On the road of life, there are roadblocks. Owning Star Trek, as well as many other turnpikes, is the Paramount Transit Authority. Decker built the private road Star Traks; and one cul-de-sac offshoot is Meneks' BorgSpace.
Roadblock
An immense gas giant ten times the size of Jupiter, Beachball spun against a cold velvet backdrop of glittering stars and wraithlike wormholes. Bands of orange, red, white, and brown delineated the prevalent latitudinal winds, with spikes of green and yellow lightening illuminating the depths. The largest planet of the Arrival-Departure systems, it was a domineering jewel.
A legion of moons swarmed around Beachball. Some circled distantly, on the edge of the planet's gravity well; and others skimmed cloud tops, even followed seemingly suicidal orbits beneath billowing thunderstorms and through hellish radiation fields. Each moon and planetoid was carefully sculpted, none a product of accidental capture. After all, it was the exceedingly rare asteroid which included ten thousand luxury hotel suites, a tropical reef theme casino, and an automated wet bar able to mix every drink ever conceived and a few unnamed yet to be dreamt.
Many believed the Beachball system to have once been a holiday destination and convention center nexus. Now, several of the planetoids continued to be run with their ancient purpose, caretaker after opportunistic caretaker entering the cutthroat entertainment business. Other asteroids served as home base(s) for the richest and/or strongest peoples stuck in the AD system.
Toss anything into an endless fall within a gravity well and the natural processes of orbital dynamics is unavoidable. The universe dictates it. Inertia, friction, basic physics, not even the ancient Progenitor engineers could forever keep Nature and Fate at bay. Orbits decay, planetoids break up, and time continues. However, one could delay the inevitable, reset the clock to zero.
A minor Beachball planetoid, currently uninhabited, reached its tolerance limit, traveling a little too low for the unseen, nonsentient monster AD computer to tolerate. Relays tripped; stimulus beget the initiation of programs and protocols last used fifty thousand years prior. If the vast computer, of which Depot was the most minor part, could truly speak, it would have said: "Time for maintenance again? I thought I just cleaned up the place! I better rev up the standard warnings on subfractual channel thirteen to caution Beachball is closed for cleaning."
Unfortunately, no one was listening to subfractual channel thirteen (well, perhaps the resident Ehtu, but they don't count for the purposes of this story), and had not for a very long time.
*****
General Ta'loc taped an extended foreclaw against the tabletop in front of her as the sublieutenant droned on. And on. And on. This underling was a windbag, and always had been one, even back in the galaxy during the war against the Borg. General Ta'loc was privately convinced the sublieutenant's territoriality instinct, which was weak in comparison to her peers, was underdeveloped at the expense of whatever genes ultimately controlled speaking much while saying little.
There /had/ to be a bullsh**ing gene. That was the only rational explanation.
General Ta'loc was typical of her species, and except for her powerful personal presence, could easily be lost in a crowd of her kind. Neither ugly nor a beauty, she was that type of person who placed duty before makeup and personal ornamentation, much to the disgust of many of her late superiors who had believed one should arrive at a function in best dress, not reeking of acrid smoke from the latest Borg encounter. An emaciated bipedal reptile in form, she exercised everyday to keep herself in top form, as comfortable fighting hand-to-hand as being the distant tactician moving pieces on a three light year front.
General Ta'loc finally slapped her open palm on the table. "Enough, sublieutenant Ja'fer! Are the decoys and their escorts ready, or not? I don't have to know the fuel and munitions of every hull, and if I don't, then no one else at this table does."
Sublieutenant Ja'fer gulped, her skin paling slightly, lending it a sea-green tint at the corners of her jaws and around her eyes. "Yes, 'm," she said, staring at a point on the table approximately five centimeters in front of Ta'loc. Well, the General had to grudgingly accord the sublieutenant as to having near perfect etiquette.
"You may look me in the eye, Sublieutenant. Just try to keep your presentations to a minimum in the future," said General Ta'loc.
Yes, 'm." Ja'fer was well aware her actions might have received her severe punishment at home, but home was no more, assimilated by the Borg, and the Lupil needed all Sisters and Brothers to survive. Those officers unable to abide by General Ta'loc's proclamation to suspend executions had been quietly removed to breeding creches, where their intellect had been reduced to that of a level able to have babies, take care of younglings until they were ready for formal education, and perform menial tasks. Still...old habits die hard, and Ja'fer could not force herself to look directly at the General.
