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Description
It was different this time. Perhaps it was because he knew what was happening only a few hundred meters away, but when Magnus materialised in the corridor outside the maturation chambers, he felt anxious. The alcoves nearby were empty, yet that did nothing to ease his emotions. He opened his tricorder, tried to take some comfort in the familiar motions. But he found no comfort there. The movements seemed empty, as though he was simply watching someone else perform them. His body was able to go through the motions, but they had long ago become so familiar to him that he wasn’t able to lose himself in them.

The map showed where the alien lifesigns were coming from, and he began walking towards them.

*

As he walked, he had heard the sounds of the Cube. The metallic thuds of his footsteps blended with the sound of machinery, the whirrs and buzzes of the Borg ship working and the sounds of the drones moving amongst the alcoves.

Then he stopped. Another sound had, for a moment, been barely discernable over them. Magnus listened, subconsciously holding his breath as his ears strained to hear anything that might be different. For a long moment, he heard nothing. And then it happened again – barely audible over the soft hiss of the air recyclers, he’d heard a scream. Distant, and so soft that he couldn’t be sure, but it had sounded like a scream, a shriek of pain mixed with terror.

His heart leapt into his throat. Part of Magnus was urging him to run to this person’s aid, part of him was urging him beam back to the Raven, and part of him was just rooted to the spot, shock and fear freezing him, preventing him from acting at all.

But then the moment passed. He became aware once again of himself, and why he was on the Cube. He flipped open his tricorder and checked the map. Not just to confirm his location, but to anchor him in his work, to make him an observer of whatever was happening, to separate him from what was he was going to witness.

It’s like predators in Africa, he thought. Lions hunting zebras. I’m just an observer. For a moment, he was shocked at the callousness of the thought that had sprung unbidden to his mind. Yeah, but the zebras aren’t people, he thought. Nonetheless, he knew that his choices were either to go forward and observe, or to go back. And while so much of him wanted to go back, unable to face the thought of watching the suffering of others without even trying to help, he knew that among the horrors ahead was information. Information that he needed. He steeled himself and stepped forwards.

*

The screams became louder, and soon he could no longer fool himself into pretending that it was just machinery making the sounds. He could hear, among the screams, shouted words, people calling to others, pleading for their lives, their freedom, but the words always turned to screaming before too long, and then Magnus didn’t hear those voices again. And new voices would always come to replace those that had been lost.

In a way, Magnus was grateful for the screams. They gave him warning, prevented him from suddenly coming across the Borg and whatever they were doing to these people. Despite the horror they made him feel, he was thankful for them. They’d allowed him to brace himself. One horror preparing him for a worse horror.

He turned the corner and stopped. There, sitting cross-legged in the narrow corridor ahead of him, amongst the drones that stepped around him as though he wasn’t even there, was a small child. Young, younger than Annika. The child turned to look at him as he approached. “Loy ka?” the child said, sounding curious. Magnus just looked at him. “Loy ka? Wan abi ka chenakin? Wan abi!” The child’s face twisted into tears, then he picked himself up and ran off crying down a side corridor.

“Wait!” called Magnus stepping forwards, reaching out. “I can help…” He quickly stepped forwards and looked down the corridor where the young boy had run.

The child had vanished.

For a long moment, Magnus stood staring down the side corridor. He wondered whether he should follow the child. Even if he could find the young boy, could he help? What had the Borg done to him?

He was broken out of his thoughts by a scream, loud and close. It came just as a Borg drone stepped in front of him, and the two together made him jump backwards. The corridor suddenly seemed ominous, foreboding, and Magnus decided that he would not walk down it. His heart was pounding, and he could hear the blood rush in his ears. He understood now how Erin felt. He turned away from the side corridor.

Continuing ahead, he came to a part of the corridor where it grew wider. From the narrowness of earlier, it spread to more than three meters across. There were more drones here, but they only stepped around Magnus, ignoring him. Spaced along the walls were large hatches, some closed and some open. Magnus walked up to one of the closed hatches. Next to it was a control panel, and Magnus tapped it.

With a loud rumble, the hatch started to open, splitting into two parts that slide both into the ceiling and floor. The chamber beyond was a single room, roughly six meters square, but with irregular walls that made it hard to tell the exact shape and size. In the center of the room was a crowd of drones, at least half a dozen that Magnus could see, and above them tubes snaked down from the ceiling.

But the stench of blood was what assailed him the most, and Magnus stepped back, his hand going up to cover his mouth and nose. It was new blood mixed with old, a metallic tang with the sickly sweet smell of dried vomit. Magnus knew that whatever the drones were doing, he did not want to see, and yet even though his brain was screaming at him to leave, his body refused to cooperate. He found himself taking a step forward.

One of the drones turned, and for a moment Magnus thought that he had been detected, that his biodampener wasn’t working, but then the drone went to a piece of machinery on the walls of the chamber. It tapped a number of keys on a panel, then turned back to the activity in the center of the room. The drone’s prosthetic arm ended in a number of small sharp things, and the gleaming metal was coloured by blood.

