"What's the latest from the Ostankino?" I ask.
Sumal Jetuz looks at the comms console. "I have their last transmission here. They took heavy damage, but they're making progress with the repairs. Still no word on when they'll restore their warp drive, though."
"Same with the Brathana?"
"Rrueo is further along with repairs, but... yes, basically, the same." The Betazoid, normally so impeccably groomed, is looking tired and ragged around the edges. I think we all are.
"Thank you, Mr. Jetuz," I say, formally, and turn my attention back to the main screen. We have been pursuing N'Drask's line of flight for hours, now. And, thus far, we have found nothing along the line. Timor's sensors are out to their fullest extent, probing space, and we have... nothing.
Behind us, our two Hazari escorts are sleek and gleaming in the light of the rushing stars, and they are the only things nearby.
"We must be getting close now," I mutter to myself. The Hazari ships are reasonably familiar - we know enough of their capabilities to predict their speed, their endurance. Given N'Drask's course, there are only so many places he could have reached....
"I think I have something," Marya Kothe calls out from the tac station. I sit bolt upright in the command chair.
"What is it?"
"Looks like... some kind of asteroid." Marya is peering intently at the displays. "I'm not sure, but I think I'm reading elevated temperatures - above normal interstellar space levels."
Interstellar space is not absolutely empty - there are rogue bodies adrift in it; asteroids, even whole planets, torn from their native suns by some gravitational catastrophe and cast away into the absolute darkness. But very few have enough internal vulcanism to sustain their temperatures for any length of time - most attain, fairly quickly, the temperature you normally find in the black gulfs; three degrees above absolute zero, the temperature of cosmic microwave radiation. If this asteroid is radiating heat at a higher level - it might be fuelled by internal radioactivity or some such process, but the most likely explanation is... a base.
"I don't suppose there is anything on our charts of the Delta Quadrant?" I ask.
"Nothing here, sir, no," says Sumal.
Only to be expected. Random space debris like this doesn't show up on our charts of the Federation, never mind the Delta Quadrant. "Take us in," I order. "Carefully. And get me N'Larl."
The face of the senior Hazari captain appears on the viewer. N'Larl is thin and wiry by his people's standards, with a nervy, watchful air about him. "We have what might be an asteroid station on sensors," I tell him. "It's on N'Drask's projected line of flight, and there's precious little else out here, so we're going to check it out."
"Makes sense," says N'Larl. "It's showing on our sensors too. I don't recognize it, though." He shrugs. "No reason why I should. Pretty quiet part of space, this."
Timor trembles as she drops below lightspeed. "Sensors to maximum, full spherical sweep," I order. "Let's see what we've got, here."
Images take shape in the viewer, data scrolls up the screen. The asteroid... there is a station there, a ramshackle collection of modules linked by tubing. And there is a ship -
"Octanti battlecruiser," Marya Kothe says. "Inactive... signs of weapon damage... no life signs."
"Do a subspace scan for warp signatures," I order. N'Drask and Ge'Sirn must have passed through here, at any rate... and somebody jumped that Octanti ship. "What about the station?"
"Shielded power source... looks like lots of comms equipment," says Marya.
"Confirmed," says Sumal. "Most of it is passive listening equipment, I think - up close, I'm getting tremendous amounts of feedback from our sensor pings, but from any distance -" He stops, abruptly. I turn towards him, and his face is pale.
"What's the problem?"
"Lifesigns on the station," Sumal says. "Positive ID... Borg."
"What's that?" N'Larl's voice, over the comm link. "Borg? Borg, here?"
"It could be Cooperative rather than Collective," I say. The liberated Borg of the Cooperative have been at odds with the Octanti - that might explain the Octanti wreck - but where did these Borg come from? Too many complicating factors....
"There's subspace traffic on Collective frequencies," Sumal says. "Not a lot, but... enough."
"I am not messing with the Borg," N'Larl's voice says firmly. "No way. The Collective uses Hazari - they say we make good tactical drones - There is no way I'm going near the Borg!"
"We need to know what happened here," I say. There are warp signatures - recognizably, there have been Hazari ships here. And there is the inbound contrail of the Octanti ship... and something else. Not Borg... Vaadwaur, I think. The antique warp engines of the Vaadwaur ships leave very distinctive echoes in subspace.
"Find out for yourself!" N'Larl's voice sounds panicky.
I look at the asteroid, at the modules on its surface, glinting faintly in the light of distant stars. "All right," I say, "I will."
---
Blue light sparkles around me, and I am there.
The corridor is dimly lit, and there is a greenish cast to what light there is. I'm standing on ordinary metal decking, with plain metal on the walls beside me... but only metres away, dark blotches are showing on that metal, blotches which run together and swell out into green-pulsing circuitry....
