Star Trek: The Next Generation - 112 - Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory

by David Mack

  “Captain Picard to the bridge.”

  Banishing his fatigue, he pushed back his chair and moved quickly toward the door, which swished open ahead of him. The muted chorus of computer feedback tones and the ambient hum of the ship’s power and ventilation systems washed over him as he stepped out onto the bridge. The dark-haired tactical officer—who was serving as the ship’s acting first officer while Worf, La Forge, and Choudhury were planetside—got up from the center seat and stepped forward to intercept him. They met in the center of the bridge. “Report,” he said.

  “Dygan’s picked up several signals on long-range sensors.” She nodded at the Cardassian operations officer, who relayed the information to the main viewscreen. “Based on the energy profile, I’d say we have a cloaked Breen starship following a patrol route through the system.”

  “How long until we’re inside their sensor range?”

  Šmrhová looked at Dygan, who checked his console, then swiveled around to face her and Picard. “Less than four minutes,” he said.

  Picard cursed their luck. The away team was scheduled to check in on the encrypted subspace frequency in half an hour. He folded his arms and fixed Šmrhová with a grim look. “Thoughts, Lieutenant?”

  “If we leave the system to avoid being detected by the Breen patrol ship, we’ll be out of range to receive the away team’s signal and send the response code.” She glanced at the viewscreen and frowned. “Unfortunately, the alternative—engaging the Breen ship in combat and risking an alert being sent to every Breen vessel in the sector—is no better.”

  A three-minute countdown appeared on the viewscreen, posted by Glinn Dygan, who again turned his chair toward the captain and Šmrhová. “Sirs, I have an idea.”

  “By all means, Glinn. Speak freely.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” He entered a command on the ops console, reverting the image on the viewscreen to the gas giant the Enterprise was orbiting. “This planet has a very powerful magnetic field and high concentrations of metallic hydrogen in its atmosphere. We can conceal ourselves inside the upper atmosphere and evade detection by the Breen patrol. It might be easier to resume the mission if we don’t have to chart a new course back into the system.”

  Šmrhová acted out her resistance to Dygan’s proposal with a raised palm. “Hang on, Glinn. If we do that, we’ll be all but blind down there. We’ll have no way of knowing when the patrol ship has cleared the system.” She looked at Picard. “We’ll also be cut off from the away team. There’s so much interference inside the atmosphere that we’ll never get a signal in or out.”

  Faur looked up from the helm console to join the discussion. “There’s another risk, Captain. Storm conditions are brutal down there, and shields won’t work. Hit the wrong patch, and we could take critical damage in a matter of minutes. Piloting a starship in that environment is extremely dangerous. Case in point: remember what happened to the da Vinci at Galvan VI.”

  Picard didn’t need to be reminded. The catastrophic damage suffered by the Sabre-class starship assigned to the Corps of Engineers had been the leading story on the news for a week after its salvage of the U.S.S. Orion had gone wrong, resulting in the loss of more than half of the da Vinci’s crew, including its second officer, chief engineer, and all but one member of its security force. The prospect of the Enterprise sharing such a tragic fate was one he dared not contemplate. He looked at the continuing countdown on the screen, then at his acting first officer. “Lieutenant, we have approximately two minutes before the Breen are on top of us. If you have an alternative to Glinn Dygan’s proposal, now would be the time to suggest it.”

  Her frustration was evident. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t have one, sir.”

  “Then the discussion’s closed.” Picard returned to his chair and sat down. Šmrhová followed him and settled into the XO’s seat on his right. He lifted his chin and raised his voice. “Dygan, route auxiliary power to the structural integrity field. Helm, take us into the atmosphere, one-tenth impulse.” As the officers at the forward stations executed his orders, he thumbed open an intraship PA channel from his chair’s armrest. “Attention, all decks. This is the captain. Evacuate the outer sections, seal emergency bulkheads in those areas, and brace for impact.” For a moment he was mesmerized by the swirling violence of the gas giant’s liquid-metal atmosphere as it filled the viewscreen. Then he composed himself and finished his announcement with the grim reminder, “This is not a drill.”

