"That's true, sir, but I really think there's more risk in that than profit, especially for Data."

"Then don't dally out there. Get a triangulation on him and we'll beam you both in. I can't afford to lose both of you. We'll have a talk later about those two vessels you appropriated. You can wager on that."

"Yes, sir, I underst-Data! Stop it!"

"Riker, what is it! Report!"

"He's arming the shuttlecraft's weapons, Captain, he's going to fire blind to attract that thing. Data, kill those weapons. That's an order."

"Sorry, Mr. Riker," Data said calmly, "but I must draw its attack before you come near enough to be caught also. I do not believe the dinghy puts out sufficient energy to draw its attention while you're still at this-"

"Riker!" Picard's voice shot through the system.

"We're picking up ma.s.sive energy readings. It's got to be right on top of him out there! Do you see it?"

"Switching," Riker snapped. Perspiration rolled down his forehead, and became a sheet of moisture when the viewscreen cleared.

In s.p.a.ce in front of him, the shuttlecraft's blocky form was dwarfed by the all-too-familiar and too hideous spectral image that had become his nightmare. It closed on Data's shuttlecraft with lightning speed and swallowed it whole while Riker watched helplessly, and it took up half his visible s.p.a.ce in the process. As it devoured Data's ship, it reached a long electrical arm through s.p.a.ce toward Riker.

A chill streaking down his arms, he smashed his fist on the comlink. "Enterprise! Beam us up now! Now!"

The nauseating sensation of beaming began almost instantly. The captain must have been ready for this, must have antic.i.p.ated it. Riker gave himself to it, as though that would help, and stared into the viewscreen as he felt himself dematerializing. But he was still able to see the viewer clearly enough when the shuttlecraft was torn to bits, its tiny impulse engine blasting outward in a dynamic explosion.

Agonizing seconds later the interior of the research dinghy was gone and the transporter room's dark gray textured walls were forming around him. Above him the soft lighting, below him the glowing platform-beside him ... another form materializing.

He reached out as soon as he could, but instinctively recoiled from the crackling electrical sheath that enveloped Data once again. This time it seemed to have a sense of purpose-or was he imagining it?

"Data!" he shouted without thinking.

The electricity snapped a few more times, then faded. Riker stepped toward Data instantly. Just in time to catch him.

The platform thumped as Captain Picard and Geordi LaForge appeared out of nowhere and knelt beside Riker and the collapsed form of Data. His android eyes stared up at nothing. His heart still beat dutifully. His pulse still made a steady drum in his wrists. Biomechanics still worked the sh.e.l.l he had called his body. But the essence of life that had possessed a courage no machine could duplicate-Was gone.

Chapter Twelve.

DATA LAY IN a wedge of bright, tight surgical beams in the dimmed main sickbay lab. Physicians, neurologists, microengineering specialists, robotics experts hovered over him, but no one could shake the poisoned apple from his throat. He lay there on the table, his face less placid than a corpse's might have been, his expression caught in a moment of surprise, perhaps even revelation.

To Picard, the elemental darkness rested in the room was like a Poe stanza. He paced around the small group and looked again into Data's opalescent eyes, and longed again to understand what the android had seen at that last moment. The chamber experience was still with him, making him feel somehow separate from these people who hadn't been through it. He thought he knew now what resurrection could be like, what it would be like to be caught by that thing-only to reawaken with new knowledge and be able to use that knowledge. He had reawakened to a monumental difference in his own perceptions. Colors seemed brighter, smells nicer, shapes crisper. There was a sudden wonder to being so consummately alive.

Over on that table, Data's face had that kind of wonder on it, but he hadn't come back.

When Beverly Crusher finally backed away from the table, her face limned with frustration, even anguish, and her willowy body had lost some of its grace. She moved slowly toward the corner where Riker and Geordi were impatiently standing, not too near each other, and Picard turned to meet her there. He lowered his voice.

"No hope?"

The doctor sighed. "Not from us. As far as we can deduce, Data's android brain is still operating all the complexities of his body. But there's no consciousness anymore. We just don't know what else to do."

Geordi turned toward them from where he had been facing the wall. "How'd it get him?" he demanded, his throat tight. For the first time he allowed himself the realization that Data might truly be lost to them, even if his heart still beat. "How could it take part of him and leave ... that?"

Riker folded his arms and pressed one shoulder into the bulkhead. As he gazed at the floor with a pall of regret over him, new lines cut themselves into his face. "Probably the thing didn't distinguish between Data's body and the shuttlecraft. If he'd been fully organic, his body might've gone up in smoke or whatever that thing does to organic. I guess it recognized something in him," he added, rather mournfully, "that it ... wanted."

