She hated the artefact. It gave her the creeps with its… well, Sarissa couldn’t say the thing had a dead-eyed stare, because it didn’t have eyes. It had, once, before assimilation and then the neurolytic pathogen. Now it just sat there, looking at her even though she turned her back and carried on with her work. 

“Sarissa?” Her grandfather called out from the other lab. He had another of the artefacts in there and was dissecting it. She refused to go in there. That one had been younger, possibly around her own age. It gave her the shivers. 

“Yeah?” she called out, with as much teen boredom as she could muster. Like everything was just too much effort. If she could prompt her grandfather into one of his ‘you’re so ungrateful’ lectures, perhaps he would send her to her room and she wouldn’t have to carry on matching these hated samples. 

“Did you take your medication yet?”

Shit. She grabbed for her wrist-comp, and turned it around to look at the screen. The timer was in the red. She was supposed to wear it all the time to monitor her bio-systems and notify her when she was due for meds, but it was just too big and bulky when she was working, so she always took it off. 

“Doing it now!” she called out, strapping the thing back on and heading over to the meds cabinet. She skirted around the head on the counter, ignoring the artefact as much as she could. Halfway there, she paused and half turned, looking back. 

“Grandfather…” she called out warily, not taking her eyes off the artefact. “Are you running tests on 201?” 

She held her breath as she waited for an answer, watching the lights flicker softly across the implants that snaked across the skull. Most of the flesh was long gone, the rest damaged by bad attempts to preserve it, something her grandfather often moaned about. But, if given the sources he got the artefacts from, they were lucky to get them even in this condition. 

“On 201?” He called back absently. “No, I have 206 in here. Why?”

Her eyes widened. If her grandfather wasn’t running tests on 201, that meant that there was no external power to the artefact…

“You…” her voice squeaked and she swallowed. “You need to come in here and see this.”

“I’m a little busy, Sarissa. This is a very difficult part of the extraction process,” he snapped. “For god’s sake, your mother was just like this. Couldn’t do a thing on her own. Just deal with whatever it is.” 

She nodded even though he couldn’t see her, sliding to the side, her back against the cool panel of the meds cabinet as she reached for the fire extinguisher on the wall. It was a cryo-foam one, designed for labs in case experiments went wrong. She was terrified of touching them after grandfather had demonstrated what they did to living flesh on a lab rat, but she was more scared of 201 as more and more lights flashed across the implants. 

Then it moved and she squeaked, grabbing for the extinguisher. Not, that was wrong. It couldn’t move, it was bolted into the holding plate on the counter. It couldn’t move… definitely couldn’t move. Her eyes were deceiving her into thinking it was. 

She flicked the guard clip out of the extinguisher by feel as she crept forward, both trying to give the artefact a wide berth and get close enough with the nozzle of the extinguisher at the same time. 

She edged around the counter, her heart pounding violently at the cage of her ribs, like a bird desperate to be free. She should have taken her meds, her heart wasn’t as strong as a normal person’s thanks to her condition. 

201 turned, lifting itself free of the mounting plate on tentacles and she screamed, hitting the trigger on the fire extinguisher at the same time something stabbed deep into her ankle… 

“Do you ever think we’re going around in circles?” RJ mused, lounging in his command chair and staring out of the front view screen. The Resolute had been on patrol for what seemed like forever, but they hadn’t picked up hide nor hair of these borg signals that had everyone’s knickers in a twist. 

His XO turned his head slightly to look at him. 

“Given the pips on your collar and the fact that you’re an academy graduate, I’m fairly sure that’s a rhetorical question,” Thane replied, without so much as batting an eyelid.

“Yeah, yeah… I’m familiar with how star charts and navigation systems work,” RJ sighed, waving dismissively. He’d been born in space and been piloting one of the families transporters since he was old enough to reach the pedals, so he could read a starchart and set a nav system upside down, back to front, while naked and drunk (the last two he actually had evidence of). “It’s just… boring as fuck.”

Thane just grunted in the back of his throat and went back to the padd he was flicking through reports on. 

RJ watched him for a moment. He still hadn’t worked the guy out. Tall and heavily muscled, he was handsome as hell, with a ‘touch me not’ aura about him RJ had only ever seen on one other person. Another llanarian… Raan Mason, the former CO of the Resolute.  But since Thane and Mason were related somehow, that made sense. Perhaps it was a family thing. 

