Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [68]
Rhea leaned over him and dabbed at his cheek with the sleeve of her shirt. “Lost you there for a minute.” She was smiling, but Data saw tears in the corners of her eyes. The sensation that the universe was sputtering had disappeared, but it had been replaced by a feeling that his senses were packed in gauze. “Your sensory processing system almost shut down,” Rhea explained. “I thought you were about to go into cascade failure, so I slowed down everything. You’re perceiving things now at about … well, at about a human level.”
For some reason, Data found this idea very amusing and felt an impulse to laugh, but the systems he needed to carry out the reaction were unavailable. A noise came out of him—a splurt —and he spasmed involuntarily. The world went away again.
When it came back, Data discovered he had lost the ability to perceive color and his visual processors were searching for the proper level of granularity. Rhea’s face kept digitizing, then shifting into a soft gray fuzz. It was very distracting.
“This isn’t good,” she said. Data heard the familiar chirp and hum of a tricorder and distantly felt her attaching a probe to the side of his head. His vision stabilized and color returned, though everything was too red. Rhea tapped a command sequence into her tricorder and Data felt some of the chill lift. From very far away, the thought crept into Data’s head, How does she know how to do these things? He tried to analyze the question more carefully, to work through possible answers, but it had already dissolved.
Rhea was shaking her head as she studied her tricorder. “There’s really only one way for me to monitor you accurately,” she said, and set the tricorder aside. Extending her arm, Rhea rolled up her left sleeve, touched her right thumb to a spot just above her left wrist, then ran the thumb up her forearm. As Data watched, an invisible seam parted and revealed a network of artificial muscles and tendons with a fine tracery of optical cable woven through it. Rhea drew out a length of the cable, uncoiled it, then inserted it into an input/output junction in the exposed circuitry of Data’s skull.
Data still could not speak, but he blinked at Rhea in rapid succession.
Rhea gave him a wry grin. “Looks like you found me, Sherlock.”
Chapter Eighteen
BRUCE MADDOX LOOKED THIN and haggard, but otherwise seemed alert and anxious to answer Picard’s questions. Dr. Crusher had made the token objections when Picard had said he was beaming down to the infirmary, but she obviously hadn’t really expected him to comply. She had given him a warning look just before she beamed up to help with casualties on the Enterprise. Over two hundred crewmen had been injured, most when the hull had been breached and they had been exposed to vacuum. The good news was that it appeared only a few cases would require long-term treatment, but it didn’t change the fact that crew strength was down significantly.
Picard sighed. He had faced worse odds, but never against an enemy about whom he knew so little.
Time for that to change.
Maddox sipped from a bottle of water. “Mouth is dry,” he rasped, then added wryly, “I guess two weeks in a coma will do that to you.”
“I’m sorry, Commander,” Picard said, “but I don’t have time for pleasantries. My ship has been badly damaged, I’ve lost crewmen, two of my senior officers are missing—”
“Data?” Maddox interrupted.
“Yes,” Picard said. “And my chief of security.” Obviously Maddox hadn’t been just sitting and sipping water. He’d been thinking, too, putting together bits of information gleaned from brief conversations with the doctor, Barclay and Admiral Haftel. “And before I can formulate my next move, I need to know what you know.” He pulled a chair close to Maddox’s bed and leaned forward. “What happened that night at the lab, the night you tried to activate the holotronic android?”
Maddox put down his water and took a deep breath, trying to focus. “The memories