VENDETTA: THE GIANT NOVEL

by Peter David

  “If you’ll keep this line open, I believe Mr. La Forge and Mr. Data were about to inform us of that.” He then nodded his head in the direction of his two officers.

  “There is a kitchen knife,” said Data, for benefit of Picard, who couldn’t see it, “protruding from one of the parts that is removed from Borg soldiers when they are disabled. We have theorized that this component—situated on the upper arm, just above the trapezius—was what kept the Borg soldiers in touch with their central mind. This particular component would send a steady relay message to the central mind, and the central mind would, in turn, relay a message back. It was a continuous loop, and when the component was removed . . . either from the Borg soldier, or by means of destruction of the origin point . . . the loop would be severed and the soldier would be destroyed.”

  “A very Alexandrian solution to a Gordian problem,” commented Picard.

  “This technology, as advanced as it is, apparently didn’t take into account something as primitive as a kitchen knife,” Geordi now continued. “It’s a total fluke. One-in-a-million shot. I think what happened is that the knife jammed into the circuits, scrambled them, and created a continuous feed loop right within the Borg soldier himself. Bascially, he sends out a steady message for instructions and then answers himself. But he can’t give himself instructions, so essentially he’s a blank slate. He’s sitting and waiting for some sort of acknowledgment that just isn’t coming, because he’s the beginning and the end of his own little world.”

  “He has no idea that their ship was destroyed,” said Riker.

  “Not a clue. He’s a circuit to nowhere,” Geordi told him.

  “And if we remove the knife? Or the component?”

  Geordi waved his hands like a magician’s. “Then pfoof. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  “Amen,” said Riker.

  “I want him brought up here,” said Picard.

  “I would not advise that, sir,” Worf said sternly. “If he self-destructs, he could pose a threat to whoever is near.”

  “No, he won’t,” said Picard sharply. Perhaps a little too sharply, because he sounded slightly calmer as he continued, “We know what happens when they destroy themselves. They’ve done it in our presence any number of times. The Borg waste nothing, including the energy for some pyrotechnically impressive explosion. I want him up here and, if possible, salvaged.”

  “Yes sir,” said Riker. “We’ll be right up. Riker out.” Geordi was staring at the Borg’s face. It was one of the oddest things he had ever seen. Alive, yet dead. He started to reach out to touch the warrior’s face, and Worf immediately grabbed Geordi’s wrist. La Forge looked up in surprise.

  “I would not advise it,” Worf said with a firmness that indicated this was far more than advice.

  Yet Geordi couldn’t help but look down. “I think the captain’s right. I think there might be something salvageable here. There’s something that . . . I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “I’m sure the captain will be relieved to know you agree with him, Mr. La Forge,” said Riker as he tapped his communicator. “Riker to transporter room. Seven to beam up.”

  “Another survivor?” came O’Brien’s voice. These days, no matter how difficult the situation, he sounded inordinately cheerful. Marriage was wearing well on him.

  Geordi stared thoughtfully at the Borg soldier. The soldier stared back up at him with unseeing eyes. And even if those eyes could see him, Geordi wouldn’t be able to tell. He could see thermal readings to the precise centigrade, but he couldn’t see a person’s expression.

  “Not another survivor,” said Geordi thoughtfully. “Another victim.”

  Picard sat on the bridge, staring at the savaged planet below them, and yet only part of his mind was on it. The rest was dwelling on Guinan’s mishap earlier. And the word she had supposedly been muttering in Riker’s arms. The word that she could not remember having said.

  Vendor.

  It made no sense. And yet, somehow, it nagged at him.

  He felt as if he should know it or understand it. He felt as if it should have some sort of significance to him.

  It tickled and probed at his subconscious. He leaned back in his chair for a moment, then stood. The bridge crew watched him, waiting patiently for some new order, but none was forthcoming.

  Vendor.

