The Enemy (Part 3 of 8)

Posted on 18 Sep 2013 @ 8:54pm by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Captain Jonathan Holliday & Commander Scarlet Blake & Lieutenant Commander Dea Mialin & Lieutenant Aria Rice & Lieutenant Jacob Pendleton & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Commander Andreus Kohl & Lieutenant JG Delainey Carlisle & Lieutenant Commander Amynta Markos & Lieutenant Ammar Fahad & Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Lieutenant Jared Nicholas & Lieutenant JG Victoria Crawley & Ensign S'Ranna T'Srrr'Kharh & Ensign Im'er Mor'an & Lieutenant JG Jacrux & Ensign Ariadne Fleming & Command Master Chief Markum Quinn & Tarishiana Barel & Alexander Iella & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Alexion Wylde & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Arthur Willis & Senior Chief Petty Officer Keval zh'Erinov & Petty Officer 1st Class Victarion Jaqen & Petty Officer 1st Class Gabriel Stark & Petty Officer 1st Class Siren Hex Saalm & EMH Mark X-C "Shirley" & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Amon Mormont

2,128 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: USS Galileo - Main Bridge, Various
Timeline: MD 03 - 0128 hrs

Previously, on The Enemy (Part 2)...

=^=Attention! Everyone in Triage. We must evacuate the area. The structure is weakening.=^= She grabbed the tray of replicated hypos filled with 'scissors'. =^=All medical personnel, and any of those that are helping with the severely injured, take one of these. In case Borg attempt to board these will prevent assimilation.=^= It was somewhat of a lie, perhaps for a time but it might even give the collective pause if their ease of assimilation was interfered with.

"Twins, if we only had that bipolaron." She realized her comm was open and then shut it down.

Allyndra began directing the evacuation as the ship continued to jerk and she could hear the groans of the structure around her. She stopped one orderly trying to wrangle with a bed and shook her head in the negative. She pulled him aside, "Some of these we will not have time to help, we must class as fatalities, help what we can." He looked at her but sometimes it was that hard call of field hospital work that one had to draw that line. It hurt, it hurt deeply to have to make that call.

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

Bridge

With the help of Galileo's competent science officers, the uploaded
computer virus did its job and began to infiltrate the cube's systems. The tractor beam which had latched on to the Nova Class suddenly disappeared, sending the tiny ship free of its captors.

"Helm, get us out of here as fast as you can!" Lirha called out to the Caitian who was sitting in front of her at the navigation console.

The release from the tractor beam brought a visible rush of relief to S'Ranna's features, her eyes gleaming as she bared razor sharp fangs. "Engaging impulse engines, Captain!" she announced as she span in her chair, tail flailing, and input a course away from the Borg cube.

Her grin lasted only a few seconds before dissolving as her console's sensors bleeped a new alert.

Galileo began to make its escape -- albeit a slow one due to the damaged impulse drive -- but it wasn't long before the nightmare continued and another massive ship suddenly appeared on sensors in the nearby vicinity.

"Captain!" Mor'an called, fighting to keep her voice calm, "There is another cube approaching us! It is an assimilation cube!"

Lirha pounded her fist against her chair's armrest in utter frustration. They had apparently encountered a Borg task group of some type, and she knew they now stood little chance of survival against so many ships. What little hope they had previously had for escape was now negligible, and thoughts of failing her crew began to run through her head.

Galileo shook violently again as the assimilation cube locked its own tractor beam on the Nova Class. A direct strike from one of its beam weapons slammed into the dorsal shields and punched through, blasting a hole in the side of the saucer section and spewing a collection of flaming debris and crew members out into the vacuum of space.

Lirha was tossed from her seat as a result of the violent impact, and she could tell from the deep rumble in the deck plating that her ship's hull had been compromised.

"Multiple hull breaches across the saucer section," Scarlet warned, her breath tight in her chest with the adrenaline swelling in her. The ex-marine in her was ready to fight, the counsellor in her was concerned over the amount of casualty reports flooding in and the mother in her was worried over her little girl somewhere in this mess. "And - the casualties are still rolling in, I don't have a full count yet." The implication was the same though; multiple casualties meant less hands working.

Aria pushed herself up again, her fingers grabbing the consol. Somehow, she looked younger standing there, before the look on her face went from recovering shock to something dark. "We've lost our shields. They're down."

Warning sirens blared across the bridge and every deck of the ship, signalling the severity of the situation. And then, the unthinkable occurred. Four green transporter swirls began to manifest on the bridge in various locations, and six Borg drones suddenly materialized. Lirha looked at them with momentary disbelief. She had never seen one up close before, only in holodeck simulations and previous recordings, but their presence sent chills through her spine as she reached for the phaser on her hip.

"We got contact. Intruder alerts across the entire ship, the Borg are beaming on board," she said and straightened, her blue eyes darkening. Fear was there. Of course she was terrified. But there was something else too. Survival.

The large drones, made even more massive by their black-plated body armor and enhancements, quickly looked around the bridge to determine their best course of action. It took only a brief second before they identified key personnel and stations. The mechanical servos in their joints whirred as they moved into action, accompanied by the eerie red optical beams from their eyepieces which illuminated the bridge through the hazy electrical smoke. One drone began to make its way up and into the back of the bridge to secure the engineering MSD, while the other three approached the nearest crew members and began an attempt to assimilate them.

