Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (47 page)

Reed went first, grasping the door frame as she leaned into the gaping turboshaft and looked straight down. A wave of vertigo shot through her at the sight of it, an octagonal tunnel that seemed to go on forever. Marking the plunge was a line of red lights mounted alongside an access ladder—one light for each deck, a ruddy cascade flowing into the depths of hell.

She felt Nick Locarno move in beside her.

“How far to main engineering?” she asked.

“Ten decks down, then aft about seventy meters.” He never took his eyes off the abyss beneath them. “Fourteen more decks after that.”

“Could be worse.”

“Yeah? Tell me that when we hit bottom.”

Reed waved Casari forward. The engineer’s mate brought along a large case, which he fastened to the deck and unlocked. Inside was a set of handheld maneuvering jets, which he passed around to the others. Reed held hers up and squeezed the trigger a couple of times to test it, the pressurized gases within escaping with a quiet hiss.

And then she stepped off the edge of the precipice.

Instinct dictated that Reed should fall, her arms and legs flailing briefly as she slipped into the shaft; but then intellect took over, a slow realization of her own weightlessness and inertia. She floated clear over to the other side before she regained her bearings, nearly bumping against the wall as she fired off a few bursts to stabilize herself. She spun around slowly, levitating in midair, to find everyone watching her performance.

Locarno smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.

“Keep it tight, people,” Reed ordered, and started the long descent.

The others jumped in after her, one by one, a chain of bodies in controlled free fall. Reed poured on thrust until it felt dangerous to go any faster, deck numbers flashing by in her peripheral vision as she focused on the rest of the team to make sure they kept pace. Out of sight meant being alone—and
alone
on this ship was unthinkable.

“Coming up on the lateral shaft,” Locarno warned. “Better slow it down.”

Reed did as he said, flipping herself over and keeping a close eye on her position. She came to a halt just above Deck 10, where she grabbed hold of the access ladder. Locarno joined her there while the others hovered directly above, their helmet lamps casting all movement in elongated shadows. Reed used the rungs to pull herself down, her hands slippery from the sweat inside her gloves, then stared down the impossible length of the conduit that stretched into
Reston
’s secondary hull.

“Easy to lose yourself in here,” she said.

Locarno didn’t respond, his gaze fixed on the nearby deck hatch.

“Going somewhere, Nick?”

“Computer cores are right through there,” he said. “One port, one starboard.”

“Take it easy. You’ll get your chance soon enough.”

With that, Reed pointed the way aft and pushed herself off the ladder. Locarno did the same, catching up to her as the rest of the team rounded the corner and followed. By this time, Reed had grown accustomed to moving in zero g and used it to her advantage. Coasting on momentum, she fired off her jets a few times to keep herself centered, traversing the distance to the end of
Reston
’s saucer section in a matter of minutes. There, she found a disabled lift car parked directly over the second vertical shaft—effectively blocking the only direct route to their objective.

“Just our luck,” Locarno remarked, floating in next to her. “You want to take this lift, or wait for the next one?”

Reed approached the car, trying to find a way around it. When that didn’t work, she planted her boots against the wall and gave it a solid push. The car didn’t budge. “Damn thing is stuck tight,” she muttered,
just as Harlow arrived with Casari and the rest of the team. “Think I could use a hand over here.”

The two engineers quickly went to work on the magnetic locks that kept the car on track, disabling the power-cutoff locks so that it could levitate back and forth. Harlow then gave it a firm shove, which made the bulk give a little. Everybody else grabbed hold of the car wherever they could. Coordinating their efforts, they all pushed at the same time—centimeter by centimeter, slowly, until the shaft beneath opened up just wide enough to let a body pass through.

Casari went up top again and reengaged the locks. The car settled back into place.

“Ladies first,” Harlow said.

Reed shuffled over to the edge of the opening and looked down. This shaft seemed even more ominous than the last one, if such a thing was possible. So was the menacing certainty that something awaited them down there—something that stirred in the dark spaces, reacting to their presence, like a predator sensing prey.