  That wasn’t it. He knew without knowing why that that wasn’t it. And he also knew, without knowing why, that the truth was buried somewhere in his mind. There was something he had long forgotten, something that he should be remembering but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. It nagged at him, poked and prodded him, frustrated and infuriated him.

  Vendor.

  Ven . . .

  “Damn,” he said in quiet frustration.

  Chapter Seven

  THE STARSHIP Repulse slowed to impulse when the sensors detected something entering the outskirts of the Kalish star system. The Repulse had simply been passing through, on their way to Howell 320 with a couple of Federation ambassadors aboard, hot to defuse a potential civil war on that strife-worn planet. The war was on the verge of breaking out because of a cure to a plague that was being withheld by the government, in hopes that the unfriendly factions would do them the service of dropping dead from it. The unfriendly factions were getting unfriendlier by the day, even the hour.

  Now, however, concerns over a civil war were quite secondary. Especially when Captain Ariel Taggert saw the readings that were coming through on the preliminary sensors.

  “I don’t assume,” she said grimly, “that we might have, say, a large spider crawling across the sensor dish somehow. Or perhaps something equally innocuous to explain this away,” she added, brushing her thick red hair out of her face.

  “Captain,” affirmed the ops officer, “I wish I could. This thing we’re picking up . . . it’s hundreds of miles long. And heading our way.”

  Just to make matters all the more irritating, Taggert’s communicator beeped. She touched it and said, not especially patiently, “Yes?”

  “We’ve stopped,” came the annoyed voice of a woman.

  Taggert sighed. “No, Doctor, we have not stopped. We’ve gone to impulse drive.”

  “That’s as good as stopping.”

  “Doctor, instead of wasting time chatting with me, I think it’d be in your best interest to get sickbay prepared. We may have a problem on our hands.”

  “Problem? A larger problem than helping those people on Howell 320?”

  “Yes, Doctor Pulaski, a considerably larger problem. Shall we say—to give you an idea—a problem a few thousand times larger than the ship you were serving on before you returned to us?”

  There was dead silence for a moment. “The Enterprise is over two thousand feet in length. Something thousands of times bigger . . . that’s monstrous.”

  “Very good, Doctor,” said Taggert. Damn. Pulaski was a superb doctor, and Taggert had been thrilled when she’d been reassigned to the Repulse, the ship she’d left to join the Enterprise crew. But blast, she could be difficult to deal with sometimes. “Now, you get ready to do your job, because if that thing is hostile, we’re going to have more casualties than you know what to do with.” She didn’t bother to add that chances were, the entire ship would be a casualty, if push came to shove.

  She didn’t have to say it, and Pulaski didn’t have to ask about it. Instead, she said simply, “I read you. Sickbay out.”

  Taggert turned back to face the screen, although her eyes had never fully strayed from it. “Sensors and viewscreen on maximum,” she said slowly. “Go to yellow alert.”

  The shields came up, and the Repulse proceeded cautiously forward.

  The Enterprise sickbay doors hissed open and Picard entered. He slowed enough to give quick, understanding, and sympathetic nods to those members of the Penzatti race that had been brought to the Enterprise for treatment. As Dr. Terman had mentioned, the Curie abilities were already overtaxed.

  He walked
past one Penzatti who reached up and grabbed his arm as he went by. “Are you the captain?” he asked urgently.

  Picard gently disengaged the strong grasp from his forearm. “I am Captain Picard, yes. If you’ll excuse me for a—”

  “I am called Dantar,” he said. Although he had been mended and was resting comfortably, the damage done to his body and to his spirit was clearly evident. “I am afraid that I did not conduct myself especially well when dealing with your men. They were exceptionally patient with me while I was in my . . . delirium. I appreciate that, and wanted to commend them.”

  “I will relay that to them,” said Picard, trying to hide his impatience. For all his skills, no one had ever accused him of having a superb bedside manner.

