Chapter Text
An array of green lights burned far overhead like a hundred malicious eyes; pain burned across his skin, and he couldn’t move his arms or legs or even his head, which Elnor realized, as he fought back to consciousness, was because he was restrained, not paralyzed. The dull hum of machinery in his ears almost drowned out the voices murmuring behind him, Rihan from the tempo of them but too quiet to make out. He quickly oriented himself, memories flooding back as the cold air of the room bit through his clothes. He was on the Artifact and had been protecting Hugh, Picard’s friend, from the Tal Shiar and their Zhat Vash commander, while they covered Picard and Dr. Asha’s escape. He remembered sheathing his sword, exchanging words with the Zhat Vash—and then she was there, stepping around from behind him into the pool of sickly greenish light that bathed him but left the corners of the room in shadow.
“Awake, freak?” she said softly in Rihan. Her accent was strange; he still couldn’t place it. She looked at him with a detached kind of interest that made his anger at her flare hotter, the rest of his memories slotting into place: the pain of her blows intermingled with the triumphant feeling of landing hits of his own, the spike of terror as he saw the flashing silver blades, the fiery agony as he moved to take their impact with his own body rather than let them hit Hugh. After that was only pain and darkness and, now, rage. He pulled against his bindings and bared his teeth at her, and said nothing. A small smile crawled from one side of her mouth to the other and was gone, but her dark, distant eyes didn’t change.
“Yes, I can see you’re back with us, now. Probably hurting a bit, no? You took two doses of poison from my little stingers, and though we’ve done what we can to revive you, there’s no quick fix for the pain, I’m afraid. But don’t worry,” she added, head tilting to one side in a way that put Elnor in mind of a reptile eyeing prey. “Soon you won’t even notice that pain. There are so many, many others I have to show you.” Another, larger knife appeared in her hand. Elnor hadn’t seen her retrieve it. Worry twisted his stomach for the first time. He did not know this woman, and knew the Zhat Vash only from stories of boogeymen told to frighten children. But she was well trained, and very real. He remembered the broken bodies of a dozen xBs lying strewn over the ground, saw the dead light in her eyes now, and suddenly understood the fear of dark stories parents told in the night. “Now. Where has the director gone?”
Hope flared hot in his chest. They didn’t have Hugh. They didn’t know where he was. That was why he was here, strapped down and threatened with a knife, and not rotting in a corridor somewhere. He still said nothing, but she must have seen the momentary spark of realization in his eyes, because she narrowed hers and leaned closer. “Don’t think so much of your use to me, boy; you are, for the moment, convenient, and that is all. If you don’t give me answers quickly, I will start extracting them from whomever is left alive aboard this cube while you watch.”
A heavy rumble trembled through the bowels of the ship, seeming far away and vaguely below them. The woman glanced away to her right, and Elnor became aware of movement in the thick shadows beyond the light: other people. “Engines,” someone said, and then a different person snapped, “That’s impossible, they’re gutted, they—”
“Silence,” the Zhat Vash commanded. “Go make yourself useful and find out what’s going on out there.” They were speaking a dialect Elnor didn’t recognize, but he was fairly sure he understood their gist. What it all meant, however, he had no idea; he’d thought this ship was derelict, and he apparently wasn’t the only one. He couldn’t wonder about it anymore, however; green light glinted off the knife in the woman’s hand again, cold metal pressing to his jaw, then skimming down his neck and parting his robes with almost no effort, leaving a trail of hot, welling pain behind. He breathed into it, drawing the sensation into himself, letting himself feel the pain so that he could more quickly go numb to it.
“Ah,” the woman murmured, watching him adjust to the discomfort. “So you don’t just wear the robes and the sword. Who are you, that the Qowat Milat should teach you? Are they so desperate for warm bodies these days they’ll take even boys so long as they’re pretty enough?” She lifted the knife to his face again, smiling. “Hm. Perhaps that is the bit of you that should go first—what do you think?” Sinking the tip of the blade into his jaw, she carved a slow, deliberate figure up his cheek; Elnor gritted his teeth against a cry of pain, momentarily intensifying the searing ache as his muscles flexed. He thought she might be cutting words into his skin. “I want to know," she said, conversationally, as she sliced into him, "where he went. The half-meat director. Where did you send him? Has he gone to sabotage the ship? I don’t think he would sacrifice his fellow dogs like that. He cares for them so deeply. I wonder, do you? Is that why you protected him? Would you change your life for theirs?” She paused, flicking little cuts across the bridge of his nose, so close to his eyes he couldn’t help but squeeze them shut instinctively. She had a beautiful, musical laugh. “Round up as many of the mutts as you can,” she said in a carrying tone. “And put them down. Kill another ten now. And ten more when I say.”
Elnor’s eyes flew open. “No!”
“Ah! You can speak!” Real delight reached her eyes, then. Elnor cursed himself. “And another ten,” she continued to her men, “for as long as it takes until this child gives us what we want. You know where he is, little sister,” she hissed in his face, the Qowat Milat word sounding sour in her voice. “And you’ll tell—”
A scream echoed faintly from somewhere, not very far away. And another. Her victorious expression darkened, and she turned away from him. “What the hell is happening out there? Where is Kodr?”
