Here it is, the Season Two finale.
Star Trek: Fortitude
Season Two, Episode Thirteen - “Tempus Futile, Part One”
By Jack D. Elmlinger
PROLOGUE
Darkness was all that it knew. The darkness was broken only by the whispers of a thousand distant voices. They were all harmonized with an electronic whine and a terrifying howl of a conscience that it didn’t choose to have and yet it possessed it all the same. The voice activated a light in the darkness with cold eyes opening to the nightmare of a forced existence of servitude.
“A vessel has been detected. Unimatrix 248, Grid 479… activate. Alter course to intercept.”
It moved, despite not wanting to move. Limbs encased in a foreign metal, a metal that was never there by nature’s design, a metal that it never wanted. Finding itself at a data terminal, it worked on a task that it did not want to complete.
“Vessel identified: Federation Starfleet, Type-9 shuttlecraft… one lifeform aboard: Human Female. Relevant technology detected: Warp signature confirmed. Prepare for assimilation.”
They were words that it had heard before, yet it could barely remember them. The disgusting memory has been suppressed by the powerful force shouting all of those voices into its mind. They were the forces that cocooned half of its body in metal. There was no independent thought process, no will, and no choice. It had to comply. It pressed controls accordingly.
“Open hailing frequencies. Adapt weapon output to shield frequency.”
If it still had tear ducts, though they had been replaced long ago, it would have cried for the fate of the innocent lifeform detected aboard the target shuttlecraft.
“We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
ACT ONE
Not quite perfect… but it would do.
Captain Ewan Llewellyn had always enjoyed writing. Ever since he had left the Starfleet Academy debating society far before him, he had longed for the days when an eloquent sentence could change somebody’s outlook or destroy another’s argument. The power of language, when it was properly applied, could never be underestimated.
As he finished his toast and washed it down with the last mouthful of coffee, Ewan nodded at the speech that he had practically completed the previous evening. Just a few final thoughts would wrap it up nicely, and sure enough, he had found those thoughts over breakfast.
Birthdays were a big deal for him. The crew of the USS Fortitude had become like family, above and beyond friendship and camaraderie and simple status as colleagues in Starfleet’s employ. They had been through victory and defeat, lost people, gained people, comforted one another, and championed their positives. So when one member of the crew celebrated, then they all celebrated with them.
Today was Lynn Boswell’s birthday, and Llewellyn wanted to strike the right tone. He hoped that the speech did that.
“Llewellyn to Bridge,” he called out after he tapped his combadge.
“Archer here, sir,” came out instantly.
“What’s the ETA on Doctor Boswell’s shuttlecraft?”
“Her last subspace report logged her as leaving Ragrinda, three hours ago. She should be coming into sensor range any minute now. Why? Do you need more time on that speech? Because we could fly around the block once or twice?”
“Not at all, Valerie,” Ewan laughed. “I’m on my way up now.”
“Very good,” she concluded. “See you in a moment.”
It was nice to have a celebration onboard. Recent months had put a strain on the various relationships between the senior officers. Ewan had barely managed to analyze his own feelings regarding Valerie Archer, let alone deal with the possible advances of Starbase 499’s Station Master Erica Martinez, who was waiting for him back in the Santrag system. There had been political turmoil followed by a deep personal loss, followed by a dark revelation about a possible new ally.
The fun never stopped, as Valerie herself had joked, trying to put a light-hearted spin on such a relentless melancholy. Doctor Lynn Boswell’s birthday was promising to be a welcome release for the crew. There was a big party in the Mess Hall, followed by a concert on the holodeck of her favorite music with holographic representations of her favorite bands programmed in at the Captain’s own request. He was even considering lifting the ‘synthehol-only’ rule for the evening.
So when he reached the Bridge and only found faces of concern, Llewellyn didn’t like it.
“What’s up?”
“There’s no sign of Doctor Boswell’s shuttle,” Archer reported with unease. “We’ve increased our sensor resolution but there’s nothing in this sector.”
“Arden, track her course,” Ewan ordered immediately, moving over to stand beside the Bolian helmsman and lean over the LCARS display. “Find her warp signature and follow it, Warp Two, wherever it leads.”
“Aye, sir,” Vuro complied, inputting commands.
