Dawson and the other survivors pushed into the middle of their shelter, closer to the pile of fire heated rocks and listened with unease and suspicion as Lerx answered their questions about the Malkin's bizzare proposal.

"Help me understand." Vail said, holding out her empty palms. "You want to use us as batteries?"

Lerx looked at her. "Engines would be a better analogy. Even that falls short of the mark." What we are suggesting is a fusion of our strengths, for our mutual survival."

Jane narrowed her eyes at Lerx. "But you did say that you'd be using our bodies as a source of power."

"In the short term, yes." Lerx replied.

Marzetti, who kept his hands busy threading fibers into a loop of a snowshoe. "Why not use one of those creatures that killed Johnson?"

"It's not merely biochemical reactions that we require." Lerx said. "The interaction of our catoms is similar in many respects to the synapses of your brains. We need to bond with a sentient being that has enough neuroelectric activity to power our catoms. Animals will not suffice. If you help us we can help you by allowing our catoms to inhance your immune systesm and able you to adapt to this world's aggressive diseases." He then pointed to Jane's wounded leg. "They would also speed your recovery from injuries."

"So what's the worse case scenario?" Dawson asked.

"Death." Lerx said.

"The answer is no." Vail said.

"Please reconsider while we have the strenght to control the process of the fusion." Lerx said.

"We've made our decision." Dawson said. "We are going to leave this frozen wasteland and head towards the equator...whichever direction that is."

"Then we all will absolutely die." Lerx said.

At that, the officers of the USS Thunderchild, left their Malkin counterparts.

A few days later, during their journey south, the survivors passed another interminable night huddled for warmth inside a crude shelter, which they had insulated from the wind by burying it inside a snow drift. Rows of metal poles and sheets of taut fabric lashed together kept their fresh excavation from imploding on them while they slept. It didn't keep the could out, thoough. Drafts of air so frigid that they felt like razors slipped through the gaps in the shelter and always seemed to find Fiona Jane, no matter how deep in the huddle she hid herself. She dreamed of the only thing she truly cared about: Earth, so far away now, farther than she'd ever imagined it would be. When the planet exploded and sent everyone in seperate directions, she and the others had landed on this frozen planet. According to their chronometer's the year was some time in the 3rd century. She assumed it had been damaged in the crash but it didn't matter because they were on some planet far from Federation space.

The next morning, all traces of their camp had been cleaned up, stowed away and hefted onto their backs for the continuing march toward the equator. Dawson returned from checking and collecting traps, which he put out each night in hope of snaring a few small rodents to sustain them another day. Unfortunately, he returned empty handed this time. He packed away the traps, and Vail led the team onward, into a landscape concealed by dense, spinning flurries of falling snow.

The group moved in a single file with Jane in the back, doing her best to keep up but knowing full well that she was slowing them down.

The survivors hugged the coast line rather than try to scale the rugged slopes and peaks of the barren arctic landscape. As a result, their journey often seemed to entail long periods of little to no forward progress, as they treked parallel to their course, and occasional periods of backtracking, when the shoreline switched backaround one body of water to another.

A few hours of camp and less than two hours shy of nightfall, they found themselves circumnavigating a frozen narrow fjord. Dawson started breaking a trail across the ice sheet.

Vail shouted at him. "Dawson, what the hell are you doing? Trying to get us killed?"

"It's less than a kilometer across." Dawson said. "But it's got to be at least nine kilometers long. It'll take hours to go the long way around, but if we take the shortcut, we can reach those trees and still have time to set traps before dark."

"That's a saltwater fjord. There's no guarantee it's frozen solid all the way across or that the ice is thick enough to hold your weight. If you feel like taking a bath in water that'll shock you dead in less than thirty seconds, be my guest."

Dawson reversed course and waved Vail ahead on the original trail around the fjord. On either side of the fjord, high cliffs of bare, black rock ascended into the violet sky as the small group of survivors marched on.

Meanwhile, Lerx had sacrificed the corporeal bonds of his body to preserve the integrity of his memory and awareness, and now those, too were starting to slip forever away from his grasp.

"I'm losing myself." He shared with the combiner.

Their communion had been winnowed to for voices. Lerx was the strongest, with only Nese as his close equal. Ranku and Domty clung to vestiges of coherence, but their thoughts had become increasingly disjointed as they faded.

All four knew that they were dim shadows of their former selves, but the quality of their past lives now eluded them. They wandered together through lightless catacombs of twisted metal and shattered stone, always near one another, like bodies united in deep space by a weak but undeniable gravity.

"NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" Dawson shouted. "We have to keep moving forward. Don't you get it?"

"We'll die without help. We have to go back." Vail said.

"Are you suggesting we bond with the Malkins?" Jane asked.

"What choice do we have? Lerx said that the catoms would help us survive famine and fight of disease."

"If we're lucky." Dawson said. "If we're not then we're dead."

"We'll be dead anyway." Vail said. Without them we're dead for certain but there's a chance we could live."

The others exchanged looks and gave Vail the agreeing nod. Vail then looked around for Dawson, to confirm his assent to the plan. The first thing she saw were Dawson's abandoned snowshoes. Her eyes followed the deep ragged bootprings that led away from them to the water's edge.

"Damn it." Vail said. "Dawson's losing it." They all stumbled over to him.

"Casey, stop." Vail said. "Put your gear back on."

Dawson ignored them and kept walking toward the water. Finally, Dawson turned and aimed his phaser at them. "Don't come any closer."

"Calm down." Vail said. "We just..."

A phaser beam lashed out and struck the ground at their feet. They all recoiled and halted. Jane slowed her own approach and then stopped at a distance.

Standing ankle deep in the frothing surf, Dawson looked like a wild animal dressed in human clothing. His face was gaunt and his eyes though sunken in their sockets, bruned with feral desperation. Behind massive clouds of exhaled breath, he shivered violently, and his jaw chattered loudly. The tips of most of his fingers were black and blistered with frostbite almost to the first knuckle. Marzetti was amazed the man could still hold a phaser in his condition, let alone fire it.

"I won't go back." He said, his voice breaking into a near hysterical pitch. "I can't. Too far. Too cold. I won't go back."

"Casey, please. Put down the phaser and come with us. It's the only way for us to survive."

"Not for me." Dawson said.

In a fluid motion, he flipped the phaser around and stuck the discharge node in his mouth. He pressed the firing stud and a flash of light and heat disintergrated most of his head.

The weapon fell from his hands. His decapitated body collapsed and fell backward into the pounding surf.

Marzetti and Vail stood in silence for a minute and watched the waves was over Dawson's corpse. Then Marzetti waded out to the body, retrieved the phaser and a few items from the body and returned. Vail felt a pang of regreat at leaving Dawson unburied. She interred her guilty feelings instead. With no food left and temperatures dropping daily, she and the others could no longer aford to be sentimental; death was a simple reality in the hard land of winter.

Concealed beneath a deep blanket of snow, the shape of the terrain had become unfamiliar to Vail's eyes. She hoped that Marzetti's wilderness combat training would enable him to find the entrance to the Malkins' buried laboratory.

The effort and the exhaustion, the hunger and the pain, they all blurred together as Vail forced her aching muscles to go through the motions of taking one step and then another. Her eyes felt like kead and an overpowering desire for rest sapped her will to continue. She was all but ready to collapse face first into the snow when a hand yanked her forward.

"I found it." Marzetti said. "The tunnel's pretty slick but we can make it down."

The three of them dumped their backpacks and huddled around a cave in the snow. It looked like an enlarged version of a spider's lair. The sides of the opening were sheathed in ice and dusted with clinging snow that had gathered in a long, shallow slope at the bottom. Vail peered cautiously over the edge anddown the icy incline.

They then slid down the slope and into the dark room. Jane looked around the room. "Where do you think the Malkins are?"

"LERX?" Vail called.

No answer. Vail called out again and her voice echoed several times. All was heard was her echo and the wailing wind outside. The three of them turned around towards the slope that led outside and saw a specter looking back at them. It was barely thereat all, a ghostly approximation of a Malkin's shape, as if it was made of smoke.

Unable to mask the fear choking her voice, Vail squeaked. "Lerx?"

An electric jolt spiked through their minds and rooted them to the floor. Then a voice, feminine, malevolent and invincible, whispered inside their thoughts as a chill like death crusted the trio's bodies and faces with a delicate layer of frost.

Nese.

Pinpricks of cold fire became unbearable stabs of pain across every square centimeter of their bodies. They wanted to scream and run but they couldn't. There was nowhere for their agony to go, so it rebounded in on itself, creating a feedback loop of suffering that drowned out every other sensation. Vail kept expected to pass out, to implode under the strain but Nese would let her mind shut down. Nese wouldn't let her escape, she just attacked relentlessly.

"No," Vail raged. "I won't become...a...cy...Borg."

The End