There was a cry from behind the drones gathered in the center, not a scream of terror but a roar of fury: a young man suddenly jumped through the space where the drone had stepped away. His right arm had been removed between the shoulder and the elbow, and the wound was not yet fully repaired. Blood was spraying in a thin stream, spurting quickly with his pulse and staining his clothes. From the waist down, the lad’s right side was soaked. For a moment, the lad looked at Magnus, surprised. Magnus saw behind the surprise was no fear, just determination. The lad ran towards him, towards the exit to the chamber. Magnus stepped aside to let him past.

The drones in the center of the chamber turned and followed him. The lad ran out into the corridor, turning to run back the way Magnus had come, but as he turned, his feet slipped out from under him on the blood that was dripping down his legs. He tried to get up, his hand pushing against the floor and smearing the blood that was there, but then the drones were on him, and they lifted him up as he shouted at them.

The determination that had been in the lad’s eyes was now gone, replaced with stark terror, and as the drones held him, one of them raised a hand to his throat. Whip-like tubes shot out of the hand and punctured his neck. The lad began screaming, his shouts forgotten. His eyes met with Magnus’s, but then they were gone, his face becoming lifeless, eyes vacant and his screams just stopped. His skin was losing its colour, turning a corpsely shade of grey. Magnus didn’t know what those tubes had done to him, but from where they had punctured his neck, he could see dark lines spreading. They’d injected him with something, and whatever it was, it was coursing through his circulatory system.

The drones dropped the lad back to the floor, and he lay there in a crumpled heap. For a moment, Magnus wondered if he should go and help him up, or if he was dead, or if whatever the drones had injected him with would infect him as well.

The flow of blood from the lad’s severed arm stopped, and the stump began to congeal, like coagulated blood was plugging it.

Magnus stepped forwards, but then the lad lifted himself up with his remaining arm, unsteadily getting to his feet. As the lad turned, Magnus saw on his face bare metal. An implant? he wondered. How had they done that? Then the lad turned, walked back into the chamber by himself to join the other drones, and the hatch closed.

Magnus stood there, and the sounds from around him came back. Around him, the Borg were doing to others what they had done to the lad. What have they done to him? Magnus wondered, and the thought stayed in his head, refusing to leave. They knew that the Borg could make others like them. Was this how they did it?

He managed to pull is thoughts together after some time, but he had no idea how long it had been. He walked further along the wide corridor, approaching one of the open hatches. Like the other hatch, this one served as an entry to a room. A series of rooms along this corridor, all designed for some kind of, what? Was this medical, torture, or something else? All Magnus knew for sure was that this was where the Borg made more of themselves.

He stepped up to the hatch, looking inside. Again, there was a cluster of drones in the center of the room, but there was no sound from inside. Nothing, apart from the whirring of the drones as they worked. Magnus stepped inside.

The drones were surrounding a table. Strapped to it was a male, several decades older than the lad but undoubtedly the same species. Mercifully, this old man appeared to be unconscious, though Magnus had little doubt that this was due to his mind simply overloading rather than any compassion shown by the Borg. His skin was already grey, and he had several implants already on his face. One of them was in the same location as the one he had seen on the lad. Magnus leaned forwards, trying to look past the drones to see if this man had puncture marks on his neck. Magnus didn’t see any on the portion of the man’s neck that was visible, but the marks could have been on the other side.

One of the drones on the far side of the table stepped aside. Magnus watched as another drone stepped forwards to take its place. It lifted its prosthetic arm, and Magnus saw that it had the same type of prosthesis as Needlefingers, a small grasping hand with long, thin fingers. The drone lowered this hand towards the man’s face, and the fingers slipped underneath the eyelids. The hand rotated, twisting the eye with it, and then it pulled back. The eye came free, pulling behind it the optic nerve. Another drone reached out, and with a flash of light, the optic nerve was severed just behind the eyeball. The optic nerve snapped wetly back into the socket. The eye was placed off to the side where it vanished in a blur of light. Recycled by the Collective.

The drone with the miniature hand reached back into the eye socket and pulled out the optic nerve again. The hand was covered with a mixture of blood and a clear jelly like substance. The other drone held out an implant, clamping it to the severed end of the optic nerve. It was then placed back into the socket, and a soft blue beam was directed into the gaping hole. Something like a dermal regenerator? Magnus forced himself to be analytical even as the revulsion rose up in his throat. To be otherwise would be to be overcome by the horrors he was witnessing.

The drones stepped away, and the old man on the table sat up, then stood. There was a thin sheen of blood on his face where his eye had been removed, but already it had cracked where it had dried. The man – the drone, Magnus forced himself to think – turned towards him, towards the entry hatch and stepped towards it. Magnus stepped back as he approached, and as the drone stepped through, the hatch cycled closed. The drone walked down the corridor.

Out of curiosity, Magnus followed. Had the assimilation process finished? Was there more to it? The man was still dressed mainly in the torn clothing he’d been wearing when he was captured. Would the rest of his implants be attached over the top of that, or would he be stripped before he received any more implants?

