Mix one part Paramount to one part Star Trek. Add a generous spoonful of Star Traks a la Decker. Sprinkle in a dash of Meneks' BorgSpace spice. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. Enjoy.
-Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself
("King Henry VIII" by William Shakespeare)
*****
A Dish Served Cold, Part I
In the dimness of a little used corridor of Cube #347, six dark shapes plus one materialized. Six distinctly reptilian heads twisted in six different directions as twelve eyes surveyed the surroundings for the tell-tale signs of detection. Twelve arms shifted six weapons to readiness; twenty-four legs positioned their respective bodies into one of alert defense, the central being standing passive at the center of the living fence.
Satisfied no notice had been taken of the invasion, two more creatures beamed into the circle, one to either side of the lone sentinel. They were smaller than the other seven, and festooned with all manner of tools and bulges attached to a complicated vest and belt combination. The extreme load elicited a passing resemblance to a dray beast, but only passing: animals of burden rarely have the glint of intelligence in their eyes. Like the sentry ring, the two newcomers also toted large weapons.
Luplup had arrived with a cunning plan in mind. But first, pull back from the scene to examine the new generation of vyst self, one adapted through use of genetic manipulation. Of the four types of Luplup self - soldier, worker, barker, brooder - three were represented in the dark hallway.
At the potential height extreme of Luplup's genotype, the ring of six soldiers stood with snouts above the waist of the typical humanoid, or half a vyst head taller than the original Luplup self. While all nine creatures now had true hands on their upper pair of arms, the fingers and thumb of the soldiers were blunt and unsuitable for delicate work. Hard muscles rolling under gray scaled skin more than made up for the lack. All six soldiers had targeting lasers (currently deactivated) soldered to the side of their skull, and rough scars over the cranium hinted at surgery deeper in the head. If one could peel back layers of bone and gristle, one would be able to see modifications done to eyes which allowed the ancestrally diurnal vyst to now peer down the blackest of corridors; two soldiers had crude versions of what one might recognize as Borg optical implants extending their visual acuity. Claws had been replaced by metal replicas on all except one self, who's talons were simply laminated in tritanium. Of the weapons held, three were stocky shotguns, one a long barreled sniper rifle, and two taser-crossbows able to be rearmed using hollow bolts packed with explosive.
At the opposite genotype extreme from the soldiers were the device festooned workers. The workers were a vyst head shorter than their heavily muscled counterparts, with the resultant lighter skeleton and lithe figure. Fingers and thumb of the upper hands were long. Like the soldiers, both workers had deactivated targeting lasers cemented to their skulls and scars which told of cranial modifications; shotguns were cradled in the larger lower arms. A four holed vest held a wide assortment of pockets, all bulging with equipment, pieces of wire, and other useful miscellaneous things; a belt at the waist carried less high tech tools such as needlenose pliers, miniature hammer, and plasma cutter. Suddenly, as one, the workers reached around with lower limbs to holster the guns while upper arms deftly flipped open a conveniently located sternum pouch to extract a PADD-like object. Fingers stabbed at buttons, activating a display solely consisting of shapes and colors - no words were in evidence.
At the center of the formation, the barker stood as tall as the soldiers but streamlined like the busy workers. The cranium bulged obscenely, nearly deformed in appearance, yet held the same amount of brain matter as any other vyst unit. A problem Luplup had discovered early was the limited range of the nanoprobe built neural transceivers, on the order of tens of kilometers. Special technologies, equivalent to Borg hardware transceivers if less efficient, allowed Luplup to extend her touch with herself to twelve AU, if one routed self's stream of consciousness through a booster, i.e. a barker. While such an effort was sufficient for solar system communication, transtellar distances unfortunately remained beyond her ability, necessitating budding off parts of Self into smaller selves when she had to travel beyond barker range. The barker's enlarged skull, and to a lesser extent her torso, was packed with the required arrays to keep the nine unit scouting party in touch with a self otherwise removed to a safe distance from the prey. Luplup had to guard the party's barker self at all costs, else lose touch with budded self; it was a necessary vulnerability given the task. The barker clutched an undersized sub-machine gun.
