***
Written By
Michael Gray
***
Please Note-
As with all of the material presented in
the Star Trek: Dark Horizon story, this installment
falls generally within the PG-13 category.
***
***
Chapter 1 - Stolen Dreams
Johnny Malone skipped down the road from his elementary school happier than any other seven year old he knew. He'd sat with Teresa Sauer at lunch just a few hours before and he had known nothing but pure bliss ever since.
The light brown haired, skinny little boy was in love.
It wasn't the complicated tangle of expectations, hopes, plans, and needs which usually sat at the core of adult love. No, Johnny's heart wasn't burdened by such things. What filled his soul was the smile and laughter of his sandy blonde-haired classmate.
His seven year old mind couldn't begin to comprehend what had drawn him to Teresa. For him, it was simply the way things were. He loved Teresa and that was that.
Turning quickly, Johnny cut through a park. He smiled because he knew it would get him home before Teresa made it to her family's house across the street. He'd be there to see her. She'd turn and grin at him as she did every day.
This ritual between them had gone on for months, but today it would be different. Today, Johnny would walk across the street and ask her over to his house for dinner. Of course, if Teresa's parents wanted to come over and talk to his mom and dad, he didn't care. That was fine with him.
Something told him this was going to be a very special day indeed.
Johnny was more right than he ever could have imagined.
He stopped and looked up into the bright blue sky above Starbase 514. Something wasn't quite right. The usual shuttle traffic was missing, replaced by fifty or more large, shinny metal craft which tore through the serene air of the only world Johnny had ever known as home.
He was so captivated by the display above him, he hadn't noticed Teresa walking up to the front of her house, not more than fifty feet away from him.
A moment later, those ships released a barrage of energy weapons into the center of the city. Johnny followed one of them with his eyes. Unlike the others it was headed for somewhere near.
Johnny Malone realized where it would hit a fraction of a second before it shattered Teresa Sauer's home.
Screaming, Johnny watched the blast consume his first, and one true love.
***
"What a terrible waste of resources," Syronus lamented as he watched the tactical display in front of him detail the destruction his forces rained down upon the Federation Starbase.
A static discharge behind the Chief Commander of the G'voda caught his attention. He turned his gleaming, metal body toward the prisoner.
"Haven't you wasted enough of your time testing that field?" the G'voda asked the female figure held in the energy field.
The Borg Queen smiled. "It is enough that it annoys you, Syronus," she said with a touch of jubilation. "I feel it my duty to add to your frustrations on a day so full of them."
"I am hardly frustrated," he said, his glowing red eyes peering down at her.
The cybernetic Borg laughed. "Your master ties your hands, forcing you to waste your time on a mere Starbase while Earth, Andor, and Vulcan stand so very near."
Syronus turned back to his tactical display. "I have waited five billion years; I can afford to wait a little longer."
"You wait because your masters are fearful," the Borg whispered. "How pathetic."
Syronus' electronic voice chuckled. "You are the one imprisoned and you call me pathetic?"
"I stand imprisoned by an exterior force," she explained. "You are imprisoned by your own mind and the minds of your masters. Escape is a matter of waiting and correct analysis of the technology which holds me; you..." She took a short breath. "... you can never escape. You and your prison come from the same source."
He did his best to ignore his captive. If she had not proven so useful, he would have vaporized her months ago. When he finally did get the opportunity to shut her up, he intended to enjoy it.
"You have so little understanding of the place of life in the Universe, Syronus," the Borg Queen spat.
"Really?" he mused as he continued looking over the tactical display of the system. "Has your captivity brought you enlightenment on that issue?"
"You place yourself inside a machine without understanding the nature of what you have done," she whispered. "A machine is an entity of becoming. It transforms this into that. It bridges the gap between what has been and what will be."
"I'm sure this is leading to some statement about the superiority of the Borg," Syronus stated. "However, I'm not in the mood to listen."
"The Borg stand at the point of transition between the imperfect and perfection," she said. "But you have turned the machine into an end unto itself. You call me an abomination, but it is the G'voda who are the true abomination. Your kind is stagnant... unchanging... dead."
Syronus' glowing red eyes brightened slightly as he turned to her. "I believe your fellow humanoids would say you resemble the dead far more than I do."
"A result of their ignorance."
"Or their perceptiveness in the face of your insanity."
The Borg Queen shook her head. "You call me insane yet bring me along to your little attack. What does that say about you?"
Syronus stepped toward her. "Oh, you are here for a very important reason." He stopped to observe her a moment. Syronus enjoyed seeing the Borg immobilized as she was.
