by David Mack
His long-limbed paramour stroked his jaw. “You get this look in your eyes, like you can see through the bulkheads. And you tend to sigh when something bothers you.”
“Good to know.” He kissed her. “I’ll remember that the next time I play poker.”
A broad grin lit up her beautiful face. “It won’t help you. I know all your tells.”
“Such as?”
“As if I’d tell you.” She rolled out of bed and sauntered toward the bath nook. “It’s not my fault you wear your heart on your sleeve.” She paused in the doorway and shot him a smile over her shoulder. “If that costs you money from time to time, that’s your problem.”
Hypnotized by the whisper-rush of the sonic shower, Worf drifted off for a few minutes, succumbing to days of sleep deprivation and overwork. Dreams came swiftly and swept him up, and all the visions bled into one another. He stood at the prow of a narrow seacraft with a dragon’s head, squinting into the spray with each break of the surf. . . . Garbed in the robes of Kahless, he climbed the steps of a jungle temple as a teeming mass of Klingons cheered his name. . . . He stood alone and naked on a barren black island in a lake of fire and wondered if it was Gre’thor. Then he awoke with a start to see Spot, the cat who had claimed him for her own after Data’s death, perched atop his chest and staring at him through half-closed eyes.
He admired the cat’s brazen, direct approach to life. If she wanted food or attention, she accosted him until he granted her desire. If he tarried or resisted, she attacked him. Despite her small size and the human-pleasing aesthetics of her appearance, she was a predator. That was something Worf could respect. He petted the feline’s orange head, then gave her a gentle pat on the back as her cue to get up and go wait by her food bowl. Spot reacted slowly and moved with obvious effort and discomfort as she jumped down to the floor, then trudged across Worf’s quarters toward her feeding area beside the replicator. He got up and followed her, dismayed by the creature’s increasingly obvious infirmity. She was roughly seventeen years old by his estimate, and despite the preventive care she received from the ship’s veterinary medical specialist, she was showing signs of her age. With proper care and nutrition, she might live another decade, but he sensed in the cat a spirit almost Klingon in its fierce pride; he knew it would offend her dignity to prolong her life after its quality had expired. As he procured her favorite dietary formula from his replicator with the press of a button, he promised himself that he would safeguard her honor as he would that of any true warrior.
There will come a good day to die, my friend. But for you, this is not that day.
Choudhury returned from the bath nook wrapped in a blue-and-white striped towel, her damp black hair tossed over one shoulder, and smiled at the sight of Worf tending to Spot. “At long last, I realize who your true master is.”
“I should have thought it was obvious long ago.”
He met her in the middle of the room and caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. She closed her eyes and leaned into his tender gesture, as if to prolong it. “That feels nice.” Cupping her hand over his, she opened her eyes. “I want to say something.”
Worf clasped her hand. “Speak.”
“I want to thank you.” For a moment, a bashful color warmed her face. “When the Borg were laying waste everything in sight, and I needed someone to cling to . . . you let me hang on to you. After it was over, and I needed someone to go home with me and help me start over, you were there.” As if ashamed, she averted her eyes from his and bowed her head. “Later, when I got scared and thought I’d made a mistake, and I asked you for space, you gave it to me.”
A tear rolled from the inner corner of her right eye, and as if by instinct, Worf reached out and with the slightest brush of his thumb wicked it away. Choudhury looked up at him with a bittersweet smile. “I feel like I’ve been stuck to a pendulum the last few years—swinging one way, then the other, pulling you close and pushing you away. But now . . . I finally feel like I’m back at the center. I’ve found my balance. I know who I am again, and what I want.”
“And that would be . . . ?”
She traced the curve of his ocular ridge with her delicate fingertips. “I want to be with you. Like this: simply . . . honestly . . . in the moment.”