  “Are we still in orbit around Penzatti?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Good.” Dantar let his head fall back. “There’s nothing there for me, and yet I can’t bring myself to want to leave it just yet.” He looked back up at Picard. “My blasters. My twin Keldin blasters. Your man Worf removed them from my person as soon as I was brought onto the ship. Where are they?”

  “Doubtlessly, they’re in the armory. They’ll be there for safekeeping.”

  “They’ll be safest with me. We Penzatti value our weapons very highly,” said Dantar. “Those Keldin blasters were passed on through my family, father to son. They are extremely powerful. They could punch a hole through the side of your ship.”

  “Then they are definitely staying locked up,” said Picard firmly. “I’m sorry, Dantar, but that’s the way it will be. There will be no risk of puncturing of my ship.”

  “But Captain—”

  “Excuse me,” said Picard, and he turned and walked into a private examining room.

  There he saw a formidable sight.

  For a moment his heart leaped into his throat and took a choke hold there. It was the first time he’d been confronted by a Borg since his hideous encounter in which he’d been transformed into a mechanized puppet of his former self. He had dreaded this moment, but now that it was here, he realized that the worry had been larger than the actual encounter. Now, when he was finally facing the creature that haunted his dreams, and had caused him to wake up screaming three times in the past months, he saw no threat. He saw only an object to be pitied.

  At least, that’s what he kept telling himself.

  The Borg soldier was strapped to a vertical biobed, the one that, mere months ago, Locutus of Borg had been on. The biobed was lowered into place, and the soldier was staring straight ahead. Staring might not have even been the right word, for staring implied that some action was being taken. The Borg’s eyes simply happened to be pointing in that direction.

  Unlike the more limited medical tricorders, the biobed was capable of giving a full medical readout, even on the hard-to-scan Borg. Beverly Crusher was studying them carefully. Nearby were Geordi, Data, and Riker.

  The side of Data’s head was open, exposing a complex array of circuitry.

  “I don’t know if this neural link is going to work, Data,” Crusher was saying. “The microcircuitry integrated into the skin of this soldier is far more extensive than what we dealt with in the case of . . . Captain,” she said, seeing him for the first time.

  He said nothing, merely nodded his head slightly, and then slowly circled the unmoving Borg warrior. The others stood respectfully silent, aware of the thoughts running through the captain’s mind. Aware of the private horror that he was, to some degree, reliving.

  “So the interactive circuits are interacting with themselves, eh?” the captain said after a time.

  “Looks that way, sir,” said Geordi. “Data was hoping to get around it the way he did with you—by severing the link on a neural level.”

  “It won’t work,” repeated Crusher firmly. “This soldier is too far gone. At least with the captain, there was still some Jean-Luc Picard helping us, fighting to come back to us. There’s nothing here, though.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Geordi. He could not understand the feeling of curiosity that was overwhelming him every time he looked at the Borg soldier. Of course, he remembered what curiosity did to the proverbial cat, but he didn’t care. He was determined to figure out just what it was he found so fascinating about this individual. “I think it’s worth the risk.”

  “The risk,” said Crusher, “is that if we make a wrong move—if we don’t figure out a way to deal with this built-in self-destruct mechanism—we’re going to wind up with one dead Borg.”

  “There’s someone trapped in there, Doctor,” said Picard fervently. “I concur with Mr. La Forge. We cannot stand idly by while some poor devil is being held prisoner to microcircuitry and implanted hardware.” He stared straight into the glassy, unblinking eyes. “There is a man in there who is screaming to get out.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” said Crusher, her arms folded.

  Picard’s eyes narrowed as he said, “It’s most unusual, Doctor, for you to be poorly stocked in the compassion department.”

  “It has nothing to do with being stocked,” she said. “There’s no man in there screaming to get out.”

  “You cannot say that for certain,” Picard told her.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “How?”

  “Because,” said Crusher, pointing at the Borg soldier, “that’s a woman.”

