THE GREAT WARRIOR prowled his technology’s ramparts, slowly gaining a foothold. He smelled battle. He tasted the raw meat of challenge upon his tongue like blood and ripped flesh. He heard the howl in his mind, the song of warriors shrieking through his instincts, and he couldn’t abide the price of peace. He knew, deep in his soul, that there would be trouble long before there was peace, and every fiber of his being prepared for it now, lest he be surprised later.
“Worf.”
Only great effort blocked the growl of response and replaced it with a civilized word. “Yes?”
“The captain’ll want a report when he gets back up here.”
Worf turned to the supple feminine body and the storybook face over it. She looked like a girl who was dressed as a boy. A girl from the stories his adoptive human parents once told him, stories that never satisfied his hunger for adventure. Very young was he when his Starfleet parents gave up telling him stories of girls who dressed as boys to fool the churchgoers and replaced them with meatier tales by Bram Stoker, Melville, Dumas, Stervasney, and Kryo to satisfy their rare son. Those he could chew. Those made him howl.
“He will not be happy with what we have to say, Tasha,” he told her, quieting his thunderous voice as they stood together on the upper deck, buffered from the bridge by the tactical station a few steps forward.
“I know,” she agreed. Beneath the lemon cuff of her hair, clear gray eyes kinked at the prospect of facing Picard. “I’ve been doing a study and you’re right. That thing’s working a pattern all right, but the pattern does have some random movements in it. It must be designed to be unpredictable.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” was his husky bass agreement. “It’s working out a search that’s deliberately hard to evade. It gives us less than a fifty percent chance of escape.”
“That’s a more-than-fifty percent chance of getting caught.” Tasha bit her lip and took the whole problem personally. “And that’s only our certainty level. The actual odds could be a lot drearier. Have you been getting the same results? Is it doing what I think it’s doing?”
“If you mean do I see the pattern closing in,” Worf said with ominous certainty, “yes. Our odds are dropping with every minute we wait to take action. They won’t get better. They’ll just get worse. The cage is tightening.”
Tasha struck off a few steps of useless pacing, a pitiful echo of the huge cage that was closing around the ship. “What if that thing gets an adrenaline surge or something and bites down harder than it did before? Even if we get shields up to power, we might not be able to take it. At least, not like we are now. Not with shields taxed to protect the whole ship, I mean.”
Worf’s large brown face pivoted up from the small monitor he’d been glaring at. From beneath his Klinzhai skull and the two downturned lances of his eyebrows, his eyes bored through her. “You’re not going to suggest—”
She chewed her lip for a few beats, but her eyes showed none of the vacillation she felt. She shifted from one foot to the other, then, as if braced, to both feet. At her sides, small fists knotted.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Oh, yes I am.”
“Do you have the slightest perception of the danger of your proposal, Lieutenant Yar?”
Tasha took refuge in standing at attention as Picard paced around her. Around them the glockenspiel of bridge noise provided little respite. She drew in a long breath and tried not to feel too small as she stood beside Worf. It took all her restraint to keep from snatching a fortifying glance at the Klingon before she could begin.
“Yes, sir. I do. But I feel it’s—” She stopped, gulping back her voice, as Picard suddenly turned and coiled his lariat of dare around her. She couldn’t talk while he was glowering at her like that.
“Let’s hear it,” he snapped, as though he didn’t know what her problem was at all.
She refused to flinch, but her stomach shrank anyway. “Yes, sir. We’ve—that is, I’ve been calculating—”
“Never mind the blasted calculations and give me the bottom line.”
“As the ship is, I put our odds for escape at less than fifty percent and shrinking. I’ve made an analysis of the last attack and it looks like the thing attacked only the high-energy portions of the ship. The warp engine chambers, the high-gain condensers on the weaponry, the sensors, and the shields.”
“Your point, please?”
“Um . . . is that the saucer section by itself may not attract the thing’s attention.”
Picard’s glare was molasses, but somewhere in it Tasha was sure she saw a tiny flicker of hope that she could walk away with her head and at least one arm.