“Were you in range of the signal on Frontier Day?” he asked in a undertone. It was partly out of curiosity, and partly because he really needed to know. If they came up against the borg again, he needed to be confident that his XO had his back and wouldn’t fold. 

Thane looked up from his padd again. He didn’t speak much, and smiled less. In fact, if he hadn’t seen the guy with his son, and caught him speaking to his wife, RJ would have doubted he actually knew how to do anything other than glower. 

“Yes. My ship was in range.”

O…kay. That meant Thane had gone up against assimilated crew. His gaze was steady, his expression closed but with none of the haunted look RJ saw on others. Then he remembered Thane’s planet had been at war. 

“You’re a veteran, aren’t you? Like Mason?” he asked and Thane shrugged. 

“Yes, and no. Ra—Mason was a lot higher up the food chain than I was,” Thane replied. “I was just a weapons sergeant.”

“You saw action though?” RJ guessed, wondering why he hadn’t seen it before. Thane held himself the same way as Mason did, although was perhaps even more reserved. 

Thane nodded. “I won’t hesitate to do what needs to be done, if that’s what you’re asking.” 

RJ inclined his head. “As long as that includes me. Should the worst happen of course.”

A flicker of a smile crossed Thane’s face. If RJ hadn’t been looking for it, he would have missed it. It was nothing more than a slight crinkling of the skin around Thane’s eyes and a glimmer of movement at the corner of his full lips. 

“Would you like to define ‘the worst’ case scenario?” Thane asked, his deep voice a burr. “Just so I’m clear on the criteria here. Are we talking about assimilation, or just your choice of sleeping partner?”

RJ chuckled, not at all offended. Obviously the ship grapevine was working perfectly. “So you do have a sense of humour. Good to know.”

“Sir,” an ensign called out from the comms console, breaking into their conversation. “You wanted to know if I picked up anything unusual. Well… I think I have something.”

RJ sat up, every trace of the charming joker put aside as he looked at the ensign. “Thank you, Ensign Howell… what do you have?”

The ensign turned in his chair, a frown on his face. He was one of the younger crew, but transferred in after the events of Frontier Day. RJ wondered where he’d been assigned previously, and whether he’d been affected by the signal. It was a constantly recurring thought; who had been affected and how? Could he trust half the crew when in the back of their minds they didn’t trust the other half?

“Well, it’s not much,” the ensign replied. “But there are several reports of ships not making their scheduled stops or not reporting in when they were supposed to.”

“Starfleet ships?” he asked, leaning back and casually crossing his legs, one ankle on the opposite knee. 

Howell shook his head. “No, these are civilian ships and transports.”

RJ inclined his head, his thoughts instantly going to his sister, but she was over the other side of the quadrant, on the Morgana. “Could be nothing more than coincidence.”

“I would say that, but for all the ships, their listed flight paths took them through the same system.”

RJ rubbed his chin. “So two coincidences. Radio silence and the same location.” He tilted his head and looked at Thane. “What do you think, number one?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences.” Thane slid him a glance. “We should check it out. Besides, perhaps it will stop you thinking we’re going in circles.”

“Coming up on the system now, sir.” 

RJ nodded at Ensign Howell’s comment, his attention on the viewscreen as they dropped out of warp and into the system that the missing ships were all supposed to have travelled through.

“Okay, tell me what we‘re looking at?” he asked, his eyes narrowing as the view on the screen ahead changed. 

The order was mostly rhetorical as his experienced gaze swept over the system revealed in front of them. He studied the chart Howell had brought up on the main screen next to it, overlaying what they could see. He was impressed, for such a new officer the kid was learning quickly. 

He crossed his arms, folding one over the other and tapping his fingers against his pursed lips with one hand, idly noting he needed to trim his mustache. He’d been brought up aboard freighters that often carried high value cargo with minimal weaponry, so it was second nature to him to check out areas of risk first… places that pirates could be hiding ready to swoop in on the unwary. 

Thankfully the system was a simple one, with minimal blind spots, and the tension between his shoulder blades eased a fraction. Of course, he had less to worry about in a ship carrying the sort of firepower the Resolute did. While the Rhode-island class wasn’t one of the big gunships of the fleet,  she could more than hold her own in a fight. She was agile and damn fast. Small though. He’d sluiced out bigger chicken coops in his time. 

“What are you thinking?” Thane, at his side, asked in a low voice.

