Strange New Worlds X

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “Thank you, Captain,” Naomi said. She shrugged off the uniform jacket she’d been wearing and handed it to Riker. “Thank you, also, Commander.”

  He took it with a grin. “Always glad to assist a young lady and future starship captain.”

  “Come, Naomi,” Seven said.

  It was still chilly outside, so both Seven and Naomi hurried to get to the building where the Wildman quarters were located. Once they got to the door, Naomi took Seven’s hand. “Will you contact me soon?”

  “I shall,” Seven said. “I still have much to tell you about Kansas. Perhaps we can share a meal together soon.”

  Naomi smiled. “I’d like that.” She hesitated, then threw her arms around Seven and hugged her. “Thank you, Seven.”

  Seven gently returned the embrace. “You will be a fine starship captain someday. You will learn much in time to come.”

  Naomi slipped into the dark quarters. Things were still quiet. She yawned, realizing how tired she was.

  She went into her parent’s room. “Mom? Dad?”

  Her mother’s tousled head lifted up from the pillow. “Naomi?”

  “Half lights,” her father said. The room went from complete darkness to a dim light. “Is everything all right?”

  She didn’t see anger in his eyes, just genuine worry. “I wanted to say I was sorry for how I acted before.”

  Her mother looked at the chronometer by the bed. “Sweetheart, haven’t you been to bed yet?”

  Naomi shook her head. “I was—I was at a meeting.”

  “At this hour?” her father’s eyebrows shot up. “With who?”

  “Commander Riker, Captain Janeway, and Seven of Nine.”

  Her parents exchanged a long glance. “Naomi, you left here to meet with the captain without telling us?” her mother asked in a tone that warned Naomi that she was in trouble.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but I had to.”

  “Well,” her father said, getting out of bed, “what was this middle of the night meeting about?”

  Naomi looked from one parent to the other. “Adjusting.”

  “Adjusting?” her mother looked confused.

  “Yes,” Naomi said. She took her father’s hand. “We are all having to adjust. I am sure I will learn a lot about adapting on Ktaria VII. And,” here her voice faltered, “I hope … I didn’t mean it when I said I hated you.”

  Her father looked at her, then suddenly pulled her close in a hug. “I love you, Naomi,” he said in a chokey voice.

  “I love you too,” Naomi said. She caught herself yawning again.

  Her mother got out of bed and hugged them both. “Well, I think we’ll deal with the rest of this tomorrow, after we’ve gotten some sleep.”

  “Yeah,” her father said. “You’d better get to bed. We’ll talk about you going off in the middle of the night later.”

  Naomi kissed both her parents and went to her room. She was so tired she dropped her clothes on the floor instead of putting them away.

  Crawling into bed, she let her eyes fall on the holographic model of Ktaria VII she’d created while on Voyager. She smiled. It’s someplace new to explore, she thought.

  She was still looking at the hologram when she fell asleep.

  The Day the Borg Came

  M. C. DeMarco

  M. C. DeMarco lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with one ailing house plant and a wall of books. This is her second appearance in Strange New Worlds, and she regrets that writing about the Borg full-time is not a viable career path. In the Collective spirit, she acknowledges those fellow alumni of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop who critiqued an earlier, imperfect version of her story.

  T he day the Borg woke up, we didn’t even know what they were. The wind was howling outside the module, and the cybernetic corpses lay on metal slabs as dead and remote, I thought, as King Tut in his wrappings. We had dug two alien, well-preserved bodies, out of the arctic ice, never expecting the mummy’s curse.

  At least, not until one mummy’s drill-bit hand started spinning. The hair rose on the back of my neck when I saw that. I worked fast on the standard lab tests, believing that decay would set in soon. But the chilly air in the small prefab shelter remained fresh, tainted only by the acrid scent of the bodies’ cybernetic parts. Maybe there wasn’t enough organic material in them to rot.

