The Beast

Source Episode: VOY 3x26 Scorpion pt. 1

Our reprieve was brief. A wedding, a holodeck honeymoon, then back to our strange life in the Delta Quadrant. Soon enough, I was having the dreams again, or being woken by some deep, innate prodding that refused to let me rest.

I held the mug of hot tea tightly in my hands as I sat alone on the couch a full four hours before the morning staff meeting. For once, I'd managed not to wake Harry when a dream ended and cast me out into the cold weather of reality. Perhaps the Prophet was finally starting to understand how much distress she was causing my husband with these traumatizing visions. It certainly wasn't what he had bargained for when he fell in love with me. He deserved so much better.

Honestly, though, I wasn't entirely sure why it was necessary to even wake me. "The hive is near," she said, this time coming as Captain Janeway. But I already knew we were in Borg space. Chakotay informed me the day before that our long-range probe had been captured by a cube and that we were looking at a long trip through their territory. It irritated me to be losing sleep for such redundancy, but I was too awake to lay down.

"I am of Earth," I whispered to the Prophet. "I answer to science, not to Bajor's gods."

But the order Chakotay had given me writhed in my mind, even after I'd tried to suffocate it for hours. "Anything your Prophet can tell us would be helpful, Talia." Staring into endless light-years of Borg space was hardly an ideal time to be rejecting help from an extra-dimensional being. Usually, seeking the will of the Prophets entailed prayer or an orb experience, but I really hadn't felt much like praying as of late. I was essentially a living orb, wasn't I? Was it really necessary to go through these motions?

I sighed and set down the mug. It was a waste of a replicator ration, but not even Vulcan spice tea appealed to me in that moment. I knew that I had to at least try to speak with the Prophet.

What a frustrating thing spirituality was turning out to be. Higher beings sure had a penchant for making life unnecessarily complicated.

Almost as soon as my knees hit the pillow in front of my altar, I felt my pagh being cocooned inside a warm, amniotic energy. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. In my mind's eye, Marnah knelt beside me.

"Must you really take her form?" I asked, grief clutching at my voice.

"The Eelo still doubts," she observed.

I looked to the altar, gazing at the faith symbol as the dim overhead light glinted off its surface. "It doesn't matter. Just tell me what you want to say."

Suddenly I was in my grandmother's house on Earth. I was sixteen and my father's transport had been out of comm range for a full day too long. I'd been crying, and I couldn't understand how my grandmother had managed to remain so calm.

"Have faith, child," the Prophet said in my grandmother's voice. "Everything will be alright."

"It doesn't look too promising from here," I told her. "The Borg can take this ship in under thirty seconds if they find us. How could we possibly stand against them?"

"The hive will not consume you. They are concerned with a greater threat."

"The beast?" I asked, now standing in Captain Janeway's ready room as she sat behind her desk.

She nodded, a grim look on her face. "They must be stopped at any cost. They threaten everything."

"Who are they?"

Images flashed before my eyes. I stared into the face of an alien creature I'd never seen before, and I could feel its hatred. A fleet of small alien ships linked together and destroyed an entire planet of Borg. I peered past a bulkhead inside a Borg cube and saw a pile of dismembered drones. I turned just in time to see one of the aliens burst through a corridor wall on the cube and look right at me.

Then I was on a gym mat with Marnah, and we were about to begin sparring. She looked at me expectantly.

"Ah'no talin'serakem," I said, pulling out my practice knife. A proud smile played across her lips just before the scene changed.

Captain Janeway stood from her chair and rounded her desk towards me. "You will approach your path and find the beast blocking it. You'll want to turn away, but all will be lost if you flee. The Eelo is of Bajor. Always keep Bajor in your sight. Enemies must become allies to drive away the beast, but do not follow the hive into the trap."

I frowned. "So you want us to walk into the middle of a conflict between the Borg and some beast. Why not just wait a while, let them destroy each other?"

In my quarters, Chakotay spun on his heel to face me after I finished zipping up his undershirt, face flushed with anger from our argument. "The hive must not be scattered to the winds! All is at risk if they are. You must not let this happen. Do not turn away from Bajor."

"Remember who you are," Marnah whispered from somewhere unseen, like a gust of wind moving all around me.

As suddenly as it began, the vision was over. I fell backwards, catching myself on my hands as a glowing blue light left my body and disappeared into the bulkhead. My limbs trembled from the strain of supporting my body, so I let myself drop to the deck and curled into a fetal position on my side.

