Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins

by Dayton Ward

  “Nick!” Reed called out.

  Neither of them dared touch Casari. They could feel the heat coming off him even at a distance, as his face contorted into a soundless scream. Holes extended into his temples from where the nanoprobes had gone in, red blood coagulating to black. It was as if the Borg inside was tearing him apart to get out.

  Reed’s communicator sounded off.

  “Skipper, bridge,” Rayna Massey said. “You better get up here.”

  She mouthed the word at first, unable to speak as she witnessed Casari’s assimilation. This was her future. Their future.

  “Report,” she finally spoke.

  “Unidentified contact, max range. I think it’s Starfleet.”

  Locarno turned to Reed, like a condemned man facing his executioner. Reed, meanwhile, drew a long breath as she weighed their limited options.

  “Best evasive,” she ordered. “We’re on our way.”

  Locarno motioned toward Casari. “What about him?”

  Her thumb caressed the trigger of her phaser. One more blast would end Casari’s misery—and make it that much easier when it was her turn. But something inside her, some species memory, wouldn’t allow it.

  “Leave him,” she said, and left without looking back.

  The corridor compressed into a jumble of illusory artifacts and points of light, every detail flashing past in stop-motion continuity. Nicole Carson could taste her body’s reaction to that imperative, survival asserting itself just as her training had taught her, and she used it to fuel her flight, focusing every impulse on her objective. She had memorized the way to auxiliary control, long before coming aboard, and could find it in total darkness if needed; and she had made provisions for just this contingency, with a stockpile of small arms and a thruster suit she had scavenged from Reston’s emergency stores.

  Carson ran toward her destination with mechanical efficiency, moving swiftly but never in a panic, stopping every few meters to check her six in case the others had decided to pursue. When the alert klaxon sounded, blaring through the narrow space with its doomsayer wail, she thought it was a bluff at first, some attempt by Reed to slow her down or flush her out; but it soon became apparent that nobody was coming after her, and that the alarm—which sounded a call to general quarters—was real, probably triggered automatically by the ship’s defensive systems. That kind of alert could only mean one thing: an enemy vessel in close proximity.

  The Feds are here.

  Carson picked up the pace, bypassing her precautions so she could cover more ground. Auxiliary control was still two full sections away, and she didn’t have much time. By her calculations, it would take at least seven minutes to suit up and get to the shuttlebay, which she had already programmed to open on a delay once she sent the command. A starship within sensor range wouldn’t take much longer than that to ascertain Reston’s identity and begin its attack run, and by then Carson had every intention of blasting through space with a thruster strapped to her back.

  The ship lurched to port, a hard evasive turn. Carson grabbed hold of a support pylon, fighting off a sudden wave of vertigo. The going wasn’t easy with the corridor starting to spin around her, and she squeezed her eyes shut for the brief moment it took for the sensation to pass. She thought about the odds against her, the chances that the Feds would ignore her distress signal even if they picked up on it—but even so, they were better than the odds of remaining on board.

  And Carson had no desire to die for the likes of the man who had sent her here.

  She pushed off, making it a few steps before the ship reeled again. This time Reston spiraled downward, gravity taking less than a second to compensate—but that was enough to knock Carson off balance and send her careening toward the deck. She dropped her phaser, both hands reaching out to blunt the impact—until something yanked her back, a grip so strong that it dug into her shoulders like a pair of sharp hooks. Her feet left the deck entirely, kicking through empty air before her body traversed the full width of the corridor and slammed into the bulkhead.

  Head cracking against cold metal, Carson felt her legs melt beneath her—but she didn’t crumble. Instead, she remained hanging on the wall, pinned there by some immutable force. She blinked several times, the blur before her eyes resolving itself into a gothic visage. It regarded her not with the impassive detachment that she expected, but a smoldering fury that metastasized into something far more malevolent because it could not find release. In that countenance, Carson saw pure, distilled evil—a perfect reflection of her own.

  Chris Thayer, a Borg shell of himself, twisted his mouth into a vampiric snarl.