“Separate the ship’s hulls?” he murmured.
“That’s . . . my suggestion, Captain.”
“Realizing, of course, that would leave the saucer section with only rudimentary shielding and no appreciable weaponry if the stardrive section were to be destroyed. You do add that into your equation, do you not, Lieutenant?”
Tasha actually broke attention and turned toward him. “The saucer section’s chances of sneaking away on very low impulse power go up to almost ninety percent, sir, especially if we run some power through the stardrive section and distract the thing.”
“Not counting any unknown variables.”
She backed into attention again and focused her eyes on the bulkhead over the main viewer. “Correct, sir. But also, if stardrive doesn’t have to put out a shield envelope around the entire saucer section too, we’ll be able to pump more power into our shields and maybe withstand another attack. Long enough to fight it, I mean, sir.”
Picard also turned, but to eye the glowing, pulsing, fuming, flat wall of electrokinetic power that searched for them in the upper range of the screen. “And stardrive’s chances of escape in your scenario?”
Tasha now took that glance from Worf, and held it like a lifeline. “Less . . . than eighteen percent, sir.”
Jean-Luc Picard circled his two personal hotheads, came around behind them, saw their shoulders twitch, one set narrow and braced by the gold tabard, the other set broad and tall, making a field of black-over-red. He came around starboard of them again and stopped in front of Worf, with Tasha blocked from his view. Before them the great wide viewscreen spread, holding in its starfield the glaring enemy. The silence mutilated their nerves, the ticking clock of the entity’s encroachment, and yet there was strength in the captain’s voice when at last he spoke.
“I’ll take those odds. Get Riker up here.”
“Report, Mr. Data.”
Picard hadn’t told them his plans yet. Riker now stood near him as Data and Geordi LaForge squared off before them on the bridge.
Riker hovered nearby, acutely aware of Deanna Troi’s absence. Was he just being too sensitive or was Data making a point of not looking at him?
Am I imagining it?
“From its actions and its capabilities—lightspeed, for instance,” Data began, “I shall risk concluding that it was indeed constructed and couldn’t possibly have evolved naturally. It possesses a rudimentary intelligence, reacting to everything on a basic, simple set of instructions, rather like an insect. When a praying mantis eats its own mate, for example, sir, it is simply doing what instinct tells it to do, without any concept of rightness or wrongness.”
Picard rubbed his palms against his thighs and resisted the urge to pace. “You’re telling me it’s the galaxy’s biggest bug.”
Data cocked his head in a semblance of nodding, but he wasn’t ready to commit to that. “Essentially.”
“Which leaves out reasoning with it,” Riker offered.
“Correct, sir,” Data said, “but if we can interface with it somehow on its own level, I may be able to effect changes in that simple programming enough to fake it out—” He caught it fast, and glanced at Riker. “Enough to alter its actions.”
Data’s self-consciousness disappeared as the turbolift opened and emitted Troi, with Dr. Crusher hovering after her, obviously unwilling to let the counselor out of her sight.
“Captain!” Troi blurted. Immediately she drew back, collected herself, and plainly announced, “Sir, they want something from us.”
Picard looked at her dubiously. “I beg your pardon? Have you been in contact with it again?”
“You could say that,” Crusher said, eyeing Troi. “For a minute there, thought we were going to lose her.”
“Indeed. Are you all right, Counselor?”
“Captain, they want something,” Troi pushed on, “something we can provide for them, or at least something they think we can provide.”
At the center of a brewing storm, Picard turned to accuse Data. “Well, Data? That’s certainly not the wrinkle we expected to develop, given your assessment.”
Data’s finely wrought lips slid open on nothing for a moment. “Sir, that cannot be accurate. All evidence suggests that the hostile is not capable of consciously wanting something from us. It has the intelligence of an insect on all response levels. It responds automatically to stimuli. Its reactions do not involve thought as we know it, but only stimulus and response.”
Picard wagged a finger toward Troi and said, “But the counselor tells us otherwise, while you”—the finger swung full about—“tell us it’s not attacking out of malice. Something in its very simple programming triggers its actions.”