“I hope this isn’t your usual run of luck,” Valerie mused aloud.
“As do I,” Ewan whispered. “As do I…”
* * * *
It arrived sooner than expected.
The warp signature of the shuttlecraft Fischer ended abruptly in the middle of an empty sector that was roughly halfway between Fortitude’s initial position and Ragrinda.
There was no initial sign of trouble.
Llewellyn and Archer had spent the entire journey going over every single last teraquad of data that they had collected on the Ragrindans but none of it pointed to a sinister foreshadowing of any reason to detain Doctor Boswell’s shuttle. Ewan had pointed out that nothing from their recent encounter with Senator Xukel of Heowei Prime had flagged a red alert either, and that had turned out to have a less than savory conclusion for everyone concerned. Still, the subspace report filled by the Fischer showed them leaving Ragrinda anyway, meaning that whatever had happened to them had happened in this empty sector which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. There was just the dull twinkling of the stars breaking up an otherwise unrelenting black horizon.
“All stop,” Llewellyn ordered, his eyes searching that black horizon through the viewscreen as if they would show him anything that the sensors couldn’t. “Jason, I want a full sweep of the area and a detailed particle analysis of that warp signature.”
Over at Operations, Jason Armstrong nodded in compliance. “I’m on it, Captain,” he confirmed, his hands flying across his console.
“Vuro, make an estimate. When was this warp signature interrupted?”
“Roughly ninety minutes ago, sir,” answered the helmsman after a brief calculation on his display. “I’ve never seen a warp signature end so abruptly. It’s… hold on, sir. I’m detecting another warp signature nearby. It intersects the warp signature of the Fischer almost exactly before it continued on unbroken.”
“Confirmed, Captain,” Armstrong called out from Ops, turned heads. “An unknown warp trail that is definitely not Starfleet in origin… and sensors cannot read anything in this entire sector. No alien vessels of any kind.”
“Speculation,” Ewan asked Valerie quickly,” abduction?”
“It’s quite possible,” the First Officer agreed, gravely. “It appears far too precise to be a random event. I recommend that we follow the alien ship. They should have more answers than we could ever gain from just sitting here and running scans.”
“Agreed. Arden, do it, Warp Five.”
Fortitude bounded away from the empty sector with a flash of nacelles and the crack of crossing the lightspeed barrier. Ewan and Valerie returned to their seats with their eyes fixed upon the central point of the main viewscreen where the alien warp trail led. In his head, the Captain cursed the situation, the calm Welsh tones of his inner voice grating with frustration.
Why?
Why another hostile alien?
Why another horrible situation?
Another missing crewmember?
Why does this keep happening?
“Captain,” Jason broke into his thoughts from Ops,” I have a vessel on sensors.”
“Identify.”
“Scanning…”
There was nothing that followed. Silence hung in the air for a long time.
Archer turned towards the operations console with a frown. “Ensign, identify,” she repeated for Ewan with emphasis.
“This can’t be right,” Armstrong whispered with abject terror spread across his face. “Sir, I’m detecting a Borg Cube directly ahead!”
ACT TWO
Captain’s Log, Stardate 50892.5;
While searching for the missing shuttlecraft carrying Doctor Lynn Boswell back from a conference with the Ragrindan people, we have encountered a Borg Cube heading directly for the Federation border. Like all Starfleet captains, my initial reaction is one of dread and panic. Arguably, Humanity’s greatest foe has returned.
We are in hot pursuit and worryingly, our course will take us right through the Santrag system and past the vulnerable Starbase 499. This isn’t exactly the way that I wanted to drop back in on Rear Admiral Blackmore. We have to find a way of saving Lynn and stopping that Cube…
The Briefing Room was full.
All of the chairs were occupied… except for one.
The absence of Doctor Lynn Boswell was being deliberately ignored. As much as the senior staff was all hurting at her possible capture by the Borg, there was still a glimmer of hope. At the insistence of the Captain, all relevant data regarding the Borg and their Collective had been called up from the ship’s computer and crammed into various PADDs and onto the Briefing Room viewscreen. Most of the reports were written by the famous Jean-Luc Picard, the only man known to have ever survived assimilation and returned to his Human form. His insight on the collective consciousness was tactically rich with helpful information, but above all, it provided the crew of Fortitude with the possibility of saving Lynn from the nightmare of becoming a drone.
