DESCENT Read online

And he wouldn’t. He refused to give the order to go about. He would drive the ship forward until the captain told him to stop.

  At full impulse the starship wasn’t exactly wallowing, and in the middle of his thought, a force slammed into the ship.

  He was pitched forward into the tactical board. Everyone scrabbled for balance. The ship screamed around them, battling to win out over whatever stayed her course.

  “We are caught in some kind of energy field,” Data called over the whine of the ship’s effort to resist.

  “All engines back full,” Riker ordered.

  Worf leaned over his console. “Shields are failing!”

  With damnable calmness at a moment when everyone might have appreciated a flare of anger, Data gazed at his console readouts and offered a simple, coolly awful explanation.

  “We are being pulled inside the space rupture.”

  Chapter Seven

  MOMENTUM . . . a beautiful word, a beautiful sensation, at the right times. The rapids of a great river, children’s joyous shouts as they plummet down a hill of packed snow, the flap of a parachutist’s lines just before the balloon opens.

  Velocity. The supreme purpose of a starship. Another lovely word—but the ship’s velocity at the moment was completely out of control.

  The starship pounded across an unthinkable distance at a speed lightning could never have matched, but without control. It was every crew member’s nightmare and the nightmare of a million sailors before them. The Enterprise was a thing on the wind, a ship with no rudder, thrust with no brakes, a vehicle with no steering wheel.

  On the huge forward screen, as though mocking those who grabbed wildly for control, a billion colors and distorted shapes sideswiped the vessel, none identifiable. If the crew could have looked at insanity, this would be the picture of it, and the speed of it.

  “Main power off-line! Switching to backups!”

  “Inertial dampers failing!”

  “Engineering, this is Picard! Can you transfer auxiliary power to the warp nacelles? Try to break us out by using the—”

  He pitched forward suddenly, smashed into the carpet, Riker falling beside him an instant later—or was it the same instant? The backlash hit them and crushed them down. The crew, fighting for a chance to save the ship from a crack-up, were all in the midst of a spur-of-the-moment action when a recoil cast them all forward. The ship rocked violently around them.

  Just as suddenly the shaking stopped. The bright light on the viewscreen . . . gone.

  Captain Picard held on to his command chair with both hands and in his mind counted his crew to see if they were all still there, if they could possibly still be working.

  Riker was beside him, doing the same. The habit of command.

  All of them but Data held their breath and stared. How could such calm have struck so completely?

  Not a one of them suspected that the trouble was over, that they were out of it.

  Picard got to his feet. “Report!”

  “We have returned to normal space,” the android said. “Navigational systems are still off-line. I will attempt to make a celestial fix using secondary systems.”

  The captain drew a breath to respond, but all at once Worf noticeably stiffened and shouted, “Captain, the Borg ship is directly ahead and closing! It’s coming about!”

  “On screen!”

  The great theater that a moment ago had displayed a vision of hell in space now showed them the devil. The Borg ship vectored toward them on an unmistakable course. It was close, it was huge—

  “Evasive maneuvers!” Riker ordered.

  Picard turned toward Tactical. “Worf?”

  The Klingon worked, ground his teeth, worked again. “Shields are down to sixteen percent, Captain.”

  He looked furious enough to go out there and stand between the Enterprise and that devil ship if they would only open a door for him.

  Too late.

  A blade of energy shot toward them and struck.

  The Enterprise plunged ten thousand feet, then fought automatically to recover. Her systems whined to keep the crew in place, or close to it, and they did all they could to hang on.

  A repulsive sensation, this earthquake shudder, when the deck under their feet could no longer be trusted.

  Seconds shot by, and Picard let them go, giving the crew time for one breath before he began shouting orders, compensating for those downed shields, gathering power to fight back—but there was now a dazzling light in his peripheral vision.

  At first he thought he’d struck his head on something, but then the shimmering coagulated, and there were Lucifers on the bridge.

  Two Borg, already firing.

  Picard gestured at his crew and several of them dodged for cover. In the next instant something struck him and he went down—Riker, doing his job—and the Borg fired again.

  A blinding beam struck out from behind Tactical. A security guard, doing his.

  Near miss, and the Borg shot back so close that the beams almost intersected. The guard flew backward, struck in the throat, and slammed against the access trunks.

  Picard caught himself on the edge of an impulse to jump up and catch the unfortunate crewman’s body, perhaps to ease it to the deck, to comfort the last instant of dying and get a message across—too late, yes—that the captain cared.

  But in an instant the body was down, the chance to deliver that small message snatched from the captain’s grasp, and there was more shooting.

  Worf, firing angrily from the upper deck, aiming at the Borg who had taken down their guard. That Borg was struck full in the chest by Worf’s shot. Coils were blasted open, bodily fluids spit out, life support was torn free. It staggered, clawed at itself, but skidded down the wall and struck the deck like a discarded doll.

  As he rolled to one side, Picard saw Riker go down, hit hard by the very Borg he was protecting his captain against. If only there were time for a thank-you.

  Not another one . . . Not Riker—

  A bolt of energy hit the Borg soldier attacking Riker, and the creature went down in a tumble of arms and legs.

