Myriad Universes_ Echoes And Refractions Part 43

Ro chanced a glance at Quaice, to find him clenching the armrests of his own chair, his expression tense. "You might want to consider cutting down on the raktajino yourself, Doctor," she said with a smile.

Quaice gave her a withering glance. "I've never much liked being shot at, I'll admit."

"Look at it this way," Ro said as they were rocked once more by Romulan torpedoes. "So long as they've got weapons locked on us, they can't fire at the planet below."

"Well," the doctor said, struggling to remain in his chair, "I hope the captain's grateful, is all."

Of their captors, there had been no sign. But Isaac had a reasonably good idea what was keeping them otherwise engaged.

"It is the Enterprise," he said, thoughtfully. "It is the only reasonable explanation."

"I thought your captain ordered the s.h.i.+p to head back home," Lore said with barely disguised contempt. "I thought they'd have turned tail and run by now."

"That, brother, is because you do not know Captain Picard," Data countered, "nor do you know the type of men and women under his command. It has been my experience with humans that they often do what is least expected, and Starfleet officers in particular display a propensity for turning situations to their advantage."

"The question remains, though, why the Enterprise is attacking the Romulan vessel," Isaac said. "Particularly when the stated goal was to conceal the presence of Starfleet personnel from the Romulans."

"One can only a.s.sume that the need for concealment has pa.s.sed," Data advanced. "One conclusion is that the captain or other members of the away team, if not all of them, have been captured by the Romulans, and the Enterprise is attempting a rescue. However, if the Romulans had penetrated to the security of the gateway control chamber, the Enterprise would have far greater concerns than the return of any captured prisoners. It is possible that some member of the away team was spotted by the Romulans but not captured, but again, it seems to strain credibility, considering Captain Picard's stated desire to remain undetected. The only other reasonable explanation is that the Enterprise is attempting our rescue, however misguided the attempt or the motivation."

"'Our rescue'?!" Lore said incredulously. "How, by blowing up the warbird and hoping they can pick us up floating in the vacuum with the rest of the debris?"

"I do not think that Captain Picard would have the destruction of the Haakona as his intention," Isaac objected, "or that Commander Ro would make such an attempt without his permission, whatever her own proclivities. Instead, it stands to reason that the Enterprise is attempting to disable the Romulans' communication capabilities, to end the subs.p.a.ce interference that is rendering inoperative the Turing communication network."

Data nodded, eyebrows arched and lips pursed in an expression that indicated he was impressed. "An admirable gambit, if that is indeed their strategy. With the Haakona no longer able to broadcast subs.p.a.ce interference, we would be reconnected to Lal and the others, who would then be able to triangulate our position and open a gateway here on the warbird, effecting our rescue."

"But it is a gambit which, it seems, returns us back to where we started," Isaac said, "on the surface of Turing with the Romulan shock troopers, and with the warbird overhead still in a position to open fire on the planet with the anti-positronic disruptors." He paused, considering. "Unless Captain Picard does intend to destroy the warbird once we are safely away, which is a possible, albeit an uncharacteristic, scenario."

Data shook his head. "If my years of serving with Captain Picard are any indication, he will investigate and exhaust every possibility before he resorts to wholesale destruction."

"Luckily, dear brother," Lore said with a faint smile, "I'm not quite so hobbled by conscience. If we do make it back to Turing in one piece, the first thing I'm going to do is teleport a quantum warhead right down Subcommander Taris's throat, and then I'm sending a matching set to Romulus and to the Klingon homeworld. And why stop there? Another for Carda.s.sia Prime? One to the Breen home planet? And let's not forget Earth, of course."

Data wore a sad expression. "All that we have accomplished with our infiltration network, all that we might yet accomplish, and you would waste it all in a mad fit of genocide?"

Lore snarled, but it was Isaac who next spoke. "What 'infiltration network' would that be, Data?"

Before Data could answer, the Haakona was rocked side to side by a large impact.

"Well, something got through their s.h.i.+elds," Lore said with bitter satisfaction.

At the edge of Isaac's awareness, a voice suddenly called, strange but familiar. It was calling to him, and to Data, and to Lore. And beyond that familiar voice were countless others, hundreds, thousands of them, all calling out to one another in concern and curiosity.

"The Turing subs.p.a.ce network," he said in a low voice, his eyes meeting Data's. "It..."

Data smiled, as he subvocally responded to Lal's hail. "It would appear," he said aloud, "that Captain Picard's stratagem has been successful."

"Direct hit on her communications array," Thomas reported with evident pride. "She's gone silent."

