ROLLERCOASTER
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Mr Data & Miss Yar Send Their Regrets
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Chapter Three – Some Are Born To Endless Night
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Fajo entered the cell once more, leering at Tasha.
'I used to view Mister Data as the most prized potential addition to my collection,' he said. 'Once I'd got my hands on him, I was never going to let him go. I was going to treasure him. He was the one who ruined that dream – not me. It was a little strange just giving him up to the highest bidder without so much as a goodbye, but there you go. With what I was paid for him, I'm well on my way to getting my fortune back, and isn't that what really matters?'
'What have you done with him?' Tasha asked. 'Who have you traded him to?'
Fajo shrugged. 'You may as well know – there's nothing you can do about it now. A handsome bounty was put out for him by a Romulan cyberneticist by the name of Dr Poklar.'
Tasha's eyes widened. 'Poklar?'
'You've heard of her?'
'I read some reports she'd written,' panicked Tasha. 'She's not just a cyberneticist, she's… she's insane. She'd started building these machines to… she wanted to torture him. Him or Lore or any android she could get her hands on…'
'Torture?' Fajo raised his eyebrows. 'Couldn't happen to a more deserving fellow.'
'I won't let you get away with this,' Tasha told him. 'I'm going to find a way out of this, and I'm going to rescue him, and you are going to pay. Not necessarily in that order…'
'Torture,' repeated Fajo, reflectively. 'Well, that would certainly make controlling him a whole lot easier. You have no idea how many times when I first had him in my hospitality I wished that I could just… just hurt him.' He balled his fists. 'Let's see him and his beloved Passive Resistance get out of that one.'
-x-
Data could see Poklar growing more and more frustrated as he resisted the Halo's effects, and after 198 seconds, she switched off the pain simulation again. She glowered at him furiously, calculating her next move.
'I can make some alterations to the device,' she announced, 'increase the levels of pain.'
'The effect upon me would be the same,' Data replied.
Poklar sat back on her haunches, still watching him. 'What "Queen"?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You mentioned that the Borg had a Queen – a leader. I always thought they were a collective. Since they came to the system, everyone's thought they were a collective. No Queen has ever tried to communicate with any ship or station or planet that they've attacked. And yet, she revealed herself to you. What an honour.'
Data paused. 'This line of questioning is irrelevant.'
Poklar looked down at her knees. 'You're probably right. It probably is…' she glanced up at him again, catching his gaze, '…futile.'
Data did not answer. In Engineering, She leaned in close to him, and whispered in his ear; 'she knows'.
'What did they want you for, anyway?' asked Poklar. 'They can't assimilate you, can they?'
'They wanted encryption codes that I had written which would grant them access to the ship's computer.'
'I see.' Poklar paused for a moment, then leaned forwards and switched the Halo on again. Suddenly, Data felt as though thousands of scalpel blades were slicing into every centimetre of his skin. Only 15 seconds passed before Poklar stopped the simulation again.
'I can make all of the pain go away, you know.'
'I am aware of that.'
'What would you do to get me to stop? Would you beg me? Are you above begging?'
'I have already implored you to stop.'
'Did she want you for a consort? This Queen – was that what she wanted from you?'
Data said nothing.
'If you were in a corner, what would you stoop to in order to escape?'
Still, Data did not reply.
Slowly, Poklar leaned right in to him, so that her mangled face was practically against his. She looked directly into his eyes and breathed hot breaths over his mouth and nose. And them, just as slowly, turning her head so that she never broke her gaze, she put out her tongue and licked in one long line from his chin, over his cheek and the corner of his eye, ending at his temple.
Data did not look away from her terrible gaze; did not react.
'What would you do?' Poklar continued. 'What can you do?'
She was practically lying on top of him now. Without warning, she pushed a hand down beneath his waistband, grabbing at his crotch.
'Well, everything seems to be there that needs to be,' she added with a slight smile.
Then, Data did something that surprised even himself. He laughed.
Poklar drew back with a scowl. 'Don't laugh. Don't laugh at me. Why are you laughing?'
'You are too late,' Data replied through a giggle.