Magnus followed the drone further down the corridor, turning into a side corridor that was narrower. But as he turned, his foot caught on something, and he stumbled, almost falling. He looked back. There was an old woman, sitting, huddled in the corner. Her dress was in tatters, and he could smell the stink of her clothes, soaked with her own urine and faeces, an acrid smell that burned his throat. Her face was turning dark; whatever the Borg were injecting these people with, she’d been infected, and it was spreading throughout her body. She looked up at him, sadly. There was disappointment in her eyes. Disappointment at him? At herself? Magnus had no idea. Her face was wet from her tears.

Without warning, the side of her face erupted. Just underneath her right ear, the skin bulged, then split, and an implant unfolded itself. Magnus jumped backwards, falling to the floor and his hands scraped across the grating. Magnus watched the implant grow in horror. A thin trickle of blood flowed from the broken skin underneath it, but it soon turned grey and congealed. Her eyes became vacant, replaced with the same unseeing expression that had taken the young lad’s eyes. Then she stood, stepped around him and walked away.

For a long moment, Magnus stayed there on the floor. The implants had come from inside the victims? What were the Borg injecting these people with? He stood and looked to see where the old man had gone. He had vanished. Magnus continued further down the corridor. Around him, the drones moved, most were covered almost completely in Borg biomechanics and implants, but some of them still showed torn and soiled clothes between implants.

There was a sudden rush of footsteps, and hands grasped Magnus from behind. He jumped, feeling a jolt of terror race through him, more than simply being startled. Had the Collective discovered him? Was his biodampener faulty? He almost surrendered to the panic – it was a drone, the Collective was aware of him, he was going to die, no, worse, he was going to be assimilated, any second he was going to feel the pain in his neck, and then his body would explode from within with Borg implants – but then the hands turned him around, and it wasn’t a drone. It was a man, and he looked to be the same age as Magnus. Like the others he had seen, his clothes were dirty and torn, and there were cuts on his face, and dried blood. But this man had no implants, and his skin, though streaked with dirt, did not have the dark veins of an assimilated drone.

“La ko aba,” he said, and his voice was rushed, desperate. His eyes were wide with fear.

Magnus shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling helpless. “The universal translator isn’t working properly. Maybe…”

“Wa ken lochaka, fol go ungommita!” The man’s grip on Magnus’s shoulders was like iron.

Magnus stepped back, lifting his arms between the man’s arms to break his grip. “I’m sorry!” Magnus shouted. “I just can’t understand you!”

“Fol go! Fol go!” the man repeated, shouting in Magnus’s face. Magnus could feel flecks of the man’s saliva on his cheek.

“I can’t understand you!” Magnus shouted back, feeling angry. Not at the man, but at being unable to help.

The man slapped at Magnus’s shoulders in anger. “Na fo tikka, lon ache to funika. Go cha! Cha!” The man blinked, and tears started to run down his cheeks. His voice was overcome with despair, the anger forgotten. “Go cha ni bonelli.” The man stepped back. He looked at Magnus with an apologetic look, then turned and walked away. A few meters from him, he turned back to Magnus, and with a shrug, said, “In tebi folan gund.” He sighed. “Folan,” he said again, the hung his head and walked away.

Magnus watched him walk away. It didn’t feel right, just leaving him go. But what else could he do? Without any way to communicate, Magnus was useless to these people. But even if he could talk to them, what could he say? He couldn’t be cruel enough to give them false hope. Not when their fate was sealed. And he couldn’t risk taking them back to the Raven; the ship wouldn’t hold more than a handful of these people, and what if they’d been infected with whatever the Borg were injecting them with? He didn’t dare take the risk.

In the end, all he could do was gather data, and hope that the universal translator was able to lock onto their syntax and grammar.

The drone he had been following lost from sight, Magnus turned and headed back towards the main corridor. When he got back to it, he could see a small group of people being lead down the corridor, each being escorted by two drones. Half a dozen people. The first two were a middle aged couple. Their identical bracelets suggested they were related. Married maybe? Behind them was an old man who walked hunched over and with shuffling steps. After him was a young woman, beautiful, with a thin graceful body like a dancer and a pretty face with wide eyes that were filled with fear. Behind her was a child, a boy who looked to be no more than twelve and stepped quickly to keep close to the others. The last was a younger boy, who could have been no more than six, but his eyes were red and puffy. He was sobbing quietly,

The first two, the married couple, simply looked at Magnus as they went past, their expression blank. They had resigned themselves to their fate. The old man behind them stopped when he saw Magnus, staring at him in wonder. But the drones holding his arms pulled him forwards, and he stumbled. If not for the drones holding him, he would have fallen.

The young woman following him seized the moment, perhaps hoping that the old man’s stumble would distract the drones that held her. She twisted her lithe body violently in their grasp, wrenching herself free, and she ran. But as she ran past one of the drones escorting the old man, its arm reached out, the whip-like tubes lashing from the back of the hand, catching her in the throat. She immediately fell, her face smacking hard into the grated floor. Magnus heard the crunch as her nose broke from the impact. He instinctively stepped forwards to help her up, but she was already lifting herself up. She groaned, and the groan turned into a deep retching sound that came from her stomach. Wanting to help her, but at the same time repulsed by the sound, Magnus could only watch as her body lurched and she vomited over the floor. The stink of her vomit and the dry heaving of her retching almost made Magnus vomit as well, but he fought back the nausea. Dimly, he noticed that there was a strange pearlesence in her vomit, grey swirls mixed in. He took his tricorder from its holster and aimed it at the vomit, hoping the grey swirls were caused by the same thing that gave the skin of the Collective’s victims the deathly pallor.