  Even in the gush of aftermath, Picard knew a death rattle when he heard it, a ghastly reminder of the Borg’s living half, and this time he saw for himself what Riker had described. These Borg weren’t automated, programmed, mindless.

  They were fighting, and doing it to win.

  Was that all or were there more of them?

  Riker stumbled, but recovered and forced himself to stand, then staggered to the guard who had gone down so early in a very fast fight. Worf plunged toward his console and pounded for a response.

  Finding himself miraculously on his feet, Picard spun around, counting faces. He held his breath as Riker knelt beside the downed guard, then looked up and shook his head.

  A hard fist of agony hit Picard in the chest. He fought to keep the pain out of his voice as he drove down a surge of resentment. Forward, move forward.

  “Is everyone else all right?”

  His gasping crew members crawled from their cover, shying away from the downed Borg the way they might shy from the twitching bodies of dead snakes.

  “Security reports no other intruders aboard ship,” Worf said, breathing with effort.

  Picard turned to the viewscreen, ready to order full attack maneuvers against the Borg ship—but there was nothing but the empty velvet of the starfield.

  When he turned to Worf for answers, the Klingon said, “Captain, the Borg ship is gone. Sensor logs indicate they entered the distortion field thirty seconds ago.”

  “They beamed aboard as a diversion,” Picard said, “to give their ship time to escape.”

  Sucking air as though he were breathing under water, Riker gestured at one of the fallen Borg. The one he took personally.

  “This is another change in Borg behavior,” he gasped. “They left the bodies of their comrades behind instead of vaporizing them.”

  On the ramp, Data paused. His arms were slightly out
at his sides as if he were unsure whether the fight was over.

  Slowly Data knelt beside the Borg who had danced so delicately with him. His hand moved against black body armor and throbbing tubes.

  “Captain,” he began, somewhat tentative. He looked up. “This one is still alive.”

  Ship’s Brig

  The deep throb of security devices endlessly reading activity and metabolic rates throughout these rooms wasn’t so subtle that prisoners could become unaware of it. The heartbeat of the brig was part of its alarm system, and those confined here learned soon to note the pulse.

  Beverly Crusher had her instruments in her hand and her courage in her pocket as she stood over the brig bed, a lot closer than she had ever again wanted to be to one of these travesties of life.

  The captain was at her shoulder with Data, but she would have preferred to be behind them while they were behind Worf and his phaser and all of them were behind the security threshold with the Bajoran security guard, but things weren’t working out today.

  Worf was two paces too far away, Data a little closer, and Jean-Luc was too close.

  Just too close.

  “I’ve stabilized his condition for now,” Beverly said, fighting to keep her tone even. “He’s still pretty weak, but he should make a full recovery.”

  Whatever that meant, she realized. A true full recovery would be to pull all these life-support appliances off the biological body in there and teach it to live for itself.

  But even the Borg were entitled to their own survival methods, their own evolution, if this could be called evolution and not manufacturing.

  Lying there with one eye closed and the other eye covered by the vision-enhancing appliance, the Borg looked unexpectedly innocent and a little helpless. The physician inside Beverly bubbled up in response to that. She couldn’t have run away if she’d wanted to.

  “Can you wake him?” The captain’s voice beside her was thorny with impatience.

  “Yes,” Beverly admitted hesitantly, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea. His blood pressure and heart rate are—”

  “Do it.”

  She started to turn to him, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to look into his eyes.

  “That’s not in the best interests of my patient, Captain,” she said tightly.

  “I’m not concerned with his best interests, Doctor,” the captain thundered. “We need information, and he has it. Wake him up. That’s an order.”

  Now she did look at him, surprised. Yes, she was. Captain Picard was a layered personality, and this wasn’t his style.

  She felt her expression harden, but his was harder.

  “All right,” she acquiesced.

  As she bent over her patient, she ran through all the obligations and duties that came with her oath and her station and found most of them in conflict with the captain’s order. She could have argued with him, perhaps even prevailed under the shield of her authority as senior medical officer, the only officer on a starship whose order could override those of the captain.

  However, there was one authority over which she could not possibly prevail. That was Jean-Luc Picard’s unlikely experience not with these creatures . . . but as one of them.

  The hypo vibrated slightly in her hand. She found the right place and pressed. In the corner of her eye she saw Worf change his stance. He moved closer, his weapon hungry.

  Picard turned to the Bajoran guard and said, “Lower the forcefield.”

  The field snapped off, and Beverly sucked in a harsh breath as Worf hustled her away from the Borg and pushed her out of the brig. The guard worked the controls again, and the field sizzled back up.

  Now she could only watch, relegated from doctor to observer, and whoever lived or died or was torn in half in there in the next few seconds, she couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Through the pastel distortion of the forcefield, all she could do was stand here rubbernecking, as useless as the Bajoran guard.

  Together they watched as the injured Borg begin to stir. Eerie movements, twitching and flinching, began in his one unshielded hand and the half of his face that they could see, and suddenly she was struck with the knowledge that medical schools had been hammering into students for centuries: how much like a machine the human body really was.

