Resistance - J.M. Dillard [90]
And she, Sara, was already dead, gone as surely as her mother and father had one day disappeared from the living to become memories.
No hope, Nave repeated to herself, as Lio pressed against her, killing her. She tried one last time to find the warmth in his eyes, but there was none, no recognition at all. In that moment, she gave up all hope of saving Lio, all hope of saving herself. She would do as she had promised him before he had left the Enterprise. She would do what he said he had not been able to do for his friend Joel.
With herculean strength borne out of her love and sorrow, Nave pulled Lio with her as she allowed herself to fall over the railing. She could hear Chao’s scream follow her as they dropped down the seemingly endless pit until she was too far to hear anything.
Sara had been right earlier.
The last thing she saw were Lio’s cold eyes.
Behind the force field, Beverly sat back on her haunches. The sound of Locutus’s saw drilling into Worf’s rifle brought her back to full consciousness; the pain had caused her nearly to faint. She stared clinically down at her injury and assessed it. The wrist of her dominant right hand was shattered, useless; she could not bear the attempt to articulate her fingers.
But Worf had fallen, and Locutus was moving in for the kill. There was no time to think about something as unimportant as pain. She had one good hand. Gritting her teeth, she propped herself on it, the injured arm tucked close to her body. The missing hypospray had rolled only a few meters away; she crawled to it on her knees.
Nearby, the fully born queen had grown impatient with her restricted mobility. Rather than wait for her courtiers, she reached clumsily, with unaccustomed hands, for the cables that attached her neck, shoulders, and crown to her overhead energy source.
Beverly clutched the errant hypo. Unseen, she rose awkwardly to her feet and, crouching, approached her enemy from the back.
The queen’s hands were behind her neck as she unfastened a piece of sinuous black tubing the way a woman might a necklace. Beverly reached out with the hypo, aiming for one of the queen’s up-raised arms.
The instant before she could rest it against the queen’s flesh, the black body, the mottled white head, whipped about and faced her.
The liquid bronze eyes were narrowed with fury. “Insect,” the queen hissed. She reached out with a bone-pale hand and wrapped it about Beverly’s throat; her touch was cool, unctuous, metal hard.
Beverly felt a flare of pain as her trachea, her larynx, were slowly crushed—but she felt no fear, only disgust and determination. She did not waste time considering the fact that she would now certainly die. She had no more than a split second to act, and in that second, she concentrated all of her energy, all of her will, on her unsteady left hand and the hypospray it held.
The queen bore down. Beverly grew light-headed; her vision began to dim. But her left hand continued to move. She felt rather than saw the hypo meet the flesh of the queen’s shoulder; she pressed her thumb down and heard it whisper. Only then did she permit her eyes to close and yield to darkness.
15
A KLINGON’S STRENGTH DID NOT QUITE MATCH that of a Borg. Worf’s hand began to tremble with the effort of holding Locutus’s saw arm back. The blade grew closer, closer, until at last it sliced through the fabric of his uniform just beneath his chest.
And then it stung his skin. Worf felt the warmth of blood as it ran down his midsection; the realization made him roar and squeeze his fingers even more deeply into Locutus’s throat. The drone’s eyes bulged slightly; its lips parted as it gasped for air.
The saw blade stuttered as it hit the edges of the Klingon’s ribs. Worf did not flinch at the pain; instead, he came to a decision. He would let go of the saw arm, let it take him—so that he could seize Locutus’s neck with both of his hands and kill him.
We will die together, he promised