La Forge worked intently over the engineering panel. Hull fragments from the destroyed Romulan ship littered the station. The longer he worked, though, the less happy he looked. "This can't be right," he said under his breath. "Computer, confirm analysis."
But at the analysis being confirmed, all he could do was repeat himself. "That can't be right. Maybe if I consider modulating..."
But the result was no more satisfying.
"No. That can't be right, either. Maybe if I add--" and he sat back abruptly. "No, La Forge," he lectured himself, "think simplicity. Parsimony. Humans always make things so much more complicated than they have to be. Couching everything in rhetoric. What do you see, La Forge?"
But the only thing it got him was some curious attention from Data.
"Just trying to give myself a second opinion," La Forge explained to him. "Where is Tiffany, anyway? I haven't been able to contact--" he stopped and attended the panel. "Here, look at this, what do you see? The computer is giving me weird answers."
"That is an interesting hypothesis, based on an arrogant human presumption of centrality of thought and logical infallibility."
"Excuse me?"
"In your context, it is natural for you to assume that the computer is giving you weird answers because its answers do not conform to those you expect, and you are failing to consider the possibility that what you expect is erroneous. Considering that computers are not designed to misrepresent information, your perseverance in attempting to force the computer to produce answers consistent with your erroneous presumptions is illogical and arrogant."
"Data--"
"In other words--" Data put on his best Sherlock Holmes, picking up the scanner and wagging it there as if it were a pipe, "when all possibilities have been ruled out, Watson, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the solution."
La Forge, a little bit flabbergasted, turned back to the panel.
Data examined it over his shoulder. "Evidence of a forced neutrino inversion. Not surprising, given that the destroyed ship was of Romulan origin. Romulan power is based on forced neutrino inversions. These signatures would indicate remnants of the warp core."
"Except that these are hull fragments. Exterior hull. This forced inversion originated outside the ship. Directly outside."
"This would only be possible if the weapon with which the ship had been destroyed had been based on a forced neutrino inversion."
"But nobody else uses that." La Forge looked uneasy then. It was the kind of realization that comes over you slowly, grudgingly, and then that moment is there when you wish you'd never figured it out. He touched his combadge. "La Forge to Captain."
La Forge entered the bridge more determined now, the truth of the situation having had a chance to sink in. Nechayev, Picard, Riker and others turned to him, ready to see what was so urgent that they shouldn't make another move until they saw him. There was simply no way not to hesitate in the face of it, like a sudden whipping breeze that left your breath so cold as you sucked it in that you couldn't remember what you'd been about to say, or why.
"Captain," La Forge started, "I'd like permission to return to the scout. I want to talk to Hugh again, Sir."
"For what possible purpose?"
"There's something odd about that Romulan ship that was destroyed out here. I don't think we've been thinking clearly about this."
"It's perfectly clear, La Forge," Riker said. "The Dominion are on trial here, not the Romulans, and as for the Borg, if they're dying, let them die. You're letting your emotions cloud your judgment."
"And you," Picard turned to Riker, "aren't letting your emotions cloud yours."
Riker said nothing. Picard turned his attention back to La Forge.
"Permission granted. But we'll wait for the proper time. And when it comes, La Forge, I'll go with you."
"Under formal protest from the first officer."
"Descent noted, Commander."
Riker expressed exasperation.
Picard turned on him. "Am I letting my emotions cloud my judgment?"
Riker took a big cold breath, and stood formally. "I don't believe, Sir, that your judgment is entirely clear on this issue, either. This is the Borg we're talking about. Even if we aren't engaged in battle with them there are risks--" he stopped suddenly, and then proceeded. "If we get too close to them, get too involved with them--"
Picard stood, waiting for more. "Continue, Commander."
"You of all people should understand."
"I of all people? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Riker said nothing.
"Well?"
Riker tried not to look around. "I don't think this is the proper place--"
"I think this is the perfect place, Commander. If you have doubts about my capacity to judge this situation, you'd damn well better say so."
"I don't believe that you have the capacity to be entirely objective. Sir." He might have hesitated, he might just have needed a breath. In any case, the air was colder now, and it was too late. "You've been part of the collective. It has to have had some effect on you, something you might not even be aware of."
"You don't trust me. I don't believe it. They've gotten to you, too, the Romulans. All this talk about threats and survival. All this emotional rhetoric, this fear-feeding."
"The fear is justified! I don't want to go through Wolf 359 again. Nobody does!"
"Will, I hardly think it will come to that."
"But you don't know. And I don't think it's worth the risk. All of our lives against--"
"That's enough, Commander! I believe I have an accurate assessment of your opinions toward me in this situation. Are you prepared to take formal action to have me removed from command of this ship?"
"No, Sir."
"Then, sit down."
