DESCENT Read online

Beverly sighed, for the girl and for herself, and for all these others manning positions they’d never seen before in anything other than student simulations. She spoke to Taitt loudly enough that everyone else could hear. “Well, Taitt, I bet you never thought you’d be serving as tactical officer after only six weeks.”

  The girl glanced at her again, her eyes expressing her gratitude for the hint that maybe they were in the same predicament.

  “No, sir,” she murmured, “I sure didn’t. . . . I think I’ve filtered out some of the sensor noise. I’ll bring the modifications on line.”

  “Good work,” Beverly said, before either of them knew whether Taitt had succeeded.

  The surrogate captain stepped down toward the command area, hoping her legs weren’t shaking—at least, no more than Taitt’s hands were. Maybe if she just sat in the command chair, she’d feel more secure about all this, and poor Taitt wouldn’t have to deal with having her commanding officer standing behind her while she tried to do unfamiliar work and apply function to what had been theories to her only weeks ago.

  “Riker to Enterprise.”

  Beverly paused, suddenly tense. “Go ahead, Will.”

  “I can’t contact the captain.” Riker’s voice was fierce with dissatisfaction at the simple statement. “It might just be the interference, but I’d like to be sure.”

  “Understood,” she told him, and hoped the communications computer would understand too. “Enterprise to Picard.”

  For the first five heartbeats she fully expected a response. The captain wasn’t lost. Riker just couldn’t get through. Something technical. A glitch. A faulty circuit. EM interference.

  By the seventh heartbeat, she knew the captain was lost, in trouble.

  “Crusher to Picard,” she tried again.

  From behind her Taitt said, “I’m not getting a comm signal from anyone on the captain’s team.”

  Beverly felt the muscles in her hands and neck tighten as she glanced up at Tactical. “The last time they checked in, they were investigating a structure in section gamma two-five.”

  She knew Riker could hear her, and she was expecting his response when Taitt turned pale and spoke up again.

  “Sir, I’m picking up a vessel closing on our location!”

  Beverly turned. “Is it a Borg ship?”

  Taitt fumbled with the controls, getting a few things right, a few wrong, rushing to correct—

  “It—it seems to match the configuration of a ship the Enterprise encountered . . . at Ohniaka Three.”

  “Red Alert!” Beverly shot to her feet again. “How long before they’re in weapons range?”

  “Uh,” Taitt gasped, “about . . . ninety seconds . . . no, no, make that seventy seconds!”

  The poor girl fought valiantly to hold herself together, and the others tried, too, all shooting looks at each other to see if anybody else was nervous. This just wasn’t the frictionless bridge of the usual day-to-day starship activity, and it wasn’t going to become that in time to face the Borg ship.

  Beverly forced herself to ignore everything but the action of the moment—the ship out there, the planet, and the fact that she was the only link between her shipmates and whatever might happen in the next few moments.

  “Crusher to Transporter Room Three,” she snapped.

  “Salazar here, sir.”

  “Start transporting the away teams off the surface!”

  “Aye, sir.”

  She anchored herself on Salazar’s steady voice and forced her own voice to sound calm. “Use the transporter in the cargo bays if you have to. I want those teams up here as fast as possible.”

  “Beverly,” Riker’s voice interrupted, “Worf and I will stay here and look for the captain’s team.”

  The idea of leaving the captain shot through her mind, chased by the idea now that Riker wasn’t coming back to the ship to take over command. That was what should happen, wasn’t it? The Borg were relentless. Even if Riker found the captain, the Borg would hunt them down. They’d have no ship to beam up to, nowhere to run.

  She turned to the forward screen and its view of the planet. “I’m not going to leave you down there.”

  “Pull as many people off the surface as you can and get back to the transwarp conduit,” Riker told her. “The captain’s orders were to get the Enterprise to Federation space.”