  I hunched over my microscope; in my samples, tiny nanotech machines were repairing both the organic and inorganic material. I thought I tasted metal—paranoia, I told myself, but fearing infection, I set aside everything else to test the microscopic machines. My instruments were crude and clunky compared to the corpses’ technology, but they sufficed to prove that the nanomachines could not survive in the air. I would not be infected by that route.

  How the pharaohs would have loved such advanced embalming technology! The nanotech had kept these dead aliens intact for a hundred years or more. Yet I doubted these ugly creatures had cared about preserving their bodies for the afterlife. Something else was going on. I felt a chill that was more than polar air leaking in the door seals.

  So I asked Drake to put them both into cold freeze in module 3. I think he might have done it if Starfleet hadn’t been so curious about our cyborg Tut and Nefertiti. Military interference in scientific research rubbed me the wrong way, though I was as pro-space as any other Terran. I was no soldier—then.

  My armed backup went over to module 3. Not being a soldier either, he had other demands on his time. I said I’d be fine watching over the mummies, but I jumped at any sound and knocked my coffee into the drysink. When heard a blip on one of the monitors, I went to look—without my gun.

  Still gray, still dead, and the monitors were silent. Yet the hair rose on my arms, and then suddenly Nefertiti’s pulse started beeping and she drew a breath.

  Her EEG and all her vitals shot up, and I leaned over her, fascinated. I didn’t even see what hit me, but I screamed at the pain in my jugular, stumbled, ran, and fell. My neck burned in the cold; the burning spread out along my veins and the last thought of my own I had was of those nanomachines that could not survive in the air.

  The first thought we had as a subcollective of isolated drones was to transmit our location to the Collective, so far away in both space and time.

  The day I come for the Borg, they aren’t ready. Do they think they’re the only ones who can use time-travel against their enemies? It gave me a headache, but I’ve figured out the paradoxes—Borg fleeing into Earth’s past and Captain Picard pursuing, the tactical sphere wrecked in the Arctic at the dawn of warp flight to be found by scientists a hundred years later, defrosted drones escaping from Earth pursued by Jonathan Archer, sending one last subspace message to Borg Space in the far reaches of the Delta Quadrant.

  Now, inside the Collective myself for a last, brief assimilation, I can access the assimilated memories of those unfortunate early scientists to verify my theories. To his credit, Captain Archer figured it out, too, because of something Zephram Cochrane let slip, and he logged it all. I have read the old records, those long-discounted fables of the early space age.

  Later, Picard thought Q had brought the Borg upon us—and in his way he did. Bringing the first cube led inevitably to the tactical sphere that Picard chased into the past. Dug up a hundred years later, frozen drones were assimilated the archaeologists and sent their message to the Delta Quadrant, et cetera, et cetera.

  I hate time paradoxes. I touch the memories of a child I never knew, though I deeply mourn the woman she became….

  The day the Borg came aboard our ship, I was seven years old. Daddy had been looking for them for as long as I could remember. Since he’d found them, we had followed their cube and hidden behind special shields. Mommy said the shields allowed Daddy to observe the Borg without interfering in their behavior—like the Prime Directive. He had been so happy then, but the day the Borg came he was upset. He tried to hide it, but I knew.

  The ship still smelled like the lightning that had come out o
f the console during the storm. Mommy said the shields went down. I knew that meant we weren’t hidden anymore, so I crawled under the sheets where the Borg wouldn’t see me. We’d been spying on the Borg, I thought, and now they were mad at us. I would be, too, if I was them.

  Daddy came in and said the Borg were just curious about us, like we were about them. I hoped they had a Prime Directive, too. He went away, and I listened to him and Mommy arguing in the other room. I put my fingers in my ears but I could still hear them.

  After a long silence, they started talking again. Daddy said something about a planet. The ship shook, and I smelled lightning again. I tiptoed to the door—the gravity felt strange, like the time it was broken and it took Mommy a week to repair it. That was fun, but this wasn’t.

