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Chapter 3: Deluge
On the bridge of the Imperial Star Destroyer Assassin, Captain Jol Marten paced from station to station, impatiently muttering under his breath. A short, pudgy man, Marten wore a perpetually pompous pout, as a man who had once envisioned himself in a high station of life. His nose, miniscule compared to his obese face, always pointed away from the deck.
Marten had been assigned this position only two weeks before. He already hated it. Commander of the fleet patrolling the Kessel system was a dead-end job and was invariably the last chapter in a flag officer's career. One Imperial-class Star Destroyer, a few older Victory-class cruisers, and a dozen Dreadnoughts were his meager armada. There was no possibility of combat. Only the occasional search and seizure of a smuggler's freighter broke the monotony of flying endlessly through the system, trying to catch one of the dozen of illegal spice shipments that left Kessel every week.
As Marten finished his uninterested walk around of the bridge stations, he summoned his second-in-command to the empty view station on the port side of the bridge. His executive officer, Commander Pell Vargas, a man of more average height and build, rolled his eyes when he was sure Marten wouldn't see him. He readied himself to listen to the captain's daily rant.
"I simply cannot believe this, Vargas," started Marten, just loud enough for several other bridge officers to hear. "An Imperial Starfleet Captain of my skills and experience wasting away here in the back end of space. Those clowns on Coruscant have the temerity to stick me, Jol Marten, in such a worthless position, guarding such a backward system? Nobody wants to go to Kessel. It's its own protection. This is such a waste of my intelligence."
Vargas' expression never changed. He so longed to put his captain onto the deck with a single blow, but he had no desire to completely end his own career just yet. Although Marten was incompetent and annoying, he now outranked Vargas, and Vargas had to accept the position he'd been given.
Vargas had once been a captain in Admiral Ozzel's fleet. Vargas felt he had been a very good captain, and he had some friends in high places on Coruscant. However, they couldn't protect him from the court-martial. Vargas had called Ozzel an "ignorant buffoon" when the admiral ignored a critical report on suspected Rebel activities. Ozzel, notorious for his pride, lack of tolerance, and his own friends on Coruscant, did his best to have Vargas drummed out of the Starfleet and sent to Kessel not as a guard, but as an inmate worker. Vargas' friends were able to talk the tribunal down to a rank reduction of Lieutenant Commander and assignment as first officer for the small fleet guarding Kessel. Strangely enough, Vargas had not since heard from his so-called friends.
Instead of voicing his true feelings, Vargas simply said, "Sir, there is always the smuggling problem that must be dealt with. Its continued existence is a black eye for the Empire." Vargas wondered what would happen if he simply drew his blaster and shot off Marten's tongue. The crew would probably applaud him, help him eject Marten out an airlock, and tell Command it had been an accident.
Marten pursed his lips. He didn't expect any different response out of Vargas. His first officer was arrogant, but not stupid enough to question the orders from headquarters. Marten found it annoying and insulting that his subordinate dared to remind him of his duty. However, he chose to let this minor incident slide.
Marten had very little respect for the man, and desired to waste as little energy as possible worrying over Vargas' opinion of him. Without another word, the round captain waddled back toward the bridge stations, watching, with little interest, the mundane tasks of each of his people.
*
The planetoid Kessel wasn't much to behold. Relatively small and misshapen, it was barely even a planet. However, despite Marten's uneducated statements to the contrary, it contained many rare and valuable minerals and spices, and was thus a hub of both interstellar commerce and interstellar crime. Currently controlled by the Empire, many large syndicates would sell their souls to command the harsh, cold chunk of rock.
One dangerous yet helpful feature of Kessel was its proximity to The Maw. Although the stellar material being pulled into the black holes made a spectacular lightshow in the Kessel sky, the nearness of the ravenous spatial anomalies was a threat to any shipping vessels that dared venture too far from official shipping lanes. It was for this reason that no one had ever suspected, nor desired to investigate, the possibility of a secret base inside the deadly phenomenon.
Even when the nearby patrol ships and freighters spotted over a dozen Borg cubes suddenly appearing from the Maw's edge, none could have guessed their origin.