  • • •

  The tactical officer’s mechanically scrambled voice cut through the hush on the bridge of the Breen cruiser Mlotek, and its automatic translation intoned flatly inside first officer Pazur’s snout-shaped helmet. “Sir? We’ve picked up something interesting on long-range sensors.”

  The last thing Pazur wanted her day to be was interesting. Anything other than boring tended to lead to only two possible outcomes: a violent altercation ending in some degree of death and destruction, or a calamitous mishap that had the potential to land her and any number of her overworked crew members in a brig, a work camp, or an executioner’s lineup. She crossed the bridge and looked over the tactical officer’s shoulder at his screen. “What is it, Zadlo?”

  He called up a screen of readings that, to Pazur, resembled little more than a jumbled mess. “I registered a momentary sensor contact, in orbit of the fifth planet.” He pointed at a detail in the flurry of symbols and static. “It was just a flicker, and I thought it might have been interference from the planet’s magnetic field, so I ran it through some filters to clean it up. I know this isn’t much, but we might want to check it out.”

  “I’m not ordering a course change for that, Zadlo.” She waved her gloved hand at his screen. “That could be anything. A meteor hitting the atmosphere. A weather phenomenon.”

  Zadlo turned and looked up at her. “I disagree, sir. Look at the disturbance in the planet’s upper layers. Heavy ionization, coupled with unusual distortions in its regular convection pattern. I think a starship disrupted that planet’s upper atmosphere.”

  It was a presumptuous interpretation of the sensor data, in Pazur’s opinion, but not an impossible one. Still, she was reluctant to deviate from the commander’s orders without a very good reason. Other first officers had been replaced for similar errors of judgment. “All right, Zadlo, tell me this. If those anomalies were caused by a starship, where is that vessel now?”

  The tactical officer hunched over his console, striking a less confident pose. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve been unable to find it, even though I’m sure it was there.” He looked up and added, “I think it might have been a cloaked vessel.”

  Was he just hedging his bet? Pazur couldn’t let this go unchallenged. “Based on what?”

  “A surge of high-energy particles emanating from the planet’s upper atmosphere. It’s an effect consistent with a close pass by a cloaked Klingon starship, maybe one that’s trying to use the planet’s magnetic field as an additional defense against our sensors.”

  To her dismay, the longer Zadlo talked, the more sense he made. Still, it was her job to be the voice of reason and restraint. “Such a surge could be generated by any number of natural phenomena or artificial technologies.”

  The tactical officer sounded mildly annoyed. “True, but what’s more likely, sir? That a reverse-spin quark strangelet slipped through a random fluctuation in the M-lattice and initiated a self-annihilating chain reaction inside the planet’s atmosphere? Or that a cloaked Klingon warship has learned we’re conducting operations on the third planet and is spying on us?”

  Pazur salvaged her pride by declining to reply to Zadlo’s snide sarcasm, and she turned away to issue orders. “Helm, new course. Take us into polar orbit of the fifth planet, then coordinate with tactical on a full sensor sweep by descending latitude.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered the pilot, a new recruit named Tren.

  The gas giant slowly expanded on the main viewscreen until, a few minutes later, its banded atm
osphere filled the screen from edge to edge. Tren confirmed the Mlotek was in a polar orbit, its dorsal hull rolled toward the planet’s surface, and Zadlo began his tedious sensor sweep.

  Observing her crew’s efficient teamwork with quiet pride, Pazur almost didn’t mind that this would likely be a complete waste of time. If nothing else, the search exercise would be good practice for a real crisis.

  Heavy footfalls echoed in the corridor behind her, a thudding step whose cadence she knew well. She turned and saluted her commanding officer, Thot Raas, as he strode onto the bridge. Before she could get a word out, he snapped, “Why have we deviated from our route?”

  Pazur lowered her salute. “Zadlo detected readings consistent with the presence of a cloaked starship in orbit of the fifth planet. None of our vessels are supposed to be in this system except us, so I ordered a full sensor sweep, starting from polar orbit.”

