Over on one of the sickbay beds, Carson performed a more detailed analysis of her patient. Casari was back from the outer darkness, under the influence of a mild tranquilizer. Massey, meanwhile, strode into sickbay with Thayer at her side, both of them nearly out of breath. They walked straight over to Reed, and the three of them retreated into the lab.
“We searched the hellhole from top to bottom,” Massey spoke in a subdued but urgent voice. “Harlow is gone.”
“People just don’t disappear,” Reed insisted. “He has to be somewhere.”
“All we found was his combadge and his phaser,” Thayer said. “Whatever hit him did it hard and fast. There was blood all over that substation.”
“Maybe it was just like Casari said,” Massey intoned. “If just one of those slags managed to get loose—”
“There are no live Borg on this ship,” Reed interjected, trying to make herself believe it. “Not after all this time.”
“If it isn’t the Borg,” Thayer asked, “then who the hell is it?”
The hiss of sliding doors pierced the loaded silence between them. Reed turned just in time to see Nick Locarno rushing in. “I heard it over the comms,” he said, shouldering the others aside and moving in on Reed. “Have you located Harlow yet?”
Reed flinched away from him.
“Where have you been, Nick?”
Locarno froze. Massey and Thayer flanked him closely, keeping their hands at their sides but menacing him just the same. Locarno shot glances at both of them, then looked to Reed for help—but she offered none.
“Firewalling the core,” he explained, turning icy. “The damn thing is like a hostile entity trying to escape into the wider system. You can’t just leave it there without taking precautions.”
Massey wasn’t convinced. “And we just have to take your word for that, right?”
Locarno deliberately ignored her, directing his words solely at Reed. “I got here as soon as I could, Jenna. Don’t waste the time we have left giving in to this kind of crazy.”
Reed felt the weight of their anticipation as she considered it. Whatever wisdom Evan Walsh might have imparted had abandoned her, leaving Reed with only her gut to make a decision—and right now, fear steered that course more than anything. Without Locarno, they were all dead—it was just that simple. She needed to believe him, for all of their sakes.
Slowly, she relented. Massey shook her head in disgust, while Thayer stood by and didn’t know what to think.
“Outside,” Reed ordered, and led them back into sickbay.
Carson propped Casari up in his bed, and the two of them observed their returning shipmates with open apprehension. There were six of them now—their ranks already dwindling only a few hours after the loss of Celtic, and Reed still couldn’t tell them why. More than anything, she wanted to settle that question, but with the resources she had, all she could do was fight a defensive battle.
“This is how it works,” she announced. “Nobody goes anywhere alone. We restrict our movements to those direct paths between the bridge, the core, and main engineering. All other sections are strictly off limits. Does everybody understand?”
No one argued.
“Jimmy,” she said to the engineer’s mate. “I want our travel corridors sealed off and life support terminated everywhere else. Can you do that?”
Casari lowered his head and nodded. “Aye, Skipper.”
“What about Chief Harlow?” Carson asked gravely. “He could still be out there, alive somewhere.”
“She’s right,” Thayer agreed, to a rising din of affirmation. “Massey and me, we didn’t have time to spread out and check the surrounding decks. We could do paired sweeps, using sensors—”
“We can’t help him,” Reed said, cutting him off in the harshest possible way. Her outburst silenced everyone, drawing shocked stares from all around—exactly as she intended. “Whatever got Harlow did it before he could get off a single shot. We start tearing this ship apart, not even sure what we’re up against, the same thing is going to happen to us.” She allowed that thought to sink in for a long, tense moment. “I will not take that risk—and neither would the chief.”
Her words dampened their bravado, until only embers remained. All except for Massey, who sneered in contempt.
Reed scowled at her. “You got something to add, mister?”
“Just wondering about the slags,” Massey said. “Sure, you can bottle us up nice and tight, but that still leaves plenty of them inside our perimeter. You plan to do something about that? Or are you just hoping that Casari was wrong about what he saw?”
The question hung out there, like bait on a string—and Reed had no choice but to take it. That one or more Borg had somehow survived, and were now on the hunt for human flesh, had assumed the status of conventional truth. There was no fighting it.
“The hangar deck,” Reed decided. “We’ll take them there.”
The image was a grainy black and white, minimalist and surreal, the feed piped in from security cameras in Reston’s shuttlebay. Reed sat at the bridge engineering console and watched on a small monitor, while Carson hovered behind her—both of them unsure of how to react to the scene that unfolded before them. Massey passed through the frame, her envirosuit trailing a ghostly light reflected from the harsh kliegs overhead, while Thayer bounded farther off, his movements slow and exaggerated in the reduced gravity. Casari had adjusted it to make their grim task more efficient—though from Reed’s vantage point, it only enhanced the abject horror of it all.
