Part 20 (1/2)

”That's true, sir, but I really think there's more risk in that than profit, especially for Data.”

”Then don't dally out there. Get a triangulation on him and we'll beam you both in. I can't afford to lose both of you. We'll have a talk later about those two vessels you appropriated. You can wager on that.”

”Yes, sir, I underst-Data! Stop it!”

”Riker, what is it! Report!”

”He's arming the shuttlecraft's weapons, Captain, he's going to fire blind to attract that thing. Data, kill those weapons. That's an order.”

”Sorry, Mr. Riker,” Data said calmly, ”but I must draw its attack before you come near enough to be caught also. I do not believe the dinghy puts out sufficient energy to draw its attention while you're still at this-”

”Riker!” Picard's voice shot through the system.

”We're picking up ma.s.sive energy readings. It's got to be right on top of him out there! Do you see it?”

”Switching,” Riker snapped. Perspiration rolled down his forehead, and became a sheet of moisture when the viewscreen cleared.

In s.p.a.ce in front of him, the shuttlecraft's blocky form was dwarfed by the all-too-familiar and too hideous spectral image that had become his nightmare. It closed on Data's shuttlecraft with lightning speed and swallowed it whole while Riker watched helplessly, and it took up half his visible s.p.a.ce in the process. As it devoured Data's s.h.i.+p, it reached a long electrical arm through s.p.a.ce toward Riker.

A chill streaking down his arms, he smashed his fist on the comlink. ”Enterprise! Beam us up now! Now!”

The nauseating sensation of beaming began almost instantly. The captain must have been ready for this, must have antic.i.p.ated it. Riker gave himself to it, as though that would help, and stared into the viewscreen as he felt himself dematerializing. But he was still able to see the viewer clearly enough when the shuttlecraft was torn to bits, its tiny impulse engine blasting outward in a dynamic explosion.

Agonizing seconds later the interior of the research dinghy was gone and the transporter room's dark gray textured walls were forming around him. Above him the soft lighting, below him the glowing platform-beside him ... another form materializing.

He reached out as soon as he could, but instinctively recoiled from the crackling electrical sheath that enveloped Data once again. This time it seemed to have a sense of purpose-or was he imagining it?

”Data!” he shouted without thinking.

The electricity snapped a few more times, then faded. Riker stepped toward Data instantly. Just in time to catch him.

The platform thumped as Captain Picard and Geordi LaForge appeared out of nowhere and knelt beside Riker and the collapsed form of Data. His android eyes stared up at nothing. His heart still beat dutifully. His pulse still made a steady drum in his wrists. Biomechanics still worked the sh.e.l.l he had called his body. But the essence of life that had possessed a courage no machine could duplicate-Was gone.

Chapter Twelve.

DATA LAY IN a wedge of bright, tight surgical beams in the dimmed main sickbay lab. Physicians, neurologists, microengineering specialists, robotics experts hovered over him, but no one could shake the poisoned apple from his throat. He lay there on the table, his face less placid than a corpse's might have been, his expression caught in a moment of surprise, perhaps even revelation.

To Picard, the elemental darkness rested in the room was like a Poe stanza. He paced around the small group and looked again into Data's opalescent eyes, and longed again to understand what the android had seen at that last moment. The chamber experience was still with him, making him feel somehow separate from these people who hadn't been through it. He thought he knew now what resurrection could be like, what it would be like to be caught by that thing-only to reawaken with new knowledge and be able to use that knowledge. He had reawakened to a monumental difference in his own perceptions. Colors seemed brighter, smells nicer, shapes crisper. There was a sudden wonder to being so consummately alive.

Over on that table, Data's face had that kind of wonder on it, but he hadn't come back.

When Beverly Crusher finally backed away from the table, her face limned with frustration, even anguish, and her willowy body had lost some of its grace. She moved slowly toward the corner where Riker and Geordi were impatiently standing, not too near each other, and Picard turned to meet her there. He lowered his voice.

”No hope?”

The doctor sighed. ”Not from us. As far as we can deduce, Data's android brain is still operating all the complexities of his body. But there's no consciousness anymore. We just don't know what else to do.”

Geordi turned toward them from where he had been facing the wall. ”How'd it get him?” he demanded, his throat tight. For the first time he allowed himself the realization that Data might truly be lost to them, even if his heart still beat. ”How could it take part of him and leave ... that?”

Riker folded his arms and pressed one shoulder into the bulkhead. As he gazed at the floor with a pall of regret over him, new lines cut themselves into his face. ”Probably the thing didn't distinguish between Data's body and the shuttlecraft. If he'd been fully organic, his body might've gone up in smoke or whatever that thing does to organic. I guess it recognized something in him,” he added, rather mournfully, ”that it ... wanted.”

Picard looked at his first officer. He'd never seen Riker so depressed, never heard this stony tone. Vexed that he didn't completely know what was going on between his command officers, he peered now at the engineers and doctors who became more helpless by the moment, who were now beginning to stand back one by one and shake their heads over Data's quiet form.

”For better or worse,” the captain said thoughtfully, ”Data may have found his answer.”

Anger began to burn low in his mind, a layer of heat beneath all other thoughts, making them sizzle and jump. There would be no diminishment of the self on this s.h.i.+p. Rage built within him as he imagined Data forever trapped inside that phenomenon, forever to endure what Picard himself had barely touched in fourteen hours of h.e.l.l.

