Diamond 812
Diamond Class Assimilation Platform
Near Titan
─•~:~•─
Rain raised her rifle, shot a full magazine through a drone that might once have been a Vulcan, and then continued running down the massive corridor of the Borg Diamond. She had learned her lesson from a year ago on Bath'lor. She was fully armoured up – wearing the same style of Molotok that the XOF operators with her were wearing – and was allowing her genetically augmented senses to fully take in everything around her, even while the Engine in her mind drowned the background in white noise.
The silent carbines wielded by the equally silent Ninjas cut a dozen more drones apart, and the Borg in front of the group of fifty fell apart in grotesque piles of circuitry, blood, and wires. An exceedingly small part of Rain felt her usual guilt about killing.
Some of these drones were likely as conscious about their existence as Virnas was. But the Engine, and her own rage, suppressed her guilt brutally. Revenge was still the only thing on Rain's mind.
The group began advancing down the hallway, when a mysterious new drone moved behind them, almost faster than Rain's eyes could track.
An Operator behind her turned to fire at the drone, but she was stabbed through the stomach as a nano-metal blade pierced the XOF armour that the operator was wearing.
The drone decloaked, and the Borg Queen offered an evil smile to Rain, "Hello"
Before the Queen had even finished speaking her words, Rain had her rifle up with a clear sight picture and squeezed a half magazine burst at her.
The Queen disappeared into the dark hallway, and Rain's wedges only found the shattered metal of the dead operator, lighting up the hallway with impact sparks.
The Operators quickly drew in close to one another and formed a tight circle. Obviously, the Queen could move faster than they could, and their only chance would be to form a tight perimeter that she couldn't penetrate.
Rain's helmet started running through visual spectrums to try to pick up her adversary. Low light came first, followed by thermals, then phonographic sonar, and finally three-dimensional motion trackers.
But Rain found nothing, and she felt her frustration mounting as the circle slowly advanced up the hallway. To Rain's right, a plasma bolt erupted from the darkness and shattered the helmet of another Operator. Before his headless body could hit the ground, the circle fired back in the direction of the bolt, but failed to find a target.
Frustrated, Rain dropped to a knee and hit several commands into her wrist-comm. An HK Drone floating behind the circle shot out hundreds of nano-cables across the hallway, and she linked the feed into her helmet faster than her fingers could type the commands. After a few seconds, Rain was able to get a hard lock on the Queen, and she issued a fast series of commands to the circle.
The Operators spread out in an even line, and as one unit unleashed a salvo of tritanium into the alcove that the Queen was hiding behind. The wedges shredded the alcove apart, and Rain allowed herself some brief satisfaction in watching Her Majesty take hits to her mysterious armoured body.
Before the operators could move in for the kill, a new transporter beam formed behind the HK Drone, and Rain watched in horror as an assimilated Gorn crushed the drone beneath his armoured foot. The average Gorn was not quite as large or as heavy as a Kinshya Sword Abbot – standing at six foot two and weighing four hundred pounds – but the added mass of Borg components added two feet of height and two hundred pounds of weight. The Borg Gorn was further augmented with all manner of mounted weaponry, and a pair of shoulder mounted phaser cannons shot out furious orange bolts into the circle.
The Operators quickly scattered and found cover where they could, but the Gorn's phaser cannons were cutting through their light Molotok armour. They shot back, firing endless rounds towards their new adversary, but the Gorn's own armour proved to be equal to his firepower, and the tritanium wedges bounced harmlessly away. And given their nature as a Spec-Ops unit, XOF lacked any heavy weaponry of their own.
The Grizzly's were too far away, and there wasn't time or space for Rain to fall back.
She instead took a cue from Mark, and decided to gamble. Opening her wrist-comm, she entered a series of commands. The process took longer – she was still hard locked to Avalon – but after a few seconds, Rain was able to clear the hard locks and link herself into Repulse. She cued up a pre-set command, and cried out – against doctrine – to her Ninjas.
"Cover!" she screamed, as she threw herself into a ball and tried to make herself as small as possible.
Seconds after, the pre-set command executed, and a single quantum torpedo from Repulse was beamed into the hallway, about fifteen feet from where the Gorn was standing. The command was simple. Once the torpedo – six feet long and weighing two hundred pounds – fully materialised, a snap detonation sequence activated at 30% yield.
Quantum torpedoes were the apex of Starfleet's anti-ship weaponry. Developed two years before the Dominion War – ironically as anti-Borg weaponry – the quantums were simply awe inspiring in their destructive capabilities. A zero-point energy reactor manipulated quantum fields to amplify explosions on a scale anything past the anti-matter chambers of photon torpedoes. Defiant had cracked Chin'toka nearly in half with a volley during the war. The Grey Ghost Enterprise had slaughtered a Borg Cube with three quantums during the Sol Incursion.
And Rain felt her senses overwhelm with the violent destruction she had just unleashed. The Gorn, the deck he was standing on, and one hundred meters in every direction, disappeared into a blue tinged field of light. Seconds later, the blast wave hit Rain and the operators like an asteroid, and the remaining forty of them were thrown back and off their feet, as was the Queen standing to the right of where the Gorn used to exist.
Rain got to her feet slower than expected, and she looked over at the destruction unleashed by the quantum torpedo. The explosion tore open a hole in the deck one hundred feet wide, and showers of sparks from damaged conduits flashed little specs of light in the dark hallway. The only thing left of the armoured Gorn were pieces of metal, stained with purple blood.
But behind Rain, over half the operators were dead, dying or down. The survivors – wounded as they were in turn – were trying to do what they could for their fallen Ninjas, but it was clear that Rain's assault element was no longer combat effective. She was about to issue orders to the remaining Ninjas, when she was again knocked off her feet, this time by a blunt object.
The Queen – also wounded – started walking towards Rain with a large section of hull metal in her one remaining hand. "You are," She said, with blood filling her otherwise cybernetic mouth, "Very, very frustrating."
Rain raised her rifle and emptied a full magazine of tritanium into the Queen in desperation, but the wedges again bounced harmlessly away from her armoured body. Rain tossed aside her rifle and fired dozens of shots from her assault phaser, but her blue beams weren't any more effective. The Queen continued to shuffle towards her, limping but refusing to stop.
Rain stood up and shouted to the surviving Operators, "Fall back!"
They turned as quickly as they could, and three men turned again and fired a covering salvo for their fellow Ninjas. One hundred and fifty wedges of tritanium, flying each nearly at the speed of light, slammed into the Queen's armoured body, but again failed to penetrate and kill her.
The Queen raised the piece of metal in her right hand, and slammed it down on the Operator in front of her, slicing him in half from his left clavicular. The Operator to his right drew his own assault phaser and fired six shots at her head, but yet again failed to achieve any meaningful results. The Queen raised her left hand, and an assimilation tubule shot out and penetrated the second Operator's thin neck armour, dropping him down to the deck in a sickening sound of a choked scream.
The final Operator, realising he needed to fall back too, set a det-pack into the deck, and ran as fast as he could to re-join Rain. He hit the detonator on his wrist-comm, and Rain felt a slightly less intense blast wave push her forward.
She looked back, and saw to her horror that the Queen was still coming towards her. Just what will it take to kill her?! She asked herself.
"Keep moving. We'll regroup at the vinculum chamber." She ordered, as she continued running down the dark hallway. She would be able to come up with a plan to kill this hateful bitch, but she needed time.
And time was something Rain didn't have.
