Part 17 (2/2)
”Cortical failure!” called Ilar's nurse.
A medical technician who was a.s.sisting Nexa with the Bolian patient scrambled for resuscitation gear as he declared, ”Cardiac arrest!” Meanwhile, Dr. Nexa and Nurse L'Kem were turning all their attention to the Zaldan, whose body was twisted by a series of gruesome convulsions while he gagged on an overflowing mouthful of maroon blood.
Ta.r.s.es wanted to sprint across the room to intervene, to take charge, to try to save three lives at once, but he knew there wasn't anything he could do for those patients that his fellow physicians weren't already doing. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on the bits of shattered bone, the ragged flaps of rent skin, and the semiliquefied jumble of damaged organs that he and Takagi were racing to rea.s.semble inside sh'Aqabaa.
Minutes pa.s.sed while he blocked out the tense, barked orders and the rising tide of desperation that surrounded him. Then the sharp clanging of a medical instrument ricocheting off the bulkhead and the clatter of it bouncing across the deck made him look up. Dr. Ilar tore the b.l.o.o.d.y gloves from his hands and hurled them to the floor, cursing under his breath. He stormed out of the main sickbay and into the triage center.
Dr. Nexa accepted her forced surrender to the inevitable with a greater modic.u.m of grace. She looked at Nurse L'Kem and said, pointing to the human, the Bolian, and then the Zaldan, ”Time of death for Lieutenant Hutchinson, 1307 hours; for Lieutenant Tane, 1309 hours; and for Crewman Doron, 1311 hours.” L'Kem noted the times in the charts and gave the padd to Nexa, who reviewed it, signed it, and handed it back to the Vulcan nurse.
Ta.r.s.es had just finished stabilizing sh'Aqabaa and was making some temporary closures to the incisions as a precaution before moving the Andorian lieutenant to the O.R. He looked up as Dr. Nexa sidled up to the biobed beside Nurse Takagi and asked, ”Is there anything I can do to help, Doctor?”
”No,” Ta.r.s.es said, surprised at how cold and unfeeling his own voice sounded. ”She's stable. Go help Ilar with those two bleeders who came in.”
The slender Triexian nodded and ambled silently away. It still amazed Ta.r.s.es that for a person with three legs, Nexa made so little sound when she walked.
”Okay,” he said to Takagi. ”She's ready. Have the medtechs come move her to the O.R., and tell them to find me another surgical arch, stat.”
”Yes, Doctor,” Takagi said, stepping away to summon help.
He stood beside the biobed as he peeled the gloves off his hands, and he thought of Ilar's outburst minutes earlier. A stickler for regulations would put Prem on report for that, Ta.r.s.es thought. He looked down at sh'Aqabaa and brooded on how hard he'd already fought to save her; then he pondered how he might react if she didn't make it out of surgery.
If she dies, I'll probably start throwing things, too.
Tuning her mind to the frequency of the Borg Collective was proving more difficult than Erika Hernandez had expected. She felt she was close to being able to link with it, as she had with the Caeliar gestalt centuries earlier, but the closer she got, the more elusive the Borg's voice became.
She stared at her access to the vinculum and asked engineer Mikaela Leishman, ”Are you sure this thing is set up correctly?”
”Positive,” Leishman said. ”It's responding to your own biofeedback, just like you asked.”
Beside the Aventine's chief engineer was its second officer and science department head, Gruhn Helkara. The Zakdorn clenched his jaw, pus.h.i.+ng up his facial ridges. ”If you don't feel up to this, we should scrub the mission now.”
”I'm fine,” Hernandez said. ”Just let me concentrate.”
She closed her eyes and focused on aligning her brainwaves with those of the Collective. She blocked out the muggy climate inside the Borg s.h.i.+p, the discomfort of her semi-invasive neural interface with the vinculum, and her own fear.
