Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins

by Margaret Clark (Editor)

  “Thayer could have used some of that on shore leave,” Massey joked, jabbing the young ops officer in the shoulder as the others laughed. “I told him not to mess around with those Orion girls.”

  “Yeah,” Casari agreed. “I just hope the Borg didn’t catch any of that action.”

  “That’s more action than any of you seen lately,” Harlow tossed in as he got his dose, winking at Thayer before locking his helmet in place. Breath fogged his faceplate for a moment while his airflow started, his voice muffled when he turned and spoke to Reed. “So what’s our entry point?”

  “Topside, main bridge,” she said. “We’ll work our way down from there, staying together until we’ve verified the ship is secure. After that, we’ll split up and complete our respective tasks: life support, integrity fields, propulsion—in that order.”

  “What about the computer core?”

  It was Nick Locarno who asked the question. Reed looked over and saw him standing at the entry hatch, wearing an envirosuit, with his helmet tucked under his right arm. He walked in as the others started hauling themselves up to the transporter pads, ignoring the hostility they directed toward him.

  “There’s no telling how the Borg might have it rigged,” he finished. “And you’ll have a tougher time with the other systems without it.”

  Reed folded her arms. “I don’t recall sending you an invitation to the party.”

  “I figured you might be short on volunteers.”

  “No argument there,” she said quietly, making sure the others didn’t hear. “So what’s the deal, Locarno? I thought you said this was a bad idea.”

  “It is. You know it as well as I do.”

  “What I think has nothing to do with it.”

  “You’re leading this mission,” he reminded her. “It has everything to do with it.”

  She sighed, mostly because Locarno was right. Seeing the others, who looked to her for confidence, didn’t make it any easier.

  “Walsh won’t back down,” Reed told him. “He’s leveraged himself too much with this operation. If it doesn’t pay off in a major way, it’ll ruin him. I won’t let that happen.”

  “Even if it gets you killed?”

  “We’d be dead a dozen times over if it weren’t for him,” Reed said. She knew how it sounded, but all she could do was try to make herself believe it. “Besides, if this is a suicide mission, why do you want to come along?”

  “Because you need me,” Locarno said, masking the sentiment with a show of feigned arrogance. “And because I like the odds better with you around. If anybody can get me through a crazy stunt like this, it’s you.”

  Reed studied him for a moment, still not quite sure what to make of him. In the end she decided to take him at his word, and motioned for Carson to come over with her medkit.

  “This is my mission,” Reed warned him. “You do what I tell you, when I tell you. If you have a problem with that, it ends right here.”

  Locarno saluted. “I’m all yours, Skipper.”

  Reed nodded at Carson, who jammed him with her hypospray.

  “Then get your ass in gear, Locarno.”

  They gave each other half a smile. Locarno then slipped his helmet over his head, snapping it onto his collar as Reed did the same with hers. The two of them walked up to the transporter pads together, Reed making sure that all of her people and equipment were in place and ready to go. They gave her a thumbs-up all around, the compartment charged by their adrenaline—so potent that it seeped through the fabric of Reed’s envirosuit, making her skin tingle with a static charge. She turned toward the crewman manning the transport console, only to find him staring back at her with a blank, haunted expression.

  It was the look of someone who didn’t expect to see them again.

  “Energize,” Reed said.

  Fear asserted itself like some ravenous force, an all-consuming thing that started to devour her from the inside out. At first Reed thought it was a manifestation of the transport process, spiking her consciousness during those few milliseconds when matter and energy converged; but then it became real—as tangible as the deck that materialized beneath her feet and the ceiling plates that sublimated above her head. It sparked a panic that gripped her central nervous system and spread outward to her extremities: evil as a physical presence, rising up from the depths. Reed felt it turn to liquid as it poured out of her, filling her helmet and forcing itself back in, her blood laden with heavy elements as it re-formed within her veins. She thrashed and convulsed, trying not to drown, but there was no self for her to save—only a residual image within the matter stream, utterly isolated, utterly alone.

  Until reality emerged from the other side of a shimmering curtain, which tore the fear from her and cast it to the corners of Reston’s bridge. Reed culled its presence at the edge of her vision, a disembodied legion that churned and howled in mad protest. Even more hellish was the emptiness it left behind, as if it had taken a piece of her—the very essence of her soul, which stared back at her like a reflection through smoke. Reed lurched toward it, frantic to take that piece back, but the thing recoiled from her as if scalded. Vaulting itself to the turbolift, it slid down the shaft and into the deepest recesses of the ship—into the hiding places where it could lie in wait for her, eager to dine on what was left.

  “Jenna?”

  Her surroundings quickly snapped into focus, off a wave of dizziness that receded at the mention of her name. Reed found herself leaning against the bridge rail, hanging on with one hand and holding a phaser in the other. She didn’t even remember drawing the weapon, just the terror that now seemed more like a faint echo—aftershocks from the trauma of being jammed back into her own body.

