Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (48 page)

He emerged with a smug expression. “Will miracles never cease?”

The rest of the team followed Harlow into the cavernous
engineering space. Reed stopped next to the railing that encircled a dormant warp core, craning her head to get a look at the full length of the translucent vessel. Although the interior was dark, green status lights flashed intermittently at each service juncture—confirmation that the containment fields for the
Reston
’s antimatter had retained their integrity. Whatever else her condition, at least the ship’s power plant remained intact.

Everything else, however, was up for grabs.

Reed had never seen the interior of a
Nebula
class before, but she knew Federation technology—and nothing here had been left untouched by the Borg. She recognized the basic layout of all the panels and interfaces, but all of them had been rigged one way or another in some strange, haphazard fashion. Thick cables of glowing fiber snaked their way around the floors and ceilings, forming a complex web of interconnected nodes, while the large status screens that had once encircled engineering had been torn out of the walls and replaced with what appeared to be holographic constructs. Alien symbols poured out of an imaging mist—textual information in what Reed could only assume was some kind of Borg code. She watched them for a time, fascinated by the complex display, but could only imagine what it all meant.

Maybe it knows we’re here.

Reed turned to Locarno, trying to read his take. If his scowl was any clue, he was thinking the same thing.

“I managed to jack into the auxiliary,” Harlow explained, walking over to one of the side panels. “At least what’s left of it. The internal circuitry is the same, but there’s been a hell of a lot of external rerouting.”

“Can you make sense of it?” Reed asked.

“Enough to get partial power,” the engineer said, pointing toward the fiber links around them. “What we’ve got here is tapping into one of the backup generators, which gets us lights and life support on this deck—at least in the immediate sections. And one more thing,” he finished, touching a button on the variable interface. “I thought you all might enjoy a little bit of gravity.”

Reed felt a building pressure on her legs as the full weight of her body started to reassert itself. Harlow increased the pull gradually, giving everyone time to adjust before pumping it up to a full g, but even
then each movement seemed sluggish. It took a few moments before Reed felt safe enough to turn off her magnetic boots.

By then, Harlow had already peeled his helmet off. The others quickly followed suit, sweat trickling down their faces even as their breath turned to fog in the frigid air. “It’ll start warming up in a few minutes,” the engineer said, “once the atmosphere makes a pass through the scrubbers.”

Reed coughed, stale trace elements settling at the back of her throat. Even the air seemed alien, somehow out of phase. “How long until you can get the other generators online?”

“Less than an hour,” Casari said. “They should give us enough power and heat to operate in our critical areas—here, the bridge, auxiliary control.”

“And the computer cores,” Locarno interjected.

The engineer shot him a harsh glance. “If need be.”

“You’ll need some form of core control if you want to get the intermix working,” Locarno informed Reed. “The calculations to get a cold start on the impulse engines are just too complex to handle from here.”

Reed took him at his word, giving Harlow a nod that told him to make it happen.

“In any case,” the engineer continued, “it’ll get us over the hump until we can fully restore auxiliary power. Once we’re under way, we can start working on the warp drive. Hell, I might even get you a couple of phaser banks before we hit dry dock.”

“Let’s hope we won’t need them,” Reed said warmly, squeezing Harlow’s arm and then sending him and Casari on their way. While they started breaking apart the consoles, she and Locarno returned to the large holographic display. They stood for a time in front of the projection, which stretched from floor to ceiling, transfixed by the arrangement of glyphs and pulses. Reed actually reached out to touch the imaging mist, which rippled around her fingers like a pool of water, hoping to divine some hidden meaning. “Any idea what it says?”

Locarno shook his head. “It does have a certain logic to it, though.”

Reed understood what he meant. It was like listening to a language she had never heard before, baffled by the words but inferring the context.

Can you hear them, Jenna? Can you hear them calling?

“They
are
all dead,” Reed asked. “Aren’t they?”

“I think they’re all in there,” Locarno said, motioning toward the display. “Every thought, every impulse, every action—reduced to some data stream with nobody left to understand it.” He paused for a long, heavy moment. “They may be dead, but they never really left.”