  Beverly held her breath. They could call her “captain” and they could call her “sir,” but she wasn’t a real captain and had just been reminded of that. She had her orders and might have to obey them even though it meant leaving her crew—her crewmates—behind. They weren’t really her crew; they were Jean-Luc Picard’s crew, and Will Riker’s after that—and after that . . . Data’s.

  Getting Data back must be more critical than she realized for it to overrule the first officer’s primary obligation to protect the ship.

  Was Riker protecting the whole Federation instead?

  I have my orders. . . .

  Through a constricting throat, she said, “Acknowledged.”

  “Riker out.”

  Communications were cut off from the planet. She’d just been told what Riker and the others expected of her. Conscience twisted her heart. She had command, but not enough. Only enough to save the ship.

  “Prepare to leave orbit,” she said to the young officer faking it at the conn.

  “Sir,” Taitt called from behind her, “the Borg ship is powering up its forward weapons array! They’ll be in range in . . . in twenty seconds.”

  “Salazar!” Beverly called. “How many people are still down on the planet?”

  “Seventy-three, sir,” said the transporter officer.

  Beverly paced forward, glaring at the screen. “Put the Borg ship on screen.”

  Somebody obeyed, and in an instant she was staring at the glowering gray Borg vessel closing in on them.

  “Should I raise shields, sir?” Taitt’s voice quavered.

  “Not yet. I want to keep bringing people up until the last possible second.”

  She caught glimpses of several of the kids manning the bridge. They knew she was disobeying orders by staying even one second longer, and she felt that she was being tested on ten fronts.

  Taitt said, “Ten seconds.”

  “Stand by to raise shields and break orbit on my mark.”

  “Five seconds.”

  “Mark!”

  Before anyone could respond, the Borg ship fired on them. The starship shuddered and rocked, tipping to port.

  “Shields are down to seventy percent!” Taitt shouted.

  “Establish a frequency-shift firing pattern and return fire,” Beverly said, holding on to the back of a chair. She hoped she was getting the phraseology right. She’d only taken one seminar in emergency command procedures—good thing doctors had to have good memories.

  “Uh,” Taitt grumbled again, “right.”

  “Fire!” Beverly ordered.

  Lancets of energy bolted from the starship and pinned the Borg ship against the flat black expanse of space as the Enterprise crossed above it and passed it.

  “Direct hit!” Taitt called. Then the excitement dropped out of her tone as she added, “No damage.”

  “Helm!” Beverly barked. “Set course for the conduit, maximum speed.”

  The fellow handling the helm didn’t seem to have as much trouble as Taitt did with Tactical, so the ship vaulted into a response that Beverly swore she could feel come through her feet. Speed, speed, speed . . . They were heading at light-speed away from the people she really wanted to help.

  “Salazar,” she called, “how many people did we leave behind?”

  “Forty-seven, sir.”

  She turned to one side and saw on an auxiliary monitor the vision of the alien planet stripping away until there was nothing but blackness on the screen.

  And the innocent, untried, unweathered faces around her, wondering if they would have been abandoned too, if the situation had changed just slightly.


  We’re leaving them. Those are my orders. . . .

  Taitt’s voice was weak as she said, “The Borg aren’t following us, sir.”

  Bittersweet. The Borg ship wasn’t following them, so they were probably safe. But that meant the Borg were staying back there, around that planet.

  Back with the captain, the first and second officers, and the crew they’d had to leave behind in order to save the ship and follow orders.

  Orders, orders . . .

  “Another minute,” Beverly said, “and we could have had them all.”

  Will Riker felt the aloneness on the planet’s surface the same way he felt cold in winter. All over, to all horizons. Just cold.

  Worf stood behind him but wasn’t saying anything. Riker hit his comm badge. “Riker to any team

  leader.”

  “Lieutenant Powell here, sir,” a stiff professional voice replied.

  “Round up everyone who was left behind. Take cover and try to avoid any encounter with the Borg.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Somehow Riker had expected more, but he didn’t know why. There wasn’t really anything to say.

