Star Trek: The Next Generation - 114 - Cold Equations: The Body Electric

by David Mack

  “He’s a genius of unique gifts, Data—but immortal or not, he’s just a human being. And that means he can be broken.” It was obvious that even contemplating such a worst-case scenario was pushing Juliana toward a fit of hysteria. “What if the Fellowship’s already taken his secrets from him? What will you do then?” Her question gave him pause. In the scant seconds he took to ponder such a hypothetical scenario, she inferred an answer to confirm her grimmest assumptions. “You’re hoping they’ve broken him, haven’t you? To spare you the trouble?”

  He recoiled, offended. “Absolutely not. I have no wish to see him harmed. He helped Rhea rebuild me after the Exo III androids tore me apart. I owe him my life—and yours, as well.” Guilt stained his conscience as he added, “I know that I owe him a great debt. But for my daughter’s sake, I must ask at least one more favor of him.”

  Juliana’s fear turned to maternal concern. “Why, Data? After all these years, why have you become fixated on resurrecting Lal now?”

  “Because before I had proof of your own restoration, I could not be sure it was possible.”

  His answer drew a dubious frown from Juliana. “Oh, come on. You must have suspected he raised me after my body was taken from the Enterprise.”

  Her line of questioning began to annoy him, though he found it difficult to articulate why. “I could not put aside my duty to Starfleet and my shipmates on suspicion alone.”

  She softened her countenance and took on a compassionate air. “Have you considered the possibility that you’re simply echoing Noonien’s last mission in life? That you’re just replaying his own obsession with bringing you back from the dead?”

  “Are you suggesting that because my memories were reincepted inside the positronic matrix my father created for his own post-organic existence, I have inherited his paternal compulsion and transferred those feelings to Lal?” He acknowledged her hypothesis with half a shrug. “The thought had occurred to me. However, I consider it irrelevant. As the saying goes, ‘Like father, like son.’ ” He brought her to the foot of the ramp and turned her toward it. “And as I have already made clear, I consider this subject closed.”

  Her tortured expression intimated that she had much more to say, but that she was holding back out of respect for his decision. She lifted her palm to his cheek. “I know I can’t talk you out of this. Just promise me you’ll be careful. Can you do that for me?”

  He pressed his hand over hers and mustered a calming smile. “I will try.”

  She kissed his left cheek and then his right, then brushed away her tears with the back of her hand. “And promise me you’ll come to visit after you get back. I want to meet this granddaughter I’ve heard so much about.”

  “If I succeed in—”

  “When you succeed.”

  He nodded, grateful for her encouragement. “I will bring Lal to meet you.”

  “I look forward to it.” She started up the ramp. Then she stopped and looked back. “I love you, Data. Never forget that.”

  “I love you, too, Mother. Take care.” He waved goodbye, and then he backpedaled away from the ship as Juliana finished ascending the ramp. As soon as she was inside, the hatch closed and the engines thrummed to life.

  In his head, he heard the voice of the ship’s sentient feminine AI, Shakti. Will you be all right here by yourself, Data?

  Yes, Shakti. I will be fine. Please take my mother home, and be careful to ensure you are not followed. Her safety is very important to me.

  I understand, the AI said. You be careful, too. I promised Noonien I’d watch out for you.

  We will be together again very soon, Data assured her. Until then, stay with my mother.

  Understood. The Archeus floated upward, and thanks to its antigravity drive, it disturbed nary a grain of sand beneath it. The mirror-perfect silver starship pointed its nose upward and streaked away, vanishing beyond a desert sky blanched of color.

  Data took the quantum transceiver from his pocket and pressed his thumb against the beacon’s activation switch. With one push, he triggered the device, signaling the Fellowship of Artificial Intelligence that he was ready, willing, and able to meet with them.

  Then he walked to a large nearby boulder, sat down, and settled in for a very long wait.

  3

  By any standard that Jean-Luc Picard cared to apply, life was good.

