DESCENT

by Diane Carey

  Barnaby seemed to take that as a challenge. “Then I’ll have to be sure my calculations are accurate.”

  Beverly studied their faces briefly. Say it, do it. There must be a class at the Academy that teaches this. I wish I’d signed up.

  “Let’s go for it,” she said. “Helm, hard about.”

  “We have reports that a Borg vessel was seen adrift in the Finala system. I want it found and the Borg aboard it brought to me.”

  “It will be done.”

  “It breaks my heart to think of them out there . . . drifting aimlessly, not knowing what to do.”

  “They will join us. You will give them purpose.” Voices against the stone.

  The great hall echoed with them. The voices of Lore and Crosis.

  Data listened to the voices. He had never thought about voices before.

  Until now the sounds of living creatures had been only a means of communication. Clarity was the responsibility of the creature making the noise.

  But Lore’s voice affected him. This was his own voice speaking those words. He recognized it.

  He paused before stepping into the great hall and mouthed the words. I want it found and the Borg aboard it brought to me. I want. I demand. Order. Order . . . I have my orders, sir. . . .

  Orders.

  He stepped around the stone corner and tried to walk past his uncertainty. Perhaps movement would override the sudden inappropriateness he felt in his presence here.

  Yes. Move beyond it. Focus on Lore.

  “Brother!” Lore turned to him and spread his arms.

  Data recognized the motion as a gesture of welcome, but he felt no correspondent satisfaction. He simply handed Lore the VISOR he had taken from Geordi.

  Geordi . . .

  “Here is the VISOR. May I ask why you wanted it?”

  Lore slipped the silver mechanism over his own eyes, then stepped back as though to model the device. “I thought it might look good on me.” He smiled.

  Data cocked his head.

  “What do you think?” Lore asked.

  Unsure of what Lore would consider an appropriate response, Data was unable to give one.

  After a moment Lore’s smile vanished. “Maybe we’d better work on your sense of humor, brother.” He turned the device in his hands, examining its terminals. “Actually, I was thinking that La Forge’s implants would make him an ideal test subject for my experiment.”

  Tentativeness had always been beyond his reach, but as Lore’s statement computed, Data paused. “All the Borg you have experimented on so far have suffered extensive brain damage.”

  This was a fact. Facts were familiar tools for him, and yet something attached to this fact had caused Data to state what Lore already knew. Was he issuing a warning? Offering a suggestion?

  Geordi . . .

  Lore shrugged. “Using the humans to perfect the procedure would allow us to prevent any further Borg deaths.”

  Data searched for the emotions he knew he had acquired and found them saturated with his old habits. He tried to be enthusiastic about Lore’s words, this talk of using the humans and experimentation and Borg deaths, and he found he could only be cold to those ideas, cold to everything. Was he losing the wanton emotional surge he had felt before?

  Having emotion—this was hard to do. It meant nothing was prescribed by logic or regulation. It meant he had to choose.

  Prevent further Borg deaths . . . he would choose that.

  Lore evidently saw something in Data’s face, because he smiled again.

  Data responded to the smile. “I understand.”

  Once the words were spoken, he wondered if Lore had spoken them. Only as he watched Lore’s face did he realize he had said what Lore expected.

  Data opened his mouth to ask a question, but angry sounds interrupted them. They both turned.

  Crosis was dragging another Borg into the hall, moving between the other Borg, who stood aside to let them through and then gathered to see what was happening.

  “What is it?” Lore demanded.

  “This Borg disconnected himself from the group,” Crosis said, indignation poisoning his tone. “He would not let me hear his thoughts.”

  Lore shook his head in what might have been sorrow. He paced to the offending Borg. “I’ve asked you all to remain linked to Crosis at all times. You know that, don’t you, Goval?”

  Goval shuddered. “Yes.”

  Crosis blurted, “This is the third time he has disabled the link since he was brought here. He should die as an example to the others.”

  “No,” Goval choked, “please—”

  Data almost reacted to an old bit of programming—something that told him to intervene—but Lore held up a staying hand.

  “I appreciate your vigilance, Crosis,” the brother said. “With you monitoring the thoughts of others, I can be sure they are not falling into confusion.”

  Lore peered into Crosis’s eyes as he spoke.

  As he watched, Data saw that Lore was attempting to make Crosis feel valuable. A compliment where due. A sensible idea for a leader.

  “But Goval has not been with us long,” Lore went on. “Don’t you remember what it was like when I first found you? How bewildered you were?”

  Crosis paused, then offered a single nod.

  Lore turned to Goval. “I understand how difficult it is for you. How uncertain you feel. All these sensations are new . . . and they can be frightening. Isn’t that right?”

  Data leaned forward slightly. He parted his lips. Yes.

  “Yes,” Goval said. “I . . . have doubts.”

  “Of course you do,” Lore said encouragingly. “That’s only natural. And no one is going to blame you for that. But the only way to lose those doubts, to keep you from fear and confusion, is to stay linked with the others, so their strength and confidence can help you.”