  “Riker out,” he said.

  There was only one choice of direction. Head to where Picard was last heard from. If he wasn’t there, resume the search for Data.

  What were his priorities now? To find the captain or to continue the search for Data? That was their primary purpose, to avoid the danger of handing over Data’s voluminous memory banks to a hostile power.

  He knew what the captain would say.

  Still, he had a feeling that to find one would be to find the other.

  And he knew the Borg had offhandedly killed thousands of human beings. This might turn out to be a search for the captain’s body.

  A grim curtain lowered over his mood. He had to blink to keep his vision from clouding with memories of past horrors, to keep a forward-looking lens on his concentration.

  This had happened before: the captain had been kidnapped by Borg. Riker couldn’t beat that memory down. He tried to tell himself that this was a new situation, with new Borg. He clung to the chance that these new, hideously emotional Borg were different and therefore made the situation different, but memories had him by the throat.

  Not just memories but experiences as well. The last time this happened, he’d ended up having to face down Jean-Luc Picard. A twisted, bastardized version, but still the captain.

  I don’t want to fight him again. This time I’ll have to kill him.

  Beating down a shudder, he turned to Worf and forced himself to speak, to give himself something to hear besides his own thoughts.

  “Even if Beverly gets back to Federation space, it’ll be days before Starfleet can get any ships out here. Until then we’re on our own.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Borg Hall

  CAPTAIN JEAN-LUC PICARD held himself still in the face of adversity and hoped his officers would take his prudent lead. He and Troi and La Forge stood surrounded by Borg entities, a swarm of pasty gray faces with eyes flickering between machine and life, clothed in the black body armor, tubes, and helmets that had become emblematic of heartless, vulgar violence.

  And Data stood nearby . . . but not the Data they had known.

  Crosis, their escaped prisoner, remained a pace or two behind Data.

  And Lore, the bizarre mirror image of Data, swaggering with too-human cockiness, waving his hands at his armored horde.

  “What do you think of my followers, Picard?” Lore said. “Impressive, aren’t they?”

  Picard held his tone in check, determined not to give Lore an ounce of satisfaction. He’d never thought the Borg could become even more threatening than they were originally. Before, they were like a colony of killer ants, using the strength of numbers and unified thoughts, rolling like a tidal wave over anything in their path.

  Now, adding to that threat was the possibility of killing emotions—killing pleasure.

  “I’m not particularly impressed,” Picard told Lore. “You’ve simply taught them to enjoy killing.”

  “You are wrong, Captain,” Data spoke up. “My brother and I serve a much higher purpose.”

  Picard almost winced at his use of the word “brother.” Whatever it had meant through all of time, these two were an aberration of it.

  He almost said that, but Troi moved up at his side and spoke. “Data . . . I can sense feelings in you.”

  Data’s yellow eyes flickered. “Yes,” he said. “My brother has made it possible.”

  Picard pushed forward. “He gave you the chip,” he snapped, the instant he realized what had happened. “The one Dr. Soong made for you!”

  Data might have responded honestly to the sudden question, but Lore never gave him the chance. He drowned out any communication between captain and second officer with a lofty fake laugh.

  “Oh, no, no,” he said. “I still have the emotional program my father designed. I wouldn’t want to give it back. It’s what has given me such a strong sense of family.”

  Family, Picard thought. Another distortion of a decent word. Lore doesn’t know the meaning of family.

  The captain fixed his attention on Data, studying, inspecting, looking for any hint of the source of these changes.

  Lore went on, trumpeting himself with words whose depth he couldn’t possibly perceive.

  “I developed an intense desire to be reunited with my dear brother,” he said. He gestured extravagantly at Data, like a carnival barker trying to draw a crowd’s attention.

  “Then you’re responsible,” Troi said, “for bringing him here.”

  “He came of his own accord,” Lore shot back. “All I had to do was lure the Enterprise into investigating those attacks we staged. Once the Borg told him about my plans, I knew Data would want to join me.”