Reed turned toward him, searching for some trace of irony but finding none.

“You have work to do,” she said.

“So do you,” Locarno replied as he walked away. “More than you know.”

Tristan Harlow delivered on his promise, firing up the last of the backup generators and bringing
Reston
back to a semblance of life. Internal sensors mapped out the pockets of life support that rushed in to fill the void, which carved out narrow passages of breathable air. The rest of the ship remained in vacuum, isolated from the sections where the advance team would perform their work—a hedge against the remote possibility that they had somehow missed any Borg survivors.

Jenna Reed had everyone download the safe zones to their padds and also commit them to memory. From there she broke everyone up into pairs, leaving Harlow and Casari behind in engineering and taking the rest of the team to secure the ship. The only exception was Locarno, who retreated to the starboard computer core. Reed didn’t like the idea of sending him there alone, but she had no choice. With only four more people at her disposal, she already had far more territory than she could ever hope to cover.

Reed sent Massey and Thayer aft toward the hangar deck, while she took Carson with her and started going forward. She wanted to keep a close watch on her medical officer, in case there was a repeat of the incident in the turboshaft; but as they moved deeper and deeper into the unexplored recesses of
Reston
’s hull, an almost surreal composure descended over Carson. Even as they encountered dozens more Borg drones, some of them in various states of decay, her clinical detachment never wavered. Neither did the cold spark behind Carson’s eyes—which disconcerted Reed even more than her earlier panic.

Over the next two hours, Carson’s tricorder sweeps only confirmed their grisly discoveries: death and more death, with no end in sight. Most disturbing were the corpses that wore remnants of their Starfleet uniforms, bits and pieces of a forgotten life interwoven with their Borg prosthetics and body armor. It made Reed feel a connection with them that she didn’t want, which made her hate—and fear—them all the more.

She tapped her communicator. “Massey, this is Reed.”

“Go ahead.”

“What’s your status?”

“We got nothing but dead slags here. You?”

“The same,” Reed signaled back, releasing a long breath. “Pack it in for now. Meet me on the bridge in ten minutes.”

Auxiliary power came online by the time she and Carson made it back, tripping the various consoles and causing them to flicker at random. The main viewer also engaged, pixels arranging and rearranging themselves, until a grainy image finally coalesced out of the static. Out there,
Celtic
pitched a slow orbit around
Reston,
hovering off the center of the screen like some blurry artifact. Her running lights punched a hole through the glowing elements of the Korso Spanse, thrusters leaving behind a cometary trail.

Massey and Thayer joined them on the bridge a few minutes later, exiting the turbolift and immediately assuming the conn and tactical.

“Can you get me ship-to-ship?” Reed asked.

“It’s borderline,” Massey replied, working to stabilize her panel, “but I think I can call up a visual frequency.”

Reed approached the captain’s chair, hesitating for a moment. Something about it just felt
wrong,
as if sitting there amounted to some kind of sacrilege, but she forced herself to do it, knowing that Evan Walsh would expect nothing less.

“Open up a channel.”

After a few starts, the image on the screen dissolved into a view of
Celtic
’s bridge. Walsh appeared there, larger than life, nodding with approval at his first officer.

“Welcome back to the world, Jenna.”

“Thanks, skipper,” Reed said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“You about ready to get that tub moving?”

“Checking on that. Stand by.” She hit the comm panel on her chair. “Engineering, bridge. How are we doing on navigation?”

“One miracle at a time, Jenna,”
Harlow said, his voice piped in through the overhead speaker.
“I’m routing helm functions through a portable node to bypass all these Borg mods, but the controls are going to be a little dicey.”

Reed turned to Thayer. “You getting any response?”

“It ain’t fancy,” the conn officer said, jockeying with the interface, “but I can lay in a course. Tell me where you want to go, I’ll point us in the right direction.”

“Propulsion?”

“Thrusters are functional. Still no response on impulse.”

Reed tapped a second channel. “Core, bridge. How are you doing down there?”

“Finding my limitations,”
Locarno replied.
“I’ve managed to isolate a few legacy subsystems, but the rest of the architecture has been completely redesigned. It could take weeks just to figure out where everything is.”