  Beverly saw the muscles knot in Jean-Luc Picard’s back and arms and knew he disliked stunt-flying this situation, hoping not only to get out of it but to end it.

  The Borg blinked with its one visible eye, and after a moment he struggled to sit up.

  Beverly saw the disorientation, the haze of dizziness, and for an instant she empathized with . . . it.

  Picard, though, didn’t seem unsure of his feelings at all. “What is your designation?” he demanded.

  The Borg forced its sight to focus.

  Contempt! Pure and plain as the walls. It hated them all.

  A Borg that was capable of hating.

  The collective couldn’t hate. But this one could. This was an individual who was devoted to a higher cause. They could see that devotion in his eyes.

  Beverly read what she saw as fanaticism.

  The Borg opened its pasty mouth and spoke with that ugly electrical sound of theirs.

  “I do not have a designation any longer. My name is Crosis.”

  “Crosis?” Picard snapped. “How did you get that name?”

  “It was given to me by the One.”

  Beverly moved an inch closer to the forcefield, until she could feel it prickling her skin and lifting the hair around her face. Yes, that was what she saw.

  Some kind of religious devotion in that thing’s demeanor. It even had the hint of a knowing grin on its mouth. Not a real grin, but a smirk of arrogance.

  “Who is the One?” Picard asked.

  Crosis responded with a forthright flicker of satisfaction. “The One who will destroy you.”

  Picard looked at Worf, then at Data, then glanced through the forcefield at Beverly.

  This was definitely not what they’d come to expect from a Borg. But then, this was just another in a string of surprises.

  “You are Borg,” Picard insisted. “Isn’t your goal to assimilate us all into the collective?”

  Say yes, Beverly thought. Be what we’re used to.

  “We do not assimilate inferior biological organisms,” Crosis said. “We destroy them.”

  “Tell me more about the One,” Picard pushed on. “Does the One have a name? Is the One . . . called Hugh?”

  The glitter of arrogance suddenly fell from the Borg’s face, and it went blank.

  As she watched the glaucous face change from an emotional expression to a death mask, Beverly couldn’t decide which of those was worse. If only Jean-Luc and the others would get out of there and talk to that creature from back here, outside the field.

  “Human. Sever spinal cord at third vertebrae,” the Borg sibilated. “Death is immediate.”

  “Why does the One wish to destroy biological organisms?” Picard insisted.

  Apparently he saw or suspected something that Beverly was missing as she watched from back here.

  Crosis shifted its head to look at Worf.

  “Klingon. Shatter the cranial exoskeleton at the tricipital lobe. Death is immediate.”

  Worf glanced at Picard, but didn’t make any overt reactions. He, too, saw the change, and didn’t believe it either.

  Picard raised his voice. “I am Locutus of Borg. You will respond to my inquiries.”

  A shudder went down Beverly’s spine to hear him say that. She held her breath, but the Borg wasn’t impressed. It looked at her now.

  She held very still. That eye . . . those tubes . . .

  “Bajoran. Puncture the lower ventricle of the heart. Death is immediate.”

  So it wasn’t looking at her. The forcefield distorted their eye contact. It was looking at the guard.

  Beverly stepped out of its line of vision, pushed by her own instincts. She didn’t want to hear t
he Borg pronounce her death sentence too, explain in instruction-manual terms how it would kill her. Its manner was noxious. She wished it were still unconscious.

  Inside the chamber, Picard turned away from the prisoner.

  “This is going nowhere,” he said. “Doctor, I want autopsies performed on the other two. Compare the results to what we learned about Hugh’s anatomy. See if recent modifications could explain the behavioral differences.”

  Without waiting for her to flash a silent question—Is that all?—at him, he turned to Data.

  “Run a bio-spectral analysis. See if this Borg is trying to send a subspace signal to the others.”

  “Aye, sir,” Data said simply, as though all this was easy and had nothing more than that to do with him.

  The forcefield came down again and Picard and Worf stalked out, frustration eddying from them both.

  The last thing Beverly Crusher saw before she, too, went off to begin her new hobby—not quilting—was Commander Data raising his tricorder.

  An android about to look into the mind, body, and soul of a cyborg.

  Biological analysis. Modificational comparison.

  Bio-spectral. Cardiovascular. Environmental diagnostic.

  “You aren’t like the others.”

  Impact resistance. Ultraviolet detection.

  Data looked up from his tricorder. It was the Borg that had spoken. In its face he saw that which was unlike other Borg. Other cyborgs of any kind. Including Data himself.

  Seduction. Individuality. No longer the mindless persona of the collective.

  Not a drone.

  If this could be envy, Data expected never to experience it regarding another mechanism.

  For uncounted microseconds he had sought the humanness within himself.

  Now he saw it, within reach, in the biological gaze of Crosis.

  “You do not need to be destroyed,” Crosis said. “You can be assimilated.”

  Data raised the tricorder and fixed his attention on its readout screen. Potentiometry curve. Vibration and stress gauge. Data analyzer . . .

  Data analyzer.

  He looked up. Crosis was observing him.

  Data failed to look away. “I do not wish to be assimilated,” he said.