"Engaging warp engines!" La Forge called
out.
And at that precise moment Reannon
Bonaventure burst onto the bridge.
The warp engines of the Enterprise released the
altered warp field and blasted forward. The warp
bubble immediately integrated itself into the field
surrounding the Borg vessel and contracted.
Space twisted and snarled around it.
On the bridge everything happened with incredible
speed. Worf saw Reannon and his eyes
widened. Without hesitation he started towards her,
and as smoothly as if this sort of thing happened every
day, another officer leaped in to man tactical.
Geordi turned and spotted Reannon, and
he froze, in shock.
Reannon swung her phaser up and Worf
dropped to the ground to avoid the blast.
All of that happened in one second.
In the next, Reannon leaped forward toward
Ops, where Data was preparing to blast the ship
forward on impulse power, away from the rapidly
spreading warp bubble. She screamed one word, the
only word anyone would ever hear her say
"Borg!", and swung her prosthetic arm with
all its strength.
She smashed in the side of Data's head.
The force of the blow was so powerful that it hurled
Data from his chair and sent him flying into Chafin
at conn. The crewman went down beneath the
insensate form of the android officer.
Now there was no one at helm or navigation; the
Enterprise had exactly one second to cut
itself loose.
On the bridge of the Chekov, Hobson
shouted an alarm as the ship abruptly shook.
"Captain, some sort of tractor beam!
We're losing shields!"
"Shift the nutonals," ordered Shelby.
Technically, he should have given the order, but
Korsmo knew that Shelby was the expert and,
furthermore, that she was right. "Do it!" he
snapped.
"Ineffective!" said Davenport at
tactical, unaware that the Borg ship they were
facing had already learned to adapt because of the
Enterprise pulling the same trick seconds
ago on another Borg vessel. "Shields at
eighty ... sixty ..."
"Fire phasers!"
"Shields gone."
The Chekov struck back at the Borg
ship, which had momentarily diverted its attention from
the moving planet-killer to dispense with the annoying
gnat of a starship.
"Their power levels are at fifty percent but
climbing," called out Davenport.
"Torpedoes and antimatter spread.
Fire."
The Chekov attacked with everything, and the Borg
ship absorbed it.
"Tractor beam gone," said Davenport.
The Borg laser beam lashed out, ripping across
the unprotected hull of the Chekov.
Bulkheads blew inward and crewmen b y the dozens
were immediately sucked out into the cold depths of
space.
"Hull breach!" shouted Hobson. "Warp
drive out! Structural damage on deck
36, sections 19 through 24."
The Borg struck again. This time the beam gutted
engineering, moved up and sliced across the left
nacelle. There was a massive explosion as the
nacelle blew clean off. Hulls ruptured
throughout the Chekov, and bulkheads on the lower
decks collapsed.
Power went out all over the ship, the vessel
barely limping forward. It was moving at a mere
fraction of impulse power, and even that would be used
up in minutes.
On the bridge everything was in smoking ruins.
Everything had happened so quickly that they had barely
had any time to react. It was as if the Borg had
been humoring them all that time, making them think that
they made a difference.
Davenport lay slumped over the tactical
station, a huge gash in his forehead. Shelby was
coughing, trying to pull herself up, her faced covered
with grime. She spit out a tooth and licked the
blood away from her mouth. "Captain," she
whispered.
Korsmo was in his command chair, shaking his head.
Blood was covering the right side of his face, and
yet, in the semi-darkness of the battered and nearly
dead bridge, there actually seemed to be grim
amusement in his eyes. Slowly he turned
towards Shelby and, through cracked and bleeding
lips, said, "Picard beat these bastards?"
She nodded.
He shook his head. "Son of a gun." He
didn't ask for a damage report. He knew
what the damage was. And he saw only one
response to it. "Shelby--you think a starship
exploding against their hull would help stop them?"
She shrugged fatalistically. In a way, she
still couldn't believe she'd survived her first
encounter with the Borg. She inwardly believed she'd
been living on borrowed time since then.
Well ... this was payback. "It couldn't hurt
to try, Captain."
"Mr. Hobson appears unconscious.
Take helm."
She did so, pushing Hobson's unmoving
body aside. She wasn't especially gentle
about it, but then, in a minute or so it wouldn't
really matter.
The screen didn't have full power to it. The
image was flickering, but they could still make out the
cube of the Borg ship.
"The Borg ship is still functioning at less
than full power," said Shelby, hoping she could
trust the instrument readings. "It expended some
energy firing at us. It's recharging."
