by David Mack
Turning in a slow circle, Choudhury asked, “How many do you think there are?”
La Forge was reaching for his tricorder when Soong answered. “Approximately twenty-one million, four hundred ninety-three thousand, assuming the filled pods I see are all packed to capacity.” Soong looked around at the legions of empty pods. “I’d estimate this facility has the capacity to store as many as fifty million.” He cracked a twisted smile. “Say hello to my family.”
• • •
Unearthly groans and peals of thunder from the gas giant’s atmosphere resounded through the hull of the Enterprise and reminded Picard of ancient tales of Earth’s storm-tossed mariners. He tried to push the harrowing din from his thoughts by focusing on reports from the ship’s lower decks. Doctor Crusher had her hands full in sickbay; despite his warning to evacuate the ship’s outer sections, several dozen personnel who’d had to remain behind at critical posts until their backup stations came on line suffered mild radiation poisoning. That threat continued to plague the Enterprise’s crew even now. The shields were unable to function in the hypercharged atmosphere, leaving the Sovereign-class starship exposed to its scourge of lightning and the unpredictable caprice of its four-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds.
A jolt rocked the ship hard to starboard, and Picard’s hand clenched the armrest by reflex. Determined to deny the storm the privilege of his attention, he skipped ahead to the latest update from Glinn Dygan and assistant chief engineer Lieutenant Taurik. The pair had established a complete internal force field that mirrored the shape of the Enterprise’s hull by reprogramming the structural integrity field’s emitter network to operate in a dual-frequency mode. It was an ingenious solution to their current predicament; it kept more of the ship’s internal volume available for service than closing off large areas with broader force fields, and it avoided the risks associated with inverting the geometry of the ship’s external shield emitters, which were unreliable in conditions such as these. He made a mental note to add commendations for both of them when he recorded his daily log.
Lightning tore across the main viewer, which blanched with static. A thunderclap hammered the ship, dimming the overhead lights for half a second. Picard realized his breath had caught in his chest, and he forced himself to exhale. That was close. He wondered how long the Enterprise’s luck would hold in this nightmarish environment. Then he winced as another fork of electricity ripped through the swirling violet gases ahead of the ship. This is ridiculous. Being down here is almost as risky as being attacked by the Breen.
He got up and stepped over to the security station, where Šmrhová was filling in for Choudhury. She looked up as he approached, and straightened her posture. “Sir.”
“As you were.” He waited until she relaxed, then he continued. “We can’t stay down here forever. There must be some way to know when the Breen have moved off.”
Šmrhová shook her head. “I’ve tried to filter out the interference from the atmosphere. It’s too erratic and too powerful for passive sensors to pick up anything except noise. I might be able to boost the active sensors by routing them through the main dish assembly, but—”
“But that would be the same as sending up a flare to the Breen,” Picard said, finishing her thought. He frowned. “What we need is a periscope.”
She reacted to his offhand remark with a quizzical wrinkling of her brow. “A what?”
“An ancient form of optical scope, made with mirrors,” Picard explained. “On Earth in the early twentieth century, submersible aquatic vessels used them to observe activity above the water’s surface while the ship remained submerged. What we need is the modern equivalent of a periscope—something to let us gather intelligence from above without revealing ourselves.”
Glinn Dygan swiveled his chair around from the ops console to join the discussion. “What about sending out one of our shuttles as a scout?”
Šmrhová looked doubtful. “I considered it. But the winds and electrical phenomena in the atmosphere are too severe. Even on autopilot, there’s an eighty-five percent chance any small craft we send out there will be destroyed in under ten minutes.”
Picard stroked his upper lip as he pondered their options. “What if we use a runabout? They have enough power to navigate inside the Badlands. They should be able to handle this.”
“Maybe,” Šmrhová said. She entered commands into her console, then brushed a few strands of her black hair from her eyes as she looked up at Picard. “We have one runabout left on board, the Cumberland. And it might be up to the flight. But I don’t think it’s our best option.”
“Explain.”
She stepped aside so Picard could stand next to her. As he stepped around the security console, Dygan got up and walked back to look over the top of the panel. Šmrhová started calling up new screens of information with light taps on the interactive panel. “A runabout would only be able to give us intel from a limited arc of visibility outside the atmosphere. If the Breen ship were on the far side of the planet, the runabout might not see it until it was too late. There’s also the risk that the Breen might detect the runabout’s engines before it sees them.”
Picard nodded. “I see your point. Can you suggest another alternative?”
She finished inputting commands, and a schematic took shape, dominating the console’s display area. “A web of passive sensor probes, deployed at regular intervals of longitude and latitude as we cruise inside the atmosphere. They can ascend to shallow depth, just inside the cloud cover, gather data from orbit, and relay it back down to us.”
Certain he saw a flaw in her plan, Picard asked, “How are they supposed to send us that data through all this interference?”
Šmrhová grimaced. “I haven’t figured that part out.”
“I have an idea,” Dygan said. “Taurik and I can modify some sensor probes to transmit short data pulses on a super-low-frequency subspace channel, like the kind used by cloaked Klingon ships. In theory, an SLF channel should be immune to most of the interference.”