Luplup eyed the PADD screens as she slowly turned her worker selves in a circle, waving the devices in large arcs as they scanned for a particular signal-scent. She caught herself rumbling subliminal growls as soldiers detected the smell of Bad-Mans; a conscious effort was made to subdue her want to rend, to bite, to tear, to destroy. Now was not the time to fight, but to use cunning. Luplup asserted herSelf...yes, slyness was called for, not savagery.
Not yet, anyway.
One PADD a unit was holding gave a quiet beep, alarmingly loud in the quiet corridors Luplup had beamed her scouting group into. Soldiers tensed talons upon modified trigger grips, barker rising to tiptoe to peer down a hallway made bright by light-enhancement optics. The worker with the offending device growled quietly at it, stabbing a button to mute the sound as she took in the colorful output. The direction to go was clear.
Luplup flowed like a low gray shadow down the dim passageway, looking for access to the interstitial spaces. She would need to traverse more populated regions to reach her goal.
The hunt was on.
*****
To an exterior observer, Cube #347 was gyrating through the full six degrees of freedom, stationary in a relative sense to the rest of the universe as long as one discounted the tumbling. The occasional odd violet burst of ionic thruster was not appreciably righting the chaotic situation. The display was similar to that of a passenger in a gyroscope trainer, the type which is designed to separate potential fighter jocks from the stomach-challenged masses.
Inside the cube, unless one had access to the dataspaces or a nonexistent window, one would not be able to tell the ship was in the middle of a minor Event. Gravity continued to function perfectly well; and while the vessel was twisting like an insane rotisserie chicken, it was not engaged in the sudden starts and stops which strained inertial dampers. Captain, however, did have access to the dataspaces.
The first indications of a problem had surfaced several hours ago while the cube was speeding down a transwarp conduit. Without access to decent maintenance facilities over the course of nearly two years of being on the punishing end of omnipotent beings, angry mobs, Xenig mechs, and spatial anomalies, it was only a matter of time before something broke. Diagnostics had indicated the simultaneous decay of the magnetic bottles holding ready reserves of ionic fuel for thrusters at 43 points around the hull. Disregarding the insanely low probability of such an occurrence happening (the merely improbable tended to become most certain in regards to Cube #347), Captain had immediately returned the cube to normal space. Tumbling down a transwarp conduit was not a recommended course of action, not if the vessel and sub-collective desired to emerge back to the Einsteinian universe in chunks larger than a hand.
The normal strain of leaving the conduit had been the last straw for the thruster units. One after another, small eruptions of ionized xenon had burst their containment near cube edges, expending all thruster reserves to the ether. In response, Cube #347 had slowly begun to rotate, each new burst either adding to the momentum or twisting the vessel a new direction.
Halting the cube's tumbling was more difficult than it might appear. A partition of command and control had easily modeled the ship's rotations once the last stressed thruster had vented its contents to vacuum. Unfortunately, those units which had self-destructed were the very ones which would be most efficient at ending the situation; and overuse of the 149 remaining thrusters would endanger their integrity. In the end, Cube #347 was reduced to occasional firing of an intact assemblage while engineering hierarchy prepared replacement equipment to simultaneously fix and recharge as many magnetic bottles as possible.
{Drone maintenance hierarchy report to command and control: six additional sensory hierarchy drones [inclusive following designation list] have logged selves on dossier [reasons highlighted and linked to designations] in last half hour,} directed Doctor towards the target hierarchy. Captain was not the specific recipient, merely one of seven hundred. {Total count now at thirty-two. If the sick puppies had functional stomachs, the tiers would be awash in vomit.} Doctor's presence retreated as the summary was acknowledged.
The hierarchy currently suffering the worst throughout the situation was that of sensory. Whereas the majority of the sub-collective observed the outside through derived data unless otherwise motivated, sensory hierarchy had to deal with the raw feeds. Normally Cube #347 was at the center of a nice spherical volume of space as experienced from a steady point of view, no matter how much Sensors twisted the grid. Right now the stars and other observable data was flashing by in a mathematically complicated path which even Sensors had difficulty grasping.
