GHOST SHIP Page 10

“You mean like those against superior officers?”

  “Yes.” He chuckled, his mouth lengthening into a melancholy grin. The change in mood cleared his head, and he found the difficult situation a little easier to accept.

  Troi turned to gaze out the viewport, waiting for the moment to end. And those against telepaths. To offer unclarity in place of another unclarity—to replace ignorance with ambiguity—is this my only service?

  “If these beings are prisoners,” Picard mused, “then they become my responsibility as well. I wonder if I have the right to decide on their behalf. We’re going to have to increase our efforts to communicate with them somehow.”

  Troi looked at him, her fears returning. “But that requires power, sir. The entity could focus on it and destroy us.”

  Crusher spoke up. “And there’s something else.” The captain tried not to sound weary. “Yes, doctor?”

  She dropped her gaze to the desktop for a moment. When she looked up again, she met Jean-Luc Picard’s eyes squarely. “What do we do if they simply will not negotiate with us?” she asked. “You know what they say about the road to hell.”

  “Curious that Counselor Troi would have been focused upon by an electromagnetic disturbance.”

  “Keep your mind on your work,” Riker grumbled at the android’s comment. Irritation skittered through him as his hand hovered an inch from the intercom, an inch from calling sickbay. There was Data, a few steps away. Still walking around after that attack. Just shook it off. And Deanna was in sickbay, fighting for control of her mind.

  Data looked up from the readout screen. “My mind is always on my work, Commander. You see, I have a multiphase memory core which allows me to—”

  “I don’t care,” Riker heard himself bite back. “I’m really not interested.”

  Data’s brows poked up over his nose. “Perhaps if I explained on a simpler level—”

  His back cramping, Riker straightened and glared into Data’s yellow eyes. “Would you mind?”

  “Not at all, sir,” the android responded amicably. “The concept behind my special multiphase brain capacity is—”

  “That’s not what I meant!”

  “Isn’t it, sir? It is what you said.”

  Geordi reached over and tugged on the android’s sleeve. “Don’t push the issue, Data. Mr. Riker wants reports exclusively on the disturbance and its source.”

  With a childish blink, Data said, “Oh. No sweat.” He pivoted and bent once again over the screen. “The phenomenon’s physical makeup is confusing to the passive sensors. There is little for the sensors to focus upon because the entity is out of phase as often as in. Entity or mechanism, I cannot define it.”

  Standing between Riker and Geordi as they each bent over different computer access panels, Data indulged in an all-too-human frown at the graphics that danced at him there.

  To his right, Riker furiously went on hammering the pressure points of the molecular microelectronics board. “Let’s start by using the most obvious criterion of life,” he suggested. “Are there any signs of organism? Skin? Bones? Cells? Anything?”

  “Organism neither suggests nor precludes life, sir. I am partly organic, but also mechanical—”

  “Don’t take everything so literally, Data,” Riker snapped. “I want a starting point. I’m not saying all life-forms are organic. This is just a process of elimination. I know perfectly well that life isn’t physical components alone. We can keep a body alive indefinitely, but that’s not life. Not human life, anyway. Get back on those instruments and interpret what you read.”

  He tightened his left hand into a ball and felt the sweat squish in his palm. A tangible enemy was one thing; he could deal with that. But all this business of life and nonlife, this wrestling to grab a definition so they could know whether or not they were killing something when they fought to save their own skins . . . I hate this. And I hate the position I’m in. Advise the captain? How? Help him fight this thing? How?

  His hands might as well be strapped to his sides. As first officer, he might as well be nothing. First officer was the supreme go-fer of all time. Not a scientist, not a tactical expert, not a psychologist—nothing specific, and yet a little of everything, anything the captain needed him to be at the moment. What would it be the next time? Would he be ready? Frustration gnawed at him.

  Picard . . . damn him. Figure out a way to fight the phenomenon. That’s all. Easy. Yes, sir, right away, sir.

  “These readings defy interpretation.”