  Raas had a reputation as a harsh taskmaster, one who rarely rewarded competence but was swift to punish errors of judgment. He stepped past Pazur and loomed over Zadlo. “Show me the sensor readings and explain your analysis.” Pazur listened from a discreet distance, fearing the worst, but Zadlo stayed calm as he presented to the commander all the data he’d shown Pazur, and the tactical officer wisely explicated his conclusions with concision and humility. After he’d finished, Raas nodded once. “Very well. Good work. Continue the search.” He turned to Pazur. “What other steps have you taken to find this cloaked vessel?”

  “So far, the sensor sweep is our only action.”

  “Not good enough. If that ship has moved away from the planet, we might be wasting our time here while it runs circles around us.” The commander turned his back on Pazur and marched over to the communications officer. “Vess, send a priority signal to the other ships in our battle group. I want them back here immediately, to set up a tachyon detection net. If there’s a cloaked enemy vessel in this system, I want it hunted down with prejudice.” Vess acknowledged the order with a tiny nod and set to work transmitting the summons. Then the commander turned back toward Pazur. “In exactly seventeen minutes, run a battle drill.”

  “Yes, sir.” The order turned a few heads subtly toward her and the commander, but the bridge crew continued working and pretended they hadn’t overheard Raas’s order.

  Raas left the bridge in a hurry, no doubt to check in with his own superiors from the privacy of his quarters. As soon as he vanished down the shadowy corridor, Pazur felt her tension abate; the bridge was hers again.

  Seven minutes later, as she watched the prismatic beauty of the gas giant’s atmosphere glide past on the viewscreen, she decided with mischievous amusement to call the battle drill early. Why should the commander get to have all the fun?

  27

  Where the mountain’s slope ended, the factory began. The sprawl of dark metal and crimson light had been hidden from view during the away team’s descent inside the narrow pass, so when the four Starfleet officers and their peculiar new acquaintance cleared the final jog in the trail, they found themselves staring up at a towering industrial behemoth. As much as La Forge wanted to imitate Worf’s stoic demeanor, he couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping. He had never seen anything quite like it, and he was at once impressed and terrified.

  “Hold up,” Worf said. He pulled back the cuff of his sleeve and checked his chrono. “Time to check in.” He tapped twice the transceiver hidden in his collar, priming it for a voice channel. “Secure frequency Three-Delta-Green: Worf to Enterprise.”

  He waited several seconds, then repeated the hail. After half a minute without a response, he looked at Choudhury. “Are we still outside the scattering field?”

  She checked her tricorder. “Affirmative. Fifty meters to disruption point.”

  Worf scowled, while La Forge masked his concern. That had been the first unsuccessful scheduled check-in. Two more in succession would mean the mission was scrubbed and the away team was abandoned. He shook off his worries as Worf motioned the group onward.

  Choudhury led them toward the black labyrinth of steel and smoke, then halted just short of clearing the chest-high rock formations at its edge. The security chief signaled everyone to halt and get down. La Forge took a knee beside Velex, who kept a watchful eye on the android Soong. Tense silence hung over them while Choudhury scanned the path ahead with her civilian tricorder, using a simple echolocation setting that wasn’t affected by the scattering field. Then she shut it off and waved everyone back into motion, and inside the complex.

  The factory’s internal passageways were massive—wide enough for thirty people to walk abreast with elbow room to spare, and over fifty meters tall. Overhead, the dense lattice of pipes, cabling, and power conduits admitted only the tiniest hints of the sky. Ragged clouds of gray vapor drifted between the machines, which shook the ground with a deep and ominous rumbling. Several minutes passed without conversation as the team forged ahead into the deserted maze, and the path behind them vanished beyond a shroud of ozone haze.

  Increasing the magnification of his cybernetic eyes, La Forge peered into the workings of the factory. He still had no idea what its purpose might be, but he began to recognize a number of troubling details in its technology: hints of biomechanically inspired systems, an idiosyncratic asymmetry, and a great deal of distributed redundancy. Restoring his field of vision to its default setting, he viewed the yawning sprawl of titanic machines with new apprehension.