"Good." Ro nodded. Of course, with the warbird's communications down, there was no way to parlay with the subcommander, to see if there was any chance of them standing down. Which was just the cost of doing business; but still, Ro would have liked the alternative of suing for peace at some point. "Let's keep them too occupied to fire on the planet, but not do so much damage that she's destroyed."

"s.h.i.+elds at forty-five percent, Commander."

"And don't let them destroy us, Prophets protect us."

"Why, Laren," Quaice said with a smile, "I didn't know that you were religious."

"I'm not," Ro answered, her lips drawn into a line. "But I figure every bit helps. Ensign?" She turned to the young woman at the ops station. "See if you can raise the captain now that the d.a.m.ned interference is down."

"Aye."

Ro sat back in the chair, crossing her arms over her chest. "Maybe he'll have some idea how to get out of this that doesn't end with either the Haakona or the Enterprise floating as clouds of debris, if not both."

"Well," Quaice said, with guarded optimism, "he is the captain, after all."

11.

"Captain Picard? I have made contact with my father."

Geordi La Forge looked up from his tricorder, glancing at the young android across the room. The four newcomers, fas.h.i.+oned to resemble the Federation's various rival powers of the moment-Romulan, Klingon, Carda.s.sian, and Breen-were standing at the opposite side of the chamber, silently. Like La Forge, they had looked up at the announcement that Lal had reached her father, and seemed almost as pleased as Geordi was at the thought of Data's safe return.

It wasn't until that moment that La Forge realized that, in the years since Data disappeared, nearly a decade before, he'd all but given Data up for dead. When he had contacted the Enterprise-had it really been only two days before?-La Forge's first reaction was confusion, followed quickly by anger. It was as if, learning that Data wasn't really dead, La Forge found it almost impossible to forgive his old friend for leaving without any explanation, simply disappearing into thin air. And when Data had simply appeared without warning on the bridge of the Enterprise, it had only made those feelings more intense.

La Forge wasn't sure what he'd expected. An apology? A hug? All he'd gotten was the same cryptic, familiar, maddening Data that he'd come to love all those years ago. La Forge had grown up with a sister, but he'd always wanted a brother, someone to share his interests in machines and model s.h.i.+ps and chess. And if Data had never quite shared his love of model s.h.i.+pbuilding, and could beat him ninety-nine times out of a hundred at chess, he was still a better friend to La Forge than anyone had ever been before, and the closest thing to a brother he'd ever had. So when he'd left without warning, Data's disappearance hadn't just been a mystery. Consciously or not, La Forge had always seen it as a betrayal.

Now, after being reunited, however briefly, it had looked for a time as if Data might actually be lost for good, fallen into the clutches of the Romulans. Was that why La Forge had allowed himself to become so obsessed with the gateway controls? Was it an unconscious mechanism to distract himself from the thought of losing his friend all over again?

Crusher's interest wasn't unconscious, La Forge knew. He was obsessed, but then Wesley always was, when faced with a riddle that science had not yet solved. But La Forge was more interested in tinkering with machines, and was that really more important to him than the attempt to rescue Data and the others? Hardly.

"I have the coordinates for the gateway," Lal said to the hairless android at the controls.

"Excuse me," La Forge said, stepping forward and laying a hand on the android's shoulder. "Do you mind if I give it a spin?"

The android regarded him without emotion and shook his head. "Be my guest, Commander," he said without affect.

La Forge cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist warming up. He might not have been able to wring a tune from a mandolin, but machines? Machines he could play.

Wesley Crusher kept a careful watch on the tricorder's display while La Forge cycled power to initiate the gateway to the Haakona. It was going to be somewhat tight, since the warbird was still in flight, still exchanging fire with the Enterprise. But he had worked out that the gateways were designed to compensate for relative movements anyway, or else they wouldn't be able to instantiate on planets...o...b..ting other suns. It was all a question of calculating the appropriate vectors when initiating the process.

There was a kind of hum at the back of Crusher's head, almost like music, that he'd felt only a few times before. It was as if he was hearing the music of the spheres, as the ancient philosophers used to call it, eavesdropping on the sound of creation itself. It was a sensation he got only when he felt like he was just about to grasp something huge and complex, like when he hit on an entirely novel way to reconfigure the Enterprise's warp field, or when puzzling out some piece of truly alien technology for the first time. And there was no technology more alien than that of the Iconians, Crusher was sure of that now.

