Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (53 page)

“Tristan—” she gasped. “Please—
don’t . . .”

He hesitated, a human spark deep within the inhuman well of his eye.

“It is already done.”

Harlow plunged the probe into Reed’s neck. The scolex buried itself deep within her flesh, writhing tendrils penetrating the length of her veins—

—until the ship exploded around her, and all was heat and light.

The blast wave entered from behind, pushing a cloud of cinders and debris, as if someone had tossed in a flash grenade. Reed felt the probe withdraw just before the concussion hit—a wall of sheer force that should have mowed Harlow down, and her along with him. Somehow he stayed upright, though his grip on her slackened. Reed used that split second to break loose, turning herself around before Harlow clamped down and wrenched her back—but not before she saw the smoldering hole in the ready room door, the edges still aglow from spent energy plasma.

And Nick Locarno launching himself through it.

Harlow, processing the newer, greater threat, tossed Reed aside. Stars bloomed in her vision as she landed on top of the desk, knocking over a model starship and a heavy bronze statue, right before she careened into the rear bulkhead with a loud crash. Reed dragged herself away as everything around her moved in slow motion, blood seeping from the surgical hole in the side of her neck.

“Stand down!” Locarno shouted, leveling his phaser at the Borg’s chest. Harlow paid no heed, lumbering toward him on biomechanical legs, the whine of spinning gears marking each move. Massey, who appeared at Locarno’s side, also took aim with her weapon, while Thayer scrambled to get inside.

“You will understand,”
Harlow said.
“You will belong.”

“I
mean
it, Chief!”

“Assimilation is inevitable.”

“Max power,” Locarno told Massey. “Tight dispersal.”

Both of them fired.

A high-pitched scream split the air wide open, a twin salvo converging on Harlow. The hit should have vaporized him instantly—but instead, the beams dissolved on impact, absorbed by a force field that swathed his body. Locarno and Massey kept pouring it on, maintaining continuous fire until their phasers began to sputter, but Harlow never even slowed down. Step by step he closed in on them, forcing them into retreat.

Thayer, seeing the hopelessness of it, jumped into the no-man’s-land between.

“Go!”
he yelled at them, and tackled Harlow.

The attack caught him by surprise, long enough for Thayer to knock him down and send both men reeling. Thayer tried to take the advantage, drawing his fist back to land a punch in the middle of Harlow’s face, but the Borg’s enhanced reflexes were just too fast, and he blocked Thayer’s move before he even got close. In a blur of motion, Harlow crushed Thayer’s fingers and spun his arm around his back, popping the bone loose from his shoulder with a sickening crack. Thayer shrieked in pain, his legs flailing as the Borg stood and hauled him off his feet. The nanoprobe, denied its feast with Reed, quickly angled itself toward Thayer, hovering in front of his terrified eyes for a moment—right before it drilled into the middle of his forehead.

“Thayer!”
Massey screamed.

Thayer twitched, little more than a dead man’s rattle, his eyes rolling back beneath their lids.

Reed, driven by pure rage, grabbed the first weapon she could find and threw herself at Harlow. She swung at him with the bronze statue before she even knew it was in her hand, cracking the Borg across the back of the head with as much strength as she could muster. A crimson mist burst from his bare scalp, wetting Reed’s lips and making her thirst for more, her mind disconnected from her actions as something bestial took over. She swung at Harlow again, this time hitting him over the top of his skull, so hard that his legs collapsed beneath him. The Borg dropped Thayer into a lifeless heap, his own limbs thrashing involuntarily as his nervous system shorted out. Reed, however, kept beating on him—bringing the statue down again and again and again, not caring what she hit, while sparks erupted from the joints between his armor plates.

Locarno and Massey had to pull her off before she would stop.

Breathless and aching, Reed dropped the statue as the world around her snapped back into focus. By then Carson had descended on her, tending to the wound in Reed’s neck, while Casari stumbled in with a dazed expression pasted across his face.

“Don’t move,” Carson said.

Reed pushed her away, motioning toward Thayer.

“Take care of him,” she rasped.

The medic did as she was told, finding Thayer splayed out on the deck with his eyes wide open. Carson ran her tricorder over him, grimacing as the readings came back. “He’s alive,” she pronounced, then turned toward Reed. “But barely. Brain functions are minimal—so is respiration.”

