all its force, and they resisted with everything they had.
Dantar had grabbed the nearest piece of
furniture, but in so doing had lost his grip on
his blasters. He watched in horrified
helplessness as the weapons skidded across the floor
and out into the vast of space.
Reannon had been closest to the window, and she
was yanked up off her feet. Her arm went through the
hole and her head was about to follow, when a screaming
Geordi La Forge leaped forward, heedless of his
own safety, and grabbed her by the leg. Geordi
then lashed out with his own foot, hoping to hook it
around a table leg, and he missed. He was dragged
forward inexorably by the pull of the air and then
stopped as Data clamped his hand onto
Geordi's ankle. Data, for his part, had
sunk his fingers right into the table top and wasn't
budging. Guinan was holding on fixedly also, her
flowing gown whipping around her, and she was trying
to shout something that no one could make out.
Data, Geordi, and Reannon formed a
human chain, Reannon suspended in midair,
one arm out the window, the rest of her barely
anchored within the safety of Ten-Forward. And even
that safety was becoming questionable. Her feet were
floating above the floor as the air rushed around
her, her head bumping up against the window.
Geordi was shouting her name, his fingers quickly
becoming numb as the temperature dropped.
He thought he was that way for months, years.
Actually, it was barely seconds, and then the great
pull of space promptly ceased. Reannon
thudded heavily to the floor, doing nothing to break
her fall, and there was an audible hiss as air
flooded back into Ten-Forward to replace that which
had been sucked out into space.
Geordi knew that as the emergency systems of the
Enterprise kicked in, a force shield
sprang into existence directly over the hole,
re-establishing hull integrity until an
emergency crew could arrive to more permanently
repair the breech.
Geordi let out a gasp and released his grip
on Reannon's leg. Then he flexed his fingers
to try and get the blood flowing again, and even as he
did so he was calling out, "Is everyone okay?
Everyone all right?"
There were ragged cries of confirmation from all
around, as the shaken crew members verified that they
were in one piece.
Dantar was lying on the floor, staring up at the
ceiling. "Did I kill her?" he was moaning
over and over again. "Did I kill her? Can my
family rest now?"
"Your family!" shouted Geordi from across the
room on the floor. He put one hand down
to start and push himself upwards. "Your family would
be thrilled to know you've turned into a--"
And then he stopped as his hand felt something warm
and wet and sticky beneath it. His head snapped around,
trying to discern the source. And when he realized
what it was, he shouted out, "Data!" with more
alarm than the android had ever heard in the chief
engineer's voice.
Reannon was lying on the floor, blood
pouring from her left shoulder, a shoulder that had no
arm.
She didn't know enough to cry out in pain or
shriek. She merely stared at the absence of
appendage with a kind of distant fascination, as if
it were happening to someone else.
Instantly Geordi realized what had
occurred. When there was a breech of hull
integrity, the force field covered over that breech
and sealed it off. It had also tried to push
Reannon's arm back in--but instead, the arm had
been sheared off as it was shoved up against the jagged
remains of the transparent aluminum window.
"Data!" Geordi cried out, not exactly
sure what he expected the android to do. Data,
however, did something immediately. He moved quickly
to Reannon and lifted her up in his powerful arms.
Within moments the front of his uniform was soaked red
with blood.
Geordi was on his feet, tapping his
communicator and alerting Crusher that he was on his
way down to sickbay with the severely injured
Reannon. They ran out just as Worf and the
registered amazement for just a moment as he saw the
truncated stump that had once been Reannon's
arm, and then Geordi and Data were gone.
Data's legs were churning up distance with formidable
speed, and it was all that Geordi could do to keep
up.
Worf's face returned to the normal
Klingon scowl with which he was far more comfortable, and then
he and the security team strode across the
Ten-Forward lounge to the prostrate form of
Dantar. A crewman was sitting flat
on top of the Penzatti to make sure he
didn't go anywhere. They needn't have worried.
Dantar was still asking over and over again whether the
Borg was dead and his family avenged.
Worf frowned, an expression only
slightly different from his normal one. If the
Penzatti man had lost his mind, or was even
faking having lost his mind as a bid for sympathy,
he was about to find Worf an extremely
unsympathetic audience.
Dantar looked up at him, wide-eyed, and in
a broken voice he said, "They kept crying out
to me. The soul s of my family, crying out. They
wouldn't stop. Wouldn't stop. Are they at rest
now? Are they?"