"So," continued General Ta'loc as she glanced around the table, "does anyone have anything else to add? No? Then Operation Shellgame is a go. If you need to contact me, I will be on Cube Killer."
2 of 3 carefully wiggled a path in the cramped space which existed between vinculum and its armored outer casing. He occasionally paused, cocking his head end at an angle as he listened to internal instructions. Several sets of legs detached various diagnostic instruments. The tools were waved around, then tucked close to the body as a new area was transited towards. 2 of 3's circumference sensory bristles gently bent as he maneuvered himself, the insectoid perfectly at home in the dark, confined environment.
{Report,} said Captain.
Delta grimaced, both of her despite the fact each body was in very different locales. {Nothing. I still think it is the neural transceivers, not the vinculum. The thing is designed to survive conditions which pulverize cubes.}
Doctor replied with an argument long grown stale, {Not possible! All neural transceivers degenerating spontaneously, and simultaneously? The odds are astronomical! No good! No biscuit!}
{Well, it isn't the vinculum. 2 of 3 is testing every square millimeter, and still we have found no physical fault,} huffed Delta.
Captain winced as the...static...momentarily buzzed his mind, overwhelming all voices, even his own. Each brief episode was as if he had stuck his head in the middle of a bee swarm. The attacks were barely a blip timewise, but subjectively the static seemed like minutes in duration. All drones on the cube were affected; and it was a local phenomenon, careful ping inquiries as to the status of other sub-collectives returning no problems.
{No one cares where the fault lies. Just fix it,} ordered captain for the eighth time.
Second entered the nodal intersection, "That was the eighth time."
Captain ignored his secondary consensus monitor and facilitator. The 'ding' of a bell echoed in the dataspaces. Attention was shifted to other tasks, and more specifically, the decoding of a series of transmission of Lupil frequencies.
{Upload data and summarize,} spoke Captain to the elements of command and control working on the task. Within the silicon and organic partnership which was the Cube #347 computing network, files opened, spilling their contents to all interested nodes.
Holding station well below the plane of the elliptic of Departure system, Cube #347 had been in position to see a change in General Ta'loc's Beachball fleet. Retaining the last known Artifact not in Borg control, the Lupil leader had been growing increasingly paranoid, her rag-tag fleet abandoning revenue-generating guard and hauling operations to cluster around Lupil strongholds. Intruders to Lupil territory were actively rebuffed, even supposed MAAC allies or traders with legitimate reasons for approaching. All were suspect in the targ-eat-targ reality of Artifact Seeker politics.
Five hours previous, an upswing in coded fleet messages had been detected. Although most of the messages were tight-beamed ship-to-ship communiques, and therefore theoretically safe from spies, such was not strictly true. Cube #347 /was/ an Exploratory-class Borg vessel, and as such had all the bells and whistles of any Exploratory-class cube dispatched on legitimate missions. One of the fundamental tasks of the Exploratory-class was to seek out new species and new civilizations for assimilation, as well as to observe known species as they advanced their technologies and/or planned resistance. To this end, the sensor suite on Exploratory-class cubes were heavy with the most sophisticated eavesdropping technologies assimilation and adaptation could acquire.
"Decoding complete," intoned Second, acting as spokesdrone for the self-conversation the sub-collective was about to begin. Captain's viewscreen altered from a stylized view of Beachball and Lupil ship positions to a quickly scrolling nonsense of green Borg alphanumerics. And it really was nonsense, lines created by a randomizer program lurking in ship archives for just such a situation as the present, its job to enhance the forbidding atmosphere just in case someone unperceived might be watching.
As Second verbally recited the summarization and Borg numbers and letters rapidly scrolled, Captain directed the absorption of data, the process by which the sub-collective became aware of what the parts were doing. Meaning swiftly became clear.
Genera Ta'loc was moving the Key Artifact, relocating it to a more secure facility. Five freighters, two shuttles, and a scout were the main playing pieces in the shellgame the General had initiated, seven decoys and one jackpot. Some had heavy escorts, and one had none, the remainder of the range in-between. It was a masterful game of misdirection, not aimed specifically at Borg watchers, but rather meant for any opportunistic Seeker who might decide to snatch the Artifact. In fact, as the cube observed, several non-Lupil vessels were already on trajectories to intercept prizes, despite the short one hour timespan since the eight targets had scattered from their starting port. However, the cube had an advantage: the sub-collective knew which vessel was the real McCoy.