They stood, facing off, until Riker relented and took his seat. Picard stood. You wondered how long it could go on, the stand-off. It went on until there was a call for assistance to help interpret the sensor reading being sent by the Integrity. As soon as Riker was off the bridge, Picard headed to his ready-room. Troi followed on his heels. Picard, having entered, walked on to the window. Troi waited. When he finally sat, it was heavily. "My crew are turning against me."
"I don't know that I would say it's quite as bad as all that."
Picard gave her a look; after what just happened out there...
"He's scared," Troi said. "It's just what he said. He doesn't want to go through it again."
"Do you think my judgment is clouded?"
"You're concerned for Hugh's welfare." And she waited. "When Hugh was first brought aboard the ship, you wouldn't get near him. You were appalled at the way he was being treated, like a person. You were as afraid of the consequences of his presence as the rest of us were. But you got past it. When you started to see him as an individual, you were humane to him, when you didn't have to be. You went out on a limb for him, and now you have a personal stake in his personal success."
"I don't want it to have to end this way." He looked at Troi.
"Yes, I know, in a Utopian universe things would be different. Here, there exist the immutable constraints of reality. Maybe I was trying to do the right thing, or maybe I was just trying to play God. Maybe I thought that with my mere presence I could imbue this God-forsaken creature with some supreme concept of humanity." His sarcasm drifted away. "Maybe Riker is right. Maybe this is just too much. After Wolf 359..." Picard buried his face in his hands, leaning his elbows on the desk as if he were tired. "Maybe I just don't want to be responsible for anything of this magnitude, anymore. The Dominion. How can we possibly defeat such a force?"
"Sir," Troi interrupted without interrupting, really; a soft interrupt. "When did you decide that the Romulans have been telling us the truth about having been attacked by the Dominion?"
Picard looked up at her. "What?"
"The last I heard, you didn't believe their story in the slightest. Even in the face of a Jem' Hadar ship, you didn't believe them. Not entirely. When did you change your mind?"
"I didn't."
"You certainly act as if you did."
Picard was thinking it through as fast as he could, that "I don't believe the Dominion could come through the wormhole without being detected. I don't believe they could have shuttled through the amount of materials it would have taken them to establish a base of operations in this quadrant. I don't believe they would attack a single Romulan ship and then do nothing until we arrived." He stared at Troi as it occurred to him. "In the short amount of time we've spent with the Romulans, I've completely lost track of what I was originally thinking. I've been completely caught up in--"
"Emotion. Strong emotion."
"Our judgments are being clouded, alright. By the Romulans."
"By design?" "To control us, to keep us busy, to keep our minds occupied, while we--"
"While we what?"
Picard sat back in the chair. "While we do precisely what we're doing, presumably."
"And the Admiral."
"Has been doing exactly what she should have been doing."
"You're beginning to regret not standing up to her more strongly."
"I'm beginning to regret a lot of things." Picard leaned up to the computer. "Computer. Locate Ensign Tiffany."
"Ensign Tiffany is in Biolab Four."
She was becoming increasingly agitated as she worked there, Tiffany, working at what I couldn't quite see as I entered. She shifted her weight after she noticed me, this way and that, as if she didn't want me to see. But that wouldn't have made any sense, right? The only one she would let anywhere near her was Mana. And that didn't make me feel better. So I did the only thing I knew to do. I pulled out my cards, and shuffled. The first round of blackjack Tiffany played out and won with a fervent "checkmate."
I laughed at her. "You're still pathetic at this, aren't you. How are-"
"You ever going to get promoted," we finished together.
I shuffled again, throwing another hand. Mana played out the hand for Tiffany, and won.
Tiffany stared at the cards. "So, what am I supposed to say?"
"You're not really required to say anything," I said. "Just smile and rake in the chips. That's the beauty of it."
Mana winked at Tiffany. "I like this game already. You should learn more of it, Engineer Med Tech."
"Leave her alone." I would have liked to have shoved Mana right out of the way, but under the circumstances, she might have outranked me. I made a mental note to check. "She's doing the best she can."
"But it isn't good enough, and she knows it." And the way she said the rest of it, obviously so that we all could hear but gouging Tiffany with such a stare, it made my skin crawl. "That isn't to say that there's any real reason for her to be afraid. She's a smart girl. She knows what she has to do. It's one of the beauties of the universe, that you don't have to be able to understand all the particulars of a situation in order to resolve it. You simply have to understand a few universal truths. Here's a universal truth for you, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction."
Mana tapped on the display and Tiffany returned her attention to it, downloading information onto a PADD. Mana was starting to speak again, but her sentence drifted off into that ethereal realm of futures that might have been but weren't quite, as Tiffany spoke.
"I don't believe you," Tiffany said.
"The technical theory is sound." Mana said it almost automatically. "If you'd like I can call up mathematical proofs for--"
"No, I mean, your story about being attacked by the Dominion. Originally, the whole thing. I'm the one who called you on it, the inconsistencies in those distress calls, remember?"
