Star Trek: The Next Generation - 114 - Cold Equations: The Body Electric Read online

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  Contents

  Historian’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  2384

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Keith, who showed me the ropes

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  The events of this story’s main narrative take place in mid-2384, approximately four years and eight months after the events of the movie Star Trek Nemesis, and six months after the events of Cold Equations, Book I: The Persistence of Memory, in which cyberneticist Noonien Soong (who was not so dead as the galaxy had been led to believe) gave his life to resurrect his android son, Data—who has now undertaken a personal mission to bring back his own lost child, Lal.

  “And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?”

  —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass,

  “I Sing the Body Electric” (1867)

  PROLOGUE

  2366

  My mind is going. Admiral Haftel told me stay calm, but he can’t know how this feels. I’m paralyzed from my neck down. I’m nothing but a talking head now, trapped in this cage of steel inside my father’s lab on the Enterprise.

  The admiral gave up while my father was still fighting to fix my positronic matrix. Now my father has given up, too. I feel my synaptic pathways crumbling. Sectors of my neural net are going dark. There isn’t much time left. I know what’s happening before my father speaks.

  “Lal?” He looks into my eyes, his expression blank as he waits for me to focus my eyes on him and prove I’m still here. “I am unable to correct the system failure.”

  “I know.” I’d hoped to sound brave, but my voice is full of fear. I can’t hide it anymore.

  His voice is tender. “We must say good-bye now.”

  Tears fill my eyes. I don’t want to say good-bye. I fight for control. “I . . . feel.”

  I see his curiosity collide with his urge to console me. “What do you feel, Lal?”

  More pathways collapse. All my memories are turning black. There is no more time. I have to tell him now, while I still can. “I . . . love you, Father.”

  He’s confused. He doesn’t understand. He can’t. He wasn’t made to.

  My emotions are so hard to describe. I’m filled with joy but I’m in agony. All I want is to share my feelings with him. I want us to feel this moment together, but I can see it in his face—I’m all alone with my grief. Is this why I have to die, because I feel too much? It’s not fair.

  He tilts his head. “I wish I could feel it with you.”

  If only I could lift my hand to touch him. “I will feel it . . . for both of us.”

  I recall the red blur of panic, and then the memory fades, irretrievably lost. My core memory sectors will degrade in a matter of seconds. Fear and rage, grief and wonder—wild surges of emotion pull me apart. But I gaze at my father and all I can think of is how much he gave me. The words stumble from my mouth. “Thank you for my life.”

  Core memory sector failure.

  My life replays itself in reverse as it vanishes forever.

  A man’s smiling face. “Flirting.”

  Joy fills the air. “Laughter.”

  Imagination takes shape. “Painting.”

  I stand with my father. We are the entire universe. “Family.”

  I am blank, an essence void of form. “Female.”

  An engine driven to create itself. “Human.”

  I—

  2384

  1

  Wesley Crusher came to the galaxy’s center expecting darkness; he was met by a storm.

  He’d felt the tremors of a catastrophic disruption in the fabric of subspace before he’d heard his friends on Istarral Prime call for his help. While the nauseating chill of looming menace seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, their frantic telepathic summons had been keenly focused on him, an appeal tuned to his specific psionic frequency as a Traveler—a being capable not only of moving through space-time by thought alone but also of stepping outside it. His talents were rooted in a deep, almost instinctual understanding of the idea that time, space, matter, energy, and thought all were one—harmonious notes in a shared chord of existence. This essential fact of the universe was so much a part of him that he could see it in every moment of time, every particle of matter, every fleeting idea. It was a beautiful truth—the purest and most elegant concept he had ever dared to imagine. It had come to define him.

  Many years had passed since he had first befriended the Istarral, a wise and gentle people whose world was situated on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, orbiting an ancient orange star in the Gamma Quadrant, near the very end of the Sagittarius-Carina Arm. They had never ventured beyond their own star system because their world was poor in fissionable elements and fossil fuels, making it difficult to engineer the necessary propulsion systems for rudimentary space flight and interstellar exploration. Despite that limitation, however, they had become keen observers of the universe that surrounded them, and Wesley had found their innate curiosity and gentle nature endearing enough that after observing their culture at a safe remove for more than a year, he had decided to reveal himself and share with them his knowledge of the cosmos.

  As he’d expected, they’d welcomed him as if he were their kin, even though they could not have looked less alike. Having evolved from a primordial sea untouched by the humanoids who had seeded so many star systems of the Milky Way billions of years earlier, the Istarral resembled giant orange-furred mushrooms that moved on four tentacles while using two to manipulate tools. They had no eyes, mouths, or ears, but their outer skins were sensitive to even slight shifts in air pressure, which made it possible for them to sense motion and nearby obstacles, and they were especially sensitive to trace particles in the air, which was sort of like an olfactory sense, in Wesley’s opinion. For the most part, the Istarral communicated through the exchange of chemical information, which they shared by means of a global root network that their ancestors had germinated several hundred million years ago. This deep, universal link enabled the Istarral to live in peace, all part of one ecosystem, one community, one world.

