Resistance - J.M. Dillard [36]
Nave was striding down the corridor just as Lio and his team were heading into the transporter room. He caught sight of her behind him.
They were a fearsome-looking group, with the largest, most powerful, and most sophisticated of the phaser rifles strapped over their shoulders and around their torsos. There were two men, new assignees, whom Nave had recently met—one of them twice her size. And there was Amrita Satchitanand, her former workout partner, a small woman with blue-black hair and full, rounded cheekbones beneath golden eyes. Amrita acknowledged her with a nod, but no one, including Lio, was smiling.
Lio gave her a quick glance and gestured for the rest of the away team to head inside the transporter room without him. He looked different from the man she met every night in the club; his easygoing manner was replaced by deadly seriousness. Even his features seemed sharp, stern: his lips were thin, compressed, his eyes full of a hardness behind which lurked grief. And his body—normally lanky and relaxed—seemed taut, strong.
Certainly he appeared different from the man who had lain in her arms only hours before. Then, his pose as the brooding intellectual had been entirely stripped away. He had looked younger, vulnerable; his manner had been sheepish, sweet, and endearingly awkward. His uncertainty had given Sara confidence; she had taken the initiative, and he had responded resoundingly.
She looked at him now and remembered how his skin had smelled: warm and clean, and masculine. She hadn’t wanted to leave his quarters—as if by staying she could somehow stretch time and keep the Borg and their ship at bay.
“Shouldn’t you be at the conn?” Lio’s tone was urgent but not unkind. He had a mission to accomplish, and Nave realized abruptly how foolish she had been to leave her post now, of all times—especially when she had no idea what she had come to say.
“Good luck,” she said awkwardly, then stopped, disgusted. “No, that’s not it.” She squared her shoulders and stared at him dead-on. “I forgot to say it last night: I love you.” Hardly the most romantic delivery: she had issued orders with more gentleness, more feeling.
It was like watching a Japanese paper lantern suddenly illuminated from the inside. Lio’s face and eyes brightened, and he graced her with one of his brilliant crescent-moon smiles. “Then kiss me,” he said.
She did, swiftly, because there wasn’t time and because this was the most unprofessional thing she’d ever done—while on duty, at least. And then she turned her back to him and headed for the nearest lift.
“Sara.”
She turned.
He was half standing in the entry, his expression once again urgent, serious. “If I don’t make it back, just consider me dead. It’s easier that way.”
His words made her furious. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But…in my quarters, on the desk. I left you something. Just in case.”
“I don’t understand,” she called. “What? What did you leave?”
He shook his head to indicate he had to go. “You’ll know. Just in case.”
His words made her inexplicably furious. “There won’t be any ‘just in case,’” she insisted, but he had already disappeared behind the door.
Lio Battaglia materialized on the Borg cube and drew in a breath. Before his eyes could focus, his body tensed at the changed environment. The air was hot, suffocatingly humid, evoking memories of those terrible patrols down the Enterprise corridors, when the Borg had seized the starship and adapted it to their comfort.
He gazed out at a vertiginous view: he and his team stood on the uppermost deck—or, rather, a catwalk with metal conduits that served as railings. The interior of the ship—which looked very much to Lio like its exterior—was a vast, open maze of decking, panels, and exposed circuitry and pipes. Below was an infinite spiral of more decks, more conduits. Beneath them in the metallic jungle, row after row of alcoves held a hundred motionless drones, their bloodless white faces marred by black cybernetic