'I'm not too late for anything. I've got you. I've got you right where I want you…'
'You were too late to punish Lore himself,' continued Data, 'I destroyed him before you were ever able to use these devices upon him, so you had to use me as a proxy. But you see, you are also too late to exact the revenge that you have dreamed of upon me. You wanted to introduce me to physical pain. It has already been done. You wanted to override my emotional controls and leave me with the torment of helplessly experiencing torture with new emotions racing through my consciousness. It has already been done. You want to subject me to sexual degradation and humiliation. It has already been done. You want to break me – to leave me a troubled, haunted shadow of my previous self, if I am to escape alive at all. It has already been done. And the one who was there first was worse than you – worse than you can ever hope to be, and yet I defeated her – after a fashion. So I shall also prevail against you, eventually, for you are nothing compared to her. And when I return to my ship and dream, my nightmares will still be filled with her, and not with you. You shall be a footnote in what has been, all in all, a truly wretched past three years for me. Between what she did to me, and what I have done to myself since deciding to install the emotion chip in the first place, there is very little that you can do to me that has not been done before. You are too late.'
Poklar got up swiftly, and went to leave the cell. She paused at the door. 'We'll see about that,' she told him. 'We'll see.'
-x-
'And what's that supposed to mean?' Tasha asked.
'It means exactly what it's supposed to,' retorted Fajo. 'We'll see how willful you'll continue to be once your new owner's had you for a little while.'
'"New owner"…' echoed Tasha bitterly, under her breath. 'You know something about this "owner", don't you? What do you know?'
'Little, except that he came in with a remarkably high offer, outbidding the initial client at the last minute, and that he'll be coming aboard to take you off my hands at any moment now.'
Tasha just glowered down at her knees and went back to trying to think up ways to escape. So far, she'd come up with a dozen different plans, but none of those would be achievable without her first being freed from the manacles that held her to the wall of the holding cell. It didn't help matters that her mind kept wandering to Data, and how she was going to locate and rescue him once she'd liberated herself. He was the priority. After what he'd gone through over the past few years, she really didn't know how much she could conceive he'd be able to withstand against somebody like Poklar.
Fajo's communicator chirruped. Tasha's captor listened to a brief message coming in through his earpiece, then smiled brightly.
'Your purchaser just beamed aboard. He should be at the cell door…'
There was a knock. Fajo split his face in a greasy grin and opened the door.
Tasha looked up. When she saw who had arrived to take her, she sucked sharply through her teeth and wished more than ever that she had her hands free and a weapon at her belt. It was Sela's father. She remembered Data's worry back on Romulus that the past was somehow going to repeat itself – that she would once again be the concubine, the baby-making-factory of the Romulans. And now, it seemed that he'd been right. Some were born to sweet delight, some were born to endless night, and Natasha Yar was doomed to go back to torture and rape and slavery again and again and again…
'General,' oozed Fajo as the Romulan stepped into the cell, 'welcome. As you can see, your purchase is in good order – unhurt and awake, as per your instructions.'
The Romulan blankly locked with Tasha's furious glare for a moment, then turned his attention back to Fajo.
'I can gag her if you like,' Fajo continued. 'In fact, I'd say that was pretty advisable…'
The Romulan pulled out a disruptor.
Tasha closed her eyes. Fine. If he'd found her so that he could kill her again, at least it would be better than years of slavery. She only wished that she could have been given the chance to help Data. It was only when she heard Fajo give a little squeak of surprise that she opened her eyes again, and saw the Romulan pointing his weapon not at her, but at her kidnapper.
'What is this?' Fajo protested. 'This is the one you wanted, wasn't it? I was very clear about what it was you'd be getting…'
'Kivas Fajo,' announced the Romulan, 'you are under arrest.'
'What? Why?'
'You're a smuggler,' the Romulan explained, 'an illegal trader, you have compromised the Romulan Empire's diplomatic position by bringing two kidnapped Federation Officers into our territory…'
'So that's it,' Fajo sneered. 'You're a Federation Sympathiser – might have known by your interest in a female Human. I bet you're one of those spineless Reunificationists too, aren't you?'
'And,' continued the Romulan, over him, 'you've laundered funds stolen from the Empire.'
'I have done no such thing.'
'You were paid a stupendous amount for the android by a single party,' spat the Romulan. 'No individual has that much to spend, let alone some mad, failed scientist. You never wondered where that money came from? Of course it was stolen!'
'I took that payment in good faith,' Fajo argued. 'Where it came from is none of my concern. Take it up with Poklar.'