  Data’s voice grated across Riker’s nerves. That tone of his, that take-it-or-leave-it tone . . .

  “But if I must verbalize, I would say the phenomenon is behaving in a pseudo-mechanical manner.”

  “Try to be specific, will you?” Riker barked, his tolerance straining.

  “Always. It’s made up of individual energy components, but it acts like neither a machine nor a being. It seems to be a living tool—something fabricated at so high a level of engineering that it’s virtually a life-form.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Geordi grumbled.

  Data glanced at him, his mouth open, but he still stung from Riker’s demand and continued on that tack. “I’m reading high-potency disruptive energies. As soon as it finds us, it could rub us out.”

  Riker straightened sharply. “Stop doing that.”

  Data’s eyes flickered as he raised his head. “Sir?”

  “You’re annoying the hell out of me. You’re distracting everyone with that kind of speech. Cut it out.”

  “Slang, sir. Colloquial terminol—”

  “It’s insulting.”

  “I . . . beg your pardon? I am trying to be more human.”

  Data backed up against the panel as Riker closed in on him, and he could see that somehow he had infuriated the first officer.

  “You’re never going to be human,” Riker ground out. “You’re not human. You don’t seem to get the difference between being human and mimicking humans. You can’t be creative because you only see the affectation and none of the substance. You’re missing life. Until you learn the difference, you’ll always be a puppet.”

  “Sir—” Geordi appeared beside them. “He’s only trying to—”

  “I know what he’s trying to do,” Riker snapped.

  They were all silent for a moment.

  A look of deep injury crossed Data’s face and he glanced at Geordi, then back to Riker. “I . . . I am only attempting to improve myself . . . to serve in the best—”

  “Then serve,” Riker blurted. “Put yourself to use in your true capacity. You’re an android. Use that to its best advantage and quit trying to be something you’re not. Give us something to work with if you can. Provide something for me to take back to the captain that’ll help us out of this.” He took a step even closer, an intimidating step that backed Data tighter against the panel. “If that entity attacks again, I want you to give in to it. See if you can interface with it.”

  Data’s pale brows drew tight over his nose, raised slightly in a delicate expression, proof—at least to Geordi—that somewhere under the voltage were feelings that could be hurt. In a near whisper, he responded, “I promise to try, sir.” Unable to meet Riker’s eyes, anymore, he slipped past Geordi and strode quickly toward the spectrometry lab. A breath of the door, and he was gone.

  Riker watched him go, saw the tension in synthetic shoulders and the kind of stride a human walks when he’s trying to keep from running. Burned into his memory were Data’s android eyes tightened in that expression of humility and distress, an expression that said he hadn’t meant to offend anyone. Riker leaned after the android as if drawn by sudden obligation. He might have taken a step.

  Had Geordi not drawn his attention.

  “If he gives into that kind of attack,” the navigator said, “he’ll be risking his life, Mr. Riker.”

  Gaining control over his voice, Riker quietly said, “I’m afraid that may be our best chance to save ourselves.” He turned toward the
monitors again, only to find himself blocked off as Geordi shouldered in front of him.

  “So that’s okay, then? Sacrifice Data because he’s not alive?”

  “Look, Geordi, I don’t—”

  “Are you telling me it isn’t true that you always choose him for away missions because he’s more expendable?”

  Riker glared into the thin metallic visor and imagined the tension around LaForge’s blind eyes. “As you were, Lieutenant.”

  “Would you try as hard to save his life as you tried to save mine on the bridge?”

  “Man your post, mister!”

  LaForge hesitated a telling moment, then stepped back, the muscles in his neck twitching, his arms like tree limbs at his sides. “Aye, sir. Anything you say.”

  Chapter Six

  THE GREAT WARRIOR prowled his technology’s ramparts, slowly gaining a foothold. He smelled battle. He tasted the raw meat of challenge upon his tongue like blood and ripped flesh. He heard the howl in his mind, the song of warriors shrieking through his instincts, and he couldn’t abide the price of peace. He knew, deep in his soul, that there would be trouble long before there was peace, and every fiber of his being prepared for it now, lest he be surprised later.

