by David Mack
The Deltan woman replied, “We don’t know yet, Captain. The last report from Lieutenant Kedair said that Captain Hernandez had to be disconnected from the vinculum for her own good.”
“Has the captain regained consciousness?”
“Yes, a few moments ago,” Kandel said.
“Then I want her patched back into the vinc—” A thunderclap and a jarring impact knocked the bridge into a confused jumble of bodies falling and tumbling in the dark.
Bowers shouted, “Shields! Tactical, report!”
Several more blasts shook the Aventine in rapid succession. “Taking fire from the Borg ship,” Kandel called back over the din of explosions.
“Return fire!” Dax said. “Target their weapons!”
“Firing,” Kandel said. On the main viewer, blue streams of phaser energy skewered the Borg scout’s hull, vaporizing its primary and secondary armaments. Dax hoped she wasn’t inflicting more friendly-fire casualties on her boarding teams.
The lights flickered back to full strength as Bowers said, “Helm, evasive pattern sigma. Give tactical a clear shot at the other side of the Borg ship.”
“Aye, sir,” replied Lieutenant Tharp. The Bolian guided the ship through a series of rolling maneuvers that dodged the Borg’s next barrage. Then a fresh wave of phaser and torpedo hits from the Aventine halted the Borg’s attack.
“Cease-fire,” Bowers ordered. “Gredenko, damage report.”
The ops officer’s hands moved lightly and quickly over her console as she compiled data flooding in from several decks and departments. “Weapons grid overload,” she said. “Shields offline. Direct hit to the main deflector—minor damage, but we’ve lost the ability to generate a dampening field.”
“I’ll bet that was the Borg’s intention,” Dax said.
Gredenko added, “There’s more, Captain. We’ve also lost our long-range comms. Complete system failure.”
“Sam, start beaming our people back,” Dax said. “I want them off that ship, on the double. Then I want it fragged.”
“Aye, Captain,” said Bowers, relaying the order to Kandel with an urgent nod.
A moment later, Kandel looked up from the tactical station and said, “Scattering fields are going up in the core of the Borg ship—and the boarding parties report they’re under attack!”
Bowers snapped, “By whom?”
Kandel’s reply confirmed Dax’s fear: “By the ship, sir.”
* * *
The walls were alive, and the floors couldn’t be trusted. Hungry maws filled with shining cables writhing in viscous black fluids had started to appear in the middle of bulkheads and corridors, as if invisible knives were slashing wounds into the ship’s metal flesh and revealing its biomechanoid innards.
Helkara looked around the transforming vinculum tower in shock. Over the deafening screeches of wrenching metal, he shouted, “What the hell is going on?”
“The ship’s adapting,” Kedair said, looking around in terror at the collapsing catwalks and wildly undulating wires that whipped like angry serpents in the space around the ship’s hollow core. “That means it’s about to start either killing us or assimilating us. Either way, I’d rather not stick around to find out.” A booming groan from the ship seemed to answer her.
Leishman and a Mizarian paramedic named Ravosus strained to lift Erika Hernandez to her feet. “C’mon, Captain,” Leishman said, grimacing under the effort of lifting the semiconscious woman. “We have to get you out of here.”
As they carried her toward the exit, Hernandez’s eyes snapped open, and her hand lashed out and snared Kedair’s sleeve. “The Queen,” she said. “She’s here. On this ship.”
Kedair tapped her combadge, intending to order the rest of the boarding teams to evacuate the Borg ship. Her metallic insignia returned a dysfunctional-sounding chirp that signaled an error. “Must be a scrambling field,” she said, thinking out loud. She pried Hernandez’s fingers off her arm, then pointed across the narrow causeway that had been extended to link the vinculum tower to the interior structure of the Borg vessel. “You three, get Hernandez to a beam-out point. Go!”
Helkara blocked the exit and protested, “What about you?”
“I have to set the detonator on the transphasic mine,” she said. Then she added a lie: “I’ll be right behind you. Go!” A hard slap on the Zakdorn’s back impelled him into motion. Leishman and the medic hurried along behind him, supporting the dazed but now weakly ambulatory Hernandez between them.