“Yes, sir,” Data was glad to agree. “Our weapons attracted and agitated it.”
“We do have to realize that there may be a difference between the hostile and the minds I am sensing, sir,” Troi pointed out.
“But in any case,” Riker pointed out, “we have to deal with it. We can’t reason with it or frighten it, and there’s only a low chance of deceiving it. But the advantage is that we may be able to figure out its programming, as Data suggested.”
“But not,” Picard pressed, “if it’s rational.” He placed his hands upon the bridge horseshoe rail and gazed up meaningfully at Deanna Troi. “If it’s rational, we may find ourselves impaled on the horns of Mr. Data’s logic.”
Data stepped down to the main deck and stood beside his chair at the Ops station as though to draw strength from a companion. “I cannot decipher its program by its actions alone, sir. There would have to be some form of communication or interface. In deference to Counselor Troi, I suggest that though it is programmed, it is also fundamentally alive. It does sustain itself with a basic survival drive.”
“If we can figure out that programming,” Picard followed, “we can thwart it much as we would draw a moth into a trap with a bright light.”
Geordi chose this moment to step past him and take his post at Conn, muttering, “We’re gonna need one sucker of a butterfly net.”
“There is a danger, sir,” Data went on, “in attracting its attention. We might inadvertently get its Irish up and lay an egg.”
Picard had already started to comment, but instead he glowered at the android for a moment. “Yes, I’d already surmised that. Thank you. Mr. Riker—”
“Sir?”
“Prepare to separate the modules.”
Riker jolted around. “Sir?”
“You heard me, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir, but . . . ”
“Do you have a question?”
Riker straightened and changed his tone. “Yes, I do, sir. Saucer separation is ideally only for situations when we’ll be going into battle and can leave the saucer far behind, well out of the danger zone. If we separate in this situation, they’ll be completely helpless!”
“Interesting way to put a question.” Picard eyed him foxily. “This isn’t the time to get cold feet about this ship’s capabilities. Lieutenant Yar, recount your statistics for the first officer.”
Yar stood straight behind tactical, her cheeks flushed. “Aye, sir. We calculate only a fifty-fifty chance for the whole ship to escape, but if we separate and the battle hull distracts the thing, the saucer section may have as high as ninety percent chance of escape.”
“And the battle hull?”
She fidgeted. “About seventeen percent.”
A vertical crease appeared over the bridge of Riker’s nose; he felt the tightness of his expression as he glared at her, saw a film of sweat break out on her face, though she withstood the force of his glare. He felt the tickle of a single lock of his dark brown hair, like an irritating thread over his left eye. His mind echoed Yar’s words, the spectacle they would bring. With them, he felt again all the implications, all the reasoning, all the trouble of having a ship that could do what this ship could do. All the problems of a battle-ready vessel that was also supposed to serve as home and hearth for families, and how awkwardly the two really went together. A battleship is supposed to plunge forward into adversity, a colony vessel to run from it. Both were honorable answers, but what happens when both are the same ship? And when one of them isn’t fast enough to run away?
This Enterprise had only been separated once before, and that wasn’t even a shakedown test. And he himself hadn’t even been on board when it happened. He’d heard about it. An insane move, at full warp speed, only the captain’s prerogative. Not one Riker felt he would have chosen, but he wasn’t Jean-Luc Picard, either. In his mind he suddenly envisioned the starship breaking into two parts at lightspeed, imagined the stardrive section shooting on by as the saucer section abruptly fell out of the warp envelope and crammed down to sublight, an effect that must have thrown every one of its passengers to the deck.
Passengers . . . damn this straddling.
The captain’s words rang out. “All hands, prepare to transfer command to the battle bridge.”
Picard evidently wasn’t interested in opinions on the subject. There would be no group decision this time, Riker saw. If he were captain, there never would be. Not even about whether or not the captain should participate in dangerous away missions. Not even that. But, as he told himself again, again, again—he wasn’t Jean-Luc Picard, wasn’t the man who now scanned the bridge crew and diplomatically said, “I’ll need a volunteer to command the saucer section in this crisis.”
