Jared and Chloe were running for their lives through the Library Arcanium.
They had come in the night.
Due to the fact Adrian did not need to sleep, he had managed to sound the alarm indicating the library was under attack. But even with the advance warning half of the Society had fallen before any resistance could be formed.
The air was very humid and ambient green light was seen everywhere. Sparks of electricity would occasionally burst and light up the room, emanating from various mechanical elements of the Library. Toppled bookshelves and broken furniture lay everywhere.
"Faster Chloe," Jared urged. "If we can just make it to my tech lab we can use Chevila to escape!" He said, hoping it was true.
"But what about all our friends?" Chloe sobbed. "Did you see what happened to Tash! We have to do something!"
"I'm sure most of them made it to Adrian's panic room." Jared replied. "It's already been put under lockdown so it's too late for us to try to get in. There's nobody left in the library that we can help or receive help from, I'm not even sure we can help ourselves! The only thing we can do right now is escape to the safest fandom possible, maybe we could contact someone like Doug's author and form a rescue force of some kind."
When Jared and Chloe rounded the corner they saw what they both had been hoping to avoid. Several mechanical beings stood in the hall blocking their progress.
"We are the Borg, You're existence as you know it is over. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." The voice came from from every drone, speaking in unison. Jared and Chloe froze at the sudden shock of seeing the beings responsible for the destruction all around them. Chloe recovered her senses first.
"Assimilate this you Borg piece of trash!" She yelled. "Enchanto!" She summoned her shield while charging at the drones, blades extending from the edges of the shield at her touch. At first it looked like she was going to very easily defeat them as her bladed weapon cut down one Borg after another. But after a couple of blows the Borg adapted to the physical assault and she bounced right off of some kind of shielding around the drone she had lunged at.
"Techtonic Shift!" Jared yelled, stomping the ground. The ground shook and the Borg all lost their balance.
Jared's earth powers were much weaker when he didn't actually have any earth to send his waves through, but they still worked. Jared took this opportunity to cut and run, pulling Chloe along by her arm. With the ramp to the science hall cut off, he was going to have to detour by using the stairs by Charis' lab.
Jared and Chloe ran into the kitchen; going way out of their way in hopes of avoiding more drones. Unfortunately they had underestimated the sheer number of drones constantly pouring in through the Library's shattered defenses. They ran smack dab in the middle of several drones busy breaking down the kitchen appliances into raw material.
They began to say"Resistance is futile" but they never got past "fut" because Jared suddenly unleashed everything he had into the room with a shout of "Magnitude 10!" causing every cabinet to splinter, every table to blow apart and every appliance to explode.
The drones fell, either dead or crippled. Dust filled the air. Jared had to stop and rest after releasing such a powerful burst. It was five minutes before he felt like he could move again. They ran through the doorway to the kitchen when a drone they hadn't spotted before before reached out and grabbed Chloe, tubes shooting out of its arm and puncturing her neck. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she fell to the ground with a weak cry of "Jared..."
Jared kept running, scared almost senseless, he couldn't bear to look back and see his fallen partner. There was nothing he could do to help her, she would become one of them now. Jared promised to himself that he was going to come back, and he would bring everything he could with him. The Borg would pay for this he swore, trying to do everything he could keep himself from falling over and having a nervous breakdown right in the middle of the Library's periodical section.
When he finally got to his tech lab and flung open the door he gasped in horror. The lab was indistinguishable from the interior of a Borg vessel. Several drones were regenerating in alcoves that had recently been put into the walls, including...
"NO!"
Adrian, Harriet, Emily, Tash, Tyler, Drake, Aster and Doug all in various states of Borg assimilation stepped out of their regeneration alcoves with a brief metallic whirring sound.
The Librarian opened his eyes. "Society Agent, designation: Jared. I am Locutus of Borg. My purpose is to facilitate the assimilation of this establishment. Resistance is futile!" Said Adrian, although "Adrian" Maybe wasn't the correct descriptive term anymore...
Jared collapsed against the wall and slid to the floor, sobbing.
It was over. The Borg had assimilated the freakin' Librarian! The strongest member of the society! What was Jared supposed to do? Chevila was nowhere to be seen, probably assimilated or broken down into raw material by now.
Jared wondered what life as a drone would be like, not even having a sense of individual identity to call his own, all his knowledge being ripped from him and being stored on a Borg server somewhere. Well, he had tried to go get help, he had tried to escape. But hey, in the end what you've tried to do doesn't really make any difference at all if you don't succeed in doing it, oh well that's life.
Adrian grabbed the shaking agent by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet, tubes shooting out of his right arm and latching onto Jared's neck, injecting their nanoprobes...
-
"NNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!"
Everybody at the mission briefing jumped, turning to look at Jared.
He opened his eyes and frowned. The entire side of his face felt moist, probably because he was lying in a puddle of his own drool. He apologized profusely, sitting up. He had never fallen asleep during a mission briefing before. He blamed it on the pain medication Valerie had given him for his cracked ribs.
Tash shot him a disapproving glare.
"Well if everybody here is finished napping I suppose we can continue..." The de facto leader said. "As I was just saying, a Level 6 Sue has been detected in the Star Trek: The Next Generation fandom. Normally I would send only the more experienced agents into a fandom like this, but with the current manhunt for Ben going on, we don't have any to spare."
Jared looked around the briefing room. He hated to say it, but Tash was right, new agents and rookies were the only ones present. Most, like Jared, had only a few missions if any under their belt, some of them weren't even full agents yet.
Jared frowned. He couldn't believe Ben would have done something like this.
After he had heard the explosion he and Chloe had come running, by the time they had arrived on the scene all the action was over. Adrian had already formed his expedition team and was preparing to leave. According to Adrian's report, Ben had supposedly been a double agent, and that he and Repiv had supposedly gone rogue and attempted to break into the Room Of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Jared couldn't believe it, he and Ben were good friends and he might have been a goof, but he had a hard time wrapping his head around the idea that Ben was a backstabber.
To make matters worse, somebody had broken into Jared's sub-lab. Jared had no way of knowing what had been stolen seeing as the whole placed had been trashed and set on fire, so there was several items Jared had no way of accounting for, and this made Jared very worried...
Dave nudged Jared with his elbow. "Pay attention!" He whispered.
"Sorry, I was busy listening to the recitation of the current plot." Jared said.
From somewhere off in the library there was a deep rumble and the sound of snapping wood.
Tash went on as if nothing happened, she was entirely too stressed out to deal with forth wall breakages at the moment.
"-and that brings me to my next point... for some reason we can't get clear reading of what is going on in the fandom at the moment due to problems with the monitors. Charis has informed me that the problem is probably due to sabotage by the double-agent Repiv, or possibly Ben. But from what information we gathered before the network went down the Sue is currently in somewhere in the pre-Nemesis, post-Generations story arc, meaning that the fandom is going to be based around the adventures of the Enterprise-E, not the Enterprise-D. Who here is the most familiar with this part of the series?"
All around the room the rookies and novices murmured amongst themselves. They had all stopped following the series after Generations because Paramount had had the nerve to kill off Captain Kirk. Jared raised his hand and arched an eyebrow.
"Given my knowledge of the area in question, I believe that I am the most logical choice for the mission." Jared said, using the exact same vocal inflections that a Vulcan would. Chloe rolled her eyes.
Tash was skeptical. "What about your ribs?" She asked, alluding to the fact that Jared had been badly injured by a vampire on his last mission just a few hours before.
Jared brushed it off. "I doubt there will be much action in this fandom, I doubt the Sue could offer much more resistance than a phaser fight, and a phaser won't do her much good if I blow up the ground underneath her."
"Alright." Tash said. "Get going, just remember we won't be able to monitor you. Use your communicator if you should require assistance."
-
Chloe and Jared looked at themselves in Chevila's rear view mirror, both were wearing Federation uniforms. In order to blend in unnoticed in the fandom they didn't try to assume any rank higher than Ensign.
Jared and Chloe both gave themselves satisfied nods and opened the truck's doors, Chloe paused before she got in.
"Jared, why did you put a decal of the Society logo on the door?"
Jared growled. "Tyler! He had to key my door, I couldn't find the right shade of navy blue paint anywhere in the entire library to fix it, so I had to just cover it up."
Chloe laughed.
"Mr. Chekov, set a course for the Next Generation fandom, warp factor 2." Chloe said, doing her best to sound like William Shatner.
Jared laughed, then assumed an unconvincing Russian accent. "Aye aye captain, course layed in!"
"Excellent, engage."
With that, Jared coaxed the truck to life and went cruising down the runway of his lab. Like always he flipped a lever that controlled the plothole generator when he was halfway down and they were suddenly in a very dark room. Jared could vaguely make out the shapes of objects in darkness, he put on the brakes and brought the truck to a stop. In the background Jared could hear the low rumble of warp engines.
