DATA LAY IN a wedge of bright, tight surgical beams in the dimmed main sickbay lab. Physicians, neurologists, microengineering specialists, robotics experts hovered over him, but no one could shake the poisoned apple from his throat. He lay there on the table, his face less placid than a corpse’s might have been, his expression caught in a moment of surprise, perhaps even revelation.
To Picard, the elemental darkness rested in the room was like a Poe stanza. He paced around the small group and looked again into Data’s opalescent eyes, and longed again to understand what the android had seen at that last moment. The chamber experience was still with him, making him feel somehow separate from these people who hadn’t been through it. He thought he knew now what resurrection could be like, what it would be like to be caught by that thing—only to reawaken with new knowledge and be able to use that knowledge. He had reawakened to a monumental difference in his own perceptions. Colors seemed brighter, smells nicer, shapes crisper. There was a sudden wonder to being so consummately alive.
Over on that table, Data’s face had that kind of wonder on it, but he hadn’t come back.
When Beverly Crusher finally backed away from the table, her face limned with frustration, even anguish, and her willowy body had lost some of its grace. She moved slowly toward the corner where Riker and Geordi were impatiently standing, not too near each other, and Picard turned to meet her there. He lowered his voice.
“No hope?”
The doctor sighed. “Not from us. As far as we can deduce, Data’s android brain is still operating all the complexities of his body. But there’s no consciousness anymore. We just don’t know what else to do.”
Geordi turned toward them from where he had been facing the wall. “How’d it get him?” he demanded, his throat tight. For the first time he allowed himself the realization that Data might truly be lost to them, even if his heart still beat. “How could it take part of him and leave . . . that?”
Riker folded his arms and pressed one shoulder into the bulkhead. As he gazed at the floor with a pall of regret over him, new lines cut themselves into his face. “Probably the thing didn’t distinguish between Data’s body and the shuttlecraft. If he’d been fully organic, his body might’ve gone up in smoke or whatever that thing does to organic. I guess it recognized something in him,” he added, rather mournfully, “that it . . . wanted.”
Picard looked at his first officer. He’d never seen Riker so depressed, never heard this stony tone. Vexed that he didn’t completely know what was going on between his command officers, he peered now at the engineers and doctors who became more helpless by the moment, who were now beginning to stand back one by one and shake their heads over Data’s quiet form.
“For better or worse,” the captain said thoughtfully, “Data may have found his answer.”
Anger began to burn low in his mind, a layer of heat beneath all other thoughts, making them sizzle and jump. There would be no diminishment of the self on this ship. Rage built within him as he imagined Data forever trapped inside that phenomenon, forever to endure what Picard himself had barely touched in fourteen hours of hell.
His shoulders stiff with his anger growing, he turned toward the exit and flatly said, “I’ll be in engineering.”
He went, but he went alone. When he was down in engineering, he swept aside each engineer’s offer to assist him or escort him, shrugged off their curious looks when he went into special-access chambers and came out again with computer input chips that no one had given him or pulled up for him. Word spread quickly that the captain was here, doing something for himself and not asking anyone to do it for him, and before long curious eyes peeked at him from a dozen hiding places in the engineering complex. Even in the dimness, he stood out simply because he wasn’t usually here. Eventually the curious junior engineers who saw him lurking about started trying to track his doings secretly on their access panels. They discovered that Captain Picard knew both what he was doing and perfectly well how to keep them from finding out. They discovered they could trace his activities about halfway at each turn before they lost the pattern of his computer use. So they watched, unable to say anything about it because he was the captain, and if this was anybody’s equipment, it was his. They knew there was something going on topside; why wasn’t he up there? They muttered among themselves about reporting to the first officer, but nobody volunteered to do the talking.
So the engimatic captain of the Enterprise floated around engineering for over an hour, not speaking to anyone, offering only the most ghostly of smiles to those who came too close, lighting here and there like a moth to tamper with the equipment and be suddenly on the move again, and not a living soul dared approach him with a direct question. He was too purposeful in each movement, each pause, each touch.
Then he was gone. Without a word, without an order. He cradled a few computer tie-in remotes in his elbow, and walked out.