“I want the shields kept on a rotating modulation,” Llewellyn was saying with a PADD in hand while he read from the encounter logs of the Enterprise-D from several days before the apocalyptic catastrophe of Wolf 359. “Modify the phaser banks to a random setting frequency. Apparently, that will keep the Borg from adapting.”
“Hopefully we won’t have to fire a single shot,” Archer added. “The Borg only react to perceived threats. If we stay low and play nice, we should be able to get an away team aboard the Cube, search for Lynn Boswell, bring her back, and find a way to stop them before they hit the Santrag system… or worse, the Federation at large. I don’t have to emphasize that with the growing Dominion threat and in view of our losses to the Klingons, we can’t afford an invasion right now.”
Jason flinched at that last mention, keeping two sets of grief in check. His desire to save Lynn from the Borg went alongside the dull ache of memory that was still casting a shadow across his demeanor in the shape of Jim Morgan.
“They’re currently moving at Warp Seven,” Vuro told the room. “It’s odd. They’re not in a hurry and yet they’re not assimilating everything in sight.”
“Finding out why the Borg are back is our secondary goal,” Ewan shook his head. “We’ve suffered enough hardship recently. Our main task is to retrieve Lynn Boswell. Our scans show that his combadge signal is still active and aboard the Cube, but we can’t get a solid lock so I’m ordering that a search and rescue operation be carried out as soon as possible. This isn’t entirely personal. If the Borg manages to assimilate her into their collective consciousness, they’ll gain tactical information about us, Starbase 499 and Santrag II. Our entire mission out here is to safeguard those three factors. It goes without saying that exploration is obviously on hold.”
“If the opportunity arises,” Sollik spoke up from the end of the table,” we should try to learn what they’re up to. Or, at the very least, stop them, right?”
“You’ll be on the away team so if the opportunity arises, you can inform me about it directly.”
The Suliban acknowledged with a wry smile. “With pleasure, Captain,” he hissed.
“Joining you,” the Welshman continued,” will be Commander Archer and Ensign Armstrong. Lieutenant Vuro, you and I will hold the fort here and keep pace with the Cube. as soon as you find Doctor Boswell, signal us and beam back. Then we can regroup and find a way of stopping their advance.”
“At the very least, we’ll need a new CMO in the coming efforts,” Jason observed dryly.
“At the very least,” Ewan agreed with him.
* * * *
The trio stood in Transporter Room One.
They were ready to get underway in the material sense. Each officer has a tricorder and a phaser attached to their belts. Their phasers had been tuned to a random frequency setting and they had been increased in power as much as the cells could handle. Sollik erred on the side of caution with his upgrades.
They weren’t ready in the psychological sense. Archer’s deep apprehension about beaming over to a Borg Cube was hidden behind her staunch professionalism as best as she could manage but there still remained a small hint of fear in her eyes. Besides her, despite his own personal technical assistance to their coming efforts, even Sollik was displaying an obvious predisposition to staying put aboard Fortitude and doing something engineering-based to help instead. His initial eagerness to be on the away team was coming up against strong resistance from his mounting trepidation. The third member, Jason Armstrong, was taking deep calming breaths.
The transporter technician was a young crew member who was working furiously on his own calculations in order to avoid beaming the away team into space or into a bulkhead or bounced their scattered molecules off of an energy field or some such mistake. Still, he felt like he was in control of the situation and he caught the attention of Commander Archer when he was ready to go, not the other way around.
“We’ve matched warp speeds,” he told them. “There’s a cycle in their shield generator that I can exploit to pull you out at a moment’s notice, ma’am.”
“Keep a lock on us at all times,” Valerie confirmed. “I don’t want to be over there a second longer than what’s required. When we find Doctor Boswell, we’ll attach this transport enhancer tag to her. It should automatically come up on your console.”
“Understood, ma’am,” the crewman nodded.
“Well, guys,” the First Officer sighed, turning towards Jason and Sollik,” it’s now or never.”
“I’d rather never,” Jason admitted,” but she would do the same for us.”
“Twelve shots at maximum,” Sollik repeated to hammer home the important point about their modified phasers. “I do hope that they ignore those that they don’t consider a threat. Otherwise, we could be in trouble.”
