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Chapter 13:
Ghosts
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"Lieutenant Tasha Yar has infiltrated Haven Station and Security Headquarters. She relayed Batto's end of a subspace communication through her comm badge." Picard announced, then motioned for Worf to replay the recording. The senior staff listened carefully, and Riker rubbed his forehead at the part where Batto and Brom plotted to kill Geordi.
"Apparently the careful placement of the Station's shields are creating a small vortex that allows subspace communication within his office only."
"So he can transport and communicate when everyone else can't." Riker summarized. "Talk about pulling up the rope ladder after him."
"He is without honor." Worf growled. "I recommend firing a single photon into the Shield vortex of his office. It would damage several shield generators and allow us to storm the building. I can take a few men, and secure the building within an hour."
"No. Geordi is still detained, and I don't want to commit to any rash action that may goad Batto into killing him before we can get to him. It would be safer to employ a more roundabout approach." Picard rubbed his hands together in thought.
"Am I to understand Tasha is still in the building?" Riker asked.
"Indeed. I couldn't speak to her directly without alerting Batto of her presence. Still, I am confident she will attempt to locate the shuttle computer. We will beam her aboard The Enterprise once it is safe in her hands. I'll be forwarding the data from the shuttle computer to Starfleet. I have no doubt they will support my decision to remove Geordi after it becomes evident Batto is holding one of our own hostage."
"I understand that the shuttle's computer could prove Geordi's innocence and justify removing him from Haven custody. But what about the people of Haven? Would we take Geordi and Tasha and leave Batto in power?" Deanna Troi asked.
She sensed a lot of despair along the outer rim of Haven Station, and the looming execution of Steward Rayal could only lead to further corruption and misery. The thought of letting those people continue to suffer felt wrong.
"The shuttle computer can only prove Geordi's innocence. It does not prove Batto is behind the illegal Spice Trade. Even with this recording, it isn't enough for Starfleet to approve intervention."
"They could discredit this as evidence if Batto accuses us of voice manipulation." Riker reasoned.
"Exactly."
The briefing room fell silent as the remaining senior staff brainstormed the possibilities. An idea struck Worf first.
"The Ferengi said he was going to set up a new exchange route near Zeneba. Maybe we could stake it out, and record an exchange that could further implicate Batto."
"Good idea. I will leave that to you and commander Riker. Take two shuttles." He said, lifting two fingers in emphasis. "Do not interfere with the exchange unless absolutely necessary." Worf and Riker nodded, both rising from their seats, eager for the chance to defend the Chief Engineer.
Catching Worf and Riker's eagerness, he dismissed the staff.
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Tasha waited in the shadows, spying on him. For nearly half an hour, Head Security Batto puttered around his office, signed documents and approved releases of assorted suspects. At some point he opened a safe with a hand-held device. A few keystrokes and it ran a color code, aligning itself with the safe's own pattern. The safe swung open, and Batto reached in, pulled out a small red bag, and shoved his fingers inside it. He pulled out a pinch of powder
and sniffed it. He wiped his nose and exhaled, smearing the red ochre-colored Spice across his face.
I'm not just the owner, I'm also a customer! Tasha thought.
She watched as he finished his beverage and complained about it being cold, then slid open the drawer of his desk. He pulled out a square box she didn't recognize. He turned it this way and that, then spotting a button on it, he depressed it. An automated recording began to play.
"Ikthinia dia basa milla, canta shinivii virreck."
"What the hell?" He pushed the button again, and the box went silent. "It's in another language." He carelessly tossed it on his desk. How the hell was this supposed to prove La Forge's innocence if it was in another language? He sighed, then yanked out a dark metallic object. Assorted wires stuck out of it like a pin cushion, and Tasha's eyes widened. The Shuttle Computer! He set it on the desk before him, then rubbed his knuckles over his lips in thought.
Brom told him to destroy it. Tasha could tell he was thinking about that very thing, and she clenched her fist. That shuttle computer was the only solid proof of Geordi's innocence that would allow Captain Picard to intervene without attracting Starfleet's wrath. If Batto moved to destroy the computer, she acknowledged she may have to assault him. She was ready to lunge for him, her center of gravity focused in the balls of her feet.
But the opportunity never surfaced; instead he growled, rubbed his tired face, then mumbled about doing it tomorrow. He scooped both items into his arms and shoved them into his safe, then slammed it shut. He turned around then and quickly left his office, forcing Tasha to dive around a corner to keep from being seen. Her foot bumped a detective's desk and caused a paper landslide.