Captain checked the derived sensor data, a routine hardwired snippet of programming necessary before engineering hierarchy would beam to the hull (upon which eyes would be firmly riveted by those who had drawn the figurative short straw). Vulnerable to attack in its current situation, the sub-collective had to check for potential enemies and complicating natural phenomenon. With Cube #347's luck, there was probably a cloaked ship a few hundred thousand meters distant, but unable to be seen due to the circumstances and/or unusual technologies.
Within the dataspaces, Cube #347 sat at the center of a volume with a fifty light year radius. As one approached the edge of the long distance sensor envelope data became increasingly fuzzy; beyond the nebulous border, stars and their spectra were easily observable, but anything else, unless it was shouting for attention, was difficult to resolve. Within the envelope, objects stood out in sharp relief, attached thumbnail description and any vector data tagged to lead to a datapath containing full details.
The immediate neighborhood around the cube appeared to be quiet. No swarm of enemy fleets were descending with phasers a'blazing, much to Weapons' disappointment. The most significant spatial anomaly - twenty-seven light years distant - barely deserved the term "anomaly": a slight wearing in space-time which was most likely of natural origin. Even the local star systems were boring. All were ancient red and white dwarfs dating back to the formation of the galaxy, except for a lone blue giant at the edge of a tattered nebula; the latter would make a spectacular supernova in five thousand years, give or take a century or so. No structures of interest, no signs of sapient life in the vicinity.
Several minor blips had been logged by the sensor hierarchy, but the origin of the tacyon and strange quark bursts was inconclusive. The data had a very high probability to be fictitious sensor ghosts, the grid negatively affected by residue xenon ions from compromised thrusters. The currently less than efficient sensor hierarchy was also a possible component in the blame game. In any case, the combination of particles, real or otherwise, was deemed irrelevant and unlikely to influence Cube #347's integrity or disrupt work on the hull.
Interjected Weapons into the cogs of consensus web-building, {Taciyons and strange quarks are hallmarks of certain cloaking devices. Depending on proportion of particles and decay times, the following species could be lurking near...}
Sighed Captain, {Weapons...the species you catalogue are either assimilated, extinct, or on the other side of the galaxy.}
{But what about new enemies? Someone could be getting ready to...}
{No. There are no life supporting star systems within our sensor envelope, much less hypothetical sentients. Weapon hierarchy concerns are irrelevant for the sake of this consensus.}
Weapons grumbled and withdrew. He promptly began outlining a BorgCraft simulation with parameters including a fleet of cloaked ships.
Consensus drew to a close.
{Engineering hierarchy,} announced Captain, {will start hull activities soonest. Sensor envelope is clear of hostiles. We require repairs to this ship such that we can continue towards BorgSpace. We also need to end the rotation before the entire sensory hierarchy collapses. Comply.}
{We will comply,} returned the thousand strong engineering hierarchy.
*****
Four brooders, one from each clade, lounged on the bridge. Only the soldier-brooder currently curled around eggs, although both worker-brooder and first-brooder were heavy with growing clutches. Barker-brooders were not as fecund as the other clades, the time between eggs nearly twice the normal length. Workers and soldiers moved purposefully around the area.
Luplup's attention was split multiple ways. A small part of her crept along the corridors of the prey, ever closing on the target. Most of her, however, was several million kilometers distant observing the cube via ship senses, watching for signs she had been discovered. Passive sensors trained on the rapidly twisting hull caught glimpses of tiny Bad-Mans among antennas and protuberances; slowly the vessel was halting its dizzy tumble.
Luplup had been trailing the cube for over a week, forced to track transwarp spoor from a distance in order to avoid detection. The effort had been made more difficult due to the fact her ship, Slash, was unable to enter transwarp. Instead she had to read the traces of Cube #347's passage, then extrapolate direction and speed of travel. Slash was faster than the prey, but Luplup was hampered by the need for the cube to exit the conduit of its own accord.