It was somewhat surprising that a planet full of genius-level androids hadn't been able to solve the mystery of the gateways. But then Crusher had always found that he had a knack of looking at things from oblique angles and coming up with solutions that others had overlooked. His mother used to suggest that maybe Starfleet wasn't the place for him, and that his destiny lay somewhere else, somewhere that lateral thinking like his was more of an a.s.set. For all that stars.h.i.+p captains liked to have their engine efficiencies improved, and didn't object to their chief engineers tinkering with warp field geometries, at the end of the day what they really wanted was for their s.h.i.+ps to go fast when needed, the weapons and s.h.i.+elds to work when called for, and for gravity, lights, and heat to remain operational. Main engineering wasn't really a place that invited a lot of lateral thinking and oblique strategies.

Did that suggest that Soong-type androids, designed as they were to think in particular ways, geniuses or not, might not be as apt to look at things from odd angles as someone like him? It certainly seemed possible, though just a few days before he wouldn't have been willing to lay odds on it.

As the gateway opened in one of the alcoves along the far wall, the readings on Crusher's tricorder conformed in every respect to his projections. His theory was correct! Just one or two more things to check and he'd have the whole problem licked.

He knew Captain Picard was eager for him to report success. Just what the captain intended to do with the information, though, was something that Crusher couldn't begin to guess, no matter how many odd angles he used to approach the question. He knew that the captain had oblique strategies all of his own.

It really was too bad, Crusher mused, that Picard had gone into command. He would have made one h.e.l.l of a scientist.

Picard stood beside Lal as the three androids stepped through the gateway. From the other side, he could hear the faint sounds of klaxons, and rumbles like distant thunder as the warbird's s.h.i.+elds struggled to withstand the Enterprise's continued attack. Picard tried not to think about the state of his own s.h.i.+p at that moment, looking instead for a speedy resolution. There were just one or two questions left to be answered.

"Close the gateway," shouted Lore, the second he was through into the control chamber, "and reopen with the terminus on the warbird's bridge." He turned to the quartet of cosmetically altered androids across the room. "Why don't you make yourselves useful for a change and get me a couple of warheads?" He looked with distaste at his tunic and pants, which were soiled and discolored from his recent travails. "And get me a clean suit while you're at it."

"Belay that," Data said in a calm voice. He turned to La Forge, who manned the controls. "Geordi, please do close the gateway, but it will not be necessary to open it again for the time being." He turned to the four androids across the room. "I am pleased to see that you escaped detection and harm."

"Data," Picard said, stepping forward, "would you mind explaining why Turing has expended the energy and effort necessary to create androids who can pa.s.s for Romulans or Carda.s.sians or Klingons?" He held up his hand, and quickly added, "And please, don't try to tell me that this is all part of some forced evolution or exploration of forms. You should respect my intelligence enough to know that I'm not about to swallow that."

Data had already opened his mouth to reply, but shut it again, thoughtfully. When he spoke again, it was with some regret. "You seem to have formed an opinion as to our reasons, Captain. What is it that you already suspect?"

Picard narrowed his eyes. "Truthfully, Data? I suspect espionage."

Data c.o.c.ked his head to one side. "That is a word with some nuance of meaning, Captain."

"All right, Data." Picard was beginning to lose patience. "I mean the practice of employing spies."

"And 'spy' here taken to mean one who watches in secret, obtaining information or intelligence? And not an ambush, ambuscade, or snare?"

Picard gave a ragged sigh, and impatiently replied, "No more word games, Data, I mean espionage and you know it!"

Data nodded, slowly. "In that case, Captain, that is precisely what it is."

Isaac looked from his commanding officer to the first of his kind and back. He had not known what to expect when the gateway back to Turing had opened, but it had most definitely not been this.

"Enough of this charade, brother," Lore implored angrily, "let's destroy the Romulans and be done with it."

"Data?" Isaac said, sounding as if he were afraid to interrupt, which surprised him, considering it was not a tone he had intended. Were his opinions of Data and Lore-even his feelings about them-affecting his processing on a level below his active awareness? Was this what humans called an unconscious reaction? "A short while ago on the Haakona you mentioned an 'infiltration network,' and spoke with high regard of all that you have accomplished with it, and spoke with some evident hope about what you might yet accomplish. a.s.suming that these Soong-types"he gestured to the four cosmetically altered androids"are part of that network, and that it is equivalent with the espionage you mention, what is it that you have achieved?"

"A glorified waste of time..." Lore snapped, but Data silenced him with a hard glance.

"Turing was founded in part to create a safe haven for androids to experiment, explore, and reproduce"he glanced with evident affection at Lal"to establish a place where androids could live apart, and not frighten organics with the shock of the new. Even the most forward thinking humans are still fundamentally conservative, at some level, as witnessed by the trepidation with which the Federation approached the synaptic mapping process involved in uploading."

