First Contact, page 7
“Not that I know of.”
Adamant instinct told him the answer to the environmental problem lay in the direction the shadowy form had appeared. Without explanation to Eiger, he crawled further down the tube until at last he arrived at a four-way intersection.
No sign of anyone straight ahead or to the right. But a glance to the left revealed a stunningly bizarre sight.
The orderly, logical arrangement of conduits that Porter expected to see had been altered in a particularly ghastly manner: alien power-packs had been randomly, almost carelessly, attached using both mechanical cables and those fashioned from flesh, tissue, bone. From all of it emerged free-form tubing that pulsed with radiant-colored fluids and pure energy.
For an instant, Porter could do nothing but gape at the horrific display—and that instant was all that was left him. His amazement was so total that he did not hear the renewed soft skittering, did not see the dark shapes looming until the very millisecond they were upon him.
It was all very swift: swift recognition, swift terror, swift pain.
Swift nothing at all.
* * *
Abysmally hot and faintly anxious, Inge Eiger was waiting beside the ladder that led up to the maintenance hatch when the horrible sounds came: a resounding thump, a faint moan, a sickeningly liquid crunch.
The moan had been Porter’s; Eiger knew his voice well enough to be certain of it. In the instant she heard the not-quite-simultaneous sounds, she became convinced that something in the crawlway had collapsed on him, that he was badly injured.
“Paul?”
No response.
“You okay in there?”
Silence. She climbed the ladder at top speed and opened the hatch. As she did, another conviction seized her, this one overwhelming and indisputable. There was someone else in the Jefferies tube, the person or persons that Paul had seen, persons of ill will who had hurt him. She slowly poked head and shoulders into the crawl space and squinted into the dim distance, trying to see Paul.
She never saw him. Instead, against the ominously charcoal backdrop, she saw a blacker shape—no, shapes—hovering only meters away, waiting.
Waiting for her, Eiger realized, and she made a move to pull back, shut the hatch, scramble down the ladder, call security—but there was no time for any of it, no time. In less than a heartbeat, the blackness was upon her, and there was no time to press her comm badge, no time to run, to think, to breathe, even to scream.
Inside the missile silo, Picard stood beside Troi, Data, and Will Riker as the four of them admiringly examined the almost-repaired Phoenix. The captain had been thinking of little else except the vessel itself and the chances of finding Zefram Cochrane alive when at once a sense of foreboding seized him.
Whispers in his head, separate yet unified: the collective. And it spoke of the Enterprise-E.
Picard turned away from the others and froze, listening, trying to understand… but the whispers faded as quickly as they had come.
Troi saw and perhaps sensed his sudden overwhelming concern. She sidled over to him and asked softly, “Captain, what is it?”
“I’m not sure,” he confessed, as he tapped his comm badge. “Picard to Enterprise. Is everything all right up there, Mr. Worf?”
“Yes, sir.” But the Klingon’s resonant baritone was faintly hesitant. “We are experiencing some environmental difficulties on deck sixteen… but that is all.”
The comment served to focus Picard’s vague anxiety. “What kind of difficulties?”
“Humidity levels have risen by seventy-two percent… and the temperature has jumped ten degrees in the last hour.”
Humidity and heat. Something about the combination triggered a mental alarm, but the memory associated with it remained submerged. “Data and I are returning to the ship.”
“Understood,” Worf said, and Picard terminated the communication, then turned to Riker, who had been listening with half his attention, while the other half was still busy adoring the Phoenix.
“Number One, take charge down here.”
Riker finally tore his gaze from Cochrane’s ship and looked at the captain with a puzzled expression. “Aye, sir.”
Picard did not face him long; no point in letting the others see his fear, though Troi no doubt sensed it. The sight of the rebuilt Phoenix had made him hopeful, but his optimism was short-lived. For if the Borg somehow managed to seize control of the Enterprise-E, there would be hope for none of them: the Enterprise crew, Cochrane, the injured woman, the Earth of the past and the Earth of the future.