I step forward, cautiously. The sensor rig flashes up data onto the visor of my helmet.
"Nanovirus," I say. "And it is spreading... slowly, but it's spreading."
"Are you in danger, sir?" Sumal's voice.
I check the readouts. "It's an old strain. My countermeasures will hold." The silvery MACO suit covers me, fitting like a glove, and it is up to date with all Starfleet's latest anti-Borg measures. My tail switches nervously - I resolve to watch that. The nanoskein material covers my tail, it should afford the same level of protection as the rest of the suit - but if it breaches - My tail is a direct extension of my spine, of my central nervous system. If the Borg virus gets through the nanoskein -
I put that thought firmly out of my mind. I lift my phaser rifle to the ready, and advance down the corridor.
"The underlying architecture isn't Borg," I say, over the open channel. "I don't know what it is - it could be a mix of several different cultures." Something flickers in one corner of the readout. "Wait. Movement."
No one speaks. I want to flatten myself against the wall... but the wall is covered in an encrustation of Borg circuitry, and I don't want to touch that. Stupid, I tell myself. Stupid animal reflex....
There are footsteps approaching. Slow, plodding footsteps.
The MACO suit feels suddenly hot, itchy, uncomfortable. It isn't, of course. The discomfort is all down to my fur bristling inside it.
The drone comes into view, lumbering around a bend in the corridor. It is big and bulky, and the Borg prosthetics do not conceal its origin. Hazari. One eye is covered by a scanning device; the other is blank and dead. The drone ignores me. It walks up to the wall, raises its left arm, thrusts its hand into a hole that has suddenly opened up. I edge cautiously around it. My phaser rifle is ready, but if I shoot this one, others will come... perhaps too many others. Something nearby hisses and clanks. The drone withdraws its hand from the wall... and the hand is no longer a hand, it has been replaced with some kind of prosthetic. The drone turns away from me, and lumbers on, down the corridor.
I lower the rifle. My hands are shaking.
"Hazari," I say. "It was a Hazari... recently converted. Still having... parts... added."
"Sir." Sumal's voice again. "N'Larl and his consort have just warped out."
Scared of the Borg. I don't blame him. I would do the same, but I need answers. I turn up the gain on the sensor rig. Data explodes onto my HUD - power sources, EM emissions, data pulses. It is mostly familiar stuff - the endless self-interrogations of a new Borg data node taking shape.
Then something catches my eye, and I pause, and call up the data menu to interrogate the sensor rig. "Just a moment," I say. "I have something here."
"What is it, sir?" Sumal asks.
My eyes widen. "It's a data signature. It's a Starfleet data signature - correction. It's an Omega Force signature."
"What?" Sumal sounds as baffled as I feel. Alpha Quadrant anti-Borg tech? The only examples of that, here, should be the ones I'm wearing right now.
"It's close at hand. Within fifty metres, at least." We selected the beam-in point carefully, putting me as close as we dared to what looked like a control centre. I pad down the corridor. "Scanning on those frequencies now."
Another drone plods into view. Different modifications... but, underneath, still Hazari. N'Drask's crew? Ge'Sirn's? We have the analysis of the warp contrails, we know they did stop here... but if the Hazari were converted to Borg, who took their ships back out?
The new drone walks past me, unseeing, uncaring. "They must be relying on the nanovirus to handle any further conversions," I mutter.
"Your suit is still holding, sir?"
"All readouts in the green." That is one data point I'm watching carefully. There is a door ahead of me - no, not so much a door, simply a gap in the corridor wall. Beyond it -
Beyond it is a shimmering, insubstantial barrier - a panel of dim white light. "That's... experimental MACO shielding," I say, wonderingly. "It's a barrier against Borg probes. Supposedly, it fools their sensors into thinking nothing's there. It's new, very new." I step cautiously through the white light -
I blink. There is an entire room behind it, a room full of equipment - computer consoles and communications gear. It is an eclectic collection of gear - I recognize some Hierarchy and Talaxian and Hazari modules, others are strange to me. There is another doorway in the wall opposite. I make my way over to that. There is a door, sealed now. A transparent aluminium panel shows nothing beyond but... stars.
"Some kind of data centre. And... a back door. An airlock, or maybe an escape pod. Whoever was in here, they got out that way." I turn around. "There's some kind of control interface... still open."
"Can you transmit a visual, sir?"
I check the panel. "It's Octanti. Nessick. This must be where he was working from...." The log files are still open. I link in the helmet's visual data recorder, start to scroll back through the log entries.
"Escape pod launch. Internal communications... communications with the Octanti cruiser...."