All my thoughts and energy focused on holding the words and images together, but they kept slipping through like a fistful of too many marbles. I began reciting out loud the sequence of the conversation, desperate to recall every detail that could prove to be important for our survival.

I didn't even realize how much the volume of my voice had grown until Harry rushed from our bedroom. A cold sweat had broken out all over my body, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated by my inability to keep every memory from the vision. He grabbed a blanket from a nearby chair and wrapped it around my shoulders as he sat me up and asked if he needed to take me to sickbay.

"Ji'atanah!" I shouted, my grip sure but my body still shaking. Too desperate to even think about which language I was speaking, I simply spoke and allowed the universal translator to sort it out. "The path! It is not safe. I saw so much death there, but we have to go. All will be lost if we flee. Enemies must become allies. Enemies… allies..."

My body gave out, and I collapsed into Harry's lap. "I don't want this," I sobbed weakly as he shushed and rocked me in his arms. "I don't want this."

"We don't know exactly how many vessels are out there," Captain Janeway told the senior staff at the morning briefing, "but their space includes thousands of solar systems. There's no going around it, but there may be a way through it. Commander?"

Chakotay stood and called up a map on the screen for us to see. "Before the probe was disabled, it picked up a narrow corridor of space devoid of Borg activity. We've nicknamed it the Northwest Passage. The passage is filled with intense gravimetric distortions likely caused by a string of quantum singularities."

"Better to ride the rapids than face the hive," Tom quipped.

I shuddered at his mention of "the hive."

"Exactly," Chakotay replied. "We're going to set a course for that corridor and go into full tactical alert. Tuvok, where do we stand with weapons?"

"I have reprogrammed the phaser banks to a rotating modulation," Tuvok reported, "but I suspect the Borg will adapt quickly."

"We can use every edge." Chakotay turned to Harry. "How are our systems, Lieutenant?"

"Operating at peak efficiency, sir," Harry answered. "I've configured the long range sensors to scan for transwarp signatures. An early warning system."

"Good work. Doctor, how are you coming on the medical front?"

"I've analyzed every square millimeter of the Borg corpse we recovered three months ago," Schmullis informed us. "I'm closer to understanding how their assimilation technology works, and I might be able to create some sort of medical defense."

"Redouble your efforts. This is your top priority." Finally, he turned to me. "Commander, what progress have your lab techs made?"

"Stellar cartography has compiled the data from the probe into several maps that have been made directly accessible to the conn," I told him. "They've managed to find a few safe places to hide if any singularities force us off course. Botany is reporting continued success in their efforts to increase the airponics harvest, so we will have a good supply of food for the trip."

He nodded his approval. "Any word from the Prophet?"

I exchanged looks with Harry and swallowed hard. "She woke me at 0300, but I don't entirely understand what she was trying to tell me. She said we were going to encounter a beast in the passage, something threatening enough that we'll consider turning around."

"The gravimetric distortions?" B'Elanna asked.

"I'm not sure," I replied, "but I'm inclined to say no. I can't remember it very clearly, but there was another alien, a non-humanoid species I've never seen before. Angry, dangerous. I got the sense that we'll need to be ready to fight them, that it's very important we do. The Prophet said, 'All will be lost if you flee.'"

Chakotay stiffened, recalling the vision from our mind-link experience in the ex-Borg cooperative. "The beast that scatters the hive," he muttered.

Janeway frowned. "Are you saying there might be a species out there that's threatening the Borg?"

I nodded. "I saw Borg corpses, ships destroyed."

"Talia, are you sure they're going to be a threat to us?" Harry asked me gently. "I mean, if they don't like the Borg, and we don't like the Borg—"

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," Tom finished.

"No, this alien species is a bigger threat to the galaxy than the Borg are," I insisted. "Of that much, I'm sure."

"Anything else?" Chakotay asked.

I nodded slowly. "She said, 'Enemies must become allies to drive away the beast, but do not follow the hive into the trap.'"

Janeway exchanged a worried look with Chakotay. "What's clear to me right now is that we need to keep moving forward, and on that front, we have to act fast. The Borg have captured one of our probes. They know we're out here. We'll do everything in our power to avoid a direct confrontation, but if and when we do engage the Borg, or this other species, I'm confident that we'll be ready. I have faith in each and every one of you." Again, she glanced at Chakotay, who gave her a confident nod. She turned back to all of us. "Let's do it."