* * *
Dr. Beverly Crusher drew a damp hand across her forehead, trying to smooth back the sweat-darkened strawberry-blond strands that clung there, then gently lifted the surgical stimulator from her still-unconscious patient’s torso. The twenty-first-century woman would be a bit woozy when she woke, but otherwise fine—assuming she managed to survive the Borg invasion. Crusher would have to administer a sedative in the next half-hour to be sure the Prime Directive was upheld and the patient remained sleeping; in the meantime, the doctor paused to study the slightly rounded oval of the unconscious woman’s face.
It revealed a woman still young but hardened by the ravages of that terrible twenty-first-century decade: loss, deprivation, and exposure; her dark chestnut skin, which should have aged more slowly than paler flesh, bore shallow creases at the corners of the mouth and eye, the delicate spot between the eyebrows. She had seen too many people die in the Third World War, and she had spent too many winters in Montana without proper shelter. Hardened, yes, but she was still delicately pretty, her hair trained in black tendrils that fell onto a high forehead, her lips full and blooming, her taupe lids squeezed tightly over huge eyes that Crusher had yet to see. Beneath the fringes of long, tightly curled lashes were aubergine shadows; she had not had much sleep, lately, either.
She must have known that she was dying; inhabitants of that era were all too familiar with the symptoms of radiation sickness. Why, then, had she been so desperate to kill Picard and Data? For all she knew, they, too, had been lethally exposed and would soon follow her in death.
Delirium? Crusher could not believe it. Instinct told her that the woman had been protecting something: the Phoenix.
Crusher ran the back of her hand over her face again and sighed, then glanced up at Nurse Ogawa, who was assisting. Alyssa looked like Beverly felt: sweat-drenched, flushed, and frankly irritable.
“I’ve repaired the damage to her cell membranes,” Crusher said. “But I’d like to run some tests on her spinal tissues.” She fanned herself with a hand. “And would you find out why it’s so hot in here?”
Ogawa never got a chance to reply; the words were not quite out of Crusher’s mouth when every light in the room flickered, then went dark—including every active monitor.
“Now what?” Alyssa said bitterly.
Beverly tapped her comm badge. “Crusher to engineering.”
Static.
Her tone rose slightly as she said, “Crusher to bridge.”
Static. She drew in a breath, unsettled. Losing power on the decks was not necessarily an indication that something ominous was occurring, but a power failure should have absolutely no effect on communications. For them both to go out at the same instant was simply too much of a coincidence for comfort.
Alyssa started and looked up at the walls; Beverly followed her gaze, hearing the noise, too: an eerie skittering movement inside the bulkheads themselves.
Another skitter above, in the ceiling. She glanced up, unable to suppress a shudder of surprise, then caught Alyssa’s gaze; the two of them stared wide-eyed at each other in silent recognition of the other’s fear.
Something was outside… and trying to get in.
* * *
“Report,” Picard commanded, as he and Data stepped onto the bridge. Worf immediately rose from the captain’s chair and returned to his console.
“We have just lost contact with deck sixteen,” the Klingon said, settling into his own station. “Communications, internal sensors, everything. I was about to send a security team to investigate.”
“No.” Picard ignored Worf’s reaction of mild surprise; there was no time to explain how he knew what he knew. “Seal off deck sixteen and post security teams at every access point.”
“Aye, sir.” The Klingon leaned over his console and set to work at once, though he did not try to mask the confusion in his eyes.
Picard took a step toward the newest lieutenant on the bridge. “Mr. Hawk. Before we lost internal sensors, what were the exact environmental conditions in Main Engineering?”
Hawk fingered his board skillfully, then furrowed his dark brow as he read the results. “Atmospheric pressure was ten kilopasquals above normal… ninety-two percent humidity…”
“Thirty-nine point one degrees Celsius,” Picard chorused with him, and the younger officer glanced up at him in amazement. “Like a Borg ship.”
