DESCENT Read online

  As Riker stepped among the bodies, he saw that the carpet was streaked with burns and smelled of smoke and death. He wished somebody else from the away team would come up here. Walking the dim bridge was akin to prowling a tomb, and he didn’t like it. He’d stayed out of archaeology for a reason. He didn’t want to spend his career unwrapping mummies, and now here he was, counting victims.

  He bent over Captain Harlock’s body and applied a little muscle to turning him over.

  The captain almost broke in half at the pelvis.

  Riker jumped back a step and winced. Allowed to flow, Harlock’s blood drained slowly onto the carpet beneath Riker’s boots.

  Starting to clot. Hadn’t been very long, though.

  Where was the rest of the away team? He battled down a strong urge to call them. He knew perfectly well they weren’t reporting in for good reason.

  Because the words were ugly and the smell came with them.

  He flinched when the turbolift doors gasped open, and before he even turned, it dawned on him just how much of the ship itself was still working. Lifts, doors, panels, internal and external systems . . .

  It was all still working. A ship that had just been attacked and taken?

  Why was it even still here?

  He stepped gratefully away from Captain Harlock’s remains and joined Engineer Geordi La Forge before the young man had to step down and defile the carpet and what soaked it.

  La Forge’s face, normally a nice healthy cocoa brown, was almost gray.

  “Geordi,” Riker moaned, “this is awful.”

  La Forge leaned one hand on the navigational auxiliary panel and tried to draw a deep breath.

  “They’re all dead,” he rasped. “The whole crew. All over the ship, all different situations. Some were fighting, some were sleeping. Sir, you won’t believe it. The—the purposefulness of it. They’ve had their . . .” He stopped.

  “Spines severed?” Riker glanced down at the captain’s mutilated body.

  La Forge looked past him, his VISOR collecting data and filtering it instantly back to him, telling him things about the slaughter that neither of them really wanted to know. Skeletal ruptures, blood loss, heat dissipation, muscular strain, cerebral violation—

  And he suddenly looked away.

  Riker wondered what the young officer could see through that appliance, what he could witness about Captain Harlock’s death and the death of everybody else draped around them, but he decided not to ask. If La Forge saw anything that needed reporting, he’d find a way to say it.

  Blood in the carpet did a lot of talking for itself.

  “What about this ship?” Riker asked. “Did you find anything? What were the attackers after?”

  La Forge swallowed, drew the other half of that breath he’d been trying to get, and shook his head.

  “Whatever they wanted,” he said, “it wasn’t the ship.”

  Enterprise

  Captain’s Log, Stardate 46772.4:

  Commander Riker’s away team has completed its survey of the Saladin, and they have returned to the Enterprise. But we still have no idea who attacked the Saladin . . . or why.

  Captain Picard tried to keep the emotion out of his face as Riker and Lieutenant Commander La Forge flanked him on the bridge. The details about Harlock’s death—there was always something truly horrible about a captain’s death, and not just to another captain—were gruesome and more than a little confusing.

  “We found bodies everywhere,” Riker said with effort. “At duty stations, in corridors, near escape pods, even some lying in their own beds. It was like walking through a slaughterhouse.”

  Picard despised himself for having sent them to see what he should have seen. He felt shielded and eccentric for not having gone himself. Now they had to relive the horror on his behalf.

  La Forge didn’t look good at all.

  “You said the ship itself was undamaged?” Picard asked him.

  “That’s right,” the engineer forced himself to say. “The computer core is intact. No equipment is missing. In fact, with the exception of the defense systems, the ship’s still fully operational.”

  “There had to be some motive for this.” The captain knew his frustration was showing. “Some reason to board a Federation starship and kill its crew . . .”

  He knew he was stating the obvious, but somehow they all needed to hear these things, these unthinkable phrases, before they could pass over them and reach for answers. He had to get them to that point, and he had to get himself to it.

  “Maybe killing the crew was the motive,” Riker said. “Those people were killing methodically, efficiently, with very few wasted shots, and the attackers did it in less than fifteen minutes. They wanted to kill every single person aboard that ship . . . and they did.”

  Picard scowled. “Even terrorist raids have some rationale behind them. If we can determine who did this, we might also learn why.”

  “Captain,” Worf’s deep voice cut through like a foghorn. “We are receiving a distress call from the outpost on Ohniaka Three. They are under attack.”

  Picard swung around. “Red Alert. Set course for Ohniaka system and engage maximum warp.” As the alert signal whooped through the ship, he thought aloud, “Ohniaka Three . . . There’s no strategic value to that outpost. Isn’t there any more information?”

  Lieutenant Worf heard his captain’s request. He worked, then worked some more. His dark face and ridged brow were panels of controlled fury. He looked as if he might rip the controls off and twist the ship’s throat until he got his answers.

  He didn’t get them. Picard could see that he didn’t like that.

  And Worf obviously didn’t like saying what he had to say either.

  “I have lost contact with them, sir.”

  “We are entering the Ohniaka system.”

  Data’s voice was steady enough to thread a needle.

  Good thing, because everyone else was twisted tight.

  “Bring us out of warp,” Picard said to the ensign at the helm.