The woman shrieked, and Magnus stepped back. She lifted herself up on all fours, and Magnus could see the vomit on her face, and then she fell onto her side. Dark lines were snaking under her skin, and she was slapping her hands at her face. She screamed again, the scream turning into another retch, and she was sick once more. She coughed, a horrible hacking sound as she choked on her own vomit, and her screams turned to sobs. Her hands began clawing at her face, blood starting to run where her fingernails were digging into the flesh. The blood flowed faster and more freely, and Magnus realised she was ripping the skin from her face. Her blood, like her vomit, was stained with grey, but Magnus’s tricorder had been dropped to the floor.

He looked down at her as she convulsed in her agony, and all he could think was Kill her. Take out your phaser and kill her. Don’t let her suffer. Death is better than this. But he was frozen, and even though part of him tried to reach down to the phaser on his hip, he couldn’t move.

Her leg, thrashing as she struggled, caught one of the drones that had been leading her, knocking it to the floor. It picked itself up, and then, with the other drone that had been her escort, lifted the young woman up off the floor. She was still gasping and retching. One of the drones pressed something against her neck, and her eyes went wide. The gasping stopped, and a shrill high-pitched wail came from her. Then the drone took the thing away from her and let her drop back to the floor. They led the others away.

The young woman lay still now. Her hands twitched, and Magnus could hear her breath as it rattled in her throat. She looked up at him, and Magnus felt completely helpless. He counted each breath she took. She’d taken fifty three before her breathing stopped.

Magnus turned, his stomach lurching, and he threw up on the grated floor. He collapsed to his knees, vomiting again. He leaned forwards on his hands, his head hung low, fighting the urge to be sick again, even though he could feel the bile rising in his throat and he knew he couldn’t stop it.

When he finally felt his stomach starting to settle, he let himself fall sideways so he was sitting on the grating floor, the young woman’s body was gone. The metallic stench of her blood remained, mixing with the thick smell of his own vomit. He realised the dull ache he felt in his hip was his own tricorder on the floor digging into the bone. He picked it up, sliding it back into the holster.

This was too much. Magnus could feel the need to escape rising inside him. He had to go, and it didn’t matter if he didn’t get any more information. The nearest assimilation chamber had its door wide open, and Magnus could see inside it a pair of drones holding down a screaming man. It was the man who had spoken to him in the corridor. In horror, Magnus watched as the sharp metal of one of the drone’s prosthetic arm ran over his forehead, and then peeled the skin back, revealing a crisp white bone stained red with blood. The man’s screams became louder, shrieks. Once the blood-slicked scalp was put aside, the drone picked up a large implant, placing it over the exposed bone. The man stopped screaming, mercifully claimed by unconsciousness. There was a soft buzzing noise, the smell of heated blood and the sting in his eyes of scorched flesh as the drones attached the implant to the man’s skull.

Magnus screwed his eyes closed, turning away. He felt something against his leg, and he opened his eyes and looked down. It was a child, a young boy, maybe five, standing naked before him.

“Can you tell me where it’s safe?” the child asked. With a shock, Magnus realised he could understand the boy. The translator must have picked up the syntax at last.

Magnus tried to respond, but when he opened his mouth to talk, the words caught in his throat. Finally, he just shook his head.

“Oh,” said the boy sadly. But he didn’t walk off, he just stood there.

Magnus looked down at him, not knowing what to do. There was a whirring noise, and a drone walking past stopped. It looked at the boy, the reached down and picked him up. The boy put his arms around the drone’s neck. The drone turned and walked into an assimilation chamber, and the door closed.

For Magnus, it was too much. He was desperate to get away from this place. He hurried down the corridor, stepping around the drones that were still leading people into the assimilation chambers. And then, when he had finally left that section of the Cube and the winding passageways were empty, Magnus broke into a run.

It wasn’t long before he found himself back at the maturation chambers. He couldn’t remember checking the map on his tricorder, but it was sitting in his hand. He could barely see. As he had run, his eyes had welled with tears, and he had to rubs his hands across his eyes before he could see anything more than blurred shapes. He tapped his combadge.

“Go ahead Magnus,” came Erin’s voice.

Magnus couldn’t respond. He tried to speak, but his breath caught in his throat and he could make noting more than a choked sound.

“Magnus, are you okay?”

He tried to force the words out, but they stubbornly refused to come. He tapped the combadge three times quickly, activating the distress beacon inside it.

“Energizing,” Erin’s voice said, even though Magnus could barely hear it for the blood rushing in his ears.

The next thing he knew was the smell of the Raven’s clean cool air and the hiss of the doors opening as Erin ran in.

“Magnus, are you alright?”

Magnus picked himself off the transporter pad and let himself fall into her arms. And as she held him, Magnus wept.

