Immortal Coil

by Jeffrey Lang

  But Riker never finished the thought. There was a crash somewhere behind him, and suddenly Data was moving, drawing his phaser and lunging toward him, moving with the effortless speed that Riker knew was always at his disposal, but which he rarely used. Riker didn't have time to turn or duck, barely had time to draw a breath, before he felt Data's hand on his shoulder, shoving him down. The impact wrenched his arm, but despite the sudden, sharp pain, he managed to draw his phaser as he rolled across the floor. Data, he knew, was obviously reacting to a threat that had just entered the lab.

  Skidding to a halt against Barclay's legs, Riker lifted the phaser high, sighting on the first thing he focused on—Data's head—then immediately shifted his attention to the two huge humanoids that were standing over him.

  Two and a half meters tall, the beings were bone-white and hairless, with pale eyes staring out from deep sockets. Silver robes hung from shoulders that were at least a meter wide. Apparently, they had been lurking inside the spaceship bay, near enough to the away team to remain hidden from view if they flattened themselves against the dark viewports. The lab was strewn with black glass from their explosive entrance into the lab.

  That would explain why McAdams and I didn't see them. But why the hell didn't they register on the tricorders? And what do they want?

  Riker could see that Data was trying different settings on his phaser to no avail; the weapon wouldn't fire. Then, almost as if taking a toy away from an errant child, the giant immediately in front of Data slapped him across the face.

  Data was thrown back, his phaser flying out of his hand. The giants started forward, and Data spared only a second to turn toward the away team, revealing a tear in the artificial skin of his face that exposed the blinking hardware beneath. Riker thought his friend's eyes were actually blazing with anger as he spoke.

  “Run.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  SPARKS FLEW AS DATA RIPPED a long console from its mount in the wall, lifted it over his head and flung it at his assailants. The console slammed into the humanoids and knocked them back, but it didn't stop them.

  Once more on his feet, Riker took aim and tried to fire, only to find his phaser wasn't working either. Some kind of dampening field, he guessed, and began to see the logic of Data's urgent order to withdraw. Their weapons were useless, and judging from what he was seeing, hand-to-hand combat wasn't an option. He grabbed Barclay's arm and called out, “McAdams! Retreat!”

  Then he saw that the security officer had other ideas.

  McAdams ran alongside one of their foes, placed her hands on his forearm and shoulder in preparation for what Riker recognized as a vicious mok'bara hold. She shifted her legs in the prescribed manner, pivoted her hips . . . and utterly failed to move her opponent. Her expression, Riker saw, betrayed not fear, but surprise. She somehow sidestepped the giant's attempt to grab her, and before Riker could formulate his next move, Data was there, interposing himself between McAdams and her attacker. Data grabbed both of the aliens' wrists and twisted them so sharply that Riker flinched, expecting a spray of blood and howl of pain. But instead, he saw a shower of blinding white sparks as a shriek of metal cut through the air.

  That explains the lack of life signs, Riker thought. Androids!

  Data tossed the hands away, then leapt into the air and dealt the creature a savage kick in the chest, sending him flying backward against a bank of instruments. The arc of the android's fall left brilliant afterimages on Riker's eyes. The second attacker ignored his companion and attempted to catch Data in a bear hug, but missed. Again, Data shouted, “Run!” and this time, McAdams complied.

  She clamped a hand around Riker's wrist and led him around the curve of the lab. “We have to find a door to the bay—the escape pods.”

  Riker slowed and grabbed hold of a metal chair. “The hell with finding a door,” he muttered, and threw the chair with all his strength at the nearest viewport. Dark glass exploded into the bay and Riker herded Barclay and McAdams through the opening. Their rapid footfalls rang loudly as they ran across the cavernous space toward the launch tubes.

  When they reached the first pod, Riker saw that it was Starfleet-standard, though a little dated, and ushered in Barclay first, who quickly found the preset switch and slapped it. The pod's systems hummed to life. Riker turned to McAdams. “You next, Lieutenant. As soon as you clear the ocean, get a fix on our position and raise the Enterprise. They may be able to beam down help.”

