He watched the way the light reflected off a bare patch of the cave's floor, and he nodded. "Metal," he said.

Jestem turned off the light, tucked it into his own belt, and said, "We're going down there. Secure some safety lines in the cliff face, and relay our coordinates to the Demial."

"Yes, sir," Sedath said. He nodded to Malfomn, who set himself to work hammering spikes into the stone cliff face and securing st.u.r.dy ropes to them. Sedath removed his pack and dug out the radio. He turned it on, set it to the ship's frequency, and pressed the transmit b.u.t.ton. "Landing party to Demial, acknowledge."

The watch officer's voice squawked and crackled over the barely reliable portable transceiver, "Demial here. Go ahead."

"Our coordinates are grid teskol seventeen, azimuth three-fifty-six-point-two, elevation one thousand three hundred nine."

"Noted," said the watch officer. "Any details for the log?"

"We've found an opening in a cliff wall," Sedath said, and then he paused as Jestem snapped around and glared at him, as if to say, Not another word-not yet. Composing himself, Sedath continued, "We're going underground to see where it leads, so we'll be out of touch for a bit."

"Got it. Watch your step down there."

"Count on it. Landing party out." He switched off the radio and tucked it back inside his pack. He walked back to the others and saw that Malfomn had finished securing two safety lines and was hurling their coils of slack down the ice shaft. Sedath sidled up to Jestem, who was still gazing down into the subterranean darkness. "Sir," Sedath said, "maybe I should go first, just this once."

"Nonsense," Jestem said, slipping back into his practiced persona of nonchalant bravery. "I was just getting my bearings, that's all. Let's get down there before we lose the light."

There was no time for Sedath to protest. Jestem locked his jacket's climbing loop around the safety line and started down the shaft, his boots slipping clumsily across the snow-dusted ice as he worked his way down the rope, using his hands as a brake. Half a minute later, the commander was at the bottom, shining his borrowed palmlight down the tunnel.

Sedath directed and supervised the descents, and he was the last person down. After a few strides away from the ice, his footsteps echoed against metal, much as they did aboard the Demial. He halted in midstep as Jestem, Karai, and Malfomn spun around and shushed him. As soon as he stopped, they turned away and seemed to be listening intently, so Sedath did the same.

Faint sounds reechoed in the darkness, so softly that they almost became lost in the melancholy moaning of the wind through the pa.s.sages. Then the sounds became closer and clearer: a soft sc.r.a.pe and several light footfalls.

"Lights," Jestem said, switching on his palmlight. Karai, Malfomn, and Marasa did the same. Empty-handed, all that Sedath could do was stand to one side and try to gaze past the crisscrossed beams to see what might emerge from the darkness.

Two shapes shuffled into the penumbra of the palmlights. At first, all Sedath could see were their dark outlines, but even from those, he was certain that he was looking at a man and a woman. They were emaciated and garbed in tattered, loose-hanging bits of fabric, which fluttered in the chilly breeze that never seemed to cease. The beams from the palmlights were reflected in the pair's eyes, which even from a distance had a disconcerting emptiness that sent a shiver of fear down Sedath's spine.

"Identify yourselves," Jestem called out.

Karai said with venomous anger, "We know who they are-corporate spies." Sneering at the disheveled figures limping and walking stiffly out of the darkness, he added, "Looks like they already got what they deserve, too."

Then the mysterious duo stepped fully into the harsh glare of the palmlights. They were definitely a male and a female, but Sedath was certain they weren't Kindir. For one thing, their hands each had only a single opposable thumb instead of the normal two. Even more shocking to him were their pallid, mottled-gray complexions. Kindir skin varied in pigmentation from golden brown to ebony, and no one in the history of the world had ever had eyes the color of the sky-but this woman did.

The landing party was still and silent, dumbfounded by the significance of this encounter: They were face-to-face with living, intelligent beings not of their world.

The alien woman spoke in a monotonal voice. Her words didn't sound like any of the dozens of major languages on Arehaz. She repeated herself as she and her companion advanced on the landing party.

Jestem muttered to Sedath, "Any idea what she said?"

"No clue," Sedath said.

The aliens stopped at arm's length from the landing party. The woman spoke again, repeating her monotonal declaration. Then she and the man each extended one hand to the landing party.

"I think it's some kind of greeting," Sedath said.

He stepped forward to take the man's hand, but Jestem grabbed his shoulder and stopped him. "Looks like she does the talking around here. Let me handle this." Jestem took half a step forward and offered his hand to the woman. "I am Salaz Jestem of the icebreaker Demial," he said. "On behalf of Kindir around the world, welcome to Arehaz."

The woman grasped the commander's extended hand. Slender metallic tubules broke through the skin between her knuckles and leaped like serpents into the fleshy part of Jestem's wrist. He convulsed and then became rigid. The light left his eyes.