-
Somewhere in transformational space a guy with messy brown hair wearing carpenter jeans and a brown leather jacket over a red shirt and a light haired women dressed in tight black clothing and covered in barbwire tattoos were lugging a strange contraption labeled "Flux Capacitor -do not remove" down a winding corridor made of blue rock towards and idling Toyota Camry.
"You know Deraj, Asasca is going to kill you when he notices you stole this thing." Said the woman.
"Not stealing Eolhc, borrowing." Deraj said. "And further more, what Asasca doesn't know will not hurt him. My Sue Storm project is more important than that little science fair project of his anyway."
"I'm sure High Command would disagree..." Said Eolhc.
"Duh, why did you think I didn't tell them." Deraj said with a smile as he and Eloch lugged the device into the car's trunk. They were just about to go and rejoin the others when a device on Deraj's wrist started making a beeping noise.
"Oh! It seems my counter-part is taking the bait I set out for him, I'm sure two less people guarding the phantom table setter or whatever that thing is won't make a difference." Deraj said, shutting off the beeping. "Hop in Toyotanya, let's go catch us our test subject."
-
"I can't see anything" Chloe said.
"I can fix that." Jared said. He clapped his hands and Chevila's headlights sprang to life.
Chloe looked at Jared. "You installed a Clapper in your truck?"
Jared shrugged. "Hey, I was bored." Chloe rolled her eyes.
The two of them got out and began to look around.
Jared could tell by their surroundings they were obviously in the main shuttle bay of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but what astounded him was the complete disarray that it was in. Debris lay all over the place. There were numerous hull breaches, but thankfully emergency force fields were in place that kept he and his partner from being sucked out into space. Several barrels of Federation rations lay overturned. It looked like someone had been trying to load a shuttle with supplies, but obviously whoever it was had not finished the job.
"This is all wrong." Jared said, looking grim. "This ship looks like it's gone through numerous battles, but the Dominion War should be over during this time period. I'm going to call Tash, this may be more than the two of us can handle."
Jared tapped his communicator, which had been modified to look and function like a federation com-badge.
"Jared to Tash." All Jared got in reply was white noise. He looked confused.
"There appears to be a heavy magnetic footprint of some kind here, it's interfering with our communicators." Said Chloe.
"And Chevila's plot hole generator won't recharge for another 10 minutes, looks like we're on our own." Jared added.
"Well, let's go find an access panel, maybe it will tell us whats going on." Chloe said.
Jared had a nagging feeling about the magnetic field, but couldn't put his finger on why exactly. They tried to leave the shuttle bay, but found the doors were non-functional.
Jared used his Boomhammer to make them functional.
After he had blown the doors down he realized that toting a sledgehammer and a sword aboard a federation starship was not the best way to go unnoticed. Regrettably, he and Chloe left their weapons in Chevila's cab, and Jared turned the truck off and killed the lights with a clap.
Darkness once again dominated the shuttle bay.
Chloe and Jared began to walk down the corridor, red emergency lights were the only thing that provided them with light of any kind. They were having to push aside debris from collapsed bulkheads and doorways as they progressed, at several points they had to turn back when they ran into severly damaged areas of the ship that were sealed off. Eventually they managed to find an access panel, unfortunately for them the main computer was offline and they couldn't get any information out of it.
"We're going to have to go to the bridge." Said Jared. Chloe agreed.
They took the nearest functional turbolift to the bridge. When they got out, the first thing they noticed was that the bridge wasn't much better off than the shuttle bay. The next thing they noticed was that Captain Jean Luc Picard was just finishing a Captian's log, his voice sounding heavy like someone who had not had much sleep lately.
"-with the fall of Earth, the war effort looks bleak, I'm afraid that they will not stop until all humanity is erased from existence, the Enterprise is currently in a state of disrepair, and we are currently on our way to rendezvous with the 42nd Fleet, or rather what remains of it after the battle of Vulcan, to make what might be considered the Federation's last stand. End log recording."
Jared froze. What force could possibly drive the Federation to near extinction? The only race with even close to that amount of power was... Jared suddenly realized the significance of the magnetic footprint.
He began to speak. "Chloe! We have to get out of here now! I know what's going on here and we don't stand a chance! We have to leave before..."
Commander Data suddenly interrupted him by turning to Picard. "Captain, enemy vessel detected, time to intercept, 2 minutes. The vessel didn't appear on our sensors until it was almost on top of us!"
"On Screen!" Shouted the captain. Jared's fears were confirmed when a vessel shaped like a perfect cube appeared on the viewscreen.
"Red Alert! All hands to battle stations!" Yelled Commander Riker. The bridge was suddenly bathed in red light and sirens filled the air, crewmen all over the bridge sprung to sudden life as consoles suddenly brought up displays indicating shield strength, hull integrity and weapons status. Jared gave them all a quick glance, the Enterprise was clearly not in optimal fighting condition. Jared doubted that this battle would have a pleasant outcome.
"Captain! The Borg are hailing us, audio only!" Data said.
The bridge speakers came to life with the typical Borg mantra. "You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."
Jared and Chloe got back in the turbolift, heading straight for the deck that Chevila was on. If they could just get to the truck they might have a chance to escape, the Enterprise was no match for a Borg Cube even when it was in top condition. Their only hope was to escape the doomed ship before the Borg could assimilate it. The ship suddenly rocked, and the turbo lift stopped. They almost panicked but after several painful seconds the lift started again.
"We're not going to make it to the shuttle bay." Jared said ominously as the ship rocked again. "We only have one chance. 'Computer, halt turbolift.'"
The doors to the lift abruptly opened, revealing a scene of absolute carnage. Repair crews were running in every direction, mixed with the occasional Yellow of security officers. Another Borg torpedo hit, the entire ship lurched as this one found it's mark, punching straight through the shields. Jared and Chloe were thrown against the wall, Jared yelping in pain and clutching his heavily bandaged side. Consoles overloaded and exploded, part of the wall burst open and fire spilled into the corridor.
"This way!" Jared yelled. He and Chloe turned to run when they saw a shimmer of Borg transporters deposit numerous Borg drones in the corridor. The nearby security officers drew their phaser rifles and began to fire at the drones. The drones adapted their shielding almost instantly, nullifying the effects of the Federation weaponry. Several drones walked right up to the security personal and injected them with nanoprobes. The security officers never gave any ground until the very last one of them was assimilated. Jared began to have vivid flashbacks from his nightmare.
"The other way!" Jared yelled. He and Chloe turned to run the opposite way down the corridor, only to find more drones.
"Tremor!" Jared shouted, arms extended, the corridor underneath the drones exploding.
The two of them ran around the dead Borg and crater down the corridor. Chloe felt the ship shudder as damaged impulse engines fired and the Enterprise maneuvered to return fire on the Borg Cube, phaser banks discharging and photon torpedo tubes emptying as the Enterprise valiantly fought the hopeless battle.
After stumbling over injured crewman and fallen bulkheads for two minutes the agents finally found the room they were looking for: the transporter room. They found it to be unoccupied, and Chloe ran over to the control panel.
"Transporters are online thankfully, I think I can give us a site-to-site transport to the main shuttle bay."
She hit a few buttons on the control panel then grabbed Jared by the arm and ran to the transporter pad. There was a shimmer of light and they were back were they had started. Apparently just after they had left the engineers had repaired the emergency lighting, clearly showing the Borg drones assimilating all of the shuttles and the engineers that had done the repair work. Thankfully they had ignored Chevila, as they didn't consider the old pickup as a worthwhile investment of their time. Chloe began her attack.
"Enchanto!" This time she summoned a dozen Rubik's cubes, half of them were unsolved, representing her intellectual side. The cubes exploded, blowing the drones back, individual sections of the cubes embedding themselves into the drones like shrapnel.
"I always wondered how to solve those." Jared said, running over and jumping in Chevila. He hit the Plothole Generator switch, but nothing happened but a slight sizzling sound and some smoke under the hood.
"Oh C'mon! The Borg are using some kind of scattering field to keep me from using the Plothole Generator, we're gonna have to make a run for it!" Jared yelled.
Chloe was about to ask him what he meant by that when Jared picked her up, threw her in the truck, got out and made his way to the shuttle bay controls, he was muttering to himself as he was trying to figure out how the controls worked until with a shout of "Bingo!" He managed to get activate the shuttle bay's decompression cycle.
"Warning: Shuttle bay decompression will begin in 30 seconds" Chimed the computer.
Jared hopped back in the truck and drifted around to face the open shuttle bay doors, in half a minute the force field holding the atmosphere in would go down and everything in the bay would be sucked into space. Jared put on Chevila's parking brake and put the pedal to the floor. Chevila's engine whined and the back tires began to spin, fighting to overpower the brake. Chevila inched forward, leaving a trail of black skid marks.
"Are you INSANE?" Shouted Chloe.
"Yes, but that has nothing to do with this! We have to get outside the range of the Borg cube's scattering field in order to call for help or escape. When I count to 25 I'm going to release the parking brake and we will shoot forward. 5 seconds later the bay decompresses and we will be sucked into space. If I time this right, we will hit 88 MPH and be able to canonize."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Well..." Said Jared. "We die, hopefully it won't come to that."