RJ turned toward his XO slightly, eyes still on the screen. There was a conglomerate of ships clustered together in the middle of the system. They all looked to be powered down, with only low level lighting on. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that one bit.

“I think it looks like a ratking.”

Thane’s eyebrow winged up. “A ratking? I’m sorry, that’s not a phrase I’m familiar with?”

“We used to get them occasionally, especially on the cattle transporters,” he said, eyes narrowing as he studied the ships. “Rats’ll get everywhere, especially when there’s feed being stored. A ratking is where their tails get matted and tangled up and they can’t get loose. This…” he nodded toward the screen in front of them. “I don’t know what it is about it, but it looks like a ratking. A ship ratking. Okay, let’s get some scans,” he ordered. “What ships are in there, and hail them. Let’s see if we can raise a reply from anyone.”

If they weren’t all dead, that was. A shiver rolled down his spine, one that he ignored. He’d seen dead ships before, floating helplessly in space, and they’d always given him the creeps. And these were definitely giving off those vibes right now.

“There’s definitely a couple of heavy cargo transporters in there,” he said in a low voice to Thane, easily picking out the shape of the hulking, blocky leviathan’s. For a moment when they’d come into view he’d caught his breath, thinking one of them was his sister’s ship. Same class, a KT-17 heavy cattle transporter, but the cargo loaders across the top were the newer automated models, not the older, manually operated kind. 

“Looks like at least one pleasure cruiser,” he carried on. “But that’s an older model, and out here, that’s not a prestige liner. Probably shuttling crew from one location to the other. Do we have any mining operations in the area?”

Thane frowned and looked down, checking on his padd. “Yeah, one two systems over. There’s a trade outpost not far from here as well.” 

RJ nodded. “Yeah, definitely carrying crew not paying passengers. I mean, this is the ass end of bumfuck-nowhere. No one’s gonna pay to come out here… and the rest.” He frowned, twisting his lips. “At least one of those smaller kaplan’s is a gunrunner, and the others look like private ships. We need to know what they’re about.”

“A gunrunner?” Thane looked up, then at the screen. “How do you know that?”

RJ shrugged. “Law of probabilities. The kaplan models are everywhere. So they’re the most frequently used for that, it’s like… a stereotype at this point. Everyone knows that.”

Thane’s eyebrow winged up. “I didn’t know that.”

RJ shrugged. “Well, you probably know a shitload about kitbashing weaponry and a multitude of ways to kill a man with toe-nail clippers that I don’t. All depends on your background and experiences in your formative years.” He leaned in. “For example, I could teach you at least three ways to cheat at strip tarocchi that mean you win without losing more of your clothes than you want to. But then… I’ve seen your wife, perhaps I’ll teach her instead.”

“Be my guest,” Thane chuckled and shrugged at his sudden look. Thane barely even smiled, so the display of humour took RJ by surprise. “Let’s just say you’ll find you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. With either of my spouses.”

“Either of them?” RJ blinked. “How many do you have?” 

“Sir… scans are complete. And…None of our hails were answered sir, but there’s a signal…”

RJ turned, gaze zeroing in on Howell as the ensign stuttered and stumbled over his words. “What kind of signal, ensign?”

“Borg, sir.“ 

He was thirteen again, on the holodeck. He shouldn’t have been there. Shouldn’t have even had access to that program. But teenagers can find anything, especially on an old cargo freighter whose systems he’d been hacking since he was five years old, and he’d been looking for ‘adult films’ in his parent’s digital lockbox on the system. 

That’s not what he found. 

He was on the bridge of a ship, but not the Morningstar. Something newer, something with more weapons. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing had mattered as the cube had materialized out of nothingness in front of him. The ship’s weapons had fired, the bridge crew around him shouting all at once. 

The gentle rush of metallic-tainted air washed over his face, the single sign he wasn’t aboard that ship, but safe on the Morningstar. 

It didn’t matter… his senses told him he was there, watching the Cube slicing through space to birth itself. Saw the weapons fire as the ship he was on, and all the others around it, fired on the cube. 

It didn’t matter. Nothing stopped it.

Then they were all around him. Screams echoed. There was the flash of amber and green as his fists clenched at his side and his nails bit deep into his palms. 

“We are the Borg…” the voice was legion and terrible, as he stumbled backward, fleeing from a fate worse than death…

——

RJ blinked himself out of the memory—he’d gotten into so much shit with his parents for finding that holo-recording… a black market recording from one of the ships at Wolf 359, and he’d had nightmares for months afterward—and focused on the ensign in front of him. 