Gradually, the sequence of events becomes clear. I pull over a stool, and sit down. I need to sit down.
"A Borg comms device. Nessick deliberately released the nanovirus from inside a captured Borg device." I would never have believed an Octanti would do such a thing. "He's pulled up coordinates for a Borg subspace communications nexus -"
"Sir," Sumal says, "I have a transmission from the Ostankino - Captain Pexlini is requesting an update."
"Patch her straight through. I think this is important."
A pause. I scroll further through Nessick's records. I don't like the picture I'm getting, here.
"What's up?" Pexlini's voice sounds in my ear.
"What's your status?" I ask her.
"Completing repairs. Ship's gonna need a new paint job, but no time to worry over that now. What about Nessick?"
"I'm sending a visual record to the Timor... the bottom line is, he has the Hazari device. Ge'Sirn tried to get it back, and Nessick suckered him into boarding this station - which was flooding with the Borg nanovirus. Nessick and the survivors from the Octanti ship have Ge'Sirn's ship now, and they're headed for a Borg comms node."
"Uh, planning what, exactly?"
"My guess is, trying to use the actualizer as a weapon against the Borg. And from what I can piece together of Nessick's records -" I stop. My mouth is dry.
"What?" Pexlini demands. "What is it?"
"He's planning on overriding the actualizer's safeties, and dumping a protomatter-enhanced holo-matrix directly into the Borg subspace network," I say.
"Just a sec," says Pexlini. "I'm no expert, but -"
"It means blasting an amplified version of the Genesis Wave through half the Delta Quadrant," I say.
There is a brief pause. Then Pexlini says, in a masterpiece of understatement, "I'm guessing that's not such a good idea, then."
"Oh, it'll hurt the Collective," I say, "maybe hurt it really badly. But the collateral damage -"
"Let me guess," says Pexlini. "Safer to watch it from the next galaxy over, yeah?"
"Most likely." I'm guessing. Where protomatter reactions are involved, we are all mostly guessing. But Nessick's guesses are fuelled by wishful thinking and a profound hatred of the Borg....
"We need to get a line on where he's headed," says Pexlini, "and stop him."
"I think I have that," I say. I stand up. "Let me make sure - I'll cross-check on his star charts." There's a stellar cartography module nearby.
"I don't get why this is all left lying around," says Pexlini.
"It's behind an anti-Borg shield," I say. "Though... even so, they'd expand around it." Borg tech grows into the surrounding areas, it would work its way around that MACO screen sooner or later. Unless -
I check the sensor rig. "Nessick's log says something about setting another clock running," I mutter. "Must be... some kind of self-destruct on the station."
"The Borg would find it. They'd neutralize it," Pexlini objects.
"Must be something hidden behind this screen. But the only things behind this screen are... all this comms gear... and the escape exit... and -"
I stop. For the second time, my fur bristles underneath the MACO suit.
"And what?" Pexlini demands.
"Looks like... the housing for the station's power unit. Antimatter storage," I whisper.
I scan in, but I already know what I'm going to find, now. "Molecular acid canister. Ruptured. Now the stuff is eating through the rock of the asteroid, and it's directly over the main antimatter confinement. Once it eats through -"
"Any way to stop it?" Pexlini asks.
"Not a chance. Too close to the matter-antimatter intermix, you'd never get a transporter fix on it to beam the stuff out - and if you tried to dig it out, mechanically, you'd likely breach the confinement that way, instead. Unless you went really slow and careful, but there isn't time to go slow -"
"How long have you got?"
I shake my head. "No way to tell. Minutes, maybe, or hours."
"Get the data and get out of there!"
"On it." I make my way to the stellar cartography unit, and then glance to the side -
"Oh, boy," I say.
"What?"
I look at the sleek grey console. "Found your leak. That is a Starfleet-issue priority diplomatic subspace encoder." I touch the device's controls, and watch data flow up its screen. "Even without data priority codes of his own, Nessick could have pulled up immense amounts of information here - Starfleet, KDF and Republic." I tap my own priority code into the panel, watch the response. "I'm uploading the registration number and command prefix codes from this thing now. We have got to know where this came from and how Nessick got it. Every one of these units is supposed to be accounted for -"
"M'eioi," Pexlini's voice says. "Hours or minutes, remember."
"I've got minutes. I'm going to use them." Without a Starfleet Admiral's personal ID codes, there are limits to what Nessick could have accessed through this device. But I have codes like that, and there is more that I can do -
There are ship IDs here that I recognize. I grin.
"M'eioi," says Pexlini, "get the hell out of there."
"In a minute." I find the comms modulator, and start opening channels. "I'm just going to do something you told me was impossible."
"What?"
My grin widens. "Calling in some cavalry."
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