Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (50 page)

Even if it’s the wrong one?

“Vector,” she said, raising her voice enough for Locarno to hear it. He picked up on her use of his grid handle, which cut through the fog of his recriminations. “What’s our status with the cores?”

“Starboard is a complete waste. That leaves two more.”

“Can we maintain control if you bring them online?”

“I don’t even know what happened yet,” Locarno admitted. “If I had the time to make a close study of the wider system,
maybe
I could pinpoint the cause—”

“Can you
do
it?” Reed cut him off abruptly. Locarno got the message, and stopped making excuses.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Then get to it, mister.”

He nodded, and walked back toward the lift. Along the way, he passed by Massey, who made a point of bumping against him hard. The two of them locked eyes for a heated moment.

“Watch your back, gridstalker.”

Locarno didn’t respond. He just left, disappearing behind the turbolift doors. With no other target, Massey turned her stare on Reed, saying nothing, but confirming more than ever that Reed had lost her.

And if that poison infects the rest of the crew . . . 

“Resume stations,” she ordered. “Mister Thayer, best speed out of here.”

On thrusters only,
Reston
limped away from the scene. Reed waited until the last pieces of
Celtic
passed into the hazy distance, then stood up and advised everyone that she would be in engineering. Tristan Harlow already knew what happened—whispered chatter between the engineer and Rayna Massey assured that much—but that didn’t change Reed’s duty to inform him personally. Next to her, no one else had been closer to Evan Walsh. Harlow really needed to hear that the old man had gone down fighting, his hand on the helm. Some lies, as Reed discovered, were better off believed.

She prepared herself for the worst, but Harlow remained stoic in that unsettling way of his—forcing his grief back in on itself, like a fire
smoldering behind a closed door, then focusing immediately on the task at hand. He returned to work without another word, leaving Reed to speculate how much he actually blamed her. There were no such doubts with James Casari. The way his eyes followed Reed, radiating the same anger as Massey but dosed with a cold shot of fear, set up a dangerous dynamic between them. She only hoped that Harlow retained enough of his loyalty to keep him in line.

If not, it would all come apart long before Starfleet arrived to kill them.

Having overstayed her welcome, Reed got out of there. She made it almost halfway to the turbolift before she broke down and cried, the tears coming hard and fast from a place she never knew existed. Walsh, for all the years he spent drilling the emotions out of her, had somehow missed this one: a deep, murky well where she sent the demons to drown, only to have them gather strength to wreak havoc another day. The Borg drones around her, even in life, never had to deal with those demons—and for that, among other things, Reed envied them.

Reed let it go for a few moments, then steadied herself. Wiping her face clean, she continued down the corridor, stopping when she saw Nicole Carson. The medic hovered at the fringes up ahead, as if she didn’t want to be seen, before finally stepping forward. She had probably heard Reed’s outburst and didn’t want to intrude. Reed quickly changed the subject.

“Everything okay on the bridge?” she asked.

“Fine,” Carson replied. “As those things go.”

“We’ll get through this, Nicole.”

“I know,” Carson said. “I just got to feeling like a fifth wheel up there, with everybody doing their jobs. Thought I might check out sickbay—you know, just in case we need it.”

“I think that’s back up on Deck Seven.”

“I should read the signs.”

Reed smiled. “It’s a big ship. Come on, I’ll take you there.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Carson blurted—then immediately tried to make light of it. “I mean, I think I can figure it out. Besides, I could use some time to clear my head.”

“Yeah,” Reed said, more dubiously than she wanted to. “Don’t
stay out here too long, though. It’s probably best not to wander around alone.”

“Of course. See you back on the bridge.”

With that, the medic excused herself and went back the way she had come. Reed frowned, not quite sure what to make of her.
Friend
or
foe
seemed to be the only two choices, which made it even harder for Reed to beat back the mounting paranoia she felt. All she
really
wanted was an ally—and so far, nobody was willing to commit. That only left one person, whom the others viewed with even greater suspicion than they did her.

She went down to the lower computer core, and found him ensconced there.

