by Jeffrey Lang
“Not positive,” Riker admitted. “We found a weak spot under the stern, but it'll be touch and go. I was hoping you might be able to tag them with a phaser burst just before I went in.”
Picard looked at Troi, who nodded. Picard nodded. “One shot, Will.”
“Understood, Captain. Dare I ask how the transporters are holding up?”
Troi knew that Will would do what he had planned whether the transporters were functioning or not, but Reg might not, so she said, as confidently as she could manage, “Don't worry, Commander. We have a lock on you.”
“Great. I'd like someone waiting with a cup of coffee when I get back.”
Picard grinned. “I'll bring it myself, Number One. Good hunting.”
“See you all in a few minutes,” Riker replied, then signed off.
Picard hailed engineering. “Mr. La Forge, make sure you still have that burst of impulse power available. The cavalry is on the way.”
Riker hit the throttle again. “Hold on,” he said unnecessarily. Reg was holding onto everything he could. The little pod's excellent sensors had done their job and found a weak spot in the enemy's shields. Now all they had to do was stay alive long enough to exploit the discovery. He didn't dare approach too closely until the Enterprise was in position; there was no telling how sensitive the attacker's sensors were or how they might react to him despite the fact that the pod would appear about as big as a flea would to a Barzan mastodon.
But this flea has a nasty bite, he thought, feeding extra power to the pod's forward deflector. Opening the link to the Enterprise, he said simply, “Now.” A second later, a phaser barrage raked the underbelly shields of the iceship. There was the spot he was looking for: a gap where two shield generators had been poorly calibrated. He gunned the impulse thrusters and punched through the gap, the tiny ship rattling like it was made of tin. Feeling the hum of the engine through the seat of his chair, Riker laughed out loud, once again thinking of Worf and the Defiant.
Barclay, despite the pale green cast to his complexion, saw Riker's expression and, over the whine of the engines, shouted, “What's so funny, sir?”
“I was just thinking about what Worf would say in this situation.”
Barclay winced, knowing exactly what the commander was referring to. “Please, Commander. Don't say it . . .”
Riker found his thoughts shifting to Deanna. “Maybe you're right,” he decided. “Just be ready when I give the word.”
Riker focused on what the sensors were telling him. The enemy had decided that he was worthy of some attention. Small blisters had opened in the “ice” and disruptor fire lashed out. Riker doubted if the pod would survive more than one direct hit.
He sent the pod weaving back and forth along the enemy ship's underside, steering from side to side randomly, moving too quickly for its targeting sensors to lock on. Reg made an unhappy noise.
Riker ignored it all. He was focused on their proximity to the enemy's bow. “Ten seconds,” he shouted. “On my mark.”
Skimming close to the hull, Riker hit the thrusters and the pod shot out past the enemy's bow, twisting back and forth between the disruptor banks. “Mark,” he said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Reg punch the correct sequence of controls.
The pod's computer intoned, “Warp core ejection sequence commencing in five, four, three, two, one. Ejection.”
Somewhere behind them, Riker knew, a small, hourglass-shaped assembly fired out the emergency ejection port. Riker rolled hard to starboard as the tiny warp core cleared the pod and breached as it slammed against the bow of the iceship.
Light filled the cabin as the blast buffeted the pod. It tumbled out of control and started to shake apart. And in that moment, Riker spoke through teeth that were clenched against the shock wave, deciding Barclay could stand to hear what Worf would say at a time like this, after all.
“Today is a good day to die.”
On the bridge of the Enterprise, Picard shouted, “Get them out of there!” as Troi's hands moved deftly over the transporter override. But she already knew something was wrong. The interference from the subspace weapon was more disruptive than sensors had indicated. On the viewscreen, the bow of the iceship disintegrated in a single, catastrophic flash, a blast that tore across the length of the craft and ripped it apart into a cloud of dust.
She checked the transporter sensors, then rechecked them, then a third time, scanning, coaxing, silently begging them to lock onto something, anything. But there was only a void.
