Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (54 page)

A sudden, dark realization settled over all of them.

“We’re the test subjects,” Reed said.

She started walking toward Carson, each step a provocation. The medic—or whatever she really was—pulled Casari closer.

“Harlow tried to tell us,” Reed continued, “but I didn’t want to hear it. ’We are kindred,’ he said—all of us except you.” She stopped, flexing her voice like a weapon. “What did you do to us, Nicole?”

Carson smiled, cold and reptilian.

“The shots I gave you prior to the mission,” she admitted. “They contained a modified strain of Borg nanoprobes.”

Reed bored into her, eyes flickering black over green. Already, the nanites were at work—manipulating her, changing her.

“How do we stop it?”

“You don’t,” Carson answered. “This was a one-way ticket. Walsh saw to that.”

Hatred flared behind Reed’s fixed expression.

“No way the skipper would sell us out.”

“I admit it took a little push,” Carson said, “but once he saw how much money was at stake, he couldn’t sign on fast enough. He was a privateer, after all.” She laughed softly, mockingly. “Of course, he didn’t plan on becoming a victim of his own greed—but it’s just as well. Knowing what he knew, Walsh would have been a dangerous loose end.”

“And what about
you?
”

“Oh, I’m a survivor.”

“Not for long,” Locarno said. “Once Starfleet gets here, they’ll kill you just as dead as the rest of us.”

“We’ll see,” Carson retorted—insinuating so much more.

“They’ll get their chance,” Reed assured her—and jumped out of the way.

Hidden behind her, Locarno had already zeroed in on Carson. He fired a short burst, ionizing the space between them with a stun beam on a wide aperture, enough to take down both her and Casari. Carson reacted with skill and speed, tossing her hostage into the field of fire while she ducked and rolled away. Casari took the brunt of the hit, which spun him around and dropped him on the deck. Carson, meanwhile, dove behind a nearby rack and peppered Locarno with phaser fire, her own weapon set to kill. The air around him crackled with coherent energy, exploding against the wall as he ran, beams dogging his movements like tracers as they closed in on their target. He leapt over a desk before the last shot could find its mark, taking cover underneath as a computer console detonated above his head.

Reed, meanwhile, threw herself over Casari. He was still conscious, but in serious pain, his left arm nearly paralyzed from the stun
beam. He swore out loud, grabbing Reed by the collar and pulling her face-to-face.

“She’s getting away,” he grunted.

Reed looked up and saw Carson bolting for the door. She disappeared before Reed could draw her phaser again.

“Come on,” she said.

By the time they got off the floor, Locarno had emerged from his hiding place. He quickly checked the corridor, then ran over to join them. “She’s gone,” he said. “Where’s Thayer?”

“Back there,” Casari told them, pointing toward the lab. “He’s in bad shape.”

“Check on him,” Reed said.

Casari limped off. At the same time, Locarno grabbed Carson’s bag off the shelf and dumped the contents out over one of the beds. The gridstalker rifled through the things with a practiced eye, searching for something specific.

“What are you looking for?” Reed asked.

“If this
is
a black-bag job,” Locarno explained, “then Carson would make sure she had an insurance policy. Spooks don’t do anything without a backup plan.” He lingered for a moment on her tricorder, which he popped open and examined closely. Removing one of the circuit boards, he found a small card wedged in where it shouldn’t have been. Prying it loose, he held it up for both of them to see.

“Looks like an isolinear chip,” Reed said.

“It is,” Locarno agreed, “but this one is a multidimensional prototype—not exactly standard issue.” He went over to a nearby console and inserted the chip, while Reed watched over his shoulder. “This is some major storage—enough to cold-boot one of the computer cores if she wanted.”

“Is that what she had in mind?”

“Tell you in a flash,” Locarno said, navigating the intricate data paths that appeared on the display. He breached the security layers in a matter of seconds, which released a torrent of code. Locarno, however, immediately found what he wanted and pointed it out to Reed. “This is a control subroutine—engines, navigation, deflectors—everything you need to fly this ship.”

“Can you use it to get us out of here?”

