The Long Way There

Now

The entire corridor of Borg drones snapped awake in their wall alcoves. Lieutenant Eric Taithian switched his phaser rifle from target to target. A mind that stretched across a galaxy looked down at him through the eyes of things that had once been people.

"Sir?" Ensign Thryiss was at his back.

"Fall back to the last junction," he said.

They ran. They turned their shoulders sideways as the Borg drones stepped down from their alcoves like the closing walls of a trap. Red sighting lasers hunted the corridor for the two Starfleet officers and whirring scanners probed their weapons.

Taithian and Thryiss reached the last junction, an intersection of the dark halls and passages they'd followed down from their beam-in point. They turned their weapons on the drones behind them.

"I give us six shots each before they adapt," Thryiss said. Her blue antennae were swivelled towards the enemy. Her voice was a hard knot, taut with controlled fear.

They saw the bulky shapes of drones in the corridor's shadows. They heard the heavy tread of their footsteps as the drones approached, steady and remorseless.

Taithian raised his rifle. "Let me fire first. Take over when they adapt."

"Yes sir." She didn't point out there were more than the dozen drones they could reliably kill. She didn't have to.

The first drone lumbered into the light. Its targeting laser locked onto Taithian. He brought his rifle up and placed his finger against the firing button.

And then he gasped.

"Sir?" Thryiss brought her own weapon to bear.

"No!" He grabbed the barrel of her rifle and pulled it down. "Don't shoot. It's him."

He looked back at the first of the approaching drones. It's skin was grey and striated with nanite infection and it's body was wormed through with black cybernetics. The drone raised its right arm and aimed a sparking emitter at Taithian.

"It's my brother."


At the End of History

Still yawning and with coffee in hand, Eric decided to risk all and check on his brother.

Simon's room in the tiny flat they shared exuded the smell of empty pizza boxes and unwashed college student. It was dark because Simon would open his curtains for nothing short of the end of the world. The only sounds that came from it were the soft whir of computer cooling fans and the occasional tap of a key.

Eric leaned in through the doorway, since the floor was covered in dirty clothes that concealed snaking electrical cables. He saw Simon hunched over his personal computer, a Pentium on which he'd spent the money he really should have used to buy a car. It was the same position he'd been in when Eric looked in on him the night before.

"Have you even slept?"

Simon grunted.

"While I normally have a policy of non-interference when it comes to what you do in here, I think the situation calls for drastic measures." He crossed the room, planting his feet carefully on drifts of dirty clothes. He grabbed the curtain with his free hand and yanked it open.

Wan London sunlight struggled through the window.

"Ah God!" Simon whipped his head to the side, away from the window. "Make it stop."

"It's the Sun. It isn't going to stop for the next few billion years, even in England. Get used to it."

Simon regarded Eric with red-rimmed eyes. "Don't you have to study for your professional schmoozing course?"

"I prefer the term engaging with the truth adventurously." He ventured a little closer and peered at the monitor on Simon's desk. "What are you doing that you denied your body a whole night of sleep?"

"Oh, I found this data store for an American company called Chronowerx that went belly-up last year." Simon's attention drifted back to the monitor and took on a distant glaze. "Fearsome security, but someone left the door open, virtually speaking. It's still taken three days to crack, mind you, but last night I broke it."

"Never heard of it," Eric said, though in fact it rang a bell. "What's so interesting about them?"

"They were an advanced technology company. Real cutting edge stuff. This looks like a backup site for some of their future designs." He cut an arched look at Eric. "It's too advanced for your business brain, so don't bother trying to figure it out."

"Tricobalt device." Eric sipped his still-steaming coffee. "A weapon of some kind, self-propelling by the looks of it. I mean, made up, obviously. There's no such thing as tricobalt. Someone's playing a trick on you."

Simon scowled. "This is a real Chronowerx data storage site. It's stuff they were really planning to build."

Eric picked his way back towards the door. Somewhere beneath the layers of grimy cloth there was a cable that ran to the phone socket in the living room, providing Simon with the 28.8 Kbps dial-up connection he put to such absurd uses as this one. "I need to make some calls later. I want the phone line for an hour."

Simon hunched back over his keyboard. "Fine."

"And shower, please. You smell like you're sweating pizza."

"Whatever."

Eric paused in the doorway and smiled fondly at his brother. "Invent something clever, would you? I'll sell it and we'll be ludicrously rich." He gestured with his coffee. "You. Me. A bright and shiny future. It can be ours."