“I've lost him,” she whispered, then, realizing what she had said, raised her voice and said, “Captain, I've lost them. There was nothing for the transporter to lock onto. I . . . I'm sorry.” She braced herself then, waiting for the moment when it would hit her, for the echo of Will's death to hit her. Imzadi . . . I'm so sorry . . .
No one on the bridge moved and Troi felt her heartbeat slow, minds becoming sluggish, despair becoming a tangible thing. Then, she felt the captain shrug off his despair and bark, “Damage reports. Welles—stabilize our orbit. Ensign Rixa, contact Dr. Crusher and inform her we have casualties.” And on and on—orders, orders, orders: the captain setting the world to order. Lights came back up to full; medics tended the injured. Blowers cleared the air. Troi felt her hands move and heard herself speak. She was doing her job, doing what she had been trained to do, but every moment, every moment, she was waiting, waiting for her heart to be pierced. It's coming, she thought. It's coming any second now and then there will be a hole in my soul . . .
And then the captain was there standing next to her, laying his hand on her shoulder and Troi felt some of the crushing weight lift from her. “Commander,” he said softly. “Deanna, I need you now. I need you to help hold the crew together. If he's truly gone, more than ever, I need you. They need you. Can you do this?”
Slowly, she lifted her head and looked into her captain's eyes, read the concern there, and nodded, her jaw set.
Picard nodded back and started to turn when Troi received a hail from the planet and put it on the main viewscreen.
It was Dr. Crusher. She was standing in the DIT's infirmary next to a pair of beds. On one of them sat Commander Bruce Maddox, looking slightly confused and a little wan, but otherwise awake and aware.
On the other Reg Barclay and Will Riker sat, both drinking out of steaming mugs. A medic was dressing a nasty-looking cut on Barclay's forehead and Riker had a swelling abrasion under his eye, but, overall, they appeared to be in passably good health, especially considering that they should both be dead.
Beverly was looking out for us, Troi realized. She must have found a way to use the infirmary's emergency transporters to lock onto Will and Reg, and beamed them off the pod before it was destroyed.
The captain had apparently drawn the same conclusion. “I see you've been busy. Well done, Doctor.”
Crusher looked exhausted, but no less pleased. “And I understand you've been keeping my medical staff busy. I'll be beaming up in a moment, but as for these three . . .” She nodded her head toward the patients behind her. “I'm afraid I can't take all the credit.”
“No?” Picard asked.
“No,” Crusher replied. “I had help.” Crusher turned to the man who was treating Reg's head and said, “Could you come over here, please?”
The med-tech turned and smiled into the pickup, then waved at the bridge crew. Troi repressed the absurd desire to wave back, noticing that a section of skin at the man's temple had been removed, exposing an android's skull. “Hello, Captain, Counselor. I guess it would be an understatement to say we have a few things to talk about.”
It was Sam.
Chapter Seventeen
RHEA MCADAMS CAREFULLY TORE Data's uniform shirt away from the wound in his left shoulder. Opening a panel in the bulkhead, she pulled out a small tool kit and set it down on the floor beside her leg. Data watched all of these simple movements and wondered why it seemed to take an eternity for her to complete each one.
He could not move his head, could barely move his eyes, so Data did not see any of the contents of the kit until she picked up a small probe and inserted it into the wound in his shoulder. There was no pain of course, though it did produce a strange invasive sensation and he would have shuddered if he could. The cataloging of this perception, too, seemed to require an inordinate amount of time.
Rhea left the probe in the wound, then flipped open a tricorder unlike any Data had ever seen. He tried to itemize the differences between the device and Star-fleet's standard tricorder, but despite the fact that he had been staring at it for more than four seconds, he could not effectively focus his thoughts.