Description
It was different this time. Perhaps it was because he knew what was happening only a few hundred meters away, but when Magnus materialised in the corridor outside the maturation chambers, he felt anxious. The alcoves nearby were empty, yet that did nothing to ease his emotions. He opened his tricorder, tried to take some comfort in the familiar motions. But he found no comfort there. The movements seemed empty, as though he was simply watching someone else perform them. His body was able to go through the motions, but they had long ago become so familiar to him that he wasn’t able to lose himself in them.

The map showed where the alien lifesigns were coming from, and he began walking towards them.

*

As he walked, he had heard the sounds of the Cube. The metallic thuds of his footsteps blended with the sound of machinery, the whirrs and buzzes of the Borg ship working and the sounds of the drones moving amongst the alcoves.

Then he stopped. Another sound had, for a moment, been barely discernable over them. Magnus listened, subconsciously holding his breath as his ears strained to hear anything that might be different. For a long moment, he heard nothing. And then it happened again – barely audible over the soft hiss of the air recyclers, he’d heard a scream. Distant, and so soft that he couldn’t be sure, but it had sounded like a scream, a shriek of pain mixed with terror.

His heart leapt into his throat. Part of Magnus was urging him to run to this person’s aid, part of him was urging him beam back to the Raven, and part of him was just rooted to the spot, shock and fear freezing him, preventing him from acting at all.

But then the moment passed. He became aware once again of himself, and why he was on the Cube. He flipped open his tricorder and checked the map. Not just to confirm his location, but to anchor him in his work, to make him an observer of whatever was happening, to separate him from what was he was going to witness.

It’s like predators in Africa, he thought. Lions hunting zebras. I’m just an observer. For a moment, he was shocked at the callousness of the thought that had sprung unbidden to his mind. Yeah, but the zebras aren’t people, he thought. Nonetheless, he knew that his choices were either to go forward and observe, or to go back. And while so much of him wanted to go back, unable to face the thought of watching the suffering of others without even trying to help, he knew that among the horrors ahead was information. Information that he needed. He steeled himself and stepped forwards.

*

The screams became louder, and soon he could no longer fool himself into pretending that it was just machinery making the sounds. He could hear, among the screams, shouted words, people calling to others, pleading for their lives, their freedom, but the words always turned to screaming before too long, and then Magnus didn’t hear those voices again. And new voices would always come to replace those that had been lost.

In a way, Magnus was grateful for the screams. They gave him warning, prevented him from suddenly coming across the Borg and whatever they were doing to these people. Despite the horror they made him feel, he was thankful for them. They’d allowed him to brace himself. One horror preparing him for a worse horror.

He turned the corner and stopped. There, sitting cross-legged in the narrow corridor ahead of him, amongst the drones that stepped around him as though he wasn’t even there, was a small child. Young, younger than Annika. The child turned to look at him as he approached. “Loy ka?” the child said, sounding curious. Magnus just looked at him. “Loy ka? Wan abi ka chenakin? Wan abi!” The child’s face twisted into tears, then he picked himself up and ran off crying down a side corridor.

“Wait!” called Magnus stepping forwards, reaching out. “I can help…” He quickly stepped forwards and looked down the corridor where the young boy had run.

The child had vanished.

For a long moment, Magnus stood staring down the side corridor. He wondered whether he should follow the child. Even if he could find the young boy, could he help? What had the Borg done to him?

He was broken out of his thoughts by a scream, loud and close. It came just as a Borg drone stepped in front of him, and the two together made him jump backwards. The corridor suddenly seemed ominous, foreboding, and Magnus decided that he would not walk down it. His heart was pounding, and he could hear the blood rush in his ears. He understood now how Erin felt. He turned away from the side corridor.

Continuing ahead, he came to a part of the corridor where it grew wider. From the narrowness of earlier, it spread to more than three meters across. There were more drones here, but they only stepped around Magnus, ignoring him. Spaced along the walls were large hatches, some closed and some open. Magnus walked up to one of the closed hatches. Next to it was a control panel, and Magnus tapped it.

With a loud rumble, the hatch started to open, splitting into two parts that slide both into the ceiling and floor. The chamber beyond was a single room, roughly six meters square, but with irregular walls that made it hard to tell the exact shape and size. In the center of the room was a crowd of drones, at least half a dozen that Magnus could see, and above them tubes snaked down from the ceiling.

But the stench of blood was what assailed him the most, and Magnus stepped back, his hand going up to cover his mouth and nose. It was new blood mixed with old, a metallic tang with the sickly sweet smell of dried vomit. Magnus knew that whatever the drones were doing, he did not want to see, and yet even though his brain was screaming at him to leave, his body refused to cooperate. He found himself taking a step forward.

One of the drones turned, and for a moment Magnus thought that he had been detected, that his biodampener wasn’t working, but then the drone went to a piece of machinery on the walls of the chamber. It tapped a number of keys on a panel, then turned back to the activity in the center of the room. The drone’s prosthetic arm ended in a number of small sharp things, and the gleaming metal was coloured by blood.