  “Sensors detect one ship orbiting the third planet,” Worf boomed from behind the command center. “Configuration does not match any in our records.”

  “Shields up,” Riker barked. “Lock phasers on target. Stand by photon torpedoes.”

  Picard eyed the viewscreen, a distant view of the system they were approaching. “Hail the ship, Mr. Worf.”

  Worf worked with audible aggravation, then said, “No response.”

  “Put them on screen.”

  An optical appeared almost instantly as the sensors reached into the impossible distance and grabbed for manufactured solidity.

  An alien vessel. Unfamiliar—the first alarm. It bore no markings, no decorations . . . and yet a haze of menace hung about its design.

  Ridiculous, Picard thought. But he let himself feel menaced nonetheless. A little compulsive suspicion could be healthy at times.

  “Information, Mr. Data?” he prodded.

  “Sir, I am unable to scan the interior of the alien ship, but it does not appear to be attacking the outpost at this time.”

  Riker stood up, uneasy, the haze of what he had seen on Saladin still clinging to his expression. “They might have attacked before we got here.”

  Calmly Picard countered him with a gently warning tone. “Or they simply might be another victim. Data, what about the outpost on the surface?”

  The android’s hands played over his console, then again, even longer.

  “There is a great deal of electromagnetic interference. I am unable to determine whether any life-forms are still living on the surface.”

  Picard pressed his lips tight and drew a gust of bottled rage. Nothing about this was going to cooperate. Every step insisted upon being a risk. And he was going to have to do it again—send others where he wanted to go himself.

  His neck almost twisted off, but he forced himself to nod at Riker.

  At least he didn’t have to say anything.
/>   Riker lunged for the ramp. “Data, Worf! You’re with me.”

  Federation Science Division Outpost,

  Ohniaka Three

  William Riker stood stiffly as the transporter room dissolved around him, fizzled to lights, and almost immediately collected again into other colors and shapes. A ceiling, walls, computer desks—corpses, corpses, corpses.

  He felt completely alone again, this crawling aloneness that involved other faces, but faces that only stared, and other bodies, but with no warmth. Suddenly he was glad he hadn’t brought Geordi this time.

  Beside him, Worf and Data were already scanning with their tricorders, analyzing the surroundings. Behind them, Security Ensign Corelki was shaking off the shock of what lay all around them.

  Riker empathized with the disbelief in their eyes.

  Everybody was heavily armed, but that didn’t make him feel much better either.

  Just like the Saladin, he thought.

  Starfleet personnel, dead, dumped all around them like so much laundry.

  Typical outpost, nothing special, except to the next of kin—a few scorch marks here and there, but no appreciable damage, not even a good gash in the wall to pretend interest in. Wishing for more damage, Riker found he had nothing to look at but the bodies.

  “These wounds,” Worf said critically as he waved his tricorder near a corpse, “were caused by a forced-plasma beam similar to the beam from a Ferengi hand phaser.”

  “This seems too brutal for the Ferengi,” Riker responded. He turned to Data. “Can you detect survivors?”

  Data paced slowly, watching the screen on his tricorder. “The electromagnetic interference is still making it difficult to get precise sensor readings.”

  Riker ignored him. “How many people were assigned to this outpost?”

  “Two hundred seventy-four,” Worf supplied instantly.

  His blood running cold as he added up how many dozen in two hundred seventy-four, Riker sighed. “All right, we’ll have to go from room to room. Maybe this time we’ll find some survivors. Worf, you and Corelki start searching the north wing. We’ll search the south wing.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Worf was a big, big entity, and he was a Klingon, but even he was not so big and not so fearless that he didn’t pull his phaser and aim it outward before taking one step outside the area.

  The door to the north wing slid open as though laughing at them. No damage.

  Riker watched as Worf and the security ensign disappeared into the depths of the science station, and the door closed again.

  Not a good feeling at all. A brutal choice between getting here too late and still being in the middle of lurking trouble. He didn’t know which he would have chosen if he’d been given a choice.

  He waved his own phaser at the other door, then glanced at Data, but the ship’s second officer was already trying to operate the panel.

  “The mechanism appears to be jammed,” Data said as he tampered with the door-panel access. “I will attempt to bypass the main system.”

  Thanks for telling me, Riker thought bitterly. Get us in there so we can confirm the body count. Maybe I could bypass the next ten minutes.

  “There’s not much damage,” he muttered. “Doesn’t look like they were interested in the station . . . just the people.”

  Riker came from a very orderly world. Starfleet was orderly, Captain Picard’s ship was orderly, things were quiet and stable, and most questions were answered right away. He could tackle a problem if he could see what it was. They all could. That was the way they were trained.

  So where was the goddamn problem? Why wouldn’t it show its face?

  “I have bypassed the primary system,” Data informed him. He might have been fishing for permission, even though he already knew the answer.

  No, Riker thought. I’m imagining that. I’m expecting him to act like a human. Subtle. Data’s just not subtle.

  He turned, as did the others with him, to the door to the south wing. They took a step toward it, the way steps are taken toward getting unpleasantness over with.

