DESCENT Read online

  Data looked up at her in a most odd way, a way that sent a shiver down her arms. When he spoke again, his words threw Deanna’s glimmer of hope into the trash.

  “I do not believe it is guilt, Counselor,” he admitted. “I believe it is pleasure.”

  Chapter Six

  “RED ALERT! All hands to battle stations!”

  Riker turned away from Worf at the tactical station and snapped at the conn officer, “Lay in a course and engage at warp nine!”

  Crew members emerged from the lifts around the bridge and flew to their stations. Captain Picard entered from the ready room, and only that showed Riker how few seconds had gone by since the emergency erupted.

  Data appeared on the aft bridge and came forward to the Ops position. Riker ignored him and went straight to the captain.

  “We have a distress call from the New Berlin colony. They’re under attack.”

  Picard nodded at him coldly, stepped past him, and spoke to Data.

  “What’s our ETA?”

  Data tapped the control surface of his display panel. “At present speed, we will arrive in fifteen minutes, thirty seconds.”

  The captain gestured back to Worf. “Contact the Crazy Horse and the Agamemnon. Tell them to stand by in case we—”

  “Incoming message, Captain,” Worf broke in. “It’s the New Berlin colony.”

  Riker felt his muscles knot. Ready for another body count. He didn’t want to go through that again.

  And he didn’t want the captain to go through it.

  “They are canceling their distress call,” Worf said. He scowled at his equipment, then huffed in disapproval. “A Ferengi trading ship entered their system and someone panicked . . . again.”

  With a bitter sigh, Riker grumbled, “That’s the third time today. Conn, reduce speed to warp six and bring us back to our patrol route.”

  He would’ve waited for the captain to give the obvious order himself, but that would’ve been dangerous.

  Captain Picard was horn-mad, and they could all see it. He didn’t want to have to issue common orders, and it was Riker’s job to make sure he didn’t have to.

  Riker hoped, at least.

  The captain held his temper as though reining in a foaming horse. His voice had an underlying roar about it.

  “Mr. Worf, stand down from Red Alert. Acknowledge the signal from New Berlin and then transmit a copy of Starfleet’s recognition protocols, and tell them to read it this time.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Riker watched the captain escape into his ready room.

  They all did.

  Captain’s Log, Supplemental:

  We have been on patrol for seventeen hours, and there are still no reports of any further Borg activity. But tensions continue to run high on the colonies and outposts in this sector.

  Picard’s voice was brusque, his manner choppy, caged.

  Will Riker wasn’t even inside the ready room yet, but he could already hear—or maybe just sense—the captain making that log entry. Slow words, sluggish, half his mind on something else . . .

  He hesitated a moment, then buzzed.

  Seconds twisted away. Riker shifted back and forth and almost left.

  “Come,” the captain’s voice caught him just in time.

  And the first officer still almost didn’t go in, but now it was too late.

  The captain was sitting at his desk, staring at his private monitor. His hands were in his lap, and he seemed compressed with indignation.

  Riker tried to ignore the captain’s posture and handed him a padd Mark II portable access unit. “I thought you’d like to see this. It’s Geordi’s analysis of the subspace distortion the Borg used to escape.”

  His face unchanged, Picard studied the padd briefly, and Riker stole those seconds to glance at the private monitor.

  A close-up. Hugh’s face. The Borg they thought they were done with.

  “ ‘An artificially created energy conduit,’ ” Picard read off, and he slammed the padd onto his desk. “That could be anything.”

  Holding his shoulders straight and forcing himself not to shrug, Riker said, “We don’t have enough information at this point to—”

  “I don’t want excuses, Number One,” Picard barked. “I want answers!”

  Riker stiffened and fell silent, ready for anything. Ready to be the scapegoat, the whipping boy—whatever the captain needed.

  Because this wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for Jean-Luc Picard to have to endure this assault again, for him to have to be the center of Borg activity. This wasn’t the kind of man who should have to have his name in the history books for this kind of reason, and Riker resented what was happening.

  He stayed quiet and just watched.

  “Sorry,” the captain said. He shrank again from the bars in this cage and stared at the screen. “He was right here, Will . . . in this room. And I let him go

  .’’ Perplexed, Riker paused and sifted what had been happening, tried to imagine what that visit with Admiral Nechayev had been all about.

  “Pick any five starship captains,” Picard murmured. “Give them a chance to rid the Federation of a mortal threat. I would wager that all five would do it, even if it meant sacrificing the rights of one man.”

  Riker paced back a step or two. “I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I’ve never thought of you as just any starship captain. Sending Hugh back to the Borg was a very risky, very dangerous choice, but it was the moral thing to do.”

  As Picard glared at the face of Hugh on the screen, there was forgiveness in the set of the captain’s jaw, not for Hugh, but for himself.

  “It may turn out that the moral thing to do . . . was not the right thing to do.”

  A shudder ran down Riker’s spine. Those two words—“moral” and “right”—had always seemed to have the same meaning until now. Leave it to Jean-Luc Picard to find the fine line that separated them—and he really sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.