There was a cry from behind the drones gathered in the center, not a scream of terror but a roar of fury: a young man suddenly jumped through the space where the drone had stepped away. His right arm had been removed between the shoulder and the elbow, and the wound was not yet fully repaired. Blood was spraying in a thin stream, spurting quickly with his pulse and staining his clothes. From the waist down, the lad’s right side was soaked. For a moment, the lad looked at Magnus, surprised. Magnus saw behind the surprise was no fear, just determination. The lad ran towards him, towards the exit to the chamber. Magnus stepped aside to let him past.

The drones in the center of the chamber turned and followed him. The lad ran out into the corridor, turning to run back the way Magnus had come, but as he turned, his feet slipped out from under him on the blood that was dripping down his legs. He tried to get up, his hand pushing against the floor and smearing the blood that was there, but then the drones were on him, and they lifted him up as he shouted at them.

The determination that had been in the lad’s eyes was now gone, replaced with stark terror, and as the drones held him, one of them raised a hand to his throat. Whip-like tubes shot out of the hand and punctured his neck. The lad began screaming, his shouts forgotten. His eyes met with Magnus’s, but then they were gone, his face becoming lifeless, eyes vacant and his screams just stopped. His skin was losing its colour, turning a corpsely shade of grey. Magnus didn’t know what those tubes had done to him, but from where they had punctured his neck, he could see dark lines spreading. They’d injected him with something, and whatever it was, it was coursing through his circulatory system.

The drones dropped the lad back to the floor, and he lay there in a crumpled heap. For a moment, Magnus wondered if he should go and help him up, or if he was dead, or if whatever the drones had injected him with would infect him as well.

The flow of blood from the lad’s severed arm stopped, and the stump began to congeal, like coagulated blood was plugging it.

Magnus stepped forwards, but then the lad lifted himself up with his remaining arm, unsteadily getting to his feet. As the lad turned, Magnus saw on his face bare metal. An implant? he wondered. How had they done that? Then the lad turned, walked back into the chamber by himself to join the other drones, and the hatch closed.

Magnus stood there, and the sounds from around him came back. Around him, the Borg were doing to others what they had done to the lad. What have they done to him? Magnus wondered, and the thought stayed in his head, refusing to leave. They knew that the Borg could make others like them. Was this how they did it?

He managed to pull is thoughts together after some time, but he had no idea how long it had been. He walked further along the wide corridor, approaching one of the open hatches. Like the other hatch, this one served as an entry to a room. A series of rooms along this corridor, all designed for some kind of, what? Was this medical, torture, or something else? All Magnus knew for sure was that this was where the Borg made more of themselves.

He stepped up to the hatch, looking inside. Again, there was a cluster of drones in the center of the room, but there was no sound from inside. Nothing, apart from the whirring of the drones as they worked. Magnus stepped inside.

The drones were surrounding a table. Strapped to it was a male, several decades older than the lad but undoubtedly the same species. Mercifully, this old man appeared to be unconscious, though Magnus had little doubt that this was due to his mind simply overloading rather than any compassion shown by the Borg. His skin was already grey, and he had several implants already on his face. One of them was in the same location as the one he had seen on the lad. Magnus leaned forwards, trying to look past the drones to see if this man had puncture marks on his neck. Magnus didn’t see any on the portion of the man’s neck that was visible, but the marks could have been on the other side.

One of the drones on the far side of the table stepped aside. Magnus watched as another drone stepped forwards to take its place. It lifted its prosthetic arm, and Magnus saw that it had the same type of prosthesis as Needlefingers, a small grasping hand with long, thin fingers. The drone lowered this hand towards the man’s face, and the fingers slipped underneath the eyelids. The hand rotated, twisting the eye with it, and then it pulled back. The eye came free, pulling behind it the optic nerve. Another drone reached out, and with a flash of light, the optic nerve was severed just behind the eyeball. The optic nerve snapped wetly back into the socket. The eye was placed off to the side where it vanished in a blur of light. Recycled by the Collective.

The drone with the miniature hand reached back into the eye socket and pulled out the optic nerve again. The hand was covered with a mixture of blood and a clear jelly like substance. The other drone held out an implant, clamping it to the severed end of the optic nerve. It was then placed back into the socket, and a soft blue beam was directed into the gaping hole. Something like a dermal regenerator? Magnus forced himself to be analytical even as the revulsion rose up in his throat. To be otherwise would be to be overcome by the horrors he was witnessing.

The drones stepped away, and the old man on the table sat up, then stood. There was a thin sheen of blood on his face where his eye had been removed, but already it had cracked where it had dried. The man – the drone, Magnus forced himself to think – turned towards him, towards the entry hatch and stepped towards it. Magnus stepped back as he approached, and as the drone stepped through, the hatch cycled closed. The drone walked down the corridor.

Out of curiosity, Magnus followed. Had the assimilation process finished? Was there more to it? The man was still dressed mainly in the torn clothing he’d been wearing when he was captured. Would the rest of his implants be attached over the top of that, or would he be stripped before he received any more implants?