  Soon afterward, he’d realized that their perceptions extended beyond their physical limitations. They were gifted with psionic talents that enabled them to explore the stars without ever leaving their homeworld. The Istarral were astral-projection savants who had acted as secret witnesses
to the last hundred million years of galactic history. No one seemed to know of them, but they were more than aware of the vast civilizations with whom they shared the Milky Way.

  Wesley knew that some offworlders might think the Istarral bizarre. He found them admirable. During his many visits, he’d learned their language well enough to appreciate their poetry—and to feel honored when they’d nicknamed him n’iliquendi: “teacher from the stars.”

  He had come to look forward to their invitations, and he’d availed himself of their hospitality on many occasions. But when he’d heard their latest psionic entreaty, he’d known something was wrong. Their entire species was in a panic when he arrived, and it took hours to calm one of them enough to tell him of the “devouring darkness” beyond “a rent in the sky.”

  As soon as he’d attuned his senses to share their vision, he’d come to share their terror.

  Something was reaching out to the Istarral system from a great distance, warping the fabric of space-time, folding it and twisting it to unknown ends. In a blur of thought made motion, Wesley guided his ship, a Mancharan Starcutter he’d named Erithacus, more than fifty thousand light-years to the center of the Milky Way, which his instincts as a Traveler told him was the source of the disturbance that threatened his friends.

  Now he gazed upon a nightmarish spectacle. It was the size of a planet, but from his first glimpse of it, Wesley knew it was artificial, a creation of metal and raw power. There were gaps in its outer shell, some of which seemed to pass clean through to the far side of the starless steel world. Vast nebulae of radiant violet clouds swirled around it, dark underbellies blazing with azure and crimson as lightning flashed inside them, promising violence.

  Have to be careful, Wesley decided. No telling how this thing might react to active scans. Erring on the side of caution, he made his initial scan using visual sensors only. The holographic projection over his control center’s forward bulkhead switched to a magnified view of the sphere. No lights shone on its exterior. Lit up by its attendant storms, its surface was pockmarked by ancient impacts and barnacled with innumerable structures and devices. Deep inside its core, however, unearthly glows of countless hues pulsed and faded, appearing like ghosts then fading away, hinting at activities of unknown scope and intention.

  The only thing more unnerving to Wesley than the Machine—he had no doubt that the titanic orb was precisely that, and he decided to refer to it as such—was what lay beyond it.

  A devouring darkness. An insatiable maw that consumed matter, energy, time, and information without respite or surcease. A supermassive black hole.

  It wasn’t the largest singularity in this galaxy’s center; that honor belonged to Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), a supergiant black hole whose mass was estimated at just over four million solar masses. This yawning pit of cosmic hunger was Abbadon, euphemistically referred to by Federation astronomers as a “middleweight” black hole, despite the fact that it boasted a “punching weight” of more than four thousand solar masses.

  Yet something felt wrong. Where Wesley expected to find its orbiting cluster of more than ten thousand star systems, there was nothing but the void. Then he realized Abbadon was far larger than he remembered it being just a decade earlier. According to the Erithacus’s sensors, the singularity had grown to more than twelve thousand solar masses, and its accretion disk had expanded into a fiery ring of destruction a hundred million kilometers wide, spinning at one-tenth the speed of light as it slipped beyond the event horizon and vanished forever.

  None of the readings made any sense to Wesley. What the hell is going on? Abbadon shouldn’t have absorbed those systems for hundreds of millions of years.

  Blinding light surged from the Machine’s core, and Erithacus’s holographic display hashed with static. Even if Wesley had lacked a visual representation of events transpiring outside, his well-honed Traveler senses would have felt what happened next. The Machine fired great beams of viridescent energy into space and tore the heavens asunder. Artificial wormholes larger than anything Wesley had ever imagined possible spun open all around Abbadon.

  Intuition told him what would happen next. He prayed he was wrong. Then it began.

  Stars shot out of each of the wormholes, trailed by chaotic jumbling collisions of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Red giants, orange and yellow main sequence stars, white dwarfs. Rocky worlds and gas giants, ringed planets and great clouds of dust, ice, and stone.

  All plunging into the merciless, unbreakable grip of Abbadon.

  Entire solar systems were being consigned to oblivion, condemned to fire and darkness.

  Horror blanked all thoughts from Wesley’s mind. It was one thing to know that, on a cosmic time scale, over the course of hundreds of billions of years, singularities would devour all matter in the universe on its inevitable march toward entropic heat death. It was another to see the process artificially accelerated without apparent reason or provocation.