Riker wasn’t about to speak up. He clamped his lips and waited for someone else to volunteer. Tasha opened her mouth, then closed it, and seemed to hope the captain didn’t see. Worf never so much as considered the offer, that much was clear on his swarthy face. Data started to turn from his position at Ops, but thought again and swallowed his unspoken response. Geordi slunk down in his chair to the point of invisibility.
On the upper deck, Beverly Crusher and Deanna Troi stood like mannequins, not daring to rupture the captain’s carefully phrased offer or the reactions it would bring. Troi stood especially still. She felt the quandary of each person here as the captain’s request flowed into each mind, stirred their consciences, and flowed out again.
Picard turned in place, touching each of them with his gaze. He took this unlikely moment to shake his head almost sentimentally. “I’m very proud of every one of you,” he said.
At bridge center, William Riker beamed at them, proud of the stock he had behind him.
Picard touched the intercom on his command chair. “Engineering, this is Picard. Chief Engineer Argyle, report to the bridge to take command of the saucer module.”
“Argyle here. Did I hear you right, Captain?”
“You did. Get up here, and bring an adjunct bridge crew with you. We’re going to take some action.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be right there, sir.”
The captain turned forward now without the slightest pause. “Mr. Riker, you may begin.”
His stomach churning so hard that he actually bent forward—he knew that Deanna saw the change if no one else did Riker faced the helm and forced out words that bothered him. A lot.
“Mr. Data, activate the battle bridge power junctions so it’s ready when we get there. All hands, prepare to adjourn to the battle bridge. Go to yellow alert. Secure for saucer separation.”
The mandolin jangles of starship noise jumped to life on the compact and utilitarian battle bridge. This was a darker place, in some ways a more private place, a place with its mind on its work. The viewscreen here was markedly smaller, as though to demand more focused attention.
Enterprise’s command crew bolted from the turbolift and settled into their respective places. Tasha and Worf to the tactical and science stations, LaForge to the helm, Data to Ops, the captain to the command center, Riker to the place of all first officers—to the right and slightly behind the captain’s shoulder. There was something about that place. Even when a first officer was somewhere else, he was still always right here. And above them, far above, the vast saucer section would soon break away from its sustaining power source, leaving the stardrive section to its little seventeen percent chance of survival and the gratification of knowing what only self-sacrifice can provide to the human soul.
Everyone was aware of LaForge’s fingers moving across his panel. Beside him, Data slid into his seat and fed in the corresponding internal adjustments—thrust to get the two modules away from each other as they hung here at full stop, careful limitation of energy surge, just in case the entity could pick up on their move, and myriad other tiny calculations required in what the naked eye saw as a simple maneuver. But this wasn’t like pulling apart a child’s toy. A million circuitry signals would have to be rerouted, and the energy to feed them would have to be ready. All the while, the creature outside moved along their starfield, glowing and snapping, hot on the trail of what it had so recently tasted.
“On my mark,” Riker said, knowing perfectly well they could do it without him. In the corner of his eye he saw the cool back of Data’s neck, the muscles working there as Data pegged down to calculating this tricky maneuver, saw the efficiency of android fingers, and felt suddenly crude. “All systems at nominal. Energy feed at fifteen percent, allowing for a twenty percent surge on separation. Flight shields only, stardrive aft thrust at point-zero five sublight. All sections comply clearance of turbo-lifts and maintenance shafts.”
The bridge lift opened. Riker’s concentration shattered.
“Deanna, what are you doing here?” He actually stepped away from the captain toward the lift, so driven was he to ask this, to ask why she would expose herself to so puny a chance of living beyond today. But he saw it in her almond eyes as she met his scolding tone unyieldingly, and he felt it in the emotions she flung at him in the next few seconds. He drew up short, canceling what he was about to say—whatever it was.
Even if he had spoken, the words would have been battered aside as Picard jammed his way in front of Riker. “Counselor Troi, damn it, you were ordered to remain with the saucer section. Explain yourself.”
