by David Mack
“It’s confirmed, sir,” Nechayev hollered back. “The Borg cubes fired on each other, and now they’ve all stopped, dead in space.” She turned away as a harried-looking Arcturian captain thrust his padd into her hands. Turning back toward Jellico, Nechayev lifted her voice to add, “All the Borg cubes are showing heavy damage—most of their cores are exposed.”
We might never get another chance, Jellico realized. “All ships, reengage! Press the attack while we can!”
His legion of officers snapped into action, rallying the fleet and directing an immediate counterattack. Watching the massive screens full of tactical diagrams shift to represent the recommitted battle forces, Jellico dared to hope.
If we’re fast enough, we might just survive this.
* * *
“Fawkes, we need to strike now!” Captain Bateson bellowed, as the Atlas accelerated on an attack heading. “Who’s left?”
His first officer studied her tactical monitor and frowned. “Exeter, Prometheus, and Kearsarge.”
“Well, tell Prometheus to do its three-way-split trick. We need to hit as many of those cubes over Vulcan as fast as we can.” Too energized to stay seated, he sprang to his feet and prowled forward. “Helm, attack pattern Theta-Red. Weapons, hit the Borg with everything we’ve got: transphasic torpedoes, phasers, bad grammar—whatever it takes!”
The reddish orb of Vulcan grew swiftly larger in the frame of the Atlas’s main viewscreen, and within seconds, the mangled and immobilized Borg cubes lingering in orbit became visible.
At tactical, Lieutenant Reese’s youthful and delicately feminine features hardened with resolve. “Targets locked, sir.”
Lieutenant Kedam at ops added, “Kearsarge and Exeter have their targets, and Prometheus has initiated multivector assault mode.” A signal beeped on Kedam’s console. He eyed the display and glanced back at Bateson. “New orders from Starfleet Command, sir: Reengage the Borg.”
“Typical brass,” Bateson said, rolling his eyes.
“Prometheus has its targets, sir,” Kedam said.
Bateson decided that if ever a moment had called for the invocation of Shakespeare, this was it. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Fire at will!”
His blood was hot in his veins and his pulse heavy in his temples, almost to the point of vertigo, as he gazed in awe at the staggering volume of sheer firepower that the Atlas and its allies loosed upon the Borg cubes. Great clusters of blazing warheads and brilliant slashes of phaser energy lanced through the black monstrosities in orbit of Vulcan and pummeled them into wreckage and dust. Any piece large enough to be detected by a scanner was targeted and shot again, until every hunk of bulkhead and every vacuum-exiled drone had been disintegrated.
“All targets eliminated,” reported Lieutenant Reese.
“Secure from Red Alert,” Bateson said, cracking his first smile in weeks. He gleamed with satisfaction at his first officer. “Thank Starfleet Command for their permission to engage—and tell them the attack on Vulcan is over.”
* * *
Erika Hernandez gasped for breath and couldn’t fill her lungs. Her mind was empty of thoughts but filled with white agony. All at once, dozens of cubes and countless thousands of drones had been annihilated, and their savagely curtailed suffering was too much for her to shut out or shunt aside.
Then came the real pain.
Psionic attacks pierced her memories like spears of fire, searing her to the core of her soul. Every engram jolted into action was transformed, bastardized, tainted into a memory of torment and violation.
She was a child again, screaming for rescue as her family’s home went up in flames, and blistering licks of orange heat consumed her beloved stuffed-animal companions …
No, our house never burned …
A dank basement, a dust-revealed shaft of dull gray light through a narrow window, her uncle sitting beside her on a sofa with torn upholstery and old stains, his hand resting somewhere that it shouldn’t have been …
He never did that! It’s a lie!
She was sixteen and on her back in the snow, on a slope in the Rocky Mountains. Kevin, the boy she’d adored since eighth grade, was on top of her—with his hands at her throat and a narcotic haze clouding his crazed countenance. Her flailing and kicking and twisting bought her no freedom, not even one more tiny breath. She scratched at his wrists but couldn’t reach his face. He was exerting himself, and clouds of exhaled breath lingered around his head, which was backlit by a full moon, giving him an undeserved halo as he throttled her.
