Locarno and Massey had to pull her off before she would stop.
Breathless and aching, Reed dropped the statue as the world around her snapped back into focus. By then Carson had descended on her, tending to the wound in Reed’s neck, while Casari stumbled in with a dazed expression pasted across his face.
“Don’t move,” Carson said.
Reed pushed her away, motioning toward Thayer.
“Take care of him,” she rasped.
The medic did as she was told, finding Thayer splayed out on the deck with his eyes wide open. Carson ran her tricorder over him, grimacing as the readings came back. “He’s alive,” she pronounced, then turned toward Reed. “But barely. Brain functions are minimal—so is respiration.”
“My God,” Casari droned, shaking his head when he saw what was left of Harlow. “The chief . . .”
Locarno cut him off. “Can you stabilize Thayer?”
Carson whipped out a hypospray and injected Thayer with it. “That should hold him until I get him to sickbay. I can’t do anything for him here.”
Locarno fixed Casari with a hard stare that told him panic wasn’t an option. “Get him down there,” he ordered, and kept the pressure on until Casari nodded. He picked Thayer up and draped the dead weight over his shoulder, following Carson as she led him out of the ready room. A moment later they were gone, leaving behind a deathly silence, punctuated by Harlow’s fading mechanical throes.
All eyes settled on him.
The Borg refused to die, his hands still probing, seeking, reaching out in every direction. Massey checked her phaser, squeezing out every last bit of power, then started off toward him to finish the job, but Reed took hold of the tactical officer’s sleeve, pulling her back.
“No,” Reed said. “Not yet.”
Locarno and Massey helped her up, and the three of them approached Harlow slowly. The Borg managed to raise his head, and regarded each of them with a strange blend of pleading and recognition. Reed peered back at him, sensing something of the old engineer.
“Tristan,” she said. “Are you still in there?”
The Borg twisted his lips into an approximation of a smile.
“He is part of the whole. We were once so many. Now there is only us.”
“You tried to kill us!” Massey spat, aiming her phaser at his head. “The same way you killed the chief !”
“Death is not our purpose. Only continued existence. Your time is growing short. You must understand before that time is at an end.”
“What do you mean?” Reed asked.
“We are aware of Starfleet directives. The knowledge of Harlow, Tristan J., is now part of our consciousness. Upon discovery, your lives and this matrix will be terminated. It is essential you act before then.”
Locarno exchanged an astonished glance with Reed, then looked back at Harlow.
“Act on what?”
“Your assimilation.”
The three of them stepped away as if struck. Reed touched her wound again, which had already begun to heal—and realized the truth of it before Harlow even spoke.
“It has already begun. You are kindred. We detected this upon your arrival.”
“That’s impossible,” Massey snarled. “You’re lying!”
“Lying is irrelevant. Denial is irrelevant.”
Reed took Massey’s phaser and took aim at Harlow herself.
“Prove it.”
The Borg smiled again, black fluid seeping between his teeth.
“Proof is irrelevant,” he said, cryptic and taunting. “But if it is your predilection to find it, then seek out the one among you who facilitated your assimilation.”
Carson burst into sickbay with Casari in tow, and headed straight toward the pathology lab. “Over there,” she ordered, directing him to a diagnostic bed near the back. Casari laid Thayer out as carefully as he could, then got out of the way so the medic could go to work. She immediately strapped Thayer down, checking the monitor above his head as vital signs poured across the screen. The readings were next to nonexistent, except for the encephalograph, which sparked to extremes far outside human range.
“What’s happening to him?” Casari asked.
“Whatever put him in a coma is stimulating the hell out of his brain,” Carson said, unable to contain her awe at the process—until she noticed Casari’s puzzled stare. Distracting him, she pointed over his shoulder toward a nearby tray. “Hand me those scissors. We need to get this envirosuit off right now.”
Casari did as he was told. Carson quickly sliced through the fabric of Thayer’s suit, shucking the whole thing like a layer of dead skin. She then opened a hidden drawer beneath the bed, which revealed a glittering collection of instruments—alien in design, with sinister contours that implied torture more than treatment. Casari’s eyes widened when he saw them, particularly the bundle of tubes that Carson affixed to various points across Thayer’s body. They bore a striking similarity to the nanoprobe that Harlow had wielded.
“What . . . are those?”
“I’m using everything in the arsenal,” Carson snapped, hoping that would end Casari’s questions. He backed off slightly, but still glared at her with open suspicion as she placed the last tube over the hole in Thayer’s forehead. “If you want to save his life, you won’t interfere.”