Magnus followed the drone further down the corridor, turning into a side corridor that was narrower. But as he turned, his foot caught on something, and he stumbled, almost falling. He looked back. There was an old woman, sitting, huddled in the corner. Her dress was in tatters, and he could smell the stink of her clothes, soaked with her own urine and faeces, an acrid smell that burned his throat. Her face was turning dark; whatever the Borg were injecting these people with, she’d been infected, and it was spreading throughout her body. She looked up at him, sadly. There was disappointment in her eyes. Disappointment at him? At herself? Magnus had no idea. Her face was wet from her tears.

Without warning, the side of her face erupted. Just underneath her right ear, the skin bulged, then split, and an implant unfolded itself. Magnus jumped backwards, falling to the floor and his hands scraped across the grating. Magnus watched the implant grow in horror. A thin trickle of blood flowed from the broken skin underneath it, but it soon turned grey and congealed. Her eyes became vacant, replaced with the same unseeing expression that had taken the young lad’s eyes. Then she stood, stepped around him and walked away.

For a long moment, Magnus stayed there on the floor. The implants had come from inside the victims? What were the Borg injecting these people with? He stood and looked to see where the old man had gone. He had vanished. Magnus continued further down the corridor. Around him, the drones moved, most were covered almost completely in Borg biomechanics and implants, but some of them still showed torn and soiled clothes between implants.

There was a sudden rush of footsteps, and hands grasped Magnus from behind. He jumped, feeling a jolt of terror race through him, more than simply being startled. Had the Collective discovered him? Was his biodampener faulty? He almost surrendered to the panic – it was a drone, the Collective was aware of him, he was going to die, no, worse, he was going to be assimilated, any second he was going to feel the pain in his neck, and then his body would explode from within with Borg implants – but then the hands turned him around, and it wasn’t a drone. It was a man, and he looked to be the same age as Magnus. Like the others he had seen, his clothes were dirty and torn, and there were cuts on his face, and dried blood. But this man had no implants, and his skin, though streaked with dirt, did not have the dark veins of an assimilated drone.

“La ko aba,” he said, and his voice was rushed, desperate. His eyes were wide with fear.

Magnus shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling helpless. “The universal translator isn’t working properly. Maybe…”

“Wa ken lochaka, fol go ungommita!” The man’s grip on Magnus’s shoulders was like iron.

Magnus stepped back, lifting his arms between the man’s arms to break his grip. “I’m sorry!” Magnus shouted. “I just can’t understand you!”

“Fol go! Fol go!” the man repeated, shouting in Magnus’s face. Magnus could feel flecks of the man’s saliva on his cheek.

“I can’t understand you!” Magnus shouted back, feeling angry. Not at the man, but at being unable to help.

The man slapped at Magnus’s shoulders in anger. “Na fo tikka, lon ache to funika. Go cha! Cha!” The man blinked, and tears started to run down his cheeks. His voice was overcome with despair, the anger forgotten. “Go cha ni bonelli.” The man stepped back. He looked at Magnus with an apologetic look, then turned and walked away. A few meters from him, he turned back to Magnus, and with a shrug, said, “In tebi folan gund.” He sighed. “Folan,” he said again, the hung his head and walked away.

Magnus watched him walk away. It didn’t feel right, just leaving him go. But what else could he do? Without any way to communicate, Magnus was useless to these people. But even if he could talk to them, what could he say? He couldn’t be cruel enough to give them false hope. Not when their fate was sealed. And he couldn’t risk taking them back to the Raven; the ship wouldn’t hold more than a handful of these people, and what if they’d been infected with whatever the Borg were injecting them with? He didn’t dare take the risk.

In the end, all he could do was gather data, and hope that the universal translator was able to lock onto their syntax and grammar.

The drone he had been following lost from sight, Magnus turned and headed back towards the main corridor. When he got back to it, he could see a small group of people being lead down the corridor, each being escorted by two drones. Half a dozen people. The first two were a middle aged couple. Their identical bracelets suggested they were related. Married maybe? Behind them was an old man who walked hunched over and with shuffling steps. After him was a young woman, beautiful, with a thin graceful body like a dancer and a pretty face with wide eyes that were filled with fear. Behind her was a child, a boy who looked to be no more than twelve and stepped quickly to keep close to the others. The last was a younger boy, who could have been no more than six, but his eyes were red and puffy. He was sobbing quietly,

The first two, the married couple, simply looked at Magnus as they went past, their expression blank. They had resigned themselves to their fate. The old man behind them stopped when he saw Magnus, staring at him in wonder. But the drones holding his arms pulled him forwards, and he stumbled. If not for the drones holding him, he would have fallen.

The young woman following him seized the moment, perhaps hoping that the old man’s stumble would distract the drones that held her. She twisted her lithe body violently in their grasp, wrenching herself free, and she ran. But as she ran past one of the drones escorting the old man, its arm reached out, the whip-like tubes lashing from the back of the hand, catching her in the throat. She immediately fell, her face smacking hard into the grated floor. Magnus heard the crunch as her nose broke from the impact. He instinctively stepped forwards to help her up, but she was already lifting herself up. She groaned, and the groan turned into a deep retching sound that came from her stomach. Wanting to help her, but at the same time repulsed by the sound, Magnus could only watch as her body lurched and she vomited over the floor. The stink of her vomit and the dry heaving of her retching almost made Magnus vomit as well, but he fought back the nausea. Dimly, he noticed that there was a strange pearlesence in her vomit, grey swirls mixed in. He took his tricorder from its holster and aimed it at the vomit, hoping the grey swirls were caused by the same thing that gave the skin of the Collective’s victims the deathly pallor.

