“Understood.” He pressed his combadge. “Picard to the Armory.”
“Battaglia here, sir.”
“Lieutenant. Assemble your team and prepare to beam over to the Borg vessel. Commander La Forge will be transmitting a schematic of their ship’s interior to you shortly; we’ll try to get you directly into the queen’s chamber.” He paused. “Most of the drones are asleep — hibernating, if you will — and you should encounter no resistance from the others. As we discussed, Lieutenant, no more than four people. It shouldn’t take more than that to accomplish your goal.” And no point in risking more . . .
“Aye, Captain.” The edge in Battaglia’s tone was unmistakable. It was the sound of someone who had done battle with the Borg before and knew what to expect now.
As Picard closed the channel, Nave looked up at him expectantly.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“It’s . . . it’s nothing, sir,” she said, flushing as she turned back to the conn.
Picard knew what question had gone unspoken. It would have been unthinkable for her to ask, even more so for Picard to grant the request. But the captain had been in this position before. He knew what the away team was facing. Furthermore, he knew that Nave was friends with them all, and possibly most of all with Lieutenant Battaglia. What Picard was about to do was not exactly within protocol, but then no part of this mission fell within Starfleet standards once he had ignored Admiral Janeway’s orders.
“Counselor, please take the conn,” Picard instructed. This was met with a questioning look from T’Lana and one of great relief from Nave.
“I promise to make this quick,” she said as she stood.
“I will hold you to that, Lieutenant,” he replied. “Five minutes and no more. I need you back at the conn by the time our people are transporting over to the Borg vessel.”
She flushed even more deeply. “Thank you, sir.” And in an instant, she was gone.
• • •
Nave was striding down the corridor just as Lio and his team were heading into the transporter room. He caught sight of her behind him.
They were a fearsome-looking group, with the largest, most powerful, and most sophisticated of the phaser rifles strapped over their shoulders and around their torsos. There were two men, new assignees, whom Nave had recently met — one of them twice her size. And there was Amrita Satchitanand, her former workout partner, a small woman with blue-black hair and full, rounded cheekbones beneath golden eyes. Amrita acknowledged her with a nod, but no one, including Lio, was smiling.
Lio gave her a quick glance and gestured for the rest of the away team to head inside the transporter room without him. He looked different from the man she met every night in the club; his easygoing manner was replaced by deadly seriousness. Even his features seemed sharp, stern: his lips were thin, compressed, his eyes full of a hardness behind which lurked grief. And his body — normally lanky and relaxed — seemed taut, strong.
Certainly he appeared different from the man who had lain in her arms only hours before. Then, his pose as the brooding intellectual had been entirely stripped away. He had looked younger, vulnerable; his manner had been sheepish, sweet, and endearingly awkward. His uncertainty had given Sara confidence; she had taken the initiative, and he had responded resoundingly.
She looked at him now and remembered how his skin had smelled: warm and clean, and masculine. She hadn’t wanted to leave his quarters — as if by staying she could somehow stretch time and keep the Borg and their ship at bay.
“Shouldn’t you be at the conn?” Lio’s tone was urgent but not unkind. He had a mission to accomplish, and Nave realized abruptly how foolish she had been to leave her post now, of all times — especially when she had no idea what she had come to say.
“Good luck,” she said awkwardly, then stopped, disgusted. “No, that’s not it.” She squared her shoulders and stared at him dead-on. “I forgot to say it last night: I love you.” Hardly the most romantic delivery: she had issued orders with more gentleness, more feeling.
It was like watching a Japanese paper lantern suddenly illuminated from the inside. Lio’s face and eyes brightened, and he graced her with one of his brilliant crescent-moon smiles. “Then kiss me,” he said.
She did, swiftly, because there wasn’t time and because this was the most unprofessional thing she’d ever done — while on duty, at least. And then she turned her back to him and headed for the nearest lift.
“Sara.”
She turned.
