"Captain," Riker began, holding out a hand as though to steady the situation, "if we can talk to it now-"

LaForge pushed forward, stopped only by the presence of Picard. "No! We've got to get him out of it!"

"This might be our only chance," Riker insisted.

"He doesn't deserve to be on your sucker list, Mr. Riker," LaForge said bitterly, just short of snarling.

"I know," Riker told him. "I know. Move back. That's an order. Captain ... "

Picard made a half-circle around the android and the force that held him. "Yes ... yes ... steady, everyone." He moved in so closely that the static field ran down his arms and legs and caused ripples on his skin. "Data, can you hear me?"

The crackling settled down suddenly. It was as though a balloon popped and shrank to its natural shape, ugly transparent colors wrapping Data and schooling around him. His breathing lost some of its gaspiness, though he still panted and strained against what was obviously still an attack. His eyes were fixed on the dimly lit battle bridge ceiling, but working as though there were words up there to read. He blinked and squinted, fighting for meaning in what he saw. His arms were flared at his sides, his hands spread, long fingers twitching.

Riker moved to the captain's side very slowly, and spoke in low tones barely above whispers. "There's some kind of harmonic sympathy going on. Like radio waves causing a crystal to vibrate. Somehow, he's compatible with it."

Picard nodded, once.

"Data?" he began again. "Can you hear me? Do you understand me?"

For a time there was nothing.

Then, the tiniest "Yes ... "

The response went through them all like a knife.

"Data, speak to me," the captain prodded, using his resonant voice for the effective tool it was.

"I ... "

"Go on. Try harder. I'm listening. Go on."

"Sub ... circuit ... com ... com ... "

"Communication?"

"Yes ... "

"That's what I was hoping to hear. Can you talk to it?"

Data's brushstroke features contorted with frustration. "I can't ... can't transmit ... "

"Keep trying. Stay calm, everyone. No one move. Worf, report."

Even the Klingon was driven to lower his voice in the presence of the vortex's a.s.sault on Data. "Still chewing the antimatter reactions in the asteroid belt, sir. No sign of changing course."

"Speaking to you ... "

Her voice was soft, but this time it had an inflection they didn't recognize, one that made them turn to her now in spite of Data's entrapment as Deanna Troi stepped stiffly down to the main deck. Riker reached out for her and she took the hand he offered, but her expression was that of one who was looking into a blinding light. The same as Data's now-seeing something that wasn't there.

"Your language," she murmured. "I speak in."

Riker was holding her hand, and now he began a hesitant step that would draw him right up close.

"No," Picard said sharply then, gesturing him back. With an extra push he nudged Riker away and came between them, quite aware of Troi's hand, suddenly empty, reaching for Riker's as it fell away. So part of her was here, at least.

"Who are you?" Picard began carefully.

Troi's eyes began to tear with the strain. "All ... you end ... "

"We don't understand. We don't know what you are," the captain clearly said.

Troi began to tremble, a bone-deep trembling that came as much from her own effort as from the effect of whatever was happening to her. Despite Picard's renouncement of folklore and ghost stories, the battle bridge took on the hazy elemental aura of a seance. Troi herself was like a specter now, a thing of dark times, of times when ignorance made indelible marks upon the imaginations of all men for all time. She was a whisper of legend somehow transferred into the present. Her hair glowed, ebony beneath the flashings, and in spite of all the lights from Data's a.s.sailant, her eyes were their usual pumice black. Yet in the midst of enchantment there was also the conscious work of a scientist. And never once were they allowed to forget that Data was also involved; the snapping brightness from the vortex around him slithered across Troi's face in a constant and patternless reminder.

Riker stepped tentatively toward her, and was grateful that Picard didn't try to stop him. "Deanna ... " he began. Then he had nothing to say afterward.

Troi forced herself to speak. Somehow they could see and understand that the insistence was hers and no one else's. "You ... can end ... it."

The captain squinted as though he could see the words. Something about the way she said it made him motion the bridge to silence.

Her voice-still soft. A raspy whisper only. But it held a power, a decisiveness Picard hadn't expected to hear at such a moment. And when the statement was over, it was completely over. Her effort slid off, she was allowed a deep breath, and the light patterns reflecting on her face began to fade.

Riker and Picard spun about, and sure enough Data was looking more like Data and less like a Fourth of July sparkler.

"No one move!" Picard warned. "Wait till it's completely gone."

In spite of the order, Riker sidled toward Troi, keeping his eye on her while Data glittered in his periphery, and when she suddenly collapsed, he was almost beside her.

The color fled from her face, and Troi dropped so sharply that Riker almost missed her completely. He was able to catch her upper arm and keep her head from striking the bridge rail, but she turned in his grip like a dangling fish until he could rearrange himself and lay her down on the deck. He knelt beside her, brushed the trailing black curls from her forehead, and looked up in time to see the same thing happen to Data.

The android's denser body struck the deck with a loud thud, and both Geordi and Worf were there to turn him over. In the dimness that suddenly reestablished itself on the bridge, he looked baffled and confused, but unlike Troi he was conscious.