She had been completely ready for this, it seemed, for she remained the quintessence of poise. “Sir, I’m needed here. If there’s any chance of communication with those beings, I am the only person who can provide it. I’d like to volunteer to remain here.”
“Yes,” Picard rasped. “And I notice you waited until the lifts were shut down rather than volunteering while we were still topside.” He pointed at her and ferociously said, “I’ll discuss this with you later. Providing there is a later for us.”
Troi let her shoulders settle, and breathed, “Yes, sir.” Her legs ached with the tension and now the relief of knowing she would stay and bear this out.
Perhaps she could evade the captain, but not Riker. Her gaze caught his, and he had that look on his face, that look with all the levels going back through it, back and back to the core of his being, and she could see all the levels as though looking into an infinity mirror.
“Mr. Riker, we don’t have all day.”
“No, sir, I know that. Mr. LaForge, Mr. Data. Effect saucer separation—now.”
Every breath held. Every spine stiffened. A subtle hum of power came up from beneath them, up from the caverns of Enterprise’s gigantic power factory to the interlocking mechanisms in her neck. With a dissonant grind, the ship pulled herself apart. No level of mechanical perfection would ever diminish the power of that dividing moment, no matter how faint, no matter how insulated. They either heard it or thought they heard it—a husky clunk-chunk as couplings released, grippers let go like great claws, their pads sucking back from the ship’s yoke with a rubbery reluctance, pins and bolts, lashes and hasps came loose from their harnesses, and all the little pins, which had moments ago held the intricate circuitry that ran the ship, retracted. As though severed by the ax of a great woodsman, the ship became two. The saucer section, with all its families, was suddenly cut adrift.
On the battle bridge, Picard and his command crew watched the stardrive section back slowly away. They seldom got this view of their starship—or even part of her. The saucer section was a wide plate with tapered edges, her frosty whiteness everywhere reflecting the rings of light from rectangular windows and energy-release points. Lights everywhere, like a glittering foil Christmas tree. A kind of pain cut through Captain Picard. He watched as the saucer’s impulse engines suddenly came to life and glowed a bright silvery blue. Starship captains were supposed to be decisive. Yet their decisions were like raw surgery to him. Why must there be such things in the universe? Why must there be snakes in the water?
Riker watched the saucer section drift away, mesmerized. Hmm. Wasn’t so bad. Let’s hope everything else goes that well. When he could pull his attention away from the sheer beauty of the saucer, he looked at the captain.
If he’d ever seen Jean-Luc Picard vacillate, now was that time. The captain looked as though he might suddenly call that disk back into place, gather all his charges beneath his robe. For several seconds Riker expected to have to give that order, even figured out what words he would use to keep the captain from looking too foolish.
But Picard said nothing. In silence he bore out the courage of his conviction.
“All secure,” LaForge reported. “Free to maneuver, sir.”
“Acknowledged,” Picard murmured. The taste of commitment. “Maintain status. Send a low-band communique to Mr. Argyle. Tell him to maneuver behind that small asteroid belt on the other side of the gas giant. It may mask their escape.”
“Aye, sir,” Worf said. “Dispatching.”
They watched in silence as the saucer section’s impulse drive flared for those few moments, then faded back, providing the huge disk with just enough thrust to coast toward the dangerous parameters of the entity’s shrinking cage. For Riker especially, this terrible moment had its profundities. There were many kinds of civilizations that would never have provided him the chance to die here today, at least in a place of his own choice. The beauty of technology awed him. It was the freedom to build what floated outward before them, the freedom to strike toward greater goals and more profitable accomplishments, to have the resources to use the wealth of their healthy society to create marvels like the one he’d just seen, and it was the freedom to die in space if that was the turn of the day.
He glanced once again at Captain Picard, and yes, it was there too. Awe. The captain didn’t seem afraid. More than anything, he looked a bit miffed at the entity for making him break his ship in two.
Or is it something else? Riker wondered. I know him so little.
Their trance was broken as Picard turned to Troi and bluntly asked, “Getting anything at all?”
The black curls of her hair made her face seem pale, the dark eyes set there like onyx chunks. “Nothing yet, sir.”