Picard looked at his first officer. He'd never seen Riker so depressed, never heard this stony tone. Vexed that he didn't completely know what was going on between his command officers, he peered now at the engineers and doctors who became more helpless by the moment, who were now beginning to stand back one by one and shake their heads over Data's quiet form.

"For better or worse," the captain said thoughtfully, "Data may have found his answer."

Anger began to burn low in his mind, a layer of heat beneath all other thoughts, making them sizzle and jump. There would be no diminishment of the self on this ship. Rage built within him as he imagined Data forever trapped inside that phenomenon, forever to endure what Picard himself had barely touched in fourteen hours of h.e.l.l.

His shoulders stiff with his anger growing, he turned toward the exit and flatly said, "I'll be in engineering."

He went, but he went alone. When he was down in engineering, he swept aside each engineer's offer to a.s.sist him or escort him, shrugged off their curious looks when he went into special-access chambers and came out again with computer input chips that no one had given him or pulled up for him. Word spread quickly that the captain was here, doing something for himself and not asking anyone to do it for him, and before long curious eyes peeked at him from a dozen hiding places in the engineering complex. Even in the dimness, he stood out simply because he wasn't usually here. Eventually the curious junior engineers who saw him lurking about started trying to track his doings secretly on their access panels. They discovered that Captain Picard knew both what he was doing and perfectly well how to keep them from finding out. They discovered they could trace his activities about halfway at each turn before they lost the pattern of his computer use. So they watched, unable to say anything about it because he was the captain, and if this was anybody's equipment, it was his. They knew there was something going on topside; why wasn't he up there? They muttered among themselves about reporting to the first officer, but n.o.body volunteered to do the talking.

So the engimatic captain of the Enterprise floated around engineering for over an hour, not speaking to anyone, offering only the most ghostly of smiles to those who came too close, lighting here and there like a moth to tamper with the equipment and be suddenly on the move again, and not a living soul dared approach him with a direct question. He was too purposeful in each movement, each pause, each touch.

Then he was gone. Without a word, without an order. He cradled a few computer tie-in remotes in his elbow, and walked out.

Once clear of engineering and on his way through the darkened ship by way of ladders and walkways, Picard paused on one of the upper decks and touched the nearest intercom. "Picard to sickbay. Mr. Riker, you still there?"

Almost immediately Riker's strong voice answered, "Yes, Captain, still here. No change."

Picard looked down at the small bundle of remotes he carried. They seemed innocent as they lay in the crook of his arm, small bundles of circuitry inside casings. But they were deadly.

"In ten minutes, I want you and LaForge to be on the bridge. This has gone far enough."

The words chimed through the ship, right through the cloth of silence and darkness they'd swathed around themselves, saying quite plainly that the phenomenon was going to have to deal with the captain now.

Before entering the bridge, Picard quietly and privately plugged his remotes into their proper places in the control layout deep within the bridge maintenance loop, a thin corridor of computer access boards behind the actual walls of the bridge itself. Here, new systems were built into the bridge systems, the great hands of the starship, working all the instructions put to it from the gigantic computer core running through the primary hull.

Picard made use of those access boards now, tying them all in to one single b.u.t.ton on the arm of his command chair. He had thought about using a code that he could key in from anywhere on the ship, but at last dismissed the idea and created an actual b.u.t.ton to be pushed. And in that one place-the command chair. If he was going to put his finger down on destiny, he would be in his rightful place, at the head of this majestic ship, when he did it.

He stalked back onto the bridge, noticeably somber, and into the audience of expectant faces. Riker. LaForge. Troi. Wesley Crusher. Worf. And others, especially those manning the positions he might have expected to see Data manning. The Ops controls or Science 2. He missed the gold-leaf face and the gently innocuous expression. He missed it a great deal. His deep rage grew.

"I'm glad you're all here," he said ceremoniously, approaching his command chair. This time, however, he didn't reach out and casually touch it as he might have otherwise. This time the chair itself was a source of raw power, and he didn't want to give anything away. "I want to know what you've concluded, what our options are, how we can best deal with this invasion. If we have to drain this starship of every last volt and every last moving molecule, we'll do it. That thing out there has already cost the life of one of us; it will take no more of us. It isn't going any farther into the galaxy. We're stopping it here and now."

Deanna Troi let her eyes drift shut, so deep was her relief and grat.i.tude. Picard saw her reaction and understood it so clearly that he might as well have been the Betazoid. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, they were glazed with tears and she was almost smiling-but then the smile dropped away and her eyes filled with perplexity. She saw into his heart now, he could tell, saw the knowledge and the determination that were foremost in his mind, unhidden from her probing thoughts, saw the remotes now engaged into certain circuits that would carry a certain message to a dozen locations in the lower structures of the ship and do the kind of thing captains thought of only in moments of supreme desperation. She stared at him, then looked down, at the arm of the command chair, at the small patch of controls that tied the captain's own touch into his ship. And that single blue pressure point, like a poker chip. She knew. Picard watched her, without offering either rea.s.surance or a request for her silence. She would be silent, he knew. They understood one another now.

