“As if we didn’t have enough to worry about,” Locarno groaned, sliding into the hole and dropping in next to her. “You always this much fun?”
“Only when I’m trying not to get killed.”
Reed dunked Locarno to keep him going. As he spiraled downward, she stood by and ushered the rest of the party through, helping to guide each of them. Nicole Carson was last, and the one who had the most trouble. She snagged her medkit, tangling herself into a knot of loose straps and jerking limbs. By the time Reed could reach her, Carson was almost in a full panic. She paid no attention to Reed’s orders for her to stop. Reed had to grab a knife from her pocket and cut the straps before Carson even realized she was there—and only then did the medic begin to calm down and allow Reed to pull her out.
Carson’s muscles were rigid against the fabric of her suit. Reed spun her around, hurriedly searching for signs of a tear, but found no obvious leaks.
“Jesus,” she exhaled. “You scared me, Nicole.”
Carson smiled weakly, a haggard expression peppered with beads of nervous sweat. “Sorry I got hung up there,” she said, finally relaxing—except for her eyes, which refused to settle on a single direction. “Thanks for the assist.”
“Are you up to this?”
“I’m fine,” Carson assured her. “Just a little claustrophobic.”
“I need everybody sharp. We can’t afford any mistakes.”
“Don’t worry about me,” the medic replied, then descended with the rest of the boarding party. Reed wasn’t fully convinced, and remained behind long enough to wonder if Carson might pose a problem. It would be easy to use that as an excuse to request an immediate beam-out, and make it that much harder for Evan Walsh to continue with this mission. Part of Reed thought she would be doing everyone a favor.
But you won’t do that, will you? Because he gave you an order.
And Jenna Reed always followed orders.
A bloom of sparks vaporized the gloom before spreading out across the shaft, the embers dying off as quickly as Tristan Harlow’s phaser torch cast them. The engineer used it to cut through the door seam on Deck 25, finishing the job in a matter of minutes; but as the torch extinguished and its sputtering ceased, the hard reality of opening the door dawned on each member of the boarding party. They passed that same, gruesome stare off to one another, like soldiers in those law few seconds before a combat drop.
Harlow lowered his torch and looked back at Reed.
“Go,” she said.
James Casari whipped out an extensible crowbar, which he wedged into the ragged seam. He worked it back and forth a few times, enough for Harlow to get his fingers through the crack, and together both men forced the doors open. They parted about three-quarters of the way before jamming, but that was more than enough to afford a view of the other side, which gradually unmasked itself through a haze of smoke and ionized particles.
Jenna Reed hadn’t thought it possible for a chill to bite through her envirosuit, but it did. She remained motionless, her gaze directed on that opening, her mind processing images with illusion but finding the reality even more ghastly than her imagination. There, under the pale ticking glow of the alert lights, Reed saw death staring back at her in its most wicked form: eternal and irrevocable, yet imbued with a cruel veneer of life.
It might have been human at one time, or one of a dozen other races, but none of that mattered now. The pallor of its skin and the mechanical prosthetic that covered its left eye conjured up only a single species.
Borg.
“Holy mother of God,” Chris Thayer whispered.
Rayna Massey scowled. “God’s got nothing to do with this.”
Reed drifted toward the entry, unable to resist so powerful a lure. Locarno reached out to stop her, but she brushed him aside. Climbing through the broken doors, she attached her boots to the deck and stood there—the flow of her own blood thundering in her ears, vision constricting into the space between her and the Borg drone.
Only the head and shoulders were visible, recessed behind the mottled glass of a regeneration chamber. The one organic eye remained open and sunken deep into its socket, the skin desiccated and taut against its skull. With its jaw frozen agape, the drone seemed to convey the horror of its last moments—or perhaps the horror its kind had visited upon so many others.
Reed lumbered closer, her movements heavy and mechanical. Unnervingly, she caught a glimpse of her own reflection superimposed over the drone, forming a composite visage that seemed so alien and yet so familiar. In that moment, she could easily imagine their roles reversed: What if it had been me on board a ship like this? Would I have let it happen? Or would I have taken myself out before they could take me?
“This one’s dead,” Reed announced.
“Maybe,” Locarno said, “but what about them?”
Only then did Reed turn and see the other chambers, one after the other, in a line that extended down the entire length of the corridor until it bent around a corner and led out of sight. Reed estimated thirty or forty chambers going in both directions, but lost count after that. There were probably hundreds more scattered throughout the ship.
“Frag me,” Harlow breathed. Like the rest of the boarding party, he had his weapon drawn, and swept the barrel back and forth, just waiting for the slightest provocation to open fire. “Are they all like this?”
Reed looked at Nicole Carson. “Tricorder.”
The medic used the device to scan as far as its sensors could go. “No life signs within five hundred square meters,” she reported, reading off the tiny screen. “No power signatures coming off these tubes, either.”
