DESPITE ITS INGENUITY and cunning, Data felt no sense of pride in the plan he had concocted.

The android officer vaguely recalled what pride had felt like, but when he tried to taste the emotion again from memory, its flavor eluded him. Cold equations, the records of the positronic pulses all were there, but they didn’t add up to anything. Recollections of feelings both subtle and intense, from petty to sublime, resided in his neural storage matrix, software for a piece of hardware he no longer possessed.

He remembered thinking once—months ago, before Starfleet had demanded he give up his emotion chip—that to remember such feelings but not know what they felt like would be a tragedy, a loss worthy of terrible sorrow. Perhaps I should feel sad now, he ruminated. Except that I cannot. He acknowledged the irony of it, even though he could not appreciate its bitter humor.

He accepted the reasoning behind Starfleet’s ultimatum, despite his reluctance to submit to it. After more than three decades of living without emotions, their sudden addition to his consciousness had changed his entire way of thinking—of being.

For a fleeting moment, he had considered resigning his commission rather than submit to Starfleet’s order. But when forced to choose between keeping his long-sought emotions or continuing to serve beside his shipmates, he chose to surrender the gift his creator had labored to give to him.

He did not regret obeying the order; without the emotion chip, he was incapable of doing so.

However, he was eminently capable of completely dominating the poorly secured Tezwan artillery-control network. With only a fairly crude optronic patch into their communications system—and with a little help from his tricorder—he had accessed every major system in the Solasook Firebase. He dedicated an extra four-tenths of a second to a review of all the many variables that might impact the success of his plan, and he deemed the statistical probability of its success to be highly favorable.

He keyed his com. “Data to Bravo Team. Are you all ready?”

“Aye, sir,” Parminder said. Her voice was almost drowned out by the howling of the arctic storm winds.

“All set on the west slope,” Obrecht answered.

“Ready,” Heaton said.

“Stand by,” Data said, setting his scheme into motion.

Bypassing several security lockouts, he logged in to the antimatter-reactor control system. With a few quietly executed overrides, he altered the status readouts for several critical systems, all of which were, in fact, functioning within normal parameters. When he had pushed the meters’ displayed states far enough away from optimal, he triggered the core-breach alarm.

Data tapped into the base’s internal security network and observed the effects of his interference. The Tezwan core engineers hesitated, then stumbled over one another in a mad scramble to secure the reactor chamber and evacuate to a safer level. In response, the android hounded them with one phony failure alarm after another; cooling-system overloads, ventilator shutdowns, and radiation-shield malfunctions met them at every turn. After two minutes of unbridled chaos, one of the harried engineers did what any one of them should have done following the first core-breach alert: He sounded the evacuation alarm.

Beneath its protective shield of snow and ice, the main portal into the firebase opened. Even from nearly one hundred meters away, and despite the fury of the blizzard, Data heard the Tezwans’ weapons blasting through the frozen barrier in their haste to escape what they believed had become a time bomb.

“They’re coming out,” Parminder said.

“Internal sensors show forty-nine personnel,” Data said. “Wait until everyone has evacuated.”

“Acknowledged,” Parminder said.

Data tracked the evacuees’ progress with the base’s internal security network. Individuals who seemed slow or reluctant to comply with the evacuation order inevitably found themselves shepherded out of the complex by a cascading series of key-system malfunctions. Whenever they turned in any direction other than the one that led out of the base, a new critical-system failure threatened their lives.

Nine minutes later, Data confirmed that the last six Tezwan officers, most likely the base commander and his senior staff, were exiting the facility. “The last group is coming out now,” he said into his com. “What is their position?”

A few seconds later, Heaton answered. “They’re congregating in the area immediately surrounding the entrance,” she said.

“Ensign Parminder, are the Tezwans clear of your charge’s blast area?”

“Barely,” she whispered, most likely exercising caution to avoid being overheard by the nearby enemy troops.

“Detonate the charge.”

A few seconds later, Data saw the golden-orange flash of the explosion a moment before he heard the crack of the blast wave. The plume of fire rolled majestically up into the sky, leaving behind an expanding cloud of thick, black smoke.

“They’re retreating,” Parminder said, her voice pitched with growing excitement.

“Lieutenants Heaton and Obrecht, stand by with your tricorders. Wait until the Tezwans pass your target markers.”

“Here they come,” Obrecht said. “Clearing the markers in three…two…one…now!”

“Activate tricorders.”

The range of Data’s hearing was barely broad enough to detect the hypersonic frequency the tricorders were emitting. Before he could verify with his own tricorder that their sonic pulses were properly collimated, a deep, rumbling thunder of collapsing snow and ice confirmed the two lieutenants had successfully sprung the trap he had instructed them to prepare.

“Report.”

“Controlled avalanche went off exactly as planned,” Heaton said. “The entrance is clear, and all Tezwan personnel are alive and uninjured—and stuck on the other side of the snowfall.”

“Well done,” Data said, disconnecting the optronic cables that linked his positronic brain, the tricorder, and the base’s subspace signal buffer. “We have approximately thirty-four minutes before the Klingon fleet arrives. Regroup at the entrance in ninety seconds.”

Pushing ahead through the clinging snow and driving wind, Data knew that capturing the firebase without a single shot being fired or anyone suffering an injury—on either side—was the optimally desirable outcome. His compatriots aboard the Enterprise would call it an achievement to be proud of…but he was no closer to remembering the sensation of pride in a job well done than he had been five minutes ago.

This did not seem unfair to him.

I am, after all, functionally immortal, he reasoned. I will have time for pride later.