  “Go ahead,” Carson rasped. “Assimilate me.”

  Thayer didn’t.

  But before the screaming stopped, before he finished with her, Carson begged him to.

  The turbolift doors opened onto an abandoned bridge, with just Rayna Massey left to man the conn. Reed felt a palpable emptiness as she walked in, even with Locarno at her side, each of them taking solemn measure of one another. Her team had numbered seven when they beamed over, and now there were only three—three of them left to handle the ship, against whatever approached through the electrified mists of the Korso Spanse.

  “What’s our status, Rayna?” Reed asked, circling around to the command chair.

  “Contact appears to be a Nova class,” Massey said, as Locarno relieved her at the conn. She patched the image to the main viewer before heading back up to tactical. “Bearing three-two-zero, parallel to our flank.”

  “Probably the same ship we tangled with before,” Locarno observed.

  “Persistent bastards,” Reed said. “Any idea if they’ve seen us?”

  “Negative,” Massey replied, checking her own display. “Looks like he’s heading toward Celtic’s last position. Picking up active sensor sweeps in the area of the debris field.”

  Reed tossed a sideways glance toward the ready room, and the large gash where there used to be a door. Inside, hidden away in the dark, she could sense a crippled Tristan Harlow without seeing him—the same way she sensed a growing connection with Casari and Thayer, something that stirred her blood and plugged her in to a wider consciousness. Reed shook her head and tried to clear it, using the sights and sounds around her like white noise—for as long as that lasted.

  “We can only make like a hole in the sky for so long,” she decided. “Once they pick up our fuel trail, we’ve had it.”

  Massey stared at the tiny moving dot on the screen. “What do we do?”

  Locarno tried his controls, the useless panel refusing every trick.

  “I got nothing,” he breathed. “We’re out of options.”

  “No,” Reed countered. “We’re not.”

  Both of them looked at her, their faces a cross between hope and terror.

  “But it all depends on how much you want to live.”

  Massey and Locarno had a silent exchange. If either one of them showed the slightest doubt, Reed would call it off and accept their fate at the hands of Starfleet—but neither of them did. As they turned back toward her, she knew they had made up their minds. Dying wasn’t the issue. They just didn’t want their lives to end like this.

  And neither did Reed.

  “The control routine,” she said to Locarno. “Can you modify it so that all command functions are routed through the crew instead of the main computer?”

  Locarno thought about it for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Then you better hurry.”

  Locarno nodded, understanding. He then rushed over to the engineering station to complete the programming, while Massey looked on, confused and anxious. “What’s that supposed to do?” she asked. “I thought we couldn’t do anything with the ship’s computer.”

  “We can’t. Not until he drops the firewall.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “What was always going to happen,” Reed told her. “We assimilate.”

  Massey shivered inside the regeneration chambe
r, more scared and vulnerable than Reed had ever seen her. All the bravado, all the posturing that had made her the toughest privateer in Evan Walsh’s crew, was gone. She was just a woman now, exactly like Reed—human, but only in the present tense. What awaited beyond that, nobody could know.

  As Reed strapped Massey in, the chamber’s circuitry began to hum and pulsate. The core matrix sensed Massey’s presence, matching her body’s rhythms in a display of eager anticipation, biometric fields cascading over her like water in a drowning pool. She reached out and touched Reed’s arm, pleading with her eyes.

  “Will I still be me?” Massey asked. “Even if it’s just a piece.”

  Reed smiled. “You can’t put out that kind of fire, Rayna.”

  Massey nodded, preparing herself for what came next. Slowly, Reed closed the door and sealed her in, watching from behind the glass as Massey closed her eyes. Her features softened, assuming a kind of peace—or, at the very least, acceptance. Perhaps it was only what Reed wanted to see, but if so, she was grateful for the illusion.

  She moved on to Locarno. He appeared the same as when she first met him, projecting that same reckless confidence. In that moment, Reed felt as if she had known him for years—and wondered if she would remember him the same way after they changed.