"Shit!" She cursed under her breath, heart now pounding in her ears.
"Who's there?" He asked at the sound of the crash, and pulled out a phaser. He rounded the corner cautiously and peered around the office. He saw the stack of papers on the floor and sheathed his weapon. "Abie, clean up your damn desk." He said to no one. He made a cautious scan around the room one last time, and determining no one was there, turned to leave. She watched as he entered the glass lift. It sent him down to ground level. She waited a good three minutes after, just to make sure he didn't come back for some random purpose.
Confident she was alone and wouldn't be disturbed, she emerged from the shadows and snatched her comm badge from under Batto's desk.
"Captain Picard, can you still hear me?"
"I can, Lieutenant."
"I'm still in Batto's office. He has the shuttle computer locked in a safe." She touched the safe, analyzing its metals. "It looks like it's made with some durable poly alloy. I don't think phaser fire will open it. "I'm going to attempt to break the lock instead."
"I want you back on the enterprise the moment you open that safe, Lieutenant Yar."
"Understood, sir. Tasha out."
She let in a deep breath, eying the safe. She had to get into it. Geordi's life counted on it. But it was locked, and Batto had taken the handheld key with him when he left. She reached into her bag and pulled out a tricorder and connection cable. She was reminded suddenly of her ex-boyfriend, Bel Cito.
"Well, if there's something positive I got out of that relationship, he taught me a few tricks." She said to herself as she opened a small port on the side of the safe; the very same port Batto had used the handheld key on. She attached the safe to her tricorder through the connection cable and began tapping her tricorder at record speed.
"I'll have to remember to thank him for teaching me this." She mumbled.
During their time together, he had taught her how to hack systems with a tricorder, and how to effectively modify it into a remote control, and manipulate almost any object connected to a hacked network.
The color code of the safe was blinking and shifting through the spectrum so quickly she couldn't pick up a pattern visually, but the tricorder was working seemingly just as fast, shifting through the spectrum. She figured it was only a matter of time before the pattern would sync up with the safe and open it. It gave her time to reflect on her past relationship with Ensign Cito.
Cito was socially awkward, but he was good with his hands and had a way with technology. He attributed his skills with spending a year as an exchange student with the Binaries. She recognized his skills as exemplary, and that was what had attracted her to him originally. He was smart in his own way, and if he hadn't been emotionally crippled by social interactions, he could have been a very successful Academy Professor. That, and she had recognized him as a potentially dangerous person, and it was a thrill to be with someone with such untapped talents.
She had little doubt then that he could be part of something wonderful and much bigger then himself if he just tried. She wondered why he wasn't where he belonged - on the Jupiter Science station or Daystrom Institute with other bright minds. After all, the guts of a computer was his element, and complex programs his playground. So for the life of her she couldn't understand why he avoided Commander Data like the plague. He and Data should have been best friends. Instead, he hated him. His insecurities crushed his drive to interact with others and make connections, and he never rose above Ensign.
It was a shame that so much potential had been wasted.
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"There are two types of Nanoes here!" Dr. Crusher hissed from inside her lab. She entered Sick Bay. "One to dissolve..." She said, watching as it ate away a small sample of Data on the overhead screen. "And one to..." She squinted at the screen, trying to understand it. "If what I am seeing here is accurate...These two are working in tandem with each other! How are they communicating?"
She thought for a moment. Evidence was showing there was definite communication between the two types, nevermind how. But it wasn't perfect communication, and that delay of contact was starting to cause a problem.
"Did I just discover a flaw in the design of Professor Tana's virus?" She almost couldn't believe it. The Nanoes had such sophisticated programming that to find such a cruel - although probably unintentional - error was almost unbelievable. Over the course of Dr. Crusher's observations of the virus, she had developed a slight reverence and jealousy for Professor Tana's skill. It gave her the false impression that Tana was above oversight. But if what Dr. Crusher was looking at was true, then it cast Tana into a more human light.
"What did you find, Doctor Crusher?" Alyssa inquired.
"These two types of Nanoes are imbalanced. Not by much, but just enough." She answered quietly. "Data is developing nocireceptors by these Type II Nanoes. They're creating a neural network deep in his tissue. As each nerve is created, it's being activated. Tested, in a sense. And that could be perceived by him as pain." She leaned closer to her unresponsive patient and eyed her tricorder critically. "But his Positronic Brain is barely affected by the Nanoes at all. He doesn't have opioid or dopamine receptors, or any kind of receptor for that matter, that I could use counteract that pain."