Two oscillating tones, slightly mismatched, served as her guide. Hers was the shorter, faster wave of sound; the more she relaxed, the closer her alpha-wave tone matched that of the Borg.
Perfectly measured, crisp footfalls approached. She knew before she heard the voice that it was Lonnoc Kedair, the security chief. ”The transphasic mine is armed,” she said to Leishman and Helkara. ”How's our royal infiltrator doing?”
”She's working on it,” Leishman said.
Hernandez was very close to bringing her psionic frequency into synch with the Collective's when Helkara's combadge beeped and broke her concentration. Dax's comm-filtered voice sliced through the low thrumming and anxiety-filled silence inside the vinculum. ”Commander Helkara, report,” she said.
Opening her eyes to glare at Dax's three officers, Hernandez noted the abashed look on Helkara's face.
”We're almost there, Captain,” he said.
”Well, get there faster,” Dax said. ”The Borg are minutes away from hitting five major targets, including Andor, Vulcan, and Qo'noS. If this plan's gonna work, it has to happen now.”
Leishman and Helkara traded glances of dismay. Kedair stared intently at the pair, awaiting their reaction. Helkara replied to Dax, ”We need a few more minutes, Captain.”
”We're out of time,” Dax said. ”What do you have now?”
Hernandez beckoned to Leishman. ”I have an idea.”
The engineer arched her eyebrows. ”I'm listening.”
”I'll be able to adjust my modulation faster if you remove the feedback buffer from my interface,” Hernandez said.
Helkara dismissed the suggestion with the energetic waving of both hands. ”Absolutely not,” he said. ”Without that, you'll run the risk of a counterattack by the Borg.”
”I'm a big girl, I can handle it,” Hernandez said. ”Look, the buffer is most of what's slowing me down. If I don't get inside the Collective's head right now, billions of people are going to die. Risking my life to save all of theirs makes sense, at least to me.” She raised her voice. ”Captain Dax, I'm asking permission to remove the buffer and face the Borg head-on.”
”Granted,” Dax said. ”Gruhn, Mikaela, get it done.”
”Aye, Captain,” Helkara said, acquiescing with reluctance.
”Aventine out,” Dax said, closing the channel.
The wiry Zakdorn frowned and ran a hand through his thatch of black hair. He pointed at the interface jury-rigged to the vinculum and said to Leishman, ”Remove the buffer, Lieutenant.”
Leishman stepped forward, tapped a few b.u.t.tons on the control panel, and reached under the console to pull free a sheet of isolinear circuits, from which dangled a bundle of optronic cables. Holding the deactivated component in one hand and leaning on the other, Leishman shook her head at Hernandez. ”I hope you know what you're doing, Captain,” she said.
”So do I, Lieutenant,” Hernandez said.
Then she turned her thoughts to fusing with the Borg.
A crowd of frazzled bodies and fearful faces had gathered in the combat operations center in the secure bunker below Starfleet Command.
Towering screens high on every wall showed images from orbital platforms above five different worlds, and a sixth hard-line feed showed President Bacco and her cabinet gathered in the Monet Room at the Palais de la Concorde in Paris.
Admiral Edward Jellico leaned against the room's enormous central strategy table, flanked by his colleagues, Admiral Alynna Nechayev and Admiral Tujiro Nakamura. Together, they watched the majestic displays that surrounded them and awaited a catastrophe. An undercurrent of comm chatter and muted voices droned beneath the pall of fear that filled the room. For the junior officers working in the command center, there was still work to be done, something to focus on, tasks to distract them from the terror of speculating about what would happen next.
For Jellico and the other admirals a.s.sembled in the command center, there was nothing left to do but wait. They had drafted their plans and moved thousands of stars.h.i.+ps and hundreds of thousands of people like pieces on a chessboard-all in what felt to Jellico like an increasingly pointless effort to escape what they all knew was really checkmate.
Quietly, he said to Nechayev, ”We've done all we could.”
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