That’s not what happened! He was my first love!
None of her protests mattered. Each stab into her psyche twisted another cherished moment of her life into something sick and shameful. Every milestone of achievement, every fleeting moment of tenderness and connection, was trampled. It was the psionic warfare equivalent of a scorched-earth policy. Her foe intended to leave her no safe haven, no place to retreat, nowhere she could go to ground.
Hernandez didn’t know how to fight something like this. It was too powerful, too ancient, too cruel. It had no mercy, and it possessed aeons of experience with shattering minds and devouring souls. A destroyer of worlds, an omen of the end of history, it was not merely the Borg Queen—it was the singular entity beyond the Queen, the very essence of the Collective.
A cold darkness enveloped her, and she felt her fear being leached from her, along with joy and sorrow, pride and shame. This is assimilation, she realized. It’s even worse than Jean-Luc said. All you can do is surrender.
Physical sensations returned with an excruciating spasm.
Hernandez’s back arched off the deck, and fiery needles shot through her arms and along her spine. A scream caught in her constricted throat, behind her clenched jaw. Sickly green light was all she saw in the dark blur that surrounded her.
Helkara shouted, “Pull the rest of the leads! Now!”
“Not yet!” Leishman said. “Too much residual charge!”
Hands pulled at cables that snaked under Hernandez’s skin, and she heard the hiss and felt the tingle of a hypospray at her throat. “We’re losing her,” Helkara fumed. “Somebody get a medic! Chief, get that first-aid kit over here!”
The convulsions ceased, and Hernandez let her body relax on the deck. Her vision started to clear and sharpen, but she felt utterly drained, and she began shivering intensely.
“Bring blankets,” Leishman said to someone running past.
Hernandez reached out and took Leishman’s forearm in a weak grasp. “Queen,” she croaked, surprised at how difficult it was for her to form words. When she tried to speak again, all that issued from her lips were reedy gasps.
Helkara leaned in and asked Leishman, “What’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Queen.’ I guess the Borg Queen shook her up.”
“No kidding,” the Zakdorn science officer said.
Vexed by their obtuseness and quickly losing consciousness, Hernandez let go of Leishman’s arm and grabbed Helkara’s collar. She yanked his face down to her own and stammered in a brittle whisper, “The Qu … Queen …”
Helkara pried her hand from his uniform and straightened his posture. “Is on her way to Earth—we know, Captain,” he said, placing her weakening hand on her chest and patting it in a patronizing manner. “We’ll deal with her next. Right now, you need to rest. Just hang tight till the medics get here.”
The sedatives they had given her were kicking in, and the edges of her world were growing soft and fading away.
Morons! she raged, imprisoned inside her tranquilized body. She wanted to warn them, but then she sank into the smothering arms of dark bliss, unable to convey a simple report:
The Queen is here.
* * *
The news was almost too good for Nan Bacco to believe it. She kept waiting for the correction, the retraction, the nuanced clarification that would negate what she and her people had just witnessed on the subspace-feed monitors in the Monet Room.
“We’ve just received confirmation from Starfleet Command,” he said, lifting his chin and letting his long gray hair frame his squarish features. “The Borg attack fleets at Vulcan, Andor, Coridan, Beta Rigel, and Qo’noS have been routed.”
He had more to say but was cut off by the room’s thunderous applause and whooping cheers of jubilant relief. Bacco permitted herself only a tight, grateful smile, for fear of tempting the Fates with premature celebration. She caught sight of a deep frown on Piñiero’s face, and then she noticed that similarly grave expressions were worn by Batanides, Akaar, and Seven.
Akaar lifted his palms again and hushed the assembled cabinet members and advisers. “There were reports of infighting among several other Borg battle groups, but those have now ceased—and all remaining Borg attack fleets are once again on the move.” He met Bacco’s questioning look and added, “Including the one on its way to Earth.”