“Shields up, red alert,” he ordered. “And get me some long range scans. Make sure no one’s coming to answer that signal.” 

If there was a borg cube incoming, he wanted to know about it, and fast. He looked at the viewscreen and the ships in the middle of the system. 

“Send a message to command,” he added. “Relay what we know so far, and inform them of the presence of a borg signal in this system.”

The bridge crew reacted instantly, a slight hum of tension running through the air. He didn’t blame them, everyone was still on edge after Frontier Day. 

“Ensign Howell,” he said. “Get me an estimate on how many people aboard all those ships?”

The ensign shook his head. “Something’s blocking our scans, sir. I can’t get accurate readings on lifesigns.”

“Can you get anything from them?” RJ asked, on his feet now. He didn’t pace, but stood in front of the captain’s chair, feet spread for balance. It was more than a physical thing. He always thought better on his feet. “Okay, pull the manifests from their last port for the liner, the kaplans we’d be looking at an average crew of six, those cargo transporters will be running a crew of twelve max. Crunch the numbers and tell me how many.”

“Aye sir.”

RJ turned to Thane. “If there’s a Borg signal, then we might be looking at drones as well. If even one of those gets aboard then we have to be ready.” 

Thane nodded. “You really think they might try and take over the ship?”

RJ shrugged. “No idea. So far we’ve only had reports of signals and the odd drone sighting. But there have been no attacks, or aggressive actions from the drones that have been seen…. But I don’t think we should discount it as an option.”

“Agreed,” Thane’s expression tightened, a grim look in his eyes. “At least we’re looking at traditional drones, not our own crew this time.” 

“Sir, I have numbers for you,” Ensign Howell said. “The liner, the SS Lizabetta, had eighty miners on board when it left the mining colony on Tervas-four. With all the other ships, we’re looking at maximum numbers of around a hundred and fifty.”

He nodded. That was more than he’d hoped for, but not as many as he’d feared. 

“That’s on the ships all clustered together sir. There should be two more on the other one.”

His eyebrow winged up. “Other one?” 

“Yes sir. There’s a research vessel just out of the system. The SS Robert Walton.”

“Can you hail it?” 

“Trying now, sir… there’s no answer.”

“Okay, bring it up on the main screen,” he ordered, his frown deepening as the screen changed to show a smaller ship. It was definitely dead in space, floating aimlessly with no lights on. 

“Life signs, power core?” he asked. 

Howell shook his head. “Nothing sir. It’s dead.” 

RJ pursed his lips, making his mustache tickle the underside of his nose. Yeah, it was definitely too long. He should do something about that later. 

If the ship was dead in the water and powered down, that would be why they hadn’t noticed it on arrival into the system. “What do we know about it?” 

“It’s dead sir,” Howell asked in confusion. “With respect, why even bother with it at the moment?”

“Hmmm?” RJ looked over at him from his musings looking at the screen. “Because it’s an oddity, ensign. The rest of the ships are all tangled up, emitting a borg signal, but this one isn’t.” 

He looked at the ship on the screen again. 

“And that begs the question why. Why is this ship not with the others? What’s so special about it?”

Of all the people Thais would have picked for an impromptu away mission, the Resolute’s chief science officer, Lieutenant Allen, was not one of them. The guy was… well, a little odd. 

Tall and lean, he wore his uniform like a rumpled afterthought, and his blond hair was a mess of spikes that looked like he’d run his hands through it. It wasn’t the deliberate bedhead sort of look their playboy of a captain would have gone for, but more absent minded. 

And… he was late. 

Thais didn’t like late. He liked precise.

“Glad you could join me, Lieutenant,” Thais said, his voice level and neutral as he checked over his weaponry. Given the nature of the situation, and with the Borg involvement, the captain had authorised personal weaponry. 

Well, that wasn’t technically true. He’d frowned and been about to say no, so Thais had smiled. He didn’t do charm often, but he wasn’t above using every advantage he had, something Mason had taught him. Smiling at the captain had seemed to lock RJ’s brain out for a second or two, which was, of course, his in to ask about personal weaponry. 

“You’re welcome, boss,” Allen quipped, dropping into the co-pilot’s seat next to him. “The captain said we’re headed to a ghost ship.”