He was half standing in the entry, his expression once again urgent, serious. “If I don’t make it back, just consider me dead. It’s easier that way.”
His words made her furious. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But . . . in my quarters, on the desk. I left you something. Just in case.”
“I don’t understand,” she called. “What? What did you leave?”
He shook his head to indicate he had to go. “You’ll know. Just in case.”
His words made her inexplicably furious. “There won’t be any ‘just in case,’ ” she insisted, but he had already disappeared behind the door.
• • •
Lio Battaglia materialized on the Borg cube and drew in a breath. Before his eyes could focus, his body tensed at the changed environment. The air was hot, suffocatingly humid, evoking memories of those terrible patrols down the Enterprise corridors, when the Borg had seized the starship and adapted it to their comfort.
He gazed out at a vertiginous view: he and his team stood on the uppermost deck — or, rather, a catwalk with metal conduits that served as railings. The interior of the ship — which looked very much to Lio like its exterior — was a vast, open maze of decking, panels, and exposed circuitry and pipes. Below was an infinite spiral of more decks, more conduits. Beneath them in the metallic jungle, row after row of alcoves held a hundred motionless drones, their bloodless white faces marred by black cybernetic implants, unblinking inhuman eyes, tubing that encircled their hairless skulls. The sight startled Lio as much as it disgusted him: how had so many of them managed to survive?
The sight also evoked the memory of his friend Joel. He had met Joel in the Happy Bottom Riding Club the first night the young ensign had arrived aboard the Enterprise. Joel had had a wicked sense of humor, and he had brought with him a bartender’s guide which, Lio believed, listed every mixed drink (cocktails, Joel called them) ever created. Joel was working his way through the list, and he insisted that Lio join him.
The first night had featured gin and tonics. It was where Lio had first heard of juniper berries. It was the reason he had introduced Sara to the drink the day before.
Lio had lied to Sara: when Joel — or, rather, the thing he had become — had attacked, Lio had fired. The Joel-Borg had stayed on its feet, impervious, until Commander Worf shouted an order for his officers to change the frequency of their phasers. Lio had recalibrated and fired again, this time taking the Joel-Borg down with a blazing, killing blast to its midsection.
It had writhed a second, no more, on the Enterprise deck, then died. And any hope of retrieving whatever remained of Joel had died with it.
Lio had spoken of the incident to no one; all of his fellow survivors had suffered similar traumas when the Borg invaded the Enterprise. Others had certainly been forced to destroy former crewmates. Lio had dealt with it by reminding himself that his hurt was not special.
Yet when he had tried to confess the truth to Sara, he had choked on the words; he had found it easier to lie. He could not bring himself to voice the fact that he had murdered his friend. Picard himself, filled with rage, had ordered them to shoot any assimilated crew members.
But Lio would deal some vengeance to the Borg today; he intended to take no small amount of pleasure in destroying the queen. And then he would return to the Enterprise, and Sara, where he would begin a new and better phase of his life. He had not thought, before he met Sara, that he w
ould ever let himself become entangled in a permanent relationship. She, of all people, should understand the dangers of family life aboard a starship: her own parents had died serving aboard the Lowe, though she never spoke of it. He had learned about their deaths not from her but one of their crewmates.
For Sara, he was willing to live dangerously. But he was not willing to live without her.
He refocused himself immediately. It took him a minute to gather his bearings; they’d materialized some thirty meters from their destination. He nodded to his team. “This way.”
He’d assembled a good group. Amrita Satchitanand was the most experienced, with the steadiest nerves he’d ever seen; she was his backup in case his attempt to destroy the queen somehow failed. Jorge Costas — lumbering and extraordinarily tall, yet with brilliantly fast reflexes — and Noel DeVrie, a deadly shot, would provide cover.
“Remember,” he said, hefting the phaser rifle as they began to move, “no firing unless attacked. We can move freely among them so long as they don’t perceive us as a threat.”