Once clear of engineering and on his way through the darkened ship by way of ladders and walkways, Picard paused on one of the upper decks and touched the nearest intercom. “Picard to sickbay. Mr. Riker, you still there?”
Almost immediately Riker’s strong voice answered, “Yes, Captain, still here. No change.”
Picard looked down at the small bundle of remotes he carried. They seemed innocent as they lay in the crook of his arm, small bundles of circuitry inside casings. But they were deadly.
“In ten minutes, I want you and LaForge to be on the bridge. This has gone far enough.”
The words chimed through the ship, right through the cloth of silence and darkness they’d swathed around themselves, saying quite plainly that the phenomenon was going to have to deal with the captain now.
Before entering the bridge, Picard quietly and privately plugged his remotes into their proper places in the control layout deep within the bridge maintenance loop, a thin corridor of computer access boards behind the actual walls of the bridge itself. Here, new systems were built into the bridge systems, the great hands of the starship, working all the instructions put to it from the gigantic computer core running through the primary hull.
Picard made use of those access boards now, tying them all in to one single button on the arm of his command chair. He had thought about using a code that he could key in from anywhere on the ship, but at last dismissed the idea and created an actual button to be pushed. And in that one place—the command chair. If he was going to put his finger down on destiny, he would be in his rightful place, at the head of this majestic ship, when he did it.
He stalked back onto the bridge, noticeably somber, and into the audience of expectant faces. Riker. LaForge. Troi. Wesley Crusher. Worf. And others, especially those manning the positions he might have expected to see Data manning. The Ops controls or Science 2. He missed the gold-leaf face and the gently innocuous expression. He missed it a great deal. His deep rage grew.
“I’m glad you’re all here,” he said ceremoniously, approaching his command chair. This time, however, he didn’t reach out and casually touch it as he might have otherwise. This time the chair itself was a source of raw power, and he didn’t want to give anything away. “I want to know what you’ve concluded, what our options are, how we can best deal with this invasion. If we have to drain this starship of every last volt and every last moving molecule, we’ll do it. That thing out there has already cost the life of one of us; it will take no more of us. It isn’t going any farther into the galaxy. We’re stopping it here and now.”
Deanna Troi let her eyes drift shut, so deep was her relief and gratitude. Picard saw her reaction and understood it so clearly that he might as well have been the Betazoid. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, they were glazed with tears and she was almost smiling—but then the smile dropped away and her eyes filled with perplexity. She saw into his heart now, he could tell, saw the knowledge and the determination that were foremost in his mind, unhidden from her probing thoughts, saw the remotes now engaged into certain circuits that would carry a certain message to a dozen locations in the lower structures of the ship and do the kind of thing captains thought of only in moments of supreme desperation. She stared at him, then looked down, at the arm of the command chair, at the small patch of controls that tied the captain’s own touch into his ship. And that single blue pressure point, like a poker chip. She knew. Picard watched her, without offering either reassurance or a request for her silence. She would be silent, he knew. They understood one another now.
Riker stepped forward—not exactly a surprise.
“We’re going to chase it down?” he asked.
“We’re going to kill it, Mr. Riker.”
The first officer paused, his lips compressing, then said, “That’s not like you, sir.”
Picard knew what was behind Riker’s eyes and that dubious tilt to his head, and he looked right at him now. “Isn’t it? Is it more like me to allow that marauder to wander the galaxy freely, sucking up more lives?”
That moment saw a charge of excitement. Even Riker realized suddenly how long he’d been waiting for something to bring that level of indignation to Picard’s face. The captain’s brown eyes were narrowed, his Roman-relief profile aimed squarely at the viewscreen, his jaw like a rock set upon another rock.
And even so, straight through the ring of Picard’s words, Riker forced himself to do what was his duty. “What about the Prime Directive? We can’t guard the whole galaxy.”
“Even the Prime Directive must have its elasticity,” Picard said firmly, and there was no doubt that he had thought about this, had already endured and forded the difficulty of this very question. He paused, and moved forward on his bridge, all eyes on him. “From a distance, this may look like Utopia, Will,” he said, broadly enough for all to hear, “but when you’re staring right at it, it’s something else. It’s a tyrant and demands our grappling with it. There will be no tyranny here,” he said. “Refusing to make a decision is its own kind of cowardice.”