Riker stepped forward-not exactly a surprise.

"We're going to chase it down?" he asked.

"We're going to kill it, Mr. Riker."

The first officer paused, his lips compressing, then said, "That's not like you, sir."

Picard knew what was behind Riker's eyes and that dubious tilt to his head, and he looked right at him now. "Isn't it? Is it more like me to allow that marauder to wander the galaxy freely, sucking up more lives?"

That moment saw a charge of excitement. Even Riker realized suddenly how long he'd been waiting for something to bring that level of indignation to Picard's face. The captain's brown eyes were narrowed, his Roman-relief profile aimed squarely at the viewscreen, his jaw like a rock set upon another rock.

And even so, straight through the ring of Picard's words, Riker forced himself to do what was his duty. "What about the Prime Directive? We can't guard the whole galaxy."

"Even the Prime Directive must have its elasticity," Picard said firmly, and there was no doubt that he had thought about this, had already endured and forded the difficulty of this very question. He paused, and moved forward on his bridge, all eyes on him. "From a distance, this may look like Utopia, Will," he said, broadly enough for all to hear, "but when you're staring right at it, it's something else. It's a tyrant and demands our grappling with it. There will be no tyranny here," he said. "Refusing to make a decision is its own kind of cowardice."

Riker moved to the captain's side, and the two men stood before the vast viewscreen and all it held. "You're that certain?" he asked. He wondered why the rock of resistance still sat in his stomach. He knew perfectly well that Captain Picard was no grandstander, that such a man would turn the ship and run in the other direction if there were a way to avoid using the weapons, yet he still had to make this one last request, that Picard simply say yes, he was certain.

But the captain said nothing. He merely gazed sidelong at Riker, exercising his command right in that simple silence.

Riker nodded and backed off a few steps, making his own message clear.

The captain turned, and standing on the dais with the whole blackness of s.p.a.ce as his backdrop, he addressed the faintly lit bridge. "All right, what do you have?"

"Sir," Worf began immediately from the opposite stage, "we've concluded that it backed away from its first attack on us because it reached its absorption capacity. We've calculated its drain on us at the point it moved off, and think it's possible to overload it."

"Risks?"

"We would have risk if we had possibility. Our phasers simply can't put out enough power to do what must be done. It dissipates its energy faster than we could pump it full."

Picard pressed his lips tight and tried to envision such a creature, but all he could do was glare at the undeniable readouts and see that it was true. Behind him, voices buzzed, annoying him as flies annoy a horse. Geordi. Wesley. Geordi. Wesley again, arguing. An exchange of whispers, grating on Picard as he tried to dig out a miracle solution, and finally he spun around, demanding, "Have you two got something to add or not?"

Both Geordi and Wesley flinched, and Wesley's cheeks flared red. "Oh ... no, sir."

"Yes, sir," Geordi contradicted.

"But it doesn't work," Wesley hissed, tugging at Geordi's sleeve.

"Data told you how to make it work."

"But what if it doesn't?"

"When you're going to die, a one-in-a-million chance is better than nothing, Wes!"

"By the devil!" Picard roared. "What are you talking about?"

Wesley dropped into self-conscious silence while Geordi fought with himself and won. He approached the captain and said, "Wes has an idea how to increase the ship's energy output through the phaser systems, sir."

"All right," Picard said then, "I'm listening. Keep it short."

"Wesley, tell him."

Wesley licked his lips and brought his narrow form up beside Geordi. "Well, sir, it's a phaser intensification system that pulls more firepower with less base energy by breaking down the first phasing cycle into increment frequencies, then reintegrating the phasing all at once in the final cycle. Mr. Data gave me some clues that should make it work, and Geordi thinks we can-"

"The point is, sir," Geordi interrupted, speaking just as fast as Picard had asked for, "if we could modify the ship's phasers to this theory, we could fill that thing up with about five times the energy it got when it-"

"Yes, I understand the science, Lieutenant. That's very radical, what you're describing." Picard stepped down from the viewscreen bank and strode between them. "But these are radical moments." With that he touched the intercom, while all breaths held. "Picard to engineering. Argyle and MacDougal, gather your primary staff and meet me in the engineering briefing room in three minutes. Ensign Crusher, I want you to describe your theory to the engineers and let them decide if it can be implemented."