Sedath and Malfomn sprang to Jestem's aid. The male alien's hand struck in a blur, locked around Sedath's throat, and lifted him off the ground. The female let go of Jestem and snared Malfomn's arm before he could land his punch.

The two men struggled in vain to free themselves. Despite the aliens' gaunt appearances, they were amazingly strong. Out of the corner of his eye, Sedath saw Dr. Marasa spring to catch Jestem, who had staggered away from the melee in a daze.

Marasa shook Jestem by his shoulders. "Commander? Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

Jestem looked up at Marasa-and then he lifted one hand to the doctor's throat and skewered it with two silver tubules from his own knuckles. Marasa twitched in Jestem's clutches, and next to Sedath, Malfomn was quaking and wearing a glazed look as the female alien withdrew her tubules from his wrist.

Then Sedath felt a bite on his own neck, like a pair of tiny fangs piercing his carotid. A dark, m.u.f.fling curtain of terror descended on his thoughts as the female spoke again. This time, hearing her inside his mind, he understood her perfectly.

You will be a.s.similated.

2381.

21.

Gredenko looked back from ops and said, "Starfleet Command is confirming all reports, Captain."

Dax smiled and heaved a deep, relieved sigh. Applause and cheering filled the Aventine's bridge, and even Bowers let down his guard for a moment to pump his fist and shout, "Yes!"

It really worked. Dax could barely believe it. a.s.saulting the Borg probe ship had been a terrible risk and the wildest of long shots, but they had done it-and played a decisive role in saving five allied worlds from annihilation.

As the applause tapered off, Dax joined Lieutenant Kandel at tactical and asked, "How long before Captain Hernandez can tap into the Borg vinculum again?"

The Deltan woman replied, "We don't know yet, Captain. The last report from Lieutenant Kedair said that Captain Hernandez had to be disconnected from the vinculum for her own good."

"Has the captain regained consciousness?"

"Yes, a few moments ago," Kandel said.

"Then I want her patched back into the vinc-" A thunderclap and a jarring impact knocked the bridge into a confused jumble of bodies falling and tumbling in the dark.

Bowers shouted, "Shields! Tactical, report!"

Several more blasts shook the Aventine in rapid succession. "Taking fire from the Borg ship," Kandel called back over the din of explosions.

"Return fire!" Dax said. "Target their weapons!"

"Firing," Kandel said. On the main viewer, blue streams of phaser energy skewered the Borg scout's hull, vaporizing its primary and secondary armaments. Dax hoped she wasn't inflicting more friendly-fire casualties on her boarding teams.

The lights flickered back to full strength as Bowers said, "Helm, evasive pattern sigma. Give tactical a clear shot at the other side of the Borg ship."

"Aye, sir," replied Lieutenant Tharp. The Bolian guided the ship through a series of rolling maneuvers that dodged the Borg's next barrage. Then a fresh wave of phaser and torpedo hits from the Aventine halted the Borg's attack.

"Cease-fire," Bowers ordered. "Gredenko, damage report."

The ops officer's hands moved lightly and quickly over her console as she compiled data flooding in from several decks and departments. "Weapons grid overload," she said. "Shields offline. Direct hit to the main deflector-minor damage, but we've lost the ability to generate a dampening field."

"I'll bet that was the Borg's intention," Dax said.

Gredenko added, "There's more, Captain. We've also lost our long-range comms. Complete system failure."

"Sam, start beaming our people back," Dax said. "I want them off that ship, on the double. Then I want it fragged."

"Aye, Captain," said Bowers, relaying the order to Kandel with an urgent nod.

A moment later, Kandel looked up from the tactical station and said, "Scattering fields are going up in the core of the Borg ship-and the boarding parties report they're under attack!"

Bowers snapped, "By whom?"

Kandel's reply confirmed Dax's fear: "By the ship, sir."

The walls were alive, and the floors couldn't be trusted. Hungry maws filled with shining cables writhing in viscous black fluids had started to appear in the middle of bulkheads and corridors, as if invisible knives were slashing wounds into the ship's metal flesh and revealing its biomechanoid innards.

Helkara looked around the transforming vinculum tower in shock. Over the deafening screeches of wrenching metal, he shouted, "What the h.e.l.l is going on?"

"The ship's adapting," Kedair said, looking around in terror at the collapsing catwalks and wildly undulating wires that whipped like angry serpents in the s.p.a.ce around the ship's hollow core. "That means it's about to start either killing us or a.s.similating us. Either way, I'd rather not stick around to find out." A booming groan from the ship seemed to answer her.

Leishman and a Mizarian paramedic named Ravosus strained to lift Erika Hernandez to her feet. "C'mon, Captain," Leishman said, grimacing under the effort of lifting the semiconscious woman. "We have to get you out of here."

