Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [86]
“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?”