The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [32]
Organic beings had created machines. But it was the machines that made organic beings into Borg. Without their technology, the Borg were like an old-fashioned lamp that had been unplugged. Everything the drones did was in response to orders from their queen, her instructions to the hive mind. Damage the queen, and the whole thing fell apart. The queen made drones. How, then, was a queen made?
She was an organic being who would have to become not just Borg, but almost a super-Borg. She was the complete operating system for the entire mammoth structure. She was more than a single being—she was the program made flesh and machine.
[93] In one of those odd connections one sometimes makes when under duress, Libby’s mind flashed back to a theater term: deus ex machina. In ancient Greek dramas, occasionally the day was saved by a god from mythology descending onto the stage by means of a mechanical device. It had become a slightly derogatory term in theater and literature, used when an author grafted on a miraculous happy ending when logically there was none to be had.
She didn’t give a damn right now about poor plotting and cheesy endings in books and holonovels. Her mind seized on the literal translation of the term “deus ex machina” and worried it like a terrier with a rat:
God from machine.
Clothing largely disguised the sickly gray pallor of Covington’s skin, except for hands and face. Special makeup designed by the doctor who had operated on her so well these past several years made her skin seem merely porcelain, not bloodless. Eyes that saw better than any human’s met those in the mirror.
But it was the back of her bald head she loved most. This was what Brian Grady so loved to fondle when they coupled; what drew him and held him fast, like a fly in her mammoth spider’s web.
No ... a spider wasn’t quite right.
The Borg had figured out how to create a god from a machine. Take an organic being, make her Borg, and give her access to the Royal Protocol ... and you had a queen. So this was how, when the Enterprise destroyed the Borg cube that had been host to Picard and also presumably [94] the queen, she had come back. This was how the Admiral Janeway of the future had been able to slay the queen, and yet there was one somewhere on Earth right now.
You couldn’t ever really kill the queen, because the queen wasn’t a person. It—she—was a program.
It was so simple. So logical. So terrifying.
For a long moment, Libby’s mind refused to function. It was trying to wrap itself around the almost inconceivable reality that Starfleet Intelligence was well on its way to creating a complete Borg queen who would utterly destroy humanity. Why? It was good to know how the bastards did it, of course, but who the hell would—
And then she knew.
Covington went into her office and settled herself at the computer. With the touch of a button, a hidden panel revealed itself. She licked her lips, drawing out the moment of pleasure, and then stepped into the secret alcove. Green light bathed her gray body.
At once, voices flooded her mind, but she was not overwhelmed. She reached out in joy, touching each mind one with her own, feeling the surge of their responses. Their need and desire for her. Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, as they did every time she connected with them thusly. Their unconditional, unwavering, undying devotion and love flooded her, and she heard and responded with every cell of her body.
They were hers, better now for being hers than they had been before she had sought them out. And there would be so many more to come, soon, soon. Each one [95] a part of the nearly perfect whole. She loved and would protect and defend them, even as she gave them their orders, even as she instructed some to die in order to preserve the whole. They fed her spirit in a way that no single human ever had. They nourished her