“Thank you, Data.”
The howling wind didn’t stop. Crusher’s eyes flew open. Data’s mouth was still open, his expression slack.
The howling grew louder.
“What’s wrong?” Malisson dropped down beside Data. “Commander? Can you hear us?”
No response.
Crusher stepped over to the bed. “Data,” she said. “Data, I don’t want to shut you—”
The sound rose up around them, louder and sharper. Her fingers tightened around Data’s arm.
“I hear waves,” Crusher whispered. “Do you?”
Malisson listened. “I do,” she whispered.
“The comm station showed Bluster Beach.” Crusher’s pulse quickened. It wasn’t an answer. But it was a connection. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t random.
“Data.” Crusher tilted his face toward her. “We’re going to look inside your brain. See what might be causing this.”
He didn’t react; he didn’t seem to hear her. It was like Data wasn’t there, that he was just playing back a recording. The endless howling moan of wind on an alien beach.
“Okay,” Crusher said. “I need my tricorder.”
Malisson jumped to her feet. “It’s back in the lab. I’ll go grab it.”
Crusher sat back on her heels, watching Data, waiting—hoping—for a change in behavior. But he just kept up that strange, haunting wail.
Abruptly, Data’s mouth shut. The room fell into silence.
“Data?” she said hesitantly.
He turned his head toward her, the movement stiff. Crusher tensed. It wasn’t him.
Suddenly the power flared back on, flooding the room with light. The computer’s voice spilled out: “Kota is an uninhabited Class-M planet—”
Somewhere else in the station, someone shouted.
“Data,” Crusher said. “Data, can you hear me?”
“Kota is an uninhabited Class-M planet,” he said. Crusher took his hand and squeezed, but he didn’t react.
He wasn’t there.
Where was Malisson? Distracted by the generator coming back on? Had she been the one to shout?
“—located in the Nilko system,” he said. “Circumference is 160,000 kilometers.”
“I’ll be right back,” Crusher said, jumping to her feet. “I promise.”
“—Oxygen, 21 percent. Nitrogen—”
Crusher rushed out of the room and slammed hard into Rikkilä.
“Doctor Crusher!” Rikkilä cried. “Lieutenant Solanko is injured.” She held up her hands, streaked red with blood. “I tried to use the combadge, but it didn’t work—nothing’s working—”
The doctor could still hear Data and the computer reciting the database’s entry on Kota. “Where is Solanko?” Crusher asked.
“The common room.” Rikkilä took off down the hall at a jog and Crusher followed. “When the power came back on, a phaser fired.”
“What?” Crusher careened through the common room door and skittered to a stop. The room was in chaos. The computer was reciting the Kota database in here, too, and Solanko leaned against the wall, clutching his arm to his chest. Sand was piled up beside the replicator.
Sand—
“Your medical tricorder’s not working,” Rikkilä said briskly as she handed it to Crusher. Rikkilä had wrapped what looked like a scrap of uniform around the wound. “Nor the replicator.”
Phaser fire blasted through the door, scorching the far wall.
“Lieutenant Talma!” Riker shouted. “I told you to get that thing away from the station, not set it to kill!”
“I did.” Talma was already yanking open the door. “And it must have changed the setting on its own somehow.”
Another phaser blast zipped through, this one leaving no scorch marks. Talma ducked out through the door.
Concentrating on Solanko, Crusher knelt down beside him and examined the dressing. Rikkilä had done a good job.
“Cecil,” she said, “what happened?”
“The damn thing just fired.” Solanko groaned. “I’ve been hit with phaser fire before, but never when I didn’t expect it.”
“I’m going to check the wound,” Crusher said, unwrapping the dressing. Solanko grunted.
Talma flew back into the room and slammed the door shut. “I threw it out the door, but it’s burning the grass out there. I tried taking out the power cell, but it was jammed.”
“Kota is an uninhabited Class-M planet in the Nilko system—”
“Good enough. Doctor?” Riker asked.
Crusher peeled away the fabric from Solanko’s arm. The wound underneath was clean, the skin charred shut. The phaser had been on a low heat setting.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “It barely grazed you.”
“Shouldn’t have fired at all,” Solanko replied. “It was locked away in the supply closet. Suddenly, zap.”
Rikkilä nodded in agreement.
“It’s clean but painful,” Crusher said.
Solanko leaned back. “Hurts like hell.”
“I should have something for that.” Crusher looked up at Josefina. “My medkit is in the lab.”
Rikkilä was already moving. “On it.”
“You’ll be fine,” Crusher said. Right now she wondered if it was a comforting lie she was telling herself.
The computer was still chattering out the database’s information about Kota. Riker and Talma were no longer in the room. She hadn’t been paying attention while she treated Solanko. Where were they?
Rikkilä jogged into the room, clutching the medkit. “Got it,” she said, heaving it up triumphantly.
“Was Malisson in the lab?”
Rikkilä shook her head and knelt down beside Solanko. She checked the dosage and administered the painkiller.
“I’m going to check on Data.” Crusher slipped into the hallway. It was slightly quieter; there were no comm speakers here. But she could hear the computer’s voice coming from all of the other rooms.