Reed dismissed the notion, which retreated into the depths from which it came. Tapping yet another reserve of strength, she squeezed herself into the opening and wriggled her way down, her helmet barely clearing the narrow slit. “Watch those edges coming through,” she warned the others as she moved out of the way, making room for the next person. “You don’t want to rip a hole in your suit.”

“As if we didn’t have enough to worry about,” Locarno groaned, sliding into the hole and dropping in next to her. “You always this much fun?”

“Only when I’m trying not to get killed.”

Reed dunked Locarno to keep him going. As he spiraled downward, she stood by and ushered the rest of the party through, helping to guide each of them. Nicole Carson was last, and the one who had the most trouble. She snagged her medkit, tangling herself into a knot of loose straps and jerking limbs. By the time Reed could reach her, Carson was almost in a full panic. She paid no attention to Reed’s orders for her to stop. Reed had to grab a knife from her pocket and cut the straps before Carson even realized she was there—and only then did the medic begin to calm down and allow Reed to pull her out.

Carson’s muscles were rigid against the fabric of her suit. Reed
spun her around, hurriedly searching for signs of a tear, but found no obvious leaks.

“Jesus,” she exhaled. “You scared me, Nicole.”

Carson smiled weakly, a haggard expression peppered with beads of nervous sweat. “Sorry I got hung up there,” she said, finally relaxing—except for her eyes, which refused to settle on a single direction. “Thanks for the assist.”

“Are you up to this?”

“I’m fine,” Carson assured her. “Just a little claustrophobic.”

“I need everybody sharp. We can’t afford any mistakes.”

“Don’t worry about me,” the medic replied, then descended with the rest of the boarding party. Reed wasn’t fully convinced, and remained behind long enough to wonder if Carson might pose a problem. It would be easy to use that as an excuse to request an immediate beam-out, and make it that much harder for Evan Walsh to continue with this mission. Part of Reed thought she would be doing everyone a favor.

But you won’t do that, will you? Because he gave you an order.

And Jenna Reed always followed orders.

A bloom of sparks vaporized the gloom before spreading out across the shaft, the embers dying off as quickly as Tristan Harlow’s phaser torch cast them. The engineer used it to cut through the door seam on Deck 25, finishing the job in a matter of minutes; but as the torch extinguished and its sputtering ceased, the hard reality of
opening
the door dawned on each member of the boarding party. They passed that same, gruesome stare off to one another, like soldiers in those law few seconds before a combat drop.

Harlow lowered his torch and looked back at Reed.

“Go,” she said.

James Casari whipped out an extensible crowbar, which he wedged into the ragged seam. He worked it back and forth a few times, enough for Harlow to get his fingers through the crack, and together both men forced the doors open. They parted about three-quarters of the way before jamming, but that was more than enough to afford a view of the other side, which gradually unmasked itself through a haze of smoke and ionized particles.

Jenna Reed hadn’t thought it possible for a chill to bite through her envirosuit, but it did. She remained motionless, her gaze directed on that opening, her mind processing images with illusion but finding the reality even more ghastly than her imagination. There, under the pale ticking glow of the alert lights, Reed saw death staring back at her in its most wicked form: eternal and irrevocable, yet imbued with a cruel veneer of life.

It might have been human at one time, or one of a dozen other races, but none of that mattered now. The pallor of its skin and the mechanical prosthetic that covered its left eye conjured up only a single species.

Borg.

“Holy mother of God,” Chris Thayer whispered.

Rayna Massey scowled. “God’s got nothing to do with this.”

Reed drifted toward the entry, unable to resist so powerful a lure. Locarno reached out to stop her, but she brushed him aside. Climbing through the broken doors, she attached her boots to the deck and stood there—the flow of her own blood thundering in her ears, vision constricting into the space between her and the Borg drone.

Only the head and shoulders were visible, recessed behind the mottled glass of a regeneration chamber. The one organic eye remained open and sunken deep into its socket, the skin desiccated and taut against its skull. With its jaw frozen agape, the drone seemed to convey the horror of its last moments—or perhaps the horror its kind had visited upon so many others.