"Yes, I remember."
"Well, I don't believe you."
"Alright."
"Well, don't forget it."
"I won't."
Mana tapped on the panel.
Gradually, Tiffany's attention turned back to it, despite herself. It was a matter of minutes after Mana had left that Picard entered. When she noticed him, Tiffany hurried to close up whatever she was doing on the PADD. Impeccable timing, as usual, she winked the display off as Picard approached her, asked her if she was busy.
"Yes." Tiffany clutched the PADD to her chest.
"What are you doing?"
"My duty."
"Tiffany--"
"Who the hell do you think you are, you can just turn people on and off when you decide that it suits you. You don't have that kind of power. Other people can command themselves. You play this game, marching in, exerting your influence whichever way it suits you, and then just walking away as if it means nothing to you. As if you can just do what you please, when you please, to whomever--" Tiffany sucked in her breath. "You'd better start looking around, because you just might find that after a point, those people don't need you anymore."
Tiffany exited, brushing past Picard and clutching her PADD. She hurried from the biolab, shaking out of her head any think, any feeling that might have been trying to rise. Down an empty corridor Tiffany looked around, took out the Romulan combadge, and transported away.
Tiffany hadn't been aboard the Tammuz, for more than five minutes before Mana and Chitin entered the biolab. Hearing the door open, feeling the change in temperature as it seemed to Tiffany that in here it had gotten very very hot, she didn't have to look to know they were there. She just kept working. Downloading Federation records into a Romulan database was a little trickier than she had anticipated, but it was working. One by one, the medical displays blinked into life, flooding the room with information, anatomy and neurology and everything the Federation knew about biochip implants. And a couple things she'd made up on her own. Hypothesizing, I would have told her--that's the words you're looking for. She would have smiled at the thought of me, if she hadn't been so busy doing her job.
From the sudden absence of the perception of movement behind her, Tiffany knew they had stopped, Mana and Chitin. Not staring directly at her, most likely, they were staring on ahead, at Hugh, who had given up trying to stand. He was probably staring back at them. Tiffany made it a point not to look up and see. She just kept working.
"Well," Mana said.
"Well," Tiffany repeated. With a little too much devout and cold resolution, Tiffany snatched the PADD off the console and headed for Hugh. When she squatted there in front of him, he did nothing. When she clasped him by the chin to turn his head, to see exactly what area she needed to see, he offered no resistance. His skin was as cold as anything else had been over there.
"Can you do it?"
Tiffany turned, flabbergasted, to Mana. "You couldn't have asked me that before."
"I didn't want you thinking about it before."
Mana came over, staring. Tiffany turned back to Hugh.
"I wanted you to think about getting to this point," Mana said. "That was all. Now that you're here, I want you to think about it. Can you do it?"
"You think you can just make people think whatever you want?"
Mana leaned over a little closer. "Oh, yes," she said in that sickening sort of way.
"Maybe," Tiffany said. "Maybe I can do it."
Tiffany balanced the PADD on her knee so she could take Hugh's arm with both hands, she so could look it all over more carefully. "I don't know anything about this."
"It's where the interface is. I don't know why you're starting will all that brain stuff. Don't make this more difficult than it has to be."
"I'm not. This might be where the interface is, but he won't use it if he doesn't want to."
"Well, make him want to."
"It isn't that simple."
"Of course it is. You just have to have a little practice at it, that's all." She stared Hugh down hard. "Now make him want to give us whatever we tell him to give us, or I will."
When Hugh dove at her Chitin was there to draw his weapon. Mana staggered back as Hugh was subdued by Tiffany and security, and by that fact that that was all there had been left in him, enough energy to lunge, but not enough to do anything with it.
Mana spit at Tiffany with the frustrated energy of fear rising up over something that was already over. "I thought you said it was manageable!"
And she flung an arm out toward the wall panel, for lack of another target. "Why is that power conduit functioning?"
"I have to give it something," Tiffany spit back. "I can't risk killing it."
"Well shut it off! Don't you understand? He knows you don't want to kill him!. You have to prove that you're willing to! It's up to you to show that you will do what you have to regardless of whether you want to or not. That's a show of strength! That's what matters!"
Tiffany shut off the power. Mana calmed. Chitin sheathed his weapon. Security shuffled, relieved, away. Hugh slumped onto the bench, and did nothing. Tiffany was seeing all of this so far from the corner of her eye that it hurt to look away from it, to look straight ahead. So she just kept working. Back at the neurological console, she tried to bury her entire face in the display.
"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light," Tiffany said to herself as she worked.
"Excuse me?" Mana had come up from behind.
"Do not go gently into that good night."
