Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [2]
Riker paused, as though collecting his thoughts. “We take it for granted, Jean-Luc.” He rarely called the captain by his first name, but at this moment it seemed to come naturally. “We move among the stars every day at high warp, surrounded by all the comforts of a posh hotel. But being there, jammed into that little cockpit, with my teeth chattering and my ears ringing as we just barely made warp one… It was the fastest I’ve ever moved in my life.”
The two officers sat in silence then, Riker staring into the darkness of space, Picard closing his eyes and clasping his hands together.
After a brief time, Riker sniffed, and wiped at his nose. Picard opened his eyes again, as Riker cleared his throat. “Geordi is working with the McKinley crews on cleanup, but I’m going to have to order him to take some down time. Barclay is… well, I think Barclay may be asking for a transfer off the ship. He seems ill-at-ease with everything that’s happened. You know how he is with people, anyhow. I think he may just want to take on a less exciting atmosphere for a while.”
Picard’s mouth pursed into a grim smile. “There are times when I think that might be the best choice myself.”
Riker hesitated, then handed the padd to his captain. He didn’t seem to want to acknowledge its contents; neither did Picard. “This is the final casualty report. We lost seventeen back on Earth from the ASRV landings. One hundred and forty-eight crewpersons were assimilated by the Borg. All of them are now dead. Those that weren’t killed in combat-or as a consequence of the plasma coolant that flooded engineering-apparently couldn’t survive the death of the queen.”
Picard nodded without speaking, remembering the malfunctioning drones who fell around him and the hideous sight of the mottle-skinned woman dissolving before his eyes.
“Do you think we’ve seen the last of the Borg? Now that their queen is dead?”
Picard sighed heavily. “We can always hope. But I don’t think so, Number One.”
Riker continued his oral report. “The bodies of those who were assimilated have been quarantined to the Borg Sciences unit for study. Finally, twenty-five people were killed in combat against Borg drones. Total loss: one hundred-ninety crewmembers.”
Picard looked down at the padd in his hand, frowning. The names scrolled by slowly, in no particular order. Carter, Lynch, Batson, Nelson, Eiger, M’Rvyn, Tret, Kewlan, Rixa, Porter… all of them dead. Not just dead, but assimilated, then dead. They couldn’t even be properly buried until they had been taken apart by Starfleet scientists. And given some of the secrets which he knew some subsections of Starfleet were capable of holding, Picard wasn’t even sure that the crewmembers’ families would ever receive their kin’s remains.
As if to underscore this thought, the padd scrolled down to another name. Hawk, Sean Liam (Lieutenant). He, too, knew about some of Starfleet’s darkest secrets. Or rather had known.
“Were we able to recover Lieutenant Hawk’s body?” Picard asked, almost too softly for Riker to hear.
“No, sir. We’re assuming that it stayed in low Earth orbit for some time after we left 2063. Data thinks that atmospheric drag would have brought it down eventually. It… would have burned up then.”
Picard shut his eyes tightly, remembering the scene. He, Worf, and Hawk had all been in their environmental suits, their magnetized boots allowing them to traverse the ventral side of the Enterprise’s hull. They had just about freed the maglock servo clamps for the particle emitter dish-in their attempt to stop the Borg from using it as an interplexing beacon to summon other Borg cubes-when Hawk was caught by a Borg drone. Shortly thereafter, with Borg nanoprobes creeping through his bloodstream, controlling him and necrotizing his flesh, Hawk had tried to stop Picard from completing the command