4527 B.C.E.
20
Karl Graylock, Kiona Thayer, and Gage Pembleton were desperate and dazed with hunger after eight days of exhausting snowshoeing in a brutal deep freeze. Walking on unraveling snowshoes, they trudged through the endless night, up the side of Junk Mountain, their every step resisted by frigid knives of screaming wind and pelting sleet.
Less than two hundred meters up the slope of Junk Mountain, Graylock’s snowshoes finally came apart beneath him. First his left foot plunged through the sagged webbing, and then his right foot tore free of its rotted binding. “Scheisse,” he cursed under his breath, fearful of triggering an avalanche.
Pembleton poked at the snow with his walking stick. “It’s pretty hard-packed,” he gasped in the thin air. “You didn’t sink much past your ankles.” He tapped the side of his snowshoe with the stick. “We probably don’t need these anymore.”
“Probably not,” Graylock said. Thayer and Pembleton pulled off their snowshoes. Graylock gathered up the broken pieces of his footwear and stuffed the fragments into folds and under flaps on his backpack; they’d make decent kindling once they dried. Looking up the slope, directly into the path of the gale-driven sleet, he winced and said, “Let’s keep going.”
Graylock remembered the way to the Caeliar’s redoubt as well as Pembleton did, so he took the lead as they ascended into the lashing gusts of the storm. It was up to Pembleton to keep watch for the local predator that had slain Mazzetti weeks earlier. All Thayer had to do was keep herself upright while hiking uphill over ice and snow with her braced foot.
From a distance, the three survivors would have looked all but identical. Mummified in multiple layers of the now-sullied silver-gray Caeliar fabric, only their heights distinguished them; Pembleton was the tallest, followed by Graylock, and then Thayer. It occurred to Graylock that they had not seen one another’s face in more than a week. As the temperatures had plummeted, they had resisted removing any but the tiniest strips of their swaddling, and then only for absolute necessities.
In the mad swirls of sleet that surrounded him, his view of the path ahead was limited to its next few meters. Fighting gravity to push his weakened body up the mountainside left his head spinning. The next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees, dry-heaving through his face wrappings.
Hands closed tentatively around his arms. Thayer and Pembleton labored to pull Graylock back to his feet.
“Don’t quit on us now, you Austrian clod,” Thayer said.
He wobbled as he found his footing. “Well, since you asked so nicely,” he mumbled to her. “Gage, can you …?”
“Take point? Sure.” Pembleton stepped past Graylock and led the trio up the slope, past icicle-draped rock formations. Towering snowdrifts had formed against the windward side of the huge black crags that jutted from the pristine slope.
Concealed beneath a deep blanket of snow, the shape of the terrain had become unfamiliar to Graylock’s eyes. He hoped that Pembleton’s wilderness combat training would enable him to find the entrance to the Caeliar’s buried laboratory.
The effort and the exhaustion, the hunger and the pain … they all blurred together as Graylock forced his aching muscles to go through the motions: taking one step and then another, walking where Pembleton had walked, never looking back.
His eyes felt leaden, and an overpowering desire for rest sapped his will to continue. So cold I can’t even feel it anymore, he mused, poised on the edge of a hallucination. He was all but ready to collapse face-first into the snow when a mitten-wrapped hand yanked him forward.
“I found it,” Pembleton said. “The tunnel’s pretty slick, but I think we can make it down. Come on!”
The three survivors doffed their backpacks and huddled around a cave in the snow. It looked like an enlarged version of a trapdoor spider’s lair. The sides of the opening were sheathed in ice and dusted with clinging snow that had gathered in a long, shallow slope at the bottom. Graylock peered cautiously over the edge and down the icy incline. “It’s mostly clear,” he said. “But how—”
A quick push sent him headfirst over the edge. He put out his hands by reflex. They slipped over the ice and did nothing to slow him down as he caromed off the sides, but the snow piled at the end broke his fall, and he was able to use his arms to guide himself down the slope on his chest. Then he slid to a stop in the pitch-dark corridor that led to the shielded lab.
He got up, dusted himself off, and walked back to the opening. When he glared up at his two comrades, Kiona said, “Sorry. Impulse.”
