DESCENT Read online

  To disguise the shudder of insecurity that rose in his voice, that none of the Borg but all of the humans recognized, Lore gestured around the hall full of those he called his followers.

  “Without me,” he said, “they would have perished. When I stumbled on the first ship, they were lost, disoriented. They had no idea how to function as individuals. They couldn’t even navigate their vessel. They had lost their sense of purpose.”

  He swung back again, his chin stiff in a forced smile.

  “I gave them their purpose,” he said. “And they gave me mine.”

  “You took advantage of their vulnerability,” Picard charged. “If you’d left them alone, they might have adapted to the change brought on by Hugh’s return. They could have determined their own future.”

  Data stepped closer to his brother, perhaps sensing that Lore was losing his control now that the adulterants, the humans, were here.

  “The Borg aspire to the perfection my brother and I represent as fully artificial life-forms,” Data said. “We are their future.”

  “The reign of biological life-forms is coming to an end,” Lore said theatrically. “You and those like you are obsolete, Picard. The Federation is already decaying, like the flesh on which it’s built.”

  “The sons of Soong,” Data said, “will usher in a new era.”

  “Data!” Geordi called. “You can’t willingly be going along with this!”

  The android turned to the one human being who had always thought of him as another human . . . and for an instant he hesitated. A trace, a hint, of doubt flashed across the cool features.

  “Answer him, brother,” Lore said, emphasizing the last word.

  It had an effect on Data—emotional or programmed, no one could tell.

  Lore made a motion, which Picard tried to see without turning his head. Had he imagined it, or was Lore manipulating Data on a low mechanical level?

  Data’s face changed. He now looked at La Forge as coldly as he could look at a wall.

  “Not just willingly,” Data said, “but with passion.”

  Picard shook his head and turned away. No help there.

  “Listen to me!” he called to the audience of Borg crowding the hall. “Lore offers you nothing that you can’t achieve for yourselves! You are free to decide your own future!”

  “Save your breath, Picard,” Lore said. “They are completely loyal to me. Remmis, come here.”

  One of the Borg stepped forward. Like all the others, he was indistinguishable from the general horde, though from individual to individual their life-support mechanisms were a little different. Some had targeting enhancers instead of eyes; some had weapons or tools instead of arms. This one had no artificial eyes, but its left arm was a manufacturing repair kit. A worker bee.

  Lore gestured casually. “Kill yourself.”

  Before Picard could even draw a breath to shout for this to stop, Remmis hooked his mechanical arm into the life-support tube that came out of his forehead and yanked it free. Sparks snapped around his forehead, and he dropped like so much scrap metal. He even clattered when he hit the floor.

  Picard bent forward, wanting to roll back the last few seconds, anticipate this horror. La Forge had a grip on his arm now and was holding him back.

  “Did you see that, Picard?” Lore taunted. “Would any of your crew do that for you?”

  The captain might have found an answer, along the lines of how he would never ask for such a callous, flagrant, wasteful sacrifice from his crew, and that was how he got loyalty, but his throat was knotted and his face was filling with heat. He forced himself to back down, to avoid giving Lore the satisfaction of anger or the pointlessness of response.

  “Take them, brother,” Lore ordered, with brazen casualness.

  Picard swung around as Data drew a Borg weapon and did as Lore had told him to do.

  Frustration gripped the captain by the spine. He could not control this moment. His crew would take his lead, so he would have to be cautious now. No wrong moves, no quick flinches.

  He stepped past the dead Remmis, whose body was still seeping fluid and the thin greenish smoke of Borg death. All he could do was submit before Data struck, before that weapon exploded, and anticipate a future when dangerous words would be the right ones.

  Scrubby vegetation on a rocky ridge wasn’t anybody’s idea of paradise, and it wasn’t helping Will Riker think positively about this whole situation.

  Beside him was the sound of Worf’s relentless tricorder.

  “Still no sign of the structure,” the Klingon reported. His deep voice betrayed simmering anger.

  Riker sighed. “With all this interference, it could be a hundred meters away and we wouldn’t know it. This could take hours.”

  He knew he sounded pained and less than inspiring.

  Images of the ship haunted him. Never in his life had he wanted so badly to be two places at once. It seemed unnatural for him to be here when the captain wasn’t on the bridge and the ship was in trouble. His job was up there somewhere.

  But if they failed here, the whole Federation would be compromised. Memories of the devastation from the first Borg attacks clawed their way into his feelings of guilt. The Federation wasn’t likely to get lucky twice and escape another assault intact. There might not be anything to rebuild if the Borg struck again, especially if Data was under Borg influence.

  Worf didn’t respond. The Klingon took a few steps off in another direction and worked with the tricorder. Instead of scanning the horizon, he was looking down now, at the ground.

  Pausing, Riker didn’t disturb him. The Klingon’s posture suggested maybe he’d thought of something new. Maybe was trying a different strategy. But what—

  “I am detecting a faint energy reading,” Worf said. There was a thread of hope in that voice now.

  Riker stumbled toward him through the unforgiving rocks and roots, and craned his neck for a look at the Klingon’s tricorder. “Residual thermal traces . . . Someone stopped here.