  Captain Ariel Taggert, with her keen eyesight and unparalleled abilities of concentration, saw it first. She pointed and said, “Thar she blows. Magnification six, ops.”

  The screen shimmered briefly and then reformed.

  The entity was now on their screen. It was huge. And it was hungry.

  And it was eating.

  There was a dead silence on the bridge, and the man at conn said finally, “Holy shit.” Then, suddenly aware that his captain did not approve of such language, especially on the bridge, he added quickly, “Sorry, Captain.”

  But Taggert just shook her head slowly. “No, it’s okay, Mr. Seth. Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to describe it.” She leaned forward, trying not to remind herself that its immensity was frightening, considering the distance they still were from it. Part of her—the intelligent part, no doubt—dearly would have loved to increase that distance a hundredfold. “What in the blazes is it doing? It’s . . .”

  “Carving up that planet,” said Seth slowly. “And . . . and eating it. And it looks like it’s got a big appetite.”

  “Is it . . . is it the Borg?” asked the tactical officer. Taggert studied them for a moment.

  “This thing,” she said, finally, “makes the Borg look like tribbles.”

  “A woman?” said Geordi in confusion. “But there are no Borg women! At least, no one’s ever seen one.”

  “When we first encountered the Borg, we found where they were . . . grown,” said Data. “Their nursery, so to speak, where Borgs are grown and affixed, almost immediately, with machine parts. There were no females.”

  “Are you sure there’s no mistake, Doctor?” asked Picard.

  “No mistake,” said Crusher firmly. “They may have made hash of her DNA structure, but I can still see two x chromosomes with the best of them. I’m telling you, this Borg is female.”

  “The point is,” said Picard, “what do we do about it?”

  “I believe,” said Data, “that I can restructure her neural motorways in a way that will reduce her interactive circuit to a simple, single pulse, generated on a steady basis. As it is, she keeps awaiting instructions that will not be forthcoming. It renders her immobile. By creating a continuous loop within her interactive circuitry, I would be providing her with the illusion that she is receiving a response from the Borg central mind. Her questioning pulse will, in essence, be rerouted and made into an answering pulse, retranslated into another question, another answer, and so on. It will maintain the status quo.”

  “You mean she’ll be talking to herself,” said Crusher.

  Data nodded. “For all
intents and purposes, yes.”

  “What will she be saying?”

  “Initially, nothing,” said Data. “She will not be receiving any instructions. She will simply be receiving an acknowledgment that the Borg mind, from which she was severed, is still in existence.”

  “Can you give her instructions, Data?” asked Geordi. “Can you restore her and make her into a person again?”

  Data shook his head. “The most that I will be able to do, Geordi, is to institute the most rudimentary of commands. She would be able to walk. She would be able to see her surroundings, although I doubt she could understand. Every other function of a Borg is guided by their ship. She is, in human terms, highly retarded.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Geordi. “We don’t know anything about the person sitting in front of us. There may be a mind in there shouting, ‘Help me. Help me out of this living prison.’ ”

  “I don’t sense any such thoughts,” Troi offered, “but we have no idea of the extent of Borg reprogramming. It could be buried so deep that not even I can touch it.”

  “It sounds to me like it’s a tremendous waste of time,” said Riker. “With the amount of work we have cut out for us, I don’t know if we should be wasting time and valuable manpower on an attempt that is, in all probability, going to be fruitless.”

  Troi looked at Riker with mild surprise. There was an unexpected sharpness in his tone, bordering on anger. There was more to his response than just simple concerns about distribution of manpower.

  Picard considered everything that had been said and then turned to Data. “Do you think you can make the connection with this individual?”

  “It is possible, sir. Yes.”

  “Then she deserves the chance to live again. Make it so.” And then, unwilling to actually see matters proceeding any further, he walked out of the ready room, followed by Riker.

  They stepped into the turbolift and Picard said, “Bridge.” As the lift began to move, he said, without looking at Riker, “You sounded somewhat aggressive in there, Number One.”