Chloe was speechless. The Enterprise had maneuvered around so it could fire from its aft torpedo bays giving Jared a view of the Borg Cube ominously through the open shuttle bay doors.
The cube engaged its tractor beam and the Enterprise ground to a halt. Borg cutting beams began to slice the Enterprise up like a Thanksgiving turkey as more tractor beams began to pull the severed parts of the ship from their places and drag them slowly towards the Borg cube to be assimilated.
Jared counted to 25 and released the brake, the truck shot forward like a bullet from gun. The speedometer hit 60 in 3.5 seconds, at 4.5 it was 70 and at 5 the shuttle bay decompressed. The dead and damaged Borg drones, the Federation rations and all the shuttles were all pulled into space, and Chevila was no exception.
The engine instantly stalled as there was no longer any air to fuel the combustion inside of the gasoline engine. The cab was not airtight and was losing air rapidly. The windshields were suddenly covered in cracks. they were mere seconds away from the cab blowing open when the speedometer hit exactly 88. Jared punched the canonization button and there was a bright flash. Jared was suddenly sitting in the captain's chair of an odd looking blue shuttle craft of obviously Federation design. The control panels revealed that they were aboard the U.S.S Chevila. Jared noticed a generic looking crewmen sitting at the helm, while Chloe sat at tactical.
Jared wondered how it was possible for Chevila to generate a crew member until he saw the holographic emitter mounted on the ceiling.
"Your orders captain?" Asked the helmsmen.
"Um, Warp 9, any heading, engage." Jared said, once he realized the man was talking to him.
"Aye aye!" The man hit a few buttons and Chevila's warp nessels that looked deceptively like brake lights lit up with a hum. Stars began to streak by as the shuttle craft shot forward and fled the massacre behind them.
"Sir!" The helmsmen said. "The Borg vessel is in pursuit."
"What?" Said Chloe. "The Borg always take the biggest technological and biological targets first, they should ignore us until they've completely assimilated the Enterprise!"
"We are being hailed!" The helmsmen ignored Chloe.
"Onscreen." Jared commanded.
Jared nearly fell out of his chair when he saw Cassandra standing on a platform aboard the Borg Cube. At least, he thought it was Cassandra, This Sue had purple hair and was slightly taller than Cassandra, but had less of a figure. She was wearing what Jared could only describe as a metal jumpsuit, her skin was a shade of pale green. Due to the implants of the Borg Queen.
"Who the heck are you and how dare you do such outstanding damage to a fandom!" Jared yelled.
"My name ez Fiona, I em Cassandra's sister." The french Sue Purred. "As for why I'm doing thes, De Borg are dee ultimate deesplay of the pursuit of perfection. Their queen was unable tu complete the goal. That's why I em here, to feenish what she begaan."
Fiona gave a devilish smirk. "wait unteel Cassandra hears I em the one who killed you."
With that, the Sue ended the transmission.
The Helmsmen turned to Jared. "Sir, the Borg are firing!"
-
Charis was performing surgery on the monitor display terminal back in the Library.
Whatever Repiv did, it had taken the techie all day to just begin to make progress. She made a connection of wires and the whole console burst into a shower of sparks. The monitor network suddenly sprang to life, the displays slowly warming up and pictures began forming, all but one of them coming to focus on Adrian's task force.
The other formed a very grainy image, heavy with interference, of Jared and Chloe's mission, but it was so garbled up that nobody could make any sense of what they were looking at.
"Charis, what's wrong with the monitor?" Tash asked.
"Absolutely nothing. The interference seems to be coming from the fandom itself. Has Jared sent you any information about something that could be causing that?"
Tash frowned. "My communicator had a burst of static awhile back, I just assumed I accidental set it off."
It was Charis' turn to frown. "That may have been Jared. If this interference can screw up our monitor feed, I'm sure it could disrupt communications. Hand me that voltage reader, I'm going to see if I can make the monitor compensate for all the static."
She began adjusting levers and knobs with the skill of someone who clearly knows what they're doing. The monitor suddenly snapped sharply into focus, it's picture depicting the U.S.S. Chevila being hit by some form of drain weapon, her shields lighting up like a firework.
Tash instantly sized up the situation and turned to Charis. "Get ahold of everybody you can, this situation is obviously well over Jared's head. We'll need to form a rescue team."
Tash whipped out her plothole generator and fired. The gadget managed to make a pinky sized plothole before shorting out, this did not bode well...
She pointed at Charis. "Never mind pulling the rescue team together. I'll do that, you try and find some way to get past that magnetic field!"
She took off at a run to try to find any available agent who wasn't a rookie. "Of all the times for Adrian to be gone!" Tash yelled to no one in particular.
-
"Shields down to 35%!" Called the helmsmen as Chevila was hit by yet another Borg shield drainer. "Captain! We can't take another hit like that!"
"Chloe! Arm Micro-quantum torpedoes!" Jared shouted over the sound of all the noises aboard the tiny shuttle.
"Torpedoes armed!" Chloe said.
"Fire!" Jared shouted.
Two micro-torpedoes fired from Chevila's aft launcher and slammed right into the Borg cube, inflicting a negligible amount of damage.
"Direct hit! Now all we need to do that again about 50,000 more times!" Shouted Chloe.
Jared hadn't expected anything different, but hey, it was worth a shot.
"Helmsmen, send an emergency distress call on all frequencies!" Jared ordered, turning to a speaker.
"This is Captain Jared of the Federation Shuttle Chevila, under attack by Borg vessel. Said vessel has also crippled the U.S.S. Enterprise, we require assistance!"
Jared had run out of options, he was even starting to consider turning about and ordering a collision course, he doubted it would do much damage but at least he'd go out with a bang.
-
Fiona was almost giddy with glee, watching the shuttle attempt to escape. Right now she was just toying with them, had she wanted to end this quickly she could just fire a real torpedo instead of low power drain weapons. Heck, one Borg torpedo could probably take out a whole fleet of Chevila's, but the Sue was just having too much fun. With a simple mental command she ordered the vessel to fire out one last drain weapon.
-
"Impact in 3... 2... 1..." The helmsmen called out. The shield status display abruptly lit up and the next moment all shields on all vectors went from 35% to offline. Green shimmers of the Borg transporters filled the cockpit of the shuttle as a dozen Borg materialized.
Mr. Generic Helmsmen grabbed his phaser, set the setting to maximum and fired at the closest drone, it dropped in a shower of sparks. He managed to take out two more before they adapted to his phaser's frequency.
"Boomhammer!" Jared shouted. Lifting the hammer from its resting place, he gave the nearest drone a crippling blow, the resulting "BBOOOOMMM" was almost unbearably loud due to the confined space of the cockpit.
Jared tried the hammer again but it only bounced off of the next drones adapted shielding, making the sound of someone loudly clapping their hands.
Jared shrank back, he didn't dare start slinging earth waves around the tiny cockpit. Chloe didn't even bother attacking, if they could absorb Jared's hammer, her sword and shield wouldn't stand a chance. And all she could accomplish with her Rubik's cubes would be to blow Jared and her up. They all backed up against the control panels at the front of the shuttle as the drones crept closer.
"Computer, initiate self-destruct matrix, no countdown. Set self destruct to occur on my command." Jared said, determined not to be assimilated.
"Confirmed. Self destruct will occur at the Captain's orders." Said the computer. It had the exact same voice as the one it had when Chevila was a transformer, and it might've only been Jared's imagination, but it also sounded sad somehow...
Then Jared got an idea.
"Chloe, strap yourself into your seat!" Jared said to his partner.
"What?"
"Just do it!"
Chloe and Jared sat in their seats and buckled in. When the Borg were only feet away, Jared turned around and readied some earth magic. He was aware he couldn't use it effectively against the Borg without accidental damaging the shuttle, but intentionally damaging the shuttle was something he could do quite easily, although he'd regret it if he ever got back to the Library.
"Tremor!" He shouted, pointing at the wall. It exploded outward and the vacuum of space began to suck everything out of the shuttle craft. The Borg were pulled into space, as well as the generic helmsmen, who dissolved into nothing the second he was outside the range of Chevila's holoprojector.
Emergency force fields sealed the hull breach a moment later.
-
Fiona was very annoyed. Jared would blow up his entire shuttle before letting drones assimilate him and Chloe, so she had to use another tactic. The cube shuddered briefly as it began to accelerate to higher warp velocities. Chevila could barely do warp 9.2, the cube would easily overtake her at warp 9.9.
-
Chloe had assumed the helm position. The Borg vessel was closing rapidly.
"Chloe, increase speed!" Jared ordered.
"But we'll fly apart!" Cried Chloe.
"Fly apart then!" Jared yelled at her. "If we get assimilated the Borg we'll be able to adapt Chevila's Plothole Generator to their technology! Once they've adapted to Adrian's defenses, which they will, they'll be able to get into the Library and we can't let that happen!"
