Star Trek (7 page)

110's shocking announcement stunned everyone except Bart and Geordi, who exchanged glances.

“Before we act on the information 110 has given us,” said La Forge, “I highly recommend we watch this.”

“Time is speeding by, Lieutenant,” said Gold. “I've got the
Enterprise
and the
Lexington
on their way here even as I'm having this pleasant conversation with you.”

“I understand the situation, sir,” Geordi continued, speaking urgently, “but trust me, you all need to see this first. And I mean
see
it, not just have me brief you on it.”

Gold's brown eyes narrowed, and he regarded La Forge intently. Geordi didn't flinch from that scrutiny. Duffy wondered what the hell was on that recording that would make La Forge buck Gold so openly.

Finally Gold nodded, cursorily. “You waste my time, La
Forge, and I'll let Picard know about it.”

“Understood, sir, but I'm certain you won't consider your time wasted.”

“Well, then, start the thing going. I feel my hair turning gray.”

Geordi pressed the control button and took a seat.

With such a dramatic lead-in, everyone assembled leaned forward, expecting to see something staggering. The static and snow stabilized, formed itself into the face of a young woman. While Duffy knew intellectually that it was the face of the greatly decayed corpse now being held in stasis in sickbay—their possible Borg—this lively, animated visage bore little resemblance to the still death mask of the decaying body they had found in the chair.

By human standards, he guessed her to be between sixteen and nineteen, if she was even that old. She was grinning. The recording device, which she held in her hands, was not steady, and she occasionally moved out of the center, but this inefficiency, which Duffy would have thought intolerable to a Borg, seemed not to trouble her one bit.

“I'm recording these on a portable device because I don't want Friend to know about them,” she said. Her eyes were a beautiful shade of leafy green, her teeth white and straight. But what broke Duffy's heart more than anything was the smattering of greenish freckles on her small nose. Judging by Abromowitz's expression, Carol, too, was mourning the loss of such a vibrant young woman.

“Don't get me wrong—I love sharing things with
Friend,” the girl hastened to add. “I love it when we link up, and I've got the whole ship's sensors at my hands.”

She looked a little smug. “I don't need a primitive viewing screen to see, or a console to program, not when I'm joined with the computer. To be able to experience so many things that, as an organic being, I'd never otherwise know is indescribable. And he—yeah, I know it's not alive and it's got no gender, but I think of the ship as a he—is so
close
to me when we're joined. I've never known anything like it, not even in a relationship with another Omearan. But there are things I want to say, so I can look back at them later, and I can't be entirely honest when Friend is so completely joined with me. So, I guess these are secret journals.”

She giggled. To his surprise, Duffy felt tears sting his eyes. He had thought they'd be looking at boring but informative impersonal logs, stuff that would reveal the horrors and atrocities committed by this ship and this pilot, not the most intimate confessions of a young girl's private thoughts. He felt like a peeping Tom. But there was nothing for it. This was, so far, the only information they had on the ship and its pilot, and they needed to keep watching, hard as it was.

One thing was becoming rapidly apparent. Their assumption about the pilot had been all wrong. Whatever she was, this giggling, endearing child on the viewscreen was no Borg.

The girl rambled on about how hard it had been for her
to say good-bye to her family. “I didn't want to tell Friend about it, because it'd upset him. He's really sensitive to my happiness. It's nice to have things like that matter to someone else so much.” She smiled, her green eyes soft with affection, and continued.

“We wouldn't normally get tapped for so deep a mission, but after the war, we're really short of pilots,” she explained. “So here Friend and I are, alone together in space, searching for an uninhabited but fertile planet so we can get off that toxic rock. Start new lives. I tried to explain to Friend about how great it feels to walk on soft grass in your bare feet, but he didn't quite get it, I think.”

Another journal entry described a severe bout of home-sickness. A third had the girl, who finally identified herself as Jaldark, describing how she and Friend had navigated a treacherous asteroid belt unscathed.