She then activated a nearby touch screen, which started a flow that inflated the tubes with a low hiss. Thayer reacted violently, his chest heaving up and down—spasms that rapidly spread through his extremities, sending him into a fit of convulsions. His arms and legs tore against their restraints, which split and frayed to the breaking point.
“Hold him down!” Carson shouted.
Terrified, Casari obeyed. He grabbed Thayer by the shoulders and pinned him, while Carson jabbed another hypospray into the rippling sinew of Thayer’s neck. He gradually tapered off into a disturbing calm—regular breaths and a rising body temperature, marked by a return of stable readings on the monitor.
Then came the metamorphosis, into something unspeakable.
Casari watched it spread across Thayer’s chest, like some kind of infection that turned his skin to ash. The color faded to bone white, as if every drop of blood had drained away, capillaries forced to the surface and spidering outward to form varicose paths. Thayer’s eyes, blue and void, hemorrhaged to black—portals into an empty soul, something much worse than death. Casari recoiled from the sight, suddenly aware of what this was.
Because the same thing had happened to the chief.
Assimilation.
He looked up at Carson, pleading with her to do something—but froze when he saw the phaser pointed at him.
“You know the drill,” she said. “Nice and easy.”
Casari pulled his own weapon, drawing it slowly and handing it over.
“You unbelievable bitch,” he seethed. “You did this to them.”
“Nothing personal,” she replied, circling around the bed with her phaser trained on him. Her posture, her demeanor—everything about Carson had changed. No longer the timid medic, she carried herself with the cold poise of a professional killer. “As a privateer, I’m sure you understand these things.”
“Sure,” he scoffed, while she motioned him toward the door. Casari wasn’t sure what she planned to do with him once they got there, but he wasn’t going to wait long enough to find out. As he turned away from Thayer, he snatched up the instrument tray, using his back to conceal his actions. “It’s all about the score, isn’t it?”
Carson, growing impatient, jabbed at Casari to get him moving. Seizing the initiative, he spun around with the tray in his hands and clubbed her across the side of the head.
A loud clang marked the point of impact, scalpels and forceps raining down on Carson as she smashed into the deck. Casari broke into a run, making it less than two steps before she grabbed him by the leg and tripped him. Losing his balance, he careened into the bulkhead next to the door, bouncing off the edge before it slid open and he fell t
hrough. Carson was on him in an instant, pouncing on Casari as he crawled into sickbay. He clawed at her, trying to push her off, but came up with fistfuls of empty air. Carson, meanwhile, wrapped her arm around Casari’s throat, jerking him backward so hard that he heard his own vertebrae cracking.
“Let him go, Nicole!”
The voice came out of nowhere, making time stand still. Oxygen flowed back into Casari’s brain, but the chokehold on him remained, even as Carson hauled him to his feet. A moment later, he felt the hard point of her phaser against his temple, along with Carson’s perfectly controlled breathing on the back of his neck.
“I said, let him go.”
Jenna Reed stood at the entrance to sickbay, with Nick Locarno next to her. Both of them pointed phasers at Carson, though their only line of fire was through Casari.
“Then what?” Carson asked.
“We sort things out.”
Carson laughed.
“I’ll give you props for honesty, Reed,” she said. “For a minute I thought you were going to say we could talk it over.”
“This ends the way you want it to end, Nicole,” Reed told her. “We’re all stuck on this ship together. Nobody else has to die.”
“The hell with that!” Casari spat, not caring anymore. “Shoot her!”
Reed did just the opposite, holstering her weapon.
“You see?” she said, holding up her hands. “We can all walk out of here.”
“It’s too late for that,” Carson said, detached from any trace of emotion or empathy. “Nobody was supposed to walk out of here at all. That was the plan.”
“What plan?” Locarno demanded. “Who are you working for?”
“People like that don’t have names. They just give orders.”
“And you follow them without question,” Reed finished. “But reviving the Borg? What kind of insanity is that?”
“A very useful kind,” Locarno proffered. “Think about it. After everything that’s happened—Wolf 359, Sector 001, the Dominion War—
all the devastation that left this quadrant vulnerable to God knows what. Then throw in a weaponized Borg, under strict control—ready to fight and die at a moment’s notice.” He scowled at Carson. “Sounds to me like your handlers have big plans for the future. The only question is, how do we fit in?”
A sudden, dark realization settled over all of them.
“We’re the test subjects,” Reed said.
She started walking toward Carson, each step a provocation. The medic—or whatever she really was—pulled Casari closer.
“Harlow tried to tell us,” Reed continued, “but I didn’t want to hear it. ’We are kindred,’ he said—all of us except you.” She stopped, flexing her voice like a weapon. “What did you do to us, Nicole?”
Carson smiled, cold and reptilian.