The hull screamed with strain as Chloe pushed the warp engines well beyond their safety tolerances. The rate the Borg cube was closing began to slow and Jared briefly thought that they might even be able to outrun it, but then with a terrible boom the warp engines gave out and Chevila dropped to sublight speeds.
The Borg cube also dropped out of warp and locked on to Chevila with a tractor beam. The docking bay where some Cubes housed Spheres opened and promptly pulled Chevila in and latched on to the shuttle with docking clamps. Jared turned to Chloe.
"Get to work on the Plothole Generator. See if you can rewire it to get past this field, I'll try to buy you some time, here's the plan..."
Jared opened the shuttles doors and walked slowly down a ramp to the floor of the cube. He had to stall Fiona as long as he could, if he couldn't stall long enough he was going to have to blow up Chevila. They were fairly close to the main reactor, he wondered if he'd be able to take out the Borg vessel with him. If he blew up the Sue, the fandom would still return to normal.
The Sue seemingly emerged from nowhere and immediately began to gloat.
"You can forgeet about escaping agent Jereed, my drones cen adapt to aneething you can throw at them. Cassandra vill be so disappointed she wasn't 'ere to personally witness your defeat." The French Sue said in a sing-song voice as she slinked towards Jared.
"Oh, you're looking for Jared! Well then this whole affair has just been a case of mistaken identity." Said Jared.
"Oh really?" The Sue said, stopping a short distance from Jared. "Then pray tell, which agent are you?"
Jared assumed a absolutely terrible British accent. Out of all of his accents, British was Jared's worst. "Agent Bond, James Bond. The woman in the shuttle is a member of the the CIA."
The Sue raised an eyebrow.
"You wouldn't happen to have a dry martini would you, shaken not stirred?" Jared kept rattling on. "It would be quite a shame if I didn't manage to get one on this mission."
The Sue quickly caught on to what Jared was doing. "You will be assimilated." She smiled. "And don't bother self destructing, de force fields around this section are more than adequate to contain the explosion."
That changed things.
Plan B, stalling the Sue and escaping failed. Plan C, blowing up the whole cube wouldn't work, so here goes Plan A.
Jared tapped his Com-badge. "Chloe, fire all phasers now!" He yelled.
Chevila's phaser banks immediately let forth a barrage of powerful bursts of energy. The drones could adapt to the frequency of the phasers, but the pure power of the beams was more than their shield generators could absorb and they were all blown away. Torpedo tubes emptied as Chevila fired micro-quantum torpedoes in quick succession into the areas where the most Borg were concentrated. The resulting explosions could easily take out up to 50 drones, but at the rate they were pouring in it wouldn't make much difference. One of the phaser banks blasted Fiona, but her own force-fields were more than strong enough to absorb the beam.
She began to run towards Jared.
"Epicenter!" He yelled, punching the ground, but nothing happened. Apparently the Borg Vessel had adapted so that it simply absorbed all the earth waves Jared could pour into it.
"That's unfortunate." He thought as the fake queen of the Borg tackled him to the ground. He let out a cry of pain as she forced him to land on his injured side. She raised her right arm and assimilation tubules shot out, writhing venomously in the air.
"Eeny last words?" The Sue said, laughing despite the destruction around them.
"Stupidsuesayswhat?" Jared said, as fast as he could.
"What?" Said the Sue.
"Ha, ha, I always wanted to do that." Jared said as he pulled out a Copyright and slapped it on the floor of the cube.
The Borg vessel, free of the non-canon influence from a fake Borg queen came to an immediate all-stop. Chloe glanced at her sensor readings aboard Chevila, noticing multiple power surges all over the vessel.
Fiona's eyes opened wide with horror.
"You ediot! Don't you know what happeens when a Borg vessel stops recieving commands from de collective? De failsafes activate and... and..." She stuttered.
"It self-destructs!" Jared said. "Goodbye."
He put his hands on her stomach. "Tremor!" He shouted, pouring the Earth waves directly into her abdomen. The Sue was blown off of Jared and flew across the room into a wall, hitting it hard. She grunted and fell to the floor, a small communicator of some kind landing next to her, Cassandra's voice coming through the tiny speakers quite clearly.
"Ello? Fiona? Where are you? We are waiting for you at dee test site for dee fandom stablizor..."
"Chloe, divert all power to the engines and engage at full impulse!" Jared yelled as he ran into Chevila's cockpit. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see an approaching explosion as the ship began to incinerate itself.
Chloe punched a few buttons, the engines groaned, but they could not break free from the docking clamps holding them.
They had only seconds left. There was no time to try something else.
Jared ran up to the Society Tech controls and punched a button next to the Plothole Generator controls labeled "experimental".
Everything went black as as the Scene Transition Jared had installed in Chevila activated. It only managed to fast forward them for about two minutes before shorting out, but it was long enough to avoid getting incinerated in the explosion.
Chevila re-appeared in the middle of a debris field, forcing Chloe to perform evasive maneuvers to avoid colliding with the wreckage.
The Scene Transition was supposed to last longer and fill them in on what happened in their absence, but all the instrument panel said was "Scene transition error 42x114d, consult licensed Society technicians for diagnostics."
"I am a licensed technician and even I don't even know what the heck that's supposed to mean. I'll look it up later. For now I'll just see whether or not that magnetic field is still there." Jared said as he flipped the switch that controlled the Plothole Generator.
Unfortunately for him, Jared did not realize Chloe had just put on a burst of speed to avoid a collision with a piece of wreckage from the Borg ship, causing them to enter his tech lab at about 75 MPH.
Chevila reverted back into truck form in a flash of light, placing Jared in the driver's seat. Jared hit the brakes but it they were going so fast that it was unable to bring him to a stop fast enough to avoid a collision. After plowing through Jared's desk and several file cabinets they crashed through the wall separating Jared's lab from Doug's.
Bricks and mortar went flying. Chevila didn't have enough power to go all the way through the wall and wound up being stuck halfway.
As tough as Doug was to startle, a pickup spontaneously forcing it's way halfway through the wall of his lab did the trick. He nearly fell out of his wheelchair in surprise.
Jared coughed and pushed Chevila's airbag out of his face. He noticed the big gaping hole where Chevila's passenger door used to be and made a mental note that any damage Chevila suffers in canon form will be reflected upon reversion in her truck form.
Then when he spotted Doug. "Uh, Hi Doug! Listen, you wouldn't mind if I parked Chevila here for awhile would you?" He said nervously while trying to jostle his door to open.
Chloe just looked at Jared. "You are going to have sssoooooo much monitor duty after this."
Doug was at a loss for words, he made sure the device he and Charis were working on wasn't damaged before wheeling around to face Jared. He did not look happy...
-
Back in the Star Trek fandom the 42nd fleet was just arriving on scene in response to the distress call Jared had issued, just in time to witness the Borg cube's explosion.
Several of the crew members cheered as they watched the burning debris slowly drift through space, none of them detecting the cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey in their midst.
Two dark figures occupied the bridge.
"Deraj you idiot! Not only did you not manage to capture a test subject for project Sue Storm, you also may have gotten a member of the race our society is supposed to protect killed!" Yelled Eolhc.
"Shut up Eolhc! Talk to me like that again and I'll use you as my test subjet!" Said Deraj.
"I'd like to see you try!" Replied Eolhc, holding her sword threateningly.
"Enough of this, if we're fighting among ourselves, who will be left to fight our enemies?" Deraj said.
"Well, there's one thing we know for sure, we can't use this fandom as a base of operations for our project anymore, they'll get suspicious if they find another Sue here." She said.
"Right." Said Deraj. "A pity... I was beginning to develop a taste for Gaak."
And with that he maneuvered the Klingon vessel, which was actually Toyotanya, into a plot hole, back to wherever Deraj had his lab set up.
-
Jared was pondering what had become of the Sue he had earth magicked and if she could have possibly escaped when Chloe interrupted his thoughts.
"Wow Jared. First you get on Tyler's bad side with the pink candy bars, then you crash a pick-up truck into Doug's lab. If you're trying to get everybody in the Society against you I suggest you try setting Aster's latest Anime fort on fire." Chloe said as the two made there way to Adrian's office to report their 'accident' but as it turned out he wasn't back yet.
"Hey, the second one wasn't my fault. Boy, for a guy in a wheelchair Doug can really move!" Jared replied.
"If I didn't shove my sword into his spokes he would have caught you too, you owe me one." Chloe said.
"Hey, I blew up an entire Borg Cube, with a copyright I might add, just so they wouldn't assimilate us, if anything, you owe me one."
"How about we just call it even." Chloe suggested.
"Deal, as long as you agree to catch me." Jared said.
"What?" Chloe asked; and with that Jared fainted. Taking on two missions, coupled with fighting off black court vampires, Borg drones, two different Mary Sues and an angry handicapped halfling all in one day had taken it's toll on the agent.