“It was the most amazing sensation, to be linked with him while we did that!” Jaldark enthused, practically bouncing up and down in her chair. “I just love Friend
so much
. He's the most wonderful ship. I'm so glad I'm bonded with him for the rest of my life. He seems to be so much easier to get along with, temperamentally, than the trainer ships, but maybe that's because they are constantly bonding and breaking bond with new pilots. Maybe they never get to settle into being themselves. Poor things.”

The grin—the wonderful, wide, endearing grin—crossed her face again. “I guess I'm just the luckiest girl in the universe.”

But you weren't, Jaldark,
Duffy thought, feeling slightly sick. And sure enough, on the next tape, the trouble had already begun. Jaldark looked thinner and paler. There were deep circles under the green eyes, and she wasn't smiling.

“Something's wrong,” she told her recorded journal without preamble. “Friend can sense it, but I'm not telling him any more than I have to in order to maintain function. He knows we're turning around and heading back toward Omearan space at our top speed, but I don't know that we'll make it in time. I hate lying to him like this.”

She swallowed hard, licked dry lips, and continued. “I think it's the implants. I've passed the rejection window, so it can't be that. They'd never have let me go on a deep-space recon mission if there was a possibility that they'd be rejected. But they're failing somehow. I can't get sustenance from Friend anymore.”

Jaldark pressed long, thin fingers to her unusually deep temples. Twin implants pulsed beneath the skin at her touch.

“I have these terrible headaches. And the arm sheathes—they ache whenever we join.” She looked dreadfully unhappy. “That means that, whenever we join, I'm in a lot of pain. So, of course, I come up with excuses not to join as often. Friend hasn't said anything much, but I know his feelings are hurt. He's the last person—well, thing—I'd ever want to hurt, and I just hate it that this is happening!”

Tears welled in her eyes, trickled down her freckled cheeks. She wiped at them angrily. The gesture afforded Duffy a good look at what Jaldark called the “arm sheathes.” They were three conical tubes that had been implanted on both lower arms. The spikes on the chair that Duffy and the others had first assumed were torture devices, and later thought were evidence of Borg technology, were links with the ship's computer. They created a way for a lively young woman to be close to a machine that had transcended its hardware and become a friend; a way to attain the sustenance that would keep Jaldark alive.

There was nothing sinister about the spikes anymore. There was nothing sinister about anything now—only sorrow.

Still crying, Jaldark reached and turned off the recording device. But there was one more entry. Kieran didn't want to see it, but, along with the others, he couldn't look away.

Jaldark looked awful. She had lost a lot of weight and was obviously very ill. She was silent at first, but in the background they could all clearly hear “Friend's” voice: slightly metallic, but filled with concern.

“Jaldark?” Friend called. “Please respond. Are you angry with me? Is there something wrong? I am an Omearan Starsearcher, a top-of-the-line vessel with extensive and flexible programming. I am certain there is something I can do to help you. Please respond, Jaldark. Please respond.”

“Do we have to watch the rest of this, Captain?” Surprised, Duffy tore his gaze from the haggard girl on the screen to look at the speaker. It was Corsi, the last person aboard the
da Vinci
he would have expected to have a problem watching this recording. She seemed to have a skin thicker than Patti's shell. And she was doing her best to look annoyed, not pained; irritated at time wasted, not about to cry. She hid it well, but he could see it, and he suspected everyone else could.

It seemed like Core-Breach Corsi had a heart after all.

“I think we owe it to Jaldark and Friend, yes,” said Gold. “It's a little bit like sitting
shiva
.” He stabbed a forefinger at the screen, where Jaldark was burying her face in her hands and sobbing openly as Friend's queries became more plaintive and frantic.

“This is a brave little girl here, who never had the chance to grow up into the brave woman she ought to have been. We may be the only ones who see what she went through, how courageously she handled it. We have to bear witness.” Gold's brown eyes were serious. “We crawl over corpses in alien vessels all the time, take their dead ships, examine their bodies. I hope we never forget that they were once people. She's reminding us. Friend is reminding us.”