A freighter steamed at moderate speeds, shadowed by a pair of corvettes and an old destroyer. None of the vessels were of Lupil make, the warships once part of General Ta'loc's resistance fleet, and the freighter domestically produced. The package was neither the heaviest warded nor the easiest to pluck; and the convoy was neither the quickest nor the slowest. Falling in the middle of the eight possibilities, and perhaps a shade to the "easy" side, it remained untargeted by encroaching Seeker forces. In an ordinary situation, General Ta'loc's gamble would likely have passed muster.
This was not an ordinary situation.
Cube #347 plotted a course with a minimum of sidetrips, then sedately moved forward, a shark to the feeding grounds. Well, okay, a plankton-feeding whale shark to the feeding grounds.
General Ta'loc sat in the command center of her battleship Cube Killer. As one of the very few Lupil-built ships to make it to the AD systems, it had not been retrofit from species whose anatomy did not quite conform to that of the reptilian race. No odd colors, no peculiarly placed buttons and light switches, and, most important, seats which were ergonomically constructed for the Lupil posterior. General Ta'loc had performed many underhanded and self-hateful things over the long years to insure the survival of her species, but she had vowed to herself to happily go to the Hells themselves as long as the ride was on a properly padded chair.
Cube Killer, which had entered service fifty-three years ago named Varlot after a famous statesman, was a stately daughter-of-a-bastard when the Borg had begun their invasion. Not quite state-of-the-art, she had still packed quite a punch, as General Ta'loc had demonstrated with the single-taloned killing of a cube about the same size as the one loose in Arrival-Departure. Christened from that time forward as Cube Killer, Ta'loc had scavenged and pillaged what she could to keep the vessel in prime working condition, using the ship as a rallying point for the forces she gathered unto herself.
From the outside, Cube Killer was not a spectacular looker, and, like her captain, would not have won any beauty contests. Her torpedo slim body's scarred and patched length was a kilometer from armored nose to stern reaction thrusters. A pair of giant warp nacelles were set opposite each other in an outrigger position; and while the nacelles were useless to escape AD, General Ta'loc always had them actively idling in case it was necessary to move from point A to point B at a speed greater than impulse. Like battleships everywhere, the hull was studded with multiply redundant sensors. Many quadrants showed signs of freefall and dry-dock surgery, areas where Lupil engineers had opened the ship exterior in order to install new and unusual weapons. Deep inside Cube Killer ticked a second warp drive, which was linked solely to defensive and offensive systems, no erg of energy squandered to propulsion, life support, or other systems. Compared to her original self fresh from the shipyards, Cube Killer was a much meaner machine.
Inside her flag vessel, General Ta'loc tapped one carefully trimmed talon against a scarred armrest. Her eyes contemplated the main viewscreen, ignoring the quiet bustle of the crew. Perfect. Of the seven decoys, three had pursuers. She believed two of the targets had sufficient escort firepower to destroy the wannabe Artifact Seekers. The final decoy, escortless, would sacrifice itself when pursuit attempted to grapple. Too bad all three pursuers were provisionally members of MAAC. Oh well, business was business.
Thinking of the Collective, General Ta'loc shifted her attention to a trajectory painted a cautionary hue of mint green. She frowned. The cube was still unerringly aimed at the freighter group which carried the Artifact. Tapping her armrest some more, General Ta'loc deliberated. If she acted to defend the target while ignoring the other attackers, all Artifact Seekers would instantly deduce where the Key Artifact was actually located. However, if she waited, the Borg would smash through the escort and grab the prize. The General sighed. The latter was intolerable, unacceptable, but if she acted carefully and correctly, she might salvage the situation by destroying that annoying cube, perhaps even gain the Artifacts the Borg had gathered.
"Helm," called Ta'loc, "point us at the cube. Let's go fricassee us some Borg."
Noting movement from the large vessel recognized as General Ta'loc's infamous Cube Killer, Cube #347 increased speed. They would obtain the Artifact, preferably before that monstrous battleship arrived, a battleship which had managed to destroy a perfectly functional Exploratory-class cube. As it was, deterring the meager escort was problematical. Throw in Cube Killer, and the Artifact was lost.
Three Artifact Seeker probe fleets, plus another six still deliberating as to what action to follow, pointed noses at a puttering Lupil freighter and her three ship escort. The race began, a race which could only end in one winner amid the twisted scrap of all the losers.