  “Jenna, are you okay?”

  Reed looked up and discovered Nick Locarno hovering over her, his features pallid under the glow of his helmet lamp. He stood by, wary of the phaser—and with good reason. Before she slipped the weapon back into its holster, she saw that it was set to maximum. A single shot might have blown a hole clear through the overhead.

  “Yeah,” she replied, steadying herself. Locarno also seemed to be shaking it off, like the rest of the boarding party—at least in the brief flashes Reed could see, which sliced across the confined space in a kinetic interplay of incandescent beams. She planted her boots firmly on the deck, magnetic soles holding her down in the disorienting environment of zero g. “That was a rough beam-out. Did everyone make it through okay?”

  “I think so,” Rayna Massey answered, her voice sounding hollow between labored breaths. “What the hell was that? It was like going through a goddamned shredder.”

  Reed gave Locarno an inquiring glance as he helped her up.

  “Why do you keep thinking I would know?”

  “You’re the gridstalker,” she offered. “Use your imagination.”

  “Right now I can imagine quite a bit,” Locarno said, taking a look around. “Between you and me, this place gives me the creeps.”

  Reed felt it as well, the afterimage of her terror playing itself out again. The abject darkness that enveloped her only magnified its presence, which she sensed in every groan of the deck and every shudder of the bulkheads. A permanent midnight had descended on Reston’s bridge—a bleak, unnatural thing captured like a still life in pitch black, pressing against her with claustrophobic intensity.

  The helmet lamps did little to disperse that unsettling notion. Harsh, sterile lights fell upon relics that served up snapshots of what had been, but was no longer: a discarded padd lying on the floor, an empty command chair awaiting a captain who would never return. Ghosts of a life all but forgotten—until the boarding party’s arrival stirred them from slumber.

  “Nothing has changed,” Chris Thayer observed. “It’s like they just got up and left.”

  “Damn strange,” Massey added. “No sign of the Borg.”

  “They probably didn’t have much use for a bridge,” Tristan Harlow said. “Once they took the ship, control would be
decentralized. They wouldn’t need to come up here.”

  “Can you get us some lights from up here?” Reed asked him.

  “If they didn’t sever the auxiliary.” Harlow motioned for James Casari to accompany him, then pushed off and floated over to the engineering station. While the two of them broke into the console, the others started fanning out across the bridge, securing their equipment and getting ready to settle in for the long haul.

  Reed, meanwhile, activated her minicom and opened a channel.

  “Celtic, advance team,” she signaled, listening intently to the crackle that came through the tinny speakers in her helmet. “Are you getting this?”

  There was enough of a delay to make both her and Locarno nervous, but after a few moments Evan Walsh answered. “Reading . . .

  Jenna,” he said, his words barely audible above all the interference. “What . . . situation . . . over there?”

  “We’re safe,” she reported. Even though Walsh sounded light-years away, it was a tremendous relief to have contact with the outside world. “Had some bumps, but we all arrived in one piece.”

  “Totally lost you . . . sensors . . . can’t pinpoint . . . exact location.”

  “We’re setting up operations on the bridge right now,” Reed told him. “Harlow is trying to get us some power. After that, we’ll head belowdecks and get to work.”

  “Any sign . . . crew?”

  Locarno’s grave expression reflected her own thinking.

  “Not yet,” she said, “but they’re here—somewhere.”

  Walsh trailed off into a disconcerting silence, punctuated by ebbs of static.

  “Very well,” he replied. “Check in . . . thirty minutes . . . keep advised . . . status.”

  “Thirty minutes,” Reed affirmed. “Acknowledged.”

  “Careful . . . Jenna.”

  “Aye, Skipper.” She paused a moment. “You too.”

  The channel fell dormant.

  Reed closed her eyes and gathered herself together. She made sure the others didn’t see—except for Locarno, who gave her the space she needed. When she opened her eyes again, he was looking the other way, allowing her to project an appearance of command, even though they both knew it was an illusion. Reed only hoped it would last long enough to get this thing done.

  She managed a few steps, boots clanking hard against the deck, and spoke up with all the authority she could muster: “Any luck, Harlow?”

  “Don’t need any,” Harlow replied as he arose from the engineering console. “Not when you’ve got talent.”

  He then touched the interface panel, and the emergency lights started to click on. They flickered in procession, forming a perimeter near the floor of the bridge that encircled the boarding party in a dim but welcome glow. Everyone took the opportunity to look up and around, to see whatever it was they hadn’t seen before—but then found themselves completely unprepared for what had been hiding under the cover of night.

  Locarno saw it first, following its paths across the deck and along the walls: darkened smears, black but not quite black—bold, garish strokes that could have been left by some large brush, rendering a macabre pastiche of abstract art. Leading up to the turbolift doors, however, the strokes metastasized into splatters, hinting at their sinister origins.

