Star Trek: The Next Generation - 112 - Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory Read online

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  Contents

  Historian’s Note

  Part One Enterprise

  2384

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two Noonien

  2367

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  2368–2369

  Chapter 9

  January 2370

  Chapter 10

  July 2370

  Chapter 11

  August 2371

  Chapter 12

  November 2372

  Chapter 13

  May 2374

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  August 2375

  Chapter 16

  October 2376

  Chapter 17

  March 2378

  Chapter 18

  November 2379

  Chapter 19

  October 2380

  Chapter 20

  2381

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  October 2383

  Chapter 23

  January 2384

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Three Elegy

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Glenn, my personal High Epopt of Slack

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  The events in Parts One and Three of this story take place in January 2384, approximately four years and two months after the events of the movie Star Trek Nemesis. The events of Part Two transpire over a span of seventeen years, from 2367 to 2384.

  For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning.

  —Genesis 37:35

  PART ONE

  ENTERPRISE

  2384

  1

  With a sonorous hum and a luminous flare, the transporter beam faded and Commander Geordi La Forge found himself alone in the dark, staring down the barrel of a phaser rifle. The hard-eyed Tellarite security officer behind the weapon lurched forward, tensed for confrontation as he challenged La Forge in a harsh voice. “Identify yourself!”

  Hands raised and palms open, the veteran Starfleet engineer recoiled, only to freeze in place as he noticed on the edges of his vision more rifles being brought to bear against him. “La Forge, Enterprise. What’s going on?”

  The Tellarite glared down his snout at La Forge, his bearing laced with suspicion and hostility. “We’ll ask the questions.” He nodded at someone behind La Forge. “Search him.”

  Singsong tones from a tricorder broke the eerie silence as La Forge was scanned, then rough hands patted him down, stripped his field tricorder from his hip pocket, and plucked the padd from his left hand. A burly Denobulan with sinister-looking ocular ridges stepped into his line of sight and showed the confiscated devices to the Tellarite. “These are all he had on him, sir.” Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed in the night, their cries faint but drawing closer.

  Despite his subordinate’s assurances, the Tellarite lieutenant commander kept his rifle aimed squarely at La Forge’s face. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited,” La Forge said. “I’m a guest of Captain Bruce Maddox. He contacted me via subspace two days ago and asked me to come here in person. He said it was urgent.”

  A Trill woman with a crew cut that matched her severe features edged into view on La Forge’s left. “Sir, I just confirmed the Enterprise is in orbit. He is who he says he is.”

  The news seemed to disappoint the Tellarite, who scowled as he lowered his weapon. “All right, stand down.” He stepped forward and offered his three-fingered hand to La Forge. “Lieutenant Commander Teg. No hard feelings, Commander.”

  “We’ll see about that.” La Forge stepped around Teg and got his first good look at the exterior of the Starfleet Annex of the Daystrom Institute. It had been nearly a decade since the Enterprise’s last visit to the facility; not much seemed to have changed. The five-story building was bland and utilitarian, and its surrounding lawn, which sloped gently downhill to a dense sprawl of old-growth forest, was impeccably manicured. He looked back at the dour Tellarite, who continued to watch him with wary, flat-black eyes. “Where’s Captain Maddox?”

  Teg beckoned La Forge with a tilt of his head. “Follow me.” Rifle slung at his side, he led La Forge inside the Annex through its open main entrance.

  Stealing looks around the wide-open ground floor, La Forge noted that the facility’s interior was far more spartan than he had remembered. If not for the armed Starfleet security personnel milling about, he might have thought the Annex deserted. Force field-partitioned work spaces that once had been crowded with fabrication equipment and computers now stood empty. What had been an office was now a stack of crates. It looked more like an academic laboratory than an active research environment at one of the Federation’s preeminent scientific institutions.

  At the far end of the floor, Teg ushered him inside an elevator and pressed the button for the recently added sublevel, where Captain Maddox’s new lab was situated. Ten years earlier, Maddox had conducted his studies in the spacious main laboratory on the ground floor. With its state-of-the-art accoutrements and commanding view of the Annex’s wooded environs, it had seemed like an ideal working environment—until its overall exposure had left it vulnerable to a devastating sneak attack that had nearly cost Maddox his life. Since then, Maddox had erred on the side of safety, eschewing the luxuries of sunlight and scenery for the practical benefits of privacy and security.

  The elevator doors parted, and bitter smoke rolled in over La Forge’s head. Teg led him out into the sublevel and down the hallway toward Maddox’s lab. Walking slowly, La Forge squinted through the smoke at the numerous scorch marks dotting the corridor. Then he saw that the airlock-style double doors to the lab were open, and through the doorway flowed a steady haze tinged with the acrid stench of burnt metal and melted circuitry. He dodged a departing firefighter as they both stepped through the doorway. Once inside, La Forge’s worst fears were confirmed: the high-tech cybernetics lab had been demolished.