“Doctor Crusher?” Malisson’s head popped out of the doorway leading into the sleeping quarters. “Thank goodness you’re here. I just— I don’t know what to do.”
I wish I did, Crusher thought.
“Have you seen Commander Riker—” Crusher stopped. The computer was still reciting from the database. Data was not. He lay on his back, and the top of his head opened up to reveal its inner workings.
A loud, shuddering whump, and all the power failed again.
For a moment, Crusher reveled in the silence. Distantly, she heard shouting coming from outside.
Then the room erupted with loud, piercing shrieks, high pitched and squealing.
“Now what!” asked Malisson.
Crusher clamped her hands over her ears and whipped around, trying to find the source. All the power was still out. Data was unmoving, lights rippling across his circuitry.
Her combadge.
All of them.
“The combadges!” she yelled, and yanked hers off. The shrieking rose in pitch—
Then silence.
Crusher flung it on an empty bed in frustration. “It’s like Data said—you were infected on the beach, and now the technology is infected. How? And with what?”
The same question, over and over.
“I don’t know,” Malisson said. “And why did it start when the Enterprise away team arrived?”
Data jerked up to sitting, so abruptly that Crusher jolted in surprise. For a moment he didn’t move, only sat in that perfect right angle. He turned his head.
“Doctor,” he said, “you must go outside immediately.”
And then he slumped over.
“Data!” He was motionless, his head lolling against his chest.
“Did he shut himself off?” Malisson said uncertainly. “Can he do that—”
“No.” She was struck with that familiar, sick feeling that came when she was on the verge of losing a patient. She tamped it down through her own determination.
Not Da
ta.
“Why did he tell you to go outside?” Malisson said.
Crusher eased Data onto his back. He was dead weight. She would give anything for her sickbay.
She pressed the pattern on his skull to pull the top of his head back into place.
“Doctor?” Malisson said softly.
“I don’t know.” Crusher looked down at him. “I’m not sure opening Data up will give us the answers. All the other technology has been going haywire, and we never found anything wrong with it.”
More shouting was filtering through the walls from outside.
Malisson moved to the window. “Do you think they are trying to get in contact with us?” She tried her combadge. Nothing.
“Possibly,” Crusher said. “Rikkilä tried her combadge, but that was when the power was still on.”
Malisson had to stand on her toes to peer out the window. “I don’t see— There’s Commander Riker. Everyone else is outside.” She pulled away from the window. “They’re all around something.”
The only thing outside was the phaser. Talma had thrown it out when it kept firing—
“We should go out there,” Crusher said.
“Will Data be okay?”
Crusher frowned. “He told us to go outside.” She took a deep breath. “And that was the first comprehensible thing he said since the attack started.”
Malisson nodded. “Okay.”
They made their way out through the common room. “Look at the replicator,” Crusher said.
“Sand,” Malisson said. “That damn beach keeps coming back up.”
“Almost like—” Crusher shook her head. “Almost like something doesn’t want us to forget about it.”
Malisson’s frown deepened.
The door was open, letting in a cool, damp breeze. The wind was singing—unlike the wail she’d heard from Data or the comm station, but close enough. They walked around the side of the station.
Malisson put her hand on the outside wall of the station.
“It’s not—” Crusher started.
“No,” Malisson answered before she could finish the question. “Not yet.”
Not yet.
“How soon?”
“I don’t know.” Malisson picked her way back through the grass. “Under normal circumstances, the structure shutdown wouldn’t begin until both the commanding officer and their second give the command to initialize.” They walked together, grass brushing against their uniforms. The voices of the team were drifting on the wind to them. “But there’s a fail-safe in place. If the power has been inactive for twelve hours, shutdown will commence. The system assumes emergency evacuation.”
Twelve hours. They would have to be here for at least another two days.
“Doctor, you’ve been on lots of away teams,” Malisson said quickly. “Have any of them been as bizarre as this one?”
“No, it’s one for the books.”
Riker spotted them and shouted, “There you are. We’ve been trying to get in contact.”
“Combadge. Another malfunction,” Crusher answered. The grass was burned in some places, sliced off cleanly in others. The malfunctioning phaser. Crusher looked up at Riker. “Is it safe to be here? That phaser—”
“We destroyed it,” Riker answered. “But not before it did this.”
Crusher’s pulse quickened. She strode quickly through the grass, swatting it away with her hands, and stepped up next to Riker.
The phaser had burned a pattern into a patch of grass. A series of circles linked together by lines radiating out in jagged, uneven paths.
“How,” Crusher whispered, “is this even possible?”
Riker pointed silently back toward the structure. Malisson gasped.
The biomass had expanded along the ground, seeping through the grass in a narrow, dark line, then lifting itself up like a snake. Crusher could see the form it had taken to hold the phaser.
“That can’t be,” Malisson said. “The biomass can’t expand like this. Not without explicit commands—”
“The phaser was covered in biomass,” Riker said matter-of-factly. “Somehow—we don’t know how—the station did this.”