Two hours later, Dr. Schmullis called me to sickbay. Remains from the Borg corpse laid on the biobed in the surgical bay, but they were all but being ignored in light of a different problem.

Kes had received a vision.

Schmullis scanned Kes with a medical tricorder while I asked her to tell me what she saw.

"Dr. Schmullis and I were discussing how we might be able to slow down the assimilation process in the blood cells," she explained. "He was suggesting that we dissect the nanoprobes, but I just kept staring at the remains. They looked familiar somehow, like I'd seen them before somewhere else. Then, suddenly, I saw dismembered Borg remains, all together in a pile. I'm not sure where I was, but it was like I was standing right in front of them."

"They were on a Borg cube," I said.

Schmullis' hands froze in midair next to Kes' head. "Commander?"

"That sounds exactly like something I saw in my vision this morning. After the vision ended, I think the Prophet left me to go elsewhere on the ship. Kes, are you aware of any non-corporeal presence in your mind?"

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, searching her consciousness. After a few moments, she nodded. "Yes, she's with me. I can feel her in my mind."

Schmullis frowned as he recalibrated his tricorder. "I'm not detecting anything unusual other than slightly heightened telepathic functions. Even scanning specifically for psionic energy, I can't detect this Prophet-alien at all." He snapped the tricorder shut. "This is very frustrating."

"It's alright, Doctor," Kes reassured him. "I'm sure there's a reason, and that we'll understand in time. I need to go home and feed Alixia. Would you mind setting up the lab for the dissection? We can get started when I return."

He nodded. "Of course."

Kes turned to me. "Do you think Tuvok would be willing to meet me at my quarters? I know you said you've talked with him some about your visions from the Prophet, and I'd like to have his input if she's going to be tapping into my telepathic abilities."

"I think that's a great idea," I told her.

Counselor's Log, Supplemental

Tuvok and I have been meeting with Kes periodically throughout the day. She's seen several images of Borg planets, cubes, and drones being destroyed, as well as the alien that the Prophet refers to as "the beast," but has received no direct communication as of yet. However, her telepathy continues to become increasingly stimulated.

Meanwhile, we have encountered our first real-world evidence of a conflict with the Borg. Earlier this afternoon, fifteen cubes passed us by with barely even a scan. Several hours later, they were all adrift in space. We've set an intercept course at low warp to investigate, so hopefully we'll get some answers when we reach their position tomorrow.

It was late by the time I walked through the doors to my quarters. Harry looked up from his seat on the couch as I dumped a stack of PADDs on the table by the door. "Are you hungry?" he asked.

Had he been waiting all this time, just to eat dinner with me?

I shook my head, unable to speak. He stiffened, ready to stand and come to me, but I crossed the room first. My whole body gave out when I reached him. I slumped in his lap, curled my knees to my chest, buried my face in his neck, and held him as tightly as my weary muscles could manage.

"Talia, what happened? What did you see?"

Again I shook my head. "Nothing. It's not that. It's just... it's already coming true—what the Prophet said. And there's no way..." I looked up, meeting his eyes. What had I done letting myself fall in love with someone I could so easily lose? I was such a fool. How could I possibly go on if this mission cost Harry his life? Tears filled my eyes. "What we're walking into, we'll be lucky if any of us survive. But I can't... I can't..."

Goddamnit. Why couldn't I ever just say how I felt?

Harry grazed his fingers over my cheeks, wiping at the tears there. He rested his forehead against mine. "I'm scared, too."

"I can't lose you," I admitted in a broken whisper.

He didn't try to soothe my fears by making promises he couldn't keep. We both knew we were utterly powerless to avoid the risks or escape the consequences of our way of life out in uncharted space, and, truth be told, neither of us would trade it for safety even if we could. Yet, in that moment, it was painfully clear that the most terrifying risk either one of us had taken was to fall in love with someone who could be snatched away in an instant. It was so easy to forget about our own fragile mortality, but the truth was that all we ever really owned was one single moment in time—the moment we embodied as the present.

So he offered me all that he could in that moment, pressing a sweet kiss on my lips. It solved exactly nothing, yet it was everything. I responded with desperation, needing him to know how much I loved him and terrified I might soon lose the chance. In each moment, I spoke the truth inside myself with my body because words failed me.

