by David Mack
“Transports complete,” Gredenko said.
“Helkara, activate the dampener field,” Dax said.
The Zakdorn science officer keyed in the command and replied, “Field is up and stable, Captain.”
She nodded. “Good work, everyone.”
Bowers watched Dax as she returned to her seat. Once she had settled, he said, “Now comes the hard part: the waiting.”
The single drawback to Dax’s plan lay in the dampening field that the Aventine was projecting toward the probe. By using the Hirogen’s tactics, her crew had neutralized the Borg ship’s weapons, shields, communications, and ability to repair itself. However, the field also prevented contact with the strike teams inside the vessel, and it made it impossible to beam them out or to send reinforcements. Unless and until the strike teams gained control of the ship and established visual contact with the Aventine, there would be nothing for Dax to do but sit and wait—and keep a volley of transphasic torpedoes armed and ready to fire, in case her captaincy’s defining moment turned out to be a historic blunder.
* * *
The shimmering haze of the transporter beam dissolved into the darkness of the Borg ship’s interior, and Lieutenant Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqabaa felt her antennae twitch with anticipation.
Heat and humidity washed over her. “Flares!” she ordered, bracing her rifle against her shoulder. “Arm dampeners!”
Ensign Rriarr moved half a step ahead of sh’Aqabaa and snapped off several quick shots from the flare launcher mounted beneath the barrel of his T-116 rifle. Pellets of compressed, oxygen-reactive illumination gel made glowing green streaks across the deck, bulkheads, and overhead of the Borg vessel’s frighteningly uniform black interior.
Clanging footsteps echoed around the strike team of Titan security personnel, and the ominous footfalls grew closer. Through tiny gaps in the ship’s interior machinery, sh’Aqabaa caught sight of drones advancing on their position at a quick step. Red beams from Borg ocular implants sliced through the dim and sultry haze. “Activate dampeners,” sh’Aqabaa said.
She and the rest of her strike team keyed the replicated dampeners attached to their uniform equipment belts. Senior Petty Officer Antillea switched on several more of the small spheres and lobbed them down the passageways and around corners. All around them, and everywhere one of the spheres rolled, the faint lighting inside the scout ship faltered and went black, along with any powered machinery or data relays.
The intimidating thunder of converging footsteps slowed. Looking out through the vast empty space in the middle of the probe’s hull, toward sections along its opposite side, sh’Aqabaa saw dozens more sites going dark. Then the entire probe shuddered, and darkness descended like a curtain drop.
“Seek and destroy,” sh’Aqabaa said, advancing toward the enemy, her finger poised in front of her rifle’s trigger.
Then the Borg drones quickened their pace. In the uneven light of the flare plasma, shadows both massive and misshapen crowded in her direction. As she turned the corner to her right, Antillea was at her left shoulder, while Rriarr and Hutchinson broke down the left corridor. In unison, they opened fire.
Muzzle flashes lit the passageway like strobes, and the explosive chatter of the rifles was deafening. High-velocity monotanium rounds tore through the oncoming wall of Borg drones, spraying blood across the ones advancing behind them.
Gunfire echoed from every deck of the ship.
Another rank of drones fell, holes blasted through their centers of mass, vital organs liquefied by brutal projectiles. And still the next waves never faltered, never hesitated. Not a glimmer of fear or hesitation crossed their pale, mottled faces, and sh’Aqabaa knew they would never retreat or surrender. This was a battle to the death.
Her rifle clicked empty. A push of her left thumb against a button ejected the empty magazine as her right hand plucked a fresh clip from her belt and slapped it into place.
In the fraction of a second it took her to reload, the drone in front of her charged, grabbed the barrel of her rifle with one hand, and forced it toward the overhead. His other hand shot forward, and sh’Aqabaa caught the glint of emerald light off a metallic blade. She twisted from the waist and pivoted, dodging a potentially fatal stab.
A staccato burst of gunfire flew past her and perforated the drone, who let go of her rifle as he collapsed backward.
Sh’Aqabaa nodded her appreciation to the Bolian officer who had fired the rescuing shot, then leveled her weapon and felled another rank of drones.