Mana grabbed Tiffany by the arm and wrenched her around so that they were face to face. "Don't feel sorry for it. It doesn't feel sorry for you."
"So," Riker sat and glared out the screen at the Tammuz. "The Romulans wanted to be friends with the Federation. No negotiations, no posturing, no conditions. Just peace and cooperation. In the wake of destruction of their own ship, they headed straight out to lick our boots."
Picard had adopted pretty much the same posture. "Presumably because they couldn't accomplish whatever it was they were trying to accomplish without our help."
"Defeating the Dominion?"
"Or they used the threat of the Dominion to gain our cooperation."
"The best way to manipulate someone," Troi said, "being to convince them that you're doing them a favor. The Romulans have traditionally had a penchant for luring potentially hostile enemies into mutual cooperation as a way of getting those enemies to become unwitting allies on some specific cause."
"Perhaps," Picard said, "that's what Tiffany was trying to tell me."
Riker stared. "You're taking Tiffany's opinions after the way she's behaved? In my opinion, she doesn't deserve the uniform."
"She may not belong here. I haven't made up my mind about that yet. But she does see clearly, simply, and we have been manipulated by the Romulans. We have been very carefully placed in this position."
"So what do we do now," I asked. "Now that we know that we're right where they want us. Do we try and figure out what they want us to do next and make a point not to do it? Or do we go ahead and do it and play it out?"
Order of business: When you ask a question that a superior officer can't answer right away, it's either a very good thing or a very bad thing, and no amount of agonizing over it later will ever help you figure out which it is.
"And the question remains," Riker finally said, "who did shoot down that Romulan ship, and why, and why aren't the Romulans interested in finding out?"
"The only reason they would be so disinterested is that they already know," Picard said.
"But if they already know, why aren't they exacting revenge on the guilty party instead of being here, playing out this charade?"
"By the same logic, because being here playing this out is their way of exacting revenge. What is the one thing they are focused on?"
"The vent."
"They'll do anything to get information on it. They're obsessed with harnessing its power. But against whom?"
"Us."
"But by the methods they themselves have proposed," Troi argued, "we would gain the same level of information that they would. Hardly to their advantage."
"The Borg, then," Riker said.
Picard disagreed. "I don't think they consider the Borg to be a genuine threat any more than we do."
"Who else in involved?"
"The Dominion," I said.
Picard stared at me. Damn. If he didn't know who I was up to that point, he sure as hell knew now. Mental note: Keep your mouth shut on duty.
"Their last expedition into the Gamma Quadrant all but destroyed their military capabilities," Picard said. Finally. "I don't believe that a single new technological advancement will give them a sufficient military boost to launch another expedition of that magnitude. No, what we're looking for has to be closer than that. It has to be right here."
"It's an amazing thing," Mana said with a distinctly satisfied air, "about will. The way its absence can prove just as valuable as its presence. He may not want to give us what we want. But now he hasn't got the strength not to."
Tiffany stared away from Hugh. It was distinctly unfair, she thought, the way you could avert your eyes, or close them, but there was nothing you could do to block out sound. Hugh's increasingly labored breathing mixed in badly with the beepings and belchings of the gluttonous Romulan computers, gorging themselves on whatever it was Hugh was giving them. Mana knelt beside Tiffany, as if she wanted to be as close as she could be. As if this all made her feel more powerful, but, of course, it did. And in the quiet, you could feel it, electric. The stuff of life.
"I based it on the sensor configurations La Forge was trying to use to get information directly from the scout," Tiffany said. She had to say something, to break the silence, to disperse the electricity, so that maybe it wouldn't feel so appealing. "This is just on a smaller scale."
"You're brilliant," Mana said to Tiffany, staring down Hugh, "that way you have of seeing the obvious that the rest of us tend to overlook. Picard is a fool."
"But if it weren't for him, you wouldn't have this now."
Mana looked, startled, at Tiffany, and began to laugh. "There you go, doing it again. You're infuriating. I think I'm in love with you." And she stood and paced to the console, just to see. She worked at the console, here and there, but increasingly her satisfaction waned.
"This is barely intelligible," Mana said. "What's going on? Why is it so fragmented?"
"We're experiencing some technical difficulties," Tiffany answered, leaning over to try and get a better look at Hugh's face. He didn't stare back at her, hadn't for hours. It was infuriating.
"Meaning that our computers can't keep us with theirs."
"That doesn't help. But I think the difficulties lie more on his end. I think he's having trouble accessing the kind of information I'm trying to force him to access."
"You mean it can't access information from its own ship?"
"Because the ship is damaged," Taposs offered.
"Well," Tiffany said. "That doesn't help either."
"Well, hurry up!" Mana stormed. "This information is immensely valuable!"
"This information is also immensely old." Giving up on Hugh, Tiffany came to the console. "It's at such a basic level I don't think he could access it under the best of circumstances."
