First Contact, page 19
“Given him what he’s always wanted. Flesh and blood.”
“Let him go,” he demanded. “He’s not the one you want.”
Her lips parted in the sly, slightly mocking smile from his dream. “Are you offering yourself to us?”
“Offering myself… that’s it. I remember now.”
His voice welled with sudden heat at the revelation, at the fierce surge of freedom and outrage it brought. “It wasn’t enough to assimilate me; you wanted me to give myself freely to the Borg, to you.”
She seemed to sense that freedom, to be repelled by it; the corner of an alabaster lip curled in repugnance. “You flatter yourself. I have overseen the assimilation of countless millions. You were no different.”
“You’re lying,” Picard said, with bitter relief. “You wanted more than just another Borg drone. You wanted the best of both worlds, a human being with a mind of his own who could bridge the gulf between humanity and the Borg. You wanted a counterpart. An equal. But I resisted. I fought you.”
The curled lip rose higher, baring hard, white teeth. “You can’t begin to imagine the life you denied yourself.”
Triumph rose within him. Whatever tragedy might follow, he at last had the satisfaction of knowing: she was his foe, not the mindless drones who served her. She was the Borg, the devourer of souls, and his resistance had not been futile—it had wounded her. And out of fear and pride, she had tried to keep this truth from him. “That’s why you created Locutus—to ease the burden of your lonely existence. But it didn’t work; I resisted. And in the end, you had to turn Locutus into just another drone.”
A moment of silence passed, one in which the quicksilver gaze swept wistfully over the vast chamber of slumbering Borg, then again fixed itself upon Picard. “You cannot begin to imagine the life you denied yourself,” she said, an unmistakable trace of sadness in her voice, her eyes. “Together… nothing could have stopped us.”
He took a deliberate step toward her, fighting to suppress his revulsion. “It’s not too late. Locutus can still be with you, just as you wanted him. An equal.” He shot a sidewise glance at the unresponsive android-human hybrid. “Let Data go, and I will take my place at your side—willingly, without resistance.”
She moved closer, her body almost touching his; she spoke, and he fought not to shudder at the feel of her warm, sterile breath upon his skin. “Such a noble creature—a quality we sometimes lack. We will add your distinctiveness to our own,” she murmured. “Welcome home, Locutus.…”
She lifted a hand and stroked cool fingertips teasingly over his cheek; he forced himself not to flinch. Then, abruptly, she turned toward Data.
“You’re free to go, Data.”
The human android did not move.
“Data, go,” Picard commanded.
“I do not wish to go,” Data replied simply.
The Borg queen smiled. “As you can see, I’ve already found an equal. Data—deactivate the self-destruct sequence.”
Picard reacted with alarm, both at the android’s refusal and the queen’s knowledge. He took a desperate step toward Data; immediately, two drones stepped from the shadows behind him, each seizing an arm and holding him fast. “Data!” he shouted. “Don’t do it! Listen to me!”
Undaunted, the android moved calmly to a computer console and pressed a series of controls with preternatural speed.
“Autodestruct sequence deactivated,” the computer reported.
The queen directed a smile of purely malevolent triumph at Picard, though her words were still addressed to Data. “Now… enter the encryption codes and give me computer control.”
Data complied, and as he worked, she stared into Picard’s eyes with such infinite malice, infinite satisfaction, that the captain realized He had never truly been the one who sought revenge. It was she, and she had waited six long years for it.
At last, Data looked up from his console; simultaneously, the warp core began to pulse, and all consoles in engineering blinked to life. The near-human android moved to the queen’s side and said, as the two Borg guards dragged Picard toward a surgical table: “He will make an excellent drone.”
FIFTEEN
Inside the Phoenix’s cockpit, Riker watched the chronometer while La Forge made a final report. The historic moment was almost upon them—and he wasn’t about to let Cochrane miss it.