Thais slid him a sideways glance. “A dead ship. I don’t believe in ghosts.” 

“Dead. Ghosts.” Quinn shrugged, the lights from the console in front of him playing over a face full of hard angles and dark stubble. “Same difference to those who can see.”

Thais’s eyebrow flickered up a fraction. Okay, Quinn was not just a little odd. He was very odd. 

“Are you locked and loaded?” he asked, noting Allen carried a standard issue phaser, holstered. 

Allen blinked at him, then looked down at the phaser like he’d never seen it before in his life. “Ah… yeah, you could say that.” 

Thais managed a tight smile. Great. Typical science officer. Wouldn’t know a weapon from his arse or his elbow. He’d probably shoot his own damn foot off the first time he used that thing.

“Okay, when we get in there stick close,” he ordered, closing the loading doors of the shuttle and bringing the engines online. The shuttlebay doors were already opening in front of them. “We’re heading over to the Robert Walton, it’s a—“

“Science vessel,” Allen butted in, lounging back in his chair. The movement reminded Thais of the captain, but where RJ’s lounge was practically a sexual harassment charge waiting to happen, Quinn’s was more disaffected teenager. “It’s registered to Professor Victor Henries. He’s a specialist in Mendelian Genetic Pathology.” 

Thais looked at Allen sharply. Initially it had looked like he’d rolled in after a hard night’s drinking, but now Thais looked more closely, he saw the sharp intelligence in the man’s eyes. 

That wasn’t unexpected for a science officer, it was a hard field of study. But the Resolute was set up for combat rather than scientific exploration, so it wasn’t a prime assignment by any stretch of the imagination. There were only two types of science officer that would end up here; young and up and coming, or washed out. 

And Allen wasn’t young. 

“Layman’s terms,” he ordered in a low voice. “Unless we’re talking the thermo-dynamtics and other properties of things of an explosive nature, then I’m all out at sea.” 

“MGP is a field of study concerned with genetic inheritance,” Allen swiveled the chair around, leaning on the arm. “Specifically genetically inherited conditions. I had no idea Professor Henries was out here in this area of space. If I’d known, I would have contacted him. His work on Stavoris syndrome was ground-breaking in its time.” 

“Stavoris syndrome?” 

Allen nodded. “Nasty little buggar of a condition. Attacks the pulmonary and cardiovascular system. It’s like stoneman syndrome, but for the internal organs. Bloody nasty way to die.”

Thais grunted in the back of his throat, concentrating on piloting the shuttle out through the doors and getting them clear of the ship. Their target was floating in space just on the edge of the system, so it wouldn’t take them long to get there. 

“Is that a human thing?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

Allen shrugged one shoulder. “No reason you should have. Given the size of you, you ain’t human.” 

Thais inclined his head. “Good guess. I’m llanarian. But my wife is human. Is this Stavoris thing something that could affect her?”

He had Allen’s full attention now. “Depends how old she is. I mean, I ain’t one to ask a lady’s age and all that. But, if she’s over mid-thirties then no… you need the gene mutation from both parents, and life expectancy is late twenties, early thirties. You get a few more years with gene therapy if you’re lucky. But, if no signs by the big three-oh, then she’s good.”

Relief flooded Thais. His species were as hardy as hull plating, and had very few diseases that affected them. He’d been horrified at the sheer number of things that could affect humans, and worried about Mads a lot. Of the two people he was married to, he definitely worried about her the most. 

“So this Professor, he specializes in gene diseases?” he asked. “Then why isn’t he in a lab somewhere, instead of out here in the middle of nowhere?” 

“Keep me updated on the away team’s progress,” RJ ordered Ensign Howell as he considered the tangle of ships in front of them. None of them had moved, not so much as an extra light had flickered on. 

“Anything new from our ship Ratking?” he asked as Harrow, the Resolute’s second officer, took place beside him in Thane’s absence. 

He made sure to keep his eyes forward on the screen. Fuck’s sake… He had no clue how Mason had done it, but most of the legacy crew of the Resolute were either packing 30 pack abs or cheekbones sharper than a bat’leth. Or both. And they were all under his damn command, so he couldn’t chat any of them up in the excuse the ship had for a bar. On the plus side, if it ever came to a throw down on the catwalk, then the Resolute would win hands down. 

“Nothing sir, just that Borg signal.”