"That doesn't make sense. How can you have information you can't access?"
"It's all coming out in pieces. This information is so old it exists at a fundamentally lower, more basic level in the computers. It exists in the circuitry that everything else they have is built over, in successively complex layers. They operate consciously at the higher levels, and are having a very difficult time directly accessing this older information. It wasn't meant to be accessed. Not directly. It's there, and they make use of it, by using the higher systems that make use of it, but bringing this up to conscious reflection just isn't working."
"Are you trying to tell me," Taposs said, "that the computers that drive these creatures have conscious and unconscious levels?"
"If that information were used to form the foundation of the systems that hold everything that come after it, then yes. More and more complex systems evolve layer on layer on top of the most basic one. It's the same way with the organic brain. There are very basic levels that contain information that can be used, but isn't available to conscious reflection. Like infantile amnesia. You retain information you learned at very early ages, but that information is coded so differently from what you use as an adult, that you can't access it consciously. You can't say that you remember it. Eventually, what you have are creatures operating at the top layers, without ever having to access directly the back layers. The basic layers are only important in as much as they support the upper ones."
"Where all the interfacing really takes place."
"Exactly. From what I've been able to put together they learned to harness energy from spatial vents like this one in their own system." Tiffany called up information. "Those are the initial references I found, to vents similar to the one that has opened up in this space. It was this energy that was killing everything in their system, and the systems around them. There a lot of references to such vents. They may have become a common occurrence. But if that were the case, it would have been a sure bet that anything living in the sphere of influence of one of these vents simply could not have survived."
"So much basic, raw energy that nothing could tolerate being exposed to it."
"Too much," Mana said sarcastically, "of a good thing."
"It was killing everything on their world," Tiffany said. "They tried to work harder and longer and faster to make themselves more and more sheltered from the vent's effects, but, eventually, where do you go? You have to build better computers, faster, and more efficient, but there's always an inherent limitation. In the creature that's trying to operate such computers. Pretty soon you're trying to work with computers that are so much more efficient than you are that you're slowing them down. And when you're fighting on the very edge of your survival, any slowdown is going to mean extinction."
"So they had to overcome that limitation."
"And they did. They learned to work directly with their machines. Directly. Nothing getting in the way. No thoughts, no feelings, just doing your job. It was the only way to keep them one step ahead of the changes taking place in their system. One step ahead of extinction." Tiffany couldn't help but steal a glance at Hugh. "By the time their planet became uninhabitable, they no longer needed it. They cannibalized it to build ships and started out, looking for raw material, information, to keep on keeping them alive. And as far as I can tell, they've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years."
"And after all that time," Taposs couldn't help but steal a glance at Hugh, "this is the result."
Mana was shaking her head, as if to shake herself back into her original purpose, or out of sheer impatience. "I didn't come here for a history lesson on these--" She shot some control into her voice. "So how can we direct the energy coming from the vent? How is it usable? That's what we want to know."
"This," Tiffany pointed out, "is where references start to mechanical specs using that sort of energy. You can tell from the wave dynamics--"
"Good. Find a point where it makes sense, and start from there."
Taposs moved up to take over at the console.
Tiffany relinquished her position. "You honestly think you can steal technology from them?"
"I intend," Mana said without looking at her, "to give it my best shot."
"Hail the Tammuz," Picard ordered. "Let's see what they want us to do next. Just for the sake of argument."
When Mana appeared on the screen, she looked distinctly annoyed. And with Picard reminding her of the position they were in, right at this moment, she seemed to want to scream.
"I am aware of the situation, Captain--"
"It just seems to me, Commander," Picard was saying to her, "that with the scout apparently incapacitated, this would be the opportune time to return--"
"No," Mana said. "I would not recommend any more direct contact with them."
Riker was astounded, in a controlled sort of way. "All of a sudden, you don't want to go over there?"
"Mana," La Forge said, "I think if I just talk to Hugh--"
"You have talked to him. It has gotten you nowhere."
There was a comsignal on the Tammuz. Mana was being summoned.
"We are considering our options," she said hurriedly. "We will contact you."
Mana's image disappeared.
"That seemed rather indecisive," was Troi's assessment.
"That," Picard agreed, "seems rather un-Romulan."
"All of a sudden they want us away from the scout. She adamantly doesn't want us anywhere near it."
This remark precipitated an exchange of looks. The kind of exchange that let you know that a decision was about to be made; a decision that could change things.
"Mr. La Forge," was all Picard said.
La Forge was at the com panel almost before the words had finished being said, and he was trying to hail the scout. We waited as much for a protest from the Tammuz as for an actual response from Hugh. We got neither.
"Mr. La Forge?"
"I wasn't getting anything. It was as if they didn't want to respond. When I asked directly for Hugh, I got some very confused responses," La Forge said. "Either Hugh is so adamant about not wanting to speak to us again that he's letting the others speak for themselves, or they just don't know what to say to us."