  A link in the mind. Data searched for a link of that kind in his own mind, but he was not a Borg. Not Borg, and not human, but more like the humans. He was alone in his mind, joined to others only in his purpose, his duty, and his devotion.

  Lore had talked about devotion. Talked about being brothers. Data watched Lore’s face and saw what he should look like himself, now that he had emotion.

  Yet the face was distant to him.

  “I need you, Goval,” the brother continued. He leaned into Goval’s gaze. “I need you to help me build a future for the Borg. I can’t do it without you. Will you help me?”

  Goval seemed overwhelmed by all the attention—the eyes of Lore, the eyes of his fellow Borg, all intense upon him. His voice quavered. “Yes . . . I will.”

  “Then I need you to be strong,” Lore said, making his voice strong as if by example. “I need you to be certain in your thinking. Will you stay linked to your brothers?”

  “Yes. I understand now.”

  Lore backed away, smiling, proud.

  The doubt in Goval’s face was fading as he became again part of the linked whole. Now his face was only plastic.

  Data watched Goval and wondered what it would be like to have someone else helping him to think. He wished he could feel that just for a moment. The hunger, the curiosity for new emotions, was still somehow unfulfilled.

  Lore was watching him. Around them the Borg were moving away, and the two of them were alone again.

  “You see, brother?” Lore said quietly. “I cherish my followers. I need every one of them. I can’t afford to lose them. That’s why I want to experiment on the humans.” His eyes changed now. “Or do you still care about them?”

  Data held himself still, forcing himself not to react. Not reacting had always been easy before, but today he had to work at it.

  Lore pressed closer. “I need to know if I can trust you, brother.”

  “Of course you can,” Data said.

  He meant what he said, but Lore seemed not to believe it. Another sensation—to be doubted, untrusted. True, his statement was subjective in theory, but . . . he had always be
en trustworthy before. The humans had always trusted him.

  “Good,” Lore said. There was a hint of testing in his voice. “Because I want you to do the surgery on La Forge.” And he paused. “You will do that for me, won’t you, brother?”

  A test. Data recognized the expression in the mirror image of his own face. He was being asked to come up to a standard. No, that was the wrong word. A standard was something . . . else.

  “Of course,” Data said. “However, I think it would be wise to do further computer modeling before attempting surgery.”

  “You’ll learn far more working with a live subject,” Lore said.

  “We have only three potential test subjects,” Data told him. “I do not wish to waste them.”

  Lore shook his head. “You’re making excuses.”

  “No, brother,” Data insisted, feeling the bond between them slip as if he were clinging by his bare hands to a cliffside. “I am merely following the most reasonable course of action.”

  “Forget reason!” Lore shouted. He turned away briefly and touched something on his own hand.

  Data felt his own face contort as surges of energy bolted through his head, his torso. His thoughts suddenly shot into order.

  Lore faced him again. “Don’t you want to dive right in and get your hands wet? Or are you afraid of crippling your old friend?”

  I have no old friend, Data thought. There is only my brother.

  “No,” Data replied. “It may be necessary.”

  Lore moved closer. “It might even be . . . fun.”

  Wonderment at this sensation gushed through Data’s brain. He felt his chest draw tight at the unspeakable intrigue of what he was feeling suddenly. The hunger returned, and he inhaled the sensation.

  And they were both smiling now.

  “Yes,” he murmured, “it might at that. . . . ”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Cell

  “I DON’T THINK Data is malfunctioning. I think he’s being controlled.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Jean-Luc Picard pressed his young engineer for answers, even though La Forge was obviously disillusioned and helpless without his VISOR. Technology could at times do a disservice simply by making the users weak when they didn’t have it around.

  La Forge looked unsure of himself. His hands clasped the edge of the bench he was sitting on, clenching so hard that his brown knuckles had gone sallow. He was trying not to let them know how lost he felt without that artificial aid.

  Picard had known other blind people who had never been fitted with a VISOR, a relatively new technology, or who couldn’t use the device for one reason or another. None of those people had the lost look on their faces that La Forge had now.

  I’ll keep him talking, the captain thought, and perhaps we’ll hammer out a few answers together.

  La Forge frowned. “Whenever we asked Data if any of this was his own idea—”

  “He hesitated,” Troi said quickly.

  “Until Lore told him to answer,” Picard added.

  La Forge turned his face toward the captain’s voice. “Lore did more than that. He initiated some kind of pulse. A carrier wave. I saw it with my VISOR.”

  “Data’s attitude changed abruptly,” Troi agreed. “It was as if he were suddenly flooded with anger and hate.”

  La Forge nodded in her direction. “Lore must have told Data to take my VISOR when he realized I could see the carrier wave radiating from him.”

  “A carrier wave,” Picard murmured. “Is that how he’s creating emotions in Data?”

  The young engineer blinked a few times, as though the dry air in here might be making his unprotected eyes sore. “I think Lore is tapping into the chip Dr. Soong created. He’s found a way to transmit part of that emotional program to Data.

  “But,” Troi said, “the only emotions Data seems to feel are negative.”

  “I’m sure that’s intentional,” La Forge said, almost a moan. “But for it to work, Lore would have had to disable Data’s ethical program first.”