Dozens of corpses littered the expansive deck. Most of them were arranged in haphazard stacks near the hangar door, awaiting disposal like victims of some wildfire contagion: a tangled mass of arms and legs and buried faces, hurriedly dumped there after extraction from their regeneration chambers. These were the last of the drones to be removed from Reed’s newly established safe zone, a veritable parade of the dead. The exercise struck her as useless, an atrocity even; but it was the only way to keep the fragile peace with her crew, who by now believed the Borg capable of anything—including resurrection.
Thayer hoisted one more body over his shoulder, throwing it on the pile with the others. Its head twisted at an unnatural angle, pointing back at Reed through the monitor—a pleading simulacrum of life, begging to be spared this final indignity. Reed turned away.
“That’s it,” Thayer said, cold and detached over the speaker. “Stand by for evac.”
Massey motioned him over to the entry hatch, and the two of them passed out of view to the other side. Reed heard a loud clang as they closed it up, the indicator on her panel showing a positive seal. She absently drummed her fingers near the purge control, which flashed red as it awaited her command.
“We’re secure, bridge,” Massey said. “They’re all yours.”
Reed hit the button. The ship rumbled as the outer door opened, venting atmosphere to space, along with everything else on the hangar deck. The violent slipstream raised a flurry of debris, which careened through the incipient vacuum like particles in a random flux. In the midst of all that chaos, bodies collided with one another as if urged on by hurricane winds, ultimately to be claimed by the void. In a matter of seconds it was over—their presence erased, the deck so clear that they might as well have never been there.
Reed kept staring until the door closed again.
“All clear,” she said. “Return to the bridge immediately.”
With that, Reed killed the image on the monitor. She then slipped out of the chair and walked away, her back turned to Carson. For some reason, she didn’t want to be seen, as if her actions had been some sort of crime, instead of some ritual to assuage a superstitious crew. I guess it’s true, she pondered. When things go bad, people revert to the old ways.
“Where are you going?” Carson asked.
“The ready room,” Reed answered, the only place that came to mind. The way Carson looked at her, the way she sounded—scared masking as sympathetic—had begun to wea
r on her. Reed needed a few minutes away from it, away from everything. “Send everyone in when they get here.”
Carson hesitated, but didn’t argue. “Aye, sir.”
Reed barely registered the doors opening, and walked into the gloom on the other side without thinking. When they hissed shut behind her, she collapsed against the bulkhead and slid to the floor. Eyes pasted shut, she tried to stem the tears that forced their way to the surface, but she was simply too exhausted, too hopped up on stims to sort one emotion from the other. Reed didn’t know how long it lasted. She just knew that when it was over, she was sitting all alone in the dark, in direct violation of her own orders.
She steadied herself with a deep breath, then rose to her feet. Through a nearby window, the electrified glow of the Korso Spanse cast the ready room in virtual light, giving life to shadows and manipulating dimensions. She traced the contours of ordinary objects—a desk, a chair, a computer console—to reassure herself of their normality, but doubts clawed at her like minions from below. The harder she looked, the more she believed that—
something
—else was with her, just out of sight, hiding in the places where things lived on board this ship. That chill was enough to make her want to leave.
Reed had almost reached the door when a voice stopped her cold.
“You found us.”
The words were synthetic, processed and filtered to an approximation of human. Dread seized upon her in that instant—an insidious, parasitic toxin that seeped into her tissues and spun her mind into free fall. Up from those depths, some latent defensive mechanism slowly guided her hand to the phaser at her hip—though the weapon itself seemed useless.
Because what she sensed in the room wasn’t alive.
“You know us,” it continued. “Just as we know you.”
Reed kept her back turned, her body trembling. She didn’t want to turn. She didn’t want to know. And the scream that rippled through her bones refused to surface, breaking open her insides.
“Resistance . . . is . . .”
Reed’s mouth dried up as she completed the dread phrase: “Futile.”
“Unnecessary.”
She drew the phaser from its holster.
“Look at us.”
“TO HELL WITH YOU!” she roared, and spun around as she mashed the trigger. Lethal energy split the air with a molten shimmer, carving a jagged line across the rear bulkhead. Sparks exploded throughout the ready room, blinding an already reckless line of attack—until pain captured Reed’s wrist in a cruel vise, paralyzing her entire arm. Crushing pressure forced her fingers open, and with it the phaser tumbled out of her hand. In the grip of agony, falling to her knees, she watched as the weapon hit the deck and slid away.
Reed’s assailant loomed over her, pure strength and singularity.
“Do you not see?”
Eyes cast down, she refused. On the other side of the door, a drumbeat of pounding joined a chorus of voices: her crew, pleading for her to open.
“You are us.”
Reed clawed after the phaser, only to be jerked back.
“We are you.”
She sobbed, an incoherent stream of consciousness. Fists against the door gave way to a loud crash, a battering ram trying to break it down.
“Look at us, Jenna.”