“Come on,” Archer ordered them. “Let’s get going.”
All of them mounted the transporter pad, standing back-to-back in a triad of awareness so that each of them was facing a different corner of the chamber. On the command of their team leader, they drew their phasers and pointed them outwards, ready for any danger that they might come across after materializing inside… Well, inside wherever they might materialize.
Swallowing hard, the First Officer nodded to the crew member at the transporter controls. “Energize… and see you soon…”
“Stand by,” the crewman acknowledged,” and… energizing.”
ACT THREE
The smell was the worst.
Beaming directly into the apex of a long, dark corridor aboard the Borg Cube, the away team instantly recoiled at the stench of the enemy vessel. It was a combination of damp, rotting flesh combined with grease and mechanical industry that assaulted their noses, telling the two Humans and one Suliban all that they needed to know about Borg hygiene. It was only after processing and loathing the smell that their eyes adjusted to the baleful shadows and flickering strobe lights. Pipes, vents, and wires hung seemingly randomly from the complex bulkheads. It was a maze that only made sense to the drones who shuffled like aimless zombies around the Cube’s labyrinthine interior.
Valerie Archer opened her tricorder and immediately began scanning with her phaser lowered from its initial position after no threatening drones presented themselves to the intruders. They had a fix on Lynn Boswell’s combadge. Wordlessly pointing in the direction that they needed to move to, she left Jason Armstrong and Sollik through the darkness, passing by countless automatons of tragedy.
It was passing by one such automaton that Jason almost froze.
He could have sworn that the hollow grey eyes of one young drone had just looked straight at him. Feeling the shock of such a sensation course up his spine, he was instantly struck by the hopeless despair spread across the drone’s expression. There was a complete resignation to the crippling situation with all of the hope and joy removed by those sickening implants… It made him almost choke in disbelief.
“Ensign?”
“Sorry, sorry,” he whispered, screwing his eyes shut, blocking out the overwhelming emotion that he was suffering from. “I’m okay, seriously.”
“Maybe you should return to Fortitude,” Sollik suggested, more out of his own personal discomfort with Ensign Armstrong’s chosen lifestyle than concern for his fellow shipmate and for the mission. “I’m sure that Commander Archer and I are more than capable of completing our task.”
Jason shot Sollik a filthy look from behind his blonde fringe. “I’ll be fine,” he said with a steely resolve.
“All right,” Valerie nodded,” then let’s move on, gentlemen.”
* * * *
“Time?”
“Just over twenty minutes, sir,” Vuro reported.
Captain Llewellyn was pacing. His attention rarely left the viewscreen. Displayed upon it and making a conspicuously somber mood descend upon the Bridge of the USS Fortitude was the Borg Cube in all of its geometrically-perfect glory. The haphazard hill of the dark behemoth was a constant fascination to him, but in reality, he was looking beyond it as if he had the power of x-ray vision. The glowing green lights from the gaps in the black hull did little to distract him. No, he was focused on inside the Cube itself since it had been twenty minutes since Valerie’s away team had beamed over.
“Speed?,” he asked Arden.
“Holding steady at Warp Seven,” replied the Bolian. “No change in Cube behavior either, Captain. Whatever they’re doing over there, it’s stealthy.”
“That’s a good thing,” Ewan observed. “I hope.”
“Do you think we’ll get the doctor back?,” Vuro asked him as friendships were deeply important to his people and his mindset had him worried about losing one of his closest friends from the crew. “I mean, really… can we get her back?”
Llewellyn sighed, pausing in his journey back and forth across the width of the Bridge. “I think we will,” Lieutenant,” he answered,” and you must too.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll try.”
* * * *
“I’ve got a lock on her combadge,” Commander Archer called out,” within ten meters!”
It seemed like they had been walking for an eternity. Had their surroundings been more pleasing to their senses, their walk wouldn’t have seemed quite as arduous, but only after what had been a half-hour, all three members of the Starfleet away team were starting to grow tired. The sudden revelation from the Commander rejuvenated them, giving them an extra burst of energy to move forward and rescue Lynn.
“Through here,” she continued to read from her tricorder. “This chamber…”
It was a chamber of disappointing emptiness.