The bridge fell resoundingly silent for the space of several seconds.
Worf spoke first, his tone indignant. “Borg… on the Enterprise?”
“They must have realized their ship was doomed,” Picard said, once again utterly unsure how he knew this, and just as unshakably certain that it was true. “So they beamed here while our shields were down. After they assimilate the Enterprise… Earth.”
Another heartbeat of silence. And then the lights began to flicker. Picard whirled about and watched the monitors behind him begin to fritz, then darken, one by one.
“Sir!” Hawk started in his chair, his voice high-pitched with alarm. “Command control is being rerouted to Main Engineering! Weapons, shields, propulsion…!”
“Data, quickly!” the captain shouted. “Lock out the main computer!”
The android sped to the nearest console and worked the controls with inhuman swiftness, his hands a blur that dizzied Picard to watch. Instead, the captain watched encryption codes scroll across the monitor. In a matter of seconds, Data turned back to him and said, “I have isolated the main computer with a fractal encryption code. It is highly unlikely the Borg will be able to break it.”
Picard permitted himself the merest of sighs, but knew any relief he might feel would be appallingly temporary. As he did, the lights gave their last flicker, then went out, leaving only the emergency lighting. Only a few consoles remained functional; one of them was Worf’s.
“The Borg have cut power to all decks… except sixteen,” the Klingon said, raising his bronzed face to share an ominously meaningful look with Picard.
Hawk’s eyes were wide, his tone still taut with tension; even so, he seemed determined to find some comfort in the midst of the horrifying situation. “But without the computer,” he countered, “they won’t be able to control the ship.”
Picard silenced him with a grim look. “The Borg won’t stay on deck sixteen.”
And the dreadful thing was, he knew it.
SEVEN
Sweet, soothing darkness, from which she was reluctant to rise; the first true rest since the war. And so deliciously warm. Yet they wouldn’t let her sleep.
Voices, murmuring, fragmented, at times indistinct.
“… got to take her; can’t worry about the damned Prime Directive.”
“They’re the ones changing history. If we let her die, how do we know…”
“… get her up.”
“… take her. Go, go, move—”
Strange noises: the sound of rapidly moving metal against metal, like a hundred mechanical mice scurrying inside a wall.
“…coming. They’re almost here…”
Lily swore silently at them: Quiet! Quiet, damn it. It feels too good to wake up. And you’re waking me up.
“Wake up!”
“Let’s go. C’mon, move it!”
The world began to shake. Earthquake? Lily wondered. Or another blast? She didn’t care, didn’t care, so long as she didn’t have to…
“Wake up!” a feminine voice demanded, and Lily grudgingly fluttered her eyelids to see a woman with red-gold hair staring down at her.
She moaned, shut her eyes, and tried to turn away; more skittering noises, growing ever closer. The world began to tremble again, and she peered out at it once again to find the same woman shaking her by the shoulders. “Come on, wake up!”
“Where… what?” Lily blinked and lifted her head; as her dimly lit surrounding came into sharp focus, she could better see the woman’s expression: wide-eyed, urgent, determined.
“There’s no time to explain,” the woman told her. “I need you to sit up.” No weapons in sight—only a bunch of weird-looking equipment hanging from the ceiling, but Lily got the definite impression that she’d better do exactly as the woman said.
Besides, Lily had had a lot of experience over the last ten years at reading people—who would help her, and who was out to do her harm. She could trust this one.
She pushed herself and staggered off the bed, with the woman’s help. She tried to linger a second, because the room was so astonishingly different from anything she’d ever seen that she longed to inspect it. But now was apparently not the time. Other people were rising from beds and being rushed by other people into a hole in the wall—all of them wearing the same black-and-gray jumpsuit; the strawberry blonde, likewise clad, took Lily’s arm and began to pull her in the same direction.
They passed by another woman, a plumper, darkhaired one who was pointing a little black instrument at a door. She, too, wore the black uniform.