  “Worf.”

  Only great effort blocked the growl of response and replaced it with a civilized word. “Yes?”

  “The captain’ll want a report when he gets back up here.”

  Worf turned to the supple feminine body and the storybook face over it. She looked like a girl who was dressed as a boy. A girl from the stories his adoptive human parents once told him, stories that never satisfied his hunger for adventure. Very young was he when his Starfleet parents gave up telling him stories of girls who dressed as boys to fool the churchgoers and replaced them with meatier tales by Bram Stoker, Melville, Dumas, Stervasney, and Kryo to satisfy their rare son. Those he could chew. Those made him howl.

  “He will not be happy with what we have to say, Tasha,” he told her, quieting his thunderous voice as they stood together on the upper deck, buffered from the bridge by the tactical station a few steps forward.

  “I know,” she agreed. Beneath the lemon cuff of her hair, clear gray eyes kinked at the prospect of facing Picard. “I’ve been doing a study and you’re right. That thing’s working a pattern all right, but the pattern does have some random movements in it. It must be designed to be unpredictable.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it,” was his husky bass agreement. “It’s working out a search that’s deliberately hard to evade. It gives us less than a fifty percent chance of escape.”

  “That’s a more-than-fifty percent chance of getting caught.” Tasha bit her lip and took the whole problem personally. “And that’s only our certainty level. The actual odds could be a lot drearier. Have you been getting the same results? Is it doing what I think it’s doing?”

  “If you mean do I see the pattern closing in,” Worf said with ominous certainty, “yes. Our odds are dropping with every minute we wait to take action. They won’t get better. They’ll just get worse. The cage is tightening.”

  Tasha struck off a few steps of useless pacing, a pitiful echo of the huge cage that was closing around the ship. “What if that thing gets an adrenaline surge or something and bites down harder than it did before? Even if we get shields up to power, we might not be able to take it. At least, not like we are now. Not with shields taxed to protect the whole ship, I mean.”

  Worf’s large brown face pivoted up from the small monitor he’d been glaring at. From beneath his Klinzhai skull and the two downturned lances of his eyebrows, his eyes bored through her. “You’re not going to suggest—”

  She chewed her lip for a few beats, but her eyes showed none of the vacillation she felt. She shifted from one foot to the other, then, as if braced, to both feet. At her sides, small fists knotted.

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “Oh, yes I am.”

  “Do you have the slightest perception of the danger of your proposal, Lieutenant Yar?”

  Tasha took refuge in standing at attention as Picard paced around her. Around them the glockenspiel of bridge noise provided little respite. She drew in a long breath and tried not to feel too small as she stood beside Worf. It took all her restraint to keep from snatching a fortifying glance at the Klingon before she could begin.

  “Yes, sir. I do. But I feel it’s—” She stopped, gulping back her voice, as Picard suddenly turned and coiled his lariat of dare around her. She couldn’t talk while he was glowering at her like that.

  “Let’s hear it,” he snapped, as though he didn’t know what her problem was at all.

  She refused to flinch, but her stomach shrank anyway. “Yes, sir. We’ve—that is, I’ve been calculating—”

  “Never mind the blasted calculations and give me the bottom line.”

  “As the ship is, I put our odds for escape at less than fifty percent and shrinking. I’ve made an analysis of the last attack and it looks like the thing attacked only the high-energy portions of the ship. The warp engine chambers, the high-gain condensers on the weaponry, the sensors, and the shields.”

  “Your point, please?”

  “Um . . . is that the saucer section by itself may not attract the thing’s attention.”

  Picard’s glare was molasses, but somewhere in it Tasha was sure she saw a tiny flicker of hope that she could walk away with her head and at least one arm.

  “Separate the ship’s hulls?” he murmured.

  “That’s . . . my suggestion, Captain.”