Simon looked over his shoulder and grinned. "Race you there."


The Night of the Living Dead

Eric pulled his keys from his pocket as he came to the front door of his flat. His second date with Vicky had gone well. She was smart enough that he had to race to keep up with her, a quality he had not encountered in a girl before and a challenge he had gladly accepted. When she laughed at his jokes she did so with a lack of self-consciousness he enjoyed. He was starting to think he could get used to hearing that laugh.

He knew something was wrong as soon as he was through the front door.

Too many footsteps. Too heavy. A low sound, animal pain. Simon.

There was an umbrella stand next to the door. He yanked free a long umbrella that had once belonged to his grandfather and could withstand hail stones the size of golf balls. He ran down the hallway to Simon's room.

Simon was sprawled across his computer. He was trying to scream, but all that came out of his mouth were little choking sounds. One hand clutched at the side of his neck and Eric could swear Simon's skin there was turning grey, like a spreading infection.

Two men, or what he first thought were men, took up almost all the space in Simon's room. They were bulky shapes, black and grey, an assemblage of features he couldn't quite bring into focus. One was holding his arm near Simon's computer, which was flashing and humming in a way it never had before.

The other turned to face Eric.

His face was all wrong. There was the grey skin and the single dead eye, but more than that there were the ridges of bone that made curling shapes around his facial features.

Eric roared and stabbed him in the face with the umbrella.

The man-like thing twitched backwards and nothing more. A hand snapped out and caught Eric's wrist. He shrieked through clenched teeth as the bone snapped. Eric fell to his knees and would have fallen completely if the man-like thing wasn't still holding him.

Where the creature's right eye should have been there were several delicate rods of different lengths, protruding as if shoved into its eye socket. Eric, trying to breathe through the shock of pain from his wrist, watched in horror as the rods rotated, spinning back and forth in little increments.

The man-like thing flicked him away. The back of Eric's skull cracked against the wall and he tumbled to the floor in the hallway.

With stars dancing before his eyes he saw Simon stand. He was unsteady, but he stood. Even from a distance, even through the concussion trying to drown him, Eric saw the spark of life that was Simon fading from his eyes.

There was a sound he'd never heard before and lights like a Christmas tree. Simon and the two men vanished.

The last thing Eric heard before he passed out was the sound of the front door crashing open.


I Did But See Her Passing By...

Eric regained consciousness to a trilling sound he didn't recognise.

"He's awake. This will help the pain."

What pain? he tried to ask, but his mouth was mush. Then the pain from his broken wrist arrived like a cold jab of steel.

He felt pressure against his neck and heard a hiss. A wave of numbness went through him and the pain in his wrist settled to a dull throb.

He tried to sit up. He was in the hallway of his flat, outside Simon's room. The man at his side had weird blotches on the sides of his face. They were the wrong colour to be tattoos.

"I've treated your concussion and bound your wrist." The man tucked an object like a bit TV remote into his belt. "You may experience some residual dizziness, so take it easy."

"What's your name?"

The question came from a woman standing above him. He stared up at her and all thought fell out of his head, because she was the most fascinating woman he had ever seen.

He couldn't decipher her ethnicity. Her skin, her cheekbones, the tilt of her eyes - they didn't fit together according to the rules he knew. She had a piece of plastic taped across the top of her nose, as though she'd had plastic surgery.

She crouched down beside him. The man at Eric's side shifted out of the way. "What's your name?" Her faint accent only made her more exotic.

Guiltily, he thought of Vicky. "Eric. Who are you? What are you doing here?"

"My name is Nika. What happened here?"

Her voice was a command. Eric had spent time practicing at conducting himself in a confident manner, because success in the life he planned for himself depended on it. But Nika spoke with an authority he had only dreamed of possessing.

"There were these men. I don't know who they were. They were wearing these weird metal parts or something. And there was something wrong with them, with their skin." He remembered his last glimpse of Simon and fumbled at Nika with his splinted hand. "They took my brother. You have to help me. They were doing something to him. He -"

"Take it easy." Again, that firm tone that stopped him in his tracks. Who is she? "Why did they take your brother?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know. They did something to his computer as well. He -" A cold wash of dread went through him. "Simon, he was a hacker. Could that be it?"

Nika jerked he chin towards Simon's room. "Setol, check the computer." There was a man standing behind Nika with a cap pulled down so low it covered the tops of his ears. He nodded and went into Simon's room. Eric heard the same electronic trilling sound he'd woken to.