  The pod's onboard computer intoned, “Lift-off in fifteen seconds.”

  “What about you?” McAdams asked.

  “I'm going back for Data. Get in.”

  McAdams hesitated, ready to argue, until her training seemed to take hold and she nodded. But instead of climbing into the seat, McAdams grabbed Riker's arm and, with no apparent effort, pitched him through the hatch. He heard her say, “Sorry, Commander,” as the automatic door closed.

  Riker barely had time to strap himself in before the engines fired.

  Stepping away from the launch cradle, McAdams watched as the escape pod disappeared up the tube. She watched it go and, almost wistfully, McAdams whispered, “It's been fun.”

  She turned just in time to see Data come crashing through another of the viewports. He sailed a good twenty meters into the bay, landing hard on his side. He tried to rise, but couldn't seem to find his footing. One leg was twisted in the wrong direction and his left arm hung uselessly.

  Rhea could see both of the attacking androids striding deliberately toward them as she ran to Data and knelt by his side, lifting his right arm over her shoulder and hauling him to his feet. Data's eyes were open and he seemed to be tracking motion, but he couldn't speak.

  She got Data to the second escape pod and eased him into the hatch, followed him inside, slammed the preset and then looked back across the bay.

  They were still coming, picking up speed now. Quickly she checked her tricorder: the dampening field that had kept their phasers from functioning earlier was concentrated in the perimeter lab. There was no sign of it inside the bay.

  As the pod's computer announced lift-off in fifteen seconds, Rhea stood and half-emerged from the pod, phaser raised, but instead of firing at their pursuers, she aimed through the shaft overhead, targeting the force field generator near the top, the only thing separating the bay from the ocean above. The phaser beam hit pointblank, and the force field winked out.

  There was no sign of fear on the androids' faces, only grim determination. Rhea almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

  There came a roar as the weight of an ocean sent a hurricane blast of cold, wet air into the bay, smacking back her pursuers as they came within arm's reach of the pod. The automatic hatch closed and the engines fired, sending the pod up the launch tube while all around, ocean water flooded and destroyed Vaslovik's lair, throwing it into darkness.

  The pod ascended rapidly, vibrating madly as it cleared first the tube, then the ocean, then climbed through the atmosphere.

  A quick survey revealed what McAdams expected to find: standard escape pod features, including controls for a small but powerful warp drive.

  As the sky outside the pod windows shifted from brilliant blue to the cobalt of space's edge, Rhea got a navigational fix. The Enterprise was in a geosynchronous orbit over the DIT, so she set the autopilot to head due west and clear the atmosphere as quickly as possible. The pod's impulse thrusters responded, and as the autopilot took over, Rhea finally felt she could turn her attention to Data.

  He was in bad shape. His eyes were still open and moving, but all other motor control appeared to be gone. The artificial skin had been torn away almost completely from the left side of his head, exposing a large section of his tripolymer skull. His left shoulder had been crushed. Additionally, there were two large rents in his neck, almost as if one of the giant androids had torn it open with its fingers or teeth.

  “Data?” Rhea asked softly. “Can you hear me? Can you answer?” She waved her hand in front of his
eyes and they seemed to follow for a few seconds, but then his eyes lost their focus. Data opened his mouth, but the only sound that came out was a thin croak, followed by a thin amber liquid that trickled out the corner. Rhea turned him onto his side so the liquid could drain out. She wasn't sure if he could choke, but she didn't want to find out.

  “Hang on, Data,” she said. “We'll be home in a few minutes.” The autopilot beeped and Rhea turned to see the sleek shape of the Enterprise on a small viewscreen. But something was wrong.

  A blip shone on the sensor display. Something was coming up from the planet, fast, from Galor IV's arctic circle, heading straight for the starship.

  What the hell—?

  Something flared outside the pod, casting ragged, streaming shadows. The pod's window darkened automatically as the autopilot threw the craft into a sudden spiral. Rhea tried raising the Enterprise, but all she could make out was the garbled sound of Deanna Troi's voice saying, “. . . Federation vessel . . . cease . . . attempt . . . will respond . . .” Then, there was another blinding flash and the signal died.