“Worf, any changes in its energy pattern?”
Worf’s guttural response carried a distinct impatience. “Only the same flux and shift it’s been doing all this time, sir.”
“Lieutenant Yar, you keep an eye on the locations of the saucer and that thing. I want to know if they’re about to run afoul of each other, and I want to know ahead of time.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and instantly bent over her glossy board.
“On second thought, best we not wait. Mr. Riker, let’s make a noise in the darkness.”
Riker nodded, never mind that it was a silly gesture. His throat was dry and he didn’t want to speak up until he’d swallowed a few times. Then he tapped the command intercom and said, “Riker to engineering. Do we have warp power?”
Engineer MacDougal spoke up so quickly she might as well have been on the battle bridge with him. “Stardrive is still down, sir, but we should have it back on line soon. It was an electrical burnout and not a matter of power generation.”
“I’m not asking for warp drive yet,” Riker said, watching Picard to see if this was what the captain had in mind. “I just need a flush of power through the tubes. Say, ten percent. Enough to keep its attention off the saucer until they’re out of the area. Be ready to shut down immediately so we can hide again too.”
“I understand what you need, Mr. Riker, but warp power isn’t that easy to control. There has to be a grace period on either side of the flush.”
Riker glanced self-consciously at Picard, who was watching him, and acknowledged, “Whatever works. And whenever you’re ready. Riker out.”
Now they would make a noise. They would flip a coin in the dark warehouse and hope its tiny ring could be heard but not found.
Up from the bowels of the engineering section, deep within the core matter/antimatter reactors that made a starship what it was, came a surge of raw power. Even that tiny surge, that ten percent, could be felt.
Then there was a change on the screen. The crackling infrared diffraction image of their pursuer suddenly paused in its search across the bottom of the viewscreen, and made a deliberate turn in their direction.
“It’s coming after us,” Yar reported. She gripped the edge of her panel, refusing to look up at the screen. Instead she watched the two target points, starship and hostile, close toward one another. Her voice quavered. “Direct line.”
“Point-three-zero sublight, helm,” Riker said, gripping the headrest of LaForge’s chair, “heading, two-two-four mark one-five.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Faster, LaForge.”
“Aye, sir, executing.”
“Lieutenant, is it following?” the captain asked, not turning.
Yar nodded, even though he wasn’t watching her. “Aye, sir. It is.”
“Speed?”
“Point-four sublight.”
“All right . . . ” Picard didn’t sit down in the command chair despite his movement toward it. “Let’s cast the pearls and see if the swine follows. Lieutenant LaForge, increase to fifty percent sublight.”
“Point-five, aye.”
The beheaded stardrive section, its energy-rimmed nacelles now its most prominent feature, slid around on an imaginary rail and cut diametrically across the entity’s search pattern, exactly opposite to the heading of the saucer section, away from the swirling gas giant, away from the tiny belt of asteroids that would someday pull together into a new planet and circle the proud little sun of this system.
“Captain,” Worf said, breaking the concentration, “MacDougal reports we now have sufficient power for shields, but not stardrive and not much for weapons. She estimates just a few minutes for those.”
Picard nodded without looking.
“I think it’s working, sir,” Riker told him, his voice so low that it hurt his throat. He mentally ticked off the distance between stardrive and the saucer, and the time needed until the saucer section could be considered safe. “Good thinking, Captain.”
“Sir!” Tasha rasped, sudden horror in her voice. “It’s—”
“I see it. Full about. Power up the shields! Get that damned thing’s attention!”
“Powering up,” Tasha said instantly. “Battle shields at full.”
No matter how careful the plan, no matter the amount of hardware, the high-tech physics, the level of mathematics and detailed analysis—no matter any of that, mankind had never been able to second-guess, sideswipe, or overcome plain old bad luck. Who could know how long the thing had been roaming the galaxy, doing what it was doing today? There was no way to know what habits it had developed, what preferences, what impulses it had learned to follow. And who could know what it spotted?
