The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [61]
“Montgomery won’t be fooled forever, either. And once he figures out that we’ve duped him, things are going to start happening very fast.”
Kaz did not protest. Even the little bit of time that Seven and Icheb had been allowed to regenerate would help them, and he knew as well as Janeway did that they didn’t have the luxury of time on any front of this strange battle they were waging.
“What do you want us to do?” asked Chakotay, quietly.
“We’ll awaken Seven and Icheb and send them back [181] to sickbay with Kaz and Data. The rest of you will come with me. This was our ship, once. We’re going to take it back.”
Brenna Covington lay on the bed, her skullcap removed and her brain exposed, calm and yet excited at the same time. She had the utmost trust in the EMH Mark One. He had not failed her yet, which was more than could be said for many humans. It had taken time, and she had lost patience more than once with him, Grady, and Blake. But they always had come through for her in the end.
She had grown weary of being a partial queen. It was good, to have the superior strength and access to the hive mind. It was even better to be able to link with them, as she could when she regenerated, to feel their need and love of her. But that was as a taste of honey on the tongue, sweet but serving only to awaken further cravings. She wanted more. She wanted it all.
Covington wanted information to flow through her body like her blood did. She wanted to penetrate all the drone minds, all the time, thoroughly and completely, with no separation. She wanted to experience the thoughts of healthy adults, not just the malleable brains of children and the sometimes dry and barren minds of the elderly. Intellectually, she knew what she would become when she was at last complete, and she thirsted for it like a man in the desert thirsted for cold, sweet water.
Had she been the true queen, the process would have taken place within moments, if not seconds. The Royal Protocol program would have selected her, imbued her [182] with knowledge that came as quickly and effortlessly as breathing. It would have replaced weak human organs with metal, and she would have become queen almost instantaneously. The Borg needed their queen, could not function without her.
But what she, Blake, and the EMH were doing was new, experimental. Had never been done before. They were creating a queen from scratch, as it were, with a recipe that had only recently been understood.
Odd, that she would use a cooking metaphor. She seemed to smell food being prepared ... cookies, she thought; baking slowly in an oven.
“I smell cookies baking,” she told the EMH. He stood behind her, busily working on her brain. She was used to it, accustomed now even to the sight of her skullcap, bony and bloody, sitting in a dish behind a sterile field.
“I’m stimulating that part of your brain,” the EMH replied. “That’s only natural. I hope it’s a pleasant association.”
“It is,” she said, her mind going back to the time before the owner of the Hand invaded her life, when she and her mother baked chocolate chip cookies every Saturday morning. She had not smelled cookies baking since then. Odd, how the mind worked, what it chose to remember.
Once the transformation from human to Borg queen was completed, she would have no need for the laborious task of chewing, swallowing, and digesting nutrients. Her taste buds would all but disappear from disuse. Anything her body needed, it would acquire through the more efficient means of direct absorption.
Faintly she heard the EMH’s voice, as if coming from far away. “... have to put you fully under, Your Majesty.”
[183] “You may proceed,” she said, her voice thick and her words slurred. As she closed eyelids that had become suddenly heavy and drifted into darkness, her last thought was one of regret at never again smelling and tasting chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven.
The slow-passing hours were taking a dreadful toll on Allyson. Andropov, Robinson, and many of the others who were Starfleet-trained