  “He was an individual, sir,” Riker attempted. “It would’ve been wrong to use him to kill his own people.”

  An instant after the words were out, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. The Borg had used Picard to kill his own people. Somehow in his effort to diffuse the guilt, Riker realized he’d simply aggravated a big wound.

  “Oh, I remember the arguments in favor of letting him go,” the captain said. “The moral and ethical reasons why it would be wrong. I made a reasoned and deliberate decision based on moral principles to send him back without the invasive program . . . and five hundred men, women, and children have died.”

  He paused, and there was more than musing melancholy in his posture. There was absorption of a horror deep in his mind’s core where the choices of command were made. His face, usually solemn and unreadable, for this moment was a page coming into brutal focus.

  “That’s a high price to pay,” he said, “just so I could feel good about making a moral decision.”

  Geordi La Forge noted a peculiar strained melancholy on the bridge as he strode out of the turbolift and looked one by one at the crew members here.

  The captain and Riker were missing. So was Data. Everybody else was hunched over a station, doing busywork.

  Their bodies were tense, tired. Muscles aching. He could see their blood throbbing as clearly as any medical scanner could. Maybe more clearly, because he could empathize with what he saw.

  He could tell they were just keeping themselves busy, keeping their hands on the equipment, waiting to see what stunning disaster lunged at them out of the darkness next.

  Tension was tiring. All of the crew members were on their own personal hairtriggers. What had happened to the captain was no secret. No one wanted it to happen again.

  And certainly they didn’t want to be the next victims. No one nursed any delusions that the ship couldn’t be taken, that they were too big or too strong, or that the Borg had read all about the ships called Enterprise and were running scared. Starfl
eet training was pretty thorough, and the attrition process didn’t leave much room for delusions.

  Keeping tight hold on his padd, Geordi drew a tense breath and wished for a nice healthy delusion as he moved toward Worf at the tactical station.

  “Hi,” he said quietly.

  Worf glanced at him with those burning eyes, ridged to constant irritation by his Klingon brow, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Have you seen Data?” Geordi asked.

  “How recently?”

  “I don’t know . . . since he left here, I guess.”

  “I have not seen him since then. I have been on duty.”

  “Yeah,” Geordi said. “He’s supposed to be on duty too. That’s what worries me.”

  “Incorrect,” the Klingon said. “He took himself off duty until his behavior could be stabilized.”

  “Oh, come on, Worf, was it really that bad?”

  “Yes. It was.”

  Geordi had thought he was making a joke, but it hadn’t worked. “I was hoping to get his opinion on this analysis of the ship the Borg used.”

  Worf grunted. “That is not what you want.”

  “Yes, it is.” Geordi held out the padd. “See?”

  “That”—the Klingon nodded toward the remote—“is your excuse to speak to Data.”

  “Oh? How do you know?”

  “It is my job to know who goes where and who speaks to whom.”

  “Oh,” Geordi said. “That means you’ve been keeping an eye on him, too, doesn’t it?”

  So they’d hit a common denominator.

  Geordi turned around, faced aft, leaned back on the tactical station, and lowered his voice even more.

  “Worf, what exactly happened to Data on Ohniaka? I mean, what changes were there?”

  “Have you read the report?”

  “Well, sure, but there was more to it, right? You just can’t get something like that into a report, and when I asked Data, he wouldn’t give me details.”

  “Then it is not my place to give them.”

  The Klingon faced forward and glared at the huge screen that dominated the bridge. His stubborn determination dropped between them and practically clanged.

  Geordi looked at him and wished he could just see him, without all the analytical claptrap. He loved engineering, but he wanted sometimes to just leave the mechanics behind and not look at everyone and everything through a spectral veil. This was one of the times.

  “Come on,” he nudged. “I’m worried about him.”

  Troubled and out of his realm, the Klingon shifted back and forth twice and glanced from the screen to Geordi three or four times, like a cornered animal who really wanted to run.

  “I am worried also,” he admitted finally.

  Geordi straightened. “Then tell me.”

  “Data was angry.”

  “I know that part.”

  Uneasy, Worf lowered his voice—and with that voice, it took some doing. He tried to be deadpan, but failed.

  “More than anger. Data was consumed by rage. I have seen him use his internal power, but never this way. He was not impassive this time. I found myself reacting to the condition of the Borg as Data assaulted it. He was not the Data we know. Something took him over.”

  “Do you mean literally?”

  “No, not literally. I mean he was consumed from within by emotion.”

  “That happens to everybody, though . . . right?”

  “It happens to all of us, but all of us are emotional creatures. We are used to dealing with such all-consuming feelings and diffusing them.”

  “Look, we ought to give Data a break. He’s wanted to get a taste of being human for a long time. So he got a little angry. We all get angry.”

  “Yes, we all get angry,” Worf said sharply. “ But Data was not just angry, Geordi. He was murderous.”

  That was as succinct a statement as Geordi could have requested. Worf wasn’t the type to toss around empty superlatives, and the Klingon’s body temperature remained steady.