“My God,” Casari droned, shaking his head when he saw what was left of Harlow. “The chief . . .”

Locarno cut him off. “Can you stabilize Thayer?”

Carson whipped out a hypospray and injected Thayer with it. “That should hold him until I get him to sickbay. I can’t do anything for him here.”

Locarno fixed Casari with a hard stare that told him panic wasn’t an option. “Get him down there,” he ordered, and kept the pressure on until Casari nodded. He picked Thayer up and draped the dead weight over his shoulder, following Carson as she led him out of the ready room. A moment later they were gone, leaving behind a deathly silence, punctuated by Harlow’s fading mechanical throes.

All eyes settled on him.

The Borg refused to die, his hands still probing, seeking, reaching out in every direction. Massey checked her phaser, squeezing out every last bit of power, then started off toward him to finish the job, but Reed took hold of the tactical officer’s sleeve, pulling her back.

“No,” Reed said. “Not yet.”

Locarno and Massey helped her up, and the three of them approached Harlow slowly. The Borg managed to raise his head, and regarded each of them with a strange blend of pleading and recognition. Reed peered back at him, sensing something of the old engineer.

“Tristan,” she said. “Are you still in there?”

The Borg twisted his lips into an approximation of a smile.

“He is part of the whole. We were once so many. Now there is only us.”

“You tried to kill us!” Massey spat, aiming her phaser at his head. “The same way you killed the chief !”

“Death is not our purpose. Only continued existence. Your time is growing short. You must understand before that time is at an end.”

“What do you mean?” Reed asked.

“We are aware of Starfleet directives. The knowledge of Harlow, Tristan J., is now part of our consciousness. Upon discovery, your lives and this matrix will be terminated. It is essential you act before then.”

Locarno exchanged an astonished glance with Reed, then looked back at Harlow.

“Act on what?”

“Your assimilation.”

The three of them stepped away as if struck. Reed touched her wound again, which had already begun to heal—and realized the truth of it before Harlow even spoke.

“It has already begun. You are kindred. We detected this upon your arrival.”

“That’s impossible,” Massey snarled. “You’re lying!”

“Lying is irrelevant. Denial is irrelevant.”

Reed took Massey’s phaser and took aim at Harlow herself.

“Prove it.”

The Borg smiled again, black fluid seeping between his teeth.

“Proof is irrelevant,”
he said, cryptic and taunting.
“But if it is your predilection to find it, then seek out the one among you who facilitated your assimilation.”

Carson burst into sickbay with Casari in tow, and headed straight toward the pathology lab. “Over there,” she ordered, directing him to a diagnostic bed near the back. Casari laid Thayer out as carefully as he could, then got out of the way so the medic could go to work. She immediately strapped Thayer down, checking the monitor above his head as vital signs poured across the screen. The readings were next to nonexistent, except for the encephalograph, which sparked to extremes far outside human range.

“What’s happening to him?” Casari asked.

“Whatever put him in a coma is stimulating the hell out of his brain,” Carson said, unable to contain her awe at the process—until
she noticed Casari’s puzzled stare. Distracting him, she pointed over his shoulder toward a nearby tray. “Hand me those scissors. We need to get this envirosuit off right now.”

Casari did as he was told. Carson quickly sliced through the fabric of Thayer’s suit, shucking the whole thing like a layer of dead skin. She then opened a hidden drawer beneath the bed, which revealed a glittering collection of instruments—alien in design, with sinister contours that implied torture more than treatment. Casari’s eyes widened when he saw them, particularly the bundle of tubes that Carson affixed to various points across Thayer’s body. They bore a striking similarity to the nanoprobe that Harlow had wielded.

“What . . . 
are
those?”

“I’m using everything in the arsenal,” Carson snapped, hoping that would end Casari’s questions. He backed off slightly, but still glared at her with open suspicion as she placed the last tube over the hole in Thayer’s forehead. “If you want to save his life, you won’t interfere.”

She then activated a nearby touch screen, which started a flow that inflated the tubes with a low hiss. Thayer reacted violently, his chest heaving up and down—spasms that rapidly spread through his extremities, sending him into a fit of convulsions. His arms and legs tore against their restraints, which split and frayed to the breaking point.