Nodding, Šmrhová said, “That might work.”
It sounded good to Picard, but even if it proved unsuccessful, it would keep the crew occupied and focused on something productive. “How long?”
“Three hours to refit the probes,” Dygan said.
Šmrhová added, “Another ninety minutes for deployment.”
“You have four hours. Make it so.”
• • •
Executing a search pattern was an intricate bit of tedium, but Pazur was committed to seeing it done well. The first officer circuited the bridge of the Mlotek, sneaking peeks at the consoles of her subordinates and assembling the glimpses into a mental snapshot of their progress.
The ship was circling its way south from the planet’s northern magnetic pole, its orbit lasting longer with each circumnavigation as it approached the gas giant’s equator. High-energy tachyon sweeps so far had found no evidence to support Zadlo’s suspicion of a cloaked vessel, but it was too soon to declare the search’s outcome negative. It was possible they were herding a cloaked intruder toward the antarctic pole—and inevitable discovery.
Communications officer Vess turned toward Pazur. “Sir. The cruisers Gwiazda and Obranca have confirmed they are en route at maximum warp. ETA, just over one hour.”
That was good news; reinforcements would speed the search. “What about the Zemsta?”
“It’ll arrive in approximately two and a half hours.”
Zadlo turned from the tactical station and nodded at Pazur to indicate he had news. The first officer told Vess, “Forward those reports to the commander,” then stepped away to confer with Zadlo. She sidled up to him to keep their discussion private. “Report.”
“No signs of cloaking device interference in the atmosphere, but I found something else.” He called up a screen of data showing what looked like a scratch across the planet’s cloudy surface. “It’s an ion trail. It’s faint, but we picked it up with the new contrast imaging
scanners.”
Pazur knew not to draw hasty conclusions. “What could cause that?”
“A trail that size? Either a small comet composed of highly radioactive elements, or a starship maneuvering on impulse power.” He switched to a screen of navigational scans. “I checked. There were no asteroids or comets on collision trajectories with the planet.”
“What would a cloaked vessel gain by descending into the atmosphere?”
“Nothing,” Zadlo said. “The charged particles and electromagnetic interference would disrupt its cloak and shields, leaving it completely vulnerable. I can imagine two scenarios consistent with this evidence. First, a cloaked vessel lost its ability to cloak for some reason, and chose to use the planet’s atmosphere for cover. Or, second, our intruder had no cloaking device.”
She reached past Zadlo and called up a chart of the star system around them. “If there is a ship inside the gas giant, the fact that it’s hiding suggests its commander would prefer to avoid a confrontation—but then why didn’t it simply retreat when we left our patrol route?”
The question lingered between them for a few moments until Zadlo replied, “There’s something here they want or need.”
“Or something they’re not willing to leave behind. Continue searching for that ship.” She turned and moved back to the bridge’s central command position. “Vess, hail the Obranca and Gwiazda. Have them do a full sensor sweep of the system on their approach. Then signal our garrison on the third planet and tell them to start looking for intruders.”
• • •
Huddled with Soong and the away team around a dormant android they’d pulled from a storage pod, La Forge watched with morbid fascination as the renowned scientist dismembered and disemboweled the mass-produced copy of his work. Gifted with superhuman dexterity and visual acuity by his new android form, Soong operated with the speed and brutal precision of a cybernetic Jack the Ripper, arranging excised synthetic organs around the artificial corpse.
“Just as I thought.” Soong plucked a tiny component from his patient’s brain and held it up for everyone to see. “A Type-L phase discriminating amplifier.” The detail’s importance seemed lost on the others, but it gave La Forge a chill of dark remembrance. Soong nodded at him. “Open its left temporal panel. I want to get a look at its positronic matrix.”
La Forge coaxed open the panel on the side of the android’s head. The sight of a face identical to Data’s beneath his hands summoned melancholy memories of his friend. He recalled helping Data repair and install his emotion chip after recovering it from Lore’s damaged brain, and the time he let Data shock himself half to death to trigger his dreaming subroutine. This thing isn’t Data, he reminded himself. None of them are. Looking around at the legions of inactive androids, the word that kept creeping unbidden into his thoughts was abomination.
Soong poked at the dissected android’s inert brain circuitry. “Very interesting,” he mumbled. “All the pieces are here. The lights are on. But nobody’s home.” He shifted an internal circuit panel and tapped a tiny circular chip with his fingertip. “There you are. Exactly where you shouldn’t be, and right where I expected.” He touched a tiny metallic instrument of inscrutable purpose to the chip. “Hmmph. Blank. Thank heaven for small mercies.”
“Enough,” Worf said, his patience clearly on the wane. “What have you found?”
The scientist deflected the query with a knowing look at La Forge. “Ask him. He knows.” Then he glanced at Worf with the gleam of an inveterate troublemaker. “And so do you, I’d bet.”
His accusation turned Worf’s attention toward La Forge, who sighed and gestured at the body. “This is a copy of Lore.” He frowned. “More precisely, it’s a copy of him as we last knew him, when he’d teamed up with those rogue Borg.”
