by David Mack
He unlocked it but resisted the impulse to race through it as it opened. Peering into the cramped compartment on the other side, he saw no sign of the person he’d come for. “Rhea?”
Her hand swung out through the open doorway, and he caught it with ease. She tried to pull him off balance, but he dragged her out, instead. The slender human-styled android struggled in his grip. “Let me go, you bastard!”
“Rhea! I’m here to set you free! I’m on your side!”
Her twisting attempts at escape abated, but she remained tensed to fight. “Prove it.”
“I don’t have time to lay out a court case for you! I’ve got half the crew trying to kill me, not to mention the ship itself. So if you want to save Data and your father, we need to go now!”
The cognitive dissonance of simultaneous hope and suspicion distorted her elegantly symmetrical features. “How can I trust you when you’re the one who led Data into a trap?”
He let go of her arms and pointed at the blackened left side of his head. “See this? Senyx shot me, on Gatt’s orders. I’m pretty sure they’re looking to space me. So blame me for whatever you want, but we have a common enemy who’s just crossed the line from obsessed to insane.”
“All right, let’s move.”
He led her back the way he’d come, pausing when he heard the din of approaching resistance. “Looks like the direct route’s been cut off.” He turned to head for an emergency ladderway, only to hear unfriendly company coming toward them from that direction, as well. “And the indirect route’s not looking too good, either.”
Rhea looked around, not in a panic but with the keen stare of someone trained to act in a crisis. “We’re headed for the brig, right?” A nod from Tyros was all the confirmation she needed. “Okay, then.” She ripped open a locked maintenance panel, rooted through the contents of the storage space, and emerged with an industrial-grade plasma torch. With a flick of her thumb, she ignited its flame and adjusted it to maximum intensity. “This should do nicely. Stay close.”
Tyros stood at Rhea’s back while she squatted and guided the plasma torch in an arm’s length circle, slicing a neat, smoldering wound through the deck.
Altanexa’s voice snapped from an overhead speaker, “What do you think you’re doing?” It was the first time Tyros could remember hearing the AI sound upset.
Under his and Rhea’s feet, the narrow line of metal plating that connected their circular oasis to the rest of the deck groaned and whined from steadily mounting stress. As she finished her cut, Rhea grinned up at Tyros. “Hang on. Express elevator, going down.”
The circle of deck and butchered machinery plummeted and struck the next deck with a tremendous clang that echoed dramatically. When the smoke cleared, Tyros saw that he and Rhea were standing between the brig’s rows of cells, flanked by Data and Akharin.
“You drop the force fields,” Rhea said. “I’ll—” She froze when she saw Akharin.
Thick, angry red scars crisscrossed his face, head, neck, and hands. His clothes were so stained in blood that it was hard to find spots on them that weren’t. The man, who had always seemed so proud and indomitable, sat slumped against the wall of his cell, his cut eyelids drooping with fatigue, his once-keen gaze dulled by the horrific pain of barbaric tortures.
Face-to-face with the gruesome result of Gatt’s fanatical quest for knowledge that had proved worthless, Tyros felt sick with shame and regret. He shut his eyes and turned away.
Rhea seized Tyros by the throat, her face bright with rage. She raised the plasma torch with vengeful intent. “What kind of monsters are you? How could you do that to him?”
Tyros was too overcome with guilt to respond.
It was Gatt who said as he stepped into the brig’s open doorway, “We didn’t.” Rhea glared at him as Senyx, Alset, and two more of their allies stepped into view behind him. Then Gatt flashed a sinister grin. “It was your beloved Data. Nexa, show her.”
At the end of the brig compartment, a holovid played in midair, showing the bloody tableau of Data wielding the instruments that butchered Akharin within an inch of his life.
Disgusted and heartbroken, Rhea staggered half a step. She lost her grip on the plasma torch, which switched off as it slipped from her hand. Tears streamed from her eyes as she turned her furious gaze upon Data. “How—how could you? He saved you once. And you did that?”
Data said nothing in his own defense. Instead, Akharin rasped out a weak reply through his swollen, damaged lips. “Not . . . his fault.”
Rhea pointed at the holovid. “Not his fault? I can see him doing it!”
Bloody spittle dribbled from Akharin’s mouth. “I . . . told him . . . to do it.”
“Why?”
“For you,” her father gasped. “To save you.”
She poured out her grief like a river in flood. Data stood in his cell, cloaked in shame, watching her weep, and Akharin slipped from consciousness, too weak to hold on to the moment.
From the corridor came the rising whine of Senyx’s plasma cannon charging to full power. “What a touching family moment,” Gatt said. “But that’s enough drama for now.” The force fields on the last of the empty cells switched off. “You two have a choice. Step inside those cells . . . or step out the airlock and meet a black hole.”
23
Worlds were dying by fire, cast down by the Machine as if it were an angry god damning souls to perdition, and all Šmrhová could do was send the same unanswered hail every ten minutes to the AI vessel Altanexa. She was sure it was a waste of time, little more than busywork to mask the fact that there seemed to be nothing the Enterprise crew could do to forestall the coming galactic catastrophe. So we sit here, she brooded, letting time slip through our hands like water while we watch star systems die. While we wait for our turn in the fire.