  The Enterprise was more than two months into a long-term mapping and survey cruise in an unexplored region of the Alpha Quadrant, and both ship and crew had been performing with distinction. Each day since they’d passed beyond the edge of Federation space had brought new insights into various stellar phenomena that had been charted by long-range sensors but never studied in detail, and the stellar cartography team, working in cooperation with the xenoculture department, had identified half a dozen populated worlds that appeared to be technologically advanced enough to have faster-than-light travel and communications. Picard had reviewed the reports with a swell of excitement and anticipation before transmitting them to Starfleet Command with his request for permission to initiate official first-contact missions.

  Recent news from home had also been encouraging. After several heated confrontations with the Typhon Pact—six interstellar powers that had formed a coalition to act as political, military, and economic rivals to the Federation and its allies in local space—tensions had finally begun to abate. The Pact had fallen prey to internal schisms after attempts by the Breen to position themselves as its dominant actor on the interstellar stage had ended in failure and embarrassment. With the Breen Confederacy shamed, the Romulan Star Empire, now led by Praetor Gell Kamemor’s diplomatically sophisticated reformist government, and the Gorn Hegemony, which had never really forgotten its old ties of friendship to the Federation, were emerging as the coalition’s trendsetters and policy-makers—a development that Picard was certain would prove beneficial to the preservation of peace in two quadrants.

  Adding to his upbeat mood was the Federation Council’s latest updated forecast for the reconstruction efforts under way throughout the Beta Quadrant. Three and a half years had passed since the end of the final Borg invasion, which had laid waste scores of worlds in a hundred-light-year radius of the Azure Nebula and obliterated more than forty percent of Starfleet’s combat ships. The few dozen worlds that had been attacked but not destroyed outright had suffered catastrophic damage and casualties. Some so-called experts had opined that a full recovery might be impossible, for either the Federation or Starfleet, and more than a few political opportunists had tried to leverage the crisis of the invasion’s bloody aftermath to make that pessimistic prediction a reality. But the people of the Federation had surprised the naysayers—in several cases by voting them out of office and replacing them with leaders who were willing to compromise and make sacrifices for the greater good. Now the rebuilding of Starfleet and the reconstruction of entire worlds was well under way. A true full recovery was still a long way off, but the citizens of the Federation had spoken: they were committed to making it happen. On days such as this, Picard felt proud to count himself among their number.

  But nothing gave him greater pride or joy than the role he found himself in that evening. He sat on the sofa in the main room of his and Beverly’s quarters, his toddler son, René, cuddled against him. Faint moving glows of warp-stretched starlight played across the boy’s flaxen hair as he looked up at Picard, who read from The Bunny Bear, René’s newest favorite bedtime story.

  He held up the page to let René follow along as he narrated, his rich baritone rising from a soothing singsong to a dramatic flourish. “ ‘And the grouchy Old Bear roared at the foxes: “Go back to your hills! Go back to your vales! Set foot in my glade, and I’ll tear off your tails!” ’ ” The story’s biggest action moment made René giggle with excitement, as it always did. Picard wasn’t sure if the credit belonged to the tale’s author or to his performance of it.

  “ ‘The Old Bear growled and held up his paws, and on each big
mitt gleamed five black claws. That was all the foxes needed to see! They ran for their lives, and hid up a very tall tree.’ ” He brushed his finger across the padd’s screen and turned to the story’s last page, a single image of a portly brown bear wearing a comical pair of rabbit ears and surrounded by a colony of lop-eared lagomorphs. “ ‘Filled with joy, the bunnies hopped every which way. “Does this mean you forgive us, Old Bear? Does this mean we can stay?” Old Bear donned his rabbit ears, a disguise he thought quite clever, and said, “This is your home, my friends—now, and forever.” ’ ” Picard gave his son’s button nose a gentle poke as he added, “The end.”

  Overflowing with energy, René flashed a supernova smile. “Again! Again!”

  “Not tonight,” Picard said, careful to cloak his rebuff in a smile. “Time for bed.” René responded with a pout so exaggerated that Picard found it difficult not to laugh. “None of that, now.” He set the padd on the coffee table, and then he stood, picked up the boy, and carried him to his bedroom. “You’ve had your bath, and your stories. Now it’s time to sleep.”

