Resistance - J.M. Dillard [39]
The bridge rocked as the Enterprise was hit by a tremendous blow. The few officers still on their feet fell to the ground. Nave and T’Lana had both been thrown from their chairs.
“Shields are down,” La Forge reported as he pulled himself back up to the console.
“Lieutenant Nave, take us out of weapons range!” Picard ordered as a second burst hit the ship.
The lieutenant struggled back to the conn, squinting in pain as the piercing sound grew impossibly louder. With a few commands, she brought the ship around and punched in a course that would take them as far away from the Borg ship as they could allow. As they sped away, the noise finally stopped.
“I’ve cut the connection to Lieutenant Battaglia’s combadge,” Worf reported.
“We’ve got shields,” La Forge said.
Picard looked to his two officers. They had been through this before—and much worse—yet he knew the looks of shock on their faces as they continued to work at their stations mirrored his own. The Borg never lashed out so quickly, unless they were in attack mode. “I want a full—”
“The cube beamed something into sickbay while the shields were down,” Worf said. “Readings are unclear.”
Beverly!
Picard was immobilized for a fraction of a second. Though the rest of the bridge crew would have hardly noticed, to the captain, it felt like an eternity. The Borg were after Beverly. Somehow, they had sensed the connection and read his thoughts. They were hitting him personally, going for blood.
“Bridge to sickbay,” Picard commanded.
Worf and Picard both went for the turbolift, when Beverly’s voice filled the air. “Sickbay to the bridge.” There was something hollow about her voice, calm yet emotionless. The tone stopped Picard.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“The Borg,” she said, halting.
“We’re on our way,” Picard said with a glance to Worf. He knew they both shouldn’t leave the bridge, but he’d be damned if he was going to stay behind.
“No,” she said. “It’s not drones. It’s the away team. The Borg have returned their bodies…or, rather, what remained.”
Picard felt a flush of relief. The Borg hadn’t noticed the connection and sent a personal attack. They had merely sent the bodies to the most logical location on the ship.
The bodies.
He had failed them. He had done the one thing he had sworn he would never do: lose even one more of his crew to the Borg. With his eyes focused on the bridge personnel, his mind finished Battaglia’s last utterance: They now attack on sight.
He had assumed that the Borg would react to the away team as they always had to humans who posed no direct threat—that they would ignore them. He had assumed…and been wrong. How had he not known? He had been correct on everything else; he had known about the existence of the unborn queen, the location of the Borg cube…
But he had not known about the Borg’s new tactic of attacking all intruders. Or their murderous intentions. His imperfect connection to the hive mind was a defect, a flaw, that had to be corrected, and swiftly.
Sickbay was filled to capacity, and yet there was none of the chaos typical in triage. The brief attack on the ship had resulted in about a dozen minor injuries to the crew, the most serious being Ensign Wahl’s broken leg from a fall from a ladder in engineering. As in any emergency situation, the entire medical staff had reported for duty and were tending to the patients. And yet the room was almost as quiet as it would be when it was empty. The reason was clear to Beverly as she conducted her autopsy on the remains of the away team.
The attack had been particularly vicious, far more so than anything she had seen the Borg inflict previously. Their bodies had been destroyed…desecrated. It was almost like their attackers had taken joy in the killing. There seemed no clear reason why the Borg would send back the dead instead of assimilating them. It ran counter to everything she had experienced when dealing with the Borg in the past. Her scans revealed nothing beyond the horrific way the away team died. There were no clues to what the Borg