“Plasma injectors are online,” Geordi said—words the engineer had uttered before on the Enterprise many a time, but this time his tone was not quite so casual. Even though Cochrane had forced his attention away from the radiant Earth, his sense of wonder at the beauty of space was infectious, so much so that Riker had to force his concentration back on his task.
“They should be out there right now,” he told Cochrane and La Forge. “We need to break the warp barrier within the next five minutes if we’re going to get their attention.”
Geordi flicked a series of switches, then glanced down at a dial display. “Nacelles charged and ready.”
Cochrane turned back, acknowledging this with a nod; then he caught Riker’s gaze and held it with his own look of exhilaration.
“Let’s do it,” Riker said.
The thrill he felt at that instant was nothing compared to the next, when Cochrane turned back toward his controls, and—eyes passionately ablaze with determination, expression utterly composed—ordered, “Engage.”
Riker immediately tensed, waiting for what would surely be an incredibly intense sensation of acceleration, then forced himself to relax. The ship did, indeed, accelerate, but this was not a starship; it would take a few minutes to attain warp speed.
“Warp field looks good,” Geordi said, eyes focused on his instrument panel, his engineer’s heart clearly far more thrilled by the readouts than the sight or sense of the ship accelerating. “Structural integrity holding.…”
Will switched on the speedometer and peered at the digital display. “Speed: twenty thousand kilometers per second.”
Cochrane reached overhead for some switches, then happened to glance out the window. “Jesus!”
La Forge and Riker looked up in tandem; outside the window, the Enterprise-E, massive, sleek, and gleaming, sailed into view.
Riker grinned, pleased by the sight. The lack of communication with the ship had gnawed at him, made him worry that perhaps all aboard her had been harmed somehow by the Borg. Communications or not, she had made it here all the same, to offer up protection in case it was needed. “Relax, Doctor. They’re just here to give us a send-off.”
* * *
Six years later, the same horror repeated, the same images that had haunted Picard in dreams.
After Data’s betrayal, the Borg had dragged the captain to a surgical table—but let their queen have the honor of slamming the human down upon it.
Once again, Picard stared up at her delicate white features, at the cold, metal-clouded eyes. The cruelty and hunger in them were depthless, unquenchable, but this time, he refused to tremble, to quail, to be afraid.
She would again steal his existence, his body, his mind—a fate to be profoundly despised—along with the realization that she had triumphed. He would again become her parrot, Locutus; and all of Earth and those upon it who dared dream would be obliterated, crushed.
But she had not succeeded utterly; she did not have his surrender, his agreement to become as she was—and in that, he found victory. And strength enough not to struggle or recoil when she lifted an instrument from the table, pressed a control, and watched a sharp, needle-thin probe emerge from its tip. Instead, he glared back at her, defiant.
“The Phoenix is coming into range,” Data said, behind him and out of view. “I am bringing the phasers online.”
She smiled, gloating, and leaned closer to her victim.
Footsteps beside her: Data. Picard glanced up as the android passed; Data’s blue gaze met his—rather pointedly, the captain thought.
And then Data looked up, at a specific area on a distant bulkhead—again pointedly, yet so fleetingly that the queen gave him no notice.
Picard could not see that far wall; but though he had not had a long acquaintance with the Enterprise-E, he knew intimately every centimeter of the ship. And he knew precisely what was in front of that bulkhead and what Data had seen.
Masking his hope, he looked back up at the queen. If deliverance was to come to the Phoenix and the future, it would have to do so now,…
* * *
“Thirty seconds to warp threshold,” Riker shouted over the roar, then clenched his teeth together hard in a vain effort to keep them from chattering. The cockpit was trembling so violently that Cochrane, who had begun to steer the ship with an old-fashioned stick rudder, was vibrating like a badly fritzed subspace image.
Riker looked back down at the speedometer display. “Approaching light speed…”
Light speed—such an outdated term; warp one, he had almost called it, but the standard would not be coined for almost another decade. Warp one, considered in the twenty-fourth century to be the speed of molasses.
