Survivors - Jean Lorrah [53]
“Tomorrow morning,” said Dare, “you will meet Rikan, the last of the Trevan warlords. Perhaps you will believe him more easily than you do us. In the meantime, a room has been prepared for you.” He reached across the table. “I’ll take the combadge.”
Oh, I am an idiot! Yar thought-but it was probably better that she had not attempted to contact Data earlier. He might still have been with Nalavia.
As she raised her hand to tap the badge, Yar realized two things simultaneously: the badge was no longer pinned to her uniform, and Dare was reaching not to her but to Poet. His henchman dropped her combadge into Dare’s hand.
The other man might be a skilled pickpocket, but Dare wasn’t. By reflex, Yar snatched the badge from him and tapped it firmly.
It chirped, but there was no response-and faster than she could try again, her wrist was gripped in an iron hand. Not Dare’s; Poet’s.
The ineffectual-looking man had a grip like a tractor beam. “Naughty, naughty,” he said, retrieving the badge with his other hand and tossing it to Dare.
Dare caught it with a frown, obviously considered giving it a tap himself, but instead passed it to Sdan. “The channel didn’t open when she touched it. Test it out, Sdan-but make sure you don’t trigger it. The robot may be able to trace her from even a single signal.”
“Mr. Data is an android, not a robot,” said Yar. “He is also a Starfleet officer, my shipmate, and my friend.”
“You used to have better taste in friends.”
“At least I don’t have to worry about where Data’s loyalties lie!” she spat in return, sorry the moment she said it. Frustration was her greatest enemy; when she felt helpless, outmaneuvered, she acted without thinking. Why hadn’t she pretended to be partly won over? Now they’d be guarded against her, lessening her chances of escape.
Dare said coldly, “I see. You still believe in my guilt. And your duty as a Starfleet officer is to apprehend a fugitive from justice should you happen upon one in the course of an assignment.” His face had the same hauteur with which he had listened to the verdict at his court-martial. Even his eyes were ice. “Poet,” he said, “put her in the blue room, and bar the door.” And with that he stood up and walked out.
In the Presidential Palace, Lieutenant Commander Data used every piece of programming in his flirtation files to disengage himself from Nalavia’s clutches.
He was having an unfamiliar reaction: it was not merely that he and Tasha had decided that restricting his actions to flirtation was the best way to “soften up” the President. No … Data discovered that he did not want to be intimate with Nalavia. He had never experienced such antipathy before, and as he finally walked through the corridors toward his room, much later than he had intended, he analyzed his response.
Why, when it was obvious that Nalavia would test and perhaps expand his limits, did he find himself hoping that it would not become necessary?
It was curious: he felt as if he had changed more in the months he had been aboard the Enterprise than in all the years he had been conscious before that. He had served on other starships, visited numerous worlds, gathered gigabytes of data … and still, on those other assignments, he remained more a piece of convenient equipment than a fellow crew member to the people he worked among. And the more he sensed that he was shut out of their camaraderie, the more he yearned to be human … until by the time he was assigned to the Enterprise he had actually dared to articulate the desire.
And was not laughed at.
Even Will Riker, who was occasionally insensitive to his aspirations to such human attributes as creativity, had laughed with, not at, him the day they met-or had intended to, not yet knowing that Data laughed even less competently than he whistled. “Nice to meet you … Pinocchio.”
He had had to search the ship’s data banks for the reference, but when he found and accessed it seconds later, even though Riker passed it off as a joke, he was stunned at being compared to the subject of a story about