Chapter 3
(note-updating on or near Thursdays)
Seven's muscles locked as thousands of volts hit her square in the back. She turned around to face her attacker as she backed up and slumped against the wall.
It was seconds before she came to again, and the first thing she saw was Neelix with a leering look on his face, staring down at Seven's body.
I do not recall him ever doing that before, Seven thought, making a note of it.
He reached out for her just in time for Seven's control to return, and she cuffed him hard on the side of his head with the back of her fist, rising as she made the blow.
"My nanites have made a makeshift Faraday Cage in my body, rerouting much of the electricity," She said as the hallway rained with sparks all around them, shorting out the lights in the ceiling.
The rage was building now, and she was letting it.
He wants to possess you, a little voice said in the back of Seven's head. Just like the Collective did. Just like they all do.
Neelix reeled backward from the blow, falling several feet to one side of her.
"Seven to Tuvok," Seven said, tapping her com badge.
"Go ah-ead," Tuvok said, his voice punching through heavy static. Her com badge was still sparking.
Neelix slowly recovered. His eyes widened as he stood up from where he'd fallen against the wall next to her. They got quite large when he saw the look she was giving him.
"If looks could kill, am I right?" He said, casually.
But Seven could see the fear in his eyes.
"Please report to-" Seven began and Neelix jerked as he shook off his concussed head and realized what Seven was doing.
The Tlaxian took a step back from the wall and stabbed his weapon into a piece of metal that Seven was still leaning against, as it was part of the panel access for this hallway.
This time, however, she barely felt it as even more sparks flew out everywhere into the hallway.
She appreciated the strange sensation of being at the center of a lightning storm. Unfortunately, the blast fried her com badge completely. It crackled one more time and whined in protest before dying, a little wisp of smoke coming up from it.
She released her hold on the back wall and stood up, turning sharply toward her attacker.
"I am Borg. I have adapted," She told him mildly.
This time she stepped forward, anchoring her body on the floor, and slammed her palm directly into the man's chest, lifting him up off the ground. At the same time, instinctually, she lashed out with her other palm as well, striking Neelix's nose, drawing on all of her borg-enhanced strength as well as pushing off with her feet on the floor.
There was a satisfying crunching sound as the cartilage crumbled under her strike.
The effect of all this was that Neelix, who had already been rising up under the first blow, took the second to his face in a way that made him spin once, end over end, finally slamming against the back wall.
He did not immediately get up.
The storm was raging in her head now, even as the electrical storm died down. She knew, intellectually, that there was a man lying on the floor in front of her-
But all she saw was a target to be destroyed.
He had not injured her today.
However-
He was just like everyone who ever had. Her vision narrowed, her body started moving, her mouth started talking, and some part of her felt just as surprised as the barely-conscious Neelix was at what she said.
"I was forbidden from ever using this. By Captain Janeway," Seven said, advancing on Neelix's crumpled form. "However, I believe I will be excused from doing so under the circumstances. Do not worry, I will not assimilate you, only incapacitate your body temporarily."
Her hand formed into a fist, and her talon tubules began to peek out of her right hand, the anticipation building as she extended them towards the prone man's neck.
The rage built and built in her mind like a wave getting taller and taller.
With a breath, finally aware of what was happening; she managed to calm it down just barely, the storm settling back into mere a merely unsettled sea.
No.
She would not do to others what had been done to her.
He still has his weapon, Another voice said. Best not get too close to him. So, instead she used her tubules to inject nanites into the wall. She would simply have them tunnel to a communications juncture and contact help that way.
Fortunately, there was one not too far away. The panel had been destroyed in the fight, but the mechanism underneath it still functioned.
In seconds, her nanites had done it.
"Seven to Tuv-" She began, but before she could establish the connection, Neelix, without moving from his position in the far wall drew another weapon from somewhere, and fired a small canister across the width of the hall, where it slammed into Seven's shoulder.