"However, I would have had no need of you if Mei-Wan had succeeded in bringing the Chamberlain to us. It would have given us all the information we needed about the Federation and Starfleet," he stated.
"Placing her within that machine was a mistake, Syronus," the Queen said. "Living beings tend to be attached to their physical forms."
"I left my physical form behind more than five billion years ago," he informed her. "I have not regretted it for a single moment since--- none of the G'voda ever have."
"A good definition for insanity if I've ever heard one," the Borg retorted with a sigh. "You were going to explain why you brought me with you."
He pointed a metal finger at her head. "The information locked away in here told me everything I needed to know about the tactics of the Federation." He leaned back as the Queen frowned. "While we were unable to infiltrate the Borg Collective, the information you have makes you invaluable."
"And as usual you underestimate the situation considerably, Syronus."
"Perhaps we should assimilate the Borg into our systems once we convince the Volmvas there is nothing to fear from the humanoids or the Vedala," Syronus told her. "You make exquisite gatherers of information."
"We shall never serve you."
"Then you shall face oblivion," Syronus said coldly.
"Our greatest strength is our ability to adapt," the Queen responded with a quiet assuredness. "We shall continue."
Syronus turned from her and walked back to his tactical displays. "I doubt that. You have force of numbers; nothing more."
Realizing he now ignored her, the Borg Queen smiled.
***
14 November 2378...
The U.S.S. Chamberlain cruised the quiet vacuum of space above the planet Tzaka Four while nearby the outer superstructure of a Federation spacedock began to take shape under the tutelage of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Small craft herded various materials and supplies between the large Oceana class starship and the honeycomb of metal in an intricate dance of cold, technological rhythm.
***
Hank Evans sat behind his desk in the security office reading an incident report concerning an altercation between some of Lee McGuire's flight deck crew and three of the Corps of Engineers. He exhaled as the details about a wrong look here and a snide comment there led to a major brawl in a recreation area on Deck Thirty-one three hours earlier. The Chief of the Corps was demanding a meeting with the captain over the way his engineering staff were being treated by the Chamberlain crew. Hank knew he wouldn't be able to put this off much longer. He'd seen it coming for three months, but he hated to have to bring it to Jack.
It was the kind of thing that really ruined his day.
The door to Hank's office opened. The enticing, wiry form of the Chamberlain's Fighter Wing Commander marched in. The look on her face matched the intensity of her red hair.
"You wanted this report on fighter drills," Kadan Loftus said with as little outward emotion as possible while she handed a PADD to Hank.
"Thanks," Hank said, reaching for the device.
Loftus let him take it and stared at him. "Is that all you needed?"
Hank set the PADD down. "Can we talk about this... this situation?"
"What's to talk about?" she said with a fierce look in her eyes.
"Look," Hank began, leaning back in his chair. "You've got every reason to be angry with me, Loftus, but..."
"Angry?!" she demanded. "Is that all I'm entitled too? A little anger?"
Hank looked down at his desk a moment. This wasn't the way he had wanted the conversation to begin.
"It's bad enough you gave me this disease so I have to take treatments for the rest of my life," she said just under a scream.
"I told you I was sorry about that," Hank said in a sheepish tone she hadn't heard from him before.
But Loftus didn't care if he had decided to act apologetic. He was going to hear her out.
"Sorry isn't enough, Evans!" she roared. "If you hadn't felt compelled to entertain yourself with prostitutes on Antenora you wouldn't have to be sorry and neither would I!"
"We went over all of that," he said.
"Not to my satisfaction."
"I can't change the past," he told her. "If you feel it's time to roast me over this particular spit again..."
She cut him off. "I just found out about your resignation!"
Hank picked the PADD up again. "I was going to tell you about that."
"When?!" she screamed full force. "It becomes effective in two months!"
Hank took a deep breath and let it exhale slowly. "With you being all upset about... well, your medical condition, I hadn't found the right time yet."
"How about right after you gave it to the captain... four months ago!"
"That wasn't the right time."
"There's never a right time with you," she growled. "There's just your time… the time that fits you and your needs."
"That's not true and you know it."
"You could have told me you'd been with those whores before we made love again, but no... you couldn't be bothered, could you?"
"I told you, I had no idea there was some new strain of..." he looked down. "What's the point? Why the hell do you care about my resignation? I'd have thought you'd be happy to see me go."
Kadan's rage transformed into the emotion it was meant to hide.
"Because, stupid me," she murmured through a single falling tear. "Before you came back from that planet I was beginning to think we might have a future together."
"Listen, when we started out we both agreed..." Hank got out before she raised her hand.
