First Contact, page 10
NINE
Data woke to abrupt, full consciousness, to the sight of a pale gray bulkhead less than an arm’s length from his face, and to a detached sense of mild amazement.
Amazement, because he could not recall the moment the Borg had deactivated him. He reached to touch the wall and discovered the metal clamps and restraints that held him fast to something resembling a surgical bed. An optical scan of the area revealed nothing but smooth gray bulkhead, for as far as his peripheral vision extended; surely, then, he was no longer in Main Engineering—although the gurgles, hums, and odd hissing sounded precisely the same as they had in the instant the Borg dragged him inside.…
Captain Picard had been most wise in suggesting that he deactivate the emotion chip. As much as he wanted to experience abject fear, he felt that the lack of it now would permit him to deal more efficiently with such a difficult and most likely fatal—at least for his personality, if not his android body—situation.
He shifted against the restraints. Something about his perspective was not right, nor was the sensation of his body pushing hard against his fetters. There should have been some resistance if he were in a vertical position, of course, but—
Beneath him, the table began to move. And as it slowly began to rotate, Data came to understand: he had been staring at the deck, not the bulkhead.
As he revolved, he studied his transformed surroundings: the great cavern that had been engineering was now dimly lit and swirling with mist, beads of moisture glittering upon the black cables and conduits that made up the cybernetic jungle. The bulkheads, ceiling, and decks had been honeycombed with thousands of alcoves where drones slept, organic tubing connecting them to more dark machinery. Other drones moved about, intent on various tasks designed to further adapt the room to their use.
Behind them, Data noted with interest, were the plasma coolant tanks—fortunately unadulterated, but nestled within a Borg-modified bulkhead and well out of reach.
As the table continued to rotate, a curious new sight caught the android’s attention: four Borg standing together, each one’s face connected by an elaborate series of tubing to the ceiling. The tubes, which appeared to be made from organic matter, pulsated with energy and a glowing, viscous liquid.
As best he could tell, the Borg appeared to be feeding, but from what?
Abruptly, the table arrived at precisely one hundred eighty degrees from its starting point and clicked into place. Nearby—and invisible to Data until the table had come half-circle—two drones worked steadily at a console. The android lifted his head and saw upon the monitor the encryption graphics with which he had protected the main bridge computer.
“Your efforts to break the encryption codes will not be successful,” he informed them matter-of-factly. “Nor will your attempts to assimilate me into your collective.”
“Brave words,” came a voice overhead, one that made him glance up sharply at the ceiling; it was not the thundering, multilayered masculine whisper of the collective but a singular voice, one that betrayed passion, intelligence, a personality capable of emotion and thought.
The low voice of a woman.
“I’ve heard them before,” she said, “from thousands of species across thousands of worlds, since long before you were created.”
Data gazed up at the thick, dark tangle of tubing and circuitry that hung from the ceiling, swaying like weeds in a gentle sea. His eye caught a rustle of movement amid them, shining beads of moisture trembling, falling as something both raven and white slithered through the jumble.
And a woman’s face: chalk-pale but hauntingly beautiful, with ancient, piercing eyes of silver.
Data frowned as the image vanished as swiftly as it had appeared, though the voice still spoke.
“But now… they are all Borg.”
“I am unlike any life-form you have encountered before,” he countered, peering up at the cybertangle but unable to find any trace of the strange female creature. “The codes stored in my neural net cannot be forcibly removed.”
“You are an imperfect being, created by an imperfect being. Finding your weakness is only a matter of time.”
As she spoke, three drones stepped forward to stand beside the table, forming a semicircle around Data’s head; one of them lifted a forearm completely encased by black metal and held it above the android’s skull. In place of hand and fingers, long, stiletto-sharp spikes extruded from the casing—and, as Data watched curiously, began to spin.
And as the whining drill descended and bit into his scalp, the android reflected once again that it was a very good thing the emotion chip had been disabled—a very good thing.
* * *
Some few hours past midnight, the encampment had grown quiet at last, and the air piercing cold. There was only one good thing about the war, Zefram Cochrane thought, and that was the night sky; without the once-omnipresent glow cast by civilization, the stars shone dazzlingly bright.
Nearby, the man named La Forge—he of the Lily-dark skin and amazing pale blue eyes—paused in his adjustment of Cochrane’s telescope, aimed now at a specific point in the clear, glittering sky. La Forge produced a small black box and pointed it at the telescope, then apparently read something on the screen that prompted him to lean forward and adjust the telescope ever so slightly.
Meanwhile, Cochrane tried to focus his attention on Deanna Troi and the man who’d introduced himself as Commander William Riker.
It was enormously difficult. Cochrane was no longer quite as drunk as he’d been when Deanna entered the Crash & Burn, and that frightened him. It would have been easier to write off what was happening now as an ethanol-induced hallucination, but this was far too real, too rational, too consistent to be anything but real… or a paranoid delusion, a product of the madness he’d been fleeing since the war.
Before the war, life had been simple. Mood disorder? Bouts of depression alternating with sky-rocketing mania? No problem; have your DNA toyed with a bit so that you’d never pass on the disease, wear an implant and have it changed once a decade, and you’ll never experience a single symptom.