"Yes," said Worf with no trace of
patience. "Their souls are resting comfortably in the
brig, and you'll be joining them momentarily." And
without another word he hauled the Penzatti male
to his feet and dragged him out of Ten-Forward.
Picard entered sickbay and walked directly
to Geordi, who was standing outside the operating
room, unable to bring himself to go in and witness firsthand
how things were going. Data was with him, having had no
particular compunction about entering the operating room,
but sensing that his friend could use whatever support
Data's presence might entail.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Fine, Captain. A little shaky, but fine."
"Guinan said the Penzatti was wielding some
sort of blasters," said Picard. "Where the
devil did he get them?"
Geordi cleared his throat. "I did some
checking on that," he said. "They were being stored in the
armory, and entrance to the armory is governed
by computer access. But the Penzatti have always been
extremely good with computers, and Dantar managed
to discover the access codes and get in to retrieve
them. It's moot at this point. I saw them get
sucked out into space."
"I want the access code changed--"
"Already done, sir."
Picard nodded approvingly. "Good. And I
understand Mr. Worf has attended to new living
arrangements for our rather aggressive guest. So the
remaining problem is our former Borg patient."
Crusher emerged from the operating room, having
already disposed of her bloody garments and switched
to fresh ones. Normally the fields that were
generated around the operating arena cleansed wounds
immediately. But when a patient was bleeding as
profusely as this one was, one couldn't help but
get her hands dirty.
She came straight towards Geordi, her
fury boiling over. "You said you could take care of
her!" she said angrily. "You said you'd be
responsible! You stood right here and sweet-talked
me about all the good you were going to do her. A fat
lot of good you've done so far, wouldn't you say,
engineer?"
"I saved her life!" protested Geordi.
"Doesn't that count for something?"
"I sent a woman out of here with two good arms
and she came back with one. That's what counts."
"Mr. La Forge is clearly upset with what
happened, Doctor," Picard said with command
firmness. "I hardly think it necessary to berate
him."
"You're not the one who was ankle-deep in
blood," said Crusher.
"I sure was!" said Geordi hotly.
"There was blood on my hands, and on my uniform,
and on my conscience, because all I was trying to do was
help this woman and instead she keeps getting
injured while in my care. So you want to heap
guilt on me, Doctor? Go ahead. Go right
ahead. Because it's only going to be a fraction of
what I've already heaped on myself."
She pursed her lips and then stepped to one
side. "You want to go in and see her? Go in and
see her."
Geordi nodded briskly and then went past them
and into the operating room.
Crusher watched him go and then shook her head.
"I don't get it," she said. "I just don't
get it. What is this fixation that Geordi's
developed on this woman?"
"He fixes things," said Picard with a shrug.
"He lives every day with something that repairs his
eyesight. Plus he has his duties as chief
engineer which, at its core, means that he is in
charge of all sorts of repairs. So instead of a
broken machine, he sees a broken human, and
he feels the need to repair her."
"It may be something else as well," said
Data thoughtfully. "It may be that when he looks
at her, he sees her in a way that we do not, and
perceives possibilities where others would only
see ..."--and he paused, searching for the
right word--"... windmills," he finished.
Inside the operating room, Reannon was
sitting up. And she was staring.
"How are you, Reannon?" asked Geordi.
In his mind he heard the saucy voice of the
holodeck Reannon replying, "Just fine, how
the hell are you?" Here, though, in the real world, he
was getting nothing.
She continued to stare, and Geordi realized that
she was looking at something very specific. She was
looking at her arm.
"It was the best I could do on short notice,"
came Crusher's voice. Behind her, Geordi
heard the distinctive footfalls of Picard and
Data. "Given time, I can clone her a new
arm once I've had time to grow skin samples.
Or, if she decides to stay with this, I can
create skin grafts over it to hide the metal.
It'll take a bit of experimenting to match her rather
pale complexion, but I can do it. No one will
even know it's a prosthesis."
Reannon was studying her new arm. Its ribbed
metal sections glinted in the soft light of the
sickbay operating theater. The fingers came
to slight points rather than the rounded edges of
normal fingers, and when she closed her hand into a
fist, it made a soft clacking sound.
"She appears much more attentive to objects
and the world than she did before," observed Picard.
"Obviously her time with Mr. La Forge is
having some degree of positive influence." The
remark was aimed rather pointedly at Crusher.
