Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [79]
“Worf! Check that!”
“Won’t do any good,” LaForge said. “He bypassed all the relays that would’ve notified the bridge. He knows all the tricks, sir. You know he does.”
“Worf, try to track him,” Riker amended as he climbed the ramp in three long steps and confronted LaForge. “You got any idea what his thinking is on this?”
LaForge said, “He’s hoping to be able to communicate with that thing if he can get closer to it.”
“And?”
“Why would there be anything else, Mr. Riker?”
“Come on, LaForge, I see it in your face. What else?”
“Just a little thing, sir. Because you’ve been so nice to him, he’s gone to find out if he’s alive enough for the creature to suck the life out of him.”
The bridge shrank away. Riker’s eyes tightened until they were aching. He brought a hand to them and leaned the other palm on the bridge rail. “Oh, no,” he groaned. “Oh, damn … who knew he’d be that sensitive?”
“Did he have to be?” LaForge shot back.
“Damn,” he murmured again, this time a whisper. “Worf, anything on that shuttlecraft?”
“Sensors on passive aren’t picking up anything at all, sir. I don’t understand. Even passive read should pick up something the size of a shuttlecraft.”
Riker gestured toward Worf, but looked at LaForge and asked, “Got an explanation for that?”
LaForge shrugged. “Data’s not stupid, sir. He probably rigged a sensor shield of some kind to give him time to get away before we could beam him back or hit him with a tractor beam. We could pick him up right away on active sensors, but passives aren’t powerful enough and Data knows we don’t dare use them.”
“Does he have a plan?”
“Not that he told me. He intends to attract its attention, that’s all I know.”
“Worf, can he do it in a shuttlecraft?”
The Klingon paused, then said, “No problem, sir. All he’d have to do is use the weapons on board.”
Pacing away from them, Riker folded his arms tightly, gathering to deal with a problem he himself had caused. “He didn’t have to do this….”
“Thanks to you, he thought he did,” LaForge said.
Riker struck him with a glare and snapped, “That’s enough from you. I know what I did. Have you got something constructive to say?”
LaForge straightened-almost to attention, but not quite-and got suddenly formal. “Yes, sir. Request permission to take another shuttlecraft and go after him. I believe that would put only the two of us at risk and not attract attention to the Enterprise.”
“And do what when you find him? Dock up and slap his wrist?”
“I could relay coordinates, and you could beam us both back simultaneously.”
Riker paused, and the sarcasm protecting him from his own mistake suddenly flooded away. “That’s a good idea,” he heard himself say, even though he hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He strode back to LaForge and said, “But you shouldn’t be the one to go. I’m the cause of this. I’m the reason he’s risking his life, and I’m going after him.”
“You, sir? You said he was just a machine. That he doesn’t have a life to risk.”
Stifling the desire to reach out and crush those words out of the air, Riker gazed at LaForge so intently he could almost see through the ribbed silver visor and through the dead eyes to the very core of LaForge’s concern for Data. He took a step closer to the navigator and said, “Geordi, nobody needs to be that wrong more than once.”
Stiffly LaForge insisted, “How do you know you were wrong?”
But the answer to the challenge was already there on Riker’s face, and he even had the words for it. “Machines don’t go beyond their programming. No machine has ever sacrificed itself to save others,” he said. “Data just did both.”
LaForge’s stiff posture slackened as he heard Riker’s whole-hearted belief and saw the subtle physiological changes that showed him the first officer was sincere. Even through his anger, he couldn’t doubt his own vision. “Sir, I don’t know if he’ll listen to you. You know what I mean.”
Softly Riker responded, “I’ll make him listen.” He started toward the turbolift, then whirled and snapped his fingers. “Notify Dr.