First Contact, page 13
“There he is.”
Lily followed his gaze and caught a glimpse of two huge Caucasian men sitting in a booth; Picard led her through the maze of dancers toward the men.
A blur of movement, a flash of red: someone moved swiftly between them, so swiftly that neither had time to react, then seized Picard, covering his face. In the first few milliseconds, Lily flailed about, looking for a weapon… then calmed as the now-static image became recognizable, as that of a woman in a long scarlet dress.
Planting a passionate kiss on Picard.
Her fear transformed into amusement, Lily counted the seconds before Jean-Luc was able to extract himself from the embrace: six. The woman—the band’s singer, Lily realized—tossed her long, swept-to-the-side hair in a casually seductive motion, then regarded Picard with large, wounded eyes.
He made a feeble effort to wipe the imprint of crimson lipstick from his cheek. “Ruby… this isn’t a good time.” And he tried to pull away, but the woman held him fast.
“It’s never the time for us, is it, Dix?” Her tone was sultry, sentimental, melodramatic. “Always some excuse… some case you’re working on.”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone rushed. “I gotta talk to Nicky. I’ll see you later on.”
She blinked back her tears and gave a low, tremulous sigh. “All right, but watch your caboose. And dump the broad.” She directed a scathing glance at Lily, then turned on a stiletto heel and, with a whisper of scarlet silk, was gone.
Freed, Picard cut through the crowd and stepped up to the booth where the two men sat.
“Well, well, well,” a nasal, oddly resonant voice said to Picard and Lily’s left. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Along with her escort, Lily turned in the direction of the sound. Behind them, seated at a large booth, sat a corpulent, dough-faced man in a boldly striped period suit. His eyes were small, sinister, glittering, his full lips curved in a slightly mocking smile. In between lay his nose—or rather, the place where it had once been; now it was covered with a crudely fashioned feature of tin.
Occasionally, the man took a breath through it, which caused it to vibrate slightly and whistle; most of the time, he breathed through his open mouth. Something about the man’s demeanor and gaudy style of dress—and that of his less corpulent but definitely larger and solidly muscled henchman sitting at the other end of the booth—evoked Lily’s memories of a long-ago history lesson about North-Am in the 1930s and a holograph of a man named A1 Capone.
Mobster, that was the word. Nicky the Nose was a mobster.
The word came to her in a flash, but she wasted no more time thinking about it; the Borg had spotted them and now were on their way. Picard clearly had some sort of plan; she remained alert, focusing her attention on him, the looming Borg, their immediate surroundings, and possibilities of escape or attack.
The Nose raised the tulip glass clutched in his thick, ruddy fingers; at once, the henchman reached for the bottle nestled in a large silver ice bucket and poured. The pale gold liquid foamed over the top of Nicky’s glass and spilled down onto the table between them. Champagne, Lily guessed—something she had never tasted and very likely would not live to.
The Nose took a sip and smacked his lips appreciatively, then stared back up at Picard. “What’s shakin’, Dix?”
“Just the usual, Nick,” Picard said, so familiarly that Lily knew at once this was not his first encounter with the character. “Martinis and skirts. Excuse me.”
He stepped over to the henchman and began hurriedly patting him down for weapons, a move with which she was intimately acquainted. The beefy man eyed him with indignance. “Hey—I’m gonna take this personal in a second.”
The Borg suddenly broke through the crowd and headed toward their prey. Instinctively, Lily seized the cold, sweating silver bucket; desperate, Picard lunged for the violin case on the seat beside the henchman.
The muscular man rose, about to throw a punch, when Lily lifted the silver bucket high and slammed it down on the man’s skull. He toppled over onto the leather seat, followed by a glittering cascade of ice.
In the meantime, Picard had popped open the case and pulled out the large and very forbidding-looking gun, a forerunner of a repeating automatic. What had they been called? A machine gun? No, no, that had come later. This was an ancient thing called a—a tommy gun.