Their steps rang hollowly against the metal decking. It was eerily silent, save for the faint, distant hum of engines. There were no voices here, no movement; a dim grayish light strobed overhead, emphasizing the profound lack of color, of life. Lio focused and suppressed his fear, his memories of Joel. It would all be over quickly: one shot, and the queen would be destroyed and all the Borg rendered harmless. All so easy . . .
Their destination was the only enclosed chamber in the vessel. At the open entryway, Lio paused.
Inside the vast interior, the light was even dimmer, with a greenish cast.
Lio pressed his combadge and breathed, “Captain Picard . . . We have found the queen.” He closed the channel.
On a table, encased in a gleaming gelatinous substance, lay a pale monstrosity: a bald head and shoulders, and a spinal cord that emerged, bloody and serpentine, from the incomplete mass of flesh. The features were bland, regular, utterly androgynous, but nearby, a Borg drone worked on a shiny black form set upon a pedestal, the missing two-thirds of the body, which bore decidedly feminine attributes.
Above the queen’s table, dark tubes extended downward — one inserted directly into her/its flesh, the second excreting more of the gelatinous medium. Two drones oversaw the procedure. A third drone was just finishing grotesque surgery on the supine figure encased in the gel: the amputation of a cybernetic arm.
An easy thing, to quickly kill . . . Lio was about to lift his rifle when he heard a scream behind him.
He should have continued the motion. He should have pressed the trigger — should have, but the instinct to protect his crewmates was too strong. He turned.
Borg drones had moved in behind them. A quartet, one for each member of the away team. It was DeVrie, leading up the rear, who had screamed. He had already dropped his weapon and fallen to his knees, dead — a whirring saw at the end of a drone’s prosthetic arm had gone straight through his chest. At the same instant that DeVrie dropped forward into the spreading stain of his own blood, a second Borg lunged forward, piercing through Costas’s midsection with a spiraling blade that split the man in half. Lio paused for the briefest moment as he realized that the Borg weren’t assimilating, they were butchering.
The moment was short. Both Lio and Amrita fired at the Borg who had so swiftly killed their friends. The drones dropped, but two more were advancing. Lio fired again, only to watch the beam bounce harmlessly off its target. With echoes of Worf’s voice in his head, he shouted to Amrita, “Recalibrate the frequency!”
She did so but too late. The drone was upon her, and Lio’s assassin was again advancing, slightly more than an arm’s length away now. In his peripheral vision, he realized that the drones tending the queen were also moving in to intercept the intruders.
As he struggled to ignore the sounds of what the Borg were doing to Amrita’s body, Lio had a dark thought: At least I won’t become one of them.
Before he could prepare himself for death, he knew that his first and last duty was to the Enterprise, and he had critical information for those who survived him.
The drone reached for his shoulder. In the final moment, everything slowed. Lio looked into the face of his attacker — the chalky flesh surrounded by black — and thought, with an odd sense of be-mused detachment, how Terrans had so often personified Death as pale-faced, cloaked in black.
At the same time, he studied the Borg’s features — so colorless, so devoid of character or individuality — and felt pity.
Most of all, he felt sad for Sara. She would weep when she went to his quarters; he felt deep regret for the sorrow his death would cause her. He had wanted so badly to return to her, to love her, to make her life happy.
Enveloping it all was mortal fear — and its opposite, fearlessness, at the realization that others would follow him, that Captain Picard would never permit the Borg to win. His death would be avenged.
Calm acceptance washed over him as the Borg took him by the throat. But the fear was renewed when instead of a violent death, he felt only the cold metal of a Borg tubule piercing his neck. At the same moment, Lio punched his combadge and shouted . . .
“Enterprise! They attack on sight! Repeat: They now attack . . .”
6
“Enterprise! They attack on sight! Repeat: They now attack. . .”
Picard was on his feet, but only briefly. The lieutenant’s voice was replaced by a shrill sound that knifed through the captain’s brain and brought him to his knees. At first, he thought the sound was only in his head — like the song of the Borg — until he saw that the entire bridge crew was similarly doubled over.