“Alyssa!” The strawberry blonde pushed Lily toward her. “Take her and go!”
At once, Alyssa grabbed Lily’s arm with no-nonsense firmness and began to steer her toward the people crawling into the wall tunnel. It was Alyssa’s face—open, honest, taut with fear—that made Lily come to herself and realize: these people were all terrified… and fleeing from the source of the ominous metal-on-metal screeching that had grown thunderous.
Something was trying to push its way in, something so horrible these people didn’t want to be around for it.
And for some reason, they were protecting her as if she were part of the group. She glanced down and was for some reason relieved to see that she still wore her old leather vest and brown jeans.
This was one damned strange dream. And unsettlingly detailed.
“Those doors won’t hold much longer,” Alyssa shouted over her shoulder. “They’re going to be right behind us!”
The woman who had handed her off to Alyssa was last to follow, and thus clearly in charge; she obviously agreed. She lingered, casting a worried glance at the door, then her surroundings. “We need a diversion. Is the EMH still online?”
Alyssa glanced at a console. “It should be. The holo-buffers are still functioning.”
So, Lily thought. This is what it looks like—some kind of hospital. And it has a secret weapon, this EMH.…
The one in charge quirked her lip in disgust, but her worried gaze remained on the door, which had begun to creak as if something was pushing against it. “God, I hate those things.”
As she spoke, the door let out a screech and began to buckle inward; she wasted no more time, but looked upward and said, “Computer—activate the EMH program.”
At that precise instant, it was Lily’s turn to enter the crowded tunnel; Alyssa gestured for her to hurry along, but she lingered—and watched as, out of thin air, a man appeared. He was slender, Caucasian, with dark, thinning hair, thick eyebrows, and a vaguely smug attitude.
Even more amazing, he spoke. His voice was calm, measured; he had to have noticed the loud battering sound and the collapsing door, but he seemed absolutely unconcerned about the matter as he addressed the woman who had caused him to appear. “Please state the nature of the medical emergency.”
“Twenty Borg are about to break down that door, and we need time to get out of here,” she shouted in one urgent breath. “Create a diversion!” And she began to run toward Alyssa and toward Lily, who had crawled into the tube but listened to the conversation behind her.
The man’s tone grew irritated. “This isn’t part of my program. I’m a doctor, not a doorstop.”
By then, the woman had climbed into the tunnel, and as she prepared to pull down the hatch, she called back with equal irritation, “Dance for them; tell them a story—I don’t care. Just give us a few extra seconds!”
With a loud clank, the hatch shut. Lily waited for both women to crawl past her before at last allowing herself to be pulled along.
Outside, in sickbay, there came a sound like thunder as the door finally crashed inward. Silence for a time, followed by the sounds of whirring, metal clanking.
And the man’s unctuous voice: “According to Star-fleet medical research, Borg implants cause severe skin irritations. Perhaps you’d like an… analgesic cream?”
One wild dream, Lily thought. One wild dream…
* * *
Yet by the time she had crawled on hands and knees a good quarter-mile down the tunnel, listening to the breathing and soft comments of the others, feeling the cool metal against her now-ungloved hands, Lily had come to realize that this was no dream. Her mind was exceptionally clear now, enough to know that certain aspects of this were simply too real: the physical effort it took to keep up with the others, for one thing. She was strong, used to lifting and running and walking miles, but she had never crawled as fast as she possibly could before, and new muscles were aching.
For another thing, the thrill of being really warm had worn off; she was hot, sweating like a glass of ice on a July afternoon.
And then there was a third thing, one that puzzled her beyond all understanding. She remembered now: the ECON attack had come, and she had gone to the silo and been exposed to an unbelievably fatal dose of radiation from the damaged throttle valve. She hadn’t dreamed that; she was capable of dreaming only what she could imagine—and nausea that intense, that unrelenting, that unspeakably unbearable was beyond all imagination.
