Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [69]
Picard frowned. “Someone? Someone stopped a ceiling collapse?”
“No, sir, what I mean is, the ceiling caved, and someone kept the debris from crushing me. It was the android. Our prototype.”
“You’re certain of this?”
“Absolutely, sir. There was another flash of lightning in the gloom and I saw it, plain as day, holding up the wreckage long enough for me to scramble away.”
“Did it say anything to you?” Picard asked.
“No,” Maddox said. “But I did hear Emil’s voice in my ear as he pressed something to my temple. He said, ‘Sorry about this, Bruce, but I can’t have you or anyone else trying to find us.’ Then he stepped away from me and called out, ‘We have to hurry. They’ll be here soon.’ “
“Is that the last thing you remember?”
“No. Oddly enough, although my strength was ebbing from the blood loss, whatever Emil did to me didn’t take effect all at once. I could see him move next to the android and activate some sort of device he had in his hand. A body suddenly materialized at his feet. Sir, it was identical to the prototype. Then the professor hit his switch again, and both he and the android beamed out. The ceiling fell, and there was dust everywhere, but I could see that the duplicate prototype was crushed.
“And that wasn’t the end of it. I couldn’t move, and staying awake was getting harder. My combadge was gone, and I was becoming increasingly aware that I was bleeding out. Then I remember seeing someone—two people—step through the wrecked side of the building. I thought it was a rescue team. It was hard to see them clearly, I could tell they were huge … much taller than any humanoids I’d seen around the DIT. Broader, too.” He held his arms far apart to indicate the width of their shoulders. “Like that.”
Like the ones Will described, Picard realized. “What happened next?”
“They immediately went for a closer look at the crushed body, and one of them said, ‘Not the one.’ “
“So they realized the android was a fake. Did they say anything else?”
“The second one answered, ‘Then we will wait. The Starfleet android will come now. He will find it.’ “
” ‘The Starfleet android…’ ” Picard repeated. “Data.”
Maddox nodded. “And then they disappeared. Maybe beamed out, but I’m not sure. Everything’s fuzzy after that. I remembered thinking if Data came, he’d be walking into a trap. All I could think about was that I had to warn him.”
“That’s why you wrote DATA on the floor,” Picard realized. “You were trying to warn him. In blood.”
“Yes, for all the good it did. And blood was, unfortunately, the only medium I had to work in at the time. Although part of me thinks if I hadn’t written it, Admiral Haftel might not have summoned you here at all, in which case Data would still be safe.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Commander,” Picard said. “I suspect the admiral would have done so anyway, given Data’s familiarity with you and his own expertise in the field of artificial intelligence. Sooner or later, the Enterprise would have been summoned to Galor IV.”
“Well, now that I’m back, I’m as eager to get to the bottom of all this as you, sir. We have a common goal, after all. Someone is after your android and mine. There can’t be many people onboard the Enterprise who know as much about them as I do. It stands to reason that I should come along …”
Internally, Picard bridled at the use of the possessive pronouns in