Her declaration pleased him. But still his mind would not be at rest. “When I was young, I had a Klingon mate, K’Ehleyr. When I was older and wiser, I took a wife, Jadzia. I loved and treasured them both. But I no longer desire such a permanent bond in my life. Perhaps one day that will change. But for now, that is how I feel. I tell you this not as a rejection of what you have offered . . . but as a statement of fact, so that there is no misunderstanding between us.”
Choudhury kissed him and made it last.
When their lips parted, she looked contented. “As I said, Worf, I only want what we have now. Each other. No vows, no ceremonies, no children, no lies. I don’t want to change you, and I don’t want to be changed.” She flashed an infectious smile. “Think you can live with that?”
He scooped her up in both arms and carried her back toward the bed. “Yes.”
• • •
Leaning against an open doorframe, Jean-Luc Picard watched his two-year-old son René sleep peacefully and hoped the boy would stay that way. His son had suffered from bad dreams recently, and as a result it had become a bit of a chore putting him down each night. Most evenings the task fell to Crusher, but as often as possible, Picard tried to lend a hand.
Tonight he had been there, giving his wife a much-needed respite from the battle of wills with their precocious son. After dinner they had bathed René, fitted him with a night diaper, dressed him in pajamas, and tucked him into his bed. Then had come story time. A stack of children’s books stood ready by René’s bedside, and as Picard had begun the paternal duty of reading his boy to sleep, he had been impressed with his scion’s growing vocabulary and seemingly insatiable appetite for narratives. By the time he cracked open the sixth tome of the evening’s recitation, he began to question whether it would be unethical to let Crusher use a mild hypospray to hasten the boy’s descent into slumber.
Never one to shirk from a challenge, Picard had held his ground, regaling his son in deep and dulcet tones with one fantastical tale after another, until, at long last, the child’s eyes grew heavy and he drifted off, his breathing slow and regular, his face angelic and calm. With great care, Picard had set down the storybook, and then he had pulled up the covers over the curve of René’s shoulder, kissed the top of the boy’s head, and bade him bonne nuit.
He had planned to slip out of René’s room and go catch up with Crusher, to see what she had been up to on this rare night of free time, but he had stopped in the doorway to look back and then found himself unable to leave. All he wanted to do was watch over his little boy, as if his presence would somehow shield the lad from the products of his own subconscious. But in his heart, he knew his motive for lingering was at least partly selfish; gazing at his son filled him with conflicting emotions of tremendous intensity. His fear of all the ills that might befall the boy in a harsh universe of cold realities clashed with all his hopes for what joys the future might bring; the pride that filled him when he saw some spark of himself in René was negated by the humility of realizing that his son was his own person, and that he could never truly know him, only love him and accept him and hope that respect was returned one day in kind.
His wife’s hand fell softly upon his shoulder. “Addictive, isn’t it?”
“More so with each passing day,” Picard admitted. “And not just because I feel like I’ve already missed so many milestones in his life: his first word, his first step. I always seem to be elsewhere when he makes these great leaps forward.”
Crusher draped a comforting arm across his shoulders. “It’s not as if the day care team and I didn’t record those moments.”
“I know.” He couldn’t shake off a petty, nagging guilt. “But seeing it on a screen—or even in
the holodeck—isn’t the same as having been there. Part of me wonders if he’ll always know, on some instinctual level, that I missed those key moments in his life.”
She rested her head against his. “Trust me, Jean-Luc: in the grand scheme of things, your absence at those moments will mean far more to you than it ever will to him.”
He snaked his arm behind her back and held her close at his side. “I want to do everything for him, and yet I can’t think of anything to do. I want to protect him from everything, even when there doesn’t seem to be any danger.” The sheer immensity of what he didn’t know made him laugh despite his transient melancholy. “I want to give him everything, but half the time I can’t seem to discern what he actually wants.”
“And that’s parenthood,” Crusher said.
• • •
La Forge was jolted out of his moment of nostalgic reverie by the voice of his dinner date, Doctor Tamala Harstad. “You’re not even listening to me, are you, Geordi?”