  I saw the drones materialize on the bridge. They grabbed Mommy; she told me to run, but I couldn’t move.

  “Annika!” Daddy said, struggling in the drone’s hands. A drone came at me, and I cried to Daddy for help. “Hide, Annika!” was all he said.

  I hid under a console in the engine access corridor. I saw the legs coming for me—metal legs. I wondered if I would have metal legs when I was a drone. I shrank back, but the drone leaned down and found me, and pulled me out.

  Then the Raven went away and we were in a green place—the biggest place I’d ever seen. The corridors went on forever and ever. I was too surprised to be afraid. The Borg were bigger than my toy cubes, bigger than the images on the Raven’s screen, bigger than my father—bigger than all of us.

  They put me into a little box on the big cube—a maturation chamber, the voices told me—and slowly, irresistibly, I became Borg.

  I first come to the Borg in their own backyard. I force them to elect a representative to speak for the Collective. They choose Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One—Annika Hansen, assimilated as a child while her parents were studying the Collective.

  Her memories are too painful for me to linger over for long. In my timeline the woman I freed from the Collective died decades ago because I stranded Voyager in the Delta Quadrant for twenty-three years. If I succeed in creating a new timeline she will be saved. This very day she will see Earth for the first time.

  But Seven was not the first human to speak for the Borg….

  The day the Borg came humanity was unprepared. I was unprepared. They had annihilated New Providence, leaving only a crater behind them. I thought they might destroy the Enterprise; in my worst nightmares they wiped out the Federation. I never imagined, as I sat on my bridge staring at a cube, that the Collective could want only me.

  The cube bristled with machinery. The gray-black framework of struts and bracing appalled me—a ship bearing humanoids yet open to space seemed more alien than the strangest lifeforms I had ever encountered.

  And they wanted me. I could not consent, not even to save the Enterprise. Some forces must be resisted, no matter how irresistible.

  With a show of overwhelming force the Borg attacked the Enterprise. She was breaking up, pieces of her being sliced off like limbs from my body—all too apt a metaphor with the Borg. Only Data was fast enough to save us by firing back at superhuman speeds. Clearly it was Data whom they should want; Data represented the height of Federation technology. I was just a man like any other.

  Shelby had a plan—a burst of energy that might disable the cube—but Geordi needed more time to adjust the deflector. We did not have that much time left. How could we delay this implacable foe? How could I reason with a hive mind, a Collective callously indifferent to individuals and quite possibly unstoppable? Human, Klingon, Betazoid—to them we were all fodder for a vast, parasitic machine.

  So why did they want me in particular?

  My ship rocked when they drove us out of the nebula with magnetic charges. They hit Deck 9 and took out the shields. Drones—the color of corpses—appeared on my bridge. Worf shot two, but the third adapted, tossing Riker aside and defeating Worf as easily. I thought the assimilation of my ship was beginning then, but as they’d promised—or threatened—they took only me.

  The cube where I rematerialized was as horrifying inside as out. A vast, open chamber surrounded me, all out of proportion to the thousands of humanoid cyborgs who staffed it. The cube set course for Earth, and the Collective spoke.

  My captors explained themselves at last; the Borg wanted a human collaborator to guide Species 5618 into the Collective. I told them that humanity would never submit—that freedom and self-determination were paramount for us. To the Borg, however, our values meant nothing. Freedom and self-determination, they said, were irrelevant.

  Despite the horror of my situation, I was as awed as I was afraid. Standing on their ship, with their technology extruding from the walls, stretching in straight lines so long they met at infinity, I felt more than ever as if I were caught in the works of an amoral, unstoppable machine. It could not feel my anger; anger and fear would be assimilated, declawed, recycled into something else.

  I cursed Q for attracting the Borg’s attention to us. I prayed that he would appear, wave his hand, and make the Borg disappear—but I knew Q would not save me. I was on my own, facing death and worse, knowing that I was not the last but the first of an endless number the Borg would consume using my knowledge, my face, my defeat. Knowing that soon I would not care whether I was the instrument of genocide.