"Anything?" Nika asked. Eric noticed her earring for the first time. It was an elaborate thing of metal circles and thin chains.

"The computer has been wiped, Captain," the man named Setol said. He had the most matter-of-fact way of speaking that Eric had ever heard. "I am also detecting residual traces of a Borg transporter."

"Then they have the data. We're done here." Nika stood.

"Wait, wait." Eric struggled up to his feet. "My brother -"

Nika clasped his upper arm. "We'll get him back if we can."

"Take me with you." He could only grab her with one hand, but he hung on as hard as he could. "Please, he's my little brother. You have to -"

Someone behind him - Setol, he would realise later - pinched him where his neck and shoulder met.

The world went away again.


The Man in Black

"Do you want to find your brother?" the man in black said.

Eric looked up from his coffee. The man in black was sitting uninvited across the cafe table from him. He was in his late forties and looked like he had never once smiled in his life.

Eric moved his mouth before he spoke. The right side of his face still ached from the fight he'd gotten into at the pub last night. "Do I know you?"

"No one knows me, Mr Taithian."

He tried again. "Are you police?"

The man in black folded his hands on the table. He had to move Eric's half-empty breakfast plate aside to do it. "I represent no organisation of which you have ever heard."

Eric slumped back in his chair. "What do you know about my brother?"

"That you reported him as abducted two months ago. That you have had no luck with the authorities of this place and that your own efforts have been fruitless." He made a minimal gesture towards the swollen side of Eric's face. "Giving up hope?"

Eric's eyes narrowed. "No."

"No, I would expect not." The man in black peered at Eric with cold blue eyes. "They're called the Borg, the ones who abducted your brother. The woman you met that night is Captain Senoni Nika of the Federation Starship Mnemosyne."

Eric held his baleful glare on the man in black. He became aware the man in black did not appear to ever blink. "So you're from outer space." The hangover added an extra layer to his scorn.

"I'm from the future, Mr Taithian. As are they."

"And what would" - he remembered those strange, grey-skinned things that hardly looked alive - "beings from the future want with my brother?"

"The Chronowerx data," the man in black said.

Eric sat up straighter. "It was that? It was that all along? I knew it. No one would listen to me. They said there would be traces of the hack and there were none."

"Captain Senoni destroyed the Chronowerx data before the Borg could reach it, but she missed the hack. Unfortunately, the Borg did not. She cleaned up the traces that led to your brother, but not until after they had him.

"The Borg assimilated your brother to acquire the Chronowerx data, Mr Taithian. There was a copy on his computer as well, of course, but it was easier for them to just take it from his mind. They have more experience with human brains than late Twentieth Century computers."

"But what is it?" Eric leaned across the table. "What is this damned information they want? What could it matter to people from the future?"

"The data is Federation technical design schematics from what you would call the 29th Century. The Borg who took your brother are from the 25th Century. They expect it will give them an advantage over the Federation. Which, regrettably, it will, if they are allowed to return it to the Collective."

Eric shook his head. "Look, I don't care about all that stuff, whatever it is. Just tell me how we get my brother back."

"You come back to the future with me. We'll drop you in early, say seven or eight years. Enrol you in Starfleet - I've seen your academic results and I believe you have what it takes. Once you've graduated and risen to command your own starship we'll -"

"Wait a minute. Wait. I want to rescue my brother and get us back to our lives. You're talking about years."

The man in black steepled his fingers. "Mr Taithian, your brother is never coming back to the 20th Century. That simply isn't an option. It's up to you whether he lives out the rest of his existence in the hell the Borg have dragged him into, or gets out and stands a chance of recovering at least some of who he was."

Eric stared at him, his brow clenched in anger. He felt a powerful urge to take a swing at that frozen face. "Why didn't that woman - Nika - why didn't she take me back?"

"There are very specific rules against such things."

"But you'd be breaking them if I do what you say."

"My ... section of the Federation operates differently." He spread his hands. "You want your brother back. That was evident from your profile and it's evident now, sitting across from you. Consider this: is there any answer I might give to any question you might ask that will change that one undeniable fact?"

Eric's jaw clenched. "You bastard."

The man in black scraped back his chair and stood. "Come along then, Mr Taithian. And look on the upside. The future is a bright and shiny place."

by TaithZero on 2012-07-26 12:52:30