A glint of light off the saucer’s hull . . . a tiny leak of subatomic particles from the impulse fusion reactor . . . a high-frequency output from maintenance? These were things that would be completely ignored in the daily running of a starship. But somehow, something told the menace that this was the likeliest source of dinner. Its bug brain got stuck on the idea of that target instead of this one, and so it turned on the saucer.
Picard spun to Worf. “Anything?”
“No change, sir,” the Klingon said clearly and fiercely. “We’re putting out twenty times the energy being emitted from the saucer section right now, but it doesn’t seem impressed.”
“Make a tight pass. We’ve got to draw it off.”
Geordi LaForge fought to keep his hands from shaking on the controls at the idea of sweeping by that mass of ugly. What he saw with his enhanced vision was so vicious a knot of power that he avoided looking at the screen. He would fly on instruments; he would do as ordered. He would push the ship past that nightmare and swing around it on the end of an invisible rope.
Too bad this ship didn’t have a chicken switch.
The ship swung through space, doubling back toward the crackling energy field of its enemy. Now the saucer section was dominant in the viewscreen, and between them and it. A wall of blinding, snapping electrical tongues, a terrible prism to look through.
LaForge increased speed without being told. He knew what he had to do. Give that firecracker a taste of raw antimatter.
For one self-indulgent moment, he looked toward Data. The android was deceptively impassive, a human form wrapped in infrared, a man-figure of hot and cool places, all moving inside a glow. As nothing mechanical could, Data felt the gaze and returned it. He responded only with a significant lifting of his straight brows. Together, at least. Like soldiers should die if they must die at all.
Behind them, Riker held the helm chair more tightly than he meant to. Now the screen before them was ablaze with the closeness. If luck went with them, they’d be in big trouble damned soon. A spear of anger pierced him when he saw the saucer section’s impulse drive come back on. Argyle knew it was following them now, and that they were too hopelessly slow to get away. Even so, like a turtle trying to get off a road in the middle of traffic, the big disk kept surging forward on full sublight. Frustration bent its ugly face over him. He wished Picard had insisted one of them stay. All at once the saucer section needed a real command and not just engineers.
The entity stepped up speed to follow, and stardrive did the same, even faster. The ship tipped as LaForge swung it around in front of the enemy’s electrical body. As they passed it they saw that it was indeed more flat than round, a gigantic field of computer fakery, yet somehow completely animated, somehow walking around in space without the screen it was supposed to be displayed on. Its electrokinetic bands sparked and erupted as the stardrive section plowed past it and swished off in the other direction.
Picard came up between Data and LaForge. “What the devil! Nothing?”
“No response,” LaForge said, and somehow he was disappointed.
“Worf!”
“No explanation, sir,” Worf boomed. “It’s unrelenting on the saucer.”
Data looked up and said, “Perhaps it is something more than an insect, Captain.” And as he said it, he looked across the small bridge at Deanna Troi, who stood now beside Tasha, ominously silent, leaving herself open to assault by mind weapon.
“Shark,” Riker muttered.
“Number One?”
Riker turned to the captain. “It’s a shark focusing on one fish in a school. It ignores tastier morsels for the one it focuses on.”
“Sir.” Troi spoke up suddenly. Her voice was a shock on the compact bridge. “We must draw it off. The saucer—”
“Won’t stand the attack, I know, Counselor, I know. Shields to full power. Engineering, this is the captain. Have we got warp speed?”
“MacDougal, sir, and barely. I can give you up to warp three.”
“Do so! And I want an emergency antimatter dump on my mark—”
Riker spun around. “Sir?”
“We’re going to make damned sure it can’t ignore us again. We’re going to crash the gate, and right now. That thing is not going to—”
“Sir!” Yar choked. “It’s closing on the saucer! Burst of speed at point-seven-five—”
“Set course dead center on it, warp three and engage!”
Both LaForge and Data actually cocked their heads toward each other as though to see if they’d both heard the same thing, and that the captain saw it.
“I said engage!” he thundered. Then his voice lowered to a whisper, like a gathering volcano. “We’re going right through that pretty bastard.”