She thought she heard her Mater’s voice and her siblings playing hop-skip nearby, but it was only a fantasy. The burning inside her became a series of soul-rending pains, each more excruciating than the last.
Suddenly the vessel spoke to her again, telling her that they were being somehow forced out of the ghost state by the scream of the alien orb.
Even as she processed that news, she and the vessel were solid again. This time when the vessel screamed, she screamed along with it.
The storm of destructive waves that had been unleashed when the Eye had awakened, the chaos from which the ghost state had protected her, now ripped through A’churak’zen as it had everything else in this creation.
It was worse, far worse, than the shrieking of the alien orb. Worse even than the pain of being bonded to her vessel. This was agony beyond understanding, beyond thought, beyond questions.
This, she thought as her torment shredded her rationality. Can this be death?
But it wasn’t death. It was only pain and therefore something she understood. They had forced her back into Erykon’s creation, which, of course, made her subject to Erykon’s wrath.
She was pounded as they had been, buffeted as they had been, the contours of her vessel scored and battered as theirs had been. She had watched them suffer and had found pleasure in it. She had made them suffer a little herself and had found it just. But, if that was justice, what was this? Was Erykon’s punishment so indiscriminate, so random and impersonal?
She wondered, before the pain overwhelmed her senses, how they had done this to her, how they had thwarted Erykon’s will and wrath. She couldn’t. She couldn’t escape or thwart or do anything but suffer and fear her god’s next inscrutable whim.
“The Orishan vessel is in phase with normal space,”said Tuvok’s voice in Riker’s ear. Not knowing what sort of conditions to expect on the alien ship, he and his team had been outfitted with tactical EV suits. “They are experiencing catastrophic failures to many key systems. Stand by.”
The team stood beside him on the transporter pad-Rriarr, Denken, Pava, and Hriss-while a somber-faced Lieutenant Radowski looked over his controls as he waited for the go order.
Titanlurched suddenly, and before he could be asked, Tuvok said, “The Orishan grappler has disengaged. Shield strength is returning to previous levels. All internal systems nominal.”
“Put us as close to their bridge as possible, Lieutenant,” said the captain. “I don’t want to lose anyone fighting our way in.”
Radowski nodded and began tapping in commands. Presently a look of puzzlement crossed his face.
“Sir,” he said. “I don’t read anything like a bridge over there. It may be distortion from the quantum flux, but the whole place seems to be tunnels and crawl spaces. No decks or specialized areas at all.”
“What does that mean?” said Pava without too much obvious trepidation. “It’s like a Borg ship?”
“Inconclusive,” said Radowski still trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “Frankly, Captain, with all this distortion, it’s lucky we’re able to get a solid lock in there at all.”
“Lieutenant Radowski is correct,”said Tuvok’s voice. “Sensors indicate a network of thin interlocking tunnels radiating from a single aft chamber.”
“How many aboard?”
“One, sir. Sensors read one living being aboard the Orishan vessel.”
The Orishan ship was nothing like a Borg cube. It was brightly lit, its tunnels easily large enough to accommodate the members of the team walking two abreast. It was, aside from them, empty.
Everywhere there was light. Some came from obvious sources like the faceted blue crystals embedded at intervals in every wall. The rest seemed to be an effect of some sort of esoteric energy exchange between various systems.
Every aperture was hexagonal, giving many of the visible surfaces a honeycomb appearance. Delicate webs of microfilaments crisscrossed half of them, some seeming to emerge from the walls and disappear again into the deck.
“Oh!” said Pava, running one graceful hand along the wall nearest to her. “There’s a pulse.”
Indeed there was. They could all feel it now; a steady staccato beat thrumming through every surface that was very much like the pulse of a living thing.
The whole place smacked as much of organism as machine, Riker thought, but in a perfectly synergistic way. Whatever else they might have done, the Orishans had apparently created a unique technology that melded organic and inorganic materials in a manner that somehow seemed more, well, natural than anything the Borg had achieved.
Telling the others to form on him, Riker moved ahead. His phaser, like all of theirs, was already in hand. He hadn’t known what sort of resistance to expect, but he had expected some. Perhaps a few attack ’bots or automated traps. He’d been on enough hostile alien vessels to be ready for anything.
But there was nothing, only the sound of their footfalls on the deck and the hum of the alien machines.
They found the probe, or half of it, still sparking on the deck. The rematerialization of one of the walls had cut the thing neatly in two as they had tried and failed to occupy the same space.
What Tuvok had called the anterior chamber was just ahead. Pava and Rriarr flanked their captain as he surged forward, while the other two brought up the rear.
As predicted, their little corridor opened up a few paces on into a much larger chamber whose every surface was covered in crimson and gold hexagons.
There were no computers visible, no workstations or control panels. The chamber was just that, an empty room, but for the one odd, vaguely oval shaped object that hung from the ceiling, supported by thousands of glowing microfilaments.
It was mildly translucent, obviously containing something suspended in what appeared to be fluid of some kind. It was very large, more than two meters from end to end and half as wide.
At first they supposed that it was just some damaged bit of the ship that had been shocked free of its normal position by the vessel’s wrenching return to normal space. On close inspection it turned out to be the farthest thing from that that was possible.
Tiny sparks of light traveled along the translucent filaments, disappearing into the strange, vaguely plasticine oval. It was soft to the touch, almost leathery in fact, which Rriarr found out when he prodded it gently with his finger.
Whatever was inside shuddered when he sustained the contact longer than a few seconds.
“Relax,” said Riker, feeling Pava tense beside him. “Everyone, relax.”
As they watched, a seam opened wide along the bottom of the oval container, allowing the thing’s viscous internal fluid to spill out on the floor below. When the thing was empty, the skin rapidly dried to the point of brittleness and simply flaked off in large clumps before their eyes. When it was gone, Pava stifled a gasp.
Inside what everyone present now realized had been a cocoon, suspended by and intertwined with the thousands of microfilaments, was an Orishan. Or rather, most of one.
All six of its limbs had been removed at the second joint and replaced with caps composed of some organic resin into which tightly bound clusters of the filaments disappeared.
There were similar, albeit smaller, versions of the caps attached to the creature’s head and corresponding to where its eyes and antennae had been. Three thick cables, also translucent and also carrying streams of unknown glowing particles into the Orishan’s body, were connected to its spine, with a similar one running into a plate on its abdomen.
It shuddered again, though none of them touched it, its mouth and lower mandibles flexing uselessly.
“It’s alive,” said Rriarr, holding up his tricorder for a quick scan. “Higher brain functions are active.”