He hadn’t until after the war. He’d gotten the implant as an adolescent, before the disease—a particularly severe type, according to the geneticist—had made itself known. To him, it had been a medical curiosity, like having a gene for a sixth finger or diabetes—just something the doctor told you about, something that could be fixed in one treatment, something noted in your medical records that would never affect your life. Soon, his physician had promised, medical science would reach a level where a single alteration of the errant gene would permanently cure the affliction.
Beaten by the holocaust, soon never came.
Cochrane hadn’t even thought about it until after the war—two years after, to be precise, eleven years after he’d received his last implant. He’d already been here, up in Montana, contemplating warp-drive theory; the one thing he’d salvaged, the only thing that mattered, were his mathematical notes. His plan had been to simply pursue his research, and when the ravaged planet began to recover, share it with the remnants of the scientific community in hopes that someone would have the necessary money and equipment to actually implement it—perhaps even someday build a warp drive.
That was when his acquaintance with mania began. A night came when he was sitting outside the silo—very near to where he sat now—staring up at the silent stars. Most people never went near that far end of the encampment, because they feared the still-viable missile inside. They’d gone to Cochrane, knowing of his work as a physicist, and asked him whether there might be some way to disarm the damned thing. After all, the silo had equipment, robots, for dealing with radioactive waste.
He had little hope it could be accomplished, actually, but he was curious to see it. And so he took a neighbor’s Geiger counter along and made local history as the first person to brave the silo since the war.
A visit to the silo’s inner sanctum in the afternoon proved fascinating, if disappointing for the community; there was no way to neutralize the nuclear material in the bomb. About the best Cochrane could recommend was to seal the whole place off with a thick layer of lead and concrete.
It was later that day, a few hours after sunset when he was staring up at the stars, that the revelation came.
The nuclear core in the missile: it was the same fuel his theoretical warp engine required, was it not? Why not beat that damned sword into a plowshare and use the bomb to make an actual ship that he could test?
He’d been feeling exceptionally energetic and optimistic the past few days, sleeping little and working feverishly on a design for the warp engine. But at the moment the revelation struck him, followed by the joyful realization that it was, in fact, doable, his optimism turned to euphoria, his energy to outright obsession.
He worked ten days and nights in the silo without sleep, without food, with only the water in his canteen. He would stay there working, he vowed, until he got the ship—the Phoenix—ready for launch.
At the time, it never occurred to him that he was looking at a good decade’s worth of work. It all seemed so easy, so utterly accomplishable that he did not stop until forced to literally crawl out of the silo, a day after his canteen ran dry. Fatigue overtook him then, and he spent the next day sleeping in his tent and forcing himself to eat and drink—not the occasional beer he was accustomed to, but hard liquor, and quite a lot of it. It was the only available substance that reined in the wildly galloping obsession (the psychoactive drugs that provided some with escape from unhappiness left him raving, delusional) and let him sleep at least a fraction of the night.
Over two weeks’ time, the euphoria gradually faded, until one day he found himself racked by such despair and doubt that he couldn’t find a reason to get out of bed. He’d been insane, deluded the past few weeks—frighteningly so—and the whole warp-drive project was impossible, the ravings of a madman. It would take long, painful years to accomplish.…
And clearly, his madness had caught up to him, seized him at last and made its presence known. How could this be possible, in a century where cognitive and emotional disorders were unknown, a part of the dim past associated with strait jackets, chains, moldering dungeons where the “insane” howled in despair?
It was a few weeks later, when he emerged enough from the depths of hopelessness to climb down into the silo once more, that he saw all the work he’d done in his speeding, three-brainstorms-a-minute phase. He’d expected to find it useless, poorly wrought, incomprehensible.
Instead, he found it perfect, brilliant, startlingly insightful—in fact, his best work. And the notions that had come to him during his “revelation” indicated genius. In ten days, he had accomplished two months’ work.
Yet it did not ease his fear of the madness.
When manic, he drank because it eased the attendant and at times unbearable racing of his thoughts and the insomnia; when depressed, he drank because it eased the pain. And conveniently, his neighbors blamed his erratic behavior on the alcohol; shame prevented him from sharing the truth.
Because of the shame, he drank when he was lucid, too.
There were no implants available anymore for the disorder. He knew; he had checked, had scoured all the surrounding states in search of the cure. He was destined to live the rest of his life at the mercy of the emotional rollercoaster. A week ago, when both he and Lily realized that the Phoenix was finally going to be ready for launch, he’d felt himself catapulted from blessed normalcy into manic euphoria.
And he’d spent the whole week bargaining with the universe: Please, just let this last long enough; don’t let me plunge into a depression until after she launches.… As long as he didn’t become too manic, too excitable, he’d make an excellent pilot.
Now, Cochrane stared hard and skeptically at William Riker’s neatly bearded pink face. If this was a fullblown hallucination courtesy of the madness, it certainly possessed the unmistakable smell, sight, sound, touch of reality, right down to Riker’s cornflower blue eyes.