Her console flashed with new information: confirmation of an incoming signal. For a moment she wondered if the androids had finally succumbed to her hails just to silence them. Then, as Worf and Picard looked her way for a report, she saw that the new signal wasn’t from Altanexa. “Captain, we’re receiving hundreds of overlapping signals on multiple frequencies—some subspace, some in older radio bandwidths.” She looked up at the main viewscreen in time to see a blue-green marble of a world, one that could almost be Earth’s twin, spiraling out of the mouth of one of the artificial wormholes. “They’re all coming from that planet.”
The captain and first officer stared at the screen, mesmerized by the horror show of a modernized, populated Class-M planet hurtling to its doom. Picard put on a brave front. “Can we tell if any of those transmissions is from a planetary government?”
Šmrhová shook her head. “Sorry, sir. They all sound like this.” She routed the signal to the bridge’s overhead speakers, and a din of panicked shouts and cries of despair and terror sent a chill down her spine. These were messages that had no need for the universal translator.
“Speakers off,” Picard said.
She muted the incoming signal, and a solemn hush descended on the bridge. Some of the junior officers, such as Dygan at ops, Faur at flight control, and the half-dozen science specialists manning the starboard and aft stations, averted their eyes from the carnage, preferring to fix their gazes upon their workstations, to lose themselves in the minutiae of their duties. But like the captain and the first officer, Šmrhová felt it part of her duty to bear witness to the unspeakable, to watch a world full of sentient beings be rent asunder by unimaginable gravitational shearing forces in Abbadon’s accretion disk and then vanish altogether into its swirling flames.
Watching as a beautiful blue world shattered at the whim of the Machine, Šmrhová felt the same empty dread that had haunted her dreams during the Borg invasion. She was sure her heart would burst, it was so filled with impotent rage and righteous indignation, with a hunger for revenge tempered by an inconsolable grief that she knew she would carry to her grave.
Moments later, the fallen world’s orange main-s
equence star followed it into oblivion, and its death-flash whited out the viewscreen for several seconds. Next came a rough tremor, a ripple in the very fabric of space-time that rocked the Enterprise like a thunderclap.
Faur keyed in commands at the helm and steadied the ship. “The gravitational distortion is getting stronger, Captain. Another ripple like that, and we could lose artificial gravity.”
No one suggested withdrawing from their confrontation with the Machine. Everyone on the bridge, including Šmrhová, had served with Captain Picard long enough to know he would never abandon a mission with so much at stake—not even to save his ship, his crew, or his son. The Enterprise and its crew would be standing their ground to the bitter end.
“Captain,” Dygan said, “the singularity’s mass has increased faster than we originally projected.” He turned his chair in a slow swivel to look back at Picard and Worf. “My current calculations suggest the singularity will reach the Machine’s targeted mass in under three hours.”
Picard became like a spring coiled to its breaking point. Šmrhová had seen this look before—the captain was on the verge of doing something bold, something he might find personally distasteful, or perhaps tactically perilous, but when his mien took on this type of hard edge, it was clear he meant to take charge of the situation by any means necessary.
He stood up quickly. “Bridge to Commander La Forge. This is the captain. Report to the observation lounge. Picard out. . . . Number One, Lieutenant Šmrhová, you’re with me. It’s time to get Mister Data and his friends off that ship.”
* * *
“I want to hear plans of action,” Picard said to his officers. “Each passing moment brings us closer to a disaster from which there will be no recovery. Under these circumstances, patience is no longer a virtue. We need to get Data, Rhea, and Akharin off that ship as soon as possible.” He looked right toward La Forge, then left at Worf and Šmrhová, and decided to make his first officer start the brainstorming session. “Recommendations, Number One?”
The Klingon did not seem to relish being put on the spot. “Our options are limited,” he confessed. “The androids’ vessel has its shields up, so we are not able to beam aboard. Their defensive systems might be compromised if we can lure them into the nebula.”
“Except,” La Forge cut in, “inside the Machine’s nebula, we won’t have shields, the transporters won’t work, and locking phasers will be little better than a guessing game.”
Šmrhová added, “That’s assuming we make it through in one piece. We’re still finishing repairs from our last brush with it. Plus, the Machine seems to have given the androids safe passage through the storm. I don’t think that courtesy will extend to us.”
Worf stroked his beard, an affectation that never failed to remind Picard of his previous first officer, Will Riker. “What if we rely on long-range attacks? Photon torpedoes might be able to penetrate the nebula and target the enemy ship once they escape its interference.”
“It’s possible,” Šmrhová said, even as she winced in the face of her doubts. “The problem with that plan is that we can’t be sure how many torpedoes, or which ones, will make it through the nebula. And if we’re too successful, we could end up destroying that ship—and Data with it.”
Picard frowned. “Unacceptable. What alternatives can you offer, Lieutenant?”
Now it was the security chief’s turn to shrink from attention. “With all respect to Commander Worf, I think we need to treat this as a rescue operation first, and a combat operation second. In my opinion, stealth and precision will be more effective here than force.”
