disarm her without causing her to disintegrate. Only
by integrating override commands directly into her
directives--while simultaneously preventing
her from taking self-destruction action--can she be
safely recovered."
Data lapsed back into silence.
"Her vital signs are all over the
place," said Beverly, and then warning tones began
to sound from the life scanners. She started
to prepare a hypo, and as she did so, Deanna
looked at her with concern.
"Is that wise?" said Troi.
"I don't honestly know," said Crusher, "but
I have to do something. We can lose the body while
he's working with the mind."
"I am processing through preliminary stages of
setting up a self-answering signal," said
Data.
"Pulse is racing," said Crusher. "Heart
rate is racing."
"Data ..." Geordi began.
"Body temperature increasing," Beverly
noted. Then her voice went up with alarm as she
said, "Increasing dramatically. Data, she's
starting to heat up!"
"It's a fail-safe, Data," said
Geordi. "She's going to combust! Her
anti-tampering imperative is kicking in!"
"There are primary alert systems built
in," said Data calmly. "I am proceeding
to override them."
"Body temperature still increasing," reported
Crusher. "I'm going to try and slow down her
metabolism," and she started to press the hypo
against the Borg's arm.
"That is not advisable," Data said.
Geordi could see the air around the Borg
woman, through his VISOR, changing from blue
to orange. "Data, she's going to go up! And
she's going to take you with her! Her surface
temperature is rising. The air
is--"
Data was no longer listening.
Instead, all the impulses of his brain were
racing through the Borg soldier, with literally the
speed of thought.
He was being pulled down, down a long,
spiralling stairway. A maze of
cross-circuiting and pure, unaffected,
undiluted order. Humans were a tangle of
emotions, all intertwined and all endlessly trying
to sort each other out and never coming close
to succeeding. It was an existence that Data envied,
a consummation to be desired. Yet here, here was an
alternative that almost seemed to be calling to him and
summoning him. Icy tendrils seemed to lick
at his positronic brain, savor his
impulses, and salivate hungrily over his
thoughts. You are primitive, they seemed
to say, but you can be used. You can be part of us. You
can join with us ...
And Data realized that he was encountering some
vestigial memory of the great Borg mind. The
overwhelming uniformity of purpose, the purity of the
concept, so engrained into the deepest engrams of the
mind that even a brain that was a virtual tabula
rasa could not completely divest itself.
He did not reply. He could not reply. And
yet, to save the life of this Borg soldier, he
had to reply. He had to insinuate himself within.
His positronic brain reached down and through,
into the depths of the Borg imperative. It swept
over him--a black tide, and the sounds of gears
turning and a steady, implacable thudding. A thudding
like a pendulum swinging steadily, or the sounds of a
million boots marching in perfect precision,
tromping across the galaxy, leaving their great heeled
prints behind them in the form of scooped-out planets
and ravaged lives.
He submerged himself in it, hiding the integrity
of his own programming while, at the same time,
fighting to maintain it. He played a dangerous
game. So many ways to fail If the Borg
soldier destroyed herself, his mind might go with it.
Or if he lost his grip on the integrated
individual that was Data, his matrix could be
overwhelmed and replaced with that of the Borg.
It filled him up the Borg mentality, the
undying, unwavering conviction that they would triumph;
that they were the future. There was, quite
simply, no doubt in their collective mind.
No room for error. No chance of concern or
questioning, of failure. There would be no failure.
The Borg would triumph.
The Borg reached into every aspect of Data.
They were inescapable and had spread themselves throughout the
soldier's body and soul like a malignant cancer
that could never be excised.
Human life is chaos. Machine life
is order. Order is preferable to chaos.
To make humans one with the Borg is to give them
order. The Borg will provide order. The
Borg will remove the human chaos. The Borg
are inevitable.
And it made sense. If Data were capable of
being frightened, he would have been. It made such
perfect sense. Humans were chaos. Humans
wallowed in their chaos. They enjoyed it ...
enjoyed it.
Of course.
No enjoyment, said Data, and his own
programming began to reassert itself. There would be
no enjoyment. Humans revel in their
humanity.
Enjoyment is irrelevant. Humanity is
irrelevant.
No, said Data. A light of pure truth
seemed to shine before him. That is the only
relevant thing.
The light widened, beginning to fill the darkness.
The Borg voice railed against him, saying You
are demonstrating your imperfection. You are
displaying your obsolescence. You will be
irrelevant.