*****
::Final warning! This is an advertisement that Beachball and its attendant environs will be disconnected in one minute! Please evacuate the area, or take shelter in one of the conveniently placed null shelters for the duration. Repeat, this is your final warning. If you are unable to follow these directions, remain where you are. The permutations of reality will be disorientating, but are not harmful. Maintenance is expected to require less than two hours.::
The one minute timer completed its backwards count. Null construction bots launched. The metaphorical giant red switch was flipped. Beachball's satellites slowed in their orbits, finally halting; and the giant bands of the planet itself ceased rotation.
*****
Cube Killer came to a sudden stop. It was not the gradual glide normal for space-faring vessels, but a sudden dump of inertia, as if the battleship had smacked into an immobile brick wall. Inertial dampers held, so the unexpected event spawned little more than shaken nerves. However, the pride of the Lupil AD fleet, stately Cube Killer, was going nowhere.
General Ta'loc stared at one of the two secondary viewscreens which flanked the primary bridge monitor. It displayed an exterior bow view of real-time, an unexciting scene of distant Departure rising over a northern hemisphere limb of Beachball. The scene remained tranquil. No visible force appeared to be causing the stoppage.
"Report!" barked General Ta'loc as she rose from her command chair. "What happened? Is it a Borg plot? A weapon courtesy of our MAAC 'friends'?"
A bridge sensor technician, Abba, hurriedly offered her diagnosis, "I don't think so, ma'am. Look at the planet. I don't know what is happening, but I don't think even the Borg can do that."
General Ta'loc curtly ordered the exterior view to be shuffled to the main screen, then stared. Beachball was frozen, storms halted mid-whirl. Qualms rose from deep in her psyche, but she swiftly moved to repress them, lest her leadership be compromised by the merest micron of fear or indecision.
"Well, I don't care if Beachball has run down like a badly maintained warp drive! We're still moving in here. Someone get this crate in a similar state of motion, even if the entire crew has to go out and push! I want us at the Key Artifact before anyone else, preferably yesterday!"
The words tore through the air, forcing action. Lupil rushed about in agitation, a spark of fear lending bounce to their steps. A force which could control celestial objects might be powerful, but it was distant, unseen. General Ta'loc, on the other hand, was very immediate.
Cube #347 slammed to a halt, as if it had smacked into an immobile brick wall. Unlike a Lupil battleship elsewhere experiencing a similar phenomenon, inertial dampers did not function as advertised. Drones, tools, a shoerack, all were tossed into walls. The unlucky found themselves falling down shafts amid a cloud of inanimate junk. The drone maintenance roster grew by 173 drones, some seriously injured, but none terminated.
Second pushed himself off the guard rail. It was a long trip down, but as one of the few safety features installed in all cubes, the rail had prevented the accident. Now, if rubber padding could only be installed at the bottom of all shafts, preferably three to five meters deep.... Second abolished the random thought, not bothering to trace it to its origination.
Captain had merely been slammed into a wall. Little damage to either bulkhead or self was apparent. A few more dents here and there, but nothing vital. He reset his equilibrium as Second reentered the nodal intersection from his involuntarily egress.
Second noted, "The inertial dampers need a tune-up. Again. I swear, the model XZ473S was a lemon production run."
Captain sent wordless agreement even as he surfed the Cube intranets. This stoppage was of exterior cause, not an uncensored whim. The cube's attention shifted to possible outside threats.
Sensors exclaimed, {Pretty! Blue [crazy quilt] shimmers of [arctic yogurt].} Of course, no one else saw anything, blue shimmering or otherwise, despite Sensor's insistence to the contrary.
What was seen was cessation of motion. Beachball was frozen, as were its moons. All ships within a boundary delineated by the planet's outermost satellite were similarly quiescent, as if insects caught in amber. Elsewhere, the cosmic dance continued, but locally the only movement was from a scattering of sparkles, unable to be resolved except as perfectly reflective spheres, converging upon a moon deep in Beachball's gravity well.
All these observations were fundamentally irrelevant. The important revelation was the cube continued go nowhere and that the situation wasn't the fault of a sub-collective member. Careful analytical thought was not a Borg strength when it came to a circumstance demanding immediate reaction, and thus the knee-jerk response of Cube #347 was to fire thrusters, to force movement. Not a millimeter was moved. Thrusters were cut in favor of low, then high, impulse. The superstructure resonated in bass undertones, but still the cube refused to budge.
Captain looked at Second; and Second looked at Captain. Both carefully positioned themselves next to a bulkhead, and more specifically, the large staples recently welded there. Hands gripped metal and bodies prepared for erratic acceleration.