Warp one had never seemed so fast.
“They’re getting pretty close!” Geordi shouted beside him, and at his gesture, Will glanced out the window.
The Enterprise was indeed closer; if Riker hadn’t known better, he might have thought she was giving chase.
If she was, there was little he could do about it now. The cabin began to shake so furiously that he found himself unable to focus his eyes, unable even to think.
From the pilot’s seat, Cochrane bellowed, “We’re at critical velocity.…”
* * *
Picard watched as Data moved in the direction of his mysterious glance to another console, on whose monitor was displayed the long, cylindrical capsule of the Phoenix, with her flanking warp nacelles—a primitive design, to be sure, but nonetheless strongly familiar. Replace the cigar-shaped capsule with a saucer, and voilà: a starship.
Ominously, the monitor image of Cochrane’s ship was partly obscured by blinking red cross hairs. But Picard had not failed to notice that the console stood directly to one side of the plasma coolant tanks.
“Quantum torpedoes locked,” Data said.
The Borg queen graced him with a savage smile, her delight in the moment distracting her from commencing surgery upon her latest victim. “Destroy them.”
Picard drew in a breath as Data returned his attention to the monitor, lifted his android arm, and held the white-gold synthetic hand poised over the controls, on the verge of complying. But then he shot an odd glance back at the queen, turned, and took a step toward her—and the coolant tanks.
“Resistance,” he said, with an irony Picard had never heard in him before, “is futile.”
With blinding swiftness, he whirled and slammed his synthetic fist into one of the tanks.
Liquid gas spewed from the resulting puncture, carrying Data across the vast chamber in a roiling wave, sweeping into the nearest alcoves of sleeping drones.
At the same mad instant, the queen looked toward the ceiling, summoning three long black cables that snaked downward at her silent command.
Picard had prepared for this moment: at once, he freed himself and stood upon the table to avoid the lethal flood that washed past upon the deck. When the cables arrived, he threw himself at them, succeeded in grabbing one, and began a desperate scramble toward the ceiling—away from the slowly rising gas.
The queen caught one of the other cables and pulled herself up as well, half a leg’s length from the swirling storm below. Then she shot an indignant glance at Picard and his cable and gave the tendril a silent command.
At once, the cable began to writhe, to lash, to whip about like an enraged serpent intent on breaking free. Its efforts loosened Picard’s grip, causing him to slip slightly, closer to the swirling gas, and death…
* * *
… While in the nearby heavens, Zefram Cochrane was having the ride of his life.
“We’re crossing the threshold…!”
Certainly, the madness had left him after the impressively painless “hypospray” Deanna had given him—as had the drunkenness, the terror, and the shakes. Despite what he had told Riker, he felt better physically than he had in ten years, but the ingrained pessimism of the postwar era had made it impossible for him to admit that, yes, he had hope; that, yes, while he did need and want the money, he also cared about the future and humanity and space travel.
He had spent so many years hurting over all he had lost—the people, the treasured possessions, the life he had known—and then so many years hurting for no reason at all, except a damned disease that had been curable for half a century, that admitting that he cared about something was unthinkable.
Lily and everyone else at the encampment shared the same belief, too: don’t say you care about something—because then you will, and you’ll wind up only losing it. Everything, everyone, was doomed to impermanence and decay.
Same with hope; same with love. Don’t admit you feel them, and maybe you won’t. After all, they lead only to disappointment and loss. In the war, six hundred million died; in the years-long aftermath, even more were lost, to disease, radiation sickness, famine, road gangs, suicide.
But now, war and despair were the farthest things from Cochrane’s mind, for the Phoenix suddenly spread her wings.
The ship around him seemed to dissolve. He felt himself go hurtling forward, weightless, as if his entire body had been launched from a giant slingshot. The stars surrounding him suddenly blurred, then began to streak past at dizzying speed.