Reed lumbered closer, her movements heavy and mechanical. Unnervingly, she caught a glimpse of her own reflection superimposed over the drone, forming a composite visage that seemed so
alien
and yet so familiar. In that moment, she could easily imagine their roles reversed:
What if it had been me on board a ship like this? Would I have let it happen? Or would I have taken myself out before they could take me?

“This one’s dead,” Reed announced.

“Maybe,” Locarno said, “but what about
them?
”

Only then did Reed turn and see the
other
chambers, one after the other, in a line that extended down the entire length of the corridor until it bent around a corner and led out of sight. Reed estimated thirty or forty chambers going in both directions, but lost count after
that. There were probably hundreds more scattered throughout the ship.

“Frag me,” Harlow breathed. Like the rest of the boarding party, he had his weapon drawn, and swept the barrel back and forth, just waiting for the slightest provocation to open fire. “Are they
all
like this?”

Reed looked at Nicole Carson. “Tricorder.”

The medic used the device to scan as far as its sensors could go. “No life signs within five hundred square meters,” she reported, reading off the tiny screen. “No power signatures coming off these tubes, either.”

“Poor bastards,” Casari observed. “That ain’t no way to die.”

“You could’ve fooled me,” Rayna Massey said, floating down the line and inspecting the chambers up close. “These guys look perfectly preserved.”

Locarno sidled up to Reed, checking out the drone that had drawn her attention. Unlike the others, this one showed signs of decomposition—which Locarno traced to a large crack in the glass near the base of the chamber. “There,” he said, pointing it out to her. “There must have been some damage before the Borg retreated into stasis.”

“Why go into stasis at all?” Chris Thayer asked.

“Fallback position,” Locarno said. “At some point, they got cut off from the larger Collective—maybe after the ship entered the Korso Spanse. After that, they would have gone into sleep mode while they tried to reestablish contact.”

“Which never happened,” Reed finished.

“They just kept on waiting,” Carson said, as if talking in a dream. “They could have been drifting out here forever.”

Something in her tone frightened Reed—not because she was afraid that Carson was losing it, but because she felt the same creeping disconnect from reality. Just
being
here was like immersion in a sensory deprivation tank, with a thousand lifeless eyes watching their every move. No rational being could continue to function long under those conditions—and even now, her people were starting to get strung out. More than ever, Reed just wanted to get the job done and get the hell out of here.

She checked her mission clock. Thirty-six minutes had elapsed.

“Celtic,
advance team,” she spoke into her transmitter. “Checking in.”

The reply was garbled, barely audible—but there, like a lifeline.

“Go, Jenna.”

“We’re on Deck Twenty-five and headed for engineering,” she advised. “Confirmed Borg presence on board, unknown number.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Looks like they’re all dead, Skipper.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I think so. We’ll continue to assume hostiles until we can verify that the rest of the ship is secure.”

“Proceed . . . try to maintain . . . transporter lock . . . emergency beam-out.”

Reed’s jaw tightened.
Try to maintain.
Nobody liked the sound of that.

“Understood,” she replied. “Advance team out.”

They stood like sentinels alongside the long passageways, their sarcophagi lined up next to one another in perfect symmetry. Reed tried not to look at them, their cadaverous stares not nearly as disturbing as the utter
sameness
of them all—and the knowledge that each one had once been an individual like her. It was almost impossible to imagine the vast, unyielding hunger that had devoured their souls.

Or that such a thing could ever truly die.

Reed was grateful for the sight of the blast door that sealed off main engineering. Tristan Harlow opened the lock mechanism, splicing a portable battery to the exposed leads so he could run a bypass. The duranium door then popped open, lifting just enough for the engineer to roll underneath and get inside. Five minutes later, the overheads started to click on: a sudden, blinding surge of lights that flooded the corridor and spread outward like fresh blood flowing through
Reston
’s arteries.

Reed held a hand up to shield her eyes as the blast door retracted into the ceiling. It locked back into place with a jarring
thump,
much louder than she would have expected in such a thin atmosphere. In addition to the lights, Harlow had obviously gotten the air flowing again.