"Sir," the teenager blurted, "I can build the crystal focusing system myself just as well as any of them."

The captain glared at him. "We're going to let the professionals handle it, Mr. Crusher. What you're describing will take pure antimatter feed, and that's nothing to play with."

He stepped away, but Wesley followed, slipping out of Geordi's grasp at the last second. He snapped the words out like spitb.a.l.l.s. "You always treat me like a kid, even though I'm on the bridge."

The captain turned. His voice took on an iron resonance.

"You're on the bridge," he said, "because I chose to put you here, not because you earned it. Your ability exceeds your wisdom, young man. You'll eventually learn the unforgiving lesson that the people around you are worth more in their experience than you are in your gifts, and you shall, like everyone else, have to wait your turn. Now mind your place, close your mouth, and follow me to engineering, where you will put your gift to use and let others do the same."

Wesley was understandably subdued thereafter, give or take the minutes it took him to spell out the phasing idea. The engineers gawked at him, frowned, rolled their eyes, squinted-it looked like a cornea convention. By the time they filed down to the main phaser reactor room, they already had half the mechanics and most of the formulae worked out in their heads, and Picard stood back to watch the machine of intelligence at work. He watched too as Wesley caught a first glimpse through his own brilliance and youthful smugness of the resourcefulness and conceptual ability of experienced engineers. The boy's face lit up with both amazement and humility each time the engineers shot him a question as part of a discussion that had simply left him behind. Picard could tell from Wesley's expression that the young man didn't even know why the engineers had to know some of the things they were asking. And for every question asked, there were two more problems to be solved that he hadn't thought of. After a time he began to catch a glimpse of why his own idea seemed so foreign. The engineers weren't looking at the phasing unit as a unit. They saw it as part of the whole ship, all the intricate systems, lines, circuits, energies, fluxes, coils, and capacitors, each affecting all the others. It wasn't enough for the phasing unit to work; it had to work in concert with a thousand other units.

As soon as the engineers understood his idea, they were at work troubleshooting it. After several false starts, and even a complete rebuilding of the strange new system, all the theoreticals became applicables. Problems Wesley had never foreseen were discovered, then sidestepped or solved on the spot. The harmonics hummed, the antimatter feed had its safeties hooked up, and all in less time than it had taken Wesley to build his original mock-up. He circled the new contraption, a hulking unit attached directly to the main phaser couplings, and shook his head. It looked like nothing he'd imagined. He could see what parts did which duty, but it simply didn't look the way he thought it would look.

Picard liked that look on a young face. He liked the look of growth.

Finally the chief of phaser engineering came toward the captain and Wesley, wiping his hands on his worksuit, and shrugged. "Good as it's gonna get, Captain."

"Will it work?"

"Can't tell you that, sir. Half of it's theory and the other half's guesswork. All the systems hook up cleanly, it's got power, it's got antimatter flow, and it's got safeties. As for working, only testing can tell."

"We'll test it in combat," Picard said ruefully. "We seem to have little choice. We can't-"

"Riker to captain! Emergency!"

Picard snapped at the nearest intercom. "Picard. What?"

"It's here, sir! Our grace period just ran out."

It had, in spades. When Picard and Wesley spun from the lift and charged onto the bridge, it was no longer dark. Red alert lights bled from every wall, but the main lights hadn't come up. The forward viewer wavered and crackled with the enhanced blue-red false-color image of the ent.i.ty at its most awful. The port monitors, starboard, aft-every monitor showed this pulsing threat in a great broken circle of electrical light around the bridge.

The bridge crew stared at the monitors, swiveling from one to the other as though looking for a doorway that hadn't been guarded, a single route that would provide escape from the prison, but they knew they were looking at the thing's backup tactic, the one to be used when all else failed.

Picard paused in the upper ramp. "Is it in the machinery?"

Riker whirled past Troi on the lower deck and stepped toward him. "No, sir, it's surrounding us. Contracting approximately twelve thousand miles per minute."

"It hasn't found us, then?"

"It's using this new pattern to find us. It knows we're here somewhere within a specific radius, and it's surrounded the whole area, gas giant, asteroids, and all. It's closing in on us. Obviously, it's a lot bigger than we first perceived."

"Size now?"

Worf straightened up at Picard's right. "Roughly three-point-one AUs in diameter, sir, and contracting."

"My G.o.d," Picard snarled. He understood the picture now; they were inside a gigantic fist-and it was closing on them. "Worf, estimation. Can we fire on it?"

A terrible scowl came over Worf's already fierce features. He hated his own answer as he said, "Not while it's in this form, sir. It dissipates energy in direct proportion to its surface area. We couldn't pump enough energy into it fast enough to overload it."