  They held me fast so I could not struggle. I could resist in my mind, as I’d promised humanity would do, but I did not doubt that resistance would be futile. I feared they were also correct when they said that death was irrelevant—or would soon be to me.

  The drone to my right twitched; I steeled myself to join the ranks of the living dead. The drone plunged its tubules into my neck, and I heard the voices—first a trickle, then a flood, then an ocean in which I drowned.

  And then I, Locutus, spoke for the Borg.

  When I come to destroy the Borg I have Picard’s words in mind: “The Borg are utterly without mercy—beyond redemption, beyond reason.” The disintegrating Collective mind shows me similar fragments of his thoughts before assimilation.

  It once gave me hope that they chose Locutus to communicate with humanity. The Collective is coming to realize that they must meet us on our own terms, that we are not just another isolated victim species of the Delta Quadrant. We resist.

  There is something in us that cannot be assimilated. If they want it, they must negotiate for it, speak our language, adapt. In return I helped them against what I once believed was a more dangerous foe.

  For a while then there seemed to be a chance the Collective would change—influenced by drones like Hugh and those who could access Unimatrix Zero in their dreams. But not everyone was willing to wait for that change to come….

  The day the Borg came I was alone. I woke up on a ship—a small transport with peeling enamel and the smell of fried circuitry. I searched the old hulk from stem to stern, but my parents were not aboard.

  I didn’t understand. I thought perhaps the Borg had returned to Brunali, but then how had I escaped alone? I did not recall launching the transport. I examined the controls. The computer informed me that I was locked out of navigational access—no surprise that an adolescent would be. So I could not have escaped on my own, and yet I was alone.

  The puzzle fascinated me. We had so few ships left after the Borg’s previous visits—legendary attacks I was too young to remember clearly. I imagined all manner of exotic explanations: a final Borg assault on Brunali of which I was the lone survivor, kidnapping by rogue traders, time loops, wormholes and tears in the fabric of space.

  My fantasies were interrupted by a voice—a billion voices all speaking as one: “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

  I believed them. To me the Borg meant vast gaping chasms in the crust of my world where Leucon said cities had once stood; they meant a hush and a trembling whenever adults looked up at the sky. I was afraid, though I didn’t know of what. I searched
desperately for weapons, but the ship had no defenses and no hand weapons in storage.

  Before I could cower in a corner or make my last, brave stand, gray men were there, all around me, filling the ship. Some stood by the controls and seemed disappointed in them somehow. Others appeared behind me, where I did not see them until something cold and sharp plunged into my neck. Then I could see them all, looking at each other, looking at Icheb, and yet I was still looking at them through Icheb’s eyes.

  We sensed the wrongness of the situation; the ship was not what it had appeared to be on our sensors. A classone transport of no technological value to the Borg had been designed to project a false warp signature into subspace for unknown purposes. The child, alone, was anomalous as well. Species 2461 protected their offspring during an unnecessarily protracted period of adolescence.

  We considered several theories, but the new drone provided little data and no conclusion was reached. We took the drone and left the transport behind. We did not associate our later malfunctions with the new drone.

  The day I come to destroy the Borg, I come like Icheb, bearing a pathogen. His destroyed a cube; mine is destroying the Queen and her entire unimatrix. So I’m watching the Borg fall apart, literally and figuratively. The neurolytic pathogen is spreading to other unimatrices already, but I will not live to see the end result.

  From Icheb I learned that assimilation could transmit infection, if you came under cover with a new vector they would not recognize. The Borg believed his ship’s false readings, like they believed my cover story of traveling into to the past to help my younger self.

  No one knows the Borg like I know them. I’ve negotiated with them, infiltrated them, and infected them before. I have traveled through their space, freeing drones and stealing transwarp coils. I have seen humanity’s hopes disappointed; the Collective has become a nearer and more dangerous menace over the years.