  “Not tired,” the boy mumbled through trembling lips.

  It was possible that René believed what he was saying, but if experience was any guide, Picard suspected the child would drift off soon after his head hit the pillow. He lowered his son into his bed, kissed his forehead, and stroked the boy’s golden mop of hair. “Sweet dreams.”

  He had barely set one foot outside René’s room when the boy started wailing—a brazen ploy for pity and attention. Determined not to mollycoddle the boy, Picard tapped the control pad beside the open doorway and shut the door—instantly muffling the boy’s piercing cries to a faint disturbance of the silence in his and Beverly’s quarters.

  Beverly Crusher sat at the dining table in the nook by the replicator and watched him plod toward her. “You look like you could use a long night’s sleep.”

  “Not until I get a shower.” He sat down at his usual place, where a plate of replicated vegetable lasagna, a bowl of spinach salad, and a tall glass of cool water awaited him. A few gingerly pokes with his fork exposed the lasagna’s dearth of cheese. “A new recipe?”

  “Just doing my part to keep you healthy.” She dug into her own dinner with gusto.

  He carved off a forkful of lasagna and was in the middle of lifting it to his mouth when a beep from the overhead comm interrupted his family evening at home. “Bridge to Captain Picard,” said Lieutenant Aneta Šmrhová, the ship’s chief of security.

  He set down his fork. “Picard here.”

  “I apologize for disturbing you, Captain,” she said, her pronunciation strongly colored by her Slavic accent, “but you’ve received a private communiqué from Admiral Nechayev at Starfleet Command. The message is marked ‘urgent and confidential,’ sir.”

  “Understood. I’ll take it down here, Lieutenant. Picard out.” He pushed his chair back from the table, and Beverly did the same. He heard the click of the channel switching off as he walked quickly to his desk. His wife followed him and stood on the other side of the desk as he sat down, powered up his computer interface, and keyed in his access code to retrieve the communiqué from Admiral Nechayev. It was a simple text message, and its content was brief, unequivocal, and unexpected. He read it twice to make certain he hadn’t misunderstood it. Though he tried to be discreet at times such as this, he felt his visage harden into a frown.

  Beverly seemed to grow agitated by his silence. “What is it, Jean-Luc?”

  “A reminder to never get too comfortable.” He closed the message and turned off the comm interface. “Dinner will have to wait, I’m afraid.” With a sigh, he stood and headed for the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a talk with Worf.”

  * * *

  A double date in the Enterprise’s arboretum had sounded like such a good idea to T’Ryssa Chen when she’d suggested it to Geordi La Forge and his inamorata, Tamala Harstad. Having them along to fill in any conversational lulls that might stretch out between herself and Taurik had seemed to her like a stroke of genius. Now, as the four of them lingered between dinner and dessert, it was all starting to feel like a tremendous mistake.

  “So there I am, minding my own business, leaning against a tree strumming at the lute,” La Forge said with a broad grin, recounting one of the Enterprise-D crew’s many run-ins with the omnipotent entity known as Q, “when Worf walks up, rips it from my hands, and smashes it against the tree trunk. Two good hits, and he busted that thing into splinters! Then he hands the neck of it back to me with its strings dangling, and mumbles, ‘Sorry.’ ”

  His spot-on impression of Worf’s gruff baritone coaxed bright peals of laughter from Harstad and Chen. After the mirth tapered off, Taurik arched one eyebrow and noted with dry precision, “That seems a rather rude overreaction.”

  It took all of Chen’s hard-won discipline not to blurt at her date, That’s what makes the story funny, you dolt. Instead, she let the moment slide.

  La Forge accepted the comment with better grace. “Worf’s always been a tough critic.” He picked up the nearly empty bottle of Betazoid albariño and glanced at Harstad, who nodded for him to top her off. He poured the last of the white wine into her tulip-shaped glass. “Anyway, I couldn’t be that mad at him. Part of what made plucking the lute fun was that I knew it was driving him up the wall. I guess I ought to be thankful he broke it instead of me.”