Those last words dissolved into the echoes of delusion. Slowly, the hand that held Reed pulled her up off the floor—toward the truth she already knew, because it had called her by name. Face-to-face, she no longer had the will to resist. This was the natural order. This was destiny.
“We are Borg,” Tristan Harlow said.
Only half of him was there. The rest was a jumble of prosthetics and body armor, grafted to an exposed skeleton of metal and bone and bound by strands of twitching muscle—as if he had only been partially assimilated. Harlow cocked his head to one side, examining Reed with his left eye—a black, lifeless orb that was no less a horror than the empty socket on the right. A tangled bundle of fiber protruded from that lidless hole, aglow with tiny bursts of laser light that splattered like blood against his skin. He was a monster, all the more terrifying in this incomplete state.
Reed stifled a scream. She kicked at Harlow, but he didn’t buckle. She punched him in the face, but his flesh only peeled away beneath her knuckles. Reacting to her hostility, he grabbed Reed by the throat and squeezed. She convulsed wildly, clutching at Harlow’s hands and trying to free herself, but he held fast. In the graying tunnel of her vision, she saw him eject a nanoprobe from one of the compartments in his armor. The thing snaked its way toward her as if it had a mind of its own, greedily seeking a point of entry.
“Tristan—” she gasped. “Please—don’t . . .”
He hesitated, a human spark deep within the inhuman well of his eye.
“It is already done.”
Harlow plunged the probe into Reed’s neck. The scolex buried itself deep within her flesh, writhing tendrils penetrating the length of her veins—
—until the ship exploded around her, and all was heat and light.
The blast wave entered from behind, pushing a cloud of cinders and debris, as if someone had tossed in a flash grenade. Reed felt the probe withdraw just before the concussion hit—a wall of sheer force that should have mowed Harlow down, and her along with him. Somehow he stayed upright, though his grip on her slackened. Reed used that split second to break loose, turning herself around before Harlow clamped down and wrenched her back—but not before she saw the smoldering hole in the ready room door, the edges still aglow from spent energy plasma.
And Nick Locarno launching himself through it.
Harlow, processing the newer, greater threat, tossed Reed aside. Stars bloomed in her vision as she landed on top of the desk, knocking over a model starship and a heavy bronze statue, right before she careened into the rear bulkhead with a loud crash. Reed dragged herself away as everything around her moved in slow motion, blood seeping from the surgical hole in the side of her neck.
“Stand down!” Locarno shouted, leveling his phaser at the Borg’s chest. Harlow paid no heed, lumbering toward him on biomechanical legs, the whine of spinning gears marking each move. Massey, who appeared at Locarno’s side, also took aim with her weapon, while Thayer scrambled to get inside.
“You will understand,” Harlow said. “You will belong.”
“I mean it, Chief!”
“Assimilation is inevitable.”
“Max power,” Locarno told Massey. “Tight dispersal.”
Both of them fired.
A high-pitched scream split the air wide open, a twin salvo converging on Harlow. The hit should have vaporized him instantly—but instead, the beams dissolved on impact, absorbed by a force field that swathed his body. Locarno and Massey kept pouring it on, maintaining continuous fire until their phasers began to sputter, but Harlow never even slowed down. Step by step he closed in on them, forcing them into retreat.
Thayer, seeing the hopelessness of it, jumped into the no-man’s-land between.
“Go!” he yelled at them, and tackled Harlow.
The attack caught him by surprise, long enough for Thayer to knock him down and send both men reeling. Thayer tried to take the advantage, drawing his fist back to land a punch in the middle of Harlow’s face, but the Borg’s enhanced reflexes were just too fast, and he blocked Thayer’s move before he even got close. In a blur of motion, Harlow crushed Thayer’s fingers and spun his arm around his back, popping the bone loose from his shoulder with a sickening crack. Thayer shrieked in pain, his legs flailing as the Borg stood and hauled him off his feet. The nanoprobe, denied its feast with Reed, quickly angled itself toward Thayer, hovering in front of his terrified eyes for a moment—right before it drilled into the middle of his forehead.
“Thayer!” Massey screamed.
Thayer twitched, little more than a dead man’s rattle, his eyes rolling back beneath their lids.
Reed, driven by pure rage, grabbed the firs
t weapon she could find and threw herself at Harlow. She swung at him with the bronze statue before she even knew it was in her hand, cracking the Borg across the back of the head with as much strength as she could muster. A crimson mist burst from his bare scalp, wetting Reed’s lips and making her thirst for more, her mind disconnected from her actions as something bestial took over. She swung at Harlow again, this time hitting him over the top of his skull, so hard that his legs collapsed beneath him. The Borg dropped Thayer into a lifeless heap, his own limbs thrashing involuntarily as his nervous system shorted out. Reed, however, kept beating on him—bringing the statue down again and again and again, not caring what she hit, while sparks erupted from the joints between his armor plates.
Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins Page 43