"How could they not know?" Riker said. La Forge shrugged. "They've been counting on Hugh for direction. If he isn't directing them..."
He didn't finish the sentence, so Riker did. "Then why isn't he, and who is?"
"No one, from the sound of it."
"We're going over there."
"Captain--"
Picard was surprised at La Forge's sudden reluctance.
"You don't think we should go?" Picard said to him.
"It just occurred to me. If Hugh were on the scout, eventually, he would have to have power. He would have to interface with the computer. And then the others would know where he was, whether he wanted them to or not. There's no way to beat the system."
"But if he isn't on his ship," Riker stood, "and he isn't on ours," and he looked to Worf, "And he isn't on the Admiral's, because we'd have heard about it by now, then where the hell is he?"
They all looked at the viewscreen, where the Tammuz drifted. It was Riker who made it to the computer first, ordering a scan of the Tammuz for life signs, for distinct species. But the results of such a scan, he was told at once by the computer, might be unreliable due to interference.
"Even if we could scan reliably through this interference," La Forge said, "Hugh might not show up as an individual lifeform, even separated from his ship."
Picard was pacing back to them, thinking hard. "Because he isn't an individual. We can't deal with him as if he were. There must be something that he is that we can deal with. Now, what is he?"
A piece at a time it came, from various individuals; that Hugh was part of something larger, part of a collective, part of a group of individuals tied to the machinery tied to their ship...
"Part of the ship," Picard said. "Part of the ship." And he ordered a scan of the elemental composition of the Borg ship, anticipating the result of elements unidentified. "Scan the Tammuz," he said impatiently. "Are there similar unidentified elements aboard?"
As the scan came back affirmative, was confirmed, looks began to be exchanged.
"Approximate mass of unidentified elements."
"About the size," La Forge said as he studied the computer's assessment, "of an average adult."
Picard slapped the companel. "Picard to Nechayev. I need to see you immediately."
"La Rue to Tiffany. I need to talk to you, immediately."
Tiffany tried not to startle, tried not be worried. Any shaking that were to start in her hands at this point could do irreparable damage, and there was no way to be certain they had all the information they needed just yet. Tiffany tightened her grip on Hugh's chin, held his head as still as she could to turn and answer me over the com. "I'm sort of in the middle of something right now," she said.
"This is an emergency. Where are you, anyway? I can barely hear you. Must be the vent. Anyway--you won't believe it. The Admiral--"
Standing abruptly away from Hugh, Tiffany's instruments clattered from their precarious balance across her thigh to the floor. "Dammit."
Downloading what she was getting from Hugh directly into a PADD, she asked me brokenly whether anyone was looking for her, anyone of command rank, but I, interrupting, put an abrupt stop to her rambling.
"Whatever you're doing, stop it," I said. "This is much bigger. Ruisi got cut."
"Got cut?" Tiffany slapped the PADD down onto the console. "I'm sure," she said uncertainly, "that there's a med tech--"
"I found it digging through the personnel records. Ruisi is getting dropped from the program. She's out of Starfleet."
"That's an emergency?"
"Well, hell yes, it is. If you were about to get the boot, you'd sure as hell consider it an emergency. I mean, what is she supposed to do?"
"I'm sure she'll find herself a niche." Tiffany stole a look at Hugh. "Somehow. Tiffany out."
She went back to Hugh and sat. The PADD hung, barely held, from her fingers. She returned to it, the PADD, but it wasn't long before it drooped again, and she let out a muted whistle of sympathy for Ruisi. And a sigh. Then she sat up and forced her attentions onto the PADD, saying to herself, "come on, Mister, don't think, don't feel, just do your job."
All she could think about was walking off the ship in disgrace. Where would a person go after that. Oh, and what do you do?
Well, I used to be...
All she could feel was under the sole of one foot a medical instrument she had stepped on. It didn't matter. She didn't bother moving.
"Such is the nature of nature," Tiffany thought out loud. "Overproduction." Random. She would have said to me, and might have, at one point, if we had ever been in a position to argue about such things, that nature sucked that way, the way it was random and overproductive. The successful and lucky ones procreate and survive, influence. The others just die, here and there. It doesn't matter about them. It was odd when she would say these things, because she was always the one on top at the Academy, beating simulations, acing exams, anticipating psych-poptests and blowing the lid right of them. It was as if she considered, every minute, that the higher she went, the farther was the inevitable fall. Been reading too much Milton, I'd have said. Competition keeps everyone working at their best. Yea, but for those who don't rise to the top, it rather sucks, she would say. Damned wasteful.
Tiffany looked at Hugh then. "Nature is hell. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you. Not being a machine."
"I am not a machine."