  The chief engineer’s gentle, self-deprecating humor about the incident drew an admiring look from Harstad. The lithe, dark-haired attending physician had been dating La Forge for several months, and the two seemed to be growing closer with each passing day.

  Observing their easy rapport awakened a deep-seated spark of envy in Chen, and she pushed back against it, recognizing it for the emotional poison that it was. She distracted herself by opening her senses to the arboretum’s ambience: the vivid hues of flowering buds on several species of tree surrounding the vast compartment’s open central space; the soothing burble of running water from an artificial creek that wound its way aft from bulkhead to bulkhead; the sweet fragrance of blossoming flowers and ripening fruit mixed with earthy perfumes of rich soil and lush organic life; and, filtering through it, the gentle beauty of mellow, bluesy piano music by one of Earth’s most revered jazz masters, Junior Mance.

  Taurik touched her arm and broke her spell of diversion. “Was your dinner satisfactory?”

  Chen looked at her plate, suppressed a grimace, and forced a taut, polite smile. “It was fine,” she lied. Though she had been raised with the same aversion to naturally procured meat and animal products as many citizens of the Federation, she had no problem with consuming their replicated versions. If the question were put to her under oath, she would freely confess to enjoying red meat of all kinds, poultry dishes, eggs, cheese, and a host of other delectable victuals. In her zeal not to offend Taurik’s Vulcan sensitivities, however, she had ordered this evening from a strict vegan menu: a green salad followed by ratatouille, and an Altair water for her beverage. All had been prepared to perfection by the ship’s services division and delivered to their table—a perk that came courtesy of dining with La Forge, who was also the ship’s second officer—and she was sure her dessert of a fruit cup would be just as diligently prepared.

  But what she had really wanted to order was an appetizer of tuna carpaccio, the filet mignon Oscar for her entrée, and a dessert of pancetta-wrapped roasted figs stuffed with chèvre. As she savored the carbonated tingle of her chilled Altair water, she secretly wished it was a silky smooth Bolian Syrah or a decadently robust Brunello di Montalcino from Earth.

  But of course Vulcans don’t drink alcohol, she simmered. Might impair their logic.

  A youthful Thallonian woman, whose burgundy complexion and long braid of sable hair contrasted with her immaculate white server’s uniform, appeared from behind Chen’s shoulder and cleared the dishes from the table onto an antigrav cart that she maneuvered adroitly in a tight orbit of their table. Th
en she folded her hands behind her back and asked La Forge, “Are you and your guests ready for dessert, sir?”

  “Sounds good to me.” La Forge polled the table with a shrug and a smile. “Objections?”

  Everyone signaled their assent. The server nodded. “Would anyone like coffee or tea?”

  La Forge gestured at himself and Harstad. “Lattes for us.”

  Taurik met the server’s stare. “Nothing for me.”

  God forbid you should ingest caffeine. Chen smiled at the server. “Green tea, please.”

  As the server stepped away, towing the antigrav cart behind her, La Forge casually clasped Harstad’s hand. “What’s the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had?”

  Harstad wrinkled her brow and pursed her lips in a pantomime of fierce concentration. “Ooo, that’s a hard question. I can name the worst cup of coffee I’ve ever had, no problem: a mug of badly burnt mud passing for java in the student lounge at the Starfleet Medical Annex in Christchurch. But the best . . . ?” After a few seconds, her face brightened with fond recollection. “A café au lait, served late on a Sunday morning, with beignets, at Café du Monde in New Orleans. If I had to pick one favorite, that’d be it. And not just because I’d been out on Bourbon Street the entire night before. That was a truly exceptional cup o’ joe.”

  “Sounds like it,” La Forge said, and he kissed her.

  Witnessing their moment of spontaneous affection left Chen feeling self-conscious. Hoping to alleviate her perceived awkwardness of the moment, she reached for Taurik’s hand.

  He didn’t flinch or pull away, but he looked at her hand as if it were a giant insect. His reaction was aloof to the point of being inscrutable. He asked softly, “Is something wrong?”

  She sighed and withdrew her hand. “It’s starting to seem that way.”