“Sever the connection,” Picard called out to the communications officer, but the young man had already dropped to the floor in agony.
In two leaping steps, Worf reached the communications console and worked the controls. “The Borg have piggybacked a signal onto the lieutenant’s comm,” he shouted over the whine. “I cannot terminate the . . . Incoming!”
The bridge rocked as the Enterprise was hit by a tremendous blow. The few officers still on their feet fell to the ground. Nave and T’Lana had both been thrown from their chairs.
“Shields are down,” La Forge reported as he pulled himself back up to the console.
“Lieutenant Nave, take us out of weapons range!” Picard ordered as a second burst hit the ship.
The lieutenant struggled back to the conn, squinting in pain as the piercing sound grew impossibly louder. With a few commands, she brought the ship around and punched in a course that would take them as far away from the Borg ship as they could allow. As they sped away, the noise finally stopped.
“I’ve cut the connection to Lieutenant Battaglia’s combadge,” Worf reported.
“We’ve got shields,” La Forge said.
Picard looked to his two officers. They had been through this before — and much worse — yet he knew the looks of shock on their faces as they continued to work at their stations mirrored his own. The Borg never lashed out so quickly, unless they were in attack mode. “I want a full —”
“The cube beamed something into sickbay while the shields were down,” Worf said. “Readings are unclear.”
Beverly!
Picard was immobilized for a fraction of a second. Though the rest of the bridge crew would have hardly noticed, to the captain, it felt like an eternity. The Borg were after Beverly. Somehow, they had sensed the connection and read his thoughts. They were hitting him personally, going for blood.
“Bridge to sickbay,” Picard commanded.
Worf and Picard both went for the turbolift, when Beverly’s voice filled the air. “Sickbay to the bridge.” There was something hollow about her voice, calm yet emotionless. The tone stopped Picard.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“The Borg,” she said, halting.
“We’re on our way,” Picard said with a glance to Worf. He knew they both shouldn’t leave the bridge, but he’d
be damned if he was going to stay behind.
“No,” she said. “It’s not drones. It’s the away team. The Borg have returned their bodies . . . or, rather, what remained.”
Picard felt a flush of relief. The Borg hadn’t noticed the connection and sent a personal attack. They had merely sent the bodies to the most logical location on the ship.
The bodies.
He had failed them. He had done the one thing he had sworn he would never do: lose even one more of his crew to the Borg. With his eyes focused on the bridge personnel, his mind finished Battaglia’s last utterance: They now attack on sight.
He had assumed that the Borg would react to the away team as they always had to humans who posed no direct threat — that they would ignore them. He had assumed . . . and been wrong. How had he not known? He had been correct on everything else; he had known about the existence of the unborn queen, the location of the Borg cube . . .
But he had not known about the Borg’s new tactic of attacking all intruders. Or their murderous intentions. His imperfect connection to the hive mind was a defect, a flaw, that had to be corrected, and swiftly.
• • •
Sickbay was filled to capacity, and yet there was none of the chaos typical in triage. The brief attack on the ship had resulted in about a dozen minor injuries to the crew, the most serious being Ensign Wahl’s broken leg from a fall from a ladder in engineering. As in any emergency situation, the entire medical staff had reported for duty and were tending to the patients. And yet the room was almost as quiet as it would be when it was empty. The reason was clear to Beverly as she conducted her autopsy on the remains of the away team.
The attack had been particularly vicious, far more so than anything she had seen the Borg inflict previously. Their bodies had been destroyed . . . desecrated. It was almost like their attackers had taken joy in the killing. There seemed no clear reason why the Borg would send back the dead instead of assimilating them. It ran counter to everything she had experienced when dealing with the Borg in the past. Her scans revealed nothing beyond the horrific way the away team died. There were no clues to what the Borg were planning.
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