The fleet of cube ships approached Kessel at sublight speed, a herd of juggernauts ready to crush anything in their way. In every ship within range, and in the ground-based sensor stations on Kessel itself, scanner techs triple-checked their instruments for malfunction. Some simply froze in fear.
They all shared the same thought: there was no way the readings could be real. It must have been a sensor malfunction. As each scanner technician contacted their communications officer to request confirmation from the other emplacements in the nearby space, they learned the frightening truth.
It was no malfunction. There was indeed a fleet of very large, ominous ships approaching.
If any needed further confirmation, it came suddenly over every communication channel:
"We are the Borg. You will surrender yourselves to us. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
The cargo freighters and civilian ships fled quickly, many jumping to lightspeed without even waiting for their navigational computers to plot safe hyperspace jumps. The nearest Imperial patrol ships, two Dreadnoughts and a Victory Star Destroyer, were all that stood between the Borg and the planetoid.
The commanders of the three ships frantically ordered defensive shields and weapons batteries brought online while simultaneously ordering their officers to call the remainder of the fleet for assistance. They had all received a general fleet briefing on these "Borg" creatures, but had never expected to run into them here, of all places. Nor had they expected there to be such a large fleet of the alien vessels, all coming for them.
They were given no time to threaten the Borg away. The three cubes at the front of the armada lashed out with their force beams and cutting lasers. The two Dreadnoughts, not as heavily shielded as the Star Destroyer, were immediately cut open, the breaches in their hulls venting atmosphere into the cold, empty space. Crew members that had not been vaporized in the blasts were also ejected out the cracks, flailing wildly and trying to breath the air that didn't exist.
The next strikes blew out the power plants in the smaller ships. Their lights flickered and died out before they could even get off a single shot. The Dreadnoughts, now without power, began to drift away with the momentum thrust upon them by the Borg weapons. They were dead in space, and any of their crew that had survived the initial attacks would follow shortly.
The Star Destroyer's shields absorbed the first two blasts, but the sheer force threw the ship to starboard. The battleship's shields were holding, but just barely. As the ship's helmsman desperately tried to force the lumbering vessel through evasive maneuvers, the gunnery crews unloaded their turbolaser batteries into the three attacking cubes.
The laser blasts exploded on contact with the cubes' surfaces, but caused no damage.
The Star Destroyer's captain held on desperately to a console, barking orders at the bridge crew. "Did you get the message out to the fleet?" he shouted to the comm officer.
"Yes sir!" cried the officer. "They're on their way!"
The captain gritted his teeth. The quickness with which the Dreadnoughts were dispatched jarred his nerves, but he forced himself to remain as cool and collected as possible. He had to keep them alive long enough for their backup to arrive.
As the Star Destroyer was battered repeatedly with Borg cutting beams, it began to roll uncontrollably away from the attacking fleet, exposing its dorsal section to the attackers. The Borg took this opportunity to strafe their cutting lasers across the ship's lower docking bays, finally overloading their prey's shield arrays and tearing into the hull. Several of the cutting beams focused their energies on a single spot of the huge dome on the cruiser's underbelly, eventually burning a pinhole into the raised hull.
That dome protected the Star Destroyer's main solar fusion reactor. Its casing now ruptured, highly energetic plasma began spraying out the fissure. The plasma evaporated the outer hull near the reactor, causing the crack to widen and even more raw plasma to eject itself into space.
The captain ordered all hands to abandon ship, but he made no move to do so himself; his limbs were frozen in shock. He had never even heard of a Star Destroyer being bested in this manner. No one had. No enemy had ever possessed enough firepower to so easily knock out a Star Destroyer's shields, and then directly rupture the shielding on its main reactor.
As the lead cube moved in for the kill, the Star Destroyer's reactor generated an uncontrolled burst of energy, throwing out a shockwave that blasted the dome wide open. The resulting fireball threw high-energy particles out of the fully exposed reactor core directly toward the Borg cube. Wherever the material made contact with the cube, it melted and vaporized metal almost instantaneously. As the cube tried to back off, the cruiser's reactor finally exploded, blasting a hole through the top of the Star Destroyer and obliterating the bridge tower. The expanding plasma gases exploded again, forcefully tearing the aft half of the ship apart like a grenade exploding inside a paper bag.
