Resistance - J.M. Dillard [57]
When Commander Worf had told her that there would be no second away team—that Captain Picard would be going alone onto the Borg vessel—Nave had been frustrated beyond tears.
There were only two things she desperately wanted. The first was to go onto the Borg ship and rescue Lio. Even though he had not been there to hear, she had promised him, standing in his quarters, that she would go to the Borg vessel and find him and bring him home. And she did not intend to break that promise.
The second thing she wanted was to go onto the enemy ship and kill as many of the Borg as she could find. She did not want rehabilitation for them, or even justice. She wanted vengeance and blood.
The queen was beautiful and grotesque.
“You,” Picard breathed, so quietly he could scarcely hear the word himself. He knew the face all too well: distinctly feminine, high cheeked, ageless, elegant.
It was the face of the queen who had desired and pursued Locutus; it was the face of the queen Picard had fought, in Earth’s past, and killed with his own hands. Here she was reborn, her features in easy repose, her eyelids shut as though she were sleeping, trapped in a deep and vaguely pleasant dream.
We were very close, you and I. You can still hear our song.
But her voice was silent now. She was no more than a bust: a lifeless head and shoulders. They sat atop an exposed snakelike spine fashioned of bone and steel and blood. The whole of it, from the queen’s neck down, was enveloped by a translucent, glistening cocoon…nutrients, Locutus knew. The nectar allowed only the queen.
But her sculpted body, of dully gleaming black metal, awaited her nearby, tended by two dead-eyed, ghostly drones. The body stood in a gruesomely alert fashion, legs and arms animate and slightly twitching, almost as if impatient for the absent head to come and rest upon its shoulders.
Picard moved over the threshold into the chamber and was relieved that neither drone glanced up from its task.
He had allowed himself an instant’s reaction to the queen’s familiar face, but now he was determined to waste no more time. He stepped cautiously toward the bed where she rested. So great was Picard’s loathing that Locutus’s impassive features began to contort from the emotion.
He kept his prosthetic arm—the arm the Borg had, ironically, given him so long ago—lowered by his side. He did not intend to strike until the last instant, when he stood directly beside her. He did not want to give the drones enough time to understand what was happening, to move in to protect her.
He stared down at her throat, its delicate veins throbbing with the first signs of life beneath a layer of glistening gel. One quick stroke, and that life would be snuffed out and the universe safe. He moved in, so close to her that his thigh brushed against the edge of the bed on which she lay. With a single thought, he activated the neural circuits that controlled the prosthetic arm and lifted it. The deadly blade at its tip, where a human hand had once been, began to whir.
He bent down.
As he did, her eyes opened, stark and wide, quicksilver, with no iris, no pupil. Yet she saw. In less than an instant, she saw—as if she had always known he was coming, as if she had been biding her time in order to startle him—and she shrieked, beauty transformed into a gorgon’s rictus.
The cry roared through the Collective, so powerful and shrill and outraged that it blotted out every other sound, every thought. Picard closed his eyes at a mental pain so intense he feared his skull would shatter. It was so much worse than the sound that had come over the Enterprise’s comlink earlier. He staggered, only an agonized burst of will keeping him on his feet. Miraculously, he opened his eyes again, steadied his arm, tried to bring the whirring blade down to meet the tender skin of that feminine throat.
It was too late. The galvanized drones were on him now. One stood behind him and gripped the prosthetic arm as Picard tried to raise it. Picard cried out as the upper part of the arm was wrenched up, then back at an unnatural angle,