“Poor bastards,” Casari observed. “That ain’t no way to die.”
“You could’ve fooled me,” Rayna Massey said, floating down the line and inspecting the chambers up close. “These guys look perfectly preserved.”
Locarno sidled up to Reed, checking out the drone that had drawn her attention. Unlike the others, this one showed signs of decomposition—which Locarno traced to a large crack in the glass near the base of the chamber. “There,” he said, pointing it out to her. “There must have been some damage before the Borg retreated into stasis.”
“Why go into stasis at all?” Chris Thayer asked.
“Fallback position,” Locarno said. “At some point, they got cut off from the larger Collective—maybe after the ship entered the Korso Spanse. After that, they would have gone into sleep mode while they tried to reestablish contact.”
“Which never happened,” Reed finished.
“They just kept on waiting,” Carson said, as if talking in a dream. “They could have been drifting out here forever.”
Something in her tone frightened Reed—not because she was afraid that Carson was losing it, but because she felt the same creeping disconnect from reality. Just being here was like immersion in a sensory deprivation tank, with a thousand lifeless eyes watching their every move. No rational being could continue to function long under those conditions—and even now, her people were starting to get strung out. More than ever, Reed just wanted to get the job done and get the hell out of here.
She checked her mission clock. Thirty-six minutes had elapsed.
“Celtic, advance team,” she spoke into her transmitter. “Checking in.”
The reply was garbled, barely audible—but there, like a lifeline.
“Go, Jenna.”
“We’re on Deck Twenty-five and headed for engineering,” she advised. “Confirmed Borg presence on board, unknown number.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Looks like they’re all dead, Skipper.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I think so. We’ll continue to assume hostiles until we can verify that the rest of the ship is secure.”
“Proceed . . . try to maintain . . . transporter lock . . . emergency beam-out.”
Reed’s jaw tightened. Try to maintain. Nobody liked the sound of that.
“Understood,” she replied. “Advan
ce team out.”
They stood like sentinels alongside the long passageways, their sarcophagi lined up next to one another in perfect symmetry. Reed tried not to look at them, their cadaverous stares not nearly as disturbing as the utter sameness of them all—and the knowledge that each one had once been an individual like her. It was almost impossible to imagine the vast, unyielding hunger that had devoured their souls.
Or that such a thing could ever truly die.
Reed was grateful for the sight of the blast door that sealed off main engineering. Tristan Harlow opened the lock mechanism, splicing a portable battery to the exposed leads so he could run a bypass. The duranium door then popped open, lifting just enough for the engineer to roll underneath and get inside. Five minutes later, the overheads started to click on: a sudden, blinding surge of lights that flooded the corridor and spread outward like fresh blood flowing through Reston’s arteries.
Reed held a hand up to shield her eyes as the blast door retracted into the ceiling. It locked back into place with a jarring thump, much louder than she would have expected in such a thin atmosphere. In addition to the lights, Harlow had obviously gotten the air flowing again.
He emerged with a smug expression. “Will miracles never cease?”
The rest of the team followed Harlow into the cavernous engineering space. Reed stopped next to the railing that encircled a dormant warp core, craning her head to get a look at the full length of the translucent vessel. Although the interior was dark, green status lights flashed intermittently at each service juncture—confirmation that the containment fields for the Reston’s antimatter had retained their integrity. Whatever else her condition, at least the ship’s power plant remained intact.
Everything else, however, was up for grabs.
Reed had never seen the interior of a Nebula class before, but she knew Federation technology—and nothing here had been left untouched by the Borg. She recognized the basic layout of all the panels and interfaces, but all of them had been rigged one way or another in some strange, haphazard fashion. Thick cables of glowing fiber snaked their way around the floors and ceilings, forming a complex web of interconnected nodes, while the large status screens that had once encircled engineering had been torn out of the walls and replaced with what appeared to be holographic constructs. Alien symbols poured out of an imaging mist—textual information in what Reed could only assume was some kind of Borg code. She watched them for a time, fascinated by the complex display, but could only imagine what it all meant.
Maybe it knows we’re here.
Reed turned to Locarno, trying to read his take. If his scowl was any clue, he was thinking the same thing.
“I managed to jack into the auxiliary,” Harlow explained, walking over to one of the side panels. “At least what’s left of it. The internal circuitry is the same, but there’s been a hell of a lot of external rerouting.”
“Can you make sense of it?” Reed asked.
“Enough to get partial power,” the engineer said, pointing toward the fiber links around them. “What we’ve got here is tapping into one of the backup generators, which gets us lights and life support on this deck—at least in the immediate sections. And one more thing,” he finished, touching a button on the variable interface. “I thought you all might enjoy a little bit of gravity.”