He grunted in the back of his throat, eyes narrowed. Nothing on long range, but also no backup in the immediate vicinity. While the Resolute was a tough little ship, and fast if they needed to haul ass, but he was under no illusions. If they went up against the Borg, then they were all dead. History had already witnessed that bigger ships than them had tried and lost that battle. 

So they were running if he saw so much of a hint of a cube or a sphere, or any other geometric shape with an agenda and an attitude. 

“Okay,” he nodded to Howell. “Open a channel… This is Reese-Riggs of the USS Resolute to the ships in the middle of the system. Please respond and identify yourself.” 

Silence and static was their only answer. 

He frowned and looked over at Howell. “Is it getting through? Or is it being blocked by what—“

“Incoming signal, sir.” Howell said quickly. “Audio only.”

RJ nodded. Finally, it looked like they would get some answers. “Okay, open channel… let’s see what they have to say.”

“Hello, this is Ree—“

For the second time within a minute, he was cut off. 

“Go away!” A soft, female voice whispered. It was barely a smudge of sound. “Don’t talk! They’ll hear you!”

RJ blinked, exchanging a glance with Harrow. Oddly, the second officer seemed to be shuffling cards in one hand. He shook it off and turned back to the view screen. It was a habit, even though the channel was audio only. 

“Hey… who is this?” he asked, dropping his voice a little, making his tone warmer and less demanding. It was an instinctive reaction to a frightened woman. RJ was an excellent judge of female voices… this one sounded young, and she was very very scared. He didn’t want to frighten her any more. It wasn’t him being a nice guy though. If she locked up, he wouldn’t get any more information out of her. And they needed information. Badly. “I’m Ryder, my friends call me RJ.”

He didn’t think she was going to answer for a moment. But then there was a small cough, and the rasp of her breathing. “Sarissa. My name is Sarissa.” 

“Hey Sarissa. Thats a lovely name… So, talk to me, tell me what’s going on,” RJ smiled, knowing the expression would carry over to his voice as he sat down next to Harrow. He had two cards in his hand. RJ frowned… They looked like playing cards. A seven of something… and one that looked like a king. But they weren’t like any playing cards RJ had ever seen, and he was very familiar with playing cards. Especially those used for poker. 

He didn’t get a good look at them as Harrow saw the direction of his gaze and folded them away quickly. 

“Nothing,” she whispered, her words punctuated by soft, metallic clunks. His eyes narrowed. It sounded like she was moving in some kind of enclosed space. 

“Nothing’s going on. Go away, before—“ She cut herself off and he frowned. 

“Before what, Sarissa?” he asked. “Come on, talk to me. I’m here to help. Before what?”

“Before they hear you! Before they find me! You need to go!”

He looked over at Howell and sliced his hand over his neck, signaling him to put the channel on mute. “Can you isolate the signal, work out where she is in there? And do we have a Sarissa on any of the manifests for the ships?”

“Not that I can see,” Howell said with a frown. “I’ll give it a try, if I can work around whatever is blocking us.”

“Okay. Put me back on,” he ordered. 

“Sarissa… before who finds you? Why do I need to go? I can help you. Let me help you. I have a ship—“

“That’s what they’ll want!” she hissed in exasperating. “They—“

“Where did she go?” RJ demanded as static filled the channel.

“Sorry sir, we lost the signal, but there’s a new one incoming,” Howell announced. “Audio and visual.

“Where from?” RJ frowned. “Is it Sarissa?”

Howell shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s coming from somewhere on the ships.”

Before RJ could respond, the image on the viewscreen distorted and a face took shape. Everyone on the bridge froze, gazes riveted to the screen. 

It was an older human man, with white hair and the crepey, wrinkled skin of an octogenarian…

And Borg implants embedded in his skin. 

The Robert Walton was deader than a dodo.

Quinn suppressed the shiver as he and Thane materialized in the middle of the central cargo space of the ship. The still air filled his lungs, but there was nothing living in it, the oppressive silence around them a warning that they were not welcome here. 

Instantly, Thane had his gun in his shoulder, turning in a circle as he checked out their surroundings. Allen looked down at the phaser in his hand then back at the cannon the commander carried. The commander was a unit and a half so the thing looked like a kid’s toy in his hands. Quinn wasn’t the smallest of guys, but if he’d tried to pick that up, he’d have dislocated his shoulder and broken his own foot when he dropped it.