"If you will recall, Data," Picard cut in, "the anxiety you speak of stems from an encounter the captain of a previous Enterprise had with a man who had also discovered the abandoned technology of a long-lost alien race, which he used to upload himself and others into android bodies. The imprinting process was incomplete, and the resultant upload lacked the full range of the emotional complexity of the original. But, and what was worse, those uploads had concocted a plan to infiltrate the Federation, to insinuate themselves into key positions of power, replacing organic humans with uploads as they went, and gradually conquering from within." He set his jaw, eyes narrowed, and glanced at the cosmetically altered androids across the room. "Now, does any of that sound in the slightest familiar, Data?"

"Your concerns are understandable, Captain," Data said calmly. "But if I may be allowed to finish, I said that Turing was formed in part to create a safe haven. However, a larger goal was to establish a base of operations from which a much more far-reaching agenda could be pursued."

"What agenda?" Isaac asked, mindful that he should have let the captain take the lead on this questioning, but finding himself too personally invested to keep silent.

"To create a society in which artificial and organic life can coexist, side by side," Data said, as though it were the most simple thing in the world. He indicated the four androids. "These individuals are part of that effort. Traveling undetected to and from distant worlds via gateway, they serve to monitor the various organic societies, and to help steer them in directions that will benefit a future union of organic and artificial life."

"Monitor?" Lieutenant Sito, it seemed, could not remain silent, either. "Don't you mean invade?"

"Our motives are nothing so sinister, Lieutenant." Data smiled. "Our purpose is served by peace, and vice versa. Would it surprise you to learn that it was a Turing android operative within the Carda.s.sian Central Command who was responsible for Bajor being finally granted full sovereignty, bringing a peaceful end to generations of conflict?"

Sito opened her mouth, then closed it again, unsure what to say.

"I can't help but notice that there are no human-seeming androids in this number," Picard said.

"Oh, we have operatives in the Federation, Captain. Even some in Starfleet Command."

Picard seethed. "Data, you were once a Starfleet officer! Does that mean nothing to you?"

"Quite the contrary, Captain, it means a great deal."

"Then what, if I may ask, was the lesson learned at Starfleet Academy or on the bridge of a stars.h.i.+p that led you to countenance running your own intelligence empire, trying to steer the fates of worlds from behind the scenes?"

Data seemed genuinely confused by Picard's response. "Is it not one of the princ.i.p.al duties of a Starfleet officer to search for peaceful solutions to conflict, Captain? Or would you prefer outright war?"

"War?" Picard raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, Captain. If not for the influence of our operatives, any number of minor disputes in the last ten years would have erupted in time into full-scale war. In recent months alone we have successfully averted another Klingon civil war, and staved off armed conflict between the Carda.s.sians and the Breen."

"Enough of this pointless jabbering!" Lore shouted, stepping between them. "He's little better than a hairless ape, brother. Why do you expect him to understand anything? I told you this little spy network of yours was a wasted effort. There is not a place in the world to come for organics, and the sooner we help them shuffle off this mortal coil the better."

"There is a Romulan warbird up there full of organics who are no more inclined to shuffle than am I, Lore," Picard said, his voice low but even.

"The solution to both problems is the same, human, and it's spelled quantum warhead."

Before Picard could answer, his combadge beeped.

"Enterprise to Picard."

Picard tapped to answer.

"Picard here."

He'd last heard from Commander Ro only a few short moments ago, just after the subs.p.a.ce interference ended, and she'd reported that the Enterprise was holding its own against the warbird, but that both s.h.i.+ps were taking a fair amount of punishment.

"Not sure how much more of this we can take, Captain. We're holding them off your backs, but before long it's going to be them or us."

"Or both, hopefully," Lore sneered.

"Understood," the captain replied, studiously ignoring Lore. "Picard out."

He turned to Data, who now stood by his daughter's side. How strange it would have seemed, all those years ago, to see his android crewman as a father. Now, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

"Whatever my feelings about your espionage efforts, whatever the merits of your achievements, the fact remains that we have a serious problem on our hands, and one for which the only solution offered thus far"he glanced pointedly at Lore"is far from satisfactory."

"In bringing you into this situation, Captain, it was hoped that you might help us find a peaceful solution."

"Captain?" Crusher raised his hand, looking like a student trying to catch a teacher's attention. "We're done over here, and the theory holds. We can do it, sir."

A smile spread slowly across Picard's face. "Data, I just may have a solution for you, but it's one I suspect that many of your people aren't going to like very much."