One minute for them to cross the bridge, Kedair calculated, two minutes to the nearest enhanced transport site. Add a minute for insurance. She turned back and faced the dark heart at the center of the Borg vessel. The inside of the vinculum tower was now a horror show of biomechanical viscera spreading like a cancer, metastasizing into every open space. To reach the transphasic mine and set its detonator, she would have to fight her way through that snaking mass of lethal, merciless pseudo-flesh and hold her ground for at least four minutes.
There was no point sending anyone else to do it; she was the only one likely to have a chance of success … and she decided that she’d gotten enough of her people killed for one day.
From a sheath on the back of one of her slain comrades, she drew a sword with a monomolecular edge. Alone and resolved, she gazed into the yawning cavity of steel teeth, slithering sinew, and oily black death. It taunted her with evil whispers, as if daring her to rush in where all others feared to tread.
She lifted her blade and charged.
* * *
Every turn seemed to lead to a dead end. Dark chords of panic rang out from all directions, echoing and vanishing into the shadowy recesses. The inside of the Borg probe was a maze of snaking conduits and sliding walls. Great slabs of machinery moved of their own volition behind the façades, traveling with deep rumbles and ear-splitting screeches.
Erika Hernandez had recovered most of her strength and was sprinting behind Leishman and Helkara, with Ravosus close behind her. She wished they could run faster. In theory, Helkara was leading them out of the industrial-style labyrinth, back to one of many secured platforms where a quartet of transporter-pattern enhancers had been set up to facilitate a rapid evacuation of the ship. In practice, he was steering them down passages to nowhere.
They rounded a corner, and Helkara slammed into a solid wall of layered metal plating and overlapping conduits. Leishman ran into him, and Ravosus collided with Hernandez and then awkwardly backed away, into the corridor from which they’d come.
Helkara stumbled backward and squinted in pained confusion at the barrier. “What the …?” Staring in dismay at his tricorder screen, he said, “There should be a passage here.”
“We were warned about this,” Leishman said, pulling Helkara back the way they’d come, past Hernandez, around the corner. “The ship’s reshaping itself, corralling us.” As soon as she had turned the corner, she stopped, looked around, and asked with obvious alarm, “Where’s Ravosus?”
Hernandez opened her catom senses to the energies that dwelled inside the Borg vessel’s vast machinery, all of it guided by a sophisticated inorganic intelligence. She saw the patterns in its alterations of form, and she felt it focusing itself to strike. Behind all of it, she heard the voice of the Queen.
“He’s gone,” Hernandez said. “Follow me.”
She led her two remaining comrades down a narrow pass between two bulkheads. It was barely wide enough for Leishman to pass; her shoulders scraped the sides, and Helkara had to shuffle-step at an angle to follow. Several meters away, at the end of the sliver-thin passage, the sickly green glow of the ship’s energy-transfer systems lit the way.
Leishman called out in alarm, “I’m snagged on something!”
Hernandez stopped and looked back. Black tendrils squirmed up through holes in the waffle-grid deck plates and snaked around Leishman’s ankles and up her legs. Hurrying back to the trapped engineer, Hernandez saw Helkara reaching for his phaser. “Stop,” she said, ho
lding out one hand. “You could hit Mikaela!”
Helkara stared past her, and his jaw went slack as a shadow fell over him. “I think we have bigger problems,” he said.
Her catom senses had already told her what was happening, but she needed to see it for herself.
She looked over her shoulder.
The path ahead went black. The passage was closing on them.
Resistance is futile, hissed the Queen, invading the sanctum of Hernandez’s thoughts.
We’ll see about that, Hernandez projected in reply.
“Take my hand, Mikaela!” she shouted. “Gruhn—you, too!”
The two officers reached out for Hernandez’s outstretched hands. She grasped their wrists.
The walls pressed inward and reached for the trio with eager tentacles. The deck fell away beneath them.
And another took its place.
She had found the royal frequency and made it her own.