Riker moved to the captain’s side, and the two men stood before the vast viewscreen and all it held. “You’re that certain?” he asked. He wondered why the rock of resistance still sat in his stomach. He knew perfectly well that Captain Picard was no grandstander, that such a man would turn the ship and run in the other direction if there were a way to avoid using the weapons, yet he still had to make this one last request, that Picard simply say yes, he was certain.
But the captain said nothing. He merely gazed sidelong at Riker, exercising his command right in that simple silence.
Riker nodded and backed off a few steps, making his own message clear.
The captain turned, and standing on the dais with the whole blackness of space as his backdrop, he addressed the faintly lit bridge. “All right, what do you have?”
“Sir,” Worf began immediately from the opposite stage, “we’ve concluded that it backed away from its first attack on us because it reached its absorption capacity. We’ve calculated its drain on us at the point it moved off, and think it’s possible to overload it.”
“Risks?”
“We would have risk if we had possibility. Our phasers simply can’t put out enough power to do what must be done. It dissipates its energy faster than we could pump it full.”
Picard pressed his lips tight and tried to envision such a creature, but all he could do was glare at the undeniable readouts and see that it was true. Behind him, voices buzzed, annoying him as flies annoy a horse. Geordi. Wesley. Geordi. Wesley again, arguing. An exchange of whispers, grating on Picard as he tried to dig out a miracle solution, and finally he spun around, demanding, “Have you two got something to add or not?”
Both Geordi and Wesley flinched, and Wesley’s cheeks flared red. “Oh . . . no, sir.”
“Yes, sir,” Geordi contradicted.
“But it doesn’t work,” Wesley hissed, tugging at Geordi’s sleeve.
“Data told you how to make it work.”
“But what if it doesn’t?”
“When you’re going to die, a one-in-a-million chance is better than nothing, Wes!”
“By the devil!” Picard roared. “What are you talking about?”
Wesley dropped into self-conscious silence while Geordi fought with himself and won. He approached the captain and said, “Wes has an idea how to increase the ship’s energy output through the phaser systems, sir.”
“All right,” Picard said then, “I’m listening. Keep it short.”
“Wesley, tell him.”
Wesley licked his lips and brought his narrow form up beside Geordi. “Well, sir, it’s a phaser intensification system that pulls more firepower with less base energy by breaking down the first phasing cycle into increment frequencies, then reintegrating the phasing all at once in the final cycle. Mr. Data gave me some clues that should make it work, and Geordi thinks we can—”
“The point is, sir,” Geordi interrupted, speaking just as fast as Picard had asked for, “if we could modify the ship’s phasers to this theory, we could fill that thing up with about five times the energy it got when it—”
“Yes, I understand the science, Lieutenant. That’s very radical, what you’re describing.” Picard stepped down from the viewscreen bank and strode between them. “But these are radical moments.” With that he touched the intercom, while all breaths held. “Picard to engineering. Argyle and MacDougal, gather your primary staff and meet me in the engineering briefing room in three minutes. Ensign Crusher, I want you to describe your theory to the engineers and let them decide if it can be implemented.”
“Sir,” the teenager blurted, “I can build the crystal focusing system myself just as well as any of them.”
The captain glared at him. “We’re going to let the professionals handle it, Mr. Crusher. What you’re describing will take pure antimatter feed, and that’s nothing to play with.”
He stepped away, but Wesley followed, slipping out of Geordi’s grasp at the last second. He snapped the words out like spitballs. “You always treat me like a kid, even though I’m on the bridge.”
The captain turned. His voice took on an iron resonance.
“You’re on the bridge,” he said, “because I chose to put you here, not because you earned it. Your ability exceeds your wisdom, young man. You’ll eventually learn the unforgiving lesson that the people around you are worth more in their experience than you are in your gifts, and you shall, like everyone else, have to wait your turn. Now mind your place, close your mouth, and follow me to engineering, where you will put your gift to use and let others do the same.”