  “Decay rate indicates they were human,” Worf said, moving his tricorder laterally across the ground, and there was a hint of triumph in his voice.

  “They followed this path,” Riker said, and the triumph was in his own voice now.

  Sensing that they weren’t, after all, half a continent in the wrong direction, Riker felt the strength flood back into his exhausted legs. Now if only he could get there in time to participate in whatever was happening. In time to help.

  The victory dropped out of his voice, shoved down by desperation.

  “Come on, Worf,” he said. “Let’s move.”

  * * *

  “Data, listen to me.”

  The grim hallway ended in a sort of holding cell, not very formal, but very functional. There were Borg guards every hundred feet or so, not all visible, but all within earshot.

  Picard had noticed that.

  Once inside the briglike cell, he turned to an officer he had not so long ago trusted with his life, his ship.

  “It’s not too late to stop this,” he said.

  “Captain, you are in no position to stop anything,” Data said with a satisfied bluntness they didn’t recognize. “The Enterprise left orbit some time ago. You have been abandoned here.”

  Troi squared off with him as though to draw that weapon away from Picard. “What’s happened to you?”

  “Something that should have happened years ago.”

  As Picard gestured Troi to back away, La Forge turned to Data and lowered his voice. “Data,” the young engineer began, “we’ve served a long time together—”

  “I now realize that time was wasted,” Data interrupted.

  “I don’t accept that.” Picard stepped between them. “I’ve watched you become a fine officer, a fine—”

  “Human being?” Data’s eyes glowed with bitterness, resentment. “What a misguided quest that was. And you encouraged it. You encouraged me to try to become more like you. You convinced me I was inferior.”<
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  The captain shook his head. “That was never our intention.”

  “I now see that you were jealous of me.”

  “You’re angry,” Troi said.

  Data swung around to face her. “Is that what your empathic powers tell you?”

  But she didn’t back down, and she wouldn’t be baited. “Yes,” she admitted. “And it makes me think you might be malfunctioning in some way.”

  “I am not malfunctioning! I have evolved.”

  La Forge let the desperation come out in his tone. They might not get Data alone again. “Don’t you see what Lore has done to you?” he said. “He’s got you echoing all his perverse ideas. This is not you talking.”

  Data seemed to harden, if only on principle. “You are wrong, Geordi. I am in complete accord with my brother’s views. I am speaking for myself.”

  A touch of panic—Picard was sure he saw it. Data was cloaking it with anger, but the uncertainty was there. His inability to answer their questions was disturbing him.

  We can use that.

  “Data,” he interrupted, nudging his two crew members back a safe step or two, “how much do you remember about your life aboard the Enterprise?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Then you must realize that something has happened to you. The Data I know would not be a willing party to Lore’s plan.”

  “My life aboard the Enterprise was a waste,” Data insisted. “My quest to become human was misguided, an evolutionary step in the wrong direction.”

  “Data,” Troi pressed, “all I’m sensing from you is anger . . . hatred. Have you felt any other emotions?”

  “There are no other emotions.”

  Picard glanced at Troi, and she glanced back. A clue, finally. They’d stumbled on something important. Now—to use it.

  “What about love?” Troi asked. “Joy?”

  “Those are words without substance,” the android told her. “Love is nothing more than the absence of hate. Joy is the absence of fear.”

  And “brothers” are nothing more than machines created by the same builder, Picard thought. Yes, we’re on to something.

  “Just because you haven’t experienced certain emotions,” La Forge said with waning effort, “doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Lore is just feeding you the negative ones.”

  Data spun around toward him. “Counselor Troi herself told me that feelings are not positive or negative. It is how we act on them that becomes good or bad.”

  “Fine,” Picard said. “Then what about the things Lore is proposing? What about the lives that have already been lost?”

  “You do not understand.” Data looked at Picard. “In a quest such as ours, sacrifices must be made. It is regrettable. But the greater good must be served.” He swung again to Geordi. “Give me your VISOR.”

  La Forge stepped backward, surprised. “What?”

  Data raised the Borg weapon. “Give it to me or I will take it by force.”

  Picard tried to get between them, but the android’s posture and the way he was holding that weapon put La Forge in immediate danger. “Why are you doing this, Data?”

  The android took the VISOR from the face of the man who had been his only close friend, took it as coldly as he might have pulled a wrench off a shelf.

  Suddenly La Forge was blind, disoriented, and his white sightless eyes blinked as the definition of the world dropped away.

  Under most circumstances, this would have been only an inconvenience that could have been dealt with step by step, but here, now, with thousands of Borg serving almost as remotes for a mad android . . . Picard felt his innards shrink as he watched Data’s cold, cold glare.

  Data stepped out of the cell and the Borg guard activated the forcefield that would keep his crewmates, his friends, helpless and captive.

  “I am not your puppet anymore,” Data said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Bridge

  THE TURBOLIFT DOORS had been opening and closing almost without rest for five minutes. Officers were rushing onto the bridge, taking the posts they were trained for as the younger crew members returned to the posts they understood. Various levels of haste and tension—Beverly felt them all, one by one.

  And forty-seven heartbeats pumped in her mind. Forty-seven.

