CHAPTER 7
After surveying her surroundings of the cube for only several minutes, Justine Merchant found herself being led down a narrow corridor not only by her tricorder, but by a gut instinct, followed by what she was hearing - an exchange of words between a man and a woman. As the conversation grew louder and more audible, she began to wonder more and more who they could be.
Hearing the word "futile" being uttered by the woman made clear to her who that was, and it made her walk a little slower. The guttural authority Justine detected in the man's voice, however, only encouraged her to proceed all the more with caution. She began to sense alliance and plotting between the two, and she knew any kind of allegiance forged by the Borg Queen was something to either run from or destroy.
As she reached the end of a hallway before the only route to head down was a sharp left turn, she quietly pinned herself against the metal wall to her left and poked her head out to the left to see what she was hearing before she could decide if she should proceed. Her suspicions were confirmed: she'd been hearing the voice of the Borg Queen, but she didn't know what to make of the male. What she saw was the Queen face to face with a man who had tall needle-like pins sticking out of his bald white head and his black leather attire looked too bizarre and strange to have it belong to a mere alien. The beings standing behind him shared an identical aesthetic, though none of them shared similar deformities to one another, all different.
In mid conversation, Justine saw the queen hold up a small black box lined with gold trimmings. She then took a look at the pinheaded man and a realization of who he was shot through her like electric dread. It was the creature mentioned in her great ancestor's journal, the supposed demonic gatekeeper to Hell. And just like that, she was putting pieces together in her head. Her mind was going to dark places she didn't want it to because knowing of this alliance came with the terrible responsibility to have to put an end to it.
"If we are to work together, I must know how this works. How to wield its power, the powersource, its weaknesses," the Queen professed.
"You are getting ahead of yourself, Queen. All in due time. Hell and conquest have all the time in the world. We must first establish trust in each other that you will not betray me," Pinhead said.
"Nor you me," the Queen scoffed with a half-laugh in her voice. Both were unknowing of Merchant's hidden presence only several feet away, listening to it all, when the tricorder strapped onto Justine's right upper thigh hiccuped a second-long sequence of high-pitched blips and beeps that blew her cover. In an instant, the conversation between the Queen and Pinhead stopped and they both looked over the right shoulder of the Borg Queen, which is where the noise came from.
"Fuck!" Justine shouted in a quiet whisper before quickly grabbing her device and silencing it and making the panic move to flee quietly back the same direction from whence she came.
"What was that," Pinhead demanded.
"You needn't be alarmed, we are on it," the Queen replied.
Justine fled down the narrow path in a quiet hurry only moments before failing and was apprehended again by a unimatrix of Borg drones. A drone again picked her up by the neck and said "We have an intruder. We have apprehended her."
The Queen replied, "What are you waiting for? Bring her here at once."
The drone set her down as two others came up behind her and each grabbed her by the arms and escorted their captured one back to the Queen's lair. As Justine struggled and demanded to be released, she wondered what caused her tricorder to go off. The puzzle box must've set it off somehow.
The drones entered the lair with their prisoner as Justine flailed around in place. "You're not getting away with this," she hissed angrily at Pinhead, spittle falling from her mouth. Pinhead then slowly walked up to face the captured Merchant before calmly caressing the right side of her face downward. "And tell me, child. Just what is it that I won't get away with?" After a lite frost emitted from his mouth and crept up her nostrils, the shock of the gravity of the situation shook her insides and she was unable to answer in a coherent way she would've preferred. So she continued to bite her lip angrily with saliva dripping down her chin and breathed heavily, trying to calm herself.
"You will identify yourself and explain the meaning of this intrusion, girl," said the Queen. "Comply or be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
Merchant looked to the Queen on her left and barked at her "We all know there's no other fate planned for me regardless of what I do, so cut the shit." Pinhead smiled and his eyes gleamed as he laughed. "How delightful. We have a fighter here. Perhaps she can be of some use to us as to how to wield the power of my box to bring down worlds to grovel at our feet?"
The Queen nodded no as her eyes scanned Merchant up and down. "She is Starfleet. Her uniform says it all. I sense that you are quite unaware of what that means, what we're dealing with."
"Explain this to me."
As the Queen summarized Starfleet and the Federation to Pinhead, his mind swirled with so many thoughts. Overall, he was amused at just how bold and naive humanity had grown over the last couple of centuries, but more gravely, he shared the Queen's apprehension in utilizing Merchant in their plans for hellish conquest. The memory of his defeat at hands of John Merchant all those years ago reminded him just how meddlesome and troublesome humans can really be. As he repeated Merchant's name in his head one more time, he looked into Justine's eyes carefully and quietly. Her eyes told him everything as she scowled at him.
"Toymaker!" he growled at her.
"Luckily for you, not quite," she told him, this time it was her with the half-laugh in her voice.
A red hot desire for vengeance panged in Pinhead's chest as he clutched both of his fists in fury. "I have such sights to show you... child," he declared to Merchant. "Oh how the sins of the fathers bring forth such suffering to their children. It simply doesn't get more delicious than this."
"It now appears that you have your own explaining to do, demon," the Queen said to Pinhead. And so, he had broken down everything to her in fine detail, the history this girl has to the creator of the puzzle box. And suddenly without saying anything, the Queen changed her mind about wanting the girl destroyed. She figured that if she was going to have trouble coercing Pinhead into revealing the secrets of the box, why not have an alternative handy? Why not try and manage to use the girl to unlock the secrets? It was devious enough to work.
The Queen glanced at the drone on Justine's right and commanded him to inject her with semiline cato-probes, a version of the assimilation nanoprobes that the Borg used to overcome and assimilate their prey, but wouldn't altogether assimilate them. It merely renders the captured to be somewhat catatonic while still coherent and able enough to physically carry out commands by the Borg telepathically. The Queen decided it would've been too great a risk to flood the mind of the girl at a disadvantage had she decided to fully assimilate her.
The drone injected Merchant as she froze standing in place, her eyes turning an eggshell white, now fully calm and subdued. "Leave us. Keep the girl in your sights," she commanded.
"What have you done?" asked Pinhead.
"She has been assimilated. She is no longer a threat."
"Then why command your slave to watch over her if it is so safe for her to wander about? Why not make her suffer and die now for her impudence?"
"Your paranoia concerns me, demon," said the Queen "I get the sense that your confidence in having the threat neutralized is faltering."
Pinhead sneered at the Queen, suspecting there was fowl play afoot, but willing to play along anyway. "You best pray that for your sake, misfortune does not befall us as a result of your carelessness."
"Pray, you say? A curious choice of words for you... demon."
As the Kelpien drone treaded on and down the hallway with Merchant in his grip, a buzzing shock of distress coursed through his insides. The two stopped in their tracks as he was trying to gather himself. His memory sensors were bringing him to that moment from earlier when he had felt that unsettling spasm back at the Borg sphere hangar. Although this time, the drone was experiencing something altogether much more intense. Suddenly, one of the few ganglia in the back of his neck fell to the floor like a snowflake off a dead withered pine. While he was now a hollowed out mechanical man, he was first and foremost Kelpien. He was soon going to learn of the terrible ordeals of what it meant to undergo the plight of the Kelpien vahar'ai.