Chloe shrugged. She tried to move him to his room, but he was too heavy for her to move effectively, so she just propped him up against the wall. She was going to find someone to help her move the unconscious techie when she heard a loud cry and a lot of shouting... Ben had returned to the Library Arcanium.
They had come in the night.
Due to the fact Adrian did not need to sleep, he had managed to sound the alarm indicating the library was under attack. But even with the advance warning half of the Society had fallen before any resistance could be formed.
The air was very humid and ambient green light was seen everywhere. Sparks of electricity would occasionally burst and light up the room, emanating from various mechanical elements of the Library. Toppled bookshelves and broken furniture lay everywhere.
"Faster Chloe," Jared urged. "If we can just make it to my tech lab we can use Chevila to escape!" He said, hoping it was true.
"But what about all our friends?" Chloe sobbed. "Did you see what happened to Tash! We have to do something!"
"I'm sure most of them made it to Adrian's panic room." Jared replied. "It's already been put under lockdown so it's too late for us to try to get in. There's nobody left in the library that we can help or receive help from, I'm not even sure we can help ourselves! The only thing we can do right now is escape to the safest fandom possible, maybe we could contact someone like Doug's author and form a rescue force of some kind."
When Jared and Chloe rounded the corner they saw what they both had been hoping to avoid. Several mechanical beings stood in the hall blocking their progress.
"We are the Borg, You're existence as you know it is over. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." The voice came from from every drone, speaking in unison. Jared and Chloe froze at the sudden shock of seeing the beings responsible for the destruction all around them. Chloe recovered her senses first.
"Assimilate this you Borg piece of trash!" She yelled. "Enchanto!" She summoned her shield while charging at the drones, blades extending from the edges of the shield at her touch. At first it looked like she was going to very easily defeat them as her bladed weapon cut down one Borg after another. But after a couple of blows the Borg adapted to the physical assault and she bounced right off of some kind of shielding around the drone she had lunged at.
"Techtonic Shift!" Jared yelled, stomping the ground. The ground shook and the Borg all lost their balance.
Jared's earth powers were much weaker when he didn't actually have any earth to send his waves through, but they still worked. Jared took this opportunity to cut and run, pulling Chloe along by her arm. With the ramp to the science hall cut off, he was going to have to detour by using the stairs by Charis' lab.
Jared and Chloe ran into the kitchen; going way out of their way in hopes of avoiding more drones. Unfortunately they had underestimated the sheer number of drones constantly pouring in through the Library's shattered defenses. They ran smack dab in the middle of several drones busy breaking down the kitchen appliances into raw material.
They began to say"Resistance is futile" but they never got past "fut" because Jared suddenly unleashed everything he had into the room with a shout of "Magnitude 10!" causing every cabinet to splinter, every table to blow apart and every appliance to explode.
The drones fell, either dead or crippled. Dust filled the air. Jared had to stop and rest after releasing such a powerful burst. It was five minutes before he felt like he could move again. They ran through the doorway to the kitchen when a drone they hadn't spotted before before reached out and grabbed Chloe, tubes shooting out of its arm and puncturing her neck. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she fell to the ground with a weak cry of "Jared..."
Jared kept running, scared almost senseless, he couldn't bear to look back and see his fallen partner. There was nothing he could do to help her, she would become one of them now. Jared promised to himself that he was going to come back, and he would bring everything he could with him. The Borg would pay for this he swore, trying to do everything he could keep himself from falling over and having a nervous breakdown right in the middle of the Library's periodical section.
When he finally got to his tech lab and flung open the door he gasped in horror. The lab was indistinguishable from the interior of a Borg vessel. Several drones were regenerating in alcoves that had recently been put into the walls, including...
"NO!"
Adrian, Harriet, Emily, Tash, Tyler, Drake, Aster and Doug all in various states of Borg assimilation stepped out of their regeneration alcoves with a brief metallic whirring sound.
The Librarian opened his eyes. "Society Agent, designation: Jared. I am Locutus of Borg. My purpose is to facilitate the assimilation of this establishment. Resistance is futile!" Said Adrian, although "Adrian" Maybe wasn't the correct descriptive term anymore...
Jared collapsed against the wall and slid to the floor, sobbing.
It was over. The Borg had assimilated the freakin' Librarian! The strongest member of the society! What was Jared supposed to do? Chevila was nowhere to be seen, probably assimilated or broken down into raw material by now.
Jared wondered what life as a drone would be like, not even having a sense of individual identity to call his own, all his knowledge being ripped from him and being stored on a Borg server somewhere. Well, he had tried to go get help, he had tried to escape. But hey, in the end what you've tried to do doesn't really make any difference at all if you don't succeed in doing it, oh well that's life.
Adrian grabbed the shaking agent by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet, tubes shooting out of his right arm and latching onto Jared's neck, injecting their nanoprobes...
-
"NNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!"
Everybody at the mission briefing jumped, turning to look at Jared.
He opened his eyes and frowned. The entire side of his face felt moist, probably because he was lying in a puddle of his own drool. He apologized profusely, sitting up. He had never fallen asleep during a mission briefing before. He blamed it on the pain medication Valerie had given him for his cracked ribs.
Tash shot him a disapproving glare.
"Well if everybody here is finished napping I suppose we can continue..." The de facto leader said. "As I was just saying, a Level 6 Sue has been detected in the Star Trek: The Next Generation fandom. Normally I would send only the more experienced agents into a fandom like this, but with the current manhunt for Ben going on, we don't have any to spare."
Jared looked around the briefing room. He hated to say it, but Tash was right, new agents and rookies were the only ones present. Most, like Jared, had only a few missions if any under their belt, some of them weren't even full agents yet.
Jared frowned. He couldn't believe Ben would have done something like this.
After he had heard the explosion he and Chloe had come running, by the time they had arrived on the scene all the action was over. Adrian had already formed his expedition team and was preparing to leave. According to Adrian's report, Ben had supposedly been a double agent, and that he and Repiv had supposedly gone rogue and attempted to break into the Room Of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Jared couldn't believe it, he and Ben were good friends and he might have been a goof, but he had a hard time wrapping his head around the idea that Ben was a backstabber.
To make matters worse, somebody had broken into Jared's sub-lab. Jared had no way of knowing what had been stolen seeing as the whole placed had been trashed and set on fire, so there was several items Jared had no way of accounting for, and this made Jared very worried...
Dave nudged Jared with his elbow. "Pay attention!" He whispered.
"Sorry, I was busy listening to the recitation of the current plot." Jared said.
From somewhere off in the library there was a deep rumble and the sound of snapping wood.
Tash went on as if nothing happened, she was entirely too stressed out to deal with forth wall breakages at the moment.
"-and that brings me to my next point... for some reason we can't get clear reading of what is going on in the fandom at the moment due to problems with the monitors. Charis has informed me that the problem is probably due to sabotage by the double-agent Repiv, or possibly Ben. But from what information we gathered before the network went down the Sue is currently in somewhere in the pre-Nemesis, post-Generations story arc, meaning that the fandom is going to be based around the adventures of the Enterprise-E, not the Enterprise-D. Who here is the most familiar with this part of the series?"
All around the room the rookies and novices murmured amongst themselves. They had all stopped following the series after Generations because Paramount had had the nerve to kill off Captain Kirk. Jared raised his hand and arched an eyebrow.
"Given my knowledge of the area in question, I believe that I am the most logical choice for the mission." Jared said, using the exact same vocal inflections that a Vulcan would. Chloe rolled her eyes.
Tash was skeptical. "What about your ribs?" She asked, alluding to the fact that Jared had been badly injured by a vampire on his last mission just a few hours before.
Jared brushed it off. "I doubt there will be much action in this fandom, I doubt the Sue could offer much more resistance than a phaser fight, and a phaser won't do her much good if I blow up the ground underneath her."
"Alright." Tash said. "Get going, just remember we won't be able to monitor you. Use your communicator if you should require assistance."
-
Chloe and Jared looked at themselves in Chevila's rear view mirror, both were wearing Federation uniforms. In order to blend in unnoticed in the fandom they didn't try to assume any rank higher than Ensign.
Jared and Chloe both gave themselves satisfied nods and opened the truck's doors, Chloe paused before she got in.
"Jared, why did you put a decal of the Society logo on the door?"
Jared growled. "Tyler! He had to key my door, I couldn't find the right shade of navy blue paint anywhere in the entire library to fix it, so I had to just cover it up."
Chloe laughed.
"Mr. Chekov, set a course for the Next Generation fandom, warp factor 2." Chloe said, doing her best to sound like William Shatner.
Jared laughed, then assumed an unconvincing Russian accent. "Aye aye captain, course layed in!"
"Excellent, engage."
With that, Jared coaxed the truck to life and went cruising down the runway of his lab. Like always he flipped a lever that controlled the plothole generator when he was halfway down and they were suddenly in a very dark room. Jared could vaguely make out the shapes of objects in darkness, he put on the brakes and brought the truck to a stop. In the background Jared could hear the low rumble of warp engines.