Corsi said nothing, only leaned back in her seat and fixed her gaze on the table.

Jaldark lifted her head and stared into the viewscreen. She was shaking. Her hair, once long and lustrous, was
dull and stringy. The implants in her temple, which had once pulsed to a steady, slow rhythm beneath the skin, were flashing erratically.

“I don't think I have much longer,” she said in a voice thick with tears. In the background, Friend continued to call for her. “The pain is so bad I can hardly stand it.” She bit her lip and closed her eyes as, Duffy guessed, another wave of pain racked her skeletal frame. “I think I'm going to die. But I can handle that. It's Friend I'm worried about. He's supposed to autodestruct if anything happens to me. They said Starsearchers aren't designed to function on their own. They told us the ships need an Omearan mind to link with in order to make ethical decisions. They warned us that they could be dangerous without a pilot. But I don't believe that. I don't think Friend would hurt anybody, unless they hurt him first.”

She took a long, shuddering breath and leaned into the recorder. “I can't kill Friend, I just can't. That would be the most selfish act I think I could possibly perform. I know I'm supposed to, but I won't do it. I won't. I've deactivated the autodestruct mechanism. Friend won't be able to reengage it on his own. He's going to live, even if … even if I don't.”

She smiled a little, a taut, pained smile. “That's what friends do, isn't it? They help each other. If anybody finds this, please take care of Friend. Send him home. The coordinates are in the computer. Help him find a new pilot. He's going to be so lost without … me to take care …”

Jaldark whimpered. More than a scream, that tiny sound rent Duffy's heart. Watching this was torture. Jaldark's chest hitched. Her free hand went up to press tightly at a flashing implant. When she was able to speak again, it was through tightly gritted teeth.

“Tell him I'm sorry. Tell him I love him. Tell him it will be all right. He's just got to be brave.”

She began to gasp, as if her body could no longer absorb oxygen. Her brilliant eyes rolled back in her head, and the recording device slipped from a suddenly limp hand to bounce on the floor. There it lay, recording only the base of the chair until it ran out of bytes, while, out of sight, Jaldark quietly gasped until she made no more sounds, and the plaintive voice of Friend kept demanding, “Jaldark, please respond!”

La Forge reached over and wordlessly turned off the screen. For a long moment, despite the urgency of the situation, no one spoke.

“Rest in peace,” said Gold solemnly.

“Do you see?” said 110 softly. “The ship—Friend—has lost its only companion. Jaldark told us that the ships are supposed to autodestruct if anything happens to the pilot, but Friend does not have that option. It was not designed to be alone. It does not know what to do. Like its pilot, it is a young vessel, with little experience, and it is terrified. We must not destroy it. We must help it. And I volunteer to be linked with it as Jaldark was.”

Gold looked at him sharply. “110, forgive me if I step
on your toes here, but—you've been deliberately avoiding such an intimate link with anyone. That's why you're putting off going back to Bynaus. Assuming I will even let you, which is not an assumption you ought to be making, why do you want to do this? You barely survived your last encounter with that ship's computer. We've got trained specialists on the way right now. They'll figure something out.”

110 looked solemn. “Because, Captain Gold, I am already partially linked to Friend. When I attempted to access the computer when we first boarded, I engaged some sort of circuit with it. It has downloaded a link to my brain, but a very inefficient one. Bynar brains are already constructed to link smoothly with computers, and contain a great deal of information. I am the only one capable of establishing communication that could convince it that we are no threat. It is up to me to stop the ship.”

“We've already stopped the ship.”

Slowly, 110 shook his large head. “No, sir, we have not.”

At that moment, Gold's combadge chirped. “Mack to Captain Gold. The alien ship is powering up. It's left the planet surface and is heading right for us.”