Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [78]
“Maddox’s breakthrough,” Picard breathed. “They believe the technology that created Rhea can repair them.”
“That’s right. And now we have to find her, and Data, before they do.”
“What of Professor Vaslovik?” Picard asked. “What is his role in all of this?”
“Captain,” Sam said, “Emil Vaslovik is not precisely what he seems …”
The journey seemed to take an eternity, but Data knew his sense of time was badly skewed. He lapsed into a gray fog at least twice, both times awakening to the sight of Rhea’s concerned face hovering over him. He was sure she spoke to him most of the time he was awake, and even though language processing was difficult, he found he enjoyed the pleasant drone of her voice. Sometime shortly after the second lapse into unconsciousness, Rhea moved him into the copilot seat and strapped him in which, initially, confused him greatly. How can she do this? I weigh at least … I weigh a great deal… . Then he remembered: she is an android and some androids have enhanced strength. He struggled mightily to retain this information. He knew that it was important and would continue to be so no matter what else happened.
Rhea channeled power into the impulse engines and they moved smoothly toward a violet orb. As they approached, Data began to worry that his visual receptors were malfunctioning again. He could not shake the feeling that the planet was staring at him. He blinked and tried to focus his thoughts: there was a large black spot roughly where a human eye would be. “Odin,” Rhea said, and Data remembered the story of how the chief of the Norse gods had sacrificed one of his eyes in exchange for wisdom. “And there are two moons coming up over the horizon. They’re Hugin and Munin, named for Odin’s two ravens.”
Hugin and Munin, Data recalled. “Thought” and “Memory.” Very poetical. He was faintly amazed that he could retrieve this information and attributed it to being linked to Rhea’s systems. She is an android, he reminded himself.
The planet, Data noticed, was banded with shimmering silver clouds, which struck him as wrong. Was this a common characteristic for gas giants? He could not recall. Then, he was distracted by another thought: Why are we here?
Data watched Rhea enter an encryption key into the pod’s communications system. Moments later, they received a hail, and, in response, Rhea spoke a single word: “Valhalla.”
Space rippled and roiled in a series of undulating concentric circles. Something immense was decloaking. Data kept expecting the ship to appear, kept waiting for the edges to stabilize, but the warbling displacement grew and grew until the effect filled his vision.
It was difficult to judge scale against the depths of space, even with Odin as a background, but the station … or ship … or whatever it was … was comparable in size to an orbiting Starfleet starbase, but there the comparison ended. Where most Starfleet bases were models of streamlined, geometric efficiency, this station, this Valhalla, could claim as ancestors both Gothic cathedrals and snowflakes. Every surface was carved, sculpted with rich geometric detail. It was overwhelming in its fractal complexity.
Without Rhea touching any controls, the pod lurched toward the station’s central hull. As they passed between two of the dozen ziggurat-shaped secondary hulls, Data turned his eyes upward and strained to take in the sheer mass of the place. It was as if a god had given shape to his own mind. Data realized absently that such colorful metaphors would never have occurred to him prior to the installation of his emotion chip.
Data spotted a tiny ring of light set into the station’s underside and watched as the circle resolved into spacedock doors that parted as the pod approached. The feathery touch of a tractor beam guided them to an airlock with nary a bump or