  Why hadn’t she defied the Borg for that extra minute? Why hadn’t she let the ship take a beating for one more minute?

  If— When Jean-Luc came back, he would know she had ducked out too soon. He would know she had done the one thing a really good commander should be able to avoid. She had followed orders. Flatly. Plainly.

  A true leader would have found another way. A real captain would have dared to bend those orders.

  Oh, she had done a perfectly good job telling the ship when to run. She could always say, “I followed my orders.”

  That was another way of saying, “It’s somebody else’s fault.”

  She tensed her bent legs until her feet tingled from lack of blood flow.

  Forty-seven.

  “Sir,” Taitt’s little voice interrupted her thoughts,

  “we’ve reached the coordinates of the conduit. The tachyon matrix is energized and ready to go.”

  Beverly pushed herself out of the command chair. She just didn’t feel worthy of sitting there right now.

  Taitt blinked down at her from the afterdeck. “And Lieutenant Barnaby has returned from the surface. He’ll be relieving me.”

  As the girl spoke, an older and more seasoned officer with bridge experience appeared behind her and waited to relieve her. At least he had the human experience not to just shove her out of the way. No one wanted to be shoved aside, especially from a job she had been managing to do. That would only have added humiliation to effort.

  “Right,” Beverly said. “Stand by to trigger the conduit.”

  Barnaby gave Taitt a chance to step aside, but nothing could erase the image of just being pushed out of the way. The girl’s face flushed, and she sidled toward the turbolift. A half hour ago the job had scared her silly. Now . . .

  “Taitt,” Beverly called, “I’d like you to stay on the bridge. I’ll need a science officer at the aft station.

  Pride flooded the girl’s face where an instant ago there had been only the awful misery of feeling useless.

  “Yes, sir,” Taitt squeaked, trying not to show what Beverly knew she was feeling. She held her breath, probably fighting to avoid letting loose with a thankyou that would’ve embarrassed them both, then made her way to the science station and hung on to it like the side of a life raft.

  Beverly turned, faced forward, and knew she had to grasp the side of her own salvation.

  “Helm,” she said, “set a course back to the planet.”

  Barnaby reacted—they all did.

  “Sir,” Barnaby said, “Captain Picard wanted us to—”

  “To warn Starfleet. Well, an emergency buoy can transmit a copy of our log entries to Starfleet just as easily as we can. I’m the acting captain, and I’m not leaving those forty-seven people stranded back there. Ensign Taitt, prepare a buoy and launch it when you’re ready.”

  “Aye, sir,” Taitt said, and she was ready a lot faster than anybody expected her to be. “Launching the buoy now, sir.”

  “Lieutenant, open the conduit.”

  Barnaby responded only by doing what she asked, working the magic that would tickle the tachyon matrix and open up that hole.

  On the forward viewer, the fabric of space withered and the conduit opened up like the mouth of a baby bird looking for food. The emergency beacon appeared on the lower screen and spun through the hole.

  Beverly didn’t watch until it was gone.

  She turned to Barnaby again. “Lieutenant, scan for any Borg ships between here and the planet.”

  He worked for a moment, then shrugged. “Sensors detect no vessels.”

  “What’s your assessment of the Borg ship’s battle capabilities?”

  Barnaby almost
laughed, but caught himself at the last second. “They nearly took out our shields with one blast. We didn’t even dent theirs.”

  “Then we have to find a way to get the away teams off the surface without engaging the Borg.”

  “We have to assume the ship that attacked us is still in orbit,” Taitt said.

  Beverly glanced at her. It was the first thing the girl had said that hadn’t been a response to a question or an order. Suddenly she realized that she was asking these people to follow an in-name-only captain to the brink, to face down an enemy that seemed invincible.

  She’d better let them hear her asking the right questions. 172

  “How long will we have before they can detect us and intercept, do you think?”

  “If their sensors function as well as ours, it could be as little as thirty seconds.”

  “And the planet’s EM field will keep the Borg from detecting us until we’ve dropped out of warp,” Barnaby added, “but even at full impulse it would still take us at least eighty seconds to get into transporter range.”

  Beverly found herself pacing and almost stopped herself, but then decided she had a right to pace. “Crusher to Salazar.”

  “Transporter room, Salazar here.”

  “How long will it take to get the rest of the crew off the surface?”

  “One minute should do it.”

  “We don’t have one minute. How much can you shave off that?”

  There was a pause that bothered everybody, then Salazar said, “If I can get a good lock on them quickly, I might be able to do it in forty-five or fifty seconds.”

  Beverly paced around, then raised her voice and spoke to the whole bridge complement. “We need to buy ourselves fifteen seconds. Is there any way we can use the planet as a . . . a barrier? To keep the Borg from realizing we’re in orbit?”

  Barnaby quickly said, “We can enter orbit while they’re on the far side of the planet.” Then he paused. “And if we delay dropping out of warp until the last possible instant, maybe we can gain a few more seconds.”

  Taitt turned to look at him—very differently from the way she’d looked at him when he was her superior and the officer who came to replace her. That insecurity was gone now. “If your calculations are even slightly off, we’ll hit the atmosphere.”