The damaged cube, reeling from the plasma fireball and the shrapnel that had embedded itself in its hull, limped toward the center of the Borg formation to power down and regenerate itself.
*
The Queen and Tarkin watched the carnage with satisfaction.
"We must make sure, from here on, to keep our distance when Star Destroyer reactors go critical," Tarkin observed. "It will help us conserve energy that could be put to better uses."
"An efficient plan, Locutus," the Queen replied. In less than a millisecond, she spread a command throughout the Collective: Keep at long range when destroying Victory-class and larger ships. "However," she continued, not missing a beat, "now that we know how fragile their defenses are against our weapons, it would be even more efficient to assimilate them."
"Yes, my Queen," Tarkin replied. Then, a new plan formed in his mind. "Perhaps we could use them for some…subterfuge?"
The Queen, intrigued by Tarkin's tone, asked, "What do you mean, my One?"
As Tarkin prepared to answer, the Collective sounded an alert. No sooner had the embers from the destroyed Imperial ship faded than just over twelve more ships entered sensor range, closing rapidly.
*
Captain Marten, on the bridge of the Assassin, licked his lips. As soon as he had heard the alert from the destroyed ships, he'd ordered the fleet to assist.
That, after he had stood frozen in shock for a full ten seconds.
Though the news was a shock to his system, he could not pass up a chance for some action, and to show Coruscant what he was really made of.
He wrung his hands in anticipation. Whoever these invaders were, they'd taste his wrath. He might even get a promotion for his heroism. Gleeful at that thought, he demanded a report on the enemy.
The sensor tech, clearly shaken by the report he was seeing, said, "Sir…I can detect the Reaper and the Siren, but they're both completely unpowered. Looks like they were just ripped apart by the aliens!" Marten raised his eyebrow, but did not show any concern for the two Dreadnoughts. Obviously, they couldn't handle the battle without his help.
Vargas, on the other hand, quickly rushed to the sensor station and began reading over the tech's shoulder. His face turned white as he stared at the readout.
"Captain," he said, "the Defiance is nowhere to be found. But from the look of these radiation readings…"
"Well, what?"
"…it looks like her main reactor detonated!"
Marten spun around. "That's impossible. You must be reading it wrong!"
"I pray to the gods I am, sir," said Vargas, "but I don't think so."
This gave Marten some pause. This threat was enough to either quickly destroy a Star Destroyer, or to make it flee in such a hurry that it did not even register on the sensors.
No, he decided. He wouldn't let this slip past.
"Order all ships," said Marten, "full attack speed. Take these bastard out at full…"
"We are the Borg."
Marten looked around. "What the hell was that?"
The communications officer said, "I don't know, sir. It just came on every channel, and forced the comm system on."
"Lower your shields and surrender your ships."
Marten ground his teeth together, mostly to keep them from chattering. "Turn that off!"
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us."
"I can't sir!"
"Resistance is futile."
Marten's officers were now all watching him, and he knew it. He was scared stiff. But he couldn't retreat. The greatest commander in the fleet couldn't give in yet. At least, not before he fired the first shots. "All ships: f-full attack speed. T-throw everything we've got at them!"
The crew, already frightened, were now terrified after hearing their haughty commander's stuttering. Yet though they feared they would not survive this day, they had no choice now. They performed their duties and prayed to whatever gods they worshipped.
As the Assassin and its fellow ships accelerated, Vargas said to the comm officer, "Send a HoloNet message to Command…"
*
The Borg had no fear. Emotion was an inefficient waste of resources. Therefore, they reacted with the utmost precision when they saw the small fleet accelerate toward them. The cubes, minus the damaged one, broke their ordered formation and flew at the fleet like a swarm of giant, angry hornets. They maneuvered with such agility that immediately the Imperial gunnery crews were thrown off-guard.