Slash, formerly Star Dancer, had once been part of a wandering convoy belonging to Not Born Of Self. While the Borg would recognize Not Born Of Self as species #56, Bumixian, Luplup was not at ease with the concept of numerical designations: she was more comfortable working with pictures and descriptions. The Not Born Of Self had fallen to a cunning trap set by Luplup, their technology stolen, their knowledge absorbed, and those few tractable individuals added to Self.
Star Dancer was a type of ship called a "cutter" - fast, maneuverable, and lightly armed. It was built to harass an enemy and prove a screening guard for larger conspecifics. As with all Bumixian ships, it had a very advanced form of propulsion called folding space drive, as well as a clocking device; the records were unclear weather the drive was a product of research or barter with another species such as Xenig mechs, but Luplup did not care. The only thing Luplup cared about was that absorbed knowledge allowed her to use the captured technologies, disregarding the fundamental /how/ or /why/ a device worked.
The lack of abstract curiosity had never bothered Luplup. She had been thrust into self-awareness by assimilation and retained many of the pre-sentient yoole-vyst mental characteristics. Luplup was somewhat aware of the deficiency from Not Born Of Self records and the few Not Selves which were a part of her, but only as a person is aware of a shadow at the edge of peripheral sight. Thus she tried to fill the hole with knowledge, with data, with power.
Like the Borg, Luplup brought assimilated knowledge unto herSelf as a means of growth. Unlike the Borg, Luplup was unable to adequately discern the relevant from the irrelevant. Among the files Luplup had absorbed from Not Born Of Self was the notion of naming vessels. Where the Borg would have tossed the data, the vyst contemplated the notion, eventually adding it to her psyche, along with genetic manipulation and advanced quantum mechanics. "Star Dancer" did not mean anything to Luplup; "Slash," on the other hand, was a valid and visceral visual concept.
For all its advanced technologies, Slash did not have powerful offensive weapons. None of the Not Born Of Self ships did, at least not of a level to tackle Borg ships, even the smallest; the Bumixian convoy had built their ships to run from danger, not face it head on. Luplup knew this bitter reality through experience. Oh, yes, she knew it well.
Shortly after the capture of the Not Born Of Self ships, an enthusiastic Luplup had budded off a part of Self. The self was and sent to destroy a known danger to Self, a known murderer not only of Self but of the increasingly mythical Owner: Cube #347, and Captain. Luplup had, at the time, been focused upon revenge and the need to keep her nest safe. Time had passed, then Luplup had received a most discordant message from the budded self telling not only of failure, but that Captain was part of a much larger entity called the Collective. And that the Collective was embarking on a quest to rid the universe of Self.
Luplup, in the midst of experimenting Self-improvement through genetic reorganization of her own clutches, had diverted her pitiful industrial base to one of war. Confident of the Not Born Of Self vessels, she did little, merely setting an ambush. By this time, the initial barker clade, or at least the technologies which eventually would become an integral part of the barker, allowed Self to be spread throughout the star system. A portion of Self had been placed on the planet and in orbit to act as bait, the majority of ships hidden within the highly radiogenic outer atmosphere of a gas giant. When the Borg swept in, Luplup realized her mistake.
The twenty Battle-class cubes had powered through the Not Born Of Self vessels over the habitable planet, never stopping to sift debris for technologies. The terrestrial, already stressed from a nearly forgotten thermonuclear war which had wiped out the dominant sapient species, disappeared under a punishing bombardment of antimatter projectiles. Almost as an afterthought, the now solitary moon underwent a similar fate.
Enraged, Luplup had sent the most powerful of her small fleet forward to engage the Borg cubes. One by one they disintegrated into cosmic dust, managing in the process to rend only a single opponent. Fight no longer an option and enemy closing in on her position, Luplup had sacrificed a part of her now much smaller Self as a diversion. Under the cover of a momentous "accident" made to simulate the fleet diving into the unforgiving depths of the gas giant, Luplup had folded away.