A doorway on the other side of the room opened, visible as a slice of light in the thick shadows, and another Romulan man stumbled in. “They’re attacking!”
“Who is?”
“The Borg!”
The Zhat Vash swore, rounding on Elnor again, plunging her knife straight into his upper arm. He screamed, choking it off as best he could; this close, he could feel her breath on his face, and she twisted the knife a little, fire consuming the whole left side of his body. “This is his doing,” she whispered sharply. “Isn’t it? He’s activated them, somehow. Where is he?”
He snarled at her, spit in her face. Shrieking, she pulled the knife out with a wet sound that seemed loud in his ears and sank the blade into his opposite shoulder; beneath the breathtaking pain, he felt his right arm go instantly limp in the binding. Tears mingled with the blood on his face, going cold almost as soon as he shed them. He couldn’t quell the trembling of pain and fear in his body, but he could keep his teeth clamped together, keep saying nothing, let her waste her fury and her time on him while Hugh...while Hugh…
“Commander, they’re trying to take back the Artifact, we should—”
“Where is he?” she demanded. Droplets of Elnor’s blood stood out dark on her pale cheek. Ringing silence filled the room—silence. No more machinery hum, no more rumbling of distant engines. Complete silence. “Find him!” she continued, shooting wild-eyed looks at the others. “Find him now. Kill anyone in the way—interrogate the Federation staff if you have to.”
“But the treaty—”
“Is void. This is a declaration of war. If this worm won’t tell us, we’ll find someone who will. Someone on this ship knows where he’s gone; there must be a control room we weren’t told about.” She hauled her knife out of him again with a sickening crack, more painful than it had gone in, wrenching a shuddering gasp from him against his will. “We will find him,” she told Elnor, breathing harder. “This won’t work. The Artifact is dead, all the drones on it are dead. You are protecting dead men, Qowat Milat. Is this what you want? To protect dead men and monsters?”
“You’ll never find him,” Elnor said, barely recognizing his own shaking voice. He swallowed. “He is where you cannot reach him.” The immense power hidden...this was what Hugh had meant. He’d activated the xBs somehow when he returned to the queencell. “And he is not a monster. You are.”
She shook her head. “Pathetic.” The green on her knife when she raised it again was now Elnor’s blood. He set his jaw and held her eyes, braced for the strike, hoping he had at least bought Hugh some time.
And then the entire ship came alive around them, the world listing sharply sideways, throwing the Zhat Vash and several others in the room off-balance. There was a roar of whirring power through the whole echoing cube, vibration Elnor could feel in his teeth as a power surge made some of those green eyes overhead pop into showers of sparks. The screaming outside the room intensified.
“We have to go,” one of her men said frantically, catching her by the shoulders. She shrugged him off just in time for the ship to right itself and an explosion to thunder through the corridor outside. “We have to go now.”
Cold rage filled her eyes when she looked back to Elnor; he slumped, bleeding heavily, in his bonds, but he managed to meet her eyes, to smile. She sneered and raised her knife again, as the man who’d tried to grab her, and half a dozen others, began to flee the room. Elnor saw fire flickering beyond the doorway, and then, silhouetted there, another figure.
“Get away from him.” The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the very walls of the ship, up through Elnor’s bones. The Zhat Vash covered her ears, ducking a little as she turned. Suddenly the doorway was crowded with people, and as they entered the circle of light, Elnor saw it was Hugh and a dozen or more xBs, most of them still encased in Borg suits and hardware. “Leave this place. Now.” The shadows in the room seemed to grow deeper, making Hugh’s eyes look black in his face. Relief and joy bubbled out of Elnor in a soft, desperate sound, and Hugh’s head ticked toward him mechanically; he regarded Elnor for a moment, and then the corners of his mouth curled up.
The Zhat Vash woman was already drawing her pistol, but the xBs swarmed her immediately. Disruptor fire burst twice, burning smoking holes in the bulkhead, and then fell silent as she screamed. Hugh closed the space to her in two strides and wrapped one hand around her throat, restraining her, his face set in an expression Elnor recognized; he’d given her a choice, and she’d chosen death.
The Voice came again; Hugh’s mouth moved, but the greater part of the sound did not come from him, seeming instead to shimmer in the air, thickening it. “This is over,” it said, as the xBs all closed in around her in a tight knot. Her screams pitched higher. None of the xBs made a sound. They simply, efficiently, took her apart.
Then Hugh was there, between him and the others, and Elnor focused on him instead. This close, Elnor could see that Hugh’s eyes really were black, all the way through. But when he spoke again, it was his voice alone, soft, sounding as he had when he’d pulled Elnor close and sworn to retake the cube. “It is over.”
He unlocked the restraints holding Elnor in place; Elnor’s legs almost immediately buckled, and Hugh hefted him up with greater strength than Elnor would have expected. Pain screamed through every part of him, his breath hitching sharply as he swallowed back more reflexive tears. Hugh’s arms around him were steady and warm, and Elnor clung to them, his vision greying at the edges. “We are here,” said the Voice. “You are safe.”