Warp engines pulsed to life. First the normal configuration of four nacelles, then eight, then ten, and finally an unprecedented full complement of twelve nacelles. The output should have flung the cube to a mere fraction of sub-10 warp factor, arriving at the impossible-to-cross AD boundary in scant minutes. The cube did move forward, but not at bat-out-of-hell velocities. Instead the speed was a leisurely walking pace. Several minutes would be required to go one kilometer, to go one cube length.
Hands locked around staples.
Warp was cut in favor of transwarp. Transwarp was not advisable in the AD systems. Not only was it an equally futile escape method as any propulsion, but transwarp conduits reacted unfavorably in close proximity to wormholes. Cube #347 did not sink into the transwarp environment, but remained stubbornly in the real universe, contrary to all physics expectations. However, the cube was puttering along at approximately one-sixteenth impulse, slowly climbing to one-eighth. At that speed, the sub-collective would reach the Key Artifact in, oh, two to three hours.
Captain and Second cautiously released their grips.
"Anagrams! 'Bob makes good pesto' can be rearranged to form what Zyn proclamation?" asked Depot's voice as the featureless chrome sphere's image materialized via holoemitter. "We have several hours to kill, after all, and I've seen how you Borg hate to stand idle. So, do you know the anagram answer?"
"Several hours to kill...." repeated Second, voicing the stunned sub-collective reaction.
Snapped Captain simultaneously, tuned to a differed subset of sentiment, "Explain!"
Depot spun slowly. "Anagram. A word or phrase derived by using the letters from another word or phrase."
"That isn't what we meant, and you know it," spat Captain.
"Oooooooh," said Depot, "plurals!" The sphere continued to rotate. "Are we getting a little agitated? Whoa! Stop that! You're gonna make...me...sick." The final words were whispered as Depot's image faded. In Analysis Shop #17, Depot's shell was vigorously shaken.
"Explain."
"Sure, sure, whatever you want. The universe is turning inside out. Make it stop. Please," begged the sphere. He made a burping noise as the drone in the analysis shop ended the 'persuasion.'
"Explain."
"Okay. No need to get all testy. Beachball is undergoing maintenance. It'll be about two hours. One of the moons has slightly slipped out of alignment, so the master computer is laboring to fix it. Because it is very difficult to shift orbiting planetoids, a null field has been spread over Beachball, suspending time and physics. The field is a bit on the patchy side, and doesn't quite work correctly on things not of AD origination, such as all the vessels about here, so reality isn't quite as canceled as well as it should be. Now, if you are done torturing me, and if you don't want to play anagrams, I am going to take myself elsewhere, to people who appreciate me." Trite comment delivered, Depot's image disappeared.
It was contrary, General Ta'loc thought, but she also had to admit it was working. By pure, frustrated chance, the engineers and helm control had discovered Cube Killer could be enticed to move if the /bow/ thrusters were engaged. The /bow/. Normally, such an action would push the immense battleship backwards, perhaps with the goal a soft dry-dock berthing. Right now, against all expectations, against all rules of known physics, not only was Cube Killer tacking forward with her bow thrusters, but she was doing so at near one-eighth impulse.
The Lupil leader stared intently at the monitor, index claw of her left hand slowly tearing the tough fabric of her chair armrest. It was times like this General Ta'loc felt redundant. A good leader not only had to know how to give orders, but when to keep her nose out of the business of her well trained underlings. General Ta'loc would have enjoyed to be working on the most menial of tasks, if only to alleviate her forced idleness, but a Lupil in her position of command could not act so without losing authority. Therefore, she was left with the monitor.
Beachball was represented by an amber globe on the computer generated schematic, with the Key Artifact freighter and escort four small white blobs. The yellow cylinder of Cube Killer tracked along a similarly colored vector. At an equal distance, but slowly gaining ominous velocity, the mint green Borg cube poked along. Two other Artifact Seekers - purple and orange - moved as well, but unless they could finagle a massive burst of speed from their propulsion, they were as out of the race as their motionless comrades.
The mint green marker abruptly dropped to zero velocity, meaning the cube had lost propulsion. General Ta'loc's toothy mouth opened into a Lupil grin. That grin was wiped away moments later as Cube Killer shuddered to a stop, then began to register negative acceleration as the bow thrusters pushed against minute residual motion. The general perked up, attempting to find a silver lining among all the clouds: maybe if thrusters were operating correctly once more, so would standard propulsion.
Unfortunately, Murphy's Law plays with loaded dice.
