Part 22 (1/2)

For every trap the Borg Queen triggered, Hernandez improvised a defense. Rebuilding the lost deck behind her, she pulled Leishman and Helkara with her as she fought for each step. Prehensile twists of tubing as thick as her arms wrapped around her throat, Leishman's waist, Helkara's legs. Hernandez answered each attack with a focused mental image of its opposite. The physical reality of the Borg s.h.i.+p, for aeons the solitary domain of the Borg Queen, now bowed to her imagination. Tentacles withdrew or broke apart. Vanished decks rebuilt themselves. The lethal pressure of closing bulkheads became the freedom of open s.p.a.ce. Then her back struck the final barrier, and at her command, it turned to coal-black dust.

The trio collapsed onto the secured platform, which had been part.i.tioned from the rest of the Borg s.h.i.+p by directional dampening field projectors. Arranged in a large square formation were four transport-pattern enhancers, all blinking in their ready standby mode.

Hernandez dropped Leishman and Helkara into the middle of the enhancers, tapped the combadge on Helkara's chest, and said, ”Boarding party to Aventine. Two for emergency beam-out!”

”Acknowledged,” said a voice made small by being filtered through the combadge. ”Stand by for transport.”

Leishman and Helkara were still staggering weakly to their feet as Hernandez bounded away, clear of the pattern enhancers, and landed with preternatural grace atop a centimeters-thin railing. Perched on it, she felt the same rush of power that she'd had in Axion. Having attuned the catoms in her body to the Borg's unique wavelength, she had usurped their strength.

The images in Hernandez's mind were absolutely clear.

She saw Kedair being smothered inside the vinculum tower, her life fading, her mission to trigger the transphasic mine on the verge of failure. There was no direct route to the transport-s.h.i.+elded tower, no way for anyone to come to Kedair's aid...no one except Hernandez.

She coiled and tensed to leap off the railing into the moving parts of the Borg s.h.i.+p, already visualizing herself negotiating its grinding gears with impunity.

The whine of a transporter beam began to fill the air.

”Where are you going?” Leishman asked over the eerie wails and mechanical clankings of the s.h.i.+p's infernal works.

Hernandez looked over her shoulder. ”To save Kedair.”

Helkara and Leishman became pillars of swirling particles as the transporter beam took hold, and Hernandez leaped off the railing and fell willingly into the belly of the beast.

Lonnoc Kedair knew that she was close to the detonator controls for the transphasic mine, but she couldn't see it. Entombed in the squirming black tangle that surrounded the Borg vinculum, all she saw was darkness, as if she'd drowned in tar.

There was no air to breathe, nowhere to move, no way to get any leverage for a counterattack. Her feet had been pulled from under her, and stinger-tipped tentacles began impaling her from the front and from behind.

Horrendous grinding sensations filled her torso as the Borg s.h.i.+p's mechanical limbs pierced her body in several places at once. Almost as quickly as the wounds were inflicted, her body fought to heal them, but it was a losing battle. Several centimeters thick, the tentacles battered her with blunt force, snapping her bones, rending her skin, and pummeling her last h.o.a.rded breaths from her lungs.

She cried out in agony and felt her scream buried in the smothering, oily lubricant of the Borg machine. The foul liquid seeped into her nostrils and poured into her mouth. Reflex and instinct told her to spit it out, but she had no more breath left to push with.

Needling jabs p.r.i.c.ked her skin with sharp, icy twinges. a.s.similation nanoprobes, she realized. For a moment, she regretted the aggressive combination of antia.s.similation implants and injections she and the other boarders had received. Although the Borg's nanoprobes had faced and overcome some of these prophylactic measures in the past, they had never encountered this precise amalgam of genetic and neurological blockades. Lucky me, Kedair realized. Since I can't be a.s.similated, I get to spend more time being chewed up. Great.

Tentacles at either end of her torso pulled in opposite directions, and she realized only then that it meant to rip her in half. Then the shearing tension began, and excruciating pain expelled everything from her mind except agony.

No amount of rapid-healing possessed by any Takaran could keep pace with what was being done to her; the Borg s.h.i.+p was breaking down her resilient body by degrees. Kedair's mouth contorted as the pressure intensified, and the dark, metallic-smelling fluid found its way inside her ears. Then, fully submerged inside the horror, she heard it.