But, he reassured himself as he followed Thane as they made their way through the research ship and its shadows, he was more than packing in the brains department. Even if his ‘visitor’ from the time he’d spent as a guest of the Devore Imperium was long gone, it had left him a few… gifts. Enough for him to know there wasn’t anything alive on the ship. 

Thane caught his eye, and indicated the lockers and equipment crates around them. This was the central load space of the ship, the catch-all location for everything on the ship from catering supplies, right through sensitive scientific equipment. 

The beam from his flashlight stabbed through the darkness, washing over the boxes around them like silent sentinels. The skin between his shoulder blades itched but he shook his head. He’d been in many labs in his time… This kind of  jumbled debris was normal. 

“Main lab should be up ahead,” he murmured in a low voice. The sound boomed in the silence like a gunshot in a mausoleum. 

“I’ll take point.” Thane moved ahead of him without waiting for an answer.

Quinn didn’t argue. Thane was the hazard team guy, not him, if he wanted to put himself between Quinn and a phaser bolt or worse, who was he to argue? He kept his eyes and ears open as they moved, slotting himself in behind Thane. So far, he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. No blood or bodies… no mad scientists lab. Pity. He’d been looking forward to something juicy.

Thane stopped in the doorway to the main lab, pausing for longer than Quinn expected. Long enough for tension to march up his spine, especially when he noticed the tightness in the big commander’s shoulders. 

Why had he stopped?

Then he moved aside and Quinn looked at him in curiosity as he passed by. They moved into the central chamber of the lab. It was octagonal, with work spaces off it like the spokes of a wheel. 

“Thought I saw something,” Thane replied, even though Quinn hadn’t asked, his deep voice little more than a rumble. “It’s nothing though. Take a look around. All this is… yeah, I’m useless with all this stuff.”

“Explosives, right?”

Thane turned to him, his features heavy with a frown. “Excuse me?” 

“What you said before… about layman’s terms unless we were talking about things that went boom? I assumed from that you worked with explosives. I mean…” he motioned to Thane. “You move like you know how to use that, squire.”

“Yeah. I do.” 

Quinn nodded, holstering his phaser as he started to look over the workbenches. There were a couple that had files and padds, actual paper notebooks. 

“Looks like there were two people working in here,” he said, keeping up a running commentary as Thane started to check out the rooms off the main area. 

He ran his hands over the work-benches as he moved, grounding himself with the touch of the metal. It was cold, the heat leaching from the ship without the environmental controls running at full efficiency. They’d booted things up remotely, but only as much as they needed to check things out over here.

He frowned as he looked at the notes on one of the counters. The handwriting was looping and scrawled, but… his gaze caught on the i that was dotted with a small heart… stylised, with doodles in the corner of the paper. He smiled slightly at the daisies. The pink pen.

“There was a young woman here,” he called out, keeping Thane in the loop. “She was matching records of some kind… looks like DNA pairs.” 

Thane grunted in reply, moving between the rooms. Quinn watched him out of the corner of his eye. It was like a dance each time. Approach the door fast, make a complicated movement with the big gun, like he was drawing lines in the air as he darted from side to side in the door frame, then move on. 

He moved around the counters, his own gaze flitting to the chiller cabinet at the back of the room. Bingo. If he took a look at what chemicals they were using in here, he might have more of an idea what Henries had been working on. 

Stepping around the last counter he froze. 

There was a head on the floor, long decayed eye sockets staring right into his soul. The implant on the side of its face drew what flesh was left up into a grinning rictus. 

“Bollocks.”

The drone’s dispassionate gaze swept over the bridge, then settled on RJ. 

“I am Two of…” he paused, frowned, then shook his head. The lights in the implants on the side of his face flickered. “Doctor Two… no… Twelve. I am Two of twelve. Lower your shields and surrender your records… your biological and technological distinctiveness will be analysed.”

“Which is it… Doctor? Or two?” 

RJ held position, his expression unchanging. He’d seen Borg drones, both during Frontier day and the more traditional drones in the holodeck training programs he’d put himself through so that if he ever hit a situation like this, then he wouldn’t freeze immediately. 

“Two of Twelve,” the old drone replied in a clipped voice. “Whom do I have the pleasure of speaking to?”

RJ smiled. O… kay, either he’d slipped into a parallel reality where borg drones all sounded like they were on the verge of inviting him for high tea in the vicar’s parlor or… this guy wasn’t a drone. 

He looked like a drone. Implants, check. Mottled grey skin, not check. 