And the twenty-fourth-century captain certainly knew how to put it to good use. He whirled to face the two Borg, who now were mere steps away from himself and Lily, pulled back a large black bolt on the weapon, and opened fire.
It was an impressive display for such an ancient firearm. With an ear-splitting blast, bullets ripped into the Borg, tearing patterns into the metal armor, shredding what lay inside it; bullets ripped also into surrounding tables, chewing wood into splinters; and into glasses, which became small, musical explosions of diamond shards and splashing liquor.
People screamed, ran out the doors, dove for whatever cover they could find. Picard just kept on shooting until the Borg crashed to the floor, twitching, smoking, emitting the vilest combination of odors Lily had ever smelled: blood, scorched metal, animal death.
Still Picard kept shooting, until the tommy gun clicked empty; had he had more bullets, he would have kept on. That in itself was disturbing enough—but far worse was the expression on his face, one of such vicious hatred, such cold ferocity that Lily again wondered how they had wounded him, these Borg. How had they hurt him so deeply that he, who treated her with such compassion, could so swiftly become capable of taking pleasure in killing?
At last he handed the gun back to the damp, shivering, and mightily angry henchman, walked over to the dead Borg, and gazed down at them with a loathing that chilled Lily to the core. She walked beside him and stared down with him at the corpses a moment, before at last saying—with intentional dryness to provoke a reaction: “I think you got ’em.”
Her words echoed in the silence. The nightclub was now almost completely empty; the dance floor had cleared out, and those few determined drunks who remained at the bar were keeping low profiles.
He ignored her and knelt down next to one of the Borg. The old-fashioned bullets had torn open its chest, leaving behind a horizontal swath of shredded black metal and pale flesh tinged with blood. Without a word, Picard opened a panel on one Borg’s abdomen. Lily leaned forward to look and grimaced at the circuitry and cable tangled together with slick, quivering, blood and bile-scented organs.
“I don’t get it,” Lily said softly above him. “You said this was all a bunch of holograms. If the gun isn’t real…”
“I disengaged the safety protocols,” Picard answered, his tone curt, distant, the exact opposite of the man she thought she had come to know. “Without them, even a holographic bullet can kill.”
He reached deep inside the alien circuitry, his manner brusque, uncaring, as if he were reaching inside a computer instead of a being of partial flesh.
Careful to keep her voice neutral, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“Looking for the neuroprocessor. Every Borg has one. It’s like a memory chip; it’ll contain a record of the instructions this Borg’s been receiving from the collective.”
She knelt on the corpse’s other side—and noticed, with a wave of revulsion, that this Borg wore the ragged remnants of a black-and-gray uniform… with a tattered Starfleet chevron over its heart. “Hey—that’s one of your uniforms.”
Picard didn’t even glance up; his expression remained steely, coldly determined. “This was Ensign Lynch.”
As he spoke, he ripped a chunk of circuitry from deep within the corpse’s gut; it came free from the blood-slicked organs with a sharp sucking sound. Oblivious to the horror, Picard neatly plucked a small, shining chip from within the mangled mess. The latter, he dropped carelessly back onto the dead Lynch-Borg; the former, he placed into a piece of equipment taken from his belt.
Lily could look at the captain no longer. Instead, she fixed her troubled gaze on the dead ensign—and saw, beneath the chalky flesh, already so like his companion Borg’s, hints of what had once been an individual human’s features. A bump on the nose here, faint remnants of a dimple there, a fading mark that might once have been a freckle—all of it soon to have been consumed by the collective, until there had been no sign whatever remaining of the individual named Ensign Lynch.
“Tough break,” she said hoarsely, more to Lynch than to Jean-Luc, but it was Picard who answered, in a voice unutterably cold.
“Yes. We’ve got to get to the bridge.”
She looked up at him then. What was it Ma used to say? Be careful of the enemies you choose—because the more you hate, the more you become like them.
And here was the formerly compassionate Captain Jean-Luc Picard, driven by a single, mindless purpose. Soulless. Heartless.