In the empty space between stars, a needle lost in the cosmic haystack, Luplup pondered her options. The genetic manipulation was a must, biological and technological process necessary to improve Self. It was now obvious the Borg as a whole had to be dealt with, else they be successful the next time they attacked. They would attack...it was an action Luplup would do, after all, were she in the Borg's place. She had to protect herSelf, her clutch, her little selves.
Over time, over a period of rebuilding of Self and licking of wounds, Luplup built her plan. Through it all, however, she remained fixated on one thing - Captain. Perhaps it was simple neurosis, perhaps it was her unconscious linking of Captain to the commanding voice and towering presence of lost Owner, whatever the reason, Luplup modeled all her revenge around the consensus monitor and facilitator of one Cube #347.
The scheme finalized, Luplup had folded to the Delta Quadrant to hunt for Cube #347. Once the transwarp spoor had been found and tracked, a smaller self was budded from Self to lance, to slash, at the target. The future was about to become much brighter, much more conducive to little selves, to the Whole.
The bridge soldier-brooder shifted slightly as a worker bearing a hypospray approached. The end was placed against each of the five eggs in turn, button depressed with a hissing note. The hiss was echoed by the brooder and the other soldiers on the ship. Luplup instinctively disliked the handling of her eggs, even though it was necessary, even though it was done by herself. To distract herself, she turned her attention outward.
The prey had their spin under control and were beginning to dampen the gyrations. The accident which brought the cube out of transwarp had been a serendipitous event. While Luplup could follow the transwarp conduit, she could not enter the medium and thus could not beam herselves to the other ship. Only in normal space could the transfer occur, and until the mishap it had appeared the Bad-Mans ship would remain inaccessible for a long while. Now the problem was to acquire the ultimate target and escape before transwarp was reinitiated.
Luplup focused upon her attack units.
Luplup stuck the heads of two of herself, both soldiers, into the corridor. This area was much more crowded with Bad-Mans than the place she had beamed in. One Bad-Man worked fifteen body lengths down the hallway, fiddling with a device embedded in the opposite bulkhead. Bright green and red lights flashed mesmerizing patterns as the worker Bad-Man inspected the naked wires. Other Bad-Mans were on the move, occasionally passing the open access hatch without giving it a second, or even first, glance.
Growling to herself in frustration, Luplup peered at her handheld computers again. Her objective was annoyingly close, just beyond the large juncture she could see on the other side of the working Bad-Man. However, the interstitial space ahead was not passable, at least not by the bulky soldier and barker units. The workers might eel closer, assuming the space did not constrict more than it already was. Such an option, unfortunately, was not open because the workers would not have the strength to subdue to target should it struggle...or if reinforcements came before all could escape. Luplup had grown beyond worrying over every minute loss of herSelf, but in this case She would only have one chance, one opportunity.
Sucking a breath of anticipation, Luplup sent a soldier beyond the protective confines of the wall. She cowered as low as possible as a Bad-Man walked by on an unknown errand. It afforded her the same interest as the unnoticed access panel. Emboldened, Luplup extracted three more soldiers, followed by a worker.
The worker Bad-Man suddenly looked up from its task, focusing down the hallway in Luplup's direction. She froze, peering at the tall drone. Her soldier selves nervously shifted their weapons, pointing them at the approaching Bad-Man. The Bad-Man's attention was not directed at the attack party, but rather on the open hatch. Luplup shuffled those of herself still in the interstitial space backwards as the drone bent over. Tails bumped into muzzles, poked eyes, as Luplup backpedaled deeper. Darkness descended upon the units in the wall as the panel was replaced and latched, drone returning to its duty.
Luplup relaxed slightly. She popped open the metal plate again, swiftly extracting the rest of herself and flattening the units against the corner formed by wall and floor. Luplup was arrayed in a line, a poor defensive formation. She wanted to arrange her attack group into a loose oval, but dared not else the Bad-Mans accidentally trip over a unit.