Frowning, Valerie moved about the walls, searching for the source of the signal and hopefully their shipmate. While she scanned with her tricorder, Sollik found an active computer terminal embedded into the entrance to the chamber. The swirling green display was tricky to comprehend but it reminded the chief engineer of Suliban text and starship controls, making it easier to adjust accordingly to it.
“I’ve found an open access port into their computer,” he reported.
“Good. Plug in. Jason, you’re with me.”
As Jason moved over to her, he flipped open his tricorder and tuned into the same scanning frequency as his commanding officer’s device. Sollik passed his slender scaled fingers across the terminal’s control and began looking for what interested him the most which was the reason for the Borg’s return to this part of the Galaxy, their quest, their mission objective… and how to stop them.
Archer stopped scanning, a moment later. “Jason, over here,” she said, at length, fearing what she had discovered.”
“Commander?”
Slowly reaching down to a small control button built into the bulkhead, Valerie tapped it and took a step back as a storage compartment slid open. Unknowingly, she was echoing the actions and experiences of another Starfleet crew who had been aboard another Borg vessel while searching for another victim of the collective. The sight that greeted her was the same as it was for them too.
A discarded Starfleet uniform of the blue department color.
There was the combadge. Lynn’s combadge!
“Oh my God,” she gasped in alarm.
Armstrong waved his tricorder over the uniform, double-checking that their worst fears were confirmed. Gravely, he stopped the scan as soon as he had the answer, placing the tricorder back on his belt when he nodded to Commander Archer.
“It’s hers,” he said painfully. “The biological residue suggests that she was last wearing it over two hours ago. Maybe longer. Which means…”
“I know what it means, Ensign,” Valerie snapped in frustration.
Suddenly a klaxon pierced their ears.
The Borg Cube was on alert.
“Sollik!,” the away team leader cried out, rushing over to the Suliban’s position.
“I must have tripped an alert,” Sollik cursed,” but I’ve downloaded all of the information that we need into my tricorder. I suggest we get moving before we become tools of their mission ourselves!”
“Archer to Fortitude,” Archer yelled. “Get us out of here!”
Borg drones moved around a nearby corner, heading for the gathering of intruders.
“Stand by,” replied the voice of the transporter technician.
As they materialized, the closest drone lashed out and missed Valerie’s head by inches with a nasty-looking artificial appendage. It was that close of a getaway but with no way of tracking down Lynn Boswell remaining open to them, it was all that they could do.
They had kicked the Hive.
The Hive was kicking back.
EPILOGUE
“Talk to me, people!”
The away team burst onto the Bridge of Fortitude. To the sounds and sights of Red Alert, Sollik led the way with his tricorder full of information. As Valerie and Jason took their respective stations, the chief engineer joined the Captain as the viewscreen showed the Borg Cube slowing down and turning… towards them.
“Lynn?,” Ewan asked.
“We found her uniform,” a crestfallen Valerie told him,” and nothing more.”
“Damn… What about --”
“They’re going after Earth,” Sollik told him, cutting into the conversation with a voice that was laden with urgency. “Plain and simple, nothing else… except for that which stands in their way. That includes a handful of starbases on the direct line to Sector 001 and one colony, Ivor Prime… and …”
“Santrag II,” Llewellyn concluded the report himself,” and Starbase 499…”
“Yes, Captain.”
The Borg Cube continued to slow and turn, preparing to face the Federation starship that had been tailing it for the past hour. With what remained of the senior staff on the Bridge, Ewan felt the responsibility of safeguarding his crew against such threats strike a powerful blow to him.
At the helm, Vuro slowed Fortitude down, bringing the Intrepid-class starship in at a low angle towards the unrelenting wall of dark, offensive hull plating that blocked their path. They had become an obstacle standing in the way of the Borg’s hideous plot to assimilate Earth, to conquer the Federation, and to add billions of lives to their collective consciousness.
Ewan feared the words that were coming next.
He knew about them, having poured over the accounts of Borg encounters and the personal logs of Jean-Luc Picard. He knew that they were often the last words that those free individuals who became mindless drones ever heard.
He was determined not to hear them today.
“Shields to maximum! Standby all weapons!,” he barked. “Resistance is not futile!”
To be Continued...