And if it was real—
If it was real, he had no damned idea what to think. Certainly, the beautiful and exotic Deanna seemed honest enough, and so did this Riker character. La Forge, too. They all seemed on the up-and-up, but the story they told was simply… unbelievable.
“Let me make sure I understand you correctly, ‘Commander,’ ” Cochrane said in his most cynical tone, afraid to show these strangers anything but mistrust. “A group of cybernetic life-forms from the future have traveled back through time to enslave the human race… and you’re here to stop them.”
Riker’s open, cheerful face wore a faint smile. “That’s right.”
“God, you’re heroic,” Cochrane spat. “Can you fly, too?”
“We’re going to prove it to you.” The tall, bearded man turned toward La Forge. “Geordi, how are you doing?”
La Forge’s admiring and faintly exasperated gaze remained fixed on the telescope. “These old refractors are tricky to align, but I think I’ve got it.” He bent down to peer through the glass. “Yeah. Come take a look.”
The last invitation was directed at Cochrane, who sighed and moved over to the scope, then stooped down and looked into the eyepiece. “What do we have here?” he said cockily. “I love a good peep”—his voice went abruptly flat with shock—“show…”
Against the glittering, velvet background of stars and indigo sky, a great ship hung, her sleek hull crafted of shining, pale gray metal. The damned thing had to have been as big as the entire campgrounds.
Cochrane jerked his head up at once and glared at the others. “It’s a trick. How’d you do that?”
Beside him, La Forge folded his arms and said smugly, “It’s your telescope.”
Cochrane frowned down at the scope controls, then peered back through the eyepiece up at the impossible, magnificent vessel. After an extended look, he slowly rose, then regarded Riker with cautious amazement.
“I don’t believe it…”
“Believe it,” Riker said, his smile one of smug pride. “That’s our ship, the Enterprise.”
“And… Lily’s up there right now?” After the attack, he had been so ravingly psychotic that he had run to the Crash & Burn and begun gulping down every bottle of booze in sight, so agitated and then later so drunk that he’d completely forgotten about poor Lily, alone in the silo. Once again, the madness caused him shame.
She could have been killed—had in fact been dying—while he was sitting around getting drunk with Deanna in hopes of seducing her.
“That’s right,” Riker affirmed.
Worried, Cochrane gazed up with his naked eyes at the place the spaceship supposedly hovered. “Can I talk to her?”
Riker’s cheerfulness deflated slightly. “We’ve lost contact with the Enterprise. We don’t know why.”
A convenient lie if ever Cochrane had heard one; yet Riker’s direct, vaguely troubled gaze was mightily convincing. Cochrane bent down one more time to peer at the handsome vessel in infinite amazement. “So… what is it you want me to do?”
Riker grinned. “Simple. Conduct your warp flight, just as you planned.”
Cochrane paused, calculating. They had already taken him down into the silo’s belly and showed him the rubble and where Lily had fallen, unconscious from the radiation poisoning. And the Phoenix, where unfamiliar women and men were working to repair damage.
Whether this was all a hallucination or not, whether these people who claimed to be from the future were telling the truth or not, what possible harm could it do to try to accomplish his dream? If they wanted to hurt him or his ship, they could easily do it now; they didn’t have to wait until he was airborne.
The frightening thing was, their story was starting to make sense.
“Well…” He hesitated. “All right—but it’ll take a couple of weeks to build a new field generator.”
“We have the technology to repair your ship tonight,” the one named La Forge said, his dark face ashine with inner excitement. A true engineer, that one, Cochrane thought. He can see beyond the equations, the damaged equipment—to see the real possibilities. He’s looking at me right now, but he’s seeing the Phoenix in flight.
Hell, if they’re telling the truth, he already knows what she’s capable of.
Riker glanced at both men, clearly pleased at each one’s reaction; even so, his expression turned somber as he told the physicist sternly: “It’s imperative that you make the flight tomorrow morning by eleven-fifteen at the latest.”
“Why?”
“Because at eleven o’clock, an alien ship will be passing through this solar system.”
Cochrane sat down hard on the ice-cold concrete. When he could speak, he said, “More bad guys…”
For the first time in several minutes, Deanna Troi spoke. Apparently, large quantities of liquor didn’t agree with her, for her eyes were narrowed from a headache and her expression was distinctly queasy; but the thought of what was to happen the following morning apparently fired her interest.
“Good guys. They’re on a survey mission,” she said—matter-of-factly, as if aliens buzzing about in spaceships were so commonplace, so expected, that his question didn’t deserve a direct answer. “They have no interest in Earth—too primitive.”
With a smile, she glanced up at Riker, who continued the explanation. “But tomorrow morning, when they detect the warp signature from your ship and realize that humans have discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light, they’ll decide to alter course and make first contact with Earth—right here.” He gestured at the frozen ground beneath his feet.
Cochrane gave up all effort to hide his amazement and gaped openly at them. “Here?”
With scientific accuracy, La Forge pointed to a spot just east of the concrete where Cochrane sat; his voice, too, was laced with admiration and pride. Pride in me, Cochrane realized wonderingly. “Over there, actually. I think that’s where the monument’s going to be.” He glanced back at Riker for verification. “Commander?”