"Maybe it's a good thing that his neural stem dissolved when it did." Alyssa observed matter-of-factly.
Beverly frowned. Yes, it probably was good that he was still disconnected from the outside world. But how long would that protection last? Natural nerves were making their way up his still-metallic spinal cord, and when they finally did meet with his preserved Neural Net, he would be connected once again between his processing brain and his body, and the developing nocireceptors within it. The dissolved nerves were like a levy against an ocean of pain.
She supposed only time would tell if she could help him when he finally awoke.
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What felt like forever passed, and the safe and tricorder was nowhere near aligning themselves right.
Lal could see the problem clearly - the tricorder didn't have enough power to match the rate of the safe as it sifted through the color code. It came close to alignment, then drifted apart. The tricorder and safe came close to interlocking three times already, but whether it was three or three thousand, the result would be the same each time. it was off by .012 seconds. It wasn't noticable to a human, but to a complex computer program, it was almost an eternity. This would not do.
"It's too slow." She said. "You need to feed more power into the tricorder." And it wouldn't take much power either. It just needed a little push. She could see Tasha's right hand holding the tricorder, and formed a plan.
If her father's neural pathways were nearly identical to a human, and she had managed to hide herself in his hand while he was seizuring, and jump from him to Yar when they touched, then theoretically she could do the same with Tasha and feed just enough power for the tricorder to mesh with the safe. All she had to do was wait for just the right moment...
"What...? Who...?" She heard her Tasha say. Lal could see Tasha's reflection in the shiny surface of the glass window. She could see Yar looked shocked and a little afraid, but didn't know why. But there was no time for such observations; the safe and tricorder were getting close to meshing again. Or as close to meshing as they ever would. Just a few more milliseconds and... NOW!
She dove through Tasha's nerves, down her brainstem and through her spine, into her hand and arced into the tricorder. Just a little push, that's all it needed. She felt a part of herself diminish as she attempted to load the tricorder. It beeped suddenly, and she witnessed the perfect alignment of color codes between safe and tricorder.
Now, back to Tasha. She dove again, running through Tasha's nerves back into her brain. She found going to the brain was faster than coming from, and wondered why that was.
She could see through Tasha's eyes again, and calculated her endeavor' took about .03 seconds, to and from.
A deep sense of satisfaction welled within her.
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The safe swung open, and Tasha whistled at the sight.
It was filled with bars of gold-pressed latinum and other odds and ends. Among the bars were the shuttle computer and the strange box. She grabbed both objects and shoved them into her pack.
This couldn't have gone more smoothly, yet she found herself breaking a nervous sweat. She tapped her comm badge. "Lieutenant Yar to Captain Picard."
"Go ahead."
"I have the shuttle computer, sir. I'm ready to beam aboard." And face her inevitable punishment. She paused. "Request permission to attempt contact with Geordi La Forge first. I need him to identify an object." She suspected the ancient looking box was something he picked up from Tseres IV, but she couldn't be sure. She didn't want to add unwarranted theft of Haven property if it wasn't - she was in enough hot water as it was.
"I must stress that you exercise utmost caution. Do not enter unless you are confident you won't be detected." He warned.
"I'll be careful."
"Keep me updated. I'll have O'Brien on standby. Picard out."
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There was an entity in Data's Dream. Like Lal, it moved freely about the confines of Ten-Forward, independent of him. But unlike Lal, he didn't find it benign.
It had formed slowly at first, barely noticable and beating dimly into existence like an unwelcome pulse. It materialized around the same time he began to sense something indescribable within what he perceived to be his body.
It was an unpleasant, swirling sensation, and as he felt it, the entity swirled with it. As if it was dancing to this chaotic music. And it grew in size as the sensation strengthened, and it began to block out what little light Dream-State Ten Forward had.
"Please state your intentions." He said to it firmly.
It did not reply, only grew in size. It began to vibrate suddenly, then split into two entities. The sensation within grew worse.
The two dark blobs ungulated together, and Data was reminded of the being Armus, the entity that had almost killed Lieutenant Yar and Commander Riker several years ago. But unlike the liquid entity that oozed across surfaces, these creatures were barely affected by gravity at all. They floated and swirled around the edges of his confines. They began to vibrate again, and split once more.
Now there were four of them.
