Chapter 22: Datalore — Part 3
[USS Enterprise-D — Bridge — 2364, Day 80]
Tasha made it four steps onto the bridge before Lore figured it out.
Cole was in the turbolift, ascending from deck 34 where Data lay recovering, when the comm erupted. He'd sent Tasha the confirmation—Wesley's positronic comparison, the chemical trace, the behavioral inconsistencies—and she'd moved with the decisive speed of a Security Chief who'd stopped waiting for the threat to come to her.
But Lore was faster than anyone had calculated.
The turbolift opened onto the bridge in time for Cole to see the aftermath of three seconds of violence. Tasha's security team was positioned at the tactical station and port entrance—standard containment formation. Riker stood at the command chair, phaser drawn. Worf flanked from the aft station.
And Lore had Wesley.
The android's arm was locked around Wesley's throat—not crushing, not yet, but positioned with the mechanical precision of a being who could snap a human neck in a quarter-second. Wesley's feet dangled, his face white, his hands pulling uselessly at an arm made of duranium composite and synthetic muscle that could bench-press a shuttlecraft.
"The Entity is already coming." Lore's voice was his own now—not Data's careful diction but something fluid, contemptuous, dripping with the particular malice of an intelligence that had decided to stop pretending. "This crew will make excellent nourishment."
"Put the boy down, Lore." Tasha's phaser was level. Her voice was ice. "There's nowhere to go."
"There's everywhere to go. The Entity will be here in—" Lore tilted his head, performing a calculation. "—fourteen minutes. When it arrives, this ship's shields won't matter. Its weapons won't matter. Nothing will matter except whether you're inside the ship when it feeds." The arm tightened. Wesley gasped. "And I'll be outside, watching."
Cole stepped off the turbolift.
Lore's eyes found him instantly—the same assessment from the corridor, the same predatory focus, but sharper now. Desperate. The android had expected to execute his plan undetected. The timeline had collapsed, and desperation made dangerous things more dangerous.
"Ah. The watchful Lieutenant." Lore's smile was wrong in ways that went beyond expression—a mask worn by something that understood the mechanics of human facial muscles without comprehending what they meant. "You see me, don't you? How... interesting."
"Let Wesley go." Cole kept his voice flat. His hand wasn't near his phaser—Lore could process and react to a draw faster than any human could complete one. Instead, his hands hung at his sides, open, unthreatening. His energy perception mapped the bridge in crystalline detail: every body, every weapon, every energy signature.
Lore's phaser—Data's phaser, stolen along with Data's face—was pressed against Wesley's ribs. Type-2, set to kill. At that range, it would burn through the teenager's torso before the pain signal reached his brain.
"I don't think so." Lore backed toward the aft turbolift, dragging Wesley. "I need a hostage until the Entity arrives. After that—well. After that, I won't need anything from any of you."
Tasha tracked him. Riker tracked him. Worf's phaser never wavered. But nobody fired. Nobody could—Wesley's body shielded every viable target.
Cole's perception was running at maximum. The bridge's energy map burned behind his eyes: the EPS conduits in the walls, the tactical station's power feeds, the phaser in Lore's hand drawing from its internal power cell, the faint emergency pulse of Data's recovering signature three decks below.
The phaser. Lore's phaser. Type-2, full charge. Energy contained in a sarium krellide power cell, ready to discharge through the emitter crystal at the slightest pressure on the trigger.
I've never absorbed directed energy before. The theory says it works—same principle as ambient absorption, different scale. The Traveler's teaching says thought and energy exist on a spectrum. If I can think fast enough, focus precisely enough—
If I'm wrong, Wesley dies.
If I don't try, Wesley dies anyway.
Lore reached the turbolift. His free hand touched the control panel. The doors began to open.
Cole moved.
Not toward Lore—the android would react to a charge faster than Cole could close the distance. Instead, Cole stepped sideways, putting himself between Lore and Tasha's firing line, and raised his right hand.
"What are you—" Lore began.
Cole focused. Not on the phaser. On the energy inside the phaser. The sarium krellide cell, charged and ready, containing enough directed energy to kill a dozen humans. He reached for it with his perception the way he reached for a light sphere in the cargo bay—not as a physical object to be grasped, but as a state of reality to be chosen.
The phaser's power cell discharged. Not through the emitter—through the casing, sideways, arcing from the weapon into the air in a crackling burst of orange light that jumped across the gap between Lore's hand and Cole's outstretched palm.
The energy hit Cole like a freight train.
Pain—white, total, a supernova detonating in his palm. Every nerve in his hand screamed. The energy tore through his skin, his muscles, his bones, flooding his nervous system with more raw power than he'd ever channeled. His vision went white. His teeth cracked together. His entire body locked rigid as the absorbed energy raced through pathways that had never been tested at this capacity.
Too much. Too fast. Hold it. HOLD IT.
The Traveler's teaching. Thought becomes energy. Energy becomes thought. They exist on a spectrum. Cole existed on that spectrum—and right now, the spectrum was trying to tear him apart from the inside.
He held it. Two seconds. Three. An eternity measured in the heartbeats between agony and control.
Lore stared at the dead weapon in his hand. The phaser was dark—completely drained, its power cell empty, its emitter cold. In the half-second of confusion, his grip on Wesley loosened.
Wesley dropped. The teenager hit the deck, rolled, scrambled clear.
Cole's hand came up. The energy he'd absorbed—raw, unfiltered, screaming for release—gathered in his palm the way it had gathered during his training sessions. But this wasn't a gentle light sphere. This was a phaser's worth of directed energy, compressed, volatile, demanding to be free.
He pushed.