Lines of tracer rounds overlapped in the deep green twilight. Drowned in the buzzing clamor of the assault rifles were the distant alarums of struggle and flight from other sections of the ship. Can’t let ourselves get pinned down, sh’Aqabaa reminded herself. Have to keep moving.
She shouted over the buzz-roar of her rifle. “Second Squad! Advance, cover formation, double-quick time!”
Behind her, the second six-person team that had beamed in with hers hurried down a corridor perpendicular to the one in which she and the rest of First Squad were fighting. Within seconds, the rapid clatter of weapons fire reverberated from Second Squad’s new position.
Then came an agonized caterwauling from behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Rriarr had been impaled by a drone’s deactivated drill, which had penetrated the Caitian’s armored combat-operations uniform by sheer force.
A scaly hand shoved her to the right. “Move, sir!”
As she slammed against the bulkhead, sh’Aqabaa saw Antillea suffer a killing jab that had been meant for sh’Aqabaa herself. A drone plunged a stationary but still razor-sharp rotary saw blade attached to the end of his arm into the Gnalish’s throat. Antillea twitched and gurgled as blood sheeted from her rent carotid, but she still managed to squeeze off a final burst of weapons fire into the drone. Then the reptilian noncom and her killer fell dead at sh’Aqabaa’s feet.
The Bolian ensign tried to provide sh’Aqabaa with covering fire, but she could see that he was beginning to panic.
Feeling the battle rage of her Andorian ancestry, sh’Aqabaa screamed a war cry and resumed firing, eschewing safe center-of-mass shots for single-round head shots. Each sharp crack of her rifle sent another bullet through another optical implant, terminated another drone, dropped another black-suited killing machine to the deck missing half its head. Then her rifle clicked empty again. She ejected the exhausted clip and jabbed the butt of her rifle into the face of the drone charging at her, knocking him backward. Then she fired a round of flare gel into the face of the next-closest drone.
It bought her only half a second, but that was all she needed. She slammed a fresh magazine into her weapon and unloaded in three-round bursts on the remaining drones in front of her. When her third clip was empty, so was the corridor.
“Tane, collect Antillea’s belt,” sh’Aqabaa told the Bolian, who nodded, despite his face being frozen in an expression of shock. Without a word, he kneeled beside the slain Gnalish, removed her equipment belt, and strapped it diagonally across his chest as if it were a bandolier.
On the other side of the intersection, Lieutenant Hutchinson was doing the same for Rriarr. Her backup, a Zaldan enlisted man, stood sentry, checking up and down the various passageways for any sign of new attackers. The probe resounded with far-off gunfire.
Loading a fresh clip into her TR-116, sh’Aqabaa stepped beside Hutchinson. “Ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Hutchinson said. “Now what?”
“Reload, regroup, and go forward,” said sh’Aqabaa.
Hutchinson and the others fell into step behind sh’Aqabaa, who led them back up the main passage. Second Squad was several intersections ahead of them, apparently having made quick work of whatever they’d encountered along the way. “Check all corners,” sh’Aqabaa said to her team. “Take no chances.”
Around the first few corners, they found only dead drones. As they got closer to Second Squad, the area looked clear. The passage was open on their left to a wide, yawning space in the m
iddle of the probe. In its center, on an elevated structure, was the secure area where the cube’s vinculum was housed.
Ahead of sh’Aqabaa and First Squad, a spark flashed off the edge of the partial left wall. She and the others pressed against the bulkhead to their right and crouched for cover.
“Stray shot?” Hutchinson speculated.
“Maybe,” sh’Aqabaa said, peering into the shadows on the far side of the ship. “Be careful, and watch the flanks.” She stood and led her team forward to catch up with Second Squad.
A burning sledgehammer impact in sh’Aqabaa’s gut knocked her backward before she heard the crack of gunfire or saw the flash of tracer rounds slamming into her and her team.
Then she was on the deck, doubled over and struggling to hold her abdomen together. A sticky blue mess like the core of a smashed kolu fruit spilled between her fingers.
She heard heavy footfalls drawing closer, and she wondered if it was the Borg coming to finish them off.
I won’t be assimilated, she promised herself. She fumbled with one blood-slicked hand to pry a chemical grenade from her belt. She barely had the strength to pull it free.
Dark shapes hove into view above her.