“Can you run the intermix models?”

“Yeah, but I’d have no way of confirming their accuracy.”

“I’d belay that, Jenna,”
Harlow cut in.
“Even a slight variance from an optimal flow state could cause those engines to overload.”

“Understood,” Reed said grimly, looking back at Walsh. “Sorry, Skipper. That’s as far as our luck goes.”

“Nothing’s easy, is it?”
the captain said, then started barking orders out to his crew.
“Shut down nonessential systems and divert all available power to the tractor beams!”
The bridge lights dimmed over the captain’s head, while several of the consoles behind him went dark. Reports poured in from all over the ship, the background chatter informing Walsh that every last joule of energy was now at his disposal—turning
Celtic
into a flying engine with no deflectors, no weapons, and barely enough life support to keep everyone breathing.

His watch officer delivered the final confirmation. Walsh nodded and sent him on his way.
“We’re ready. It’ll be slow, but we’ll get you out of the sector—far enough to keep Starfleet off our backs until we can get that ship under way.”

“Aye, sir. Mooring points are being relayed to you.”

“Receiving,”
Walsh acknowledged, checking his own monitor.
“Tactical, feed this information into the targeting computer and prepare to commence operation.”

“Got it,” Celtic
’s tactical officer said, quickly programming a solution.
“On your orders, Skipper.”

“Engage.”

Reston
shuddered as the tractor beams took hold. Inertia anchored her in place for a few endless moments, but slowly, painfully the ship began to move. An alarm on Thayer’s panel marked their progress with a rapid series of pings, while the conn officer fired off thrusters to bring their course in line with
Celtic.

“Picking up speed,” Thayer reported, the excitement in his voice building as he read from his console. “Five hundred kps . . . seven hundred—one
thousand.
It’s working, boss!”

“Very good,” Reed said, finally relaxing. She settled back into the command chair, and for the first time felt like she actually
belonged
there. “Match bearings and maintain a distance of twelve hundred meters.”

“Twelve hundred meters, aye.”

Reed heard the tactical panel sound off behind her.

“Frag me,” Massey intoned, a worried scowl spreading across her face. Reed turned back and saw the tactical officer tapping several buttons on her panel, her eyes darting back and forth as they tried to keep up with some unknown development. “This can’t be right.”

“What is it?”

“Threat indicator,” Massey explained. “Tactical systems are programmed to assume a defensive posture when there’s a breach in the security sphere. Must be a glitch.” She canceled the alert, only to have another one pop right up.
“Dammit
—there it goes again. I’m reading a single hostile contact, close proximity.”

A surge of dread crawled across Reed’s skin.

“Locate,” she snapped.

“Zero-zero-five, directly ahead,” Massey answered—then turned ashen as she looked up at Reed. “Jenna, it’s targeting
Celtic.
”

Reed whirled back around. On the viewscreen, Walsh proceeded as if nothing was wrong, his bridge crew completely unaware.

“Abort defensive stance,” she ordered.

Massey worked the panel to no avail.

“I can’t,” she said. “Local controls are frozen.”

Reed punched her comm button. “Engineering, bridge—tactical is locked out. What the hell’s happening down there?”

“Stand by, bridge!”
the engineer replied, trading shouts with Casari. From the desperation in their voices, it sounded like a full-scale disaster in progress.
“I don’t know how, Jenna, but the node I installed just up and reprogrammed itself. Could be some kind of virus. Whatever it is, the thing is
fast.”

Reed steeled herself, even though her mind was in total panic mode.

“Thayer, do you still have the helm?”

He shook his head gravely. “Nonresponsive.”

The ship suddenly, violently lurched to starboard. Massey left her feet, hitting the deck and tumbling down to the command level. On the viewscreen,
Celtic
took an even worse hit, the aftershock knocking almost everyone out of their chairs and shorting out consoles all across the bridge. Walsh scrambled for a fire extinguisher, spraying the conn and dousing the sparks that exploded from there, his movements leaving a ghostly trail across the garbled transmission.