  Standing in the middle of the wreckage was Bruce Maddox, one of the Federation’s leading experts on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. He was in his mid-sixties but still retained the trim physique of his youth; only his salt-and-pepper hair betrayed his years. Dark circles of fatigue ringed his eyes, and his disheveled uniform suggested to La Forge that the man had been involved in whatever crisis had just unfolded.

  Maddox’s first brush with the Enterprise crew, nearly twenty-five years earlier, had been adversarial; he had tried to have Data declared the property of Starfleet so he could disassemble the android to further his own research. That legal battle had been decided in Data’s favor, setting the first precedent that eventually led the Federation to recognize the legal personhood of artificially sentient beings—an argument that Maddox
himself had made before the Federation’s highest civilian court, in defense of Data’s older brother, B-4. In the fifteen years between those two legal milestones, Maddox and Data had developed a mutual if guarded professional respect. It still amazed La Forge that Data had never borne a grudge against Maddox, not even after he’d acquired his emotion chip. Inspired by Data’s example, La Forge had put aside his own anger at Maddox long ago and since then had come to respect and admire the man’s work. If pressed, La Forge would have had to admit that Maddox was likely the only person alive who knew more than he did about Soong-type androids.

  They met in the middle of the lab and clasped hands. Maddox looked exhausted and desperate. “Geordi! Thank God you’re here. Please tell me the Enterprise is with you.”

  “Yes, it is.” He put a hand to Maddox’s shoulder in reassurance. “Bruce, calm down. Tell me what happened.”

  Maddox pressed his dirty palms over his eyes, then pulled down, stretching his face into something that looked like it belonged in a funhouse mirror. “It happened so fast. One minute I was upstairs in my office, preparing for our meeting. The next, alarms started going off. I raced down here, and when I stepped out of the elevator, they started shooting.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know who they were. I couldn’t get a good look at them.” He turned and pointed at a wall console that had been blasted to pieces, leaving only an ugly scorch from floor to ceiling. “They knocked out the security system, including the scattering field. Then they beamed out—I heard the sound of the transporter from the end of the hall. I ran toward the lab, and that’s when something exploded.”

  Teg stepped between La Forge and Maddox. “Five somethings exploded, actually.” He grunted and shook his head. “Hell of a way to cover an escape.”

  La Forge surveyed the damage inflicted by the explosives. “That wasn’t part of their exit strategy. If that’s all it was, they’d only have needed one—but they brought five, one for each of the lab’s computer banks. This was about terminating Captain Maddox’s research.” He turned toward Maddox. “Bruce, what have you been working on?”

  The cyberneticist looked flummoxed. “Nothing except helping B-4.” Recoiling from La Forge’s incredulous glare, he insisted, “I’m serious, Geordi. I haven’t done any new work in years—not since that fiasco with the Exo III androids.”

  “Then what was this break-in about?”

  Maddox flung his arms wide in frustration. “I don’t know!”

  “Start by telling me what secret project was so urgent that you needed to have the Enterprise pulled off-mission to race here at maximum warp.”

  The scientist took a deep breath and regained some of his calm. “It wasn’t a secret project so much as a personal emergency. It’s about B-4.”

  “What about him?”

  “It’s complicated.” Maddox walked toward an empty corner of the lab and gestured for La Forge to follow him. “I’ll have to show you.”

  The mention of the prototype android’s name had filled La Forge with worry. An early creation of the late Doctor Noonien Soong, B-4 had been a relative simpleton compared with his younger kin, such as Data, Lore, and the replicant of Juliana Tainer. B-4’s positronic brain was far less advanced than the others’ were, though much of his physical body was comparable to those of his twins. What now made B-4 of keen personal interest to La Forge—as well as the rest of the Enterprise crew, to say nothing of Maddox—was that Data, less than a day before embarking on a suicide mission to save Captain Picard and destroy the planet-killing weapon of the usurper Praetor Shinzon, had uploaded a complete copy of his memory engrams into B-4 for safekeeping. Because of limitations in B-4’s hardware and software, he had never been able to consciously access those memories, but knowing they resided within him, as if he were a living memorial to his lamented sibling, had meant a great deal to those who’d known Data.

  Maddox stopped in the corner of the room and opened a panel to reveal the lab’s environmental controls. He activated the interface with a single tap of his finger. “A few months ago, I noticed that B-4’s response time to stimuli was slowing down.” He turned toward La Forge. “At first, I thought it was a simple biomechanical problem. But then I ran a full diagnostic. Something was going wrong in B-4’s positronic matrix. It was breaking down, and it was because of Data’s memory engrams. There must have been traces of operational code mixed in with his memories, and when B-4’s operating software tried to incorporate the new subroutines, it started a slow-motion cascade failure.”

  “You mean like what happened to Data’s daughter, Lal?”