For every trap the Borg Queen triggered, Hernandez improvised a defense. Rebuilding the lost deck behind her, she pulled Leishman and Helkara with her as she fought for each step. Prehensile twists of tubing as thick as her arms wrapped around her throat, Leishman’s waist, Helkara’s legs. Hernandez answered each attack with a focused mental image of its opposite. The physical reality of the Borg ship, for aeons the solitary domain of the Borg Queen, now bowed to her imagination. Tentacles withdrew or broke apart. Vanished decks rebuilt themselves. The lethal pressure of closing bulkheads became the freedom of open space. Then her back struck the final barrier, and at her command, it turned to coal-black dust.
The trio collapsed onto the secured platform, which had been partitioned from the rest of the Borg ship by directional dampening field projectors. Arranged in a large square formation were four transport-pattern enhancers, all blinking in their ready standby mode.
Hernandez dropped Leishman and Helkara into the middle of the enhancers, tapped the combadge on Helkara’s chest, and said, “Boarding party to Aventine. Two for emergency beam-out!”
“Acknowledged,” said a voice made small by being filtered through the combadge. “Stand by for transport.”
Leishman and Helkara were still staggering weakly to their feet as Hernandez bounded away, clear of the pattern enhancers, and landed with preternatural grace atop a centimeters-thin railing. Perched on it, she felt the same rush of power that she’d had in Axion. Having attuned the catoms in her body to the Borg’s unique wavelength, she had usurped their strength.
The images in Hernandez’s mind were absolutely clear.
She saw Kedair being smothered inside the vinculum tower, her life fading, her mission to trigger the transphasic mine on the verge of failure. There was no direct route to the transport-shielded tower, no way for anyone to come to Kedair’s aid … no one except Hernandez.
She coiled and tensed to leap off the railing into the moving parts of the Borg ship, already visualizing herself negotiating its lethal gears with impunity.
The whine of a transporter beam began to fill the air.
“Where are you going?” Leishman asked over the eerie wails and mechanical clankings of the ship’s infernal works.
Hernandez looked over her shoulder. “To save Kedair.”
Helkara and Leishman became pillars of swirling particles as the transporter beam took hold, and Hernandez leaped off the railing and fell willingly into the belly of the beast.
* * *
Lonnoc Kedair knew that she was close to the detonator controls for the transphasic mine, but she couldn’t see it. Entombed in the squirming black tangle that surrounded the Borg vinculum, all she saw was darkness, as if she’d drowned in tar.
There was no air to breathe, nowhere to move, no way to get any leverage for a counterattack. Her feet had been pulled from under her, and stinger-tipped tentacles began impaling her from the front and from behind.
Horrendous grinding sensations filled her torso as the Borg ship’s mechanical limbs pierced her body in several places at once. Almost as quickly as the wounds were inflicted, her body fought to heal them, but it was a losing battle. Several centimeters thick, the tentacles battered her with blunt force, snapping her bones, rending her skin, and pummeling her last hoarded breaths from her lungs.
She cried out in agony and felt her scream buried in the smothering, oily lubricant of the Borg machine. The foul liquid seeped into her nostrils and poured into her mouth. Reflex and instinct told her to spit it out, but she had no more breath left to push with.
Needling jabs pricked her skin with sharp, icy twinges. Assimilation nanoprobes, she realized. For a moment, she regretted the aggressive combination of antiassimilation implants and injections she and the other boarders had received. Although the Borg’s nanoprobes had faced and overcome some of these prophylactic measures in the past, they had never encountered this precise amalgam of genetic and neurological blockades. Lucky me, Kedair realized. Since I can’t be assimilated, I get to spend more time being chewed up. Great.
Tentacles at either end of her torso pulled in opposite directions, and she realized only then that it meant to rip her in half. Then the shearing tension began, and excruciating pain expelled everything from her mind except agony.
No amount of rapid-healing possessed by any Takaran could keep pace with what was being done to her; the Borg ship was breaking down her resilient body by degrees. Kedair’s mouth contorted as the pressure intensified, and the dark, metallic-smelling fluid found its way inside her ears. Then, fully submerged inside the horror, she heard it.