Scarlet was up and out of her chair in a heartbeat. She pushed away before crouching down behind her chair for limited cover, her arm strong as she took aim at a drone approaching the Captain. It hit square, but Scarlet knew not to get trigger happy; they'd all only have a limited amount of shots before they adapted and they had to make every shot count.

The XO could simply not believe what was happening around him. From out of nowhere, Borg drones had begun materializing across the Galileo, threatening to overwhelm the Starfleet defences before they had even had chance to react.

On the Bridge, drones had begun moving towards most of the primary stations, and the sound of phaser fire whistled through the air as the senior staff fought to maintain control of their vessel.

S'Ranna grabbed the phaser from the security locker beneath her station and managed to fire off barely two shots, but the second was useless, the Borg advancing on her already adapting with a dismissive blue flash of its personal shield. She snarled and backed up, tail whipping about crazily as she sought an escape route. The console next to her had exploded and some of the bulkhead come away, a sharp metal spike pointing up to the centre of the Bridge. It was far too narrow for a normal humanoid to attempt to scale, but for a Caitian...

As the first drones materialised, John had leapt from his chair in the direction of the Tactical station, grabbing one of the phasers from the nearby weapons locker and preparing himself for the inevitable.

One drone materialised across the Bridge from him, but the XO's sharp eye was enough to mean a phaser blast struck its chest armour the moment it finished transport. The drone collapsed to the floor before it even had a chance to take a single step.

Another appeared near the turbolift doors, again the XO steadied his arm and squeezed off another shot, watching with satisfaction as the drone became nothing more than a pile of spare parts, dematerialising into nothingness as the Borg reclaimed their dead for recycling.

The third drone however was a different story, in the centre of the Bridge, the Commander saw the outline of a drone forming as a transporter beam positioned itself near to the chair he had been sat in only moments before. What made it worse, was that his Captain was only a few steps away from the new danger that was making its way into solid form.

With his own crew in danger from crossfire, John threw his phaser aside, and like a wild animal threw himself at the drone, thrashing wildly as he aimed to pull on anything and everything that he could lay his hands on. After a moment's struggle against the cold grey carapace of the drone, John found the weak point he was looking for, ripping a cable from the back of the Borg's machine-infested skull, finally granting death to the former individual.

Panting, the XO pulled himself to his feet in preparation for the next fight, but instead it found him, the steely vice-like grip of a drone found his shoulder, making Holliday drop to his knees in agony as it felt like his shoulder blade would be broken clean into fragments. But he would not be so lucky, the next thing he felt was the cold penetrating feeling of the drone's assimilation tubules burying themselves in his neck.

As the nanoprobes filled his bloodstream, the Commander seemed to be able to feel his own individuality slipping away. As he muttered a single word, the embrace of a Borg transporter beam took the stricken XO.

"Captain......."

"NO!" Jacob screamed at the top of his lungs and rushed across the Bridge to help the Commander but reached him too late, horrified at seeing the Borg attempting to assimilate Holliday. He grabbed the Borg by the waist and pulled him off the Commander. The Borg may be stronger than he but not from the back and not expecting to be attacked from the rear. He pulled the drone up and over in a perfect suplex and made sure the Borg's head smashed hard into the floor. He then quickly manuevered the drone into what wrestlers call the "Boston Crab" and since he knew that using wrestling moves which are scripted as real attacks would be major damage inducers to the point of being fatal under most circumstances, he sat back on the back of the drone with it's legs wrapped by his arms until he felt the spine of the drone break into multiple pieces killing it painfully if the Borg could feel pain.

He got up, letting go the lifeless body fall under him as another drone attack came after him but he was far too quick due to his athleticism and simply ducked and rolled past the drone. Jacob then sent a mule kick to the drone's back of the right knee making it stop its advance immediately and then spinning around while low to the floor in a sweep of the leg attack, dropping the hapless drone. He then grabbed a piece of the bulkhead that had broken off. The tritanium/duranium piece was about half the size of an end table but weighed at least four hundred pounds but with his adrenaline rushing full speed through his system, it felt to him like it might weigh all of one hundred pounds. He picked up to his chest, walked over and dropped it right on the head of the drone with a satisfyingly sick sound of squishing bone, metal and flesh.

Jacob realized he was cut off from Commander Holliday's body just as his form dematerialized off the Bridge; he then looked up as more drones were now headed to OPS and Mor'an. His anger and rage grew even more. He vowed to himself that if he could not protect her and the rest of the crew that was left, he would kill himself before allowing his powerful form to be assimilated.

Jared may have only been a linguist, but before his time in Star Fleet he, had to worry about pirates and other intruders. So he had made a habit of carrying weapons with him wherever he went. He was pretty sure he was violating a regulation or two, but at this point he really didn't give a rat's ass.

He pulled a phaser, moved the setting to kill and fired at the nearest Borg. He knew that they would adapt pretty quickly but that didn't concern him overmuch. He also had a particularly nasty and no doubt illegal double edged fighting knife that he kept honed to a fine edge. The Bork would have a damn hard time assimilating that.

Lirha watched with stricken eyes as her XO was assimilated and then abducted, his body de-materializing with the Borg drone back to the cube. Panic and grief washed over her after witnessing the awful scene, but her thoughts were quickly interrupted when she caught the sight of a drone in her peripheral vision. It closed in on her fast, and she raised her phaser in preparation to fire.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

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