-
Somewhere in transformational space a guy with messy brown hair wearing carpenter jeans and a brown leather jacket over a red shirt and a light haired women dressed in tight black clothing and covered in barbwire tattoos were lugging a strange contraption labeled "Flux Capacitor -do not remove" down a winding corridor made of blue rock towards and idling Toyota Camry.
"You know Deraj, Asasca is going to kill you when he notices you stole this thing." Said the woman.
"Not stealing Eolhc, borrowing." Deraj said. "And further more, what Asasca doesn't know will not hurt him. My Sue Storm project is more important than that little science fair project of his anyway."
"I'm sure High Command would disagree..." Said Eolhc.
"Duh, why did you think I didn't tell them." Deraj said with a smile as he and Eloch lugged the device into the car's trunk. They were just about to go and rejoin the others when a device on Deraj's wrist started making a beeping noise.
"Oh! It seems my counter-part is taking the bait I set out for him, I'm sure two less people guarding the phantom table setter or whatever that thing is won't make a difference." Deraj said, shutting off the beeping. "Hop in Toyotanya, let's go catch us our test subject."
-
"I can't see anything" Chloe said.
"I can fix that." Jared said. He clapped his hands and Chevila's headlights sprang to life.
Chloe looked at Jared. "You installed a Clapper in your truck?"
Jared shrugged. "Hey, I was bored." Chloe rolled her eyes.
The two of them got out and began to look around.
Jared could tell by their surroundings they were obviously in the main shuttle bay of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but what astounded him was the complete disarray that it was in. Debris lay all over the place. There were numerous hull breaches, but thankfully emergency force fields were in place that kept he and his partner from being sucked out into space. Several barrels of Federation rations lay overturned. It looked like someone had been trying to load a shuttle with supplies, but obviously whoever it was had not finished the job.
"This is all wrong." Jared said, looking grim. "This ship looks like it's gone through numerous battles, but the Dominion War should be over during this time period. I'm going to call Tash, this may be more than the two of us can handle."
Jared tapped his communicator, which had been modified to look and function like a federation com-badge.
"Jared to Tash." All Jared got in reply was white noise. He looked confused.
"There appears to be a heavy magnetic footprint of some kind here, it's interfering with our communicators." Said Chloe.
"And Chevila's plot hole generator won't recharge for another 10 minutes, looks like we're on our own." Jared added.
"Well, let's go find an access panel, maybe it will tell us whats going on." Chloe said.
Jared had a nagging feeling about the magnetic field, but couldn't put his finger on why exactly. They tried to leave the shuttle bay, but found the doors were non-functional.
Jared used his Boomhammer to make them functional.
After he had blown the doors down he realized that toting a sledgehammer and a sword aboard a federation starship was not the best way to go unnoticed. Regrettably, he and Chloe left their weapons in Chevila's cab, and Jared turned the truck off and killed the lights with a clap.
Darkness once again dominated the shuttle bay.
Chloe and Jared began to walk down the corridor, red emergency lights were the only thing that provided them with light of any kind. They were having to push aside debris from collapsed bulkheads and doorways as they progressed, at several points they had to turn back when they ran into severly damaged areas of the ship that were sealed off. Eventually they managed to find an access panel, unfortunately for them the main computer was offline and they couldn't get any information out of it.
"We're going to have to go to the bridge." Said Jared. Chloe agreed.
They took the nearest functional turbolift to the bridge. When they got out, the first thing they noticed was that the bridge wasn't much better off than the shuttle bay. The next thing they noticed was that Captain Jean Luc Picard was just finishing a Captian's log, his voice sounding heavy like someone who had not had much sleep lately.
"-with the fall of Earth, the war effort looks bleak, I'm afraid that they will not stop until all humanity is erased from existence, the Enterprise is currently in a state of disrepair, and we are currently on our way to rendezvous with the 42nd Fleet, or rather what remains of it after the battle of Vulcan, to make what might be considered the Federation's last stand. End log recording."
Jared froze. What force could possibly drive the Federation to near extinction? The only race with even close to that amount of power was... Jared suddenly realized the significance of the magnetic footprint.
He began to speak. "Chloe! We have to get out of here now! I know what's going on here and we don't stand a chance! We have to leave before..."
Commander Data suddenly interrupted him by turning to Picard. "Captain, enemy vessel detected, time to intercept, 2 minutes. The vessel didn't appear on our sensors until it was almost on top of us!"
"On Screen!" Shouted the captain. Jared's fears were confirmed when a vessel shaped like a perfect cube appeared on the viewscreen.
"Red Alert! All hands to battle stations!" Yelled Commander Riker. The bridge was suddenly bathed in red light and sirens filled the air, crewmen all over the bridge sprung to sudden life as consoles suddenly brought up displays indicating shield strength, hull integrity and weapons status. Jared gave them all a quick glance, the Enterprise was clearly not in optimal fighting condition. Jared doubted that this battle would have a pleasant outcome.
"Captain! The Borg are hailing us, audio only!" Data said.
The bridge speakers came to life with the typical Borg mantra. "You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."
Jared and Chloe got back in the turbolift, heading straight for the deck that Chevila was on. If they could just get to the truck they might have a chance to escape, the Enterprise was no match for a Borg Cube even when it was in top condition. Their only hope was to escape the doomed ship before the Borg could assimilate it. The ship suddenly rocked, and the turbo lift stopped. They almost panicked but after several painful seconds the lift started again.
"We're not going to make it to the shuttle bay." Jared said ominously as the ship rocked again. "We only have one chance. 'Computer, halt turbolift.'"
The doors to the lift abruptly opened, revealing a scene of absolute carnage. Repair crews were running in every direction, mixed with the occasional Yellow of security officers. Another Borg torpedo hit, the entire ship lurched as this one found it's mark, punching straight through the shields. Jared and Chloe were thrown against the wall, Jared yelping in pain and clutching his heavily bandaged side. Consoles overloaded and exploded, part of the wall burst open and fire spilled into the corridor.
"This way!" Jared yelled. He and Chloe turned to run when they saw a shimmer of Borg transporters deposit numerous Borg drones in the corridor. The nearby security officers drew their phaser rifles and began to fire at the drones. The drones adapted their shielding almost instantly, nullifying the effects of the Federation weaponry. Several drones walked right up to the security personal and injected them with nanoprobes. The security officers never gave any ground until the very last one of them was assimilated. Jared began to have vivid flashbacks from his nightmare.
"The other way!" Jared yelled. He and Chloe turned to run the opposite way down the corridor, only to find more drones.
"Tremor!" Jared shouted, arms extended, the corridor underneath the drones exploding.
The two of them ran around the dead Borg and crater down the corridor. Chloe felt the ship shudder as damaged impulse engines fired and the Enterprise maneuvered to return fire on the Borg Cube, phaser banks discharging and photon torpedo tubes emptying as the Enterprise valiantly fought the hopeless battle.
After stumbling over injured crewman and fallen bulkheads for two minutes the agents finally found the room they were looking for: the transporter room. They found it to be unoccupied, and Chloe ran over to the control panel.
"Transporters are online thankfully, I think I can give us a site-to-site transport to the main shuttle bay."
She hit a few buttons on the control panel then grabbed Jared by the arm and ran to the transporter pad. There was a shimmer of light and they were back were they had started. Apparently just after they had left the engineers had repaired the emergency lighting, clearly showing the Borg drones assimilating all of the shuttles and the engineers that had done the repair work. Thankfully they had ignored Chevila, as they didn't consider the old pickup as a worthwhile investment of their time. Chloe began her attack.
"Enchanto!" This time she summoned a dozen Rubik's cubes, half of them were unsolved, representing her intellectual side. The cubes exploded, blowing the drones back, individual sections of the cubes embedding themselves into the drones like shrapnel.
"I always wondered how to solve those." Jared said, running over and jumping in Chevila. He hit the Plothole Generator switch, but nothing happened but a slight sizzling sound and some smoke under the hood.
"Oh C'mon! The Borg are using some kind of scattering field to keep me from using the Plothole Generator, we're gonna have to make a run for it!" Jared yelled.
Chloe was about to ask him what he meant by that when Jared picked her up, threw her in the truck, got out and made his way to the shuttle bay controls, he was muttering to himself as he was trying to figure out how the controls worked until with a shout of "Bingo!" He managed to get activate the shuttle bay's decompression cycle.
"Warning: Shuttle bay decompression will begin in 30 seconds" Chimed the computer.
Jared hopped back in the truck and drifted around to face the open shuttle bay doors, in half a minute the force field holding the atmosphere in would go down and everything in the bay would be sucked into space. Jared put on Chevila's parking brake and put the pedal to the floor. Chevila's engine whined and the back tires began to spin, fighting to overpower the brake. Chevila inched forward, leaving a trail of black skid marks.
"Are you INSANE?" Shouted Chloe.
