Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [3]
Picard remembered the look on Hawk’s face, as the last vestiges of his humanity fought against the Borg nanoprobes coursing through him.
Even if Hawk had burned up in the atmosphere, Picard doubted that that was what had ended his life. Assuming that Worf’s phaser blast hadn’t killed him, the lieutenant had most likely suffocated in his environment suit, frightened and alone as his humanity was torn from him. Picard shuddered. He knew what it was like to have his consciousness subsumed within the hive mind of the collective. After the Borg queen had been destroyed, what then? What had Hawk thought in the last few hours of his life, separated from both humanity and the collective?
“Damn,” said Picard softly, putting the padd down on the table. Riker stood and leaned forward, momentarily putting a supportive hand on his captain’s shoulder, and then exited the room without a word.
The padd blinked. Hawk, Sean Liam (Lieutenant). Hawk, Sean Liam (Lieutenant).
Such a loss. So enthusiastic and passionate. So much promise…
Hawk had been on the ship slightly less than a year, transferring with a group of others onto the newly commissioned Enterprise-E. It didn’t take long for him to be assigned to the conn during alpha watch. He was bright and fast, and well-liked by all. He had said how pleased he was to serve aboard Starfleet’s flagship, which he considered a special honor since he was only a few years out of the Academy. But that time had been long enough for Hawk to forge a personal relationship with a man whom he loved, long enough for him to rise in the ranks, long enough for him to reach his own personal crossroad.
Everyone eventually reaches a crossroad, if he lives long enough. Six months ago, Lieutenant Hawk had reached his.
Chapter One
Stardate 50368.0
The coffee cup suffused Captain Karen Blaylock’s hands with a cheery warmth as she strode purposefully onto the bridge of her ship, the Excelsior-class starship Slayton. Though the alpha watch wasn’t due to begin for another ten minutes, she wasn’t at all surprised to see several key bridge officers already hard at work at their consoles, which hummed and beeped agreeably.
Commander Ernst Roget, her executive officer, turned toward her in the command chair and favored her with a reserved smile. “Captain on the bridge,” he said, vacating the seat for her.
Heads turned toward Blaylock, distracted momentarily from their vigilance. These were good officers, science and engineering specialists all, and she hated allowing command protocol to interfere with their work, even momentarily. She often envied them their single-minded dedication to discovery. How ironic, she thought, to have allowed her command responsibilities to come between her and the very thing that had brought her out to the galactic hinterlands in the first place: the pursuit of pure knowledge.
Blaylock nodded a silent as you were, and each crewmember quickly returned to the work at hand. She took her seat and sipped her coffee.
Commander Cortin Zweller approached Blaylock from the science station on the bridge’s starboard side. His thick shock of white hair was belied by the boyish twinkle in his eye. During the nearly four months he had served as chief science officer, he had proven to be a valuable member of the Slayton team. Though by no means a brilliant researcher, Zweller was well-liked by the other science specialists, an administrator apparently gifted with the good sense not to step on the toes of his better-trained subordinates-unless absolutely necessary.
“The anomaly still seems to be hiding from us,” Zweller said. “So far, at least.”
Blaylock sighed, disappointed. The Slayton had last made long-range sensor contact with the subspace anomaly eight days previously, but had turned up nothing since. Several weeks before that, the Federation’s Argus Array subspace observatory had detected intermittent but extremely powerful waves of