As the Imperials began evasive maneuvers, their turbolasers fired almost aimlessly at the swift cube ships. The few blasts that met their marks were absorbed by the Borg shielding. A few more blasts struck one of the Dreadnoughts accidentally, overloading its attitude controls and sending it into a slow spiral.
Although much smaller than the Star Destroyers, the Dreadnoughts were less agile and had a much more difficult time tracking their targets. Two of them collided with each other, tearing both ships apart and generating a fireball that severely damaged three other nearby Dreadnoughts. Those three ships were then quickly rendered powerless by Borg force beams.
The Victory-class Star Destroyer Vengeance banked to its starboard to avoid colliding with the dead starships and began to give chase to the nearest Borg cube. The cube initially moved away from the Vengeance, but then slowed, stopped, and headed back toward the Star Destroyer. Because of the perfectly symmetrical construction of the cube ship, it did not need to turn around.
The captain of the Vengeance quickly ordered for evasive maneuvers, even though he knew that they would not have enough time at their current speed to avoid flying right through the Borg ship. He watched the cube ship grow larger in the front viewer, before being blinded by a bright blue beam.
The Borg fired their tractor beam at top intensity, striking out at the Vengeance. The beam entirely engulfed the triangular vessel, violently wrenched it sideways, and forced it to move backward while its engines were on full.
The sudden stress instantly knocked out the Star Destroyer's engines, causing them to fizzle out as their emergency venting systems kicked in. The center engine began to leak extra plasma reactant from a ruptured fuel conduit.
Inside the Vengeance, many of the crew had been killed when the sudden jolt overloaded the inertial dampers. They had been sent flying into the hard metal ceiling at high speed, crushing bones and vital organs. Those that had thoughtfully strapped themselves into their blast chairs survived, but with varying degrees of injury. They could only watch as the not so fortunate fell from the ceiling, piece by piece. Blood had splattered everywhere, and made every populated compartment of the ship into a slaughterhouse.
Seconds later, the Borg tractor beam released them. Emergency power kicked in and reactivated the inertial damping fields, making it safe for the survivors to return to their posts.
They all quickly jumped out of their chairs, many and heading for the nearest escape pods. A few dozen pods made it away before the Borg again struck the Star Destroyer, this time with their force beam.
The beam crushed the already battered ship and ruptured its reactor core. The Borg ship quickly changed course to avoid the resulting fireball, not making the same mistake its predecessor had.
The shockwave from the explosion obliterated several of the escape pods and propelled most of the others away at high speed. The pods, without enough fuel to stop their rapid egress, began their eternal journey into the oblivion of deep space. Some were propelled into The Maw, whose intense gravity grabbed them and pulled them in for a firsthand view of the destructive power of a black hole.
Captain Marten of the Assassin watched the melee in horror, as his fleet was rapidly converted into millions of tons of scrap metal. Even as his own ship was bombarded by the Borg, he simply stood and stared as his command was decimated.
Vargas, on the other hand, was barking battle orders. He knew from day one that the captain would likely freeze under the pressure of combat, and he had no desire to die without fighting.
Marten started shaking. From behind him, it may have looked like tremors of rage. In reality, Marten was on the verge of a breakdown.
"Get us out of here!" he ordered.
Vargas stood up and said, "Sir! We can't leave Kessel unprotected! We have to hold out until Lord Vader's reinforcements arrive!"
Marten spun around just as a Borg plasma charge detonated against their bridge shields. He stumbled to the floor, but got back up on his hands and knees and said, "You…you c-called Vader?"
"We have to…"
"No!" shouted Marten. "We have to survive! And when Vader sees what's happened, if the Borg haven't killed me, he certainly will!"
Then, to the helmsman, "Jump to hyperspace! Any direction, just get us out of here!"
The helmsman, only too eager to both follow orders and save his own skin, set a quick course away from the battle and threw the hyperdrive lever.
The Assassin disappeared in a flash of pseudomotion just as two deadly Borg lasers intersected on its previous position.
Inside the bridge, the crew saw as the stars in the forward viewer stretched toward them, wavered, and shrunk back down to stars. A piercing whine emitted from the deck, and was suddenly silenced with a *clunk*.