"I'm sorry," Loftus said. "But my heart isn't a machine I can program with some set of parameters." She took a step toward him. "I wish it was, because it could have kept me from falling in love with a son of a bitch like you."
She turned and walked out.
***
Jack McCall sat in his ready room staring out a window into space. He'd done little else for most of the day with the exception of attending a meeting between his chief staff officer, Celeste Purcell, and first officer, Lak Negev, where they hashed out the details concerning their next spacedock construction assignment. Jack hadn't said much during the discussion. He had come to enjoy the benefits of delegating the operational details of such issues to his subordinates.
But this day was special and he simply hadn't wanted to let anything take time from it. When the meeting had ended, he'd returned to where he now sat and unless someone attacked them, he planned to remain there.
He owed her at least that much.
It was two years ago on this very day Jack had married the woman he had loved more than life itself. And despite the loss of that one special soul, Jack McCall was determined to still make it her day.
In the more than eight months since she had been taken captive by the G'voda and declared dead after her tattered uniform had been found, this day was one of the hardest for him. He wanted to remember only the happy times this day brought to mind, but the way in which Mei-Wan's life had come to an end made that impossible.
He kept wondering what the last moments were like for her, but not in any morbid sense. He was tormented by the thought she had died afraid, and worse, alone.
More tormenting for him was the possibility the G'voda machine which had come aboard his ship four months ago and sounded so much like his wife and claimed to be her, had indeed contained her consciousness.
And I killed her, he thought, remembering that day in engineering when he fired a phaser blast at the machine's head, shattering it and saving his ship and crew.
He didn't know which he hated more: the idea she had died alone and afraid, or that he had been the one to kill her.
My sweet Mei, why did it all have to happen... and why to you?
He knew there were no answers, but the ship's Counselor, Akala Wilmarza, had told him he should at least listen to the questions and not deny them their place. It didn't stop the pain, but for some reason it helped him move on with his life.
But this day, he didn't want to move on. All he wanted was to think of Mei-Wan.
He owed her that much.
Jack's thoughts were interrupted by the door chime. He let the obnoxious sound bounce around the walls of his ready room for nearly a minute before answering it.
"Come in," he finally said, turning in his chair to face the person who would soon be coming up the stairs.
"I was wondering if I was going to have to call security," Kristen Bishop, his chief engineer, said with a mischievous grin.
"Sorry, Kristy."
Bishop moved her supple body toward him and sat down in the chair across from his desk.
"I think you'll want to read this," she said, handing him a large PADD.
"What is it?" he asked, activating the unit's display.
"My analysis of that G'voda shuttle we got when..." Kristen stopped herself, still uncertain how to refer to the mechanical being which claimed to contain the consciousness of Mei-Wan McCall.
"It's okay, Kristy," Jack said, realizing her discomfort. "It's been four months. I've learned to deal with it."
"Really, Jack?" she asked, unsure because of what she'd seen in his eyes when she'd entered the room.
Jack let a smile come to his face as he began going over the data on the PADD. "So what did you find out?"
She took a breath and the excitement took over. "G'voda ships don't require shields because of the apparent impervious nature of their hulls," she explained. "Most energy weapons throw a wide frequency range against their targets which this metal easily reflects away from the ship."
Jack stopped reading and looked at her with a grin. "But?"
"But there are a set of narrow frequencies and their harmonics which it doesn't reflect," Kristen stated. "They're at the upper end of what's theoretically possible to produce with a quantum torpedo."
"Can you modify them to damage a G'voda vessel?"
Kristen smiled. "It will require some major alterations, but I believe so."
Jack looked at her. "Good work, Kristy."
"It wasn't so much work as it was a couple of guesses, a hunch or two, and a good measure of old fashioned human intuition," She told him. "Along with a bottle of fine whisky."
"Well, whatever you're drinking, make sure to pass it out to all your engineers," Jack replied with a smirk.
"I already have," she said.
Jack didn't want to get his hopes up at this news. However, after the G'voda attacks on three Federation worlds the last several months, any sign of having a chance against their ships was worth getting excited about.
"Start work on modifying our torpedoes and I'll send a message to Admiral Simmons. You may have just given us a weapon we can finally use."
"Aye, sir," Kristen Bishop said with a smile. She and her engineers would be busy doing the kind of work she loved--- the kind that made a difference.
***
I hate this kind of work, the mechanical being thought in the hidden recesses of its electronic brain.