Reed felt a building pressure on her legs as the full weight of her body started to reassert itself. Harlow increased the pull gradually, giving everyone time to adjust before pumping it up to a full g, but even then each movement seemed sluggish. It took a few moments before Reed felt safe enough to turn off her magnetic boots.
By then, Harlow had already peeled his helmet off. The others quickly followed suit, sweat trickling down their faces even as their breath turned to fog in the frigid air. “It’ll start warming up in a few minutes,” the engineer said, “once the atmosphere makes a pass through the scrubbers.”
Reed coughed, stale trace elements settling at the back of her throat. Even the air seemed alien, somehow out of phase. “How long until you can get the other generators online?”
“Less than an hour,” Casari said. “They should give us enough power and heat to operate in our critical areas—here, the bridge, auxiliary control.”
“And the computer cores,” Locarno interjected.
The engineer shot him a harsh glance. “If need be.”
“You’ll need some form of core control if you want to get the intermix working,” Locarno informed Reed. “The calculations to get a cold start on the impulse engines are just too complex to handle from here.”
Reed took him at his word, giving Harlow a nod that told him to make it happen.
“In any case,” the engineer continued, “it’ll get us over the hump until we can fully restore auxiliary power. Once we’re under way, we can start working on the warp drive. Hell, I might even get you a couple of phaser banks before we hit dry dock.”
“Let’s hope we won’t need them,” Reed said warmly, squeezing Harlow’s arm and then sending him and Casari on their way. While they started breaking apart the consoles, she and Locarno returned to the large holographic display. They stood for a time in front of the projection, which stretched from floor to ceiling, transfixed by the arrangement of glyphs and pulses. Reed actually reached out to touch the imaging mist, which rippled around her fingers like a pool of water, hoping to divine some hidden meaning. “Any idea what it says?”
Locarno shook his head. “It does have a certain logic to it, though.”
Reed understood what he meant. It was like listening to a language she had never heard before, baffled by the words but inferring the context.
Can you hear them, Jenna? Can you hear them calling?
“They are all dead,” Reed asked. “Aren’t they?”
“I think they’re all in there,” Locarno said, motioning toward the display. “Every thought, every impulse, every action—reduced to some data stream with nobody left to understand it.” He paused for a long, heavy moment. “They may be dead, but they never really left.”
Reed turned toward him, searching for some trace of irony but finding none.
“You have work to do,” she said.
“So do you,” Locarno replied as he walked away. “More than you know.”
Tristan Harlow delivered on his promise, firing up the last of the backup generators and bringing Reston back to a semblance of life. Internal sensors mapped out the pockets of life support that rushed in to fill the void, which carved out narrow passages of breathable air. The rest of the ship remained in vacuum, isolated from the sections where the advance team would perform their work—a hedge against the remote possibility that they had somehow missed any Borg survivors.
Jenna Reed had everyone download the safe zones to their padds and also commit them to memory. From there she broke everyone up into pairs, leaving Harlow and Casari behind in engineering and taking the rest of the team to secure the ship. The only exception was Locarno, who retreated to the starboard computer core. Reed didn’t like the idea of sending him there alone, but she had no choice. With only four more people at her disposal, she already had far more territory than she could ever hope to cover.
Reed sent Massey and Thayer aft toward the hangar deck, while she took Carson with her and started going forward. She wanted to keep a close watch on her medical officer, in case there was a repeat of the incident in the turboshaft; but as they moved deeper and deeper into the unexplored recesses of Reston’s hull, an almost surreal composure descended over Carson. Even as they encountered dozens more Borg drones, some of them in various states of decay, her clinical detachment never wavered. Neither did the cold spark behind Carson’s eyes—which disconcerted Reed even more than her earlier panic.
Over the next two hours, Carson’s tricorder sweeps only confirmed their grisly discoveries: death and more death, with no end in sight. Most disturbing were the corpses that wore remnants of their Starfleet uniforms, bits and pieces of a forgo
tten life interwoven with their Borg prosthetics and body armor. It made Reed feel a connection with them that she didn’t want, which made her hate—and fear—them all the more.
She tapped her communicator. “Massey, this is Reed.”
“Go ahead.”
“What’s your status?”
“We got nothing but dead slags here. You?”
“The same,” Reed signaled back, releasing a long breath. “Pack it in for now. Meet me on the bridge in ten minutes.”
Auxiliary power came online by the time she and Carson made it back, tripping the various consoles and causing them to flicker at random. The main viewer also engaged, pixels arranging and rearranging themselves, until a grainy image finally coalesced out of the static. Out there, Celtic pitched a slow orbit around Reston, hovering off the center of the screen like some blurry artifact. Her running lights punched a hole through the glowing elements of the Korso Spanse, thrusters leaving behind a cometary trail.
Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins Page 39