The Bad-Man working in the corridor abruptly halted its job once more, head swiveling towards the again open hatch. Its unaltered eye registered not dull boredom and mindlessness Luplup normally associated with enemy units, but instead squinted with barely repressed annoyance. Luplup squatted low, forearms partially supporting her weights. The Bad-Man moved to close the entrance to the interstitial spaces; its footfalls were heavier than the prior time and it muttered something nearly inaudible under its breath. The leading soldier unit managed to catch part of the self conversation:
"... mn access point not well made. Yell at me, will Delta? I refit it properly. I swear, stupid cube falling down around our ears one..."
Luplup crept behind the back of the Bad-Man. A temporary lull in traffic meant it was the only one currently visible. One by one Luplup slipped herself into her immediate goal.
Four pairs of eyes lifted to inspect the area while the rest of herself either watched for danger or consulted the PADD. The room, "nodal intersection" Luplup recalled from data initially absorbed from Cube #347, was the enlarged loci for three hallways and two catwalks. A large screen hung from the wall opposite her bunched position. It was currently showing many pairs of eyes opening and closing to the accompaniment of a light cricket noise. Luplup suppressed the growl rumbling in her throats as she turned away from the disturbing sight of multiple predators blinking at her. Scorches and dents adorned the walls at random intervals; an especially large black mark was to the left side of the screen. Also in the nodal intersection was a single Bad-Man.
Luplup carefully stared at her PADDs. The words and symbols which now scrolled at the bottom of the miniature display were meaningless to her, written language just beyond her grasp of the relevant. Why bother writing for future generations when those born were already of Self? The pictures, on the other hand, were meaningful. The computer was indicating the drone was not the target, although its emanated signature was similar to that of the prey. No...the goal was down the alcove tier to the right.
Selves scampered along the catwalk, Luplup very bold by the lack of attention she had thus far received. Empty alcove, empty alcove, full alcove, empty alcove, three full alcoves...more alcoves in various states of use...and then...
Luplup paused, soldiers forming an arc in front of an occupied alcove; eyes gazed up and up to focus on the humanoid's head. Workers and barker were on the outside, heads swiveling rapidly to watch for oncoming Bad-Mans, of which there currently were none. If Luplup could have cracked her jaws into a triumphant smile, she would have. As it was, she allowed herself on Slash to raise her voice in the echoing bark of sighted prey.
The Bad-Man before Luplup, the goal she had risked herself to find, to capture, was registering on the PADD as Borg interplexing beacon 4 of 8 (and irrelevant secondary string of base sixteen numerals). Luplup less formally knew the drone as Captain, as her nemesis, as the anti-Owner.
*****
{Drone maintenance hierarchy report to command and control,} began Doctor, {accounts no new boo-boos over the last half hour, at least none from sensory hierarchy. Engineering is another matter. In synopsis...}
Captain only listened to the recitation with a small portion of his attention; other partitions of command and control were engaged in the routine of filing. The shifting of minor damage to engineering teams who had been on the hull was another welcome indicator that the situation was coming under control.
The thruster repair had been (mostly) successful. The few instances which continued to defy installation of temporary magnetic bottles and xenon reactor mass were not worrisome, at least not to Captain. Delta, on the other hand, fretted over the loss of overall efficiency, but at this point Captain merely desired the cube to stop spinning like a demonic top. The fixed thruster banks added their impetus to the whole, allowing Captain via his hierarchy to reimpose control one spurt of stripped atoms at a time.
As a bonus, ultra long range sensor resolution was improving; and sensory hierarchy drones were no longer literally falling out of their alcoves as balance problems overloaded personal senses. Even Sensors herself had been affected to the point she had disengaged herself from the grid in order to mentally recover equilibrium.
Captain threaded his awareness into that of Second, {Well?}
{Weaponry hierarchy is off in La-La Land for the moment. Delta wouldn't let Weapons draw on the auxiliary cores to light up his hologrid in Bulk Cargo Bay #5 during the crisis, so he's loaded a dataspace-only simulation into BorgCraft. Examine the feeds if you wish,} offered Second, the appropriate river of data highlighted, {but my opinion is he'll be out of the collective hair we don't have for at least eighteen hours.}
{Understood.} Captain contemplated: should he exit his alcove or stay there for another cycle or two? Unlike the unassimilated faced with a similar question as to rise from bed or not, the eventual siren call of a full bladder would not be motivating him.