You're everything to me. I enclosed his lips in mine. I need you with me. I drew his bottom lip between my teeth. You're a part of me. My tongue danced with his.

One after another, the moments came and went until the boundaries between them—and between us—were erased completely, and our whole existence became a blur of love and need. Somehow, even after we had become two bodies again, the boundaries between those moments did not reassert themselves for the rest of the night.

It dawned on me as we laid in bed, still tangled up in each other, that it was Christmas Eve—the long night that preceded the birth of a new and hopeful age. Maybe real life would follow the same course. Maybe when we reached those fifteen cubes, we would find the answers we needed to make it through Borg space.

But those were worries for the next day. Tonight we were timeless. I traced my fingers around the edges of Harry's face and asked him to tell me about our future.

He smiled. "I picture us having two kids—a girl and a boy—and both are just like you. They'll learn to fly shuttles from your lap, and I'll show them how to build things out of spare parts. Aunt Janeway will teach them how to make rules. Uncle Tom will teach them how to break rules. Uncle Chakotay will teach them to always follow their hearts. Aunt B'Elanna will teach them to never take any shit..."

On and on, we spoke of our future like a sacrament—anointing it with laughter and tears, affirming it with the liturgy of our kisses, drinking again from the cup of our physical union—until we finally drifted off to sleep.

The next day, Voyager found the remains of the Borg cubes. At first glance, they appeared to be little more than a field of rubble. One of the farthest cubes was still partially in tact, and showed a few weak life signs. Other than that, however, there was little left of the terrifying armada that had passed us by only the day before. Tuvok's tactical readings left no doubt that someone else had battled them and won. We could hardly believe our eyes.

"Scan the vicinity for other vessels," Chakotay ordered.

"There are none, sir," Harry replied.

The science station readings were telling me something odd. "Captain, bio-scanners are picking up some kind of organic substance on the hull of one of the cubes. I can't scan past the surface, though."

"Let's see it," Janeway ordered. She stood and walked forward as Harry activated the view screen, revealing a large brown bio-mass attached to the most in-tact cube. Our hails went unanswered, recalibrated sensors still failed to penetrate it, and we couldn't lock onto it with transporters or a tractor beam.

"Harry, are you reading an atmosphere inside the cube?" Janeway asked.

"Yes, Captain."

"Chakotay," she said, "I want you to take an away team inside. Try to get a short range scan of the bio-mass. We'll keep an open comlink and an active transporter lock. We'll pull you out of there at the first sign of trouble."

Chakotay gave a curt nod. "Aye, Captain. Tuvok, Talia, you're with me."

Tuvok and I followed Chakotay through the winding corridors of the cube. The two men brandished their phaser rifles, covering me as I actively scanned the area and dictated our direction. A few drones still milled about the ship, but they paid us no attention.

Briefly, Tuvok strayed from us by a few paces, pausing in front of a doorway. "Commanders," he called, beckoning us over to where he stood. He watched me carefully as I stepped past the last bulkhead blocking my view and faced the exact same pile of dismembered Borg bodies that I had seen in my vision.

I gasped, freezing where I stood just long enough to register the scene before me. My head swam and I swayed on my feet. Tuvok reached out to steady me.

"Talia?" Chakotay said, worry lacing his voice.

"I believe she has just experienced the displaced consciousness of her past self, and of Kes, as they were being shown this event in their visions," Tuvok explained.

Chakotay frowned. "You mean her mind travelled forward in time to see this?"

"That is an imprecise explanation, Commander, but yes."

Slowly, I released my grip on Tuvok's arm as my dizziness cleared. After a few seconds more, I felt entirely back to myself.

Tuvok's eyes met mine. "Are you alright, Commander?"

"Yes," I said, and he released his grip. I turned to Chakotay. "It's past now. Let's keep moving."

He nodded, then turned again towards the bio-mass—which, according to my scans, was very close by.

As we approached it, we found that it had melted a hole right through the hull of the cube. I stepped forward and scanned the threshold with my tricorder. "There's a chamber beyond this opening. Forty meters wide, high concentrations of antimatter particles. It looks like a warp propulsion system of some kind."

"It's a ship," Chakotay observed.

"I'm not detecting any lifeforms on board," I said. "Should we go inside?"

"Captain?" Chakotay asked over the open comlink.

"Do it," came the reply.

Chakotay gestured towards a device on the wall of a neighboring corridor. "Tuvok, that's a Borg distribution node. See if you can download their tactical database. It might contain a record of what happened here."

