DESCENT Read online

  Beverly felt like the last arrival at a Saturday night performance. “Crosis escaped?”

  The methodical evil in Crosis’s eyes haunted her as she remembered standing outside the forcefield and feeling that the field wasn’t secure enough. Now that thing was loose in the ship?

  She saw the change in Deanna’s face, and knew the counselor was picking up her strong reaction. She tried to hold it back, but couldn’t.

  Deanna’s brows drew tight. “Crosis? The Borg had a name?”

  Leaning one elbow on the surgical clamshell, Beverly sighed with aggravation and said, “You know, you and I should just bug the captain’s office. Maybe then we’d both get the whole story at once.”

  “Maybe we would,” Deanna said lightly, but she was unable to smile as she gazed tentatively at the Borg’s innards.

  “What are you doing down here?” the doctor asked, digging deep between a lower spinal disk and what appeared to be a biofilter net.

  “I felt like a bit of a fifth wheel in the midst of all this,” the ship’s counselor admitted, “and I wanted to talk to you about Data. Get your opinion about his psychological condition.”

  “Does he have psychology?”

  “Apparently . . . he does now.”

  Beverly looked up sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Picard to Crusher.”

  “Ah, better late than never. Would you mind?” Beverly turned, presenting her left side to Deanna, who accommodatingly touched the doctor’s medical comm badge for her. “Crusher here, Captain.”

  “We have an emergency change of venue, Doctor. I need you on the bridge. You’re going to take command of the ship.”

  The two women stared at each other. This was quite literally the last arrangement of words either of them had expected to hear.

  Picard obviously read their silence. “We have a situation that demands the planetside presence of every available pilot and field officer,” he said. “Commander Data has either taken or been forced to take a shuttlecraft and has gone through a small wormhole-type anomaly in space. We have followed him through it and are now preparing to search a planet without the aid of sensors. I want a senior officer in command.”

  “I wondered what all that shaking was,” Beverly drawled. “Begging your pardon, sir,” she began firmly, “but it doesn’t make any sense to put me in command. Command line goes down to the lowest yeoman in the bowels of Engineering before it gets to medical personnel. We’re the only people on board who have absolutely no piloting experience and still get to wear Fleet bars. I don’t know a heading from hardware.”

  “But you do know the workings of the Borg physiology,” Picard said, “and you know more about their behavior patterns and weaknesses than anyone else on board. It’s that knowledge I want in command when I leave the vessel, Doctor. You’ll be left with a team of engineers and junior crewmen. They will move the ship when and where you say to move it. Should this become an interstellar crisis, Doctor, I want the record to show that the decision was made by a ranking officer. Please, put that creature in cryonic holding, wash your hands, and meet me in my ready room in half an hour. I’ll brief you personally.”

  A penetrating numbness rolled through Beverly Crusher’s limbs. She stared across the surgical unit at Deanna, whose expression provided nothing but a cliff-hanging disquiet.

  She straightened up and clicked off the sterile field.

  “I understand,” she said.

  The Bridge, Two Hours Later

  “If the Borg should attack, don’t wait for me or anyone else to get back to the ship. Take the Enterprise to the transwarp conduit and return to the Federation.”

  Jean-Luc made it sound so simple.

  So she gave him a simple answer. “Got it.”

  And she almost moaned aloud. “Got it?” Why don’t I add a cheerful “pal” or “buddy,” too?

  The captain was looking at her—just a short connective pulsebeat of understanding that they were both going into situations that didn’t suit them.

  He was armed now, prepared for rough terrain and situations that spit back. She didn’t like seeing him this way, dressed for trouble.

  Beverly knew as she let the captain hold her with his eyes that their relationship was still special and always would be. There would forever be that underlying intensity they couldn’t shake despite the agreements of distancing they made in the rational moments of the waking day.

  She realized only now, at this instant, that he was leaving her in command not only so there would be accountability at the command level if anything went abhorrently wrong. He wasn’t only leaving her rank pin in charge. He was leaving someone in charge of his ship whom he trusted, command line or no command line. When it came to his ship and the lives aboard her, Jean-Luc Picard didn’t look down the straight line.

  “Good luck, Jean-Luc,” she said quietly.

  The gravity in Picard’s hardened expression released a little when he saw her smile.

  He managed to smile back. “Good luck . . . Captain.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Planet’s Surface

  THE PLANET was deceptively welcoming, with its beckoning shrubbery and humming meadows. The land rolled, soft to the eye and tough to the touch. The distant mountains sparkled with obsidian dust. The grass was like flannel.

  In the middle distance, other officers and security backups were heading off on their meter-by-meter search.

  Captain Picard saw it all in a single sweeping glance before pulling his attention to where it belonged. Around him, Geordi La Forge and Deanna Troi were backed up by a security man with a phaser rifle.

  He moved toward the abandoned shuttle, and his team followed him.

  Riker and Worf had set up a table with a remote computer console.

  “I’ve sent out twelve search teams so far,” Riker said, pointing to his console screen, then to the countryside. “I’ve assigned your team to search section gamma two-five, which is in that direction. Worf and I will take theta one-six once the final team is down.”