“That’s fine in principle,” Picard said. “But we need a specific plan, Lieutenant. How can you translate your notion into action?”
“A small boarding party,” she said. The way she was avoiding eye contact suggested to Picard that she was concocting her plan as she spoke. “Deployed in a shuttle with reinforced shields, to help it get through the nebula, and a layer of chimerium shielding around its warp core to hide its energy signature on approach. They . . .” Her features tensed with concentration for half a second before she continued. “They use magnetic clamps to attach themselves to Altanexa’s ventral hull, directly beneath the position Data gave us for the brig. Then they go EVA, blast through the hull with shaped charges, board the ship, free Data and the others—”
“Stop,” said La Forge. “If they do that, they’ll explosively decompress that ship’s lower decks. And in case you’ve forgotten, one of the prisoners is a human. He’ll suffocate before the boarding party can get him back to the shuttle.”
She nodded, processing the constructive criticism. “All right. We can have them carry in triox shots and a portable breathing mask, and make securing Akharin their first priority.”
“You have both failed to address a key detail,” Worf said. “How will the shuttle break through Altanexa’s shields without being detected?”
“That’s the least of my concerns,” Picard interjected. “If we send in a boarding party, armed or otherwise, the android crew will be within their rights to respond with deadly force. They also might choose to turn their prisoners into hostages.”
“If we move quickly enough, they won’t get the chance,” Šmrhová argued. “As for how we get through the shields without tipping them off, all we need to do is match the shuttle’s shield frequency to theirs. On a slow approach, it would be like two soap bubbles merging.”
Incredulous reactions were volleyed between Worf and La Forge. The chief engineer asked, “And how, exactly, do you plan to find Altanexa’s shield frequency?”
Her mask of resolve collapsed into a sheepish grimace. “I was hoping Data could feed us tactical intel about the ship.”
La Forge shook his head. “The last time I talked to Data, he was in no position to help anybody. If your plan hinges on him facilitating from the inside, I think you need a new plan.”
She crossed her arms. “You have a better idea?”
“I have plenty of ideas,” La Forge said. “I can’t say if they’re any better, though. One approach would be to go after the androids’ ship with a computer virus. In theory, if we could upload an adaptive attack program, it could knock out their shields, sensors, comms, anything we want. But before you say anything, I can already see holes in that plan. First, we have no way to get a signal through their shields, not to mention through their firewall. Second, we can’t be sure any of our cyber warfare applications would have any effect on Altanexa. Not only is she based on alien programming languages, her systems might be way more advanced than ours.”
Worf leaned forward against the table, resting his weight on one arm. “Is there some way to knock out Altanexa’s power without damaging the ship or hurting its passengers?”
“Again,” La Forge said, “theoretically, sure. A subspatial shock wave might suppress its power generation and comm systems, but any pulse strong enough to do that would probably destroy Data and half the androids on board, not to mention take down the Enterprise. I thought about building a larger version of those Hirogen energy dampers we got hit with during the Borg invasion, but it would take weeks to construct a prototype with a directional area of effect.”
Šmrhová sighed. “I think we’re also forgetting the planet-sized gorilla in the room. If the Machine senses we’re taking action against Altanexa’s crew, it might retaliate on their behalf.”
Picard replied, “I assure you, Lieutenant, no one has forgotten about that.”
A curious expression crossed Worf’s stern visage. “What about Wesley? He can enter and leave their ship at will. We could use that to our advantage.”
The security chief shook her head. “No. I talked to Wes about this before he left to find Data the first time; when he pops around without a ship, he can’t bring people with him. So he could get in and out, but he can’t rescue the prisoners.”
Wheels seemed to be turning in La Forge’s imagination. “What if he went there just to do some recon? Or a
bit of sabotage?”
“According to Data’s reports, Altanexa is self-aware, inside and out,” Šmrhová said. “The second Wes pops in, she’ll know he’s there. If he tampers with anything, they’ll know it. And if he pops into the wrong spot at the wrong time, he could get himself killed.”
That depressing image brought the discussion to an awkward halt.
In an effort to keep things moving forward, Picard asked, “Do we have any other ideas worth considering?”
La Forge shrugged. “We could use the gravitational mass of Abbadon for a slingshot effect that would throw us backward in time, and then we could—”
“I’ll take that as a no, Mister La Forge.”
“Aye, sir.”
The door to Picard’s left slid open, revealing Wesley Crusher. The young man looked exhausted and pallid, and he entered the observation lounge with the stiff gait of a man nursing deep aches. He forced out a pained smile. “Hello, everyone. What have I missed?”
Picard stood to greet him, and the other officers did likewise. Worf reached out and patted Wesley’s shoulder. “It is good to see you back on your feet.”
“Thanks, Worf. It feels good to be seen.” He shook Picard’s hand, then crossed behind the captain’s chair at the head of the table to take the first empty seat past La Forge. As he sat down, the others settled back into their own chairs. “Sorry to barge in uninvited, but I get the sense we’re running out of time against the Machine.” There was a mischievous quality to his manner as he studied their faces. “And if this Enterprise’s crew is anything like the one I used to know, I’m betting you’re planning a rescue mission for Data.”