Malisson shook her head. “I don’t— There’s some pulses in the biomass, but it shouldn’t be enough to form… I mean, not unless someone programmed it.”
Crusher studied the patterns in the grass, her mind racing. It all started with the team collapsing on Bluster Beach.
The beach, appearing on the screens. How? Data’s howling. The replicator, making sand.
Dreams. The affected crew members all talked about dreams. With water. A beach. The beach.
Could all the people, all the technology, even Data, be reacting to the sensory input it received? Impossible. Crusher dismissed the thought. However, Malisson had said the same thing about the biomass expanding.
Is something programming the station? Crusher thought. Is something spilling strange, watery thoughts into the team’s dreams? Into Data?
25
“Aviana Virox knows more than she’s letting on,” Troi said.
Worf looked over at her. They were in the ready room; Troi had joined him to share Virox’s reactions while they were down on Issaw II.
“She insisted that rider was Thuvetha,” Troi said. “Which could just be the result of her being such a skilled telepath, but—” She shook her head. “I get the sense there’s something more. She’s hiding it from me, of course. But she let part of it slip while we were on the planet.”
“In what way?” Worf asked.
Troi told him about Virox’s insistence on pursuing the Ferengi. “She was ready to run in there herself.”
“That does not exactly fit with the frightened Betazoid woman we found on Uesta, does it?” He frowned. “I’ll admit this information cements some of the doubts I had about her. The insistence on coming with us on the away mission. The detailed image of Thuvetha she was able to give you—”
“Exactly,” Troi said. “Something’s going on here.”
Worf nodded and hit his combadge. “Worf to Bridge. Please send Aviana Virox into the ready room.” He looked over at Troi. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
He walked around behind the desk and sat down. Troi slipped into the guest seat just as the door whisked open and Virox stepped into the ready room.
We shouldn’t be having meetings, she said. We should be storming into—
“Aviana,” Troi said, “could you please speak out loud, for the lieutenant’s sake?”
Aviana gazed evenly across the room at Worf. “Of course,” she said in her raspy voice. “Lieutenant Worf, we know the location of Thuvetha. We shouldn’t be here. We should be down there.”
“I’m not convinced it’s our best course of action,” Worf said.
Troi concentrated on Virox, trying to get a sense of her emotions. She was working to keep them blocked, but a few impressions slipped through. Virox was frustrated and impatient.
“And why not?” Virox demanded. Was that Troi’s imagination, or did her voice seem stronger, more clear? “If we’re dealing with a criminal element, I’m sure the Ferengi Alliance will be pleased that we can bring them this Bryt the Baron. I’m not requesting a declaration of war here.”
Worf studied her. “You are a much more—forceful woman than I originally thought, Madam Virox.”
Something flickered in Virox.
Virox smiled sweetly. “All Betazoid women are forceful.”
“Yes,” Troi said, “but not all Betazoid women are as traditional as you.”
Virox eyed her coolly. Whatever mask she had up was slipping, and Troi caught a whiff of desperation. A sense that all of this was personal.
“Aviana,” Troi said, “what aren’t you telling us?”
Virox looked between the Enterprise officers.
“Madam,” Worf said, “if you have been withholding information from us, I need to know immediately. We are trying to get these artifacts back as smoothly as
we can.”
Virox took a deep breath. Her eyes burned. “I haven’t always been a House leader,” she finally said.
“Yes, you mentioned that,” Troi said wryly.
“What did you do before you were a House leader?” Worf said. “It’s uncommon to find someone who can read Ferengi.”
Virox sat for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice rang out clear and steady, without any hint of the disuse that had plagued it before. “I used to be Betazed Intelligence.”
Troi gaped at Virox in shock. She’d heard stories about the branch of Betazoid military that operated in the shadows. It had always seemed vaguely outlandish.
“You were a spy?” Troi spat out.
Virox crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin slightly.
“Betazed Intelligence?” Worf’s frown deepened. “Why didn’t you tell us from the beginning?”
“I’ve been retired for ten years,” Virox said darkly. “It’s customary for those retired to return to an everyday existence.”
“With all due respect,” Worf said, “it is not normal for a Betazoid civilian to accompany an Enterprise away team.”
“I was desperate to have this matter handled,” Virox said.
“And so you lied,” Worf said.
“I most certainly did. The Enshrined Disk is my responsibility. My old skills could be useful. If I was allowed to use them instead of sitting in this ready room discussing my past.”
Troi studied her. She still couldn’t get over the sound of her voice. It was the rasp that had made her seem so frail. All an affectation.
It was all just so—un-Betazoid.
And suspicious. Why keep it a secret? And how did a Betazed Intelligence operative, even a retired one, get bested by a Romulan mercenary?
Troi could sense that Worf had similar thoughts. Suspicion and doubt rolled off him.
“Madam, if we are to successfully retrieve the three treasures,” Worf said, “I need to know any information that could potentially be useful. Surely, as a former intelligence operative, you understand that.”
Virox hesitated.
“Commander Troi told me that the image you sent her of Thuvetha was startlingly accurate,” he continued. “Which is, as I understand, rather unusual for a situation in which you would have only briefly seen her face.”
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