The woman shrieked, and Magnus stepped back. She lifted herself up on all fours, and Magnus could see the vomit on her face, and then she fell onto her side. Dark lines were snaking under her skin, and she was slapping her hands at her face. She screamed again, the scream turning into another retch, and she was sick once more. She coughed, a horrible hacking sound as she choked on her own vomit, and her screams turned to sobs. Her hands began clawing at her face, blood starting to run where her fingernails were digging into the flesh. The blood flowed faster and more freely, and Magnus realised she was ripping the skin from her face. Her blood, like her vomit, was stained with grey, but Magnus’s tricorder had been dropped to the floor.

He looked down at her as she convulsed in her agony, and all he could think was Kill her. Take out your phaser and kill her. Don’t let her suffer. Death is better than this. But he was frozen, and even though part of him tried to reach down to the phaser on his hip, he couldn’t move.

Her leg, thrashing as she struggled, caught one of the drones that had been leading her, knocking it to the floor. It picked itself up, and then, with the other drone that had been her escort, lifted the young woman up off the floor. She was still gasping and retching. One of the drones pressed something against her neck, and her eyes went wide. The gasping stopped, and a shrill high-pitched wail came from her. Then the drone took the thing away from her and let her drop back to the floor. They led the others away.

The young woman lay still now. Her hands twitched, and Magnus could hear her breath as it rattled in her throat. She looked up at him, and Magnus felt completely helpless. He counted each breath she took. She’d taken fifty three before her breathing stopped.

Magnus turned, his stomach lurching, and he threw up on the grated floor. He collapsed to his knees, vomiting again. He leaned forwards on his hands, his head hung low, fighting the urge to be sick again, even though he could feel the bile rising in his throat and he knew he couldn’t stop it.

When he finally felt his stomach starting to settle, he let himself fall sideways so he was sitting on the grating floor, the young woman’s body was gone. The metallic stench of her blood remained, mixing with the thick smell of his own vomit. He realised the dull ache he felt in his hip was his own tricorder on the floor digging into the bone. He picked it up, sliding it back into the holster.

This was too much. Magnus could feel the need to escape rising inside him. He had to go, and it didn’t matter if he didn’t get any more information. The nearest assimilation chamber had its door wide open, and Magnus could see inside it a pair of drones holding down a screaming man. It was the man who had spoken to him in the corridor. In horror, Magnus watched as the sharp metal of one of the drone’s prosthetic arm ran over his forehead, and then peeled the skin back, revealing a crisp white bone stained red with blood. The man’s screams became louder, shrieks. Once the blood-slicked scalp was put aside, the drone picked up a large implant, placing it over the exposed bone. The man stopped screaming, mercifully claimed by unconsciousness. There was a soft buzzing noise, the smell of heated blood and the sting in his eyes of scorched flesh as the drones attached the implant to the man’s skull.

Magnus screwed his eyes closed, turning away. He felt something against his leg, and he opened his eyes and looked down. It was a child, a young boy, maybe five, standing naked before him.

“Can you tell me where it’s safe?” the child asked. With a shock, Magnus realised he could understand the boy. The translator must have picked up the syntax at last.

Magnus tried to respond, but when he opened his mouth to talk, the words caught in his throat. Finally, he just shook his head.

“Oh,” said the boy sadly. But he didn’t walk off, he just stood there.

Magnus looked down at him, not knowing what to do. There was a whirring noise, and a drone walking past stopped. It looked at the boy, the reached down and picked him up. The boy put his arms around the drone’s neck. The drone turned and walked into an assimilation chamber, and the door closed.

For Magnus, it was too much. He was desperate to get away from this place. He hurried down the corridor, stepping around the drones that were still leading people into the assimilation chambers. And then, when he had finally left that section of the Cube and the winding passageways were empty, Magnus broke into a run.

It wasn’t long before he found himself back at the maturation chambers. He couldn’t remember checking the map on his tricorder, but it was sitting in his hand. He could barely see. As he had run, his eyes had welled with tears, and he had to rubs his hands across his eyes before he could see anything more than blurred shapes. He tapped his combadge.

“Go ahead Magnus,” came Erin’s voice.

Magnus couldn’t respond. He tried to speak, but his breath caught in his throat and he could make noting more than a choked sound.

“Magnus, are you okay?”

He tried to force the words out, but they stubbornly refused to come. He tapped the combadge three times quickly, activating the distress beacon inside it.

“Energizing,” Erin’s voice said, even though Magnus could barely hear it for the blood rushing in his ears.

The next thing he knew was the smell of the Raven’s clean cool air and the hiss of the doors opening as Erin ran in.

“Magnus, are you alright?”

Magnus picked himself off the transporter pad and let himself fall into her arms. And as she held him, Magnus wept.