There might have been something in his voice. Or it might have been the way it was broken. The out-of-synch rhythm came from not having enough energy to move enough air to make all of the sounds properly.
"For all intents and purposes," Tiffany said, not thinking about it. "You got angry with La Forge for implying that you were human, now you're angry with me for implying that you're not. You'd better make up a story and stick to it."
"We are Borg."
"Yea, so you like to remind people. As if that's so much better."
"It is better. We are balanced--"
"I didn't come here to listen to propaganda. I'm going to get what I want out of you if I have to pick through your brain with my bare hands. Nothing else matters to me. Is that relevant enough? Now, give it up. Resisting--"
"Is Futile?"
Tiffany froze.
"I was not going to say that!" she yelled as she unfroze, throwing herself onto her feet and hurling the PADD into the wall. She nearly lost her balance on the clamp under her foot.
"You would kill every one of us for this information, each one of us at a time, when we have done nothing to you."
Retrieving the PADD from where it had landed, Tiffany turned on Hugh.
"You have done everything to us!" she yelled at him. "We would be able to defend ourselves from the Dominion if it hadn't been for you! You would have destroyed us! All of us! For nothing! And you have the gall to tell me that you're better than us. Even now, sitting here, with our morality, our ethics, our philosophies--all the things you've seen of us! Those things make us better than you."
"The things I've seen of you," he said.
"We don't go barreling around driving stakes through the hearts of entire civilizations. We don't tell people that just because they don't live like us that they have any less right to exist!"
"The Prime Directive."
"It's one of the things that proves that we are different from you."
"It's the one thing that proves that you are not different from us at all."
Tiffany stared. "Your Prime Directive is there to remind you of what you're not supposed to do, to remind you not to interfere with other worlds. You have to have that written down, you have to keep reminding yourselves of it because you think everyone would be better off if they were like you. You think you are what is best, for everyone. If you didn't first have the inclination to interfere, the directive would be unnecessary."
Tiffany wiped a palm down her pants. She was sweating now, not just around her forehead, but everywhere.
"Look at yourself," Hugh strained to say to her. "Look at what you're doing, why you are doing it. You will take whatever you can get from us, because you think it will help you survive. That is all you care about. Your survival. We will die here after you are finished with us, and you don't give a damn. Tell me how this is different."
Tiffany was thinking furiously, feeling it sink in. The PADD hung there in her hand, her job. She looked down at it and felt sick. When she sat a little less certainly there beside Hugh, called up what she wanted on the PADD, and showed it to him, he wouldn't look at it right away.
"This is the Jem' Hadar," she said. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"
Hugh stared at her.
"Please, Hugh, tell me this one thing. There haven't been any ships out here, have there. Except for the Romulans."
"No unsupported biological life can exist here."
"Well," Mana said, entering. "What have you learned?"
"You knew he wouldn't attack a Federation ship," Tiffany said back to her without taking her eyes off Hugh.
Mana walked calmly up to Tiffany's shoulder, crossed her arms, and stood and listened.
"You had entire outposts studying the vent," Tiffany said. "Ships coming and going. You had to have known the Borg scout was here. You had to have known it was crippled. But you also had to have known that it was alive, and that as long as it was, they would never let you get close to it. And if you waited until it was dead, the information you wanted so badly would have been lost. Everything you wanted so desperately to know was so close you could taste it, but you couldn't touch it."
Tiffany turned to Mana.
"Not without us," she went on. "Not without La Forge and Picard, at least. You were genuinely frustrated when the Integrity and the Enterprise got separated. It was a mistake, you said. You were using the vent waves to project images of pieces of a Jem' Hadar ship, reflections, but you couldn't predict in what direction the reflections would fragment. They went off in different ways, and the Enterprise went off after one of them. And all you were left with was--"
"You," Mana finished for her. "And I couldn't be happier with your progress. I wasn't lying to you when I said that I'm a woman of great faith. This plan was precarious at best, but we had no practical alternative. So we've just taken it one step at a time. And everything is working out for the best."
Tiffany rose to face Mana. "There was never any Dominion insurgence into the quadrant."
"But there very well could have been."
"Because it's what we've all been waiting for. It's what we've been most afraid of."
"It's what you would have done anything to avoid. Anything."
Tiffany couldn't help but look past Mana to the door.
"Do you really think you'll make it anywhere near that door?" Mana said.
"No." Tiffany sat.
"Bridge to Mana," the com interrupted.
"I'm resolving a morale crisis right now," Mana responded.
"But, Commander, it's the Enterprise. They have information about the vent, about the mechanics of the way the scout is making use of that energy." Mana stood, for a moment, perfectly still. "They need to coordinate an effort to reproduce it. They're asking if you will see them."
"Now?"
"Now."
Mana dashed out.
Nechayev, troubled, found it easier to look at the warbird hull fragments in the center of the conference room table than to look at anyone seated around it. When even that became too troubling, she paced.