The Assassin's three main engines flickered, flashed brightly as if backfiring, and then winked out. The internal comm. screen came to life, showing an image of fiery hell and panicked, dying crewmen. The speakers crackled, "Captain, the engi…oaded! Maj…actor leak! Ve…dying down here!"
Vargas wasted no time taking command of the situation. "Initiate reactor shutdown. Seal the compartments surrounding the leak and vent into space to put out the plasma fires." He turned to his ashen-faced captain. "Anyone in those areas is already dead."
Marten looked down, inhaled deeply, and stood. "Take care of the recovery and repair efforts, Mr. Vargas. I'll be planning our strategy."
Vargas, flustered, glared at his captain as the pudgy man marched out of the bridge. He bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood. Then, he began giving orders to initiate emergency repairs.
Marten strode into his office, just outside the bridge. He sealed the pneumatic door behind him, took his officer's cap off his head, and retched into it.
*
The Borg cubes dispatched the remainder of the fleet by either destruction or infiltration, and then immediately turned their attention to the Kessel planetoid. Now completely defenseless, the planet could be effortlessly assimilated.
The first drones that beamed down to the surface met strong resistance from the stormtroopers and soldiers guarding the nearby facilities. Apparently, they had been informed of the Borg's presence and their transporter technology. However, their weapons were no different than those the Borg had encountered on board the Death Star; they had long since adapted.
The troopers watched in amazement as their blaster bolts were easily absorbed by the creatures. As the drones marched closer to the troopers, the troopers swarmed against them them head-on. Looking much like a battle between two armies of yore, the troopers charged the drones and struck them with the butts of their rifles and any other hand weapon they had available.
The drones, however, shrugged off the troopers' blows and struck back fiercely. Many of them used their bionic arms to savagely crush the troopers' armor, instantly killing the humans inside. Others grabbed the defenders and impaled their throats with their assimilation tubules. The tubules easily pierced the white durasteel armor and sunk themselves into the soft flesh underneath. These troopers, partially paralyzed by the sedative carrying the Borg nanoprobes, fell to the ground. They spend their last few moments of consciousness watching Borg drones walk over and around them, and trying unsuccessfully to pick up their blasters to continue the fight.
The assimilation of the first troopers took only about a minute. Although only possessing the bare essentials for a drone, they were under Collective control and already had been given augmented strength. Each one stood up and marched with their fellow drones toward the facility being guarded by the dwindling number of troopers.
Some of the troopers saw their compatriots attacking them now on the side of the enemy, and were shocked. They'd heard some reports about what the Borg did, but this was far too much for them to bear. Many of them began firing wildly into the swarm of drones. Most of their blast bolts struck the normal drones and were easily absorbed by their shields. Some, however, struck the newly assimilated stormtroopers. The armor of each trooper-drones that was struck exploded with a shower of sparks, and the assimilated troopers fell dead to the ground.
Other trooper-drones raised their blasters and returned fire. They fired intense volleys at the defending troopers, killing many of them, and forcing the rest to retreat into the compound behind them. The drones followed them inside, marching relentlessly toward their goal.
*
The Queen and Tarkin beamed as they oversaw their drones assimilate thousands of Kessel inhabitants, and all their technology, over a matter of a few standard days. All resistance was easily crushed.
The newly captured drones built the assimilation chambers where they would be fitted with the complete array of drone equipment. The older drones immediately began modifying the existing structures and mines for their use, and erected environmental control towers to convert the planet's thin atmosphere into one that was more efficient for Borg activity, with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and fluorine, to a temperature of 39.6 degrees centigrade.
The Queen credited part of the victory to Tarkin's tactical genius, which had taught the Collective more efficient ways to fight. No longer would they simply roll over the opposition like a boulder, accepting any number of lost drones. Tarkin's skill would lead them to destroy or capture their opposition with the minimum of wasted energy and equipment.
Several of the cubes flew out to the other planets in the system, ordered to create mining platforms on them to harvest resources to build even more Borg ships. The Borg had spread across the Kessel system within days, and soon they would spread across the galaxy.
The Borg would prevail.
