Resistance - J.M. Dillard [75]
But Dante had said that the innermost circle was bitterly cold; that was surely not the case on this ship, so humid that mists swirled about Nave’s feet. Sweat already glazed her upper lip and forehead.
Nave forced her gaze upward, at the away team: Worf leading, then Leary, Crusher, and Diasourakis and Chao side by side. Clutching her phaser rifle close, its butt pressing into her collarbone, Nave brought up the rear, her body angled sideways in order to follow the movements of the team while still being alert to any threats approaching from her direction.
“There,” Worf said softly. Nave craned her neck and looked beyond Chao’s straight spill of dark hair, beyond Diasourakis and Leary and Crusher, to the Klingon, who pointed at a light—faint and pulsating and unmistakably green in the colorless landscape—emanating from an arched entryway in the near distance. “That would be the queen’s chamber.”
The team moved forward, each step punctuated by another pulse of the green light. In the silence, Nave heard the whisper of ghosts.
As the catwalk was intersected by a perpendicular walkway, Crusher hissed a warning. Nave turned, instantly on the alert. The phaser rifle was thicker than her two arms laid side by side, fastened to her body by a thick strap so there was no danger of her dropping it. Some officers complained that the weapon was unwieldy, but Nave swung it around as though it were an extension of herself.
A Borg drone was closing in on them from the side, moving faster than Nave had anticipated. By the time the away team slowed to react, Diasourakis was directly in the drone’s path.
Nave saw no more than a blur of white and black and fired a split second before all the others; the rifle’s blast was painfully dazzling. A small nova exploded at the level of the drone’s chest. It staggered, bent neatly and impossibly backward at the waist, then steadied itself and straightened before restarting its inexorable move forward.
Nave fired again. This time, the beam from her rifle and Worf’s converged and scalded the drone, brightening the shadowed corridors to daylight. It writhed briefly, then fell, scorched and lifeless, to the metal deck.
Her hands shook only slightly as she lowered her weapon.
Before she reacted, she had not even looked at the drone’s face; she could not have said whether it had been Lio, whether it had been Picard. Along with the others, she stared down at the dead creature. Its features were indistinct, bland, unremarkable; Nave could do no more than identify the species as humanoid.
As she lifted her gaze, she caught the doctor’s. Crusher had been gazing down at the drone’s body; as she looked up, her eyes met Nave’s. Neither woman spoke, neither gave any overt sign of acknowledgment, but Nave understood completely. She and Crusher had both come onto the Borg vessel for the same reason. She and Crusher had both been terrified by the possible identity of the murdered drone.
The away team moved on in silence.
It was no more than thirty meters to the source of the pulsing green light, the arching entrance to the lone walled-in structure on the ship. But the slow, stealthy march seemed interminable. Nave shifted her gaze constantly toward the rear, toward the sides, toward the front, where Worf led the way. It will happen, she told herself, and happen quickly. They would reach the queen’s chamber. There would be a few more shots fired, then Crusher would inject the queen and all would be well. Picard and Lio would be discovered whole and be restored.
At least, she tried hard to believe it. She had thought, before she came aboard the Borg vessel, that she would have time to scan the chalky features of each drone before she fired, that she would have time to recognize Lio if he appeared and somehow magically