Resistance - J.M. Dillard [55]
Beverly hesitated and frowned. She pressed a control and enlarged an image of the queen that had long ago been imprinted by Data’s positronic brain.
The queen’s skin glistened. Jean-Luc had told her, long ago, of the revulsion he had felt at the Queen’s touch. It had been damp, sticky…coated with some sort of viscous semiliquid compound.
Beverly drew in a breath, then pushed another control and enlarged the image still further.
“Royal jelly,” she said in a tone of wonder. It was the compound secreted by the pharyngeal glands of worker bees, fed to all bee larvae. But one special larva received only royal jelly—and this exclusive diet produced a queen for the colony.
Could this nutrient trigger the development of the hormone? Or might the nutrient itself be broken down into the hormone in the bloodstream?
Beverly could not help glancing up at the blinking green light—showing that Jean-Luc’s neutralizer chip was still working—before putting the computer to work on the answer.
As he sat in the captain’s chair with T’Lana beside him, Worf studied the image of the Borg cube on the main viewscreen. Like all the others on the bridge, he was unable to tear his gaze from it for very long—as if by staring at it hard enough he might be able to see where Captain Picard was and what he was doing.
Geordi La Forge, of course, knew better than all of them. He stood at the engineering console behind Worf, monitoring the readout that tracked the captain’s position aboard the Borg vessel. The Klingon had instructed him to alert them if the captain veered off course or stalled in his progress to the queen’s chamber. In the Enterprise transporter chamber, an operator was ready to beam the captain aboard at the first sign of trouble.
At that moment, Worf was also thinking of the past: of the moment he and Captain Picard had stood, in magnetized boots, on the gleaming white outer hull of the Enterprise. It had been like standing on the curving surface of a small, dead moon against the dark backdrop of space. He and Picard had gone in order to stop the Borg from finishing work on a transmitter. More specifically, Worf was remembering the instant he had wrested himself free from an attacking Borg, only to glance up and find one about to kill the captain.
Worf had reacted smoothly, without hesitation or thought. He had blasted the drone into eternity with the epithet, Assimilate this. And he had watched with pleasure as the impact of the blast had caused the drone to lose its footing and go sailing backward into space, receding swiftly in the frictionless vacuum until it could no longer be seen.
He did not regret killing the Borg that day. If he had not, it would certainly have killed the captain, an act that might eventually have brought the Borg victory. But Worf regretted the attitude that had seized him, the sense of satisfaction and smug triumph at destroying an enemy.
Now he looked at Lieutenant Nave, stone faced and grief stricken, at the conn. She sat, rigid and stiff, in her chair, one hand clutching the console as if it were the only thing supporting her. Her eyes were wide and vacant, reminding Worf uncomfortably of how he had functioned after losing Jadzia. Clearly Nave had cared more for Lieutenant Battaglia than the Klingon had realized.
He stared at the Borg cube and thought of the four crew members who had recently been lost to the Borg. He thought, too, of the captain and the enormous sacrifice he was making—embracing the specter of Locutus again, going alone onto the Borg vessel. He had seen the bitterness in the captain’s eyes. It was one thing for one’s body to be vanquished by a foe, but to allow one’s mind and spirit to be degraded was unthinkable. Yet such extreme situations called for personal sacrifice.
Worf knew that if he had to face the enemy again, he would kill without question, so long as it was necessary. But this time, he would take no pleasure in killing, find no sense of victory or pleasure. This time, he would remember that behind each Borg was an assimilated—and tormented—individual