  Casari grimaced. “What is that?”

  Massey, no stranger to combat, knew in a heartbeat.

  “It’s blood,” she said.

  Nobody spoke of it. There was only the urgency of getting out, traded in anxious, knowing glances as everyone waited for Tristan Harlow to pry open the turbolift doors. When that was finished, they proceeded cautiously, each of them sidestepping blood trails as they filed toward the exit, not daring to tread where someone had fallen.

  Reed went first, grasping the door frame as she leaned into the gaping turboshaft and looked straight down. A wave of vertigo shot through her at the sight of it, an octagonal tunnel that seemed to go on forever. Marking the plunge was a line of red lights mounted alongside an access ladder—one light for each deck, a ruddy cascade flowing into the depths of hell.

  She felt Nick Locarno move in beside her.

  “How far to main engineering?” she asked.

  “Ten decks down, then aft about seventy meters.” He never took his eyes off the abyss beneath them. “Fourteen more decks after that.”

  “Could be worse.”

  “Yeah? Tell me that when we hit bottom.”

  Reed waved Casari forward. The engineer’s mate brought along a large case, which he fastened to the deck and unlocked. Inside was a set of handheld maneuvering jets, which he passed around to the others. Reed held hers up and squeezed the trigger a couple of times to test it, the pressurized gases within escaping with a quiet hiss.

  And then she stepped off the edge of the precipice.

  Instinct dictated that Reed should fall, her arms and legs flailing briefly as she slipped into the shaft; but then intellect took over, a slow realization of her own weightlessness and inertia. She floated clear over to the other side before she regained her bearings, nearly bumping against the wall as she fired off a few bursts to stabilize herself. She spun around slowly, levitating in midair, to find everyone watching her performance.

  Locarno smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Keep it tight, people,” Reed ordered, and started the long descent.

  The others jumped in after her, one by one, a chain of bodies in controlled free fall. Reed poured on thrust until it felt dangerous to go any faster, deck numbers flashing by in her peripheral vision as she focused on the rest of the team to make sure they kept pace. Out of sight meant being alone—and alone on this ship was unthinkable.

  “Coming up on the lateral shaft,” Locarno warned. “Better slow it down.”

  Reed did as he said, flipping herself over and keeping a close eye on her position. She came to a halt just above Deck 10, where she grabbed hold of the access ladder. Locarno joined her there while the others hovered directly above, their helmet lamps casting all movement in elongated shadows. Reed used the rungs to pull herself down, her hands slippery from the sweat inside her gloves, then stared down the impossible length of the conduit that stretched into Reston’s secondary hull.

  “Easy to lose yourself in here,” she said.

  Locarno didn’t respond, his gaze fixed on the nearby deck hatch.

  “Going somewhere, Nick?”

  “Computer cores are right through there,” he said. “One port, one starboard.”

  “Take it easy. You’ll get your chance soon enough.”

  With that, Reed pointed the way aft and pushed herself off the ladder. Locarno did the same, catching up to her as the rest of the team rounded the corner and followed. By this time, Reed had grown accustomed to moving in zero g and used it to her advantage. Coasting on momentum, she fired off her jets a few times to keep herself centered, traversing the distance to the end of Reston’s saucer section in a matter of minutes. There, she found a disabled lift car parked directly over the second vertical shaft—effectively blocking the only direct route to their objective.

  “Just our luck,” Locarno remarked, floating in next to her. “You want to take this lift, or wait for the next one?”

  Reed approached the car, trying to find a way around it. When that didn’t work, she planted her boots against the wall and gave it a solid push. The car didn’t budge. “Damn thing is stuck tight,” she muttered, just as Harlow arrived with Casari and the rest of the team. “Think I could use a hand over here.”

  The two engineers quickly went to work on the magnetic locks that kept the car on track, disabling the power-cutoff locks so that it could levitate back and forth. Harlow then gave it a firm shove, which made the bulk give a little. Everybody else grabbed hold of the car wherever they could. Coordinating their efforts, they all pushed at the same time—centimeter by centimeter, slowly, until the shaft beneath opened up just wide enough to let a body pass through.

  Cas
ari went up top again and reengaged the locks. The car settled back into place.

  “Ladies first,” Harlow said.

  Reed shuffled over to the edge of the opening and looked down. This shaft seemed even more ominous than the last one, if such a thing was possible. So was the menacing certainty that something awaited them down there—something that stirred in the dark spaces, reacting to their presence, like a predator sensing prey.

  Reed dismissed the notion, which retreated into the depths from which it came. Tapping yet another reserve of strength, she squeezed herself into the opening and wriggled her way down, her helmet barely clearing the narrow slit. “Watch those edges coming through,” she warned the others as she moved out of the way, making room for the next person. “You don’t want to rip a hole in your suit.”