Picard glanced once around the bridge to be sure the electrical effect had truly gone away. Then: "Yar, condition of that creature?"

"Still involved with the asteroids, sir," she reported, "though going after the antimatter explosions very deliberately. It doesn't seem to understand what the disturbances are. Seems unclear about what it should do."

Picard huffed. "Aren't we all. LaForge? Leave Data to Worf and get us away from here quickly."

"Yes, sir-heading?"

"Back toward the saucer. While we still have the chance."

With that he knelt beside Riker, who was hovering rather helplessly over Troi. "She alive?"

"Her pulse is like a ba.s.s drum," Riker told him. "Under these circ.u.mstances, who knows what that means?"

"I'll take it for the good," Picard said ruefully, "since it's all we've got."

"Are we going to reestablish contact with the saucer, Captain?" Riker asked, though he knew the answer. This time reestablishment wouldn't mean the trouble was over. Quite the opposite. It would mean they'd utterly failed.

Picard eyed the screen. "Looks like we crowed before we were out of the woods. Tasha, contact Engineer Argyle and inform him we're picking them up."

"Aye, sir; right away."

"Make that low band, as frugal a message as possible."

"Aye, sir."

Now the captain lowered his voice as he turned back to Riker, and clasped Troi's wrist to find her pulse for himself. "What do you make of all this? Those words she spoke ... and is she in contact with the same thing that's contacting Data?"

Riker shook his head. "It's pretty boggy right now. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be affecting them both in the same way. She keeps talking about these-well, these people as though she knows them, and it doesn't glitter around her like it does on Data. And it didn't grab her. Did you notice she could still move around? It's like the electrical field of the ent.i.ty is focusing on him, but speaking through her."

"Yes, but these messages she's perceiving. How accurate is her telepathy? I've never seen anything like this from Troi before. You know as well as I do that Betazoid telepathy is subfrequency and seems supernatural, but that it's perfectly explainable scientifically. This business of behaving like a spiritual medium, though ... I don't buy into that."

"If it's any help," Riker told him, "I don't think she does either, sir."

"What was it she said? We can end it? End what?" He tilted a little closer and lowered his voice. "Have you any idea at all?"

Riker licked his lips. So this was what a first officer was for. To come up with hypotheses about things he knew nothing about. To fudge answers out of nothing. Then again, sometimes that was the best way to get the answers: plow on through until you hit wall or water. "End it. We can. I wonder if that even means us specifically. Could it have been talking to the life essences Troi was sensing?"

"Or rather, were they talking to it? Tell you what," Picard said with sudden conviction, "soon as these two can sit straight again, we're going to put them down side by side and get some answers. We've got the messages right in our hands, and we simply aren't interpreting them correctly. It's time we did."

"How is she, Mr. Riker?" Tasha Yar kept her voice low. Afraid to attract attention to herself, possibly because she had stepped away from her post at this critical, touchy moment, she knelt beside Troi and leaned over her, nearly whispering.

"I'm no doctor," Riker said simply, venting his frustration. If he had time to step away from his own post, Troi would be on the way to auxiliary sickbay, but there simply weren't those extra seconds to spare. So she would remain here, beneath his hands, within his sight, under what little care he could offer.

"Sir, are we going to reconnect with the saucer section?" Yar asked. She looked at him with eyes that wanted everything to be all right, and she seemed as innocent and hopeful as a Disney drawing.

"I don't think we have much choice," he told her. "It just didn't work. We get used to situations that work out, and it's hard to get hit with one that doesn't. Fortunes of risk, that's all, Lieutenant." He gave her a dismissing toss of his head, silently ordering her back to tactical, but she didn't go.

"Mr. Riker?"

"Yes, what is it?"

"Sir ... it was my idea to separate the sections." Tasha paused, waiting to catch his attention again. When she did, she tightened her thin narrow lips and asked, "Should I apologize to the captain?"

Riker dropped himself into the wishing well of those eyes, just for a moment. Her eyes were enhanced with a simple stroke of eyeliner and a touch of mascara; not very much, as though she were unsure and self-conscious about her femininity. Riker found himself fascinated by those thin brown lines, now slightly smudged and a tad uneven. Tasha Yar was all good intentions in one package. Had Riker not reviewed the personnel files of the bridge officers when he got this a.s.signment, he'd have taken one look into those eyes and at the supple, slim body under them and rea.s.signed her to teaching kindergarten to all the children on Enterprise who would brighten to see her face each day.

He felt that way right now-like she was the child and he was the teacher. There was nothing in her face, in her eyes, to remind him of her upbringing on a pathetic excuse for a colony, yet he thought of it. A colony that had actually seceded from the Federation. Its economy crashed within three decades of that secession. That distant colony where gangs became the ruling bodies, a place that resembled nothing and nowhere as much as it resembled the aftermath of the French Revolution, a place where a bad system was torn down in the name of the people and replaced by something entirely worse. A place whose day-to-day life made the Reign of Terror look organized. Mobs, gangs, indulgence of some, starvation of others, parents teaching their children to be alone because self-sufficiency meant survival. Children functioning like rats in the rubbish. And among them, Tasha. Surviving. Running. Fighting when she had to, eating when she could. Developing the single-mindedness that would allow her to move in record time to chief of security on a mainline starship. Didn't happen every day.