*****
Like Depot, individual null construction bots manifested as silvered spheres; and like Depot, a close examination would reveal no moving parts and an exterior impossible to penetrate without extremely special equipment. Unlike Depot, the bots were not intelligent, but extensions of the master computer, budded bundles of stimulus-response given a specific task to accomplish. When not in use, they sat in null garage stasis - the same constructed subreality the AD computer and much of the systems 'machinery' existed. When needed, the garage opened to whatever location required maintenance. Once active, the bots adroitly jumped around their target, carefully nudging it here and there using twists of reality as an effective grappling tractor in an environment where the universe had temporarily been placed on hold.
The construction bots ignored the ships so very distant from their worksite, myopic attention focused solely on the moon. The master computer rippled the null field blanketing Beachball, itself aware of the vessels only as a peripheral datum: as long as they were not directly impacting maintenance, no action was required to be taken.
*****
The transwarp engines strained, but nothing occurred. No forward progress. With several transwarp coils on the edge of burn out, Delta unilaterally cut all propulsion, leaving the cube in the same no go situation it had originally found itself.
{Assist us,} demanded Captain of Depot. The Artifact was sulking, no one, not even his several usually obligating drone playmates, having the time to conjugate verbs or unscramble words.
Depot responded, {This is physics, engineering. I don't know, and frankly don't care, how it works.}
{Assist us.}
{You can shake me all you like, shake me until the AD systems falls apart in a space-time wormhole temper-tantrum, but the fact remains I cannot. The master computer would freak if I tried to manipulate openly the maintenance routines, assuming I could do so in the first place. And as I told you earlier, the propulsion effects on ships caught in the null field are random. It is better to just wait it out.} Pause. {There are /so/ many interesting word ways to pass the time. Wouldn't you, Captain, 4 of 8, like to...}
Captain ignored Depot's quest for a word game, instead focusing on Delta's attempts to force the cube into frontward motion. Nothing. Delta was slowly cycling the cube through each form of propulsion, but the ship stubbornly refused to stir.
In the distant alleyways of his mind (well, actually, a combination of command and control and automatic computer observation logs), Captain noted transporter use by 312 of 422. The action was not unusual considering the scarcity of elevators and the large volume of Cube #347. Censor relays and protocols began tripping, questioning. Loosely translated, the process was saying, 'What a minute...the hull? Does 312 of 422 have legitimate reasons to be on the hull? Answer - no. Query - what is 312 of 422 doing on the hull?' By the time the final interrogate had been posed and directed at wayward 312 of 422, the drone had already tossed his paper 'Will you be my pen-pal' message in a glass bottle to the cosmic winds.
Reaction begets an equal and opposite reaction. Cube #347 sedately moved in the opposing direction, albeit at a speed much higher than could be attributed by the simple release of a small beer bottle.
Thought processes leapt even as 312 of 422 was retrieved for a stern warning upon the unBorgness of his actions. Inventory catalogues were examined as to what could be thrown overboard without repercussion; and several drones argued why they shouldn't be included among the list. Soon Cube #347 was forging forward once more, this time via the power of litter.
Cube Killer slowed, regained momentum, slowed, regained momentum, slowed, regained momentum. The actions were erratic, jerky, and even the well-tuned inertial dampers had difficulty blocking the random fits and starts.
General Ta'loc held her tongue. Scolding her crew was pointless. By sheer accident a technician had discovered slow headway towards the Key Artifact freighter could be made if the nacelles were tuned to warp 5.3. Further refinements to a warp factor of 5.32131 translated to a real speed approaching one-eighth impulse. The dilemma arose in maintaining the precise alignment, precision to the hundred thousandth decimal place not necessary during normal operation. Inherent fluctuations of warp core energy output, minor permutations in the warp field, all conspired against sustaining exactitude.
Sudden slowing, jerky acceleration, slowing, acceleration.
General Ta'loc rubbed her sore neck and sighed.
Cube #347 spun, an insane whirling dervish. Using all three axes, the carefully orchestrated variation upon the classic Borg defensive/offensive maneuver had put the sub-collective in the lead for the race to the Key Artifact. It was also a method to guarantee balance problems in even the most stoic of drones who dared to access raw data from the external sensor grid. The outside was largely filtered by Sensors and a few select individuals of the type who once-upon-a-time had actively sought the most extreme examples of gut-wrenching rollercoasters. Still, the cube was ahead.