Beneath the frantic pounding of her pulse, a malevolent whisper lurked in the suffocating fluid of this dark womb. Its message penetrated her thoughts, and she knew that it couldn't be debated or bargained with. Strength is irrelevant, it told her. You are small, and we are endless. You are one, and we are legion. You will become as we are. You will become part of us.

Kedair was ready to surrender to the darkness.

Then there was light.

The vile tentacles pulled out of her flesh and retreated into the walls. The crus.h.i.+ng press of machines and needles and saws fell away, and some of the contraptions that turned humanoids into drones fell to pieces and scattered across the deck. Kedair's body fell free, and she landed in a twisted, mutilated heap on the floor. Through the cloudy stains in her vision, she saw that her left arm was partially severed and dangled by a tendon just below the elbow. Everything had a flat, distorted quality, and when she tried to blink away the slime, she realized she had only one working eye. The other had been gouged out to make way for some monstrous implant.

She heard footsteps approaching.

Turning her head, she saw Erika Hernandez striding back into the vinculum tower, heading directly toward her. The woman's uniform had become stained and tattered, but Hernandez herself looked none the worse for whatever she'd endured. She asked Kedair, ”Can you walk?”

Kedair sputtered through a mouthful of filth, ”Both my legs are broken.” She jerked her head toward the transphasic mine, which had been securely affixed to the Borg s.h.i.+p's central plexus-essentially, its nerve center. ”Set the detonator. We-” She paused to hack up a mouthful of viscous black oil and spat several times to clear her mouth. ”We have to frag this s.h.i.+p.”

Hernandez walked toward the mine. ”Tell me what to do.”

”It's already armed,” Kedair said, wincing as her back and chest muscles began pulling shattered bones back into place before mending them. ”Enter a delay in seconds using the touchpad, then press 'Enable' to start the countdown.”

Standing at the detonator, Hernandez keyed in the data. She hurried back to Kedair. ”It's running,” she said, kneeling beside Kedair's mangled body.

Kedair asked, ”How long?”

”Seventy-five seconds,” Hernandez said.

”Are you crazy?” Kedair snapped. ”That's not-”

A three-clawed biomechanoid tentacle lunged at Hernandez from behind. Kedair meant to shout or point or give a warning-then, without seeming to notice or care, Hernandez lifted a hand in a dismissive gesture, and the tentacle shredded into sc.r.a.p metal. Hernandez straightened Kedair's mauled limbs and prompted her, ”You were saying?”

It took Kedair a second to recover her wits. ”It's not enough time to reach a transport site,” she said.

”Yes, it is,” Hernandez replied. She slid her hands under Kedair, who at first felt no contact-and then she realized that she was floating a few centimeters above the deck. She was in Hernandez's arms and being lifted gently over the woman's shoulder. ”Hang on,” added Hernandez. ”This part won't be fun.”

Kedair's full weight rested on Hernandez's shoulder, and the youthful woman carried Kedair out of the vinculum tower at a brisk pace. The bobbing cadence of Hernandez's stride and the pressure on Kedair's abdomen made the Takaran cough up more of the bitter, toxic black fluid she'd inhaled while snared in the Borg s.h.i.+p's grasp.

Between hacking coughs, she saw more serpentine appendages lash out at Hernandez, who deflected each attack with the slightest motions of her fingers, like a sorcerer cowing demons. Pa.s.sages and exits closed themselves with piping and components that spread like black metallic ivy, but the hastily risen barriers retreated ahead of Hernandez, who parted them with broad waves of her hand.

They pa.s.sed through the last portal and reached the platform outside the tower. The bridge back to the s.h.i.+p's outer superstructure had been retracted. The s.p.a.ce above them, which only minutes earlier had been empty, now was alive with moving metal and blue-black clouds of some primordial matter that flashed with static electricity.

”Are you afraid of heights?” Hernandez asked.

”No,” Kedair said.

Hernandez grinned. ”Good.”

She stretched one hand toward the distant top of the s.h.i.+p's interior, and then they were aloft, rising away from the platform and accelerating toward the shadowy maelstrom overhead.

Kedair, still draped over Hernandez's shoulder, watched the vinculum tower shrink beneath them. ”How in the name of Yaltakh are you doing this?”

”Easy,” Hernandez said. ”I imagine I've already done it.”

They arrowed through the center of the s.h.i.+p's brewing thunderhead, and an eye of calm swirled around them as they pa.s.sed. Then they were near the top deck of the s.h.i.+p, and a dampener-secured platform equipped with transporter-pattern enhancers hove into view.

”Ten seconds,” Kedair said. ”No pressure.”