As they carried her toward the exit, Hernandez's eyes snapped open, and her hand lashed out and snared Kedair's sleeve. "The Queen," she said. "She's here. On this ship."

Kedair tapped her combadge, intending to order the rest of the boarding teams to evacuate the Borg ship. Her metallic insignia returned a dysfunctional-sounding chirp that signaled an error. "Must be a scrambling field," she said, thinking out loud. She pried Hernandez's fingers off her arm, then pointed across the narrow causeway that had been extended to link the vinculum tower to the interior structure of the Borg vessel. "You three, get Hernandez to a beam-out point. Go!"

Helkara blocked the exit and protested, "What about you?"

"I have to set the detonator on the transphasic mine," she said. Then she added a lie: "I'll be right behind you. Go!" A hard slap on the Zakdorn's back impelled him into motion. Leishman and the medic hurried along behind him, supporting the dazed but now weakly ambulatory Hernandez between them.

One minute for them to cross the bridge, Kedair calculated, two minutes to the nearest enhanced transport site. Add a minute for insurance. She turned back and faced the dark heart at the center of the Borg vessel. The inside of the vinculum tower was now a horror show of biomechanical viscera spreading like a cancer, metastasizing into every open s.p.a.ce. To reach the transphasic mine and set its detonator, she would have to fight her way through that snaking ma.s.s of lethal, merciless pseudo-flesh and hold her ground for at least four minutes.

There was no point sending anyone else to do it; she was the only one likely to have a chance of success...and she decided that she'd gotten enough of her people killed for one day.

From a sheath on the back of one of her slain comrades, she drew a sword with a monomolecular edge. Alone and resolved, she gazed into the yawning cavity of steel teeth, slithering sinew, and oily black death. It taunted her with evil whispers, as if daring her to rush in where all others feared to tread.

She lifted her blade and charged.

Every turn seemed to lead to a dead end. Dark chords of panic rang out from all directions, echoing and vanishing into the shadowy recesses. The inside of the Borg probe was a maze of snaking conduits and sliding walls. Great slabs of machinery moved of their own volition behind the facades, traveling with deep rumbles and earsplitting screeches.

Erika Hernandez had recovered most of her strength and was sprinting behind Leishman and Helkara, with Ravosus close behind her. She wished they could run faster. In theory, Helkara was leading them out of the industrial-style labyrinth, back to one of many secured platforms where a quartet of transporter-pattern enhancers had been set up to facilitate a rapid evacuation of the ship. In practice, he was steering them down pa.s.sages to nowhere.

They rounded a corner, and Helkara slammed into a solid wall of layered metal plating and overlapping conduits. Leishman ran into him, and Ravosus collided with Hernandez and then awkwardly backed away, into the corridor from which they'd come.

Helkara stumbled backward and squinted in pained confusion at the barrier. "What the...?" Staring in dismay at his tricorder screen, he said, "There should be a pa.s.sage here."

"We were warned about this," Leishman said, pulling Helkara back the way they'd come, past Hernandez, around the corner. "The ship's reshaping itself, corralling us." As soon as she had turned the corner, she stopped, looked around, and asked with obvious alarm, "Where's Ravosus?"

Hernandez opened her catom senses to the energies that dwelled inside the Borg vessel's vast machinery, all of it guided by a sophisticated inorganic intelligence. She saw the patterns in its alterations of form, and she felt it focusing itself to strike. Behind all of it, she heard the voice of the Queen.

"He's gone," Hernandez said. "Follow me."

She led her two remaining comrades down a narrow pa.s.s between two bulkheads. It was barely wide enough for Leishman to pa.s.s; her shoulders sc.r.a.ped the sides, and Helkara had to shuffle-step at an angle to follow. Several meters away, at the end of the sliver-thin pa.s.sage, the sickly green glow of the ship's energy-transfer systems lit the way.

Leishman called out in alarm, "I'm snagged on something!"

Hernandez stopped and looked back. Black tendrils squirmed up through holes in the waffle-grid deck plates and snaked around Leishman's ankles and up her legs. Hurrying back to the trapped engineer, Hernandez saw Helkara reaching for his phaser. "Stop," she said, holding out one hand. "You could hit Mikaela!"

Helkara stared past her, and his jaw went slack as a shadow fell over him. "I think we have bigger problems," he said.

Her catom senses had already told her what was happening, but she needed to see it for herself.

She looked over her shoulder.

The path ahead went black. The pa.s.sage was closing on them.

Resistance is futile, hissed the Queen, invading the sanctum of Hernandez's thoughts.

We'll see about that, Hernandez projected in reply.

"Take my hand, Mikaela!" she shouted. "Gruhn-you, too!"

The two officers reached out for Hernandez's outstretched hands. She grasped their wrists.

The walls pressed inward and reached for the trio with eager tentacles. The deck fell away beneath them.

And another took its place.

She had found the royal frequency and made it her own.