Data's brain, programmed with respect and
admiration for the accomplishments and wonder of
humanity, stabbed out. He sensed the worldstmind of the
woman running out of time around him. The Borg
imperatives hidden deep in her mind were about
to order her to self-destruct. He could virtually
sense the impulse command about to be sent, for the
preparations had been made in response to his
initial probings.
The call for destruction went out.
And Data snared it.
He fashioned a net from his own neurons,
tackling the synaptic leap that would trigger the
final command. The Borg imperative almost seemed
to howl in frustration, although Data wasn't certain
whether that was really happening, or whether it
was his imagination. He knew he had imagination,
or something approximating it. He had realized it
the first time he'd found himself wondering what it would have
been like if Tasha Yar had lived.
The destruct command writhed deep within her
subconscious, and Data pushed it farther and
farther away. For one brief instant the Borg
almost fought back, but Data shoved it down once
more and then sealed it off. Then he suddenly realized
that in so doing, he had halted the continuous loop that
was preventing the Borg soldier from launching the
destruct sequence and turning to ash.
He realized this in less th an a
millisecond and because of the state that he was in, his
thinking the action was performing the action. He sent a
command winging directly into the conscious, operational
brain of the Borg soldier, and the command was, quite
simply, You are functional. There was, after
all, no reason she couldn't be. She just needed
someone to tell that was the case.
He waited for a response. Some sort of
reply that would say, he expected, What are
your orders? What should I do? Something like that.
But nothing came. For a moment he thought that he
had failed, but he ran a complete diagnostic
along the neural systems. No, he had
succeeded. He sensed that the command was now firmly in
place. Implanted in her brain was the command
telling her to function. In its most basic
concept, he had ordered her to live. That's all.
Just live. And he had done so with such force that it
had overridden the Borg self-destruct
imperative. He had imprinted his own
determination for continued existence upon her brain
engrams. But he had not been able to do more than that.
If he could have felt frustration, he would have.
If he could have felt anger, or helplessness, or
even pity, then all those would have flooded through him as
well. Instead, all he could do was decide that he
had accomplished as much as possible, and with that, he
withdrew.
"--getting hotter," said Geordi La
Forge, finishing the sentence that, to him, had taken a
mere second. Yet to Data, it was almost as if
Geordi had begun the sentence a lifetime ago.
Then La Forge saw through his VISOR that the
intense heat being generated had abruptly begun
to subside. "Son of a--"
Crusher, for her part, was studying her medical
monitors. "Life signs
stabilizing," she said with great relief, and she
laid down the hypo. "Pulse, respiration,
both beginning to attain human norms."
"Data, are you okay?" asked Geordi.
"Data?"
Data was still taking a moment to collect his
thoughts, and finally he turned to La Forge. "I
am functioning quite well, thank you, Geordi."
"What happened? What did you do?"
"I planted a command to continue functioning within
her brain," said Data. He stood and reached
over and, before Crusher could stop him, pulled out the
knife that was protruding from the Borg's arm. She
did not so much as flinch. Instead, she continued
to stare straight ahead. "I overrode the Borg
command to self-destruct. It was actually quite close
in terms of timing. She is now functional."
"Can I remove the Borg implants?"
asked Beverly.
"I do not see why not," said Data. He was
reaching up to his head and disconnecting the complex
wiring. "There should be no danger now. I have
essentially defused the bomb within her."
"Can she talk?" asked La Forge. Confident
that Data had matters firmly in hand, Geordi
walked around the table from his instruments and stared into the
face of the Borg woman. "Can you understand me? Can
you hear me? Counselor, is she in there?"
"I sense nothing," Deanna Troi
admitted. "Her mind is still clear."
"We can reeducate her," said Geordi
excitedly. "We can--"
"It will be virtually impossible, Geordi,"
Troi said. "Whoever or whatever this woman is,
we are talking about something far beyond a simple
erasure of memory. This woman's entire ...
soul, if you will ... has been expunged. Her
only claim to being alive is the fact that her
body is functioning. Otherwise--"
"Counselor Troi is correct," said
Data. "Recreating knowledge is well within our
technology. It has been, for decades. But
recreating an entire individual ..."
"We've done it in the holodeck. I've
done it," said Geordi firmly.
"What is created in the holodeck is not
alive," Data said. "What you are discussing
does not seem feasible."