Found out and called out, he did his best to feign attention and pretend nothing had happened. “Sure I was. I’m sorry. You were saying, about the . . .” He paused, hoping Harstad would show mercy and fill the conversational gap. Instead, she stared at him, her dark brown eyes piercing his pretenses and defenses with alarming ease. He raised his palms in surrender. “You got me. I lost focus for a minute there. I’m sorry.”
The trim, dark-haired physician set down her fork beside her plate of half-eaten vegetable stir-fry over jasmine rice. Then she reached across the table and laid her pale, slender fingers across the back of La Forge’s large, callused brown hand. Her reassuring smile accentuated her already high, prominent cheekbones. “Something’s bothering you.”
“Not exactly,” La Forge said. “The break-in, that android we chased on Galor IV, and now this Breen ship we’re tailing . . . it all has me thinking about Data.”
She seemed genuinely curious. “Anything in particular?”
“The stolen prototypes.” La Forge realized that it was a relief to unburden himself, to let someone else hear the thoughts that plagued him, so he continued. “To Data, they weren’t just failed experiments. They were his brothers. He used to keep them in a private cybernetics lab, inside his quarters here on the ship, along with the bodies of his older brother, Lore, his daughter, Lal, and his mother, Juliana Tainer.”
Harstad waved one hand to interrupt. “Hold on—who? His daughter? His mother?”
“It’s a long story, and it’s late. Mind if I just hit the high points?”
She reached for her glass of white wine. “That would probably be best.”
“Lore was Data’s twin, but to be blunt, he was kind of a sociopath. He tried to betray the Enterprise-D to a crystalline life-form, stole Data’s original emotion chip, and ended up colluding with the Borg before Data shut him down and disassembled him.”
To his surprise, Harstad absorbed his first salvo of Enterprise crew history with aplomb. “So, you’re saying his family has no shortage of drama.”
“Pretty much.” He sipped from his glass of zinfandel. “Around that same time, Data built an android, told us it was his ‘child,’ and named it Lal. She picked her own identity and seemed to fit in pretty well at first. Then some admiral from Starfleet tried to take her away from Data, and she got so panicked that her positronic matrix failed. She died later that day.”
Harstad cringed in sympathetic horror. “God, that’s awful. How could they do that to her? Or to him?”
“It was before the ruling on AI rights.” He sighed, saddened by progress that had come too late for those who’d needed it most. “On a completely different tack, there’s the story of Data’s mother, Juliana Tainer.”
She propped her elbow on the table and planted her chin on her hand. “I’m all ears.”
“Data’s creator, a scientist named Noonien Soong, loved a woman named Juliana Tainer. They married in secret while working together, and she helped make Data the person he was. Well, when she was mortally wounded and Soong couldn’t save her, he copied her consciousness to a positronic matrix—then put it in an android replica of her body. He made it so it could fool sensors and let her pass for a human. It even made her age like a normal human, so she could grow old and have a ‘natural’ death.” His heart grew heavy as he recalled the sight of his friend returning to the ship in mourning, bearing his mother’s coffin. “Ten years ago, shortly before our last mission to Galor IV, she passed away.” He leaned forward. “Ready for the weird part?”
A conspiratorial gleam signaled her interest. “There’s a weird part?”
“A few days after Data brought his mother’s body back to his lab . . . she vanished.”
He could see in her eyes she’d taken the rhetorical bait. She was hooked. “How?”
“That,” La Forge replied with a theatrical flourish, “is a tale for another time.”
Her enthralled gaze became a chastising scowl. “Enjoy sleeping alone tonight.”
“All right—if you insist. Believe it or not, there is an immortal human being, a man who’s lived several thousand years. If I told you some of the famous people he’s been, you’d be amazed. When we met him ten years ago, he went by the name Emil Vaslovik. He’d reinvented himself as a professor of cybernetics—and he was Noonien Soong’s mentor.”
The doctor arched one elegant sable eyebrow. “Now I think you’re putting me on.”
“I’m completely serious. Do you want to hear this or not?”