  Rhea only had a second to see the attacker before the pod's autopilot sent it into evasive maneuvers, but the brief glimpse was more than enough. It wasn't quite the size of the Enterprise, but the few readings her sensors were able to take showed power readings on a par with the Sovereign-class starship. In both its color and its irregular shape, it looked like a sheet of ice broken free from a glacier. Hiding in the north pole all along, Rhea surmised. Clever. The alien ship opened fire again.

  The Enterprise was going to have her hands full and wasn't going to have time to worry about a tiny escape pod. Rhea silently wished the ship good luck, then entered a new course into the autopilot. A quick look confirmed that they did indeed have the range to get where she wanted to go, though she never really doubted it.

  She turned around in the seat and saw that Data was staring past her, out into space. Was he wondering about the fate of his ship? Was his mind even functioning anymore?

  “I can't take you to your home, Data,” she said softly. “But I can take you back to mine.”

  The pod cleared the gravity well of the planet and the warp drive engaged, while behind it, two titans battled.

  Beverly Crusher was trying to make herself heard above the bray of the planetary emergency klaxon. A pair of orderlies was trying to transfer a recently admitted patient—a pregnant woman who had been having false labor pains—out of her bed and onto a stretcher without first disconnecting all the monitors. Finally, one of them heard her, disconnected the monitors, untangled himself and the expectant mother was bundled off without any additional injuries to either patient or staff. As they headed for the shelter, Crusher stayed behind and silently counted to ten. This isn't a starship crew, she reminded herself. They're infirmary workers at a research institute. It isn't like they're attacked by silent, implacable foes every day.

  Her ship was under fire—Haftel had been able to tell her that much before the evacuation order had been sounded—but no one seemed to know anything else. She had tried to check with DIT security, but they had cut her off when they realized she wasn't in immediate distress. Crusher had been annoyed, but then decided to let it go. The entire security staff for the Institute might have numbered in the neighborhood of a few dozen officers and they had their hands full. Could it be the Dominion? Had one of their ships made its way this far into Federation territory? There was no way to know and the only way the doctor could focus past her frustration was to keep busy.

  Crusher followed the orderlies down the corridor until they passed the ICU where Crusher stopped and passed through the large double doors. As she had expected, Maury Sullivan was at the nurse's station transferring patient records to the protected core. They would need the records if they were forced to spend any length of time in the shelters, and they couldn't risk their being lost if the main computers were damaged. Most of the backups were done automatically, but the infirmary workers knew the limitations of their system and knew not to trust automatic systems.

  “Who's left?” Crusher asked.

  Maury answered without looking up. “Just Maddox. I wanted you here.” Suddenly, the lights dimmed to almost complete darkness, then rose again to half their former level.

  “Get down to the shelter,” Crusher ordered. “And send back those two orderlies. I'll do what I can until they return.” Crusher hurried to Maddox's room, but when she got there she was surprised to find someone already at work, an unfamiliar med-tech. But as soon as her eyes adjusted to the subdued light, the doctor saw the tech wasn't getting Maddox ready to move. Quite the opposite, in fact; he was attaching something—some sort of neural stimulator?—to his forehead. Crusher shouted, “What the hell are you doing? Get away from him!” But the tech didn't even look up until he had completed the procedure and removed the device, shoving past Crusher as he bolted out the door.

  Cursing, Crusher recovered quickly and checked Maddox, made sure his vital signs were stable, then ran out into the hall. She almost crashed into Maury and a worried-looking orderly, but managed to spin around them without breaking stride. “A tech just walked out of here,” Crusher shouted to be heard above the klaxon. “Which way?”

  Maury pointed to the left. Crusher nodded and jerked her head toward Maddox. “Don't move him unless you absolutely have to,” she said. “That tech might have done something. I don't know what, but I'm going to find out.”