"But if--"
"She's looking at you," said
Crusher. There was wonder and amazement in her
voice. "She focussed. She hadn't done that
before. Geordi, she focussed on you. She's
doing it right now."
Geordi turned and stared at the Borg
woman. He couldn't see her eyes, of course.
But her head was definitely pointed in his
direction, and she seemed to be concentrating on
him.
Then the moment passed, and her head slumped
back. She returned to staring off into space.
Geordi looked from one of his comrades to the other
and then said firmly, "I don't care if it's
feasible or not. We're going to make it feasible."
On board the Repulse, Mr. Seth
turned in his chair and said, "Transporter room
reports all planetside colonists are now
aboard. Emergency evacuation is complete."
"Just in time," said Taggert grimly.
The planet-eater descended towards Kalish
VIII, and a force beam leaped out from the maw of the
machine. It sliced through the planet, bisecting it
with surgical precision.
"Hailing frequencies," bellowed Taggert in
a thunderous rage, and then, without even waiting for
acknowledgment, she said, "Intruder, this is
Taggert of the Repulse. You are destroying the
homes of the Astra colonists!"
"We are still hungry."
"Back away. That's an order."
There was a dead silence, and for one brief moment
Taggert deluded herself into thinking that the massive
destroyer was actually going to obey.
"I am tired of you," the ship said.
A force beam lashed out from the destroyer, carving
a swathe across the primary hull of the Repulse.
Some shields actually held as systems all
over the ship went into overload. In engineering,
power couldn't be rerouted fast enough, and circuit
boards blew out. The ship shook violently under
the unexpected pounding. A radiation containment
unit cracked open, and massive doors immediately
slid into place to seal off the damage before the
entire ship could be contaminated.
"Warp drive is out!" shouted Seth.
"Deflector shields at thirty percent!
Hull damage on decks 33 through 39!"
Taggert was gripping the arms of her chair as the
red-alert klaxon seemed even louder.
In her head she could hear the screams of her people.
"What in hell did they hit us with?"
"Force beam of pure anti-proton."
Taggert's eyes widened momentarily, and then,
with as much conviction as if she were holding the upper
hand, she rapped o
ut, "Combination array of photon
torpedos and phasers. Fire!"
The full armament of the Repulse was unleashed
at the planet-killer. For all the good it did,
they might as well have been hurling rocks. The
photon torpedos exploded prematurely against
the towering spikes, and the phasers ricocheted
harmlessly off the neutronium skin.
The force beam of the planet-killer struck again.
This time the shields were totally unable to withstand it.
They crumbled like tissue paper, and the aft hull
buckled inward, stopping just short of actual
breach. The entire ship shook, like a toy caught
in the hand of a massive baby.
"Shields down!" shouted Seth over the din and the
barrage of damage reports that were coming in from all
over the ship. "Weapons systems out!"
Suddenly the ship was jolted again, but this time there
was no force beam. Instead, a tractor beam had
taken hold of them and was starting to drag them
downward.
The Repulse hurtled downward, toward one
of the looming spikes. Taggert could see that it
came to a point, miles above the surface of the
machine, that was almost needle-sharp. And her ship was
being dragged right towards it.
"Full reverse!" snapped Taggert. She
didn't have to shout; she was always able to make herself
heard at her normal tone, no matter how loud
her surroundings. In happier times, she claimed
it was because she came from a large family.
"Warp drive is out, switching to impulse,"
called out Seth. The ship lurched slightly, and
then the tractor beam reaffirmed its superiority
and continued to drag them downward. The spike
loomed closer and closer. Taggert could almost see
a small array of lights against it, flickering on
and off like a deadly Christmas tree.
The ship was about to be skewered. That was all there
was to it. The spike would penetrate either the primary
or secondary hull, or maybe both warp
nacelles. Whatever, it didn't matter. They
were about to be gouged, ripped apart, left for dead.
"Intruder!" shouted Taggert. "There's nothing
to be gained by killing us!"
The spikes came ever closer.
"Let's discuss this," she continued. "You and
I. Just the two of us. Let my ship go, and we
can--"
And suddenly the Repulse snapped free.
Taggert stumbled backwards, landing heavily in her
chair. The starship spiralled away, like a stone
caught in the flow of a brook. "Stabilize us!"
said Taggert, somewhat unnecessarily since