"Then we'll charge first. Bridge to engineering.
Come in, Parke."
There was a pause and then a voice that sounded on
the verge of panic. "Bridge, Chief Engineer
Parke is dead. They're ... they're all
dead. They're ... this ... this is Ensign
Toomey, sir."
Korsmo nodded approvingly. "Pull yourself
together, son. That's good. Ensign, I just saw our
left nacelle go floating by, so I assume
warp isn't very likely. Impulse?"
"I can give you half impulse sir, but not for
very long."
"It'll be long enough. Get ready, son."
He turned to Shelby. "Full ahead," he said
quietly, aware that he was giving his last order.
"Captain," said Shelby, making sure her
voice didn't catch in her throat. "It's
been an honor serving with you."
"Yes." Korsmo smiled. "It has,
hasn't it."
She shook her head and punched in the course.
The ship staggered forward on a collision course
with the Borg, on its final run.
And a massive object cut in front of them.
"What the hell?!" demanded Korsmo.
It dropped down, almost from nowhere, gleaming
white against the scarred surface of the Borg cube
and blocking the suicidal path of the Chekov.
Korsmo had a split-instant to make a
decision. He made it. "Hard aport!" he
sho
uted, and instantly Shelby cut hard to the
left. The newcomer banked hard and neatly
dove out of the Chekov's way. It angled down
and away from the Borg ship and suddenly a
tractor beam had grabbed the Chekov firmly,
taking it in tow.
It was a starship, and even through the battered
viewscreen, Shelby was able to make out the
registry number on the underside of the saucer
section NCC-2544. "It's the
Repulse!" she said.
"The Repulse?" Korsmo couldn't believe
it. "What's she doing here?"
"Saving our butts, Captain."
The Repulse swung around, releasing its
tractor beam hold on the Chekov, and headed
back towards the Borg ship.
"Open a channel. Repulse! That you,
Taggert?"
"You've looked better, Korsmo," came the
voice of Captain Ariel Taggert. "Sit
back and watch the fireworks. Our engineer
Argyle has got a knockout punch that Commander
Shelby should find familiar. And our sensors
say that the Borg ship won't have enough power to repel
it for another ten seconds. Fortunately,
we're ready in three ... two ... one ...
fire!"
Power churned around the deflector dish of the
Repulse, and an instant later a massive
charge of energy lashed out. It struck the Borg
ship dead on, and huge pieces of the craft were
blown away, faster than the monster could
possibly repair.
Shelby's eyes widened. "That was Geordi's
idea! Powering an energy blast via the warp
engines and pushing it through the main deflector dish!
But they were prepared for it when we tried it!"
"They may be prepared this time," said Korsmo,
"but they weren't ready. They may not have been
expecting it from another ship, and they didn't have the
power to counter it anyway."
The structure of the Borg ship actually
seemed to crumble inward, power cells unable
to cope with the sudden and total loss. The entire
ship was held together by the collective strength of the
Borg, and with no strength, there was no ship. As the
Repulse kept up with the blast, second after
long second, the Borg ship tried to rally, but it
had no defenses to muster.
Shelby and Korsmo watched in helpless
amazement as the Repulse, using the strategy that
didn't work for the Enterprise, blasted the Borg
ship. The vessel lost all cohesion and
simply came apart, huge fragments tumbling
away.
"Son of a bitch," said Shelby. "It would have
worked. Riker will be pleased to know."
Riker leaped forward, under the swinging arm of
Reannon, and hit the controls. The
Enterprise surged gamely ahead, the
impulse engines roaring.
The Borg ship's subspace field seemed
to be twisting like a thing alive as the Enterprise
ripped away. Geordi, fighting down his shock
over the sudden and violent appearance of
Reannon, quickly rerouted the navigation systems
through the engineer station and pushed the impulse engines
as far as they would go. He watched the monitors,
sure that any second the overworked engines were going
to blow the saucer section clear off the secondary
hull.
It seemed as if the Enterprise actually
stretched, space warping back on itself around it, and
then the mighty starship leaped free. Ahead of
them, space was collapsing into a dazzling,
spiralling whirlpool of light. The
Enterprise vaulted towards it, the thick legs
of impulse power picking up speed with every step.
Reannon swung her metal arm at Riker
and he blocked it, slamming a fist forward into her
stomach. She doubled over and, with a quick turn,
Riker hurled her towards Worf. The Klingon
snagged her and held her immobile with a
hammerlock.
