accomplish here?” Then she scrutinized him more closely. “You’re really bothered by this.”
    “Yeah. Ever since coming aboard I have this bad feeling. Something’s going to go wrong.”
    Gomez put her arms about his waist. “Nothing’s going to go wrong. We’ve been shot at a lot. We’re still here.”
    “For now.” Duffy nuzzled her hair, and inhaled the aroma of jasmine and musk. Tightened his grip. “You smell good. And, God, you feel