His shoulders stiff with his anger growing, he turned toward the exit and flatly said, ”I'll be in engineering.”

He went, but he went alone. When he was down in engineering, he swept aside each engineer's offer to a.s.sist him or escort him, shrugged off their curious looks when he went into special-access chambers and came out again with computer input chips that no one had given him or pulled up for him. Word spread quickly that the captain was here, doing something for himself and not asking anyone to do it for him, and before long curious eyes peeked at him from a dozen hiding places in the engineering complex. Even in the dimness, he stood out simply because he wasn't usually here. Eventually the curious junior engineers who saw him lurking about started trying to track his doings secretly on their access panels. They discovered that Captain Picard knew both what he was doing and perfectly well how to keep them from finding out. They discovered they could trace his activities about halfway at each turn before they lost the pattern of his computer use. So they watched, unable to say anything about it because he was the captain, and if this was anybody's equipment, it was his. They knew there was something going on topside; why wasn't he up there? They muttered among themselves about reporting to the first officer, but n.o.body volunteered to do the talking.

So the engimatic captain of the Enterprise floated around engineering for over an hour, not speaking to anyone, offering only the most ghostly of smiles to those who came too close, lighting here and there like a moth to tamper with the equipment and be suddenly on the move again, and not a living soul dared approach him with a direct question. He was too purposeful in each movement, each pause, each touch.

Then he was gone. Without a word, without an order. He cradled a few computer tie-in remotes in his elbow, and walked out.

Once clear of engineering and on his way through the darkened s.h.i.+p by way of ladders and walkways, Picard paused on one of the upper decks and touched the nearest intercom. ”Picard to sickbay. Mr. Riker, you still there?”

Almost immediately Riker's strong voice answered, ”Yes, Captain, still here. No change.”

Picard looked down at the small bundle of remotes he carried. They seemed innocent as they lay in the crook of his arm, small bundles of circuitry inside casings. But they were deadly.

”In ten minutes, I want you and LaForge to be on the bridge. This has gone far enough.”

The words chimed through the s.h.i.+p, right through the cloth of silence and darkness they'd swathed around themselves, saying quite plainly that the phenomenon was going to have to deal with the captain now.

Before entering the bridge, Picard quietly and privately plugged his remotes into their proper places in the control layout deep within the bridge maintenance loop, a thin corridor of computer access boards behind the actual walls of the bridge itself. Here, new systems were built into the bridge systems, the great hands of the stars.h.i.+p, working all the instructions put to it from the gigantic computer core running through the primary hull.

Picard made use of those access boards now, tying them all in to one single b.u.t.ton on the arm of his command chair. He had thought about using a code that he could key in from anywhere on the s.h.i.+p, but at last dismissed the idea and created an actual b.u.t.ton to be pushed. And in that one place-the command chair. If he was going to put his finger down on destiny, he would be in his rightful place, at the head of this majestic s.h.i.+p, when he did it.

He stalked back onto the bridge, noticeably somber, and into the audience of expectant faces. Riker. LaForge. Troi. Wesley Crusher. Worf. And others, especially those manning the positions he might have expected to see Data manning. The Ops controls or Science 2. He missed the gold-leaf face and the gently innocuous expression. He missed it a great deal. His deep rage grew.

”I'm glad you're all here,” he said ceremoniously, approaching his command chair. This time, however, he didn't reach out and casually touch it as he might have otherwise. This time the chair itself was a source of raw power, and he didn't want to give anything away. ”I want to know what you've concluded, what our options are, how we can best deal with this invasion. If we have to drain this stars.h.i.+p of every last volt and every last moving molecule, we'll do it. That thing out there has already cost the life of one of us; it will take no more of us. It isn't going any farther into the galaxy. We're stopping it here and now.”

Deanna Troi let her eyes drift shut, so deep was her relief and grat.i.tude. Picard saw her reaction and understood it so clearly that he might as well have been the Betazoid. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, they were glazed with tears and she was almost smiling-but then the smile dropped away and her eyes filled with perplexity. She saw into his heart now, he could tell, saw the knowledge and the determination that were foremost in his mind, unhidden from her probing thoughts, saw the remotes now engaged into certain circuits that would carry a certain message to a dozen locations in the lower structures of the s.h.i.+p and do the kind of thing captains thought of only in moments of supreme desperation. She stared at him, then looked down, at the arm of the command chair, at the small patch of controls that tied the captain's own touch into his s.h.i.+p. And that single blue pressure point, like a poker chip. She knew. Picard watched her, without offering either rea.s.surance or a request for her silence. She would be silent, he knew. They understood one another now.

Riker stepped forward-not exactly a surprise.

”We're going to chase it down?” he asked.

”We're going to kill it, Mr. Riker.”

The first officer paused, his lips compressing, then said, ”That's not like you, sir.”

Picard knew what was behind Riker's eyes and that dubious tilt to his head, and he looked right at him now. ”Isn't it? Is it more like me to allow that marauder to wander the galaxy freely, sucking up more lives?”

That moment saw a charge of excitement. Even Riker realized suddenly how long he'd been waiting for something to bring that level of indignation to Picard's face. The captain's brown eyes were narrowed, his Roman-relief profile aimed squarely at the viewscreen, his jaw like a rock set upon another rock.