Wesley was understandably subdued thereafter, give or take the minutes it took him to spell out the phasing idea. The engineers gawked at him, frowned, rolled their eyes, squinted—it looked like a cornea convention. By the time they filed down to the main phaser reactor room, they already had half the mechanics and most of the formulae worked out in their heads, and Picard stood back to watch the machine of intelligence at work. He watched too as Wesley caught a first glimpse through his own brilliance and youthful smugness of the resourcefulness and conceptual ability of experienced engineers. The boy’s face lit up with both amazement and humility each time the engineers shot him a question as part of a discussion that had simply left him behind. Picard could tell from Wesley’s expression that the young man didn’t even know why the engineers had to know some of the things they were asking. And for every question asked, there were two more problems to be solved that he hadn’t thought of. After a time he began to catch a glimpse of why his own idea seemed so foreign. The engineers weren’t looking at the phasing unit as a unit. They saw it as part of the whole ship, all the intricate systems, lines, circuits, energies, fluxes, coils, and capacitors, each affecting all the others. It wasn’t enough for the phasing unit to work; it had to work in concert with a thousand other units.
As soon as the engineers understood his idea, they were at work troubleshooting it. After several false starts, and even a complete rebuilding of the strange new system, all the theoreticals became applicables. Problems Wesley had never foreseen were discovered, then sidestepped or solved on the spot. The harmonics hummed, the antimatter feed had its safeties hooked up, and all in less time than it had taken Wesley to build his original mock-up. He circled the new contraption, a hulking unit attached directly to the main phaser couplings, and shook his head. It looked like nothing he’d imagined. He could see what parts did which duty, but it simply didn’t look the way he thought it would look.
Picard liked that look on a young face. He liked the look of growth.
Finally the chief of phaser engineering came toward the captain and Wesley, wiping his hands on his worksuit, and shrugged. “Good as it’s gonna get, Captain.”
“Will it work?”
“Can’t tell you that, sir. Half of it’s theory and the other half’s guesswork. All the systems hook up cleanly, it’s got power, it’s got antimatter flow, and it’s got safeties. As for working, only testing can tell.”
“We’ll test it in combat,” Picard said ruefully. “We seem to have little choice. We can’t—”
“Riker to captain! Emergency!”
Picard snapped at the nearest intercom. “Picard. What?”
“It’s here, sir! Our grace period just ran out.”
It had, in spades. When Picard and Wesley spun from the lift and charged onto the bridge, it was no longer dark. Red alert lights bled from every wall, but the main lights hadn’t come up. The forward viewer wavered and crackled with the enhanced blue-red false-color image of the entity at its most awful. The port monitors, starboard, aft—every monitor showed this pulsing threat in a great broken circle of electrical light around the bridge.
The bridge crew stared at the monitors, swiveling from one to the other as though looking for a doorway that hadn’t been guarded, a single route that would provide escape from the prison, but they knew they were looking at the thing’s backup tactic, the one to be used when all else failed.
Picard paused in the upper ramp. “Is it in the machinery?”
Riker whirled past Troi on the lower deck and stepped toward him. “No, sir, it’s surrounding us. Contracting approximately twelve thousand miles per minute.”
“It hasn’t found us, then?”
“It’s using this new pattern to find us. It knows we’re here somewhere within a specific radius, and it’s surrounded the whole area, gas giant, asteroids, and all. It’s closing in on us. Obviously, it’s a lot bigger than we first perceived.”
“Size now?”
Worf straightened up at Picard’s right. “Roughly three-point-one AUs in diameter, sir, and contracting.”
“My God,” Picard snarled. He understood the picture now; they were inside a gigantic fist—and it was closing on them. “Worf, estimation. Can we fire on it?”
A terrible scowl came over Worf’s already fierce features. He hated his own answer as he said, “Not while it’s in this form, sir. It dissipates energy in direct proportion to its surface area. We couldn’t pump enough energy into it fast enough to overload it.”
Picard rounded on the tactical station and stood beside Tasha Yar. “Then we’re going to have to force it to compact again. Where’s that gas giant?”
Yar shook herself and bent over her console. “Bearing point-seven-nine mark three-four, sir.”
“Head toward it.”
Riker came aft on the lower deck and asked, “Your plan, sir?”