“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” he said, projecting wrathful sarcasm. “Get down here.”
Graylock stepped back and waited. Seconds later, Thayer slid feetfirst onto the snow and glided on her buttocks into the corridor. He helped her up, and she called back up to Pembleton, “Clear!” Next, the trio’s backpacks were dropped, and Thayer helped Graylock recover them and move them to one side. After the third one, Thayer again yelled back, “Clear!”
Then Pembleton joined them, landing and sliding as Thayer had. Graylock and Thayer pulled him to his feet. He brushed the snow off the backs of his legs as he asked, “Where do you think the Caeliar would be?”
“Probably near whatever energy-storage system they were living from,” Graylock said. “We should probably start looking in the lab.” The engineer opened his pack and removed the fire-making kit. They quickly fashioned small torches from their remaining thick branches of firewood and some strips of their old uniforms soaked in salvaged machine oil. Pembleton lit two torches with a flint and steel, passed them to Thayer and Graylock, then lit his own. Weak firelight and massive shadows danced on the metallic walls.
Graylock started down the corridor, and the others followed him. It felt strange to him to be back inside an artificial structure again. Their footsteps were loud and crisp on the hard floors, and they reverberated in the empty passages. The wind sang mournful songs in the dead city’s empty spaces.
Away from the ice chute and the brunt of the wind, Graylock peeled off the layers of fabric wrapped around his head. The final layers felt glued to the front of his face, and he teased the fabric loose with gingerly tugs. As it came free, he saw why it had held fast. It was crusted with dried blood. Exposed for two weeks to extreme cold and aridity, his sinuses and lips had cracked like salt flats in the desert.
Thayer and Pembleton coaxed off their own bandages, revealing the same kind of cold-weather damage to their faces. What alarmed Graylock, however, wasn’t the blood but the bones. Their cheekbones looked as if they might pierce their skin at any moment. Touching his own face, Graylock realized with horror how gaunt they all had become. We look like walking corpses.
They turned a corner, entered the lab, and found the cavernous space deserted. Every corridor and chamber they had explored had deepened Graylock’s profound unease; as th
ey wandered through the open space, he felt as if he were lurking in a crypt. “I think we’re too late,” he said. “They’re gone.”
“Maybe if you tried calling for them,” Thayer said. “What was the name of the one you knew?”
“Lerxst,” Graylock said. He looked to Pembleton for an opinion. The man shrugged as if to say, Why not? Raising his voice, Graylock called out for the Caeliar scientist. “Lerxst?”
There was no answer but the keening of the wind.
He tried again: “Lerxst?”
His voice echoed several times.
Then a sepulchral groan shook the ruined city.
“Maybe we should leave,” Pembleton said, turning a wary eye toward the ceiling, while Thayer threw frightened glances in every other direction.
“Not the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Graylock said.
They turned to retreat from the lab—and saw a specter looking back at them. It was barely there at all, a ghostly approximation of a Caeliar’s shape, as if made of steam.
Unable to mask the fear choking his voice, Graylock squeaked out, “Lerxst?”
An electric jolt spiked through Graylock’s mind and rooted him to the floor. Thayer and Pembleton stood shaking beside him. Then a voice—at once feminine, malevolent, and invincible—whispered inside his thoughts as a chill like death crusted the trio’s bodies and faces with a delicate layer of frost.
Sedín.
Pinpricks of cold fire became unbearable stabs of pain across every square centimeter of Graylock’s body. He wanted to scream and run, but he couldn’t move. There was nowhere for his agony to go, so it rebounded on itself, creating a feedback loop of suffering that drowned out every other sensation. He kept expecting to pass out, to implode under the strain, but Sedín wouldn’t let his mind shut down. She wouldn’t let him escape; she just hammered and hammered.
No! he raged. I won’t be … won’t become … a … cy—
* * *
—borg.
The hunger had found new strength. Three drones, easily controlled. Two males, one female. Properly replenished, they would serve. But these were nearly depleted. The female must be preserved to produce more vessels, decided the hunger. One of the males must be consolidated for the collective good.