{Bungie jump time!} screamed into the intranet from 96 of 133, followed heartbeats later by an audible whoosh as a body flew past Captain's alcove tier eight meters to his left. A thrumming buzz sounded several long seconds later as the bungie in question pulled taunt, succeeded by a drawn out "Yeeeee-haaaaaw" from the depths where the floor of subsection 17 met the solid and several meter thick duralloy ceiling of subsection 26.
Motivation enough. 96 of 133 and fellow enthusiasts were known to attach unwilling subjects - current status in the loose command web was of no concern - to bungies and toss them off tiers, to the amusement of those not involved. By the sudden rise of sound distinctive to drones exiting alcoves, the thought of escape was a communal one.
Captain opened his eye and disengaged alcove clamps, stepping automatically to the walkway. The bumping presence at thigh and waist was not expected, and neither were the soft growls. Captain craned his head down to see what was impeding forward momentum towards his nodal intersection.
Five reptilian heads gazed back at Captain, dark eyes boring into his own. Lasers soldered to the side of craniums were active; Captain could feel (psychosomatically, as the low powered devices were not powerful enough to heat skin) red dots painting his face. The three burly beasts to the front hissed as they hefted their kinetic weapons, dangerous ends a very large threat to personal safety.
Captain momentarily registered the same perverse feeling a human might have if assaulted in his or her own bedroom by midgets wielding spears - a hint of amusement mixed with a healthy dose of confusion and a dollop of alarm. The stand-off stretched for nearly five seconds as Captain retrieved the appropriate branch of data on the sub-collective's information tree.
Vysts. Luplup. On the cube.
Captain triggered intruder alarm protocols. The standard beating-a-dying-bagpipe call warbled over speakers even as Captain flashed a recounting of events. The vysts hissed, the two different looking ones in back glancing up in startlement; a quartet of hisses also sounded from behind, warning Captain that he was surrounded.
As Captain locked a transporter beam on himself to remove his body from danger (both that represented by the unexpected vysts and the disrupter barrage which would begin as soon as members of an eager weapon hierarchy arrived), he was bowled over at the knees. Nine throats rose in barking cacophony, surprisingly heavy bodies piling onto hips, back, shoulders. Captain was forced to the walkway.
A lithe hand, fully formed with claws neatly trimmed, reached into Captain's field of view. It was holding a hypospray. A second pair of hands, then a third, grabbed at his head, forcing it to turn and expose unarmored neck; Captain felt as talons accidentally bit into flesh, at least he supposed with a corner of his mind which was not demanding the vermin to be rid of that the slashes were not purposeful. The vyst bodies had disrupted transporter lock.
"'Snot goin' t' work," grunted Captain as the hypospray hissed against his neck. He didn't know what Luplup thought she was accomplishing, however the /hell/ she managed to get out here. The last he knew, a Borg fleet had destroyed the Borgified animal, the last of her captured ships imploded deep in the gravity well of a gas giant, the tainted terrestrial planet and its moon no more than shards of molten rock. Obviously some had escaped the Collective's paranoia. At any rate, Luplup should not be able to introduce anything to his system which would permanently damage him, assuming it did not outright kill his body. Which, in fact, might be her intention.
The last thing Captain recalled as he spiraled into the uncomfortable hands of unconsciousness was the whine of a transporter beam. A nonBorg transporter beam.
*****
Luplup rejoiced! Her selves voiced victory, shrill barker units louder than all due to structural aberrations directly traceable to genetically enlarged skull and thorax. Claws skittered over lightly textured floors as legs lifted to prance. Happy, happy, happy!
The transporter in the Not Born Of Self ship was powerful enough to reach into the depths of the Bad-Mans' cube, to pluck back the attack unit and prey. Luckily she had struck quickly enough to immobilize Captain before the target's shields had risen. The unexpected motion of Captain prey stepping from his food-fluid alcove had almost been Luplup's downfall, but she was crafty, was cunning. She was also swift.