Worf bristled at the news. “How can you tell?”
“The Type-L phase discriminating amplifier, for starters. Data’s body used a Type-R.” La Forge turned the inanimate head to call attention to the open panel. “But this is the giveaway. See that little round bit? That was the original configuration of Data’s emotion chip—the one Lore stole from him on Terlina III—before I helped him fix it. Which means this body is based on a scan of Lore that included the chip. And judging from the technology in here . . .”
A rare look of alarm crossed Worf’s face. “These bodies were made for the Borg.”
Choudhury leaned forward, her serenity transformed to intensity. “What are you two talking about? Why would the Borg mass-produce Soong-type androids?”
“It was a renegade faction,” La Forge explained. “A few months earlier, we’d ‘infected’ them with the concept of individual identity. The drones in the infected cube split off from the Collective and ended up lost and unable to function. That was when Lore found them.”
Worf continued the narrative. “He made himself their leader and turned them into crazed killers. Then he used tricks and lies to take control of Data.”
“I know this story, from Data’s logs,” Soong cut in. “Lore promised the Borg he’d free them from the imperfections of flesh and lead them to a fully synthetic existence. There was just one problem: he didn’t know how to transfer organic consciousness into a positronic brain.”
Anger welled from a place inside La Forge that he’d hoped never to face again. “To solve that problem, Lore made Data experiment on a living subject.” The memory of the torments he’d endured at Data’s hands made him wince. “They started with me.”
His revelation made Choudhury stifle a small gasp of horror, and Velex averted his gaze rather than bear witness to the pain that still burned in La Forge’s eyes.
Soong looked around at the vast workings of the factory. “That explains why none of their matrixes are initialized. If they were made as vessels for the Borg to transfer into, they’d have been left blank on purpose. So, the good news is, there’s no chance of them waking up and storming us like some kind of cybernetic zombie mob.”
With obvious reluctance, Worf asked, “What is the bad news?”
“The only thing stopping them from becoming an army is a bit of programming.”
La Forge nodded grimly. “And the Breen plan to provide it.”
“Not if we stop it,” Worf said. “It would not make sense to program each android separately. There must be a control center that can program them all at once.”
“That must be why they wanted the earlier Soong prototypes,” Choudhury said. “If we find the control center, we’ll probably find the stolen androids.”
Worf looked at Soong. “If we find it, can you stop these androids from being activated?”
Soong flashed a trickster’s evil smile. “Are you kidding? I could melt their brains and burn this whole place down.”
“Good.” Worf stood tall, looking ready to take on the world. “Let’s go.”
28
In the three years that Lieutenant Aneta Šmrhová had served aboard the Enterprise, she’d had few opportunities to really impress Captain Picard. By reputation, he was a fair and patient man who took an interest in promoting the refinement of his officers—but he was also known for expecting the best of his people in even the most trying of circumstances, and on a ship such as the Enterprise, which was crewed by some of the most accomplished officers and noncoms in Starfleet, it was difficult to be seen as exceptional.
She knew the satisfaction of her ego was the least of her concerns at that moment; if her plan proved successful, it might earn her a moment of longed-for recognition from the captain, but what really mattered was whether it served the ship and the mission. The captain needed reliable information from orbit, and it was her duty to provide it to him. Whether her work was acknowledged was unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
But it’s important to me. She clamped down hard on her feelings. Stop that. An update from Dygan appeared on her console and renewed her focus on the mission. After making a quick review of his report, she turned toward Picard. “ ‘Oper
ation Periscope’ is ready, Captain.”
“Launch the probes,” Picard said with a dramatic thrust of his arm.
Several gingerly taps on her console fired clusters of modified probes into the maelstrom of the gas giant’s atmosphere. Though they vanished from sight on the main viewer almost instantly, the SLF pulse transmitters Dygan had installed inside them sent back clear readings. “All probes are away and proceeding to their assigned coordinates.”
Picard leaned forward, his manner pensive. “Glinn Dygan, how are the probes faring against the wind currents? Are we sure they’ll be able to hold their positions?”
Dygan checked the probes’ telemetry on the ops console. “The probes are experiencing minor course deviations from turbulence en route to their final positions, but so far the effects from the atmosphere are within expected parameters. As the probes gain altitude, they’ll encounter less resistance. They should be able to maintain formation for up to a day.”
“Very well. Continue to monitor their flight performance.”
“Aye, sir.”
The next hour passed with little conversation to break the monotony of the rumbling tempest outside the ship and the ambience of feedback tones inside the bridge. Šmrhová reviewed the ship’s security status while Dygan managed the deployment of the probes. She was relieved to see the radiation-exposure issue had been addressed for the time being. As long as the Enterprise didn’t linger more than a day inside the supercharged soup of the gas giant, it would likely emerge with only minor maintenance needs in its outer sections. All the personnel who had been affected by radiation exposure had been treated in sickbay and cleared for duty by Doctor Crusher or one of the senior physicians on her medical staff. Regardless, just to err on the side of caution, Šmrhová adjusted the security division’s duty schedule to give its radiation-exposed personnel an extra twenty-four hours each to recover before returning to service.