Historic accounts of the homeworld, before Borg, before space flight, before computers, before the industrial revolution era, detailed longships powered by oars, rowed by ranks of sailor-warriors. General Ta'loc imagined Cube Killer to bear an eerie resemblance to those ancestral longboats, substituting tractor beams for oars and computer for the rowers.
Three times per minute, twelve tractor beams, six per side, stabbed forward at equal angles. Three times per minute, those tractor beam oars, contacting nothing as far as Lupil or machine was concerned, were swung in a firm bow to stern stroke. In response, Cube Killer sculled forwards, exactly like one of those historic longboats cutting through the ocean waves.
Unfortunately, their speed was not great enough. Not enough.
*****
The null construction bots paused. They had successfully completed the primary task of returning the moon to an acceptable orbital path, but another anomaly had been detected. Within the rock, an environment designed to be a pleasing day spa for chlorine breathers, as well as act as one of the many necessary gravitational sub-wells to ultimately keep the central wormholes properly balanced, something was wrong. Specifically, the chlorine equivalent of bubbly bath soaps, pleasingly scented candles, and incense was depleted.
The master computer deliberated. The fact the habitat had remained unused for three hundred thousand years - chlorine breathers in the Milky Way were exceedingly rare - did not enter into the equation. What mattered was the restocking opportunity which existed. The pros and cons were examined, with the computer finally deciding to resupply the spa. The additional hour necessary would not disrupt wormhole traffic. The volume through the nexus had been unusually depressed for many eons, and economic models indicated high probability for the situation to remain at the low level.
*****
"You said two hours, you useless pile of..."
Captain missed the remainder of the verbal component of Second's expletive as a nearby data pillar shorted spectacularly. The scatological conclusion was obvious, invented over and over again on a myriad of worlds and in a myriad of languages. Captain did catch his backup counterpart making a futile swipe at Depot's holoemitter image.
"It /was/ two hours," retorted Depot. "If you had bothered to ask earlier, I would have told you additional satellite maintenance had been initiated, tacking on another hour."
The cube shook as three photon torpedoes impacted shields.
"Bit of a spot of trouble, eh? Can't even spare a drone to shake little ol' me?"
Second said, "You're on this ship too, you know."
"Ah," replied Depot as he serenely spun, "but I've been in the middle of more explosions than I care to elaborate upon. And whirled around in wormholes. And shot out torpedo tubes. Funny, but usually the fight isn't over trying to acquire me, but a rush to get rid of me. I've never really understood it, considering the effort Artifact Seekers usually put forth to gain an Artifact." The sphere ended on a puzzled note.
Captain ignored Depot, concentrating upon the situation at hand.
The final leg of the trek had involved warp drive, forward impetus shifted 137.2 degrees from point of travel. Actual speed had ranged between one-tenth and one-eighth impulse, which was still quite a bit faster than the stuck freighter, a motley collection of prefabricated boxes attached to a structural backbone and mounting a workhorse impulse engine. While the 'rules' of the immediate environment allowed the vessel's three escorts to forge off on their own, the domestically produced and warp-less freighter was unable to move. Abandoning the Key Artifact was not an option, as overheard from several subspace conversations. Similarly, tractoring the freighter was not viable, either tractor or warp drive allowable by the scrambled physics, but not both simultaneously. Attempts to move the Key Artifact to a warp capable warship were also doomed to failure, the Lupil in all their wisdom locking the Artifact in a safe welded to the freighter's superstructure, a safe unable to be opened without the physical presence of a key at the destination locale, a safe which could not be cut open with anything less robust than a ship-mounted phaser.
Breaking through the pitiful escort defense, Cube #347 shield-clipped one corvette, sending it slowly careening out of the forthcoming skirmish. As the cube had reached to tractor the freighter, the sub-collective discovered another difficulty of the environment - precise aiming did not function. Trying to tractor a relatively large target with a wide beam was not a problem, but locking a transporter to a specific object was impossible, as was trying to hit anything with narrow cutting beams, disrupters, phasers, or other energy based weaponry (not that Weapons was dissuaded). The imprecision was not a constant, which could have been compensated, but instead a continuous fluctuation.
The current situation found the cube with the freighter caught in a tractor beam, the smaller vessel used as an impromptu defense as the cube turned away less abused shield sections to incoming munitions. Simultaneously, the cube wavered between ignoring the defender's rather pitiful attempts at defiance and attempting to swat at them with the same determination a man has for an annoying fly. Additional concentration was spent forming a transporter lock to snatch the Key Artifact before the rapidly approaching Cube Killer arrived.