Locarno read further, his face hardening. “No,” he said, with an edge of finality. “Nothing works without the interaction of an actual Borg crew. The core matrix won’t allow it.”

Reed pounded a fist on the desk.

“We were going to be that crew,” she seethed. “After we turned, Carson was going to use
us
to handle the goddamned ship.”

“That explains why she moved on Chief Harlow. She needed to speed up assimilation before Starfleet got here.”

“A lot of good it did her,” Reed muttered, glancing toward the lab. “Where the hell is Casari? He should have been back by now.” Raising her voice, she started in that direction herself. “Jimmy! What’s going on in there?”

No answer. Locarno followed her as an ominous pall descended, a sudden realization that something was horribly, dangerously
wrong.
Phasers in hand, they approached the door to the pathology lab. An unnatural silence reigned within, stirred only by the low, steady flow of the reclamation tanks. Reed signaled for Locarno to hang back and cover her, while she slipped over to the edge of the door, the pounding of her heart and the adrenal surge in her veins somehow alien to her.

I’m losing myself,
she thought.
It won’t be long—for any of us.

And right there, the concept of risk suddenly lost all meaning.

Reed thrust herself inside, staying low and staring down the sight of her weapon. Locarno appeared behind her, taking the high ground and sweeping the area while Reed pushed in farther. She immediately found the diagnostic bed empty, its restraints torn to shreds—the only trace that Thayer had ever been there. On the floor between the tanks, however, she saw a pair of legs sticking out. It would have been bad enough if they belonged to a dead man—but these legs jerked like flesh on a live wire, as did the rest of the body, in some kind of diseased frenzy.

“Nick!” Reed called out.

Neither of them dared touch Casari. They could feel the heat coming off him even at a distance, as his face contorted into a soundless scream. Holes extended into his temples from where the nanoprobes had gone in, red blood coagulating to black. It was as if the Borg inside was tearing him apart to get out.

Reed’s communicator sounded off.

“Skipper, bridge,”
Rayna Massey said.
“You better get up here.”

She mouthed the word at first, unable to speak as she witnessed Casari’s assimilation. This was her future.
Their
future.

“Report,” she finally spoke.

“Unidentified contact, max range. I think it’s Starfleet.”

Locarno turned to Reed, like a condemned man facing his executioner. Reed, meanwhile, drew a long breath as she weighed their limited options.

“Best evasive,” she ordered. “We’re on our way.”

Locarno motioned toward Casari. “What about him?”

Her thumb caressed the trigger of her phaser. One more blast would end Casari’s misery—and make it that much easier when it was her turn. But something inside her, some species memory, wouldn’t allow it.

“Leave him,” she said, and left without looking back.

The corridor compressed into a jumble of illusory artifacts and points of light, every detail flashing past in stop-motion continuity. Nicole Carson could taste her body’s reaction to that imperative, survival asserting itself just as her training had taught her, and she used it to fuel her flight, focusing every impulse on her objective. She had memorized the way to auxiliary control, long before coming aboard, and could find it in total darkness if needed; and she had made provisions for just this contingency, with a stockpile of small arms and a thruster suit she had scavenged from
Reston
’s emergency stores.

Carson ran toward her destination with mechanical efficiency, moving swiftly but never in a panic, stopping every few meters to check her six in case the others had decided to pursue. When the alert klaxon sounded, blaring through the narrow space with its doomsayer wail, she thought it was a bluff at first, some attempt by Reed to slow her down or flush her out; but it soon became apparent that nobody was coming after her, and that the alarm—which sounded a call to general quarters—was
real,
probably triggered automatically by the ship’s defensive systems. That kind of alert could only mean one thing: an enemy vessel in close proximity.

The Feds are here.

Carson picked up the pace, bypassing her precautions so she could cover more ground. Auxiliary control was still two full sections away, and she didn’t have much time. By her calculations, it would take at least seven minutes to suit up and get to the shuttlebay, which she had already programmed to open on a delay once she sent the command. A starship within sensor range wouldn’t take much longer than that to ascertain
Reston
’s identity and begin its attack run, and by then Carson had every intention of blasting through space with a thruster strapped to her back.

