Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [58]
Rhea could see both of the attacking androids striding deliberately toward them as she ran to Data and knelt by his side, lifting his right arm over her shoulder and hauling him to his feet. Data’s eyes were open and he seemed to be tracking motion, but he couldn’t speak.
She got Data to the second escape pod and eased him into the hatch, followed him inside, slammed the preset and then looked back across the bay.
They were still coming, picking up speed now. Quickly she checked her tricorder: the dampening field that had kept their phasers from functioning earlier was concentrated in the perimeter lab. There was no sign of it inside the bay.
As the pod’s computer announced lift-off in fifteen seconds, Rhea stood and half-emerged from the pod, phaser raised, but instead of firing at their pursuers, she aimed through the shaft overhead, targeting the force field generator near the top, the only thing separating the bay from the ocean above. The phaser beam hit pointblank, and the force field winked out.
There was no sign of fear on the androids’ faces, only grim determination. Rhea almost felt sorry for them. Almost.
There came a roar as the weight of an ocean sent a hurricane blast of cold, wet air into the bay, smacking back her pursuers as they came within arm’s reach of the pod. The automatic hatch closed and the engines fired, sending the pod up the launch tube while all around, ocean water flooded and destroyed Vaslovik’s lair, throwing it into darkness.
The pod ascended rapidly, vibrating madly as it cleared first the tube, then the ocean, then climbed through the atmosphere.
A quick survey revealed what McAdams expected to find: standard escape pod features, including controls for a small but powerful warp drive.
As the sky outside the pod windows shifted from brilliant blue to the cobalt of space’s edge, Rhea got a navigational fix. The Enterprise was in a geosynchronous orbit over the DIT, so she set the autopilot to head due west and clear the atmosphere as quickly as possible. The pod’s impulse thrusters responded, and as the autopilot took over, Rhea finally felt she could turn her attention to Data.
He was in bad shape. His eyes were still open and moving, but all other motor control appeared to be gone. The artificial skin had been torn away almost completely from the left side of his head, exposing a large section of his tripolymer skull. His left shoulder had been crushed. Additionally, there were two large rents in his neck, almost as if one of the giant androids had torn it open with its fingers or teeth.
“Data?” Rhea asked softly. “Can you hear me? Can you answer?” She waved her hand in front of his eyes and they seemed to follow for a few seconds, but then his eyes lost their focus. Data opened his mouth, but the only sound that came out was a thin croak, followed by a thin amber liquid that trickled out the corner. Rhea turned him onto his side so the liquid could drain out. She wasn’t sure if he could choke, but she didn’t want to find out.
“Hang on, Data,” she said. “We’ll be home in a few minutes.” The autopilot beeped and Rhea turned to see the sleek shape of the Enterprise on a small viewscreen. But something was wrong.
A blip shone on the sensor display. Something was coming up from the planet, fast, from Galor IV’s arctic circle, heading straight for the starship.
What the hell—?
Something flared outside the pod, casting ragged, streaming shadows. The pod’s window darkened automatically as the autopilot threw the craft into a sudden spiral. Rhea tried raising the Enterprise, but all she could make out was the garbled sound of Deanna Troi’s voice saying, “… Federation vessel … cease … attempt … will respond …” Then, there was another blinding flash and the signal died.
Rhea only had a second to see the attacker before the pod’s autopilot sent it into evasive maneuvers, but the brief glimpse was more than enough. It wasn’t quite the size of the Enterprise, but the few readings her sensors were able to take showed power readings on a par with the Sovereign-class starship. In both