"Get her the hell out of here!" shouted Riker.
As Worf obeyed, shoving her towards the
turbolift and following her in, Riker continued,
"Geordi, what's happening! Are we clear?
You said we had only seconds!"
The light around them was blinding, blinding to everyone
except Geordi, whose VISOR immediately made
the brilliance bearable. And then the Enterprise
ripped through the undulating fabric of space and out
into the blessed peace of normalcy.
"Clear! We're clear!" Geordi crowed.
"We made it!"
Riker noticed, on the screen, that another
starship had shown up, and it was at that moment pounding
the other Borg vessel with energy blasts that
seemed devastating. It looked like the
Repulse. He also noted, in a flash, the
dire condition of the crippled Chekov.
But first things had to be first. "Where's the Borg
ship we dropped the warp bubble on? Did it
work?"
The monitor switched to a rear view and there,
rippling behind them, was a huge area of space that
looked like a lake someone had just dropped a stone
in.
It continued to ripple.
Then it flattened, seeming almost to turn
sideways, as if something was struggling to get out.
"I don't believe it," said Riker. "I do
not believe it."
The space where the Borg ship had been had now
coalesced into a visible square, as if someone had
with shears and walked away with it. The square took
on form and substance, and then twisted on its axis
and pushed out into a cube.
The Borg ship was back, and directly behind
them.
"I think we made them mad," said Geordi.
Chapter Twenty-two
Vastator of the Borg pushed the button of the
large phaser that was pointed point-blank at
Picard.
Nothing happened.
Picard, for his part, was already moving. He knew
what the Ferengi did not that after a type II
personal phaser released a sustained blast at
setting 16, there was an automatic cool-down
period. Otherwise the weapon would overheat and,
sooner or later, explode. That cool-down was
precisely six seconds.
That was enough for Picard to cover the distance and ram his
shoulder into Vastator. The Borg stumbled back,
holding on to the phaser as tightly as he could, but
Picard grabbed at it and managed to get a
solid grip. They struggled, shoving against each
other, and then Picard stumbled back, the phaser
slipping out of his hands.
He dodged behind one of the upright crystal
slabs, flattening against it.
"Picard," snarled the voice of the Ferengi.
It was absolutely uncanny. There was a trace
of the persistent obnoxious overtones of a
Ferengi, but it was combined with the icy machine-like
precision of the Borg. "Picard ... let us
deal."
The thing
was stalking him. "What is there to deal
about?" said Picard.
He heard the sudden whine of the phaser and the
crystal that he was hiding behind started to superheat.
He lunged for cover once more as the crystal
exploded. He toyed with the idea of charging again but
rejected it. The Borg was too far away, and
might even be hiding behind another crystal. Six
seconds was too short a time in which to charge a
target when you didn't know exactly where it was.
The crystal slabs were maze-like, providing
rudimentary shelter. He saw his face
reflected in it. His face was screaming, as if the
Many were personifying his personal agony. The
agony of helplessness. Meters away, Delcara
was dying. He knew that. And kilometers away,
his ship was in the midst of battle, and he wasn't
there.
What madness had possessed him? He had
told himself that coming to the ship, coming directly
to Delcara, he could persuade her to abandon the
planet-killer. Once that was done, he had been
certain the power could then be harnessed for the Federation.
The ultimate defense against the Borg.
That was what he had believed. But was it the
truth? Or had he been chasing a crazed dream
of decades ago, a dream that was conjured up by a
young, inexperienced teenager named Jean-Luc, and
insanely pursued by an adult madman named
Picard.
"Picard!" came the voice of the Ferengi
Borg again, and again the phaser lashed out. This time,
though, it was at the crystal slab to his right. The
crystal sizzled and crumbled beneath the onslaught,
and Picard put his arm up to shield his face as
pieces flew right past him.
So the Ferengi didn't know exactly where he
was. That was comforting. And the crystal blocks were so
superdense that they didn't simply vanish, but
instead put up a resistance and even maintained
molecular cohesion in defeat.
He cast a glance in Delcara's direction,
but his view was cut off. That was fortunate. He
knew it would have been rather disheartening if he could have
seen her.
Another crystal--further to his right--blew
apart, accompanied by the whine of what had
once been his phaser. The Borg was clearly
starting to become impatient. "Picard," he said
again.
"What do you want!" called out Picard, and
then for good measure dropped back, scurrying
crab-like to another crystal slab directly behind
him.
"I am prepared to deal," said Vastator.