Zefram Cochrane let go a scream—of fear, of exhilaration, of the purest joy—and with it, released ten years’ worth of grief and cynicism, pain and hopelessness.
“Whoooooooooooaaaaaa!”
* * *
Plasma coolant seething only inches beneath his boots, Picard struggled furiously against the thrashing cable—with no success. The cable had entwined itself so tightly around his arms, legs, torso that he could not climb, could not break free. Through some miracle, he managed to cling to it, but again his grip was loosened, and he slipped yet another inch downward toward the lethal gas.
On the cable beside him, the queen had managed to climb to his level; as he tried vainly to recoil from her, she reached forth with a delicate hand—capable, he knew, of crushing bone—and caught his leg.
He flailed, helpless, limbs too entangled to successfully kick back. She yanked downward; once more, his grip on the slick synthetic material faltered, and he lost another inch.
Again she pulled. This time when he slipped, the sole of his boot skimmed the gas and began to hiss as it melted away.
Again she reached—
A monstrous sight emerged from the roiling gas behind her: Data, the human flesh covering his face and arm grotesquely eaten away, revealing wiring and metal clamps strewn with half-liquefied blood vessels.
The android hurled himself at the queen, knocking her from the cable; together, they disappeared down into the swirling gas.
Picard’s thrashing cable gave an abrupt twitch, then fell limp. Immediately, he scrambled up to the ceiling—and safety; only then did he dare look down.
Below, amid swirls of gas, lay the queen—the pale flesh of her handsome face and hands bubbling as it slowly slid from her skeleton.
* * *
Inside the cockpit, the ride had smoothed out considerably, but the mood was still rapidly ascending.
“That should be enough. Throttle back; bring us out of warp,” Riker told Cochrane, with as much professionalism as he could muster—which wasn’t much, since he’d been grinning so hard his cheeks literally began to ache. They had done it, really done it, and from the look of elation on Cochrane’s face, Will had no doubt that, within another hundred years or so, the statue of the great Zefram Cochrane would be standing next to the silo, precisely where it was supposed to be.
As for his momentary concern about the Enterprise, obviously, his secret fear that the Borg had somehow commandeered the ship had been foolish; if they had, the Phoenix would have already been reduced to space debris.
Cochrane sighed and worked his control panel; almost immediately, the ship dropped out of warp. The scientist paused to stare out the front viewshield, at the stars that were once again twinkling dots. In the far distance, a blue one shone more brightly than all the rest.
Cochrane nodded reverently at it. “Is that Earth?”
“That’s it,” La Forge answered, his voice equally quiet.
The scientist gave a slight shake of his head, marveling. “It’s so… small.”
Riker leaned forward, still grinning, but no longer feeling the ache. “It’s about to get a whole lot bigger.…”
* * *
Picard climbed carefully through the thick tangle of cables and conduits to the far side of the room and the third level of the engineering deck. Below, the gas had ceased its roiling and settled into a calm, soft blanket that covered the lower two decks, hiding the carnage there.
Swinging from one of the cables, he leapt onto the third-level grating, hurried to a wall panel, opened it, and struck a control. An enormous whoosh followed as the emergency ventilation system set to work; the captain at once moved to the edge of the deck and peered down.
In that brief instant, the powerful vents had already sucked away all but a few last wisps of plasma coolant, revealing a grisly—but relief-inspiring—sight: the stripped metal skeletons of Borg drones, most fallen from their alcoves as they slept, interior metal workings spilled everywhere.
Picard scrambled down the access ladders to the first level, wincing at the slight hiss as his boots met the deck. The sprawling metal carcasses were so numerous, the chamber so vast, that he spent some time looking through the black-and-gray sea before he recognized Data sitting among them.
All of the new human flesh on the android’s face and right arm had been utterly stripped away, exposing the silvery android skeleton beneath; the synthetic flesh on his left arm, however, remained.