His skin was a little pale, but if RJ didn’t miss his guess, it was the papery, crepey skin of advanced old age rather than drone pale. 

“I’m Captain Reese-Riggs, of the USS Resolute,” he replied. “And the pleasure is all mine. May I ask,” he carried on, since there was no harm while they were all being pleasant. “Why you want us to surrender our records?”

Instead of just beaming aboard and trying to assimilate the whole crew, for example.

That little speech was different to the normal borg spiel as well. Usually it was all ‘assimilate, assimilate, assimilate’… not a request to see records. Someone moved in the background behind two. RJ blinked. For a moment there he could swear that looked like—

He shook his head. No, that couldn’t have been what he thought it was.

“We will analyse your records,” Two continued. “And ensure you and your crew are in compliance.”

“Compliance?” That did break RJ’s poker face for a second before he managed to get it under control, crossing his arms over his chest. His uniform was getting a bit too tight, he’d have to calm it down in the gym a little. Not like he was trying to compete with Mason in the muscle-bound stakes. “Compliance in what way?”

Two didn’t answer him, a look of irritation crossing over his face. “That is not relevant,” he snapped. “You have one hour to comply.”

The comm cut off abruptly, leaving him looking at a blank screen, then, a second later, a view of the system and and RJ rubbed his hand over his face tiredly. Yeah, that had definitely been a sink plunger in the background. He knew the borg scavenged a lot of parts, but using cleaning supplies was taking it a little too far.

“Okay,” he said to the bridge as a whole. “Did anyone else think that was as weird as fuck? I’m going to need the senior staff in the briefing room and someone get me Thane on that ship!”

“Bollocks?” Thane whipped his head around at the science officer’s soft exhalation. “What bollocks? No bollocks.” 

He was across the room in a few strides, looking down in the direction that Allen was. 

“Bollocks.”

“Yeah… that’s what I said. Keep up,” Allen replied, and crouched down in front of the head. It was long dead—or, if it wasn’t, it had belonged to a zombie borg—and lay on its side, trailing tentacles like some kind of freaky cybernetic jellyfish. 

“Careful,” he warned, covering it with the business end of the big rifle he carried. If it so much as twitched, it was gone. Literally. The caliber of this thing would obliterate it, and probably punch a hole in the deck plating as well. 

But it would be dead… Deader. Problem solved either way. 

Allen shook his head. “It’s inert. Nothing doing in there.”

He reached out and picked it up, holding it up in one hand. “Alas, poor Yorick!”

Thane blinked, looking between the crazy science officer and the borg head. “I’m sorry, did you…” 

“Know him?” Allen slid him a sideways look. “Nope.”

Thane gave him a deadpan look. 

“What?” Allen put the head down on the counter. “It’s a skull. You have to say that when you find a skull.”

Thane’s eyebrow winged up. “If you say so.” 

“Okay… this makes things make more sense.” Allen had already moved on, looking at the notes on the counter next to the head. “Looks like Henries was studying borg tech… specifically dead drones.”

He frowned, rubbing at his chin as he read. 

“Dead drones? How many? Are we sure they’re dead?” Thane asked, turning but not wanting to put his back to the head on the counter. There were still two rooms that he hadn’t swept yet. 

“Well, our friend here isn’t going anywhere,” Allen said, trying to log into the nearest console. “Computer core is still online, I’m downloading the logs. There are… no, that one’s not active.” He looked up at Thane. “Looks like they had two pieces of tech onboard. So we’re looking for one more.”

“Shit.”

Thane snapped his rifle up and turned, eyes on the doors to the two side rooms they hadn’t checked yet. His steps were silent as he crossed the floor, not so much as a squeak of boot rubber across the metal plate. For a moment he missed the fire and chaos of the war. 

At least back then the only people who had been trying to kill him where people who had chosen to do so. Not victims who had been plugged into the collective and had no choice. He missed the honest hatred of an enemy who wanted him dead rather than to plug him in as a spare cog in a massive machine. 

The first room was clear, nothing looking back at him apart from an empty counter… no, a dissection table… and some steel cabinets. He crouched down, checking under the table in case Yorick’s friend was hiding down there. 

He moved on, his jaw tightening as he stopped in the next doorway. There was a body on the table, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Not with that much of its insides neatly lined up on the counter beside it. 

“Allen,” he called over his shoulder. “What’s your anatomy like?”