  He gestured now at Crosis, who stood with mock passivity to one side.

  Fury roared in Picard’s mind, and he bit his lip to keep from lashing out. This wasn’t the moment—not yet. He hadn’t found out enough. He needed more.

  At his other side, La Forge spoke with surprise and disgust. “You mean you attacked those outposts, killed all those people, just to get Data here with you?”

  Picard turned to Data, without giving Lore a chance to stoke the fire in La Forge’s voice. “How did he do it, Data? What made you decide to come here?”

  “I am talking to you, Picard!” Lore barked. “I will tell you what you need to know.”

  “You’re controlling him,” Picard said, refusing to ask a question. “And you’ve corrupted the Borg.”

  Anger drained from the android’s face, and that twisted nasty smile came back. “You simply don’t understand,” Lore said. “You don’t grasp the enormity of what I’m doing.”

  Troi spoke again, her voice soft, yet somehow carrying through the huge hall. “Data said you intend to destroy the Federation.”

  Lore waved a hand like a weapon. “When my plan is realized, there will be no need for a Federation. People will be eager to join me.”

  “Somehow,” La Forge said, “I doubt that.”

  Lore spun to face him but managed to keep control over the rage boiling in his eyes. “I don’t blame you for your ignorance. You have no idea what has happened here, how I found my true calling . . . how the Borg found something to believe in.”

  “Believe.” Another of those words Lore didn’t really understand but was tossing about as though he’d founded a religion.

  The captain held still a moment, trying to move through this in deliberate stages and trying to keep control over the stages. There was something significant in Lore’s tossing all these potent words around. Words had never seemed dangerous before.

  “I’d like to learn about it,” he told Lore, “but I want Data to tell us.”

  Lore flared again and barked, “I told you that I will tell you what you need to know!”

  Sensing a chance to gain the upper hand, Picard firmly turned away fr
om him, minding his body language to give Lore a silent message. “How do you like that, Data? He won’t even let you talk.”

  “Do not try to drive a wedge between us, Captain,” Data said. “I am loyal to my brother.”

  Lore beamed, but Picard, refusing to back down, continued to gaze at Data.

  “You see, Picard?” Lore said. “He’s not your pawn anymore. I’ve helped him break free.” He gestured at the eerie crowd of gray-black Borg. “Just as I’ve helped them.”

  Puffed up now and enjoying being center stage, Lore moved through his horde, drawing as much attention from the Borg as from the Starfleet presences. He raised his voice—and now Picard was sure the show was for all the entities in this hall. Lore was still playing to an audience, still working to build a following.

  That meant there was room to push in the other direction. It meant that Lore hadn’t accomplished all he thought he could.

  It meant there was a chance to reverse the damage—or to push events in an entirely new direction.

  “Look at them,” Lore said, raising his voice, waving his arms. “Look at what I’ve helped them become. They’re no longer mindless automatons. They’re passionate! Alive and—”

  “Are you saying that you caused them to become individuals?” Troi interrupted.

  Good, Picard thought. Pick at him. Make him explain.

  “No,” Lore said. “You and your friends did that. All I did was clean up the mess you made when that Borg you befriended returned to his ship.”

  “Hugh interfaced with the others,” Data told them, “and transferred his sense of individuality to them. It almost destroyed them.”

  “Data,” Picard started forward again, “do you remember when Hugh was on the Enterprise? Do you remember what you were like then?”

  Lore stepped between them. “That doesn’t matter,” he snapped.

  “It does to me,” the captain said. “I want to know what’s happened to Data.”

  Fury seethed through Lore, and he was unsuccessful at controlling it.

  Pick, pick, pick—they would get to him. If they could get enough time—

  “What’s important is what I’ve done here!” Lore insisted. “I’ve found my calling, Picard. I know now why I was created. And no one can ever take that away from me.”