Sinking into a dark and silent haze, she decided it didn’t matter anymore. It’s over, she thought. Her strength faded, and the grenade slipped from her grasp, along with consciousness.
* * *
The oppressive monotony of the Borg probe’s interior was one of the most disorienting environments Lonnoc Kedair had ever seen, and the near-total darkness enforced by the energy dampeners only made it more so. Every time her eyes began to adjust to the shadows, another blinding flash of rifle shots or another stream of tracers made her wince and turned the scene black again.
Marching footsteps echoed from a few sections ahead of her and her squad from the Aventine. Red targeting beams from Borg ocular implants crisscrossed erratically in the dark.
Kedair waved her squad to a halt with raised fist. At her back was T’Prel, and across from them were Englehorn and Darrow. With quick, silent hand gestures, Kedair directed Darrow and Englehorn to alternate fire with her and T’Prel. Then she looked back and signaled ch’Maras and Malaya to guard the rear flank.
She detached an energy dampener from her belt and primed it. Twenty-odd meters away, at the intersection, a platoon of Borg drones rounded the corner, spotted her and the rest of her team, and sprinted toward them, firing green pulses of charged plasma from wrist-mounted weapons.
Their flurry of bolts dissipated into sparks as it made contact with the outer edge of the squad’s dampening field. Then Kedair lobbed her spare dampener at the drones, aimed her rifle, and waited for the Borg’s roving ocular beams to go dark. They all went out at once, like snuffed candles.
With a tap of her finger against the trigger, a stutter-crack of semiautomatic fire dropped two drones to the deck.
T’Prel crouched beside Kedair and snapped off a fast series of single shots, and each one found its mark at a drone’s throat, just above the sternum.
The rear ranks of drones hurdled over their dead, in a frenzy to reach the intruders.
Whoever said this ship would have only fifty drones was either lying or out of their mind, Kedair decided as she fired the last few rounds in her clip. There was no break in the buzz of weapons fire while she and T’Prel reloaded; Englehorn and Darrow had started firing just in time to overlap them.
Two more drones down. Four. Six. They kept getting closer.
Darrow set her weapon to full auto and strobed the corridor with a steady stream of tracers. Then her clip ran dry.
Kedair and T’Prel snapped fresh clips into place. Able to count the rear rank of drones in a glance, the Takaran security chief switched over to full automatic and mowed down the final handful of Borg in the corridor. She released the trigger as the last drone fell in a bloody, shredded heap. The tang of blood and the acrid bite of sulfur hung heavily in the sweltering darkness.
“Like clockwork,” Kedair said to her team. “Nice work. Let’s keep moving. Malaya, ch’Maras, on point.”
The rear guard moved past Kedair and the others and advanced through the passage, occasionally peppering the overhead or the bulkheads with streaks of flare gel. As she followed them, Kedair retrieved her spare dampener from the deck, deactivated it, and put it back on her belt.
At the end of a long corridor, they arrived at a T-shaped intersection. The perpendicular passage was open on one side into the great empty space that surrounded the vinculum, which was housed in an hourglass-shaped structure at the probe’s center. Kedair stared out at the other sections of the ship. From the highest deck to the lowest, the interior of the probe was almost as dark as space, except where weapons fire flashed white, explosions blossomed in crimson, or flares bathed their surroundings in lime green. The constant, echoing rattles of rifle fire reminded Kedair of the sound of construction work.
Movement caught her eye from the opposite side of the ship. A group of black shapes moved in quick steps through the murky shadows, heading straight toward a Starfleet strike team that had its back turned to the ambush. Out of force of habit, Kedair reached toward her combadge before she remembered that the energy dampeners had cut off all communications. She considered shouting a warning to the other strike team, but then she thought better of advertising her squad’s position, and she doubted that her voice would carry all that distance with enough volume to pierce the din of the ongoing battle.
There’s more than one way to get someone’s attention, she realized, and she lifted her rifle, put her eye to the scope, and targeted a bulkhead support beam near the Starfleet team. Her single shot pinged off the metal beam, startling the other Starfleet team, whose sharpshooter immediately turned his weapon toward her. Kedair looked up from behind her scope and pointed emphatically in the direction of the coming ambush.