"Are you telling me," she said, staring back over the table, "that all this time we've been fighting Romulans? But everything we've seen."
"But what have we seen? I mean, really." La Forge tried to put it in perspective for her. "Fragments of ship signatures that our sensors couldn't identify. A ship crushed practically beyond recognition. Garbled communications."
"All of those ship signatures that we were trying to track could have been reflections in the vent waves."
"Reflections of pieces of a single Jem' Hadar ship. One already reduced to wreckage and placed for our convenience."
"And whose image bounced back and forth off in the interference and made it appear as if there were more of them."
"And weapons fire that we assumed was coming from the ships we thought we could see approaching--" Riker fidgeted in his chair. "We could have been seeing junk, and we never would have known it."
"They brought back pieces from the Gamma Quadrant and stored them out here, until they thought they could make use of them," La Forge said.
"Or," Nechayev corrected, "those pieces were part of another military project."
When Mana and Taposs entered, everyone was quiet.
"Yes, Captain," Mana tried to stand still, professionally, but she couldn't, quite. "If we could get on with this--I'm really quite busy."
"I'm sure you are," Picard said. "My chief engineer just has a few simple questions that should clear procedures up immensely."
"Anything we can do to expedite matters."
La Forge got up and worked at the panel by the viewscreen, calling up a spacechart. In one corner was a designation for the vent. Near it, were a cluster of designations. La Forge gestured to a them. "What are these? Military outposts? It was a military ship that was destroyed, the one you sent those distress calls about. I've found evidence that it was destroyed by a Romulan weapon. It occurred to me that if we visited the outpost firsthand--"
"That is impossible," Mana said too fast. "I'm afraid the Tal Shiar will not allow it."
Picard leaned back and stared Mana down. "The Tal Shiar? These are military outposts."
"The military is--inclined--to cooperate with the Tal Shiar. I cannot let you visit our outposts."
"It's because they're no longer there, isn't it," Picard said. Mana flashed a look at Nechayev.
"You're not the only ones," Picard went on, "with access to information you've no business having."
La Forge returned Mana's attention to the spacechart. "Your outposts. They're awfully close together, aren't they. I mean they're all clustered around here, and then there's not another one until way over here. Were these outposts all studying the vent?"
"The potential for learning from the spatial anomaly was too great to not take advantage of. We intended to fully explore this phenomenon."
"Oh, I see, so you built new outposts nearby in case the old ones fell to pieces during this important assignment."
"All of our outposts were constructed of and equipped with the latest equipment," Mana was boasting herself right into it.
"So you built all of these outposts all at the same time that close together all to study a single energy vent?"
Mana stood through the long and tense pause. "What is your point?"
"Why didn't you blame the Dominion for destroying your outposts, because you didn't have enough ships return from the Gamma Quadrant to bring you enough wreckage to substantiate a claim of full-scale assault?"
"This is outrageous! Picard, can't you control your crew?"
"It's a fair question, Commander. What did happen to your outposts?"
"I will not hear any more of this!"
"You destroyed your own ship. You were afraid the military would learn how to use the vent energy and not share that information."
Mana took a quick step back, yelling seemingly into the air about "sequence omega nine," only she looked around with the beginnings of embarrassment and rage when nothing seemed to happen. She looked to Taposs, who could do nothing.
"Computer," Picard said, and in response it provided an assurance that the security field was in place, preventing transporter lock. For a moment, Mana looked as if she were considering diving through the window. For a moment, she looked admirably at Picard for having been able not just to catch her with her pants down, but to entice her to pull them down in front of everyone. But the smile, when she planted it on him, was harsh.
"You sacrificed yourselves," he said to her.
"Part of ourselves," Mana returned proudly. "To ensure the survival of the whole."
Nechayev sat.
"We are not like you," Tiffany said. But the power was gone from her voice, the conviction. It wasn't, after all, true, and knowing that, she started again. "We have no wish to be like you."
"Nor do we have any wish to be like you," Hugh said. "Can you understand that?"
"Yes, I can understand."
Tiffany stood, the PADD clutched and forgotten in her hand. When she went to the power conduit on the wall and activated it, she didn't know what she expected. But she expected something. And getting no immediate response, no relief, from Hugh, made her uneasy.
"Damn."
She came back to him, reached out, but when he focused his stare it wasn't at her, but behind her. It was as if something were happening there. And then you could feel it, electric.
"Don't touch anything," Tiffany shouted to the away-team as they began to stir into the room. "I'm not certain what will happen. Don't touch the consoles."
She carefully didn't look at Picard when he came over, when he looked at Hugh.
"We have to get him to sickbay," she said.
"What can you do there?"
"I don't know, but I know I can't do anything for him here."
Picard touched his combadge.
On to Chapter Seven.