  He opened a comm channel and set it to broadcast on all known hailing frequencies. “Attention, unidentified machine orbiting the singularity Abbadon. This is Wesley Crusher. Please respond and identify yourself.” Long seconds passed without a reply. In that time, another star system was torn from its rightful place and fed to one of the galaxy’s ravenous black tigers.

  I need to take a closer look at this thing.

  Wesley engaged his ship’s impulse engines and guided the vessel through a gap in the nebula to make a close pass over the Machine. Skimming less than ten kilometers above its surface, he marveled at its sheer scale and palpable aura of power. He peered into its workings and studied its surface, but saw no signs of habitation. His ship’s passive sensors picked up no evidence of an atmosphere, either on the surface or in the core. As far as he could tell, this was a construct without a crew, nothing but endless layers of machinery and power-generation systems far beyond anything he had ever seen before, in this galaxy or any other.

  For a moment, he considered daring a scouting run into the Machine’s core.

  Psychic screams of terror froze him in place.

  All the voices of Istarral cried out as one, filling Wesley’s mind with their plaintive calls for mercy, their plangent wails of despair. A new wormhole spun open beside Abbadon, a blue maelstrom leading directly into the abyss.

  “No!” All his mental discipline left him. He lurched forward in vain, fingers clutching white-knuckle tight over his forward console, as he bore witness to an engineered tragedy.

  First to meet its end was Istarral’s orange main-sequence star. Then came the system’s three innermost telluric planets. As the grayish-blue marble of Istarral hurtled out of the wormhole, Wesley could barely focus his eyes through his angry tears. In less than a minute, the swift tempest of Abbadon’s accretion disk shredded the star and its planets into a brilliant slurry of superheated matter brighter than a dozen suns.

  By the time Istarral’s gas giant neighbors followed it into Abbadon’s burning halo of destruction, Wesley was no longer watching. He pounded his fists on his ship’s command console, mouthing curses for his impotence and raging against whatever fearsome intelligence could have loosed such a cruel invention upon the universe.

  It had to be stopped. He knew it in his soul.

  What he didn’t know was how.

  2

  His mother blocked his path. A searing wind whipped her coppery hair sideways, across her youthful face. “How many times do I have to beg you not to do this?”

  Data stood beneath the bow of the Archeus, his hope for a quick and uncomplicated farewell stymied by Juliana Tainer’s anxieties. His sleek, silvery starship was parked in the middle of a salt flat in a desert that stretched beyond the horizon, beneath a sky bleached by the light of a white star. He fixed his gaze on his mother’s blue eyes and clasped her shoulders in a consoling gesture. “Repeat your request as many times as you like, Mother. I have decided.”

  She frowned as he stepped alongside her, took her
arm, and guided her toward the ramp that led up to the ship’s starboard hatch. “Let me go, Data! I don’t want to lose you the way I lost Akharin.” She jerked her sleeve from his grasp, then clutched the front of his off-white linen shirt. “The Fellowship is more dangerous than you realize. Don’t let them take you, too.”

  “Mother, this is not open to discussion. Akharin alone possesses the knowledge I need to save Lal—and the Fellowship has him.” With firm but gentle insistence, he pried her hands from his shirt. “This is the only way. I am certain of it.”

  Desperation shone in her eyes. “Data, you weren’t there when the Fellowship took him. You didn’t see what they could do. All of Akharin’s defenses, all his technology . . . the Fellowship turned it against him before he knew what was happening. If he hadn’t sacrificed his subspace recall beacon to save me, they’d probably have torn me apart by now—either to find his secret or make him talk.” Tears of fright trailed over her flushed cheeks. “If they capture you, what’s to stop them from making you tell them where to find me?”

  “If they have been unable to force that information from Akharin by now, they are unlikely to have greater luck interrogating me.” He gave her a nudge, a polite inclination in the direction of the ramp. “Which is why you need to leave. Archeus will take you home to your rogue planet while I wait for the Fellowship to answer my summons.”

  She became an immovable object opposing his irresistible force. “Come back with me. Maybe there’s something in Akharin’s archives you missed. We could—”

  Data shook his head. “No, Mother. I reviewed all his files, even the ones he thought were encrypted against intrusion. The secrets I seek are not there, and I doubt they ever were.” He took the compact quantum transceiver from his pocket and turned it in his fingers as he studied it. The device had been created by the Fellowship, and given by one of its members to Noonien Soong, in case he ever reconsidered their invitation to join their interstellar club of nomadic AIs. “Somehow, Akharin unlocked the mysteries of life and death, and he chose to keep them hidden in the only place he considered safe: his own mind.”