Tuvok nodded. "Aye, Commander."

Absently adjusting the strap of the phaser rifle on my back, I followed Chakotay into the bio-ship. The structure of the ship was like a skeleton, with a spine running down the center of the ceiling and ribs protruding out from it towards the floor. It was dark and foreboding, with almost no sources of lighting inside. I felt like I was walking into the belly of a monster.

That thought stopped me short, and I grabbed Chakotay's arm. He gave me a questioning look. "The beast," I said, reminding him of the Prophet's visions. "This ship belongs to the beast. It's here."

"We'll leave at the first sign of trouble," he promised, "but we need as much information on this alien as we can get."

I nodded and released my grip, returning to my scans. The bio-ship was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Its conduits were filled with electrodynamic fluid, giving off a slight glow as they moved through the system. A binary matrix blinked and buzzed from the middle of a wall. It brought to mind a neurological diagram I'd once seen of the humanoid brain. It appeared as if the ship was an unconscious life form all on its own.

If I hadn't felt the overwhelming need to run away, I would have been utterly mesmerized by it.

"Talia!" Chakotay called, directing the beam of his wrist light towards a wound on an internal wall. "It looks like a phaser burn."

My tricorder readings concurred. "Yes, a Borg disrupter beam. The wall is regenerating itself."

Once I finished my scan, I nodded at Chakotay, who stepped past me and into the corridor. He rounded a corner and stopped short at the sight of a dead drone covered with tendrils of infected flesh that slowly consumed the drone's healthy organic cells.

I stooped down to scan the drone, collecting as much data as I could. "Captain," I said, speaking to the comm channel, "have Sam link the science station to my tricorder. You need to see this data right away."

"Acknowledged, Commander," she replied. "What have you found?"

"It's incredible, Captain. Instead of being assimilated by the Borg cybernetic technology, the alien DNA is eating right through it like acid. This process could be the key to defeating both the Borg and the beast."

"I apologize for the interruption," Tuvok interjected over the comm, "but I believe the pilot of the bio-ship may be returning. We should return to Voyager."

"I can't get a lock on Talia and the commander while they're inside the bio-ship," Harry said.

"Then I want you two to get back to Tuvok's position so we can beam you all out," Janeway ordered.

"Aye, Captain," Chakotay replied.

Pocketing my tricorder, I grabbed the phaser rifle from my back and set off after Chakotay as we made our way back out of the bio-ship.

When we reached Tuvok, he had a tricorder open in his hand. "I am unable to localize the alien's bio-signature, but it is within twenty meters of our position."

"Standby for transport," Janeway said over the comm.

"I can't get a lock on them," Harry reported, fear rising in his voice. "The alien is giving off some kind of bio-electric energy. It's interfering with the transporter."

"It is now within seven meters," Tuvok said. He stashed his tricorder. "I suggest we retreat."

Chakotay nodded. "Agreed. Let's go." He took off down the corridor that ran along the hull of the cube, while Tuvok and I followed. The chatter on the bridge went silent, hopefully due to an audio mute rather than a comm system failure. Either way, the silence gave us an extra cover, so we slowed our pace in order to quiet our steps on the metal grate underneath our feet.

I shouldered my rifle and pulled out my tricorder, alerts muted, as we paused behind a bulkhead to get our bearings. I held up five fingers on my free hand to signal that the alien was five meters away, but I struggled to get a fix on its location. Chakotay frowned, likely confused at how it was somehow closer to us even though we'd been moving away from it and its ship. I counted down with my fingers as the alien closed on us, and my tricorder finally localized its position. My eyes widened and I pointed two fingers towards the wall opposite us.

We didn't even have time to react when the bulkhead exploded in front of us, depositing a tall, muscular, greenish-brown, non-humanoid alien. They tossed the body of a drone like a doll, then turned and looked right at us. Again I swayed on my feet as I looked into their face, glaring menacingly at me just as they had in my vision. Chakotay grabbed me by the arm and braced me against his chest as he backed away from the creature.

The alien lunged. Tuvok shot them in the chest, but they were merely angered by the burn. They swiped at Tuvok, throwing him to the floor in front of us. He hit the deck hard, face twisted with agony. A feeling like fire in my bones seemed to rip me apart.

A moment later, we materialized on one of Voyager's transporter pads, where Chakotay and I promptly collapsed.