“You're hemorrhaging internally,” Rhea said calmly, “but I can't find where.” Or rather, this is what Data guessed Rhea said. He heard it as, “You're hemorrhag___int____ly, but I can't____where.” His language processing center labored for several seconds to try to fill in the blanks until he came up with the most likely interpretation, by which time Rhea had already said at least one more sentence, perhaps two. Data sensed dimly that he should be frightened, but felt only a slight annoyance; it was very inconsiderate of the universe—a universe he had always cataloged with precise, careful observations—to begin sputtering.
Rhea twisted the probe deeper into the wound and a thin stream of circulatory fluid sprayed out and hit her on the cheek. “Found it!” she cried, and Data felt very pleased for her. He must have grayed out then for several seconds because when consciousness returned, he was once again lying flat on his back. A viscous liquid trickled down the side of his face. It was warm, but he felt cold.
Rhea leaned over him and dabbed at his cheek with the sleeve of her shirt. “Lost you there for a minute.” She was smiling, but Data saw tears in the corners of her eyes. The sensation that the universe was sputtering had disappeared, but it had been replaced by a feeling that his senses were packed in gauze. “Your sensory processing system almost shut down,” Rhea explained. “I thought you were about to go into cascade failure, so I slowed down everything. You're perceiving things now at about . . . well, at about a human level.”
For some reason, Data found this idea very amusing and felt an impulse to laugh, but the systems he needed to carry out the reaction were unavailable. A noise came out of him—a splurt —and he spasmed involuntarily. The world went away again.
When it came back, Data discovered he had lost the ability to perceive color and his visual processors were searching for the proper level of granularity. Rhea's face kept digitizing, then shifting into a soft gray fuzz. It was very distracting.
“This isn't good,” she said. Data heard the familiar chirp and hum of a tricorder and distantly felt her attaching a probe to the side of his head. His vision stabilized and color returned, though everything was too red. Rhea tapped a command sequence into her tricorder and Data felt some of the chill lift. From very far away, the thought crept into Data's head, How does she know how to do these things? He tried to analyze the question more carefully, to work through possible answers, but it had already dissolved.
Rhea was shaking her head as she studied her tricorder. “There's really only one way for me to monitor you accurately,” she said, and set the tricorder aside. Extending her arm, Rhea rolled up her left sleeve, touched her right thumb to a spot just above her left wrist, then ran the thumb up her forearm. As Data watched, an invisible seam parted and revealed a network of artificial muscles and tendons with a fine tracery of optical cable woven through it. Rhea drew out a length of the cable, uncoiled it, then inserted it into an input/output junction in the exposed circuitry of Data's skull.
Data still could not speak, but he blinked at Rhea in rapid succession.
Rhea gave him a wry grin. “Looks like you found me, Sherlock.”
Chapter Eighteen
BRUCE MADDOX LOOKED THIN and haggard, but otherwise seemed alert and anxious to answer Picard's questions. Dr. Crusher had made the token objections when Picard had said he was beaming down to the infirmary, but she obviously hadn't really expected him to comply. She had given him a warning look just before she beamed up to help with casualties on the Enterprise. Over two hundred crewmen had been injured, most when the hull had been breached and they had been exposed to vacuum. The good news was that it appeared only a few cases would require long-term treatment, but it didn't change the fact that crew strength was down significantly.
Picard sighed. He had faced worse odds, but never against an enemy about whom he knew so little.
Time for that to change.
Maddox sipped from a bottle of water. “Mouth is dry,” he rasped, then added wryly, “I guess two weeks in a coma will do that to you.”
“I'm sorry, Commander,” Picard said, “but I don't have time for pleasantries. My ship has been badly damaged, I've lost crewmen, two of my senior officers are missing—”
“Data?” Maddox interrupted.
“Yes,” Picard said. “And my chief of security.” Obviously Maddox hadn't been just sitting and sipping water. He'd been thinking, too, putting together bits of information gleaned from brief conversations with the doctor, Barclay and Admiral Haftel. “And before I can formulate my next move, I need to know what you know.” He pulled a chair close to Maddox's bed and leaned forward. “What happened that night at the lab, the night you tried to activate the holotronic android?”