Locarno seemed almost one with the interface, which he operated with such skill that it was hard to tell where the man ended and the machine began. Shadows rendered his expression into a gaunt, inscrutable cipher, lit from below by the random electrons of a floating display. His eyes reflected the complex pathways of the Borg program matrix, which he followed deeper and deeper into the hole of their programmed consciousness—the same barren intellect that had deemed
Celtic
a threat and destroyed it.

“You must be running out of friends if you ended up here,” the gridstalker said, never shifting his gaze from the display. “Take a load off. You can help me decompile some of this code.”

Reed sat on the edge of a nearby console.

“You getting a feel for it?”

“Enough to know that I’ll never understand it. You could spend years picking it apart and not even scratch the surface.” Locarno killed the construct and sank back into his chair. “There’s some good news, though. I know why my failsafe didn’t work.”

“Bad luck?”

“That’s the least of it. This matrix is based on some kind of phased dimensional scheme—exploiting differentials between quantum states to propagate data faster than light, instead of the subspace architecture in the original design.”

Reed caught on to his line of thinking. “The failsafe employs a subspace pulse . . .”

“Which wipes the pathways,” Locarno finished. “No pathways, no
fireworks. I could have been using harsh language, for all the good it did.” He stared into the blank display. “I should have known.”

“That’s a tall order, Nick.”

“Then I should have guessed,” he retorted, his eyes lighting on some distant memory. “But that’s me—always rolling the dice.”

Reed shook her head and smiled knowingly.

“You were trying to impress Walsh.”

“Doesn’t matter who,” Locarno said. “Whether it’s him or the Academy flight board—people end up just as dead.” His face set into a scowl at the mention of it, his breathing forced and steady—probably replaying the accusations that Rayna Massey had hurled at him, because they carried the sting of truth.

“You were Starfleet,” she observed. “I kind of figured.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“You let a few things slip—spending time at the Presidio, for one. Then there’s your knowledge of Federation starships.” She paused for a long moment, considering whether or not to press him on it. “So what happened?”

“Same thing that always happens. I took things too far.”

“And somebody else paid the price.”

“That’s how I work.” Locarno dropped his guard just a little, but trod cautiously with the details. “Senior year, I was captain of Nova Squadron. Even led the team to a Rigel Cup, if you can believe it—so you can imagine what a cocky bastard I was.”

“You never struck me as the flyboy type.”

“Back in the day.” His tone wandered off into painful territory, the kind of wound a man kept opening to punish himself. “By the time graduation came around, all of us were looking for some way to top ourselves, so I came up with an idea to go out with a real bang.” He gave Reed a sidelong glance. “You ever see a Kolvoord Starburst?”

Reed shook her head.

“You don’t forget something like that,” Locarno said, his tone as far away as his expression. “Unbelievably dangerous—but you never saw a more beautiful thing in your life. Not a dozen pilots in Academy history could pull it off.” His head sank. “But we were Nova Squadron. We were immortal.”

Pain materialized between them, the kind that can be stifled but never fully contained.

“How many did you lose?” Reed asked.

“Just one,” he replied, a slight tremble in his voice. “We were at the Saturn Proving Grounds, making a practice run. Josh clipped my starboard wing during a close pass and lost control of his ship. We were in such tight formation that it caused a chain reaction. Four of us managed to eject.” He paused for a long, sober moment. “Josh didn’t.”

Locarno didn’t seem interested in absolution, but Reed felt compelled to offer it anyway. “You don’t own that kind of mistake,” she said. “Sounds to me like everyone was in.”

“Evan Walsh ordered you here. Does that change anything for you?”

Reed didn’t have to answer. Locarno already knew.

“How did you two cross paths?” she asked, changing the subject. “Seems like a strange alliance.”

“My father served with him on the same merchant ship for a while. After he died, Walsh looked in on me from time to time—but I never found out his real profession until I got expelled from the Academy. When I needed a job, he set me up.”

“And it’s been a life of crime ever since.”

“When everyone you’ve ever known hates you, there aren’t a lot of options.”