Borg…
ELEVEN
By daybreak, Zefram Cochrane had given up any hope of sleep, alcohol-induced or otherwise; the stress of the previous night’s events—the attack on the silo and his inordinately strange conversation with William Riker and company—had stripped away any chance of taming the mania that seized him. He’d spent the night alone in his tent, pacing and giggling and watching his racing thoughts careen out of control into marvelous fantasies of space travel, encounters with aliens, his own elevation to godhood.
By dawn, the euphoria and the speeding thoughts had zoomed past pleasure and straight toward full-blown panic; the physical sensation was that of ants dancing upon his skin, inside his skull. He was going too fast, Cochrane knew, too fast—and that could lead to either overconfident carelessness or paralyzing fear, both lethal states for any pilot.
Eleven A.M., and the next few minutes afterward—if he could only last until then, could only maintain a measure of control, he might be able to make it. With that thought in mind, he had tucked a flask of booze beneath his fleece vest and had taken a double shot before leaving his tent; alcohol took some of the edge off and eased the shaking of his hands.
He was not fool enough to think they shook from fear. He’d become a drunk, a damned drunk in his efforts to manage the disease—a destructive thing, to be sure, but less destructive than the disease unallayed.
Despite the past few sleepless nights and the staggering amount of alcohol he’d consumed, Cochrane felt perfectly rested, even energetic as he made his way down the slope; he paused only once, turning his head to take in his surroundings now that daylight had come.
The air still smelled strongly of smoke; in the near distance, what had yesterday been a lush evergreen forest was now a sparse collection of blackened tree trunks emerging from charred, lifeless soil. The settlement itself was pockmarked with damage—two tents standing untouched here, one tent and a Quonset hut there reduced to scorched rubble. From time to time, one of the occasional huge craters emitted a wisp of smoke.
He sighed and began walking again. His thoughts had become annoyingly loud and insistent, impossible to squelch.
If this Commander Riker guy is right, then you’re the cause of this, Zefram. You—and your goddamned ship. What’s to keep this from happening again?
As compelling as the thought was, Cochrane did not fail to notice a small group of clean-cut young men dressed in local garb—but with decidedly un-twenty-first-century hairstyles—headed up toward the town. As they passed Cochrane, one of them stared at him in starry-eyed recognition, then nudged the others; Zefram watched in horror as a look of outright adoration and awe passed from face to face.
Geezus, these kids see you as a hero—a role model. You, Zefram Cochrane, indisputable nut case and undeniable alcoholic.
He frowned and looked away, desperate to avoid contact—suddenly desperate, also, for another drink. He had made his way down the slope and was nearing the silo entrance, where a number of Riker’s people were milling about; rather than be seen, he dashed behind a nearby Quonset hut, grabbed his flask, and took a long pull.
A vaguely familiar voice came behind him. “Doctor?”
He almost choked, but managed to shove the flask back, cover it, and turn smoothly around. “Yeah?”
The speaker was the pale-eyed engineer named La Forge; if he had seen what Cochrane was up to, he gave no sign. Cheerfully, he proffered what looked to be a hand-held computer to Cochrane. “Will you take a look at this?”
Cochrane took the little computer and stared down at it, marveling at the quality of the display on the tiny screen—until he saw one of his own designs for the Phoenix there.
“I tried to reconstruct the intermix chamber from what I remember from school,” La Forge prattled. “Tell me if I got it right.”
“School…” Cochrane whispered, aghast, then asked, louder: “You learned this in school?”
“Yeah,” the engineer said, clearly delighted to be sharing this information. “Basic warp design is a required course at the academy. The first chapter’s called”—he grinned, pausing a beat for dramatic emphasis—“Zefram Cochrane.”
Disconsolate, Cochrane stared down at the little computer screen until La Forge cleared his throat to indicate a response was called for.
“Well,” Cochrane managed at last, “it looks like you got it right.…”
The engineer brightened visibly; while Cochrane wilted under his adoration, yet another spaceman approached. This one was lanky, wide-eyed, and obviously overwhelmed by Cochrane’s presence.
