Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [0]
Heather Jarman
Heather Jarman lives in Portland, Oregon, where she supplements her day job as a tired mommy with her writing career. Her most recent contributions to the Star Trek fiction include the Kira Nerys story in Tales from the Captain’s Table and Worlds of Deep Space Nine: Andor. In spring 2006, her novel Evolution will round out the Star Trek: Voyager: String Theory trilogy.
By night Heather flies to distant lands on black ops missions for the government, where she frequently breaks open industrial-strength cans of whupass on evildoers.
Inhale…
Within the space of a breath, Admiral Kathryn Janeway had been transported out of her shuttle and into the Borg Queen’s lair.
Damn it, Kathryn, you got careless! She offered a throwaway thought in the direction of deity, luck, and whatever other forces might influence Voyager’s fate, hoping that she’d given Captain Janeway enough time to execute her outrageously risky plan.
Exhale…
Turning her head, she glanced at her prison: a nest of snake-like conduits and circuitry wreathed in glowing green. The throbbing pulse of the hive mind enveloped her senses. She met the glistening black beetle eyes of the Queen across the room-and wasn’t nearly frightened enough. She’d expected that her oldest nemesis would employ this tactic, and for that reason alone her predicament felt like an anticlimax. Ah! The good old days when she could still surprise me, Janeway thought with a twinge of regret. Time for this old campaigner to surrender her post to a less jaded soldier-a flash from her recent days on Voyager intruded-like my younger self: That feisty redhead has a lot of fight left in her. And me…? I have enough fight for this round of combat and that’s all I need. Too bad she wouldn’t live long enough to see what Captain Janeway would do with her second chance. Unbidden, a memory from a primary school poetry lesson wafted to the fore of her consciousness:
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Imprisoned in the throne room of a Borg cube, helpless to hold back her inevitable assimilation, Janeway found the poet’s sentiment fitting. Acceptance of her fate flooded her.
Exhale…
“Very clever,” the Queen said, her tone cutting. “Hiding right on my ‘doorstep.’ “
At least I knocked before I invited myself in.
The Queen turned toward a floating viewscreen filled with the image of Janeway’s shuttle hanging near the Unicomplex’s exterior. Any minute, the Borg would assimilate her ship and any chance she ever had of returning home would be lost.
Inhale…
She’d left the future assuming that the change in the timeline would erase her from existence. She couldn’t fathom what being erased might feel like. Now facing death, she wished for a less passive end. The Klingons’ aspiration to “die in glorious battle” suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense than it ever had before. At least she’d go down with her boots on, and if she succeeded, all the people who populated her future would cease to be; temporally speaking, there wouldn’t be anything to miss or anyone to mourn her passing.
Janeway was working her way up to a good wallow until she glanced over at the Borg Queen, whose smug superiority raised her hackles more effectively than any being she’d ever known. She believes she has the upper hand, Janeway thought. Behind that deceptively indifferent facade she glories at the prospect of my demise. She’s gloating. But she has no idea what’s coming. I’m going to wipe that smirk off her face and I’ll live long enough to enjoy it. She repressed the urge to cackle.
Exhale…
“Were you planning to attack us from inside the Unicomplex?” the Queen asked accusingly. Her melodious, soothing voice sliced through the mechanized whir and hum in the background.
Janeway recognized bait when she saw it, and she certainly wouldn’t be goaded into biting on this offering. You hate that I’ve outmaneuvered you so far, that I’ve piqued your sense of superiority. She sensed that she’d stretched the Queen’s patience: stretch a little further and Her Majesty might be provoked