“I think it’s more than that,” Reed observed. “The chance to get back at Starfleet must’ve been hard to resist.”

“They did me a favor. I would have made a lousy officer.” Locarno slid out from the main interface and went over to one of the direct access panels, which he pried open to get a look into the core itself. “Is that your story? Some big grudge against the Federation?”

“Nothing that personal,” Reed admitted.

Locarno nodded in understanding. “So it’s the money.”

“That, and a real problem with authority.”

“Explains why Walsh took a shine to you.”

“He saved my life,” Reed said, drifting off on her own tangent. “I used to broker deals between organized crime factions on Delta IV. One of the overlords found out I was skimming a percentage
for myself—including a pretty big slice of some latinum that Walsh boosted from a Ferengi freighter.”

“Stealing from the Deltan mob?” Locarno asked, impressed. “That took some brass.”

“That’s what Walsh said,” Reed told him, the trace of a smile on her lips. “They were just about to show me the nearest airlock when he stepped in and covered my debt. Bought out my contract right there on the spot—said he needed someone crazy enough to keep his crew in line. I’ve been flying with him ever since.” She paused for an awkward moment as the hard reality intruded. “You know what I mean.”

“This your way of cheering me up?”

Reed shrugged. “Privateers aren’t known for their social skills.”

“Neither are gridstalkers.”

“Something else we have in common.”

“Yeah,” Locarno agreed. “Another time, another place—who knows?”

“Keep your head in the game,” Reed fired back, though she was grateful for the effort—and the distraction. She walked over and joined him, looking over his shoulder into the raw data stream that pulsated within the core. “Does any of that even make sense?”

“There is a certain a logic to it. I was able to isolate some of the log files. From what I could put together, it looks as if the matrix terminated itself a short time after the Borg died.”

“A self-destruct program?”

“More than that,” Locarno mused. “The relationship between a Borg ship and its crew is symbiotic. Without that element, there is no greater purpose—and with no greater purpose, there’s no reason to continue.”

“Are you saying it committed
suicide?
”

“Essentially, yes.”

Reed took a step back while Locarno buttoned up the panel. The very idea astonished her, so much that her mind raced to find arguments against it. That the Borg could feel
any
connection outside of a mechanical sense made them seem less like monsters—and right now, she
needed
them to be monsters.

Because she needed the hate. It was the last measure of her strength.

“I don’t believe it,” Reed said. “Obviously, the matrix isn’t dead. The damn thing took control of the ship and blew
Celtic
out of the sky. It tried to kill
you,
for God’s sake.”

“I’m just telling you what I know,” Locarno insisted. “Maybe it’s just some by-product of the Borg design that allows it to survive beyond death, but this system was completely purged when I turned it on. Now it’s not.”

Reed swallowed hard, frightened by the implications.

“You’re talking like this thing has a soul, Nick.”

“Not a soul. More like a ghost in the machine.”

“That’s insane.”

“You believe in God, Jenna?”

Reed hesitated before answering. “Yeah, so what?”

“Then it’s not so crazy.” Locarno returned to the interface and watched her through the empty display, his features distorted by random pixels in suspension. “You look to God for your own sense of identity. This matrix isn’t so different. The Borg simply created it in their own image—the same basic drives, the same overriding impulse.”

Reed thought of the presence she sensed after beaming aboard, which even now asserted itself like a dry static charge.

“Hunger,” she spoke, her voice giving it substance. “Pure, insatiable hunger.”

“Form and function. Nothing wasted.”

She searched Locarno’s eyes, terrified at the prospect of her next question.

“What brought it back?”

Locarno averted himself from that question. He knew as well as she did, but couldn’t bring himself to answer.

“We
resurrected this thing,” Reed pronounced, “didn’t we?”

“That’s one possibility.”

“As opposed to what?”

“I don’t know.” Locarno sighed. “I can’t even pretend to understand the idiosyncrasies of this system. The best I can do is hazard a guess—and so far, guesswork hasn’t done us a hell of a lot of good.”