A wicked way to grow up. Too quick, too hard, and too unforgiving. She'd missed all those girl things, all the giggling and the ducking behind each other and the moon-eyed crushes and the wondrous ignorance that lets a girl believe what she sees on first glance. For Tasha there had been no mirrors or fussing, and if there had been mirrors, wouldn't she have shrunk away from the gaunt teenager whose hair was cropped to make her look like a boy-less likely to attract the attention of those who took their low-cla.s.s habits out in casual rape? From the day her mother first took out a knife and sawed off her four-year-old daughter's knee-length braid, Tasha had learned to deal.

Yet she could still look at him now with this absolute cleanness, this complete faith in him and in everything she saw when she looked at a senior officer, everything Starfleet meant for someone who had grown up under mob rule. As he looked at her now, a half ton of responsibility fell on him. What could he say to her that wouldn't wrinkle that antiseptic faith? She was stronger with it than without it, a better officer in her purity than the woman she might have become if she gave in to the callousness to which she had every right.

Reaching over the stirring form of Troi, Riker cupped Tasha's elbow. "Whatever you do," he said, "don't apologize."

Chapter Eight.

BEHIND THEM, ANTIMATTER explosions were still lighting up the solar system in all directions. Amazing that so little antimatter connecting with so little matter could result in such conflagration.

Getting away from the immediate vicinity was easy enough-the creature wasn't watching for the moment, busy devouring the pure energy of matter/antimatter reactions among the asteroids, and therefore stardrive had a few extra seconds to ride the detonation shock waves and get back toward the saucer section. Easy, considering what had gone on so far today.

Reuniting the ships was something else.

Riker stood beside the science station where Deanna Troi was now sitting. She appeared disturbed, fatigued, aching, somber, like someone who had just heard bad news, but she seemed aware of the circ.u.mstances, perhaps too acutely aware.

Watching the disconnected saucer section loom toward them in the viewscreen, Riker felt a shiver of antic.i.p.ation. This was the tricky part, the difference between pulling an ocean liner out of a dock and pulling back into one. Or maybe like docking one of those aircraft carriers the screen had shown them. Angle had to be right. Every linkage, hasp, and junctor had to line up exactly to its sleeve. Luckily Enterprise had computers made to do that. There was really no such thing as doing it manually, although that was the term they used for less-than-fully automated hookup. Really doing it manually would take all day and half the night. But for the moment Riker was glad Picard watched so carefully as the big ships approached each other, saucer at full stop, stardrive moving forward on inertia so as not to attract the ent.i.ty's attention. At no other time would they be more helpless than during those last five feet before hookup.

At the last moment a shock wave from the antimatter explosions in the asteroid belt washed across the two ships and pushed between them like a wedge.

"Reverse!" Picard sharply ordered, and beneath him the ship moved to comply. "Stabilize. Smartly now. We may not get another chance. Approach on tight-frequency tractor beams. Get us in there."

"Aye, sir," LaForge mumbled, sweating.

"Worf, a.s.sist."

"Yes, sir," the Klingon acknowledged. He left Data sitting on the deck steps and slid in behind Ops.

Data blinked and watched, but made no attempt to regain his position; in fact, Riker noticed a thick preoccupation on the android's part.

Now what? he thought. Look at him. He looks as though a straight answer would do him as much good as it'd do me. Maybe he tried too hard. Maybe he took me too seriously and let that thing get inside and poach him. Next time I'll keep my mouth shut.

Maybe.

The deck rocked beneath him. He grabbed for the bridge rail and looked at the viewscreen barely in time to see an artificially lighted view of the saucer section's docking sleeve. Then the viewer went black and disengaged automatically.

"Docking complete, Captain," LaForge reported. "All sections, all junctions show green. Docking chief reports all secure."

"Signal acknowledgment. All stop. Well," Picard said with a sigh, "that was a blasted fiasco if ever I saw one. Evidently there's not going to be an easy way out of this one."

"Orders, sir?" Riker asked.

"Captain!" Yar blurted. "It's gone!"

The bridge might as well have whirled under them like a giant lazy Susan, they all turned so fast.

"Gone?" Picard repeated. "Just like that?"

"Even faster." Yar glowered over her equipment as though angrier at the phenomenon's disappearance than she had been about its attacks. It was allowed to go away, but not without checking with the security chief first. "No trail, no residual energy, nothing. Popped out of existence."

"Charming. It's playing some b.l.o.o.d.y game with us. Well, I'd say this confirms Data's hypothesis about interdimensionality with rather alarming panache."

"Maybe we should get out of the area while we can, sir," Riker suggested.