“Hold him down!”
Carson shouted.

Terrified, Casari obeyed. He grabbed Thayer by the shoulders and pinned him, while Carson jabbed another hypospray into the rippling sinew of Thayer’s neck. He gradually tapered off into a disturbing calm—regular breaths and a rising body temperature, marked by a return of stable readings on the monitor.

Then came the metamorphosis, into something unspeakable.

Casari watched it spread across Thayer’s chest, like some kind of infection that turned his skin to ash. The color faded to bone white, as if every drop of blood had drained away, capillaries forced to the surface and spidering outward to form varicose paths. Thayer’s eyes, blue and void, hemorrhaged to black—portals into an empty soul, something much worse than death. Casari recoiled from the sight, suddenly aware of what this was.

Because the same thing had happened to the chief.

Assimilation.

He looked up at Carson, pleading with her to do something—but froze when he saw the phaser pointed at him.

“You know the drill,” she said. “Nice and easy.”

Casari pulled his own weapon, drawing it slowly and handing it over.

“You unbelievable bitch,” he seethed. “You
did
this to them.”

“Nothing personal,” she replied, circling around the bed with her phaser trained on him. Her posture, her demeanor—everything about Carson had changed. No longer the timid medic, she carried herself with the cold poise of a professional killer. “As a privateer, I’m sure you understand these things.”

“Sure,” he scoffed, while she motioned him toward the door. Casari wasn’t sure what she planned to do with him once they got there, but he wasn’t going to wait long enough to find out. As he turned away from Thayer, he snatched up the instrument tray, using his back to conceal his actions. “It’s all about the score, isn’t it?”

Carson, growing impatient, jabbed at Casari to get him moving. Seizing the initiative, he spun around with the tray in his hands and clubbed her across the side of the head.

A loud clang marked the point of impact, scalpels and forceps raining down on Carson as she smashed into the deck. Casari broke into a run, making it less than two steps before she grabbed him by the leg and tripped him. Losing his balance, he careened into the bulkhead next to the door, bouncing off the edge before it slid open and he fell through. Carson was on him in an instant, pouncing on Casari as he crawled into sickbay. He clawed at her, trying to push her off, but came up with fistfuls of empty air. Carson, meanwhile, wrapped her arm around Casari’s throat, jerking him backward so hard that he heard his own vertebrae cracking.

“Let him go, Nicole!”

The voice came out of nowhere, making time stand still. Oxygen flowed back into Casari’s brain, but the chokehold on him remained, even as Carson hauled him to his feet. A moment later, he felt the hard point of her phaser against his temple, along with Carson’s perfectly controlled breathing on the back of his neck.

“I said, let him go.”

Jenna Reed stood at the entrance to sickbay, with Nick Locarno next to her. Both of them pointed phasers at Carson, though their only line of fire was through Casari.

“Then what?” Carson asked.

“We sort things out.”

Carson laughed.

“I’ll give you props for honesty, Reed,” she said. “For a minute I thought you were going to say we could talk it over.”

“This ends the way you want it to end, Nicole,” Reed told her. “We’re all stuck on this ship together. Nobody else has to die.”

“The hell with that!” Casari spat, not caring anymore.
“Shoot
her!”

Reed did just the opposite, holstering her weapon.

“You see?” she said, holding up her hands. “We can all walk out of here.”

“It’s too late for that,” Carson said, detached from any trace of emotion or empathy. “Nobody was supposed to walk out of here at all. That was the plan.”

“What
plan?” Locarno demanded. “Who are you working for?”

“People like that don’t have names. They just give orders.”

“And you follow them without question,” Reed finished. “But reviving
the Borg?
What kind of insanity is that?”

“A very useful kind,” Locarno proffered. “Think about it. After everything that’s happened—Wolf 359, Sector 001, the Dominion War—
all the devastation that left this quadrant vulnerable to God knows what. Then throw in a weaponized Borg, under strict control—ready to fight and die at a moment’s notice.” He scowled at Carson. “Sounds to me like your handlers have big plans for the future. The only question is, how do
we
fit in?”