  A grimace and a nod. “Exactly.” He turned and started entering commands into the environmental panel. “B-4’s mind simply wasn’t made to harbor software that advanced. Once the cascade failure began, I did all I could to reverse it, but I failed. I’ve managed to slow it down, but unless we find a way to halt the degradation of his matrix, he’ll suffer a complete cascade failure in less than a week.” He finished keying in commands, and with a soft hiss, a large section of the wall began to creep open. “The only solution I’ve come up with so far has been to purge all of Data’s memories from B-4’s brain.”

  The mere suggestion horrified La Forge. “Bruce, you can’t . . .”

  “I don’t want to, Geordi. But if B-4’s mind fails, it’ll purge Data’s memory engrams as part of the final cascade error. If we’re doomed to lose him either way, I’d prefer to save B-4.”

  The towering, floor-to-ceiling secret door opened wide enough for Maddox to slip past it, into the alcove hidden behind it. He stopped abruptly just a few steps inside, and La Forge nearly stumbled into him. “Bruce, what’s—” His question trailed off, forgotten, as he realized that he and Maddox were in a room with sarcophagus-shaped alcoves for six Soong-type androids. The three on the left side of the room were labeled for Soong’s first three unnamed prototypes. The three on the right were labeled for B-4, Lore, and Lal.

  All six alcoves were empty.

  Maddox faltered, and La Forge put a hand to his back to steady him. Slackjawed with grief and shock, the cyberneticist muttered, “Gone. . . . They’re all gone.”

  “I think it’s safe to say we know what the intruders were after.” La Forge stepped away and tapped his combadge. “La Forge to Enterprise.”

  He was answered by the gruff baritone of Commander Worf. “Enterprise. Go ahead.”

  “Captain Maddox’s lab has been attacked, and all six of the Soong-type androids in his care are missing and presumed stolen. We need to lock down this whole planet right now.”

  “Understood. Stay there. I’ll join you shortly. Enterprise out.”

  La Forge returned to Maddox’s side and clasped his shoulder in consolation. “Don’t worry, Bruce, we’ll find them.”

  “Who? The thieves? Or the androids?”

  He regarded the empty alcoves with cold fury. “Both.”

  • • •

  Every word that issued from the mouth of Governor Eloch, the head of the civilian government on Galor IV, seemed calculated to annoy Worf, who stood outside the main entrance of the Starfleet Annex of the Daystrom Institute and listened to the freakishly tall, pot-bellied Kobliad politico’s whining. “A class-one planetary security alert. Do you have even the slightest idea what such a protocol entails, Commander?”

  “Yes.” Worf hoped the simplicity of his answer would obviate Eloch’s impulse to continue. But as he expected, he was disappointed.

  “I don’t think you do, Commander. All nonessential, nonemergency communications have been suspended. The planet’s transporter network is locked down, beyond even my authority to reinstate. Every aircraft, spacecraft, and starship on the planet’s been grounded; every publicly accessible computer system has been shut down; and every law enforcement and defense agency on my planet is at a state of high alert, awaiting instructions from your vessel.” The governor crossed his arms and radiated contempt. “A class-one planetary security alert is a ver
y rare thing, Commander. There hasn’t been one on Galor IV in ten years. Would you care to guess what that incident and this one have in common?”

  “No, I would not.”

  “Your ship, that’s what! An officer from the Enterprise plunged this world into a state of panic ten years ago, for reasons that were never explained. Now, here we are again, seized in a state of global paralysis on the whims of another Enterprise officer. Trouble seems to follow your ship, Commander. Has it occurred to Starfleet that perhaps the Enterprise is the problem?”

  “I do not think it has.” Tiring of the one-sided conversation, Worf looked around the grounds for any small objects he might use to commit ritual suicide.

  The governor gesticulated clumsily at the assorted armed Starfleet security personnel moving about outside the Annex. “Are we even going to get an explanation for what’s gone wrong this time? Or are we supposed to sit by while Starfleet places us under martial law?”

  “With all respect, Governor, your planet has not been placed under martial law. We are enforcing a temporary state of heightened security in response to a direct threat. These measures are as much to ensure your people’s safety as they are to aid our investigation.”

  Eloch appeared unconvinced. “Does that mean the perpetrators of whatever crime has been committed here will face justice in our civilian courts under Federation law?”

  “It does not.” Worf hadn’t planned to elaborate, but the sudden reddening of Eloch’s visage made it seem a prudent course of action. “The Daystrom Institute is a civilian research entity, but the Annex remains under Starfleet’s jurisdiction. As such, the offenses that transpired here will be dealt with by a military tribunal.”

  The middle-aged Kobliad was the very portrait of frustration. “Can you even tell me when the lockdown might end? There’s an entire planet full of people out there waiting to get back to their lives and businesses.”

  “I cannot. We have just begun our investigation. There is no way to know how long it will take to reach its conclusion.”