Exit, Pursued By a Borg [18+]

Posted on 26 Sep 2013 @ 4:01pm by Ensign Natalie Chevalier
Edited on on 26 Sep 2013 @ 4:02pm

1,411 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 4, Arboretum
Timeline: MD03 - 0200 Hours

This post is marked 18+ for mild gore.

[ON]

Nat felt guilty leaving Ariadne and Tarishiana behind, but she had little choice: a Borg drone was hard on her heels as she vaulted past the litter of broken machinery and ducked into the hole. The Jefferies tube ahead was dimly lit and had a strong smell of smoke, no doubt from the burning power conduits and relays she could hear crackling throughout, but it was her only route of escape. Clambering up, she ignored a sharp twinge of pain as a fused bulkhead scraped across her cheek, and breathed a brief sigh of relief - until a dull shudder informed her, without needing to look back, that the drone had managed to follow her up.

She scampered along as fast as she could on hands and knees, her ragged breathing echoing around her weirdly in the cramped environment, but as hard as she tried she could not seem to keep ahead of the scraping, thudding, clanging sound behind her, steadily gaining. Despite its huge size - the drone had been bigger than even Lieutenant Pendleton, and lacked the friendly grin - the Borg could move pretty fast, and as her eyes started to sting from the smoke she tried to look for a way out, or else she would be trapped and no doubt assimilated. Up ahead was an access port, and with an actual laugh of nervous tension exiting her body, she recognised the hatch serial number: it connected to the Arboretum.

As she scrabbled with the locking, the drone gained fast, and in the last second before the hatch swung open she could feel the red light of its eye playing over her, hear the hum of the exposed circuitry in its shoulder, smell the strange metallic odour coming from its rotten skin, feel its hand reaching out to grasp her with metal-infused fingers and drag her to her doom...With a cry of "Yah!" she leapt through the port, slamming it behind her. Two fingers poked through, fusing and straining: she watched in grim fascination as the full weight of the metal closed, and the fingers were pried off. Falling to the soil, they started scuttling about among the roots of the tall redwood tree whose foliage hid the hatch, before falling dead. They gave a hissing click when she delicately picked them up to dispose of, but were beyond hurting her.

The same could not be said of the drone. The hatch held for barely thirty seconds before she heard the tell-tale hum of a laser saw. Looking up, she could only watch as the drone cut a large hole in the bulkhead and then crashed through, ripping down branches as it landed just a few metres away from her. Something about the calm of the arboretum being invaded by this sinister biomechanical zombie was too much her to bear, and she let out a wail of distress, looking around for assistance. The drone began stomping towards her, and she turned and ran headlong into the bushes. The dense areas of vegetation hid her well, but the drone was cutting them aside with its saw and making fast progress: though it could not see her, she knew it could sense her presence with its scanning equipment, so she had to keep thinking of ideas to confuse it. "Computer," she called out, "Reset environmental controls, Tropical Storm Simulation Chevalier Alpha Four."

Immediately a crack of thunder peeled out, and rain began to fall. The arboretum's internal watering system wasn't designed to sustain artificial precipitation for long, but it would be enough to give her cover while she thought of something else. Lightning bolts flashed across the sky, but they were of no use to her, no more real than the sky itself. Her ruse allowed her to trail back towards the wetland area, and the Borg seemed disoriented, turning the other way and lurching into the wall. She realized the water was damaging its exposed circuitry. But it didn't last long. The drone gained access to the manual control console using its assimilation hardware, and overrode her commands, shutting off the environmental controls. They defaulted to the night time setting the schedule called for, flowers closing as the sun faded away. In the ghostly gloom, the mad red eye of the Borg flashed over and swept across Nat's face. She shivered.

There was nowhere else to run to now, no other tricks to play. All she could do was stand and fight. Her feet were sticky with mud as she neared the edge of the pond, so she stamped up and down to free herself. There were a few tools that she hadn't put away after her latest shift: a short trowel had an edge on it, and a fork had some mean tines. They might give her thirty or forty seconds more, she thought bitterly, as she picked them up, hefting them from left to right and back. The rushes parted, and out stepped the Borg.

"We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

The strange, resonant voice screamed across her mind, and she could feel tears prickling her eyes. Stepping back, she was now ankle deep in the pond, the mud sucking at her feet obstinately as she tried to find firmer ground from which to swing. The drone was extending its arm, small pieces of machinery combing together to form some kind of ominous needle, and she hacked wildly in a mad flash of rage. The edge of the trowel cleaved off another two fingers, leaving nothing but a bare stump of exposed circuitry and moving parts, but it was an insignificant blow in arresting the drone's progress towards her, close enough now that she had to lean back.

She swung again - and this time a pulse of energy send the trowel spinning away in ruins. Nat collapsed to her knees, openly sobbing now as the drone took another step towards her. Images flashed before her mind, maman's cooking, her siblings playing, her first kiss in the woods beside the hotel, a kindly professor's book-filled office, the excitement of getting her first lab kit, Starfleet security officers deploying anesthezine cannisters on her friends, Captain Saalm and the colour changing flowers, dancing with Jared, train rides with Jacob, breakfast with S'Ranna. One image remained, of the drone bearing down on her ...

Its foot went out, slipping in the wet mud at the pond's edge, and with an enormous crash it landed face down in the water. Nat leapt clear, watching in wide-eyed disbelief as the huge drone started to fit. Crackles of electricity shot over its surface, and an entire section of Borg implants exploded, splattering dark grey flesh over the arboretum wall. Bone was visible beneath, organs infested with nanoprobes, what looked to be four or five lunges, all of them scaled with metallic webbing. It was short-circuiting in the water, she realized. Borg considered organic being inferior, yet no organic pursuer would have been tripped up by a shallow pond. Its superior implants were its downfall. Nat found herself laughing, incredibly, hysterically, wildly, dragging herself up to her feet again, a ruin of mud, yet untouched by the drone. Splashing over, she raised her fork, and slammed it down with a vicious thrust, directly into the temple of the drone. She closed her eyes so she would not have to watch, but she could hear the crack of bone, squelch of dead flesh, and the final hum of the machinery dying off.

When she opened her eyes, the red eye was no longer. She wrenched the fork clean and dragged herself to the pond edge, sitting down shivering. That was where they found her, when the team finally responded to the distress hail, wrapping the mud-spattered, rain-soaked, blood-stained young woman in a warm blanket and disposing of what remained of the drone by means she did not care to think about. Twenty minutes later, hot chocolate in hand and a dermal regenerator healing up her cheek, Nat was being ordered back to duty with the Science team, but she somehow knew the next time she stepped into the Arboretum, she would find it a very different place from the haven she had held it to be thus far on her time aboard the Galileo.

[OFF]

Ensign Natalie Chevalier
Ecologist
USS Galileo

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