Second waved a hand at Depot as the latter placed his image next to the drone's left shoulder. "Go away, you chrome pest."
The transporter lock wavered, slipped.
"Second," reprimanded Captain in annoyance, "you lost our lock. Concentrate on our task, not Depot."
Second grumbled, squinted a skunk eye at the chortling sphere, then returning to the demanding task of reacquiring transporter lock.
The corvette which remained mobile yawed as it was hit by a fortuitously (and randomly) aimed phaser. As its static warp bubble collapsed, it ceased anything resembling rapid forward momentum, a fly caught in solidifying amber. It continued to tumble bow over stern, stabilization thrusters disabled.
{Cube Killer incoming,} warned Sensors. {Arrival one minute.}
<<Crap,>> echoed through the dataspaces.
"Second..." voiced Captain. The warning was mimicked by Depot, who proceeded to permute the word one letter at a time, ending with the term 'tignat,' which loosely translated as 'inferior wife's badly darned stocking.'
{Got it!} exclaimed Second, backed by the combined designations inclusive in the task partition. The Key Artifact was not the sole item grabbed, but also the safe, three potted plants, half a bathroom, one very surprised Lupil cook, and anything else within a five meter spherical volume. The sub-collective had forsaken finesse, instead including whatever dross was necessary to also gain the Artifact. The entire mess was deposited as a pile in Bulk Cargo Hold #1, the Artifact naturally at the bottom of tons of unwanted material.
Spouted Depot, "Oops! Looks like maintenance is about done. The null blanket will be lifted in three...two...one...."
Simultaneously counted Sensors, {Cube Killer will [drive] in weapons range in three...[music]...one....}
*****
Three.
Two.
One.
With the final application of wallpaper most species with color vision and a minimum sense of aesthetics would declare to be sickly yellow, the construction bots lifted from the moonlet. No dramatic flourish accompanied banishment of the null field and resumption of normal physics, but suddenly Beachball's storms again churned and its satellites progressed in their orbits. Freeze frame resumed active life. The AD computer swiftly assured itself all gravitational wells were precisely aligned, then calculated the time to next expected maintenance. All was good.
Of the organics embroiled in struggle over components which could affect the AD systems fate (else make an extra-dimensional phone with a direct line to Q-Pizzas), it never noticed.
*****
Three. Two. One.
Cube Killer lurched as her warp drives momentarily resumed their normal operation, striving to pull the battleship onto a trajectory 137.2 degrees from direction of desired travel. Fortunately, the computer cut power before Awful Things could occur. The near accident did not matter, for the vessel had arrived at the goal, her weapons ready to meet a Borg cube in glorious battle.
Nothing.
Well, not precisely nothing.
"Evasive maneuvers!" yelled General Ta'loc as primitive hindbrain calmly informed intellectual gray matter that when objects are rapidly enlarging on a viewscreen, it probably indicates a direct collision course.
The Lupil at helm was already responding, but a ship the size of Cube Killer imparts a huge amount of inertia, and abrupt turns are not a part of the repartee. Still, the battleship (coaxed by breathless oaths on the part of the helm) managed to slide along her y-axis just enough for the two tumbling corvettes and freighter to miss. All three ships had been parting gifts flung via tractor beams courtesy of the fleeing Borg cube.
"Ma'am," said the crewman at communications, "distress calls from corvettes Yansi and Ga'lot and freighter Joy Luck, as well as request for orders by destroyer Wicked. We are also receiving a boatload of messages from various captains, both our own, as well as of nonLupil origination. Oh, yes, your ceremonial robe is ready for pickup at dry-cleaning."
As each message was relayed, General Ta'loc's expression became increasingly stony. She stared at the viewscreen, unblinking; and muscles of her face were still. All crew on the bridge, from lowest private wielding mop and bucket to Cube Killer's second-in-command, similarly became motionless, attempting to disappear, attempting to avoid attention. General Ta'loc brusquely stood from her chair; crew flinched.
"One," she calmly replied in a dry voice which had greater effect than any bellow, "tell the dry cleaner that the robe should have been done a week ago. Two, tell Wicked to begin coordinating with the corvettes and freighter to stabilize the vessels and assist with injuries. Three, tell everyone, our own forces and the vultures, to bugger themselves and their requests. If they want, they can follow us, else they can go play in the wormholes. As far as four..."
The bridge held their collective breathes.
"...pursue that damned cube and our Artifacts!!"
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