She waved him on. “Continue.”
He took another sip of wine to shed his inhibitions. “Vaslovik built a new kind of android, with a holotronic brain. He’d built androids before, for company, but never one like this. It took on a female persona and called itself Rhea McAdams. She seemed so human that she tricked us into believing she was our new chief of security. Long story short—”
“Too late.”
“—Data fell in love with her, she fell for him, but then she left and broke his heart. I had to listen to him moan about her for months after she left. Anyway, Data always thought Vaslovik took Juliana’s body because he hoped to resurrect her positronic matrix, even though that’s pretty much impossible.”
Harstad appeared to be speechless. For close to half a minute she sat in silence, looking in every direction, it seemed, except at La Forge. Then she looked the chief engineer in the eye. “Do you have a lot of stories like these?”
“You have no idea.” He remembered how they had steered onto this topic, and his mood turned serious. “Anyway, all this has had me thinking about Data’s brother, B-4. As far as we knew, he was the last of Data’s kin that was still functioning. He also has all of Data’s memory engrams stored in his mind. But something’s going wrong, and unless we find him soon, it might be too late to help him. . . . And that’s what I was thinking about when you snapped me out of my trance a few minutes ago: how I plan to help B-4, assuming we get to him in time.”
A look of concern darkened her countenance. “What is it you’re not saying, Geordi?”
The truth of his situation was one that he dreaded speaking aloud. He had balked at it when Maddox had spelled it out for him, and when he’d read the protocols for the stabilization procedure, he’d felt physically ill. As desperately as he wanted to envision himself as a healer trying to bring relief to B-4, his conscience insisted on tarring him as an assassin.
“The only way I can save B-4,” he said, “is to permanently erase Data’s memories.”
6
A bold orange star blazed at the center of the main viewscreen as Picard stepped out of the turbolift and strode to his chair. Minutes earlier, after several days of radio-silent, high-warp pursuit, the Enterprise had abruptly returned to impulse, and Worf had requested Picard’s presence on the bridge. The captain took his seat beside Worf. “Report, Number One.”
“The transport dropped out of warp as soon as it reached the edge of this star system.” The XO relayed a tactical map from his command
console to Picard’s. “It appears to be taking cover inside the rings of the system’s fourth planet, a gas giant. I’ve ordered Faur and Dygan to use the fifth planet’s northern magnetic pole to mask our presence once we enter the system.”
It was a tactically sound decision, and exactly the sort of precaution Picard expected from an officer of Worf’s experience. He studied the map of the system and read its dry-sounding catalog identification aloud. “ ‘FGC-38919.’ What do we know about this system?”
“Not much beyond what is listed in the General Catalog. This system was mapped thirty-nine years ago using long-range sensors, but it has not yet been explored.”
A titanic, pale blue gas giant with rings of varying shades of gray drifted into view from the left side of the viewscreen and soon dominated the ship’s forward view. Piloting the ship into a parking orbit, Faur reported, “We’re inside the planet’s magnetic field.”
Worf issued orders with cool confidence. “All systems to minimal power. Lieutenant Choudhury, monitor the system for any signs of starship traffic—passive sensors only.”
“Aye, sir,” the security chief replied, just before the bridge lights dimmed to standby mode and the rich thrumming of the ship’s impulse engines faded to silence.
Minutes passed slowly, and Picard used the time to familiarize himself with the map of the star system. Seven planets orbited a K3V main-sequence star. Its three inner planets were terrestrial worlds. The first was a mostly molten chunk of lead and iron; the second was a Class-N world with a superdense, superhot atmosphere of sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide, and methane; and the third was a Class-L world with a barely breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, similar to Mars after its first several decades of aggressive terraforming. A wide, dense asteroid belt lay between the orbits of the third and fourth planets, separating the system’s rocky inner worlds from its four Class-J gas giants of varying sizes and hues. Only one of the giants lacked rings, and each was orbited by no fewer than a dozen natural satellites in a wide range of sizes.