The ship lurched to port, a hard evasive turn. Carson grabbed hold of a support pylon, fighting off a sudden wave of vertigo. The going wasn’t easy with the corridor starting to spin around her, and she squeezed her eyes shut for the brief moment it took for the sensation to pass. She thought about the odds against her, the chances that the Feds would ignore her distress signal even if they picked up on it—but even so, they were better than the odds of remaining on board.

And Carson had no desire to die for the likes of the man who had sent her here.

She pushed off, making it a few steps before the ship reeled again. This time
Reston
spiraled downward, gravity taking less than a second to compensate—but that was enough to knock Carson off balance and send her careening toward the deck. She dropped her phaser, both hands reaching out to blunt the impact—until something yanked her back, a grip so strong that it dug into her shoulders like a pair of sharp hooks. Her feet left the deck entirely, kicking through empty air before her body traversed the full width of the corridor and slammed into the bulkhead.

Head cracking against cold metal, Carson felt her legs melt beneath her—but she didn’t crumble. Instead, she remained hanging on the wall, pinned there by some immutable force. She blinked several times, the blur before her eyes resolving itself into a gothic visage. It regarded her not with the impassive detachment that she expected, but a smoldering fury that metastasized into something far more malevolent because it could not find release. In that countenance, Carson saw pure, distilled evil—a perfect reflection of her own.

Chris Thayer, a Borg shell of himself, twisted his mouth into a vampiric snarl.

“Go ahead,” Carson rasped. “Assimilate me.”

Thayer didn’t.

But before the screaming stopped, before he finished with her, Carson begged him to.

The turbolift doors opened onto an abandoned bridge, with just Rayna Massey left to man the conn. Reed felt a palpable emptiness as she walked in, even with Locarno at her side, each of them taking solemn measure of one another. Her team had numbered seven when they beamed over, and now there were only three—
three
of them left to handle the ship, against whatever approached through the electrified mists of the Korso Spanse.

“What’s our status, Rayna?” Reed asked, circling around to the command chair.

“Contact appears to be a
Nova
class,” Massey said, as Locarno relieved her at the conn. She patched the image to the main viewer before heading back up to tactical. “Bearing three-two-zero, parallel to our flank.”

“Probably the same ship we tangled with before,” Locarno observed.

“Persistent bastards,” Reed said. “Any idea if they’ve seen us?”

“Negative,” Massey replied, checking her own display. “Looks like he’s heading toward
Celtic
’s last position. Picking up active sensor sweeps in the area of the debris field.”

Reed tossed a sideways glance toward the ready room, and the large gash where there used to be a door. Inside, hidden away in the dark, she could sense a crippled Tristan Harlow without seeing him—the same way she sensed a growing connection with Casari and Thayer, something that stirred her blood and plugged her in to a wider consciousness. Reed shook her head and tried to clear it, using the sights and sounds around her like white noise—for as long as that lasted.

“We can only make like a hole in the sky for so long,” she decided. “Once they pick up our fuel trail, we’ve had it.”

Massey stared at the tiny moving dot on the screen. “What do we do?”

Locarno tried his controls, the useless panel refusing every trick.

“I got nothing,” he breathed. “We’re out of options.”

“No,” Reed countered. “We’re not.”

Both of them looked at her, their faces a cross between hope and terror.

“But it all depends on how much you want to live.”

Massey and Locarno had a silent exchange. If either one of them showed the slightest doubt, Reed would call it off and accept their fate at the hands of Starfleet—but neither of them did. As they turned back toward her, she knew they had made up their minds. Dying wasn’t the issue. They just didn’t want their lives to end like this.

And neither did Reed.

“The control routine,” she said to Locarno. “Can you modify it so that all command functions are routed through the crew instead of the main computer?”

Locarno thought about it for a moment. “Yes.”

“Then you better hurry.”

Locarno nodded, understanding. He then rushed over to the engineering station to complete the programming, while Massey looked on, confused and anxious. “What’s that supposed to do?” she asked. “I thought we couldn’t do anything with the ship’s computer.”