'Believe me, I will. But first, you'll return to the Empire what is ours.'
Fajo shook his head. 'No, no no no. This is not happening again. That money's mine now.'
'You won't comply?'
Fajo narrowed his eyes. 'Make me.'
'I don't have to,' replied the Romulan, and fired.
One moment, Kivas Fajo was there, standing defiantly against his supposed customer, and the next, he was simply gone. Fajo had become a cloud of atoms – the one-time trader, collector, thief, kidnapper and murderer was no more than a smear on the memory of the cosmos.
'What…?' Tasha managed. 'I mean, what…?'
The Romulan hurried over to a small computer panel next to the cell's door and started prodding at it.
'You killed him!'
'Mr Fajo was a particularly stubborn individual,' the Romulan explained. 'It's a shame he wouldn't surrender, but I didn't have the time to persuade him. I suppose he didn't want to face up to just how insignificant he is, in the grand scheme of things.' He paused a little. 'Are you upset that I killed him – after what he did to you?'
'All he did to me was to try to sell me to you.'
The Romulan smiled a little. 'Precisely.'
'So, if what he did was so bad that he deserved an immediate execution, why did you place a bid on me in the first place?'
'I didn't.' The Romulan turned back to the computer panel. 'It was somebody else who offered the bounty for you. All I did was outbid her. I had to. She'd have killed you.'
'Sela,' realised Tasha. 'It was Sela who offered the reward for me, wasn't it? I imagine she'll have given up on ever posing as me after I found her plans and finally decided that it was more trouble still having me around in the universe than she could be bothered to deal with.'
'Sela is the greatest achievement of my life,' the Romulan told her. 'I live for my daughter, and I would die for her. But your head, Tasha? The life of the woman who bore my only child? That's too much to ask – even of the most doting father.'
The computer pad flashed yellow and Tasha's manacles clicked apart, freeing her. Tasha sighed slightly, wriggling the pins and needles out of her fingers.
The Romulan walked over to where she was crouched and held out a hand. 'Come with me.'
Tasha pushed herself away, furiously. 'Don't you touch me!'
'I wasn't going to…'
'It's not going to happen again, you know. You're not going to get me again. So if it's that or die, you might as well just kill me now…'
'Tasha. I'm not going to hurt you.'
'You expect me to believe that?' Tasha seethed.
'Not really,' replied the Romulan. 'But this might help.'
He tossed her his disruptor. She caught the weapon easily.
'It isn't as though it's my only one,' he admitted, indicating to a second disruptor on his belt, 'but I thought it might make you feel a bit safer in my company, considering….'
'Considering,' interjected Tasha, 'that you enslaved another version of me – raped her, murdered her…'
'That was a long time ago,' The Romulan told her. 'I was a different person back then. I thought that I could own you, and I became so angry when you tried to escape… it took me a long time to understand, but I know now that I can't lock you in a cage. You're a creature that has to be free in order to thrive.' He paused. 'There's a merchant vessel that I've paid to wait for us in the nearest planetary system. I've programmed my ship's escape pod to rendezvous with them – we're close to the edge of Romulan Space here - they can get you to a friendly station in the Neutral Zone within a matter of hours. You should easily be able to find passage into Federation space from there. I can put you on that escape pod right now, if you wish.'
Tasha eyed him. 'There's a "but" coming up, isn't there?'
'Only in that it would be much easier to find Dr Poklar's ship and free your friend from it with your help,' the Romulan told her. 'I can't deal with her as simply as I did Mr Fajo – insane and discredited as she is, if I were to simply kill a once eminent Romulan cyberneticist, questions would be asked that I'd find difficult to answer.'
'I think Poklar wants to hurt Data,' replied Tasha.
'I know for a fact that Poklar wants to hurt Data,' the Romulan confirmed.
Tasha nodded quietly, and got to her feet. 'Then I'll come with you. But the first hint of Funny Business…'
'There won't be any,' the Romulan assured her. He stared at her for a moment. 'You know, I'd forgotten just how alike you and my daughter look.'
'Don't remind me.'
The Romulan smiled, gently. 'Still so young.'
'Not that young. I'll be 40 in a few years. Can we get on, please?'
-x-
Tasha was surprised at quite how little the Romulan's ship was, once they'd beamed aboard it. He was clearly the only one running it.
She gave him a sideways look. 'No one knows that you're here, do they?'