Maddox put down his water and took a deep breath, trying to focus. “The memories are a bit disjointed, sir, but I'll do my best to make sense of them,” he began. “Professor Vaslovik and I were running what were supposed to be the final tests of the new android's AI matrix. Then the storm hit. I remember a lightning strike, and main power going offline. We tried to secure the experiment until the situation improved, but then there was a second strike, and something exploded in the floor that took out the side of the building. I was hit by something, cut me pretty badly, too. I almost blacked out, and for a long time I couldn't even see. I don't know how long I was like that, but then my vision started to clear, and suddenly part of the ceiling started to collapse right above me. But someone stopped it.”
Picard frowned. “Someone? Someone stopped a ceiling collapse?”
“No, sir, what I mean is, the ceiling caved, and someone kept the debris from crushing me. It was the android. Our prototype.”
“You're certain of this?”
“Absolutely, sir. There was another flash of lightning in the gloom and I saw it, plain as day, holding up the wreckage long enough for me to scramble away.”
“Did it say anything to you?” Picard asked.
“No,” Maddox said. “But I did hear Emil's voice in my ear as he pressed something to my temple. He said, ‘Sorry about this, Bruce, but I can't have you or anyone else trying to find us.’ Then he stepped away from me and called out, ‘We have to hurry. They'll be here soon.’ ”
“Is that the last thing you remember?”
“No. Oddly enough, although my strength was ebbing from the blood loss, whatever Emil did to me didn't take effect all at once. I could see him move next to the android and activate some sort of device he had in his hand. A body suddenly materialized at his feet. Sir, it was identical to the prototype. Then the professor hit his switch again, and both he and the android beamed out. The ceiling fell, and there was dust everywhere, but I could see that the duplicate prototype was crushed.
“And that wasn't the end of it. I couldn't move, and staying awake was getting harder. My combadge was gone, and I was becoming increasingly aware that I was bleeding out. Then I remember seeing someone—two people—step through the wrecked side of the building. I thought it was a rescue team. It was hard to see them clearly, I could tell they were huge . . . much taller than any humanoids I'd seen around the DIT. Broader, too.” He held his arms far apart to indicate the width of their shoulders. “Like that.”
Like the ones Will described, Picard realized. “What happened next?”
“They immediately went for a closer look at the
crushed body, and one of them said, ‘Not the one.’ ”
“So they realized the android was a fake. Did they say anything else?”
“The second one answered, ‘Then we will wait. The Starfleet android will come now. He will find it.’ ”
“ ‘The Starfleet android...’ ” Picard repeated. “Data.”
Maddox nodded. “And then they disappeared. Maybe beamed out, but I'm not sure. Everything's fuzzy after that. I remembered thinking if Data came, he'd be walking into a trap. All I could think about was that I had to warn him.”
“That's why you wrote DATA on the floor,” Picard realized. “You were trying to warn him. In blood.”
“Yes, for all the good it did. And blood was, unfortunately, the only medium I had to work in at the time. Although part of me thinks if I hadn't written it, Admiral Haftel might not have summoned you here at all, in which case Data would still be safe.”
“Don't blame yourself, Commander,” Picard said. “I suspect the admiral would have done so anyway, given Data's familiarity with you and his own expertise in the field of artificial intelligence. Sooner or later, the Enterprise would have been summoned to Galor IV.”
“Well, now that I'm back, I'm as eager to get to the bottom of all this as you, sir. We have a common goal, after all. Someone is after your android and mine. There can't be many people onboard the Enterprise who know as much about them as I do. It stands to reason that I should come along . . .”
Internally, Picard bridled at the use of the possessive pronouns in referring to the missing androids, but he couldn't deny that Maddox's sentiment was essentially correct. The commander might be useful in the coming search.
Picard stepped to the corner of the room, turned his back to Maddox and tapped his combadge. “Picard to Crusher.”
There was a brief pause, then the exasperated voice of the doctor. “Crusher here. What is it, Captain?”