  “It’s kind of fitting when you think about it,” Locarno said. “The man becomes machine. Not a bad way to go for a gridstalker.”

  “We’ll find out who did this, Nick.”

  He gave her a sympathetic look.

  “I mean it,” she implored. “Promise me you’ll hold on to that.”

  Locarno couldn’t refuse her.

  “I promise,” he said. “We won’t let anybody stop us.”

  Reed took his hand and squeezed it tight. She didn’t want to let go, but he was fading already, along with her capacity to connect with him on a flesh-and-blood level. For her, the world had narrowed to an interface, bits of data coalescing into a new reality. As Reed closed the door on him, severing her final human contact, she cast off the last of her emotions—except for her anger, which burned like a glowing ember in an endless night.

  That was her anchor, her purpose. And she swore never to lose sight of it.

  Stepping into her own chamber, Reed didn’t need to seal herself in. The others had gathered there, as she knew they would, to await her transcendence. Thayer and Casari did it with a care and precision akin to reverence, acknowledging Reed’s previous incarnation while ushering her into the next. And when the assimilation began, she borrowed their strength and made it her own, even as the core matrix ripped the consciousness from her body and merged it with the collective whole.

  The agony spanned time and space, then collapsed in on itself.

  And on the other side emerged hunger, the kind that devoured worlds.

  Captain Rivellini saw past Norfolk’s viewscreen, probing the Spanse with his own instincts and taking measure of the wreckage that drifted past his ship. He already had the vessel identified by the time the sensor sweep was done, but waited for his people to confirm.

  “Mass and dimensions match the merchant vessel we intercepted,” the ops officer reported. “So do the markings. It’s definitely Celtic, Captain.”

  Rivellini maintained an outward detachment, but the destruction of any vessel—even one he was hunting—made him nervous. He stood up from the command chair, walking toward the screen while the bridge crew looked on. Blast patterns on the remains of Celtic’s hull indicated phaser fire, but not conclusively. The way the rest of the ship had broken apart, with entire sections separated from one another at the seams, could just as easily have been caused by a massive structural failure.

  “What the hell happened here?” Rivellini muttered.

  “Captain,” the tactical officer said, his panel beeping. “I just detected a stream of ionized gases. Could be a thruster trail.”

  “Direction?”

  “Off the starboard.”

  “Defensive posture,” Rivellini ordered, returning to his chair as Yellow Alert sounded. “Full active sweep. If something’s out there, I want to see it.”

  “Aye, sir,” tactical replied, and almost immediately his panel lit up. “Positive contact, bearing zero-four-zero—range, five hundred thousand kilometers.”

  “Identify.”

  The tactical officer looked at his display, eyes darting back and forth in confusion. “This can’t be right,” he said, running through the scan again—and coming up with the same result. “Captain, our sensors are picking up what appears to be a Federation starship. There’s some interference from the cloud . . . but it looks like a Nebula class, sir.”

  Rivellini frowned. “That’s impossible.”

  “Verified, sir. She’s the real deal.”

  “One-half impulse power!” the captain snapped. “Plot an intercept course!”

  A proximity alarm went off.

  “Contact is already moving to intercept us,” the conn officer said. “Closing fast.”

  “Raise shields!”

  “Incoming!” tactical shouted—half a second before the first salvo hit.

  Norfolk rocked under the blunt force of impact, her frame groaning from stem to stern. As she began to roll, the starship roared past on the viewscreen, releasing aft torpedoes in her wake. One of them struck Norfolk amidships, while the others exploded fore and aft. The resulting shock wave shattered consoles across the bridge, gravity and inertia canceling each other out and tossing crewmen back and forth. Rivellini grabbed hold of his chair and hauled himself up, smoke burning his eyes as he tried to make sense of it all.

  “Emergency power!” he ordered. “Give me some room to maneuver!”

  “I can’t get engineering!” ops answered. “Nobody’s responding!”

  “Then get me a weapons lock!”

  “Fire control is down!” tactical replied. “I need a minute to bypass!”