Cilda had spent months cataloging materials in various storerooms and while this did keep her away from her G'voda masters, she hated the endless nature of the task before her. The past five months were only the beginning of a process that would take five hundred years for her and the thousand other G'voda given similar orders to inventory every tool, weapon, fastener, and every other loose item on the planet of Nybiros.
Nybiros was the fifth world the G'voda had called home in their more than five billion year history. It had served them well, but the system's star had shown recent signs of becoming unstable. While it wouldn't become serious for several million years, the G'voda were not the kind of beings to wait for a problem to sneak up on them. They were preparing once again to move.
Cilda left the storage room full of spare mechanical legs and proceeded to the next. Her metal feet made only the barest of sounds against the similarly constructed floor, but with no one else present, the tiny clanging seemed to pound away in her auditory sensors.
She wished there was a way she could force the G'voda to remain on this world and die with the star they orbited. More than the work she now did, more than the metal body she was forced to exist in, Cilda hated the G'voda for what they had done to her. The stole her life, her home, her people and her dreams. She had allowed her mind to plot endlessly against them in schemes she knew would never succeed. It was one of the few ways she had kept her sanity for five centuries. But nothing she had tried, nothing she had discovered would ever free her from the hollow life she knew.
Once she had gotten as far to figure out a means to steal a small craft and deactivate the planetary defense shield to allow her an escape, but she had never tried that, her best of plans, because once off planet, the G'voda would track her. Once they brought her back, she would have her mind "reconditioned" to prevent any further scheming.
But it was only the hidden world of her thoughts and dreams which gave her the ability to endure serving her captors. She didn't dare risk losing that--- losing the last part of herself which was real--- to attempt an escape.
So she continued, as she had for so long, serving the G'voda in whatever menial tasks they gave her.
She entered the next store room and opened the small scanning device she held and began to catalog more of the clutter the G'voda had either built or accumulated over the millennia.
This room contained stasis units for the storage of biological materials the G'voda had collected from various worlds. She wasn't sure why they conducted the experiments they did upon these samples and she really didn't want to know. She was always afraid they had kept some part of her original, organic body after they had transferred her consciousness to the shell of metal she existed in. She was convinced there were some things better left unknown.
She glanced at the display on her scanning device and everything seemed to be already accounted for in the last inventory taken three thousand years before. The readout stated most of what the stasis chambers contained were samples of plant life from hundreds of worlds across the Galaxy. She suspected they were gathered to help the G'voda develop biological weapons if needed against an enemy.
She stopped.
One stasis unit wasn't on the previous inventory. Its identification number didn't show up anywhere.
Wondering how it could have been missed, Cilda touched a control on her device.
There it was, she thought. She looked up at the controls of the three foot by three foot end of the stasis unit which was flush with the wall. The indicator display showed it to be in perfect order and operating within standard parameters.
Remembering something, she stopped and stared at the unit. She had placed it here herself, months earlier. It was a memory she had done her best to forget. The G'voda had ordered her to do to someone else what they had done to her. The creature's body had been sent here in case one of the Volmvas, the G'voda's own masters, decided they wanted to inhabit it as one of them had already done with another being. The body was to remain in stasis because, without its mind to sustain it, it would soon decay.
So few bodies had ever been kept after the transferal process, Cilda had wondered at first if there was a place to keep such a thing. She had been told to store it along with the other organic samples in this room.
She started to turn away when her scanner made a sound which almost startled her. Cilda looked down at the device. If her glowing red eyes had been her original eyes, they would have opened as wide as they'd been physically able.
Impossible! her mind shouted. Neural activity?
Cilda made adjustments to her scanner. It couldn't be functioning correctly. "It cannot be. The procedure is designed to..." she spoke audibly. But the reading remained. It was very faint, the creature was in stasis after all, but there shouldn't have been any neural activity at all. If removed, the body should die from a total lack of mental activity.
Cilda turned and closed the door to the small, brightly lit room. She needed time to think this through. If what she suspected was true, it meant she, and every one of the G'voda were living a lie--- a lie which had existed for five billion years--- a lie which she guessed most, if not all of them, would find impossible to accept, just as she was finding it difficult to do.
What have they done to me? her mind cried.
She stopped as a new thought occurred to her. She laughed out loud for the first time in five centuries.
"For what they did to me?" she laughed again. She turned to the unit at the center of her attention. Her fantasies of revenge over the years came to life again, but now she had an opportunity for more than simple payback. Now she could finish the war the G'voda had brought to her people. She could reveal the truth by exposing the lie of the G'voda.
Cilda ran her metal hand across the outer door holding the stasis unit. "Perhaps I can put you to far better use than the G'voda ever imagined," she whispered to its slumbering occupant.