“We’re going to hide behind a tree, Mr. Riker,” the captain said, moving down the ramp with his hand tracing the shape of the bridge horseshoe. The strange light across the monitors cast a bloody purple glow on his face. “It won’t be able to absorb all the energy inside a level-ten gas giant a half million miles across. It’s going to have to decide to come around one way or the other. When it does, there’ll be a standoff.”
Riker turned immediately and said, “Geordi, point-five-zero sublight to the gas giant, tight orbit.”
“Point-five-zero, aye,” Geordi repeated, avoiding a glance at the Ops position, where Wesley had slipped into Data’s seat.
Picard kept his voice steady. “Prepare an emergency warning dispatch to Starfleet, single-pulse and high-warp. If we don’t make it, I want to be sure the Federation’s ready for this. Shields at maximum,” he added, holding a hand up to shade his eyes from the sizzling screens.
“Shields up,” Yar said shakily. “Maximum energy available for defensive—” She stopped, glaring at her readouts, and almost instantly had to gasp, “Sir, it’s moving in!”
“Keep tight to the gas giant. Tighter, LaForge!”
“Trying, sir . . . ”
Across the Enterprise’s shields crashed the punishing force of the phenomenon. It knew where the starship was, but discovered it had found two things—a starship, and a massive planet that was virtually a ball of twisting energy. No matter how it contracted, no matter how it closed its fist, the planet confounded every effort to devour the starship. Every time the thing tried to contract upon its quarry, it was driven back by the energy put out by the gas giant. Spasms of electrical energy pounded the ship and flooded through the gas giant’s churning atmosphere. The ship defied the attack, shimmying with every pulse of energy that flogged the shields, draining them moment by moment.
“Outer skin heating up, Captain,” Yar reported. “We’re entering the atmosphere.”
Picard ignored her. “Move in closer, LaForge. If it wants us, it’s going to have to face us.”
“Captain!” Troi shouted. When he neither fired the weapons nor hit that blue button, frustration crumpled her features and she blinked into the bright screen.
Threads of smoke and fans of sparks shot from half the bridge consoles as the ship fought the mauling once again, but Picard made no further orders. He would stand his ground and so would this ship—though he stood now beside his command chair and gripped the arm with the blue button.
“Captain!” Yar shrieked then, and raised her eyes to the main screen. Even as she spoke, every screen dropped its color in a great wash forward, as though all the images had been sucked out of the back to the main viewer. The main screen now glowed with a compact view of the creature, back in its original form.
“Get ready!” Picard shouted, but it was already upon them, dashing around the protective tree and pouncing on the ship alone, while beside them the gas giant spun ignorantly.
The Enterprise was taken by a great fist of lightning many times more powerful than that of moments before, and electrical bombardment once again blitzed the bridge.
“Fire phasers point-blank!” Picard ordered over the shrieking noise.
The ship spewed energy. Rocked by each shot, the Enterprise endured the punishment as the radical new phasing system dragged energies apart that wanted to be together, then shoved them into each other at the last instant. The entity bucked in the assault, shaking the ship. Around him Picard saw his crew attacked by the silvery lights and blue undercurrents.
“Shields draining . . . ” Yar shouted from her post above them.
“Keep firing!” Picard responded, hanging on to the command chair as bolt after bolt of intensified phaser energy thundered through the ship and into the phenomenon’s heart.
“The thing’s output is becoming unsteady, sir!” Worf shouted over the electrical shriek. “It’s working!”
Suddenly the ship trembled so deep in her core that everyone felt it through his feet, and the phasers stopped.
“What—” Picard tried to turn, but managed only to twist the upper half of his body around to see Yar.
“Complete phaser meltdown, Captain! The core’s blown!”
Picard’s heart sank to his knees and rattled inside the electrical sheath that now strengthened on the bridge.
“Captain!” Troi’s face appeared beside his shoulder. She was hanging on to his arm with both hands, her eyes tormented. “Do it! Do it, sir! Please!”
He looked at the blue button. He pushed his hand toward it. Even as he moved, forcing his quaking muscles to fight against the electrical attack, he felt himself slipping away. The beginnings of the chamber experience . . . consciousness beginning to float, to let go . . .