  Looking up through the static on the viewer, Rivellini knew they didn’t have that kind of time. Reston had swung around and now approached on a kill vector, her weapons locked. He kept going over the reasons why a Federation starship would want to destroy them—and it was only then that he noticed the starship’s true configuration.

  “No,” he whispered, as the Borg ship coasted to a halt.

  It hung there, suspended over them, as an abject quiet settled over the bridge. Everyone stared at that image, nobody daring to move or make a sound, as the seconds ticked into minutes. But still nothing happened. Rivellini picked himself up, straightening his uniform jacket while he cleared his throat, speaking the words no captain ever wanted to utter.

  “Signal enemy vessel,” he said. “Is it their intention to discuss terms?”

  The comm officer opened a channel, but received no response.

  “Ask them what they want.”

  Again, the Borg ship refused to answer. After a few moments, however, it broke off from Norfolk and pushed into the debris field, where it drifted among the Celtic’s remains and collected all the pieces. One by one, it assimilated them all—and when it finished, the Borg ship turned about and withdrew. It shrank into the distance as it left the Korso Spanse, farther and farther until it was only a speck.

  Then it disappeared into warp, gone in a relativistic shimmer.

  “Alert Starfleet Command,” Rivellini intoned. “Inform them that the Borg are back.”

  Sloth

  Work Is Hard

  Greg Cox

  Historian’s Note

  This story takes place in the year 2370 (ACE) just after the discovery of the interphasic organisms infecting the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D warp core (“Phantasms”) and before Ambassador Lwaxana Troi comes aboard the ship with the Cairn (“Dark Page”).

  Captain’s book, today.

  Went a long way. Will go more tomorrow. We are far from home.

  Not right now.”

  Aadnalurg, captain of the Pakled freighter Rorpot, waved away Snollicoob, his chief engineer. A
comfy chair supported his ponderous bulk as he rested in his stateroom, adjacent to the bridge. The delta-shaped chamber was dominated by a squat, cluttered desk made of dull orange metal. Outside a metal porthole, distant stars streaked past at warp speed. The captain scowled at Snollicoob for intruding on his privacy; he did not feel like looking over any boring maintenance reports at the moment. It was time for his lunch and then maybe a nap. A tray of replicated leviathan blubber rested on top of his desk, next to a mug of steaming raktajino. The refreshing Klingon beverage was just one innovation that the Pakleds had adopted as their own. A nearby couch beckoned to him.

  He stifled a yawn. It was hard work being a captain, telling people what to do. He would look at those reports tomorrow. Or maybe the day after that.

  “But the reports are ready,” Snollicoob protested. He stood before the captain, holding out a padd full of data. Like the captain, he was a heavyset humanoid clad in a layered brown uniform made of thick, quilted fabric. Bushy brown eyebrows, meeting above his nose, climbed toward a receding hairline, giving him a perpetually bemused expression. What little hair he had was slicked back from his forehead. Squinty brown eyes were sunken beneath the heavy brows. Horizontal facial folds creased his cheeks. A tool belt girded his waist. Typical of Pakleds, his verbal abilities were distinctly limited. “You should read them. Now.”

  “Later.” Aadnalurg disliked repeating himself; it was too much work. A medallion upon his chest proclaimed his rank. He took the padd from Snollicoob and put it aside, atop a stack of navigational reports and sensor readings he was going to look at sometime soon. When he found the time. The padd teetered precariously atop the pile. “My eyes are tired.”

  Maintenance reports always put him to sleep. Besides, he would rather play with his pet slug. Snirgli wriggled upon his lap. Its tentacles protruded over the edge of the desk, sniffing the captain’s lunch. Aadnalurg plucked a tiny morsel of blubber from the tray and fed it to the greedy mollusk. Its mottled yellow skin glistened wetly. Over ten centimeters long, from head to tail, Snirgli stretched eagerly for the treat. Aadnalurg chuckled at the slug’s appetite. He licked his greasy fingertips. The replicated blubber tasted almost as good as the real thing.