The blast caught Lore in the chest. Not elegant—not the precise, surgical projection he'd been training toward. A raw, desperate expulsion of stolen energy that threw the android backward into the turbolift doors hard enough to dent the duranium frame. Lore's positronic brain stuttered. His limbs went rigid. His eyes flickered.
Tasha fired. Maximum stun, center mass. Worf fired. Riker fired. Three phaser beams converging on an android who was already compromised by Cole's blast, driving Lore's systems past the threshold of emergency shutdown.
Lore collapsed. His eyes dimmed. His smile—that wrong, calculated smile—froze on his face as his consciousness retreated into the emergency buffers of a positronic brain that hadn't been designed to handle this much abuse.
Silence on the bridge. The kind of silence that follows an explosion—not empty but pressurized, filled with the weight of what everyone had just witnessed.
Cole's hand was ruined. The palm was blackened—second-degree burns across the entire surface, blistering already, the skin cracked and weeping. The energy absorption had exceeded his capacity by a factor he couldn't calculate, and the projection had used pathways that weren't meant for that volume. His arm shook. His vision pulsed with dark spots.
His knees buckled. He caught himself on the tactical console—Tasha's console, the irony not lost on him even through the pain—and stayed upright through pure stubbornness.
"Wesley." His voice was a rasp. "You okay?"
Wesley sat on the deck, trembling, rubbing his throat where Lore's arm had been. "I'm—yeah. I'm okay. You—how did you—"
"Lieutenant Coleman." Picard's voice cut through the bridge's stunned silence. The captain stood at the command chair, his expression a masterwork of controlled incredulity. He looked at Cole's burned hand, at Lore's crumpled form, at the dented turbolift doors. "You and I will have a conversation about what I just witnessed."
"Yes, sir." Cole's hand throbbed. His vision dimmed further. The energy absorption had cost him more than calories this time—his neural pathways were screaming, his enhanced physiology struggling to process the overload.
Tasha was beside him. When had she moved? Her hand found his elbow, steadying him, her phaser holstered with the automatic efficiency of a woman who'd already classified the threat as neutralized.
"Sickbay," she said. Not a suggestion.
"Yeah." Cole let her take some of his weight. Not much—pride, or what was left of it—but enough to stay vertical. "Sickbay sounds good."
Behind them, Riker's security team was already securing Lore's body. Wesley was being checked by a medic. Worf stood guard over the deactivated android with the particular intensity of a Klingon who'd just discovered that his battlemate could throw lightning.
---
[USS Enterprise-D — Sickbay — Day 80, 1600 Hours]
Dr. Crusher ran the dermal regenerator over Cole's palm for the third time, her expression caught between medical fascination and professional concern.
"The tissue damage is consistent with a type-2 phaser discharge at point-blank range." She adjusted the regenerator's settings. "Except the burn pattern is inverted—it goes inward, not outward. As if the energy entered through your palm rather than striking it."
"That's... approximately what happened."
"You absorbed a phaser blast." Crusher set the regenerator down. Her eyes—Beverly Crusher's eyes, the CMO who'd just watched her son nearly die and been rescued by the man sitting on her biobed—held a clinical intensity that reminded Cole of Tasha's interrogation stare. "Through your hand. Then you redirected it."
"First time trying that." Cole flexed his fingers. The regenerator had handled the worst of the burns, but the new skin was pink and tender, sensitive enough that the air circulation felt like sandpaper. "I don't recommend it."
"Your neural scans are elevated. Significantly." Crusher pulled up a display—brain activity patterns, hormone levels, cellular energy readings. "Whatever you did, it stressed your entire nervous system. You need rest. Minimum twelve hours before any... unusual activity."
"Understood."
"Cole." Crusher's voice softened. The doctor's mask cracked enough to show the mother underneath. "Thank you. For Wesley."
"He's a good kid. Brave."
"He's my son. And you saved his life." A pause. "Whatever questions the captain has—and he will have many—remember that you have friends aboard this ship."
The word landed in Cole's chest with a warmth that no replicated meal had ever produced. Friends. Not allies, not colleagues, not assets in his ongoing survival strategy. Friends. People who cared about him because he'd earned it through three months of quiet competence and one desperate act of open heroism.
The sickbay door opened. Data walked in.
His gait was slightly uneven—the positronic inhibitor's aftereffects still working through his systems—but his eyes were clear and his posture was unmistakably, reassuringly Data. No contractions. No predatory assessment. Just the open, curious, earnest gaze of the most trustworthy being Cole had ever known.
"I have been informed of the events on the bridge." Data stopped at the foot of the biobed. "Wesley is uninjured. Lore has been deactivated and will be disassembled for secure storage." A pause—the processing kind. "You saved Wesley's life by absorbing and redirecting Lore's phaser discharge."
"Yeah."
"I was unaware that your abilities had developed to include directed energy absorption." Data's head tilted. "This represents a significant advancement."
"It represents a significant bruise." Cole held up his hand. The new skin glistened. "I don't think I could do it again without better preparation."
"I will update my research notes accordingly." Another pause. Longer. "Cole. I must apologize. You warned me about Lore. I chose to prioritize familial hope over empirical caution. This was an error."
"It wasn't an error, Data. It was human."
"I am not human."
"No. You're better. And you wanted a brother. There's nothing wrong with wanting that."
Data processed. Four-point-two seconds. "Thank you. Your friendship continues to exceed my expectations."
Cole grinned despite the pain, despite the exhaustion, despite everything. "Prune juice later?"
"I will acquire some." Data turned to leave, then paused. "I should note that Lieutenant Yar has been standing outside sickbay for approximately seventeen minutes. She appears to be waiting for you."
"Of course she is."
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