She turned toward him again, reaching to where the canister had pierced her body. Electricity redoubled out of the canister, this time with an intensity that made it hard to even look at, like an arc welder. She put her fingers around it and attempted to pull it out of her shoulder. Her muscles were starting to spasm, however, and her nanites were struggling to diffuse the energy, as many had been destroyed in the two previous efforts.
After a few long moments, she slumped back against the wall, her body still spasming as the embedded device continued to deliver shocks.
"I only had one shot of that you belligerent tart," Neelix spat, barely able to get out of the hole his body had made in the wall.
"It's lucky I'm a good shot, or I would have actually been bested by a woman."
He was shaking himself now, and for a very different reason as the woman on the ground.
Then, his mind went into overdrive.
She just contacted Tuvok. Twice.
He had no time.
If Tuvok came here, he was dead. Plain and simple.
But how would Mr. Vulcan know where to go?
Neelix had a chance. But he had to act at the speed of light.
It took him three tries to get his body moving, as his legs weren't working. His whole body screamed at him to give up, but he didn't.
Taking a hyper spray out of his pack, he deactivated his only trump card weapon-the shock canister, right as he injected Seven with the spray at the neck. He used 10 times the dose he'd give a normal human, and he only had to hope it was enough.
She had been a monster. He'd seen her fight before, but never like this.
The worst pain he ever felt in his life occurred was when he reached down to grab her leg and pull her towards his quarters. He screamed loud enough that everyone on the ship probably heard him. He took a moment to make sure his privacy tool was still working, disrupting any recording devices nearby and dampening any kind of energy, including screaming.
It was. It hadn't been destroyed by the fight, somehow.
Small mercies.
He almost blacked out twice trying to drag the woman into his room.
Normally this would be fun, he thought, looking down at her prone form with a grin, finally getting her past the threshold.
Then he remembered his bowl of food.
Returning with an exaggerated limp into the hallway, he saw that it was everywhere. Bananas, greens, vegetables, scattered in all directions.
If anyone sees this, I'm once again-dead, He thought.
His hand was now shaking so bad he could barely open his pack. He didn't have the luxury to be thorough. Instead, he simply used a low-grade energy pistol to vaporize as much as he could in the area without getting it past the threshold that would alert the security systems.
Fortunately, it didn't take much to vaporize a salad.
He laughed and then winced in pain, his vision narrowing again with agony.
He managed to avoid screaming as he put a hand on his face, keeping his blood from getting on the ground from his destroyed nose. It had soaked thoroughly into his shirt, however, a large stain that would likely never come out again. The flow was down to a drip he could catch with his body.
Ironically, that first blow to his chest, which made him barely able to move, had probably saved his life. It had pushed him a little bit away from his pretty little cyborg in the nanosecond before she hit him in the face, otherwise it probably would've driven his nose right into his head and killed him instantly.
He fell over onto a chair back in his quarters, making sure to lock the doors as they shut.
Pulling a Vidiian medical scanner out of his pocket, he scanned himself and waited for the prognosis.
He was breathing heavily now and-
The next time he looked down at the scanner he saw it flashing in his hand.
"Please respond," it was saying.
The chronometer on it indicated he'd been unconscious for two minutes.
Two minutes he didn't have. How long until that joyless Vulcan and his logic figured out where Seven had gone?
"I'm here," He told it. "Tell me what to do."
It was listing out his injuries and told him he would be dead in under an hour if he didn't seek treatment.
Fractured ribs. One of them had punctured an organ. He didn't bother to look at which one. Broken leg. Broken arm. Broken nose.
Broken everything. He coughed up blood as he took out a vial that came out of the scanner and bit off the cork with his teeth.
He downed the whole thing in two seconds. Thick, brackish liquid that tasted like he was drinking foul, rotting bread before it had been baked.
The scanner sent out light to pick up on what he was doing, confirming that he'd taken the medicine.
It then instructed him to put the scanner near half a dozen places on his body as it injected him over and over again.
Stem cells, administered. Biochemical regenerative agents administered. Allied reconstructor cells administered. Anti-pain agent administered.