With self and prey back on cloaked Slash, Luplup had broken from tracking, directing the ship to return to the main convoy, to return the budded self to the larger Self.
Captain lay on the floor of what had once been the Slash's sick bay, the table beds too high for short vyst bodies to haul his heavy humanoid form on to. This was the domain of the worker, and many of the clade scurried in tasks as Luplup worked. A worker-brooder lay quietly nearby on a desk, her elevated position allowing for Luplup to better coordinate herselves. A soldier-brooder would be clutching within the hour and she needed to ready the first of the generation four genetic inoculation series for the eggs.
For the time being, Captain prey was unsupervised, pushed to the back of Luplup's abbreviated focus: the smaller the budded self, the shorter and more limited the attention span. Captain was expected to remain in a state of not-sleep until the convoy was rejoined, the introduced chemical a general humanoid soporific given in highly concentrated form; it would take time for the small machines in his blood to counteract the injection. By then, the facilities of the main convoy would be ready to receive the prey, and Phase II of the plan would commence.
Out of place in the hustle and bustle of the sick bay was a first-brooder. The body was physically /old/. Adult vysts usually lived two or three years, a much shorter period of time when compared to the fifteen to twenty year infant (and stupid) pre-metamorph yoole stage. The primary purpose of the vyst, after all, was to lay a clutch or two of eggs, then protect the newly hatched yooles (or vysts if it was a parthogenic clutching) from immediate dangers, usually in the form of rival vyst mothers. For species assimilated by the Borg, aging often slowed as nanites and computerized alcoves retarded the process; for those individual "lucky" enough to be assimilated young and not terminated in the course of service to the Collective, lifespan could be stretched two or three times the species norm. If anything, however, the vyst version of nanoprobes combined with less-than-optimum regeneration led to an acceleration of the maturation process, with units often living less than six months from time of hatching.
The first-brooder was also unusual in that she did not have the genetic modifications of the units around her. She was of old stock, before the initiation of genetic programming, and she showed it. Her upper hands were clumsy almost-fingers and almost-thumb; scars on her hide from surgery were more pronounced than in later series.
Luplup was unsure why she kept the ancient first-brooder around, especially as the unit was unable to produce eggs any more. True, she served as a valuable template of the original Self genetic map, but it was also true Self had preserved tissue in cryogenic storage. Analytical analysis, cold numbers of the type Luplup could understand, showed the first-brooder was no longer an asset and should be terminated, yet at the same time something prevented her from simply euthanizing the unit.
The first-brooder hissed slightly as a worker unit nimbly hopped over Captain as she made her way across the room. The instinctive action on the part of Luplup, much as one might absently swat a buzzing fly, revealed the hole at the front of the first-brooder's mouth where one sharp tooth was missing. First-brooder hissed again, for no particular reason as she regarded Captain. Wrapped around her neck, just above the upper clavicle, was a voder box, the first version of devices being perfected for installation by Self on all selves last Luplup had known of before her budding from Self. The vyst body was physically unable to speak, vocal cords still that of the pre-sentient animal she had once been. However, technology and liberal experimentation on selves had isolated the correct part of the brain to make vocal speech possible.
A very small part of Luplup isolated itself from the whole, a core part integral to, yet slightly different from, the melding of four clades where once there had been one. That Luplup gazed at Captain, stubby fingers of one hand reaching up to follow the line along face and neck where she as attack group had scored the prey's flesh. Soon no indication would be left on the gray skin to show where claws had penetrated.
The voder coughed to life, quiet metallic words unheard in the noise of the sick bay, "I am Luplup. All will be annihilated." Pause. "I am Luplup. I will be...your Queen. I am...Queen. Resistance is futile."
*****
Here ends "A Dish Served Cold, Part I." If you wish to know what Luplup is up to and if Captain will get out of this mess (not to mention how Second will react to his sudden elevation to captaincy), you will have to continue reading Part II. If you really don't care, then, well...that's your problem.
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