  But as the door slid open, unpleasantness drafted a new appearance. Familiar and horrible, it was the face of mechanization gone mad. A face of dead humanity confiscated and forced to keep living, as though one of these corpses had been stood up, fitted with tubes, life support, and body armor, and propped against a wall with its eyes open.

  Borg . . . Borg . . . Borg!

  Riker’s mind clanged with a word that was its own warning, and he wished he’d never seen one before, but he had. Real close up.

  And this one was real close too.

  Before he could move, before anyone, even Data, could move, the Borg was firing its built-in weaponry. Bolts of energy cut across the room.

  As he and Data fired wildly and dived for cover, Will Riker realized through his astonishment that they’d just found the goddamn problem.

  Chapter Four

  Enterprise

  “BATTLE STATIONS! Full shields!”

  Jean-Luc Picard’s deep voice turned corrosive and his small eyes, fractious. On the giant forward screen, the alien ship had come to life in a most malevolent manner and was spitting poison at them like some kind of veldt adder.

  “Evasive maneuvers, Ensign!” he called to the helm. “Return fire!”

  The painfully obvious orders were also painfully necessary. No one but the senior bridge command could issue either of those instructions.

  Again venom spit, malicious streaks of constricted energy, and slammed the starship square in the forward shields—a strike for the heart.

  There was no caginess about it, no trick, no dodging or strategy. The other ship stood toe-to-toe and battered at them. Just an infuriating direct hard hit, the kind delivered by a bully who knew his own strength. The other ship didn’t even make any attempt to dodge the starship’s return fire.

  “Shields are down to eighty percent!” Geordi called from his station. “Compensating with auxiliary power—”

  He was cut off as the ship was hit again and canted to starboard before recovering.

  Picard clung to his command lounge. “Who are they? No one in this sector bears any malice toward the Federation! Analyze those beams—get some kind of correlation out of the computer. Perhaps we can use it to identify them. And someone attempt to make contact with the away team!”

  Ohniaka Station

  Borg, Borg, Borg!

  With his brain shouting that single chilling word at him, Riker had to plow through shock and disbelief and fire back as more of the mindless automated devils, so bitterly familiar to him, came charging into the research area.

  This was the Federation’s recurring nightmare, and certainly the Enterprise’s. Added to the long history of firsts attributed to the starships called Enterprise was the first encounter with the nation of Borg, partly biological, partly robotic beings, run by a single control center, devoid of passion or pain, blunted of any emotion, relentless to the extreme. Nightmare, yes.

  Cybernetics gone mad. Mutation of machine and being. Their bluish faces helmeted with armor, coiled with tubing, half covered by audio- and visual-enhancement mechanisms, their forms coated with black body armor and bionic generator components. Ugly. Just ugly.

  Riker and Data were behind desks, already cornered and driven down to defense. His heart slammed against his breastbone. He hadn’t gotten a whole breath yet, and he needed one. At least Data would remain unexcited. That gave the two of them an extra measure of advantage.

  And they needed it. The Borg semi-robots fired relentlessly, shot after shot, filling the room with the snapping crackle of energy bolts. Riker got precious few opportunities to fire back without having his beard singed.

  This didn’t make sense. He should have been able to get a clear shot, should have been able to take the Borgs’ heads off one by one in a situation like this. They were all worker bees, dull-witted drones willing to die for the swarm, with no sense of personal salvation.
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br />   So why were they hiding and ducking and dodging? Why were their faces twisted with wrath. These were mutated still further, past the stage of mindlessness and into something else. Fury.

  Am I imagining this? Did they catch me just a little too much by surprise?

  He lunged from his hiding place, rolled, and landed behind a steel shipping crate, using Data’s shots as cover, and he snatched from those few seconds one good look at the Borg.

  No, he wasn’t imagining. These Borg weren’t acting like the ones he had seen before. They were moving fast—fast! They were hiding, avoiding being shot, and their eyes were crimped with rage and purpose.

  How many were there? He couldn’t even tell. One simple strategical fact and he couldn’t get it. The two of them would drain their phasers in seconds against these mutated cyborgs.

  The north wing door broke open, and Worf and his ensign charged back in, firing as they hit the threshold, but the quick-moving Borg drove them to cover immediately. There wasn’t even an instant of advantage. The Starfleet crew was still outgunned, outnumbered, but Riker took the chance that the Borg might be distracted by Worf and the guard.

  Gritting his teeth, ready to be scorched into a fizzle himself, he dodged from his cover long enough to get out one shot at the nearest Borg—and made it! His phaser shot seared across the Borg’s throat and cut its life support, then cauterized the tubing beyond repair.

  The monster went down behind a console.

  One of the other Borg stopped firing and tried to catch the one that went down, but there wasn’t anything to be done.

  That was not surprising in a battle like this. The surprise came when the Borg looked up from his comrade’s body, its face distorted with anger.

  “You have killed Torsus!” it accused. “I will make you suffer for this!”

  Riker stared. Behind him, Worf and Corelki paused in their hiding places, and even Data, just a few feet away, seemed confused.

  A second Borg peeked from its own hiding place and its glare connected with Worf, then with Riker. “Biological organism Klingon,” it said, “Biological organism human, I will destroy you.”