“The shots I gave you prior to the mission,” she admitted. “They contained a modified strain of Borg nanoprobes.”
Reed bored into her, eyes flickering black over green. Already, the nanites were at work—manipulating her, changing her.
“How do we stop it?”
“You don’t,” Carson answered. “This was a one-way ticket. Walsh saw to that.”
Hatred flared behind Reed’s fixed expression.
“No way the skipper would sell us out.”
“I admit it took a little push,” Carson said, “but once he saw how much money was at stake, he couldn’t sign on fast enough. He was a privateer, after all.” She laughed softly, mockingly. “Of course, he didn’t plan on becoming a victim of his own greed—but it’s just as well. Knowing what he knew, Walsh would have been a dangerous loose end.”
“And what about you?”
“Oh, I’m a survivor.”
“Not for long,” Locarno said. “Once Starfleet gets here, they’ll kill you just as dead as the rest of us.”
“We’ll see,” Carson retorted—insinuating so much more.
“They’ll get their chance,” Reed assured her—and jumped out of the way.
Hidden behind her, Locarno had already zeroed in on Carson. He fired a short burst, ionizing the space between them with a stun beam on a wide aperture, enough to take down both her and Casari. Carson reacted with skill and speed, tossing her hostage into the field of fire while she ducked and rolled away. Casari took the brunt of the hit, which spun him around and dropped him on the deck. Carson, meanwhile, dove behind a nearby rack and peppered Locarno with phaser fire, her own weapon set to kill. The air around him crackled with coherent energy, exploding against the wall as he ran, beams dogging his movements like tracers as they closed in on their target. He leapt over a desk before the last shot could find its mark, taking cover underneath as a computer console detonated above his head.
Reed, meanwhile, threw herself over Casari. He was still conscious, but in serious pain, his left arm nearly paralyzed from the stun beam. He swore out loud, grabbing Reed by the collar and pulling her face-to-face.
“She’s getting away,” he grunted.
Reed looked up and saw Carson bolting for the door. She disappeared before Reed could draw her phaser again.
“Come on,” she said.
By the time they got off the floor, Locarno had emerged from his hiding place. He quickly checked the corridor, then ran over to join them. “She’s gone,” he said. “Where’s Thayer?”
“Back there,” Casari told them, pointing toward the lab. “He’s in bad shape.”
“Check on him,” Reed said.
Casari limped off. At the same time, Locarno grabbed Carson’s bag off the shelf and dumped the contents out over one of the beds. The gridstalker rifled through the things with a practiced eye, searching for something specific.
“What are you looking for?” Reed asked.
“If this is a black-bag job,” Locarno explained, “then Carson would make sure she had an insurance policy. Spooks don’t do anything without a backup plan.” He lingered for a moment on her tricorder, which he popped open and examined closely. Removing one of the circuit boards, he found a small card wedged in where it shouldn’t have been. Prying it loose, he held it up for both of them to see.
“Looks like an isolinear chip,” Reed said.
“It is,” Locarno agreed, “but this one is a multidimensional prototype—not exactly standard issue.” He went over to a nearby console and inserted the chip, while Reed watched over his shoulder. “This is some major storage—enough to cold-boot one of the computer cores if she wanted.”
“Is that what she had in mind?”
“Tell you in a flash,” Locarno said, navigating the intricate data paths that appeared on the display. He breached the security layers in a matter of seconds, which released a torrent of code. Locarno, however, immediately found what he wanted and pointed it out to Reed. “This is a control subroutine—engines, navigation, deflectors—everything you need to fly this ship.”
“Can you use it to get us out of here?”
Locarno read further, his face hardening. “No,” he said, with an edge of finality. “Nothing works without the interaction of an actual Borg crew. The core matrix won’t allow it.”
Reed pounded a fist on the desk.
“We were going to be that crew,” she seethed. “After we turned, Carson was going to use us to handle the goddamned ship.”
“That explains why she moved on Chief Harlow. She needed to speed up assimilation before Starfleet got here.”
“A lot of good it did her,” Reed muttered, glancing toward the lab. “Where the hell is Casari? He should have been back by now.” Raising her voice, she started in that direction herself. “Jimmy! What’s going on in there?”
No answer. Locarno followed her as an ominous pall descended, a sudden realization that something was horribly, dangerously wrong. Phasers in hand, they approached the door to the pathology lab. An unnatural silence reigned within, stirred only by the low, steady flow of the reclamation tanks. Reed signaled for Locarno to hang back and cover h
er, while she slipped over to the edge of the door, the pounding of her heart and the adrenal surge in her veins somehow alien to her.
I’m losing myself, she thought. It won’t be long—for any of us.
Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins Page 44