It was a mild barb that was not lost on her. "So
it would seem," she admitted. "Still, I'd feel
more comfortable if Deanna had some time with her.
Psychology is her field, not Geordi's."
"The Counselor wasn't picking up anything
from her earlier," said Picard, "but it's more than
possible that--"
"Look!" Crusher said suddenly.
Reannon was staring at her mechanical hand,
and the edges of her lips had turned up ever so
slightly.
"She is smiling," observed Data. "That is
the first significant facial reaction that she
has displayed."
"She is smiling," said Crusher, regarding
Reannon closely. "I'll be. All right,
Geordi, you have my full apologies. You're
clearly making headway with her."
"No, I'm not," said Geordi sourly.
They looked at him with surprise. "How can you
say that?" asked Crusher. "To get an emotional
response from someone who seemed as brain-dead as
..."
"Yeah, but don't you see what she was
responding to?" He took the metal hand
firmly in his own. "She's happy because she has
a part attached to her that's mechanical.
Artificial. She's smiling because whatever part of
her is alive in there is happy because she's taken
her first step back towards being a cybernetic
organism."
"You're saying that--" began Picard.
And Geordi nodded. "Yeah. The only
reason she's displaying any sort of emotion is
because she thinks she's taken the first step toward
becoming a Borg again. And she's happy about it."
He released her hand and, with a discouraged shake
of his head, walked out of the operating room.
Chapter Thirteen
"That's all we can tell you, Jean-Luc. I
wish we knew more."
The face of Ariel Taggert was on the screen,
having replaced the image of moments ago of the
Repulse hanging in space, moving at
one-half impulse power. When the Enterprise
had arrived in the Kalish star system and found a
battered starship and several planets missing, they
had thought the worst ... until they managed to open
a channel to the Repulse and learn that loss of
life had been minimal. "It's a big monster,
and it's powerful," continued Taggert. "I've fed
you all the specs that our sensors were able to pick
up. When we last saw it, it was heading out of the
system at two-eleven mark four."
Data, seated at ops, quickly ran the
coordinates through on his charts. "Captain," he
said, and then amended, "Captains," since the comment
was really addressed to both of them, "that would be in
line with our projected origin of the device."
"Device." Taggert shook her head. "A
chronometer is a device. This thing was a
monstrosity. This thing, and whoever was
controlling it."
"You definitely communicated with it," said
Picard.
"Ooooh yes. And it had a few choice words
for us that, boiled down, amounted to, "Stay the
hell out of my way." If she's out for the
Borg, then I certainly wouldn't want to be in
the Borg's shoes."
I've been there, and I wouldn't want to be
there again, either, Picard thought. Out loud, he said,
"Shall we take you in tow, Ariel?"
She made a dismissive wave. "Save your
energy. We'll have repairs effected within
twelve hours to be on our way again. Besides, in
the condition we're in right now, we wouldn't do you a
damned bit of good. A few phaser shots and some
maneuvering tricks aren't going to help. Not that
attacking that thing with all systems go would do you any
good."
"It's that powerful?"
"Oh yes," she said with quiet conviction.
"I've never seen anything like it, Jean-Luc.
Not ever. You can't stop it. No one can stop it."
"We'll have to try."
"Then God watch over you, Picard."
"If he will. Enterprise out."
Ariel's image vanished, replaced by the
Repulse, and Picard turned to Data.
"Mr. Data, what will be the next star system that
the planet-killer encounters?"
Data didn't even have to glance. "If it
continues its present course, the planet-killer
will next enter Tholian space."
"Oh, wonderful," said Riker. "They'll be
thrilled to help out."
"Sarcasm, Number One? Perhaps you can
employ it against the planet-killer," Picard
said.
"From what Captain Taggert was saying,
phasers and photon torpedoes had no effect,"
Riker said drily. "Perhaps other weapons might
be in order."
"I'll have Mr. La Forge prepare some
slingshots. Mr. Data, set course on
two-eleven mark four. Warp factor seven."
He pointed slightly in that small shooting motion
he'd developed. "Engage," he said.
The Enterprise leaped into warp space and was
gone.
Taggert watched them go, then said, "Bridge
to sickbay. How you doing down there, Kate?"
"Holdi ng up," came Pulaski's reply.
"You didn't send us as many injuries as I
figured you would."
"I'm mellowing in my old age," said
Taggert.
"Old age beats the alternative."