Resistance - J.M. Dillard [38]
Above the queen’s table, dark tubes extended downward—one inserted directly into her/its flesh, the second excreting more of the gelatinous medium. Two drones oversaw the procedure. A third drone was just finishing grotesque surgery on the supine figure encased in the gel: the amputation of a cybernetic arm.
An easy thing, to quickly kill…Lio was about to lift his rifle when he heard a scream behind him.
He should have continued the motion. He should have pressed the trigger—should have, but the instinct to protect his crewmates was too strong. He turned.
Borg drones had moved in behind them. A quartet, one for each member of the away team. It was DeVrie, leading up the rear, who had screamed. He had already dropped his weapon and fallen to his knees, dead—a whirring saw at the end of a drone’s prosthetic arm had gone straight through his chest. At the same instant that DeVrie dropped forward into the spreading stain of his own blood, a second Borg lunged forward, piercing through Costas’s midsection with a spiraling blade that split the man in half. Lio paused for the briefest moment as he realized that the Borg weren’t assimilating, they were butchering.
The moment was short. Both Lio and Amrita fired at the Borg who had so swiftly killed their friends. The drones dropped, but two more were advancing. Lio fired again, only to watch the beam bounce harmlessly off its target. With echoes of Worf’s voice in his head, he shouted to Amrita, “Recalibrate the frequency!”
She did so but too late. The drone was upon her, and Lio’s assassin was again advancing, slightly more than an arm’s length away now. In his peripheral vision, he realized that the drones tending the queen were also moving in to intercept the intruders.
As he struggled to ignore the sounds of what the Borg were doing to Amrita’s body, Lio had a dark thought: At least I won’t become one of them.
Before he could prepare himself for death, he knew that his first and last duty was to the Enterprise, and he had critical information for those who survived him.
The drone reached for his shoulder. In the final moment, everything slowed. Lio looked into the face of his attacker—the chalky flesh surrounded by black—and thought, with an odd sense of be-mused detachment, how Terrans had so often personified Death as pale-faced, cloaked in black.
At the same time, he studied the Borg’s features—so colorless, so devoid of character or individuality—and felt pity.
Most of all, he felt sad for Sara. She would weep when she went to his quarters; he felt deep regret for the sorrow his death would cause her. He had wanted so badly to return to her, to love her, to make her life happy.
Enveloping it all was mortal fear—and its opposite, fearlessness, at the realization that others would follow him, that Captain Picard would never permit the Borg to win. His death would be avenged.
Calm acceptance washed over him as the Borg took him by the throat. But the fear was renewed when instead of a violent death, he felt only the cold metal of a Borg tubule piercing his neck. At the same moment, Lio punched his combadge and shouted…
“Enterprise! They attack on sight! Repeat: They now attack…”
6
“ENTERPRISE ! THEY ATTACK ON SIGHT! REPEAT: They now attack…”
Picard was on his feet, but only briefly. The lieutenant’s voice was replaced by a shrill sound that knifed through the captain’s brain and brought him to his knees. At first, he thought the sound was only in his head—like the song of the Borg—until he saw that the entire bridge crew was similarly doubled over.
“Sever the connection,” Picard called out to the communications officer, but the young man had already dropped to the floor in agony.
In two leaping steps, Worf reached the communications console and worked the controls. “The Borg have piggybacked a signal onto the lieutenant’s comm,” he shouted