  “Realizing, of course, that would leave the saucer section with only rudimentary shielding and no appreciable weaponry if the stardrive section were to be destroyed. You do add that into your equation, do you not, Lieutenant?”

  Tasha actually broke attention and turned toward him. “The saucer section’s chances of sneaking away on very low impulse power go up to almost ninety percent, sir, especially if we run some power through the stardrive section and distract the thing.”

  “Not counting any unknown variables.”

  She backed into attention again and focused her eyes on the bulkhead over the main viewer. “Correct, sir. But also, if stardrive doesn’t have to put out a shield envelope around the entire saucer section too, we’ll be able to pump more power into our shields and maybe withstand another attack. Long enough to fight it, I mean, sir.”

  Picard also turned, but to eye the glowing, pulsing, fuming, flat wall of electrokinetic power that searched for them in the upper range of the screen. “And stardrive’s chances of escape in your scenario?”

  Tasha now took that glance from Worf, and held it like a lifeline. “Less . . . than eighteen percent, sir.”

  Jean-Luc Picard circled his two personal hotheads, came around behind them, saw their shoulders twitch, one set narrow and braced by the gold tabard, the other set broad and tall, making a field of black-over-red. He came around starboard of them again and stopped in front of Worf, with Tasha blocked from his view. Before them the great wide viewscreen spread, holding in its starfield the glaring enemy. The silence mutilated their nerves, the ticking clock of the entity’s encroachment, and yet there was strength in the captain’s voice when at last he spoke.

  “I’ll take those odds. Get Riker up here.”

  “Report, Mr. Data.”

  Picard hadn’t told them his plans yet. Riker now stood near him as Data and Geordi LaForge squared off before them on the bridge.

  Riker hovered nearby, acutely aware of Deanna Troi’s absence. Was he just being too sensitive or was Data making a point of not looking at him?

  Am I imagining it?

  “From its actions and its capabilities—lightspeed, for instance,” Data began, “I shall risk concluding that it was indeed constructed and couldn’t possibly have evolved naturally. It possesses a rudimentary intelligence, reacting to everything on a basic, simple set of instructions, rather like an insect. When a praying mantis eats its own mate, for example, sir, it is simply d
oing what instinct tells it to do, without any concept of rightness or wrongness.”

  Picard rubbed his palms against his thighs and resisted the urge to pace. “You’re telling me it’s the galaxy’s biggest bug.”

  Data cocked his head in a semblance of nodding, but he wasn’t ready to commit to that. “Essentially.”

  “Which leaves out reasoning with it,” Riker offered.

  “Correct, sir,” Data said, “but if we can interface with it somehow on its own level, I may be able to effect changes in that simple programming enough to fake it out—” He caught it fast, and glanced at Riker. “Enough to alter its actions.”

  Data’s self-consciousness disappeared as the turbolift opened and emitted Troi, with Dr. Crusher hovering after her, obviously unwilling to let the counselor out of her sight.

  “Captain!” Troi blurted. Immediately she drew back, collected herself, and plainly announced, “Sir, they want something from us.”

  Picard looked at her dubiously. “I beg your pardon? Have you been in contact with it again?”

  “You could say that,” Crusher said, eyeing Troi. “For a minute there, thought we were going to lose her.”

  “Indeed. Are you all right, Counselor?”

  “Captain, they want something,” Troi pushed on, “something we can provide for them, or at least something they think we can provide.”

  At the center of a brewing storm, Picard turned to accuse Data. “Well, Data? That’s certainly not the wrinkle we expected to develop, given your assessment.”

  Data’s finely wrought lips slid open on nothing for a moment. “Sir, that cannot be accurate. All evidence suggests that the hostile is not capable of consciously wanting something from us. It has the intelligence of an insect on all response levels. It responds automatically to stimuli. Its reactions do not involve thought as we know it, but only stimulus and response.”

  Picard wagged a finger toward Troi and said, “But the counselor tells us otherwise, while you”—the finger swung full about—“tell us it’s not attacking out of malice. Something in its very simple programming triggers its actions.”