  Picard was too tense to nod. “Who’s manning the command post?”

  Riker nodded toward two engineers standing nearby. “Wallace and Towles.”

  Allowing himself a sigh—these moments when everything had already been done were somewhat draining to a senior officer—Picard looked from Troi to La Forge. “Ready?”

  They glanced at each other, and though he didn’t get so much as a “Yes, sir” out of it, they moved to follow him.

  He didn’t blame them. The day seemed very long already.

  Hours passed before he allowed them to stop for a break. Constant scanning with hand-held tricorders left them all in deep appreciation of the wide-sweep scanners aboard the ship that could pinpoint a naughty thought from a five thousand miles away.

  When Picard paused to scan a hillside rising before them, Deanna took it as a chance to sit down, and Geordi, though he didn’t sit, braced both feet in a tired manner and sighed heavily as he scanned the perimeter.

  “Anything, Mr. La Forge?” Picard prodded.

  Geordi paused, but the tricorder just wouldn’t give him a better answer than “Nothing, sir.”

  “Mr. La Forge, what if we modify one of our phasers to send out a luvetric pulse? It might cause a resonance fluctuation in Data’s power cells.”

  “And then,” Geordi said with a nod that was half shrug, “we could home in on that response with our tricorders. I thought about that. The problem is that the pulse would have to be so powerful that it would probably destroy Data’s entire positronic net in the pr—”

  “Captain!”

  The two men turned.

  Troi was standing now, looking in the opposite direction from them. Her voice was troubled as she fought to make sense of wordless impulses that served as companions to what she saw on her tricorder screen.

  “I think I’ve found something,” she said.

  Picard led the way. He and Geordi pushed to wher
e she was, then past her and through the brush.

  The security guard ran to join them, trying to get ahead so that he, rather than the captain, could take the brunt of any attack. He braced his phaser rifle against his chest so it wouldn’t be caught on the thick foliage.

  They’d had experiences with Deanna’s mystical discoveries. And when she said “I think,” there was almost always an “I know” floating in the lower currents.

  They spotted the top of a structure—or was it another distant mountain fooling their tired eyes?

  No, it was a building. They could just glimpse the top of it.

  “Come on,” Picard urged.

  Perhaps it was only a ruin, left here for ten thousand years to rot in the fresh breeze of this constant spring.

  They climbed until their chests were pumping, until they could see the thing they climbed for. So big that it had appeared closer, the building tempted them for another half mile as they struggled through the growth, but there was no mistaking it for a mountain anymore.

  Yes, a structure built by machines and hands. Monstrous and looming, it appeared to be made out of bits of molded stone.

  When they finally got to the tall side of it, they saw that runes had been cut into the walls by alien scribes. Another little mystery.

  Exhausted now, Picard summoned a reserve of strength and drew his phaser. Geordi kept working with the tricorder, concentrating so intently that he nearly fell twice as they approached the building.

  “I’m having trouble scanning the interior,” he said.

  Frustrated with half answers and vague details, Picard flatly asked, “Can you tell if it’s a Borg structure?”

  “I don’t think so. The rock and other materials used in the construction are all native to this planet. And I don’t see any Borg energy signatures. . . . I think there’s a door or a hatch or something about twenty meters that way.”

  Picard didn’t even grunt a response.

  In less than a breath he was plowing the way past his own team and through the cracking overgrowth in the direction Geordi had pointed.

  They went in through a gaping entrance and found an expansive open space, dark and unwelcoming, a concert hall with no chairs, no audience, no clue as to its purpose, and no Borg waiting to shoot their heads off. Only a selective few lights pierced the darkness, harsh and strange, without hinting of their source. It might have been natural light. Or not.

  As their eyes adjusted, they moved farther into the wide arena.

  At one end of the hall was a platform, and all over were doors and exits that suggested other rooms, or at least other places to go.

  “It looks like some kind of meeting hall,” Deanna said.

  Picard glared in suspicious disapproval. “No dust, no wild vegetation of any kind,” he said. “It’s been well maintained. It can’t have been abandoned for that long.”

  With a grimace of frustration that he couldn’t get readings that would help, Geordi aimed his tricorder at one of the lights. “Something’s wrong. I can’t get any kind of energy signature from this light source.”

  Moving toward him, reluctant to look away from the platform and doors, Picard looked at the tiny tricorder screen.

  “A dampening field!” he said sharply. “The whole building could be shielded from our sensors. Let’s go!”

  They turned, but that was all they managed.

  Screams rose, and the concert hall became an echo of high-pitched sound. The banshees were descending to warn them of a death in the village.

  Two dozen Borg blew in from the doors and corridors in every direction, howling like demons out of some hideous legend of clan conquest.

  The guard raised his rifle and got off one shot, but five Borg phasers drilled him square in the body, and there was nothing left when the whine cut off.

  Nothing. A puff of steaming air. Vapor.

