Resistance - J.M. Dillard [56]
Worf released a sigh. His life with humans, especially his marriage to Jadzia, had softened him greatly. And perhaps—just perhaps—the presence of the Vulcan counselor was influencing him, too.
He shot her a sidewise look. Poised and impassive, she sat beside him, her blue-black hair and brows contrasting starkly with her pale skin, her dark blue eyes fixed steadily on the image of the Borg cube. Unlike the others on the bridge, however, she showed no hint of turmoil or revulsion. Admirable, Worf thought, to be so cool and efficient under such pressure. Were they not averse to fighting, Vulcans would make greatly effective warriors.
Jadzia, he decided, would have liked her.
T’Lana’s lashes flickered. She had detected his gaze; her expression hardened very faintly as she looked back at the viewscreen. He could not know the truth at that moment: that she was looking at the Borg ship and remembering what she had told Captain Wozniak about the Jem’Hadar.
In their case, diplomacy fails. They are mindless creatures whose sole focus is killing. They cannot be reasoned with.
Worf forced his gaze and his thoughts away from her, and stared back at the Borg cube. He hoped that he would not have to test his newfound resolution not to kill the Borg unnecessarily; he hoped for the captain’s swift success.
But he had learned, when Jadzia had died, that hope was sometimes thwarted and that the very worst was indeed capable of happening.
At the helm, Sara Nave was holding on.
She was staring out at the Borg ship trying to focus on her duty, on her ability to react swiftly the instant she was needed, just as she had forced herself, after her parents died, to focus on her finals at the academy. The problem was that this time there was nothing to study, nothing to learn, nothing to distract her. She had nothing to do other than sit and wait…which made it extremely difficult not to imagine what was occurring there, on the ship in front of her eyes.
Holding on, her father had called it. When things were so impossible that all you could do was keep breathing, keep taking that next step, keep going until finally you were somewhere else, where things weren’t so terrible.
Her dad’s mother had died long ago, in a skimmer accident, when Sara was still a girl. He had just gotten the news and was still dazed when she had hugged him, crying, and asked him how he was.
Holding on, he had said dully, no doubt feeling the same emptiness, the same disbelief, the same helpless anger Nave felt now.
Duty was her only link to sanity at the moment. Without it, she would have to think about Lio and what was happening to him aboard the Borg vessel this very instant.
Assimilate. Such an innocuous-sounding word for such an unspeakably monstrous act. If he had simply been killed, it would have been awful enough. She had assumed that his broken body was transported to sickbay. When she found out that Lio was still out there, she was temporarily awash with joy and hope, until she realized that he was being forced to suffer a far worse violation.
Despite her efforts to suppress it, Lio’s voice spoke unbidden in her mind. But it wasn’t really Joel. They’d taken him, changed him, defiled his body with these, these weapons and cybernetic attachments to his head, his eyes, his arms. He was no longer human…And the worst part was…I couldn’t destroy the monster they’d made of him…
When her parents had been killed, Nave had not remembered the names of the two warring planets; she had not wanted to know which side was responsible for the destruction of the Lowe. In her mind, her parents’ deaths were a faultless tragedy. She had been too stunned to think about blame.
Now it took near-impossible effort not to think of the Borg, not to be filled with venom at the sight of their ship, at the utterance of their name.