Troi’s voice pierced his pain and struggle. “Captain!”
The blue button was an inch away from his thumb.
He concentrated on it, clinging to his identity and his memories as if they were ropes dangling in an abyss. If only he could find the energy—
“Energy,” he ground through his gritted teeth. “The gas giant! Yar!”
But she was helpless, plastered back against Worf by the lightning, which grew stronger with every pulse now that the ship’s shielding was strained to its fullest.
“Riker!” Picard roared.
He could vaguely see Riker dragging himself step by agonizing step up the horseshoe rail toward tactical.
A form pressed against Picard’s shoulder and a narrow shape came by his elbow . . . a hand. Troi’s hand. Reaching for the blue button. He heard her struggling to move past him, to fight off the terrible assault as she promised she would.
He struck out with his left arm and held her back, but her determination made her strength superhuman and she was pressing harder against his shoulder, her hand clawing toward that button.
“Let me!” she bellowed through the electrical blasts.
Picard wrenched her away from the command chair with the last of his energy, and the two of them collapsed across the command arena. “Riker,” Picard rasped with a final breath, “hurry! Full power!”
Even as he spoke, glowing photon torpedoes broke from the ship’s primary hull and crashed down through the gas giant’s atmosphere into its active heart, forcing it to release its energy. Bolt after bolt careened downward, drilling into the compacted energy, which spewed back out in great volcanic blasts. And still the ship didn’t relent. It continued sending fully charged photon torps deep into the planetary reactor and forcing explosion after explosion, until finally the greatest of all disruptions came. Half the planet’s violent core erupted and shot out into space.
The concussion sent the ship catapulting through open space, blown out of orbit by megatons of exploding matter.
The ship turned in space, gravity gone to hell, tossing its people about like dolls, and finally settled a quarter million miles from the gas giant.
Picard dragged himself to his feet and stumbled forward. An instant later, Riker was beside him. Around them, the crew grabbed for their control boards and tried to accept the fact that they were still alive—really alive.
Before them on the screen, the creature fluxed and twisted against the glowing rubble of the gas giant’s remains. A million explosions raged around them where it was forced to digest the gas giant’s released energy and, finally, in one singular blast, was ripped apart.
Nodules of false-color energy splayed outward across the system, and all the glitter was suddenly gone. Only blobs of dissipating energy remained, cascading by the millions around the ship and outward into open space.
“It couldn’t take it. . . .” Riker murmured hoarsely.
Picard rasped, “Status!”
Yar’s voice trembled. “Shields down . . . main reactors unstable. The phaser core is a complete burnout. Totally fused. Nothing but molten metal in there, sir.”
“Bet it smells,” Geordi grumbled as he pulled himself back into his helm seat and gingerly touched his own equipment. Beside him, Wesley simply held on to the Ops console with both hands, and shook. They both knew. Fused. The whole core. All the safety systems had somehow saved the ship from being part of that meltdown. Wesley’s model had had no safeties. If he’d turned it on, it would’ve created a dead short, the reserve antimatter containment would’ve collapsed, and a thousand people would’ve disappeared and Starfleet would never have known why. There was a sudden ringing clarity about why a starship had rules.
Wesley continued to stare, to blink, and the color stayed out from his face for a long, long while.
“Report on that thing?” Picard barked as he got to his feet.
It was Worf who finally came forward on the upper bridge and made the stark announcement. “Dissipated, sir. No central mass any longer.” He looked at Picard directly now and said, “You did it, sir.”
Picard sighed, his shoulders aching. “Collaborative effort, Mr. Worf.” He stepped to one side now and reached downward for Counselor Troi’s hand.
She sat on the floor, stunned, her face a thousand emotions slowly wringing out of her as she regained control. As her hand closed on his it was weak and shaking.
He lifted her to her feet and privately said, “Well done, Counselor. Your prognosis?”
She swallowed hard, then looked up at him and forced herself to speak. “I can’t feel them, sir . . . anymore.”
He smiled. “Congratulations.”
Troi nodded, trembling, still working at once again being in total possession of herself. For a fleeting moment, loneliness filled her eyes.