“Commander.” He handed La Forge a section of copper tubing, all the while glancing nervously at Cochrane. “This is what we’re thinking of using to replace the damaged warp plasma conduit.”
As the other spoke, La Forge’s eyes began to dilate, then pixilate as he scanned the bit of metal. Cochrane forgot his discomfort for an instant and watched with euphoric fascination. So this is the future.…
Abruptly, the engineer handed the object back. “Fine, but you’ve got to reinforce the copper tubing with a nanopolymer.”
The lanky man nodded and turned to leave—then paused and fixed his shy, ingenuous gaze on Cochrane, who felt a sudden surge of dismay. “Dr. Cochrane… I—I know this sounds silly, but—can I shake your hand?”
Cochrane forced a smile and reached out.
The man immediately seized his hand and began to pump it vigorously, frantically, words gushing: “Thank you Doctor I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be working with you on this project I never imagined I’d be meeting the man who invented drive I mean it’s a—”
La Forge stepped between them and put a firm hand on the lanky man’s shoulder. “Reg. Reg…”
Reg broke off, then flushed brightly. “Oh. Right. Sorry…” He looked back at Cochrane with an embarrassing degree of awe. “Thank you.…”
Cochrane could manage no more than an uncomfortable nod. As his slavering admirer returned to the silo, he pivoted and began to walk quickly, unable to resist the need to move his body as quickly as his own thoughts. La Forge walked with him.
“Do they have to keep doing that?” Cochrane snapped. He didn’t mean to speak ill of his awkward fan, but the momentary thrill of euphoria had worn off, leaving behind a hypersensitivity that was unbearably irritating.
La Forge looked at him with mild surprise. “It’s just a little hero worship, Doc. I can’t say I blame them. We all grew up hearing about what you did here”—he corrected himself—“or what you’re about to do here.” He paused and shyly lowered his gaze. “And you know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but—I went to Zefram Cochrane High School.”
“Oh, really?” Cochrane asked. A faint smile froze on his face. Despite the chilly weather, sweat broke out on his upper lip, his back, the nape of his neck; his heart began to pound so furiously, he was amazed the other man did not notice.
These people worship you. They freaking worship you, because they don’t know who you really are: an insane drunk. The warp drive, the Phoenix, the future—they’re not a product of genius, like these people think, but of madness, pure, unadulterated madness. What will they think when they find out?
Too high. Oh, God, I’m too high. I can’t pilot like this. Can’t do it—and the whole freaking future is going to fall apart. Going to fall apart because of me, the famous Dr. Zefram Cochrane…
He glanced, panicked, around him. Most of the forest surrounding the settlement was burned away, but if he ran hard for a while, he could make it past the damage, into an area thick with evergreen.…
Beside him, La Forge laughed, completely unaware of his companion’s downward spiral into fear. “I wish I had a picture of this.”
“What?” Cochrane demanded, tensing.
“Well…” Beaming, La Forge gestured at the immediate area around the silo. “In the future, this whole area becomes a historical monument. You’re standing in almost the exact spot where your statue’s going to be.”
“Statue,” Cochrane echoed, terrified.
“Yeah. It’s marble, about twenty meters tall…” He struck a pose. “You’re looking up at the sky, your hand sort of reaching toward the future…”
“I have to take a leak,” Cochrane croaked.
La Forge scowled suddenly at the silo doors, then down at his little computer. “Leaks? I’m not detecting any leaks.”
“Don’t you people ever pee in the twenty-fourth century?”
The engineer’s expression went from concern to amusement. “Oh… leak. I get it. That’s pretty funny.”
“Excuse me.” Cochrane wheeled about and made for the woods, forcing himself to walk deliberately until La Forge himself turned and headed back down into the silo.
And then he glanced back over his shoulder, struggling to appear calm, and made sure that La Forge had gone and that no one else had noticed him.