The sharpshooter and his fellows dropped into covered positions and took aim at the approaching pack of drones. From a distance, all Kedair saw was a blaze of tracers and the violent, twitching dance of the mortally wounded. Then the Starfleet squad’s commander was up and shouting, but Kedair couldn’t hear what the man was saying. The shooting came to an abrupt stop, and the squad fired some flare rounds down the passageway.
As soon as the corridor brightened, Kedair saw what she’d done. A bullet-riddled Starfleet strike team lay on the deck in a spreading pool of its own blood. Four of her brothers and sisters in arms had been shot down on her command.
Kedair wanted to scream as if she had been the one who was shot. Denial and guilt collided in her thoughts while she stared wide-eyed at the carnage she’d carelessly provoked.
“Sir,” T’Prel said, “we need to keep moving and clear this deck.” The Vulcan woman’s flat, uninflected manner of speaking conveyed no sympathy or pity for Kedair’s tragic mistake, and that suited Kedair perfectly.
“All right,” Kedair said. “Take point with Englehorn.”
T’Prel and the human man stepped away and continued the sweep through the Borg probe. Kedair turned her back on the bloody consequence of a moment’s error, already knowing she would bear its memory with shame until the day she died.
* * *
Enterprise security officers Randolph Giudice, Peter Davila, Kirsten Cruzen, and Bryan Regnis stood guard beside an opening that led to the probe’s center. Two of their shipmates—an acerbic Vulcan woman named T’Sona, and Jarata Beyn, a hulking Bajoran man whom Giudice had nicknamed “Moose”—used compressed-gas tools to sink self-sealing anchor bolts into a bulkhead opposite the gap.
Giudice winced at the series of sharp pneumatic hisses and reverberating thunks of metal piercing metal. “Hurry up,” he said, impatient to be on the move again.
He tried not to think about the fact that Dr. Crusher had told him he shouldn’t be moving around at all for a few more days; it had been less than ten hours since she and the rest of the Enterprise’s medical staff had spliced him, Davila, and
Regnis back together after their harrowing fight with the Hirogen boarding party.
Hiss-thunk. Hiss-thunk. “Anchors secure,” T’Sona said.
Jarata threaded four thin but resilient cables through the eyes of the anchor bolts, then affixed the cables to grapples cocked in the barrels of four handheld launchers. “Ready to go,” he said to Giudice.
“Nice work, Moose,” Giudice replied. He slung his TR-116 across his back and picked up one of the grapple guns. Davila, Regnis, and Cruzen did likewise. “Time to go to work,” he said, bracing the device against his shoulder. He shut one eye and peered with the other through the launcher’s targeting scope. “On count of three. One … two … three.”
Four grappling hooks soared away through the bulkhead gap, down toward the hourglass-shaped vinculum tower at the heart of the Borg ship. Each grappling hook penetrated the black tower’s chaotic twists of exterior machinery and stuck fast, directly above an entrance passage whose access walkway had been retracted into the tower’s foundation.
Working quickly, Giudice and his team took up the slack from the cables and secured them as tightly as they were able. “Moose, T’Sona, watch our backs. We’re going in.” He locked a handheld pulley over his cable and then attached himself to it with a safety line that was looped through a carabiner on his belt. In a few seconds, the other three humans had also hooked up their pulleys and safety loops to their zip lines.
“Now the fun part,” Giudice said. Gripping his pulley with both hands, he pulled himself up onto the ledge of the barrier that stood between him and the great emptiness on the other side. He waited until Davila, Cruzen, and Regnis were perched beside him atop the barrier. “Three … two … one.”
They tucked their knees toward their chests and let gravity do the rest. The incline was fairly shallow, less than fifteen degrees, but within seconds, they were hurtling through open air at an exhilarating speed. Deep aches and sharp pangs—aggravated by his sudden, extreme exertion—reminded Giudice of the impaling wound he’d suffered hours earlier.
He stole a glance at Davila and saw that the older man, who had been slashed across his chest, was also in considerable pain. I guess even Starfleet medicine has its limits, Giudice mused. Only Regnis had recovered fully from the Hirogen attack, despite having been garroted nearly to death. Giudice scowled. Some guys have all the luck.