Beneath the frantic pounding of her pulse, a malevolent whisper lurked in the suffocating fluid of this dark womb. Its message penetrated her thoughts, and she knew that it couldn’t be debated or bargained with. Strength is irrelevant, it told her. You are small, and we are endless. You are one, and we are legion. You will become as we are. You will become part of us.
Kedair was ready to surrender to the darkness.
Then there was light.
The vile tentacles pulled out of her flesh and retreated into the walls. The crushing press of machines and needles and saws fell away, and some of the contraptions that turned humanoids into drones fell to pieces and scattered across the deck. Kedair’s body fell free, and she landed in a twisted, mutilated heap on the floor. Through the cloudy stains in her vision, she saw that her left arm was partially severed and dangled by a tendon just below the elbow. Everything had a flat, distorted quality, and when she tried to blink away the slime, she realized she had only one working eye. The other had been gouged out to make way for some monstrous implant.
She heard footsteps approaching.
Turning her head, she saw Erika Hernandez striding back into the vinculum tower, heading directly toward her. The woman’s uniform had become stained and tattered, but Hernandez herself looked none the worse for whatever she’d endured. She asked Kedair, “Can you walk?”
Kedair sputtered through a mouthful of filth, “Both my legs are broken.” She jerked her head toward the transphasic mine, which had been securely affixed to the Borg ship’s central plexus—essentially, its nerve center. “Set the detonator. We—” She paused to hack up a mouthful of viscous black oil and spat several times to clear her mouth. “We have to frag this ship.”
Hernandez walked toward the mine. “Tell me what to do.”
“It’s already armed,” Kedair said, wincing as her back and chest muscles began pulling shattered bones back into place before mending them. “Enter a delay in seconds using the touchpad, then press ‘Enable’ to start the countdown.”
Standing at the detonator, Hernandez keyed in the data. She hurried back to Kedair. “It’s running,” she said, kneeling beside Kedair’s mangled body.
Kedair asked, “How long?”
“Seventy-five seconds,” Hernandez said.
“Are you crazy?” Kedair snapped. “That’s not—”
A three-clawed biomechanoid tentacle lunged at Hernandez from behind. Kedair meant to shout or
point or give a warning—then, without seeming to notice or care, Hernandez lifted a hand in a dismissive gesture, and the tentacle shredded into scrap metal. Hernandez straightened Kedair’s mauled limbs and prompted her, “You were saying?”
It took Kedair a second to recover her wits. “It’s not enough time to reach a transport site,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” Hernandez replied. She slid her hands under Kedair, who at first felt no contact—and then she realized that she was floating a few centimeters above the deck. She was in Hernandez’s arms and being lifted gently over the woman’s shoulder. “Hang on,” added Hernandez. “This part won’t be fun.”
Kedair’s full weight rested on Hernandez’s shoulder, and the youthful woman carried Kedair out of the vinculum tower at a brisk pace. The bobbing cadence of Hernandez’s stride and the pressure on Kedair’s abdomen made the Takaran cough up more of the bitter, toxic black fluid she’d inhaled while snared in the Borg ship’s grasp.
Between hacking coughs, she saw more serpentine appendages lash out at Hernandez, who deflected each attack with the slightest motions of her fingers, like a sorcerer cowing demons. Passages and exits closed themselves with piping and components that spread like black metallic ivy, but the hastily risen barriers retreated ahead of Hernandez, who parted them with broad waves of her hand.
They passed through the last portal and reached the platform outside the tower. The bridge back to the ship’s outer superstructure had been retracted. The space above them, which only minutes earlier had been empty, now was alive with moving metal and blue-black clouds of some primordial matter that flashed with static electricity.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Hernandez asked.
“No,” Kedair said.
“Good.”
She stretched one hand toward the distant top of the ship’s interior, and then they were aloft, rising away from the platform and accelerating toward the shadowy maelstrom overhead.
Kedair, still draped over Hernandez’s shoulder, watched the vinculum tower shrink beneath them. “How in the name of Yaltakh are you doing this?”