"Yes, but that has nothing to do with this! We have to get outside the range of the Borg cube's scattering field in order to call for help or escape. When I count to 25 I'm going to release the parking brake and we will shoot forward. 5 seconds later the bay decompresses and we will be sucked into space. If I time this right, we will hit 88 MPH and be able to canonize."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Well..." Said Jared. "We die, hopefully it won't come to that."
Chloe was speechless. The Enterprise had maneuvered around so it could fire from its aft torpedo bays giving Jared a view of the Borg Cube ominously through the open shuttle bay doors.
The cube engaged its tractor beam and the Enterprise ground to a halt. Borg cutting beams began to slice the Enterprise up like a Thanksgiving turkey as more tractor beams began to pull the severed parts of the ship from their places and drag them slowly towards the Borg cube to be assimilated.
Jared counted to 25 and released the brake, the truck shot forward like a bullet from gun. The speedometer hit 60 in 3.5 seconds, at 4.5 it was 70 and at 5 the shuttle bay decompressed. The dead and damaged Borg drones, the Federation rations and all the shuttles were all pulled into space, and Chevila was no exception.
The engine instantly stalled as there was no longer any air to fuel the combustion inside of the gasoline engine. The cab was not airtight and was losing air rapidly. The windshields were suddenly covered in cracks. they were mere seconds away from the cab blowing open when the speedometer hit exactly 88. Jared punched the canonization button and there was a bright flash. Jared was suddenly sitting in the captain's chair of an odd looking blue shuttle craft of obviously Federation design. The control panels revealed that they were aboard the U.S.S Chevila. Jared noticed a generic looking crewmen sitting at the helm, while Chloe sat at tactical.
Jared wondered how it was possible for Chevila to generate a crew member until he saw the holographic emitter mounted on the ceiling.
"Your orders captain?" Asked the helmsmen.
"Um, Warp 9, any heading, engage." Jared said, once he realized the man was talking to him.
"Aye aye!" The man hit a few buttons and Chevila's warp nessels that looked deceptively like brake lights lit up with a hum. Stars began to streak by as the shuttle craft shot forward and fled the massacre behind them.
"Sir!" The helmsmen said. "The Borg vessel is in pursuit."
"What?" Said Chloe. "The Borg always take the biggest technological and biological targets first, they should ignore us until they've completely assimilated the Enterprise!"
"We are being hailed!" The helmsmen ignored Chloe.
"Onscreen." Jared commanded.
Jared nearly fell out of his chair when he saw Cassandra standing on a platform aboard the Borg Cube. At least, he thought it was Cassandra, This Sue had purple hair and was slightly taller than Cassandra, but had less of a figure. She was wearing what Jared could only describe as a metal jumpsuit, her skin was a shade of pale green. Due to the implants of the Borg Queen.
"Who the heck are you and how dare you do such outstanding damage to a fandom!" Jared yelled.
"My name ez Fiona, I em Cassandra's sister." The french Sue Purred. "As for why I'm doing thes, De Borg are dee ultimate deesplay of the pursuit of perfection. Their queen was unable tu complete the goal. That's why I em here, to feenish what she begaan."
Fiona gave a devilish smirk. "wait unteel Cassandra hears I em the one who killed you."
With that, the Sue ended the transmission.
The Helmsmen turned to Jared. "Sir, the Borg are firing!"
-
Charis was performing surgery on the monitor display terminal back in the Library.
Whatever Repiv did, it had taken the techie all day to just begin to make progress. She made a connection of wires and the whole console burst into a shower of sparks. The monitor network suddenly sprang to life, the displays slowly warming up and pictures began forming, all but one of them coming to focus on Adrian's task force.
The other formed a very grainy image, heavy with interference, of Jared and Chloe's mission, but it was so garbled up that nobody could make any sense of what they were looking at.
"Charis, what's wrong with the monitor?" Tash asked.
"Absolutely nothing. The interference seems to be coming from the fandom itself. Has Jared sent you any information about something that could be causing that?"
Tash frowned. "My communicator had a burst of static awhile back, I just assumed I accidental set it off."
It was Charis' turn to frown. "That may have been Jared. If this interference can screw up our monitor feed, I'm sure it could disrupt communications. Hand me that voltage reader, I'm going to see if I can make the monitor compensate for all the static."
She began adjusting levers and knobs with the skill of someone who clearly knows what they're doing. The monitor suddenly snapped sharply into focus, it's picture depicting the U.S.S. Chevila being hit by some form of drain weapon, her shields lighting up like a firework.
Tash instantly sized up the situation and turned to Charis. "Get ahold of everybody you can, this situation is obviously well over Jared's head. We'll need to form a rescue team."
Tash whipped out her plothole generator and fired. The gadget managed to make a pinky sized plothole before shorting out, this did not bode well...
She pointed at Charis. "Never mind pulling the rescue team together. I'll do that, you try and find some way to get past that magnetic field!"
She took off at a run to try to find any available agent who wasn't a rookie. "Of all the times for Adrian to be gone!" Tash yelled to no one in particular.
-
"Shields down to 35%!" Called the helmsmen as Chevila was hit by yet another Borg shield drainer. "Captain! We can't take another hit like that!"
"Chloe! Arm Micro-quantum torpedoes!" Jared shouted over the sound of all the noises aboard the tiny shuttle.
"Torpedoes armed!" Chloe said.
"Fire!" Jared shouted.
Two micro-torpedoes fired from Chevila's aft launcher and slammed right into the Borg cube, inflicting a negligible amount of damage.
"Direct hit! Now all we need to do that again about 50,000 more times!" Shouted Chloe.
Jared hadn't expected anything different, but hey, it was worth a shot.
"Helmsmen, send an emergency distress call on all frequencies!" Jared ordered, turning to a speaker.
"This is Captain Jared of the Federation Shuttle Chevila, under attack by Borg vessel. Said vessel has also crippled the U.S.S. Enterprise, we require assistance!"
Jared had run out of options, he was even starting to consider turning about and ordering a collision course, he doubted it would do much damage but at least he'd go out with a bang.
-
Fiona was almost giddy with glee, watching the shuttle attempt to escape. Right now she was just toying with them, had she wanted to end this quickly she could just fire a real torpedo instead of low power drain weapons. Heck, one Borg torpedo could probably take out a whole fleet of Chevila's, but the Sue was just having too much fun. With a simple mental command she ordered the vessel to fire out one last drain weapon.
-
"Impact in 3... 2... 1..." The helmsmen called out. The shield status display abruptly lit up and the next moment all shields on all vectors went from 35% to offline. Green shimmers of the Borg transporters filled the cockpit of the shuttle as a dozen Borg materialized.
Mr. Generic Helmsmen grabbed his phaser, set the setting to maximum and fired at the closest drone, it dropped in a shower of sparks. He managed to take out two more before they adapted to his phaser's frequency.
"Boomhammer!" Jared shouted. Lifting the hammer from its resting place, he gave the nearest drone a crippling blow, the resulting "BBOOOOMMM" was almost unbearably loud due to the confined space of the cockpit.
Jared tried the hammer again but it only bounced off of the next drones adapted shielding, making the sound of someone loudly clapping their hands.
Jared shrank back, he didn't dare start slinging earth waves around the tiny cockpit. Chloe didn't even bother attacking, if they could absorb Jared's hammer, her sword and shield wouldn't stand a chance. And all she could accomplish with her Rubik's cubes would be to blow Jared and her up. They all backed up against the control panels at the front of the shuttle as the drones crept closer.
"Computer, initiate self-destruct matrix, no countdown. Set self destruct to occur on my command." Jared said, determined not to be assimilated.
"Confirmed. Self destruct will occur at the Captain's orders." Said the computer. It had the exact same voice as the one it had when Chevila was a transformer, and it might've only been Jared's imagination, but it also sounded sad somehow...
Then Jared got an idea.
"Chloe, strap yourself into your seat!" Jared said to his partner.
"What?"
"Just do it!"
Chloe and Jared sat in their seats and buckled in. When the Borg were only feet away, Jared turned around and readied some earth magic. He was aware he couldn't use it effectively against the Borg without accidental damaging the shuttle, but intentionally damaging the shuttle was something he could do quite easily, although he'd regret it if he ever got back to the Library.
"Tremor!" He shouted, pointing at the wall. It exploded outward and the vacuum of space began to suck everything out of the shuttle craft. The Borg were pulled into space, as well as the generic helmsmen, who dissolved into nothing the second he was outside the range of Chevila's holoprojector.
Emergency force fields sealed the hull breach a moment later.
-
Fiona was very annoyed. Jared would blow up his entire shuttle before letting drones assimilate him and Chloe, so she had to use another tactic. The cube shuddered briefly as it began to accelerate to higher warp velocities. Chevila could barely do warp 9.2, the cube would easily overtake her at warp 9.9.
-
Chloe had assumed the helm position. The Borg vessel was closing rapidly.
"Chloe, increase speed!" Jared ordered.
"But we'll fly apart!" Cried Chloe.
"Fly apart then!" Jared yelled at her. "If we get assimilated the Borg we'll be able to adapt Chevila's Plothole Generator to their technology! Once they've adapted to Adrian's defenses, which they will, they'll be able to get into the Library and we can't let that happen!"