  A sin to die as vapor! A mutilation of what it was to be alive—to be born, grow, learn, live, and be snuffed by so arbitrary a chance, by so callous an enemy. Picard almost choked with the injustice of it.

  No matter the violence of the moment, he was stabbed with the thought of writing the letter to the guard’s family to tell them what had happened and why there was nothing for them to bury.

  He hated writing those letters.

  Concentrate! Think forward.

  With only hand phasers, he and the others were driven to a defensive final stand. He knew his crew would hold their fire until he fired, not waste the energy packs but concentrate on a single volley. The odds were mind-boggling as the Borg closed in, grinding their teeth and squinting their eyes, their life-support coils throbbing as excitement pumped through their bodies.

  He saw for himself what Riker had described and knew only at this instant that Riker had restrained himself and failed to communicate the pure reeking malevolence that had somehow soiled the Borg culture and driven it beyond its own blind evil and into something even more corrupt.

  Picard had been close to death before, but he’d never seen it walking at him from twenty directions, howling like hell-born vultures. He couldn’t blink or he would be dead. He willed his eyes to stay open. He wouldn’t die blinking.

  Nor would he die in a puff of vapor or stand by and watch any more of his crew destroyed so completely. If they died, they would die standing firm.

  “Stop!”

  Thank God—Data.

  The captain’s heart almost stopped from relief. If only the Borg—

  They stopped in their tracks, like dolls whose plugs had been pulled.

  Picard looked up at the platform and focused his burning eyes.

  On the platform, out of uniform and dressed in some sort of trappings that Picard didn’t recognize from any of the cultures or establishments he had ever encountered, Data was standing.

  Picard forced his voice out, and it filled the hall.

  “Data?”

  The being on the platform offered a foxy smile.

  Beside Picard, Deanna suddenly gasped. “That’s not Data!” she choked.

  “You should listen to her, Captain,” the android said. “She’s way ahead of you.”

  The swaggering manner was suddenly familiar, a terrible aberration of the officer on whom their lives had so often depended and who had never let them down. This wasn’t their subdued shipmate.

  This was somebody else.

  Picard straightened, and his tone dropped. “Lore!”

  “Very good,” the twin said. “And I’m not alone.”

  The android, with its twisted grin, turned to one side. They followed his look.

  Data.

  Yes, this time it was Data, still wearing his Starfleet uniform. Posture good, all limbs intact, steady expression. He looked all right . . .

  But his face was different. His bearing, his attitude, the way he walked—all were different.

  And he was looking at them as if he didn’t know who they were. No, worse. As if he didn’t care who they were.

  “The sons of Soong have joined together,” Data said.

  And there was a new emotion in his face.

  Pride.

  “And together,” he went on, “we will destroy the Federation.”

  Picard would have challenged him, attempted to give an order and see if it would be obeyed, if there was any programming left of the officer and gentleman they knew and had worked with side by side, through unimaginable undertakings for years now.

  But he never got the chance. The hall was filling now with voices other than his own.

  The Borg parted their lips into gaudy holes and began their god-awful shriek, a mind-shattering whoop that lifted to the ceiling of the hall and smashed back down again.

  Approval for their master. Their masters.

  Chapter Eleven

  Acting Captain’s Log, Supplemental:

  The skeleton crew left on board the Enterprise is unable to help in the search for Commander Data. The planet’s unusual EM field is interfering with the s
hip’s sensors, severely limiting their effectiveness. Without our sensors, we’re sitting ducks. A Borg ship could be right on top of us before we knew it.

  BEVERLY CRUSHER TURNED from the aft station to look over at Tactical, at a very young—too young—girl operating the station. The control boards seemed ten times too large for such a young ensign.

  Was I ever that young?

  Beverly shook the sentimental question out of her head. This just wasn’t the moment to doubt the few young people who were now her bridge crew. They didn’t have any more choice than she did. She would have to rise to a position she wasn’t prepared for. These young people would have to do the same.

  “Ensign,” she said, “we need to modify the sensor array to filter out these EM pulses.” And she leaned forward just a little, opening her eyes a bit wider, the way she used to when her son was little. “Can you do that?”

  The girl was nervous. Who could blame her? There was hesitation before she forced herself to answer.

  “Yes, sir . . .” A few seconds went by. Then she added an honest “I think so.”

  She tried to work the bridge controls as though she recognized them all, but she didn’t. This was all taking her longer than she liked. The girl’s body language was giving away both her awkwardness and her genuine effort.

  Beverly smiled. “What’s your name?”

  The girl glanced at her and seemed to try to work faster. “Taitt, sir.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

  It might have been a silly statement from anybody but the ship’s doctor, even from the ship’s captain, but the doctor was probably the only officer on board a starship who got a chance to see everybody eventually.

  But I’m not the doctor right now. I’m supposed to be taking Jean-Luc Picard’s place. That’s what they all expect of me.

  “I was just posted six weeks ago,” Taitt said, her voice hesitant. She worked haltingly over the controls, making adjustments, backing up again, correcting her own mistakes, and readjusting. Hanging here in the planet’s magnetosphere was shattering the usefulness of their standard sensors.