'This is a personal mission,' the Romulan replied. He gave her a small smile. 'Now do you see why I needed your help?'
'So Poklar isn't really a thief,' Tasha concluded. 'The Romulan Empire isn't actually trying to find and arrest her.'
'Oh no,' assured the Romulan, 'she's a most wanted criminal – an embezzler of the highest order. Only, if the Romulan authorities were to find her first, I believe that they would deal with those associated with her in a manner that I would find unacceptable.'
Tasha nodded. 'She made a deal with the same trader as Sela – anything that financially traces her to your daughter has to be bad for your family, right?'
'It's not just my daughter that I'm worried about,' the Romulan replied. 'They wouldn't have been nearly so kind to you had they caught up with Fajo. And there are other issues. There are already questions being asked about your whereabouts… your Klingon Officer in particular has been swift to suspect that the pair of you have been brought into Romulan space.'
'Good old Worf.' Tasha smiled, fondly. 'He really hates you guys.'
'But so fast,' the Romulan exclaimed. 'It's almost as though he had insider knowledge…'
'He works with Ferengi.'
'Ah. That will explain it. Well then, I hope you see why I believe that it's in the diplomatic interest to the Empire that you and the android are returned to Starfleet as soon as possible… even though I imagine the Senate would disagree with me.'
'The last Borg attack crippled Starfleet and the Federation,' Tasha noted. 'Everybody knows that – I can't imagine the Romulan Empire would have any qualms over going to war with us right now – quite the opposite, in fact.'
'Some of us have come to believe that war is not the way forward for the Empire any more. Some of us are seeking a more peaceful future.'
'Don't tell me you really are one of those "spineless Reunificationists"…?' Tasha asked.
'I believe that Romulus' future lies with reconnection with our Vulcan brethren,' the Romulan told her. 'And for that, continued peace with the Federation is fundamental.' He seated himself in front of what Tasha assumed was the ship's navigation computer and began keying in some code. 'I should be able to access the computer systems on Fajo's ship now…'
Tasha cocked an eyebrow at him. 'Yeah. About that. I hate to break this to you, Mister Peace And Logic, but you just killed a man in cold blood. Not very Vulcan of you.'
The Romulan concentrated on his task. 'Yes. As you can probably tell, I still have much to learn from my peaceful cousins… ah-ha. Here it is.' He pointed at the monitor. 'The co-ordinates where he traded the android to Poklar. Right on the edge of Romulan Space.'
Tasha peered at the unfamiliar screen. 'Would she have taken off into the Neutral Zone, do you think?'
'Unlikely,' replied the Romulan. 'From what we know of Poklar, she tends not to flee – she prefers to hide. She's a creature of habit – she'll have dug her heels in somewhere – in the crater of a moon, or masquerading her ship as a natural satellite to some far-flung planet where she thinks nobody would ever think to look.' He studied the screen a little more. 'Luckily, there are only two planetary systems close enough to those co-ordinates for her to have gone to in the short term.'
'Then let's pick which one we're going to fine-tooth-comb first and set off for it now,' Tasha told him, impatiently. 'We have to get Data back. You don't know what he's been through recently. I'm not sure how much punishment he'd be able to take.'
'We'll try the closest system first,' agreed the Romulan, setting the navigation computer. He flicked a brief glance up at her. 'You love him, don't you?'
'I'm concerned for a friend and colleague.'
'But you do love him.'
'Yes. Yes, I do.'
'A machine,' sighed the Romulan. 'Is he capable of loving you back?'
'In theory,' she replied, 'but he doesn't.'
The Romulan shook his head. 'When I think of the years I spent trying to make you love me…'
'You make it sound as if I have any say in the matter of who I fall in love with and who I don't.'
'So do you,' replied the Romulan. 'I understand how you feel, Tasha. I couldn't help loving you. I still can't.'
Tasha turned herself away from him, folding her arms tightly over her chest. 'Don't.'
'You still despise me.'
Tasha raised her eyebrows. 'Oh, do you think? I'm doing this because I believe you can help me rescue him quicker and cleaner than I could do alone. If it weren't for him, I'd be the murderer here, and you'd be a haze of atoms.'
'I hope he appreciates the lengths you'll go through for him.'
'I don't care whether he does or not. I just want to bring him back. I daren't think about what she's doing to him right now.'