  At the end of the hall, the corridor kinked to the left. Crusher peered around the corner before proceeding, half-expecting the tech to be lying in wait. This turned out not to be the case; the corridor was wide and empty and ended in a set of swinging double doors. This was a part of the infirmary Crusher hadn't visited before and she hesitated to enter unknown terrain without something with which to defend herself. But all she had on her was her medkit. Not exactly a formidable array of weaponry. Should she proceed? Go back for help? No, if she did that, the trail would grow cold.

  She popped open her medical tricorder and tried to reset it to search for gross physical displacement. The tricorder couldn't tell her much—only that someone had been down the corridor in the past few minutes—but not much more. She checked the cartridges in her medkit—antibiotics, antivirals, a cardiopulmonary stimulant, a couple of steroid combinations, a viral inhibitor—the standard mix. Nothing very useful. She spotted something through the windows of the double doors that she liked much better, a med cart someone had left outside a patient's room when the emergency began. Checking the labels quickly, the doctor found something more to her liking: a general neuro-inhibitor. It was meant to be used on patients experiencing seizure, but, if she could administer it near a nerve cluster, it would drop the man in his tracks. She slid a cartridge into the hypo, pocketed a couple extra and pushed on down the hall.

  When she reached the end of the corridor, Crusher realized she had left the last of the patient rooms behind her and was getting into the maintenance areas. Behind another set of double doors at the end of the corridor were several large pieces of cleaning equipment, barrels of chemicals and a single door on the left. Otherwise, it was a dead end. Crusher started to take another reading, but stopped when she saw the door was ajar. Peering through the crack, she saw a dimly lit stairwell, then heard the distant clank of a heavy door closing. Once again, the doctor hesitated and tried to determine whether there was a more intelligent solution to the present situation, but nothing suggested itself that didn't involve endangering more civilians. Gripping the hypo, she slipped through the door as quietly as she was able. The stairs only led in one direction—down.

  At the bottom of the stairway, she pulled open another door expecting a dimly lit basement or a storage area. Instead, she found a short, brightly lit corridor ending in a pair of heavy security doors. Two armed security drones lay inert on the floor. “This is not good,” she muttered. Taking a quick tricorder reading, all she was able to determine for sure was that no weapon had been fired, which
only added to her uncertainty.

  Approaching the security doors, Crusher wondered how she could pass without a password or keycard, but the doors slid open at her approach. A body slumped into the hall: a security guard. Crusher knelt beside him and checked his vitals. He was only lightly stunned. There was another man leaning against a console inside the security doors, also unconscious.

  She realized where she was: the infirmary's computer core. That was a problem. The damage a single determined person could do to such a vital facility, once they were inside, was incalculable—likewise, to any well-meaning soul who tried to stop them. But it wasn't as if she had a choice.

  The door to the core slid open as she approached, but the sound of her passage was lost in the bass throb of supercooled data processors and storage units. It wasn't an immense chamber, as far as she could tell, but it was a maze of free-standing equipment that inhibited her view of the entire room.

  Crusher stepped back into the anteroom and quickly searched the two guards for weapons, but found none. Obviously, her quarry had taken them.

  This was too much. Crusher was not going to face an armed opponent with only a hypo. She very much doubted that there was another exit from the room, so if she could move something heavy in front of the door, the tech would be trapped until security could make it down here. But who knew what kind of damage might be done while she waited?

  Steeling her resolve, the doctor eased around a console when, suddenly, a new alarm went off. It wasn't the planetary disaster klaxon she had left behind upstairs, but something else, something that originated inside the core.

  “Dammit,” Crusher hissed, her grip tightening around the hypo. She tried to keep low and use the consoles for cover, glad that her quarry would not be able to hear her footfalls over the din of the alarm.

  She turned a corner and almost walked into the intruder's back. He was leaning over an active interface console, lit up in what looked to her like a transporter configuration, working so intently that he didn't appear to even notice her. Ducking back, she collected herself, checked the setting on her hypo and willed herself to be calm. You've done this a thousand times, Bev. Put it on his neck and press the button. She took a deep breath, straightened, stepped quickly around the console and gently laid the hypo below his ear. There was a satisfying hiss as the hypo emptied.