  Other things changed, though. Little things that Geordi recognized. Telltale signs that something was wrong and that nobody really knew yet what to do about it.

  He sighed. “I guess I better find Data.”

  “Check on him, you mean,” Worf said.

  Geordi pushed himself up. “Yeah . . . I guess that’s what I mean.”

  He tapped his comm badge.

  “Computer,” he said, “locate Commander Data.”

  “Door,” Geordi said and didn’t even miss a step as the holodeck accommodated him by opening its big metal mouth.

  Once inside, he stopped short. He saw nothing but the black walls and floors with their unbroken arsenic-yellow squares.

  “Computer,” he snapped, “you said Commander Data was here. He’s not here.”

  “Commander Data is in Holodeck Two,” the computer voice responded. “This is Holodeck One.”

  Geordi shook his head and huffed at himself. “Stupid . . . but wasn’t he on this holodeck earlier today?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Well, I guess that’s an answer.”

  He spun on his heel and headed out, but at the last minute he stopped again.

  “Computer.”

  “Working.”

  “Did Commander Data save a program in this holodeck this morning?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Has it got a personal privacy lock on it?”

  “Negative.”

  “Let me have a look at it, then, will you?”

  “Processing.”

  The holodeck suddenly went completely black. An instant later a single hanging lamp popped on and glowed down onto a table littered with playing cards and chips.

  Geordi walked over to it. “He was playing poker?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. He plays poker with us all the time. Was he simulating characters to play with?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Any lock on them?”

  “Negative.”

  “Let me see them.”

  Suddenly three of the chairs were occupied.

  Geordi saw through the images as he did all holodeck images. No heartbeats, no heat generation, no pulse. The fabulous science here tried very hard to make these beings appear real, but Geordi, the Enterprise’s one blind crewman, could see right through them by using another science.

  The holodeck should have been just that to him—hollow. Nothing here should ever have succeeded in fooling him, drawing him into the scenario.

  But that had happened before. He’d come into this place where everything looked like a cartoon, and he’d allowed himself to be caught up in the people he met and the things he “saw.”

  That’s how I know I’m more human than machine, he realized as he stared at the three people around the table, and as he sank tentatively into the dealer’s empty seat.

  To his left was an elderly man with wild hair and sagging eyes. Across from him in a special supportive chair sat a small debilitated fellow with black hair and an infectious smile that showed up through Geordi’s VISOR as a brushstroke of welcome light.

  And to his right a beautiful seventeenth-century painting.

  No, that was a working simulation too—except that he was staring at Geordi, his expression of astonishment framed by a very long curly brown wig and a high white collar.

  The old man shoved some chips into the middle of the table, and looked up. “Mr. Data, I will raise you—oh. You’re not Mr. Data!” he blustered in a thick German accent. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Geordi. Who are . . . you? Wait a minute—you look familiar.”

  “I am Albert Einstein.”

  The simple statement almost knocked Geordi off his seat. With his mouth hanging open, he simply turned and pointed at the debilitated man with the accommodating smile.

  “What’s the matter with you, boy?” Einstein said. “That’s Dr. Stephen Hawking! Don’t you kno
w your own history?”

  “Well, I . . . Stephen Hawking . . . wow!”

  Now that he was getting the pattern, Geordi looked to his right again, at the man in the ruffled collar and tumbling wig.

  “You must be . . .”

  But the man from the past only stared at him in some kind of shock.

  “He is the man who invented science as we all know it,” Stephen Hawking buzzed through some kind of voice synthesizer. The words were very hard to discern.

  Geordi flinched at the sound, but the idea of getting a chance to listen to Stephen Hawking . . . Why hadn’t he thought of this program? What a school this could be!

  Stephen Hawking flopped his small hand in an attempt to make a gesture at the nobleman.

  “This is the man,” the twentieth-century phenomenon went on, “who explained the fundamental forces that run ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the universe. The science that holds up bridges and keeps planets in orbit.”

  He forced himself to turn, though he had very little muscular control over his neck and head, and his voice synthesizer stripped the grandeur from his statement.

  “This,” he finished, “is Isaac Newton.”

  “Oh!” Geordi blurted.

  “Thank you, Stephen,” the Englishman spoke. Then he offered Geordi a nodding bow. “Forgive me, young man. I have never seen a Negro before.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Geordi laughed. “Neither have I.”

  Newton pointed at the VISOR and asked, “Then that is not a religious decoration on your face?”

  “No. I’m blind. It’s a mechanism that analyzes the surroundings and carries the impulses to my brain. Were you gentlemen playing poker with Data?”

  “Obviously,” Newton said sharply. “Why else would three functioning men of science be shackled to this table?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. But I need your help. Why would he play poker with you when he could just come down to the lounge and play it with his friends? . . . God, what am I saying!” He thumped the side of his head with a finger. “Why play poker with these brains! What’s the matter with me?”

  The three scientists glanced at each other as if trying to figure out if that was a rhetorical question or if he really wanted them to deduce what was wrong with him. They probably could have.