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Tasha had yet to leave Batto's office. She sat still underneath Batto's desk with an uncomfortable weight in her chest. She had yet to locate Geordi and speak with him. She didn't want to return to Enterprise just yet: There was a matter she had to address first. There was something brazenly unusual happening with her since she boarded Haven. Twice she heard thoughts clearly not her own instruct her in moments of uncertainty.
For the past few hours, she had entertained uncomfortable images of flying off the hook and attacking random strangers under the influence of some malevolent alien spirit. Unlikely as the scenario was, the worry was still there, and she had to make light of it. She leaned forward in a sitting position, wrists resting over her knees. She had put it off for long enough. She took in a breath, ready to call attention to it. She spoke in a very clear and low voice, one she used to emphasize to others the seriousness of her words.
"Who are you."
Lal recognized it was a question, but it was said in the form of a statement. But no one was present, so she wondered just who she was talking to? She knew humans spoke to themselves often, usually to redirect thoughts or reassure themselves in times of inner struggle. But this question was not something she understood to be self-serving.
"You helped me in the alley, then again here. I'm assuming you're benevolent. So who are you?"
"You can hear me?" Lal replied, astonished. If she had a mouth, it would have been open in shock.
"I can. Why are you possessing me? What are your intentions here?"
Intentions? Possession? Lal was alarmed at the aggressiveness of the questions. She recognized that aggression stemmed from fear and a need for Tasha to protect herself. It made Lal want to laugh. Someone as strong as Yar was afraid of little old her? What an absurd fear! she was programmed to assist humans.
"I apologize. I wasn't intending to possess you, it just happened."
That did it. She felt Tasha's body relax. Apparently being possessed was touchy business.
"Please don't think I'm not grateful for your help. But I don't take kindly to possession. Will you leave?"
Damn; Lal thought. She was beginning to like Tasha. Never had she felt such excitement before. Tasha's life was much more dangerous than her father's was, which she found to be very organized and proper; maybe even predictable. The change was unexpected and riveting.
She supposed she could associate her father's Neural Net and his designated pathways as a sort of nursery - It was safe and there were things to do - but when she was forced to flee his seizured pathways, she passed from his body to Yar's in the brief moment that they held hands. Now that she experienced Yar's dangerous world, and now that her universe expanded with new possibilities, she wasn't sure she wanted to go back to the dull-by-comparison monotony.
But Yar didn't appreciate Lal's presence within her mind, so the ex-android figured she had little choice in the matter. Lacking a body as she was, she would have to go back to her father. That was assuming, of course, that she could go back.
"I can't at the moment."
"You mean to tell me you're stuck here? With me?" Tasha sounded upset.
"I promise I won't interfere. I can't even control you."
"Wait. You tried to control me?"
"Before I knew you had a ghost, yes."
"Ghost!?"
"Yes. You have what I have chosen to refer to as a ghost; a self-awareness that defines you as a separate entity from someone else that spans beyond physical features and beliefs. Klingons often equate their souls to Honor. The Bajorans call it Pah. Humans call it Chi, spirit, soul, or inner-light."
Tasha remained silent. This entity sounded a lot like Data when he over-explained an observation; the similarity made her feel uncomfortable. The entity continued on her explanation, oblivious to Tasha's sudden concentration on the sick android back on Enterprise.
"At first I thought you were a shell, like my previous hosts. But this viscera doesn't respond to my commands. I have to assume your ghost is dominant over mine."
"Well, that's a relief at least." She didn't much care for being defined as viscera, but let it slide. What else would a shell-dweller call her, after all?
"So you're an energy-being?"
She thought about it for a moment. She could say she was an android designed after a human, but that wasn't what she was anymore. And it probably would add too much complexity too soon. Regardless of how she started out in life, she was all electro-magnetic now. "I suppose I am."
"What's your name?"
"My name is Lal." She said it matter-of-factly, as if surprised Yar didn't recognize her. But then again, why would she? Her life began and ended after Yar left Enterprise, and it was likely none of the Enterprise crew mentioned her.
"Lal? That's a pretty name. I'm assuming you already know mine?"
"I do."
"I want you to know that when I get back to Enterprise, I will attempt to remove you."
"I understand. I will cooperate with your efforts when the time comes."
"Good!" She smiled, relieved. The communication with this entity was cordial and polite, not like the battle of wills most possessive aliens harkened to. This being, whatever it was, had to be one of the friendliest she had ever met. "With that out of the way. It's a pleasure to meet you, Lal."
And with that sorted, she could focus on finding Geordi.
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