  “This is Borg technology,” he said.

  Worf and Choudhury stopped and turned back to face him. Then the first officer looked up and around, as if expecting Borg drones to drop out of the machine, even though the Borg had ceased to exist nearly three years earlier, after being benignly assimilated by their ultra-advanced progenitors, the Caeliar. The Klingon shot a stern glare at La Forge. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. The entire layout of this place is modeled on the architecture inside a Borg cube. Same distributed systems, redundant backups, the works.”

  Soong ran his hand across the exterior of a broad, circular structure with a domed top. “Not all of it. Some of these big machines are based on Federation designs. You might not recognize them because they’re older, but Brock-Cepak was mass-producing generators like this one about sixty years ago. We had one for the colony on Omicron Theta.”

  Velex cast a confused look at their surroundings. “Who would use Federation tech and Borg tech in the same operation?”

  “The Borg, for one,” Choudhury said. “They never reinvented something they could assimilate from someone else. If a Brock-Cepak generator was the best solution for this”—she glanced up and around—“whatever this is, then they’d steal one or copy one. If the Borg built this, we’ll probably see bits of tech from lots of different cultures.”

  “I’m looking at some of it right now,” La Forge said. He pointed at an ungainly cluster of components that in any other context would look like the result of an accidental collision. “That mishmash up there has Romulan plasma regulators, Klingon-style heat sinks, and something that looks like a crude copy of Starfleet’s bioneural gel packs.”

  Worf checked his tricorder, then he pointed forward, toward a break in the long wall of machines, just over fifty meters ahead on their right. “I’ve found an access port to the factory’s core. We should continue.” He resumed walking, and the team fell in—Choudhury at his side, Soong in the middle of the group, and Velex and La Forge in the rear, keeping an eye on Soong.

  As they turned the corner and continued down the narrower side passage, Velex asked La Forge in an anxious whisper, “What do you think the Breen are doing with leftover Borg tech?”

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know. But I think we’re about to find out.”

  The passage ended at a locked hatch. Choudhury and Worf stepped back from it and beckoned La Forge, who joined them at the portal. Worf nodded at the hatch. “Can you open it?”

  La Forge eyed the door’s hardened security features. “Maybe
. It could take a while.”

  From behind him, Soong interjected, “Let me take a shot.” Without waiting for anyone to respond, much less give him permission, Soong shouldered past La Forge and set to work looking for weaknesses in the door. After a few seconds of mumbling “mm-hm” and “aha” under his breath, the eccentric old scientist in a youthful android body glanced back at La Forge and extended an open hand. “Tell me you have a pair of gravitic calipers.”

  “Never leave home without ’em.” La Forge opened a flap on the torso of his suit; the inside of the flap was lined with easily concealed tools of various kinds. He plucked out the miniaturized calipers and passed them to Soong.

  A soft but high-pitched oscillating whine issued from the device as Soong adjusted its setting and directed its effects upon the hatch’s lock mechanism. Then a loud clack reverberated inside the door and echoed through the oppressive lattice surrounding the away team. Soong handed the tool back to La Forge, then grabbed the hatch’s lever and opened it with a theatrical flourish that reminded La Forge unfavorably of Data’s late but unlamented brother Lore.

  Worf stepped through the hatchway first, followed by Choudhury. Soong tried to usher Velex through ahead of him, but the Troyian motioned Soong forward with a wave of his blaster. La Forge let Velex stay directly behind Soong, and ended up the last one through the portal.

  He stepped inside the ten-kilometer-long enclosed space and froze. The away team stood beside a massive, automated assembly line. Millions of robotic arms and hands worked with surgical precision, combining mass-produced components into fully integrated finished products.

  No matter where La Forge looked, he saw Data’s face.

  It was a factory for mass-producing Soong-type androids.

  Choudhury stared in wide-eyed horror at the legions of androids packed into pods that lined the walls like honeycomb. Worf’s features hardened with rage. Velex looked stunned. Soong seemed perversely intrigued. In a strange way, La Forge understood how each of them felt, even though he was at a loss to put a name to his own stew of emotions.