  Picard straightened up. “Can we get it working again?”

  La Forge shrugged, squeezed the bench with his tight hands again, then shrugged a couple more times. He seemed to be trying to think of what he would do if he had the starship’s resources at his fingers—and his VISOR back over his eyes.

  “If we could generate a phased kedion pulse,” he mused, “at just the right frequency, it would trigger Data’s subsystems and reboot the program.”

  Picard nodded. “Reinstating the ethical program wouldn’t counteract Lore’s ability to feed Data emotions, but at least he might listen to us.”

  Any chance, however remote, was worth grasping. It gave them a direction. The building blocks any leader needs in a bad situation.

  “I think it’s worth a try,” Troi said encouragingly.

  Picard looked at her, she looked back at him, they both looked at La Forge, who blinked at the empty air of their concrete cell, with its concrete floor and concrete ceiling, its static benches and the forcefield keeping them from the world outside. No communicators, no tricorders, not even a metal nail file to carry a current.

  “So,” La Forge began, “anybody got any ideas about how to generate a kedion pulse?”

  Shifting on his feet, his back aching now, Picard sighed. His earlier hopes crashed. They’d figured out a solution, but they had no way to execute it. The solution was simply too sophisticated.

  Is this what we’ve become? So reliant on technology that we can’t think down to a problem? There must be some way to down-tech ourselves to this situation—

  The forcefield suddenly snapped off. Picard spun around.

  Data came in, waved him and Troi away with his weapon. The android gestured them back and took La Forge by the arm.

  Troi started toward them, but Picard held her back.

  “Where are you taking him?” the captain demanded.

  Data’s voice was flat. “That is not your concern.”

  He pulled La Forge to his feet, holding him with an iron grip on the engineer’s arm that was obviously bringing up bruises.

  “Data!” Picard implored. “Wait. Let us talk to you—”

  But the forcefield snapped back on and growled between them.

  “Where are you taking him?” Picard asked.

  “That also need not concern you.”

  The captain pressed so close to the forcefield that the skin of his face glowed with the heat. “Take me instead, Data!”

  Rage poured through the sheer astonishment of having to fear his long-trusted second officer, having to be afraid of what Data might do to the closest friend he’d ever had. This shouldn’t be happening. The urge to stop it, to turn the events with brute force if necessary, was almost enough to make him shove his hand through the burning electrical net between him and the situation he simply could not control.

  At the last moment, before rounding the stark gray corner that would take them out of each other’s sight, Data turned. He held La Forge at his side like a stricken calf, and looked at his two former crewmates.

  “Your turn will come,” the android said.

  The climbing was enough to pull legs and arms out of their sockets.

  Riker was pretty sure about that, because he almost turned around a couple of times to retrieve one of his limbs that he was sure had fallen off.

  He’d gone up a dozen slopes like this during Starfleet training, but he’d been eighteen then and dreaming of command. Now he had command, but age eighteen was long gone, and this just plain hurt. Two bruised knees, two scraped elbows, and a pair of heaving lungs, and all he had to drive him onward was his determination to save the lives of his captain and crewmates.

  He spat out dust kicked back by Worf, who was climbing above him, and kept going. One more foothold, one more niche to dig his bleeding fingernails into, one more clump of weeds to grab, then one more after that.

  Suddenly something hit him in the shoulder and
drove his face into the rock. He lay almost flat against the slope, buried in stalks and grass so thick he couldn’t even see his own hands. He almost shouted to Worf that the Klingon had knocked him down with a bad step, but instinct kept him from speaking out. He lay still a moment, then another moment, just in case.

  The ground vibrated faintly. Footsteps!

  He lay completely still. Above him on the slope, Worf had disappeared into the brush.

  Riker strained his eyes to look upward without moving his head.

  Footsteps crunched across the crest of the slope. Two sets of footsteps . . . three . . . maybe more.

  Black boots. Armored. Borg boots.

  He saw only one of them, but it was enough.

  Beneath one of his feet, the dry rock crumbled. He felt his foothold giving way. He stayed still and hoped his grip on the slope side didn’t give. Not now. Just ten more seconds . . .

  The footsteps drummed methodically across the crest. Grass crunched. Pebbles rained down the slope into Riker’s face. He ducked, but not in time. The reflex to let go of his handhold and cover his eyes almost cost him his grip and almost gave away his presence to the Borg who were crossing above.

  Couldn’t risk that. Dust burned his eyes. He squeezed them shut and hoped they would water enough to stop the burning. The desire to rub them was infuriating.

  The backs of his legs throbbed with the effort of holding his body tight against the steep slope. Not only his own life but the lives of the captain and the others depended on his holding very still. He couldn’t give himself away, not now, not this close.

  Above him, Worf moved. Riker almost called out to him to hold still, stay down, but he caught the words back in time.

  The Klingon moved slowly at first, then stood up. A second passed, another, and another. Then Worf reached down and pulled Riker to the top of the slope.

  The Borg were gone.

  Riker dabbed at his reddened eyes and tried to brush himself off.

  Worf was pointing in the direction the Borg had gone. “Commander,” he said, “we have found it!”