Vidiian script flew across the screen, with a Vidiian voice and another, high-pitched one translating it, vying for his attention.
He began to feel better immediately. From being on the ship, he knew that the injuries he'd just sustained would've taken weeks, maybe months to heal in this ship's medbay.
Thanks to Vidiian tech, it would only be minutes.
That was it though, he was out now. The Vidiians didn't have the fancy federation tech that could make something from nothing. He would need to buy more.
No more almost-dying allowed, he thought. That was OK. No fun anyway!
He looked around at his quarters and Seven's unconscious body.
If only there were more time, he thought.
But there wasn't.
"If I didn't know any better, sirs, and lady, I would say I wasn't welcome here anymore!"
His body began to relax as the crisis was averted. He began to feel better and better.
Until he didn't.
Something was wrong.
"Intrusion detected."
The translating alien voice on the scanner said.
His arm began to seize up and the feeling spread to his legs.
Before long, he toppled to the ground and began seizing as all of his muscles contracted at once.
Fortunately, this meant that he didn't drop the scanner and it kept chirping along merrily, trying to save his life in that awful, double-voice.
"Nanomechanical intrusion detected. Warning. Motor functions at 80% and dropping.
Warning. Nanomechanical counteragent cartridge required. Warning."
With horror, Neelix watched the veins in his arms and legs turn black from where he lay on the ground, helpless.
He'd seen this before.
That witch. It was her nanobots.
From when I grabbed her and pulled her inside, he realized suddenly.
She'd prepped the bots before. In those horrible talon tubules. Some must have been still on her when I grabbed her.
Oh God.
He could feel them in his body now. Circuit patterns began to appear on his arms and legs underneath the rips in his clothing from the fight.
"Cartridge required!" The useless scanner was saying.
"Warning! Infestation at 40%"
The double voice sounded like good old Tlaxian was being drowned out by sounds coming out of some kind of partially burnt frog's throat.
Neelix managed to overcome the paralysis in his body with sheer willpower, crawling along the ground like a worm.
His arm was gripping the scanner so tightly due to his paralysis that he couldn't have dropped it if he tried.
It put out a hologram that hovered over his closet, indicating where his secret stash was.
Fortunately, he'd foolishly left it open from before. His fake Neelix mannerisms were coming out and causing him to act the buffoon.
Lucky they did, he thought.
He reached out to the stash and grabbed the cartridge, his whole hand tremoring from the effort of fighting the paralysis, and just barely managed to put the cartridge in the scanner.
Then he fell over, completely paralyzed. He couldn't move a muscle anymore.
He had to rely on the technology of those horrible Frankensteins (as the humans would put it) for his life now.
Cartridge received. Preparing countermeasure…Done. Administering countermeasure. Please remain still and do not disrupt the procedure.
Something fired out of the scanner and into his arm.
As if anything that went wrong would be my fault, Neelix thought. Typical Vidiians.
The seconds ticked by and Neelix felt panic rising in his throat. They were going to come through at any minute.
He'd probably be thrown out an airlock.
Or worse, they wouldn't find him, and it would just be more of this.
Neelix watched the black circuit patterns infesting his body and imagined it completing. He'd seen what the borg did to people.
After a moment the paralysis began to subside, just a little bit at first and then, bit by bit, he got control back.
It had only been a little bit from that horrible Borg woman. If that had been a full dose-
"Countermeasure complete. Gratitude for not ruining procedure."
Neelix got up from the ground. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw Seven, with her tubules moving toward him, his flesh turning to metal.
"You beast of a woman!" He screamed, kicking her in the ribs until he heard them crack. "You almost killed me twice! After you were unconscious!"
He drew his Vidiian knife and put it to her throat.
Maybe instead he would just tie her up.
Maybe he had just enough time to-
No. Neelix glanced at his chronometer.
He'd lost nearly 20 minutes. If he had any chance of getting out of here it had to be now.
Instead, he went and got a large bag, maybe the last trick the Vidiians would ever give him, and he began preparing his excuses.