The hull screamed with strain as Chloe pushed the warp engines well beyond their safety tolerances. The rate the Borg cube was closing began to slow and Jared briefly thought that they might even be able to outrun it, but then with a terrible boom the warp engines gave out and Chevila dropped to sublight speeds.
The Borg cube also dropped out of warp and locked on to Chevila with a tractor beam. The docking bay where some Cubes housed Spheres opened and promptly pulled Chevila in and latched on to the shuttle with docking clamps. Jared turned to Chloe.
"Get to work on the Plothole Generator. See if you can rewire it to get past this field, I'll try to buy you some time, here's the plan..."
Jared opened the shuttles doors and walked slowly down a ramp to the floor of the cube. He had to stall Fiona as long as he could, if he couldn't stall long enough he was going to have to blow up Chevila. They were fairly close to the main reactor, he wondered if he'd be able to take out the Borg vessel with him. If he blew up the Sue, the fandom would still return to normal.
The Sue seemingly emerged from nowhere and immediately began to gloat.
"You can forgeet about escaping agent Jereed, my drones cen adapt to aneething you can throw at them. Cassandra vill be so disappointed she wasn't 'ere to personally witness your defeat." The French Sue said in a sing-song voice as she slinked towards Jared.
"Oh, you're looking for Jared! Well then this whole affair has just been a case of mistaken identity." Said Jared.
"Oh really?" The Sue said, stopping a short distance from Jared. "Then pray tell, which agent are you?"
Jared assumed a absolutely terrible British accent. Out of all of his accents, British was Jared's worst. "Agent Bond, James Bond. The woman in the shuttle is a member of the the CIA."
The Sue raised an eyebrow.
"You wouldn't happen to have a dry martini would you, shaken not stirred?" Jared kept rattling on. "It would be quite a shame if I didn't manage to get one on this mission."
The Sue quickly caught on to what Jared was doing. "You will be assimilated." She smiled. "And don't bother self destructing, de force fields around this section are more than adequate to contain the explosion."
That changed things.
Plan B, stalling the Sue and escaping failed. Plan C, blowing up the whole cube wouldn't work, so here goes Plan A.
Jared tapped his Com-badge. "Chloe, fire all phasers now!" He yelled.
Chevila's phaser banks immediately let forth a barrage of powerful bursts of energy. The drones could adapt to the frequency of the phasers, but the pure power of the beams was more than their shield generators could absorb and they were all blown away. Torpedo tubes emptied as Chevila fired micro-quantum torpedoes in quick succession into the areas where the most Borg were concentrated. The resulting explosions could easily take out up to 50 drones, but at the rate they were pouring in it wouldn't make much difference. One of the phaser banks blasted Fiona, but her own force-fields were more than strong enough to absorb the beam.
She began to run towards Jared.
"Epicenter!" He yelled, punching the ground, but nothing happened. Apparently the Borg Vessel had adapted so that it simply absorbed all the earth waves Jared could pour into it.
"That's unfortunate." He thought as the fake queen of the Borg tackled him to the ground. He let out a cry of pain as she forced him to land on his injured side. She raised her right arm and assimilation tubules shot out, writhing venomously in the air.
"Eeny last words?" The Sue said, laughing despite the destruction around them.
"Stupidsuesayswhat?" Jared said, as fast as he could.
"What?" Said the Sue.
"Ha, ha, I always wanted to do that." Jared said as he pulled out a Copyright and slapped it on the floor of the cube.
The Borg vessel, free of the non-canon influence from a fake Borg queen came to an immediate all-stop. Chloe glanced at her sensor readings aboard Chevila, noticing multiple power surges all over the vessel.
Fiona's eyes opened wide with horror.
"You ediot! Don't you know what happeens when a Borg vessel stops recieving commands from de collective? De failsafes activate and... and..." She stuttered.
"It self-destructs!" Jared said. "Goodbye."
He put his hands on her stomach. "Tremor!" He shouted, pouring the Earth waves directly into her abdomen. The Sue was blown off of Jared and flew across the room into a wall, hitting it hard. She grunted and fell to the floor, a small communicator of some kind landing next to her, Cassandra's voice coming through the tiny speakers quite clearly.
"Ello? Fiona? Where are you? We are waiting for you at dee test site for dee fandom stablizor..."
"Chloe, divert all power to the engines and engage at full impulse!" Jared yelled as he ran into Chevila's cockpit. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see an approaching explosion as the ship began to incinerate itself.
Chloe punched a few buttons, the engines groaned, but they could not break free from the docking clamps holding them.
They had only seconds left. There was no time to try something else.
Jared ran up to the Society Tech controls and punched a button next to the Plothole Generator controls labeled "experimental".
Everything went black as as the Scene Transition Jared had installed in Chevila activated. It only managed to fast forward them for about two minutes before shorting out, but it was long enough to avoid getting incinerated in the explosion.
Chevila re-appeared in the middle of a debris field, forcing Chloe to perform evasive maneuvers to avoid colliding with the wreckage.
The Scene Transition was supposed to last longer and fill them in on what happened in their absence, but all the instrument panel said was "Scene transition error 42x114d, consult licensed Society technicians for diagnostics."
"I am a licensed technician and even I don't even know what the heck that's supposed to mean. I'll look it up later. For now I'll just see whether or not that magnetic field is still there." Jared said as he flipped the switch that controlled the Plothole Generator.
Unfortunately for him, Jared did not realize Chloe had just put on a burst of speed to avoid a collision with a piece of wreckage from the Borg ship, causing them to enter his tech lab at about 75 MPH.
Chevila reverted back into truck form in a flash of light, placing Jared in the driver's seat. Jared hit the brakes but it they were going so fast that it was unable to bring him to a stop fast enough to avoid a collision. After plowing through Jared's desk and several file cabinets they crashed through the wall separating Jared's lab from Doug's.
Bricks and mortar went flying. Chevila didn't have enough power to go all the way through the wall and wound up being stuck halfway.
As tough as Doug was to startle, a pickup spontaneously forcing it's way halfway through the wall of his lab did the trick. He nearly fell out of his wheelchair in surprise.
Jared coughed and pushed Chevila's airbag out of his face. He noticed the big gaping hole where Chevila's passenger door used to be and made a mental note that any damage Chevila suffers in canon form will be reflected upon reversion in her truck form.
Then when he spotted Doug. "Uh, Hi Doug! Listen, you wouldn't mind if I parked Chevila here for awhile would you?" He said nervously while trying to jostle his door to open.
Chloe just looked at Jared. "You are going to have sssoooooo much monitor duty after this."
Doug was at a loss for words, he made sure the device he and Charis were working on wasn't damaged before wheeling around to face Jared. He did not look happy...
-
Back in the Star Trek fandom the 42nd fleet was just arriving on scene in response to the distress call Jared had issued, just in time to witness the Borg cube's explosion.
Several of the crew members cheered as they watched the burning debris slowly drift through space, none of them detecting the cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey in their midst.
Two dark figures occupied the bridge.
"Deraj you idiot! Not only did you not manage to capture a test subject for project Sue Storm, you also may have gotten a member of the race our society is supposed to protect killed!" Yelled Eolhc.
"Shut up Eolhc! Talk to me like that again and I'll use you as my test subjet!" Said Deraj.
"I'd like to see you try!" Replied Eolhc, holding her sword threateningly.
"Enough of this, if we're fighting among ourselves, who will be left to fight our enemies?" Deraj said.
"Well, there's one thing we know for sure, we can't use this fandom as a base of operations for our project anymore, they'll get suspicious if they find another Sue here." She said.
"Right." Said Deraj. "A pity... I was beginning to develop a taste for Gaak."
And with that he maneuvered the Klingon vessel, which was actually Toyotanya, into a plot hole, back to wherever Deraj had his lab set up.
-
Jared was pondering what had become of the Sue he had earth magicked and if she could have possibly escaped when Chloe interrupted his thoughts.
"Wow Jared. First you get on Tyler's bad side with the pink candy bars, then you crash a pick-up truck into Doug's lab. If you're trying to get everybody in the Society against you I suggest you try setting Aster's latest Anime fort on fire." Chloe said as the two made there way to Adrian's office to report their 'accident' but as it turned out he wasn't back yet.
"Hey, the second one wasn't my fault. Boy, for a guy in a wheelchair Doug can really move!" Jared replied.
"If I didn't shove my sword into his spokes he would have caught you too, you owe me one." Chloe said.
"Hey, I blew up an entire Borg Cube, with a copyright I might add, just so they wouldn't assimilate us, if anything, you owe me one."
"How about we just call it even." Chloe suggested.
"Deal, as long as you agree to catch me." Jared said.
"What?" Chloe asked; and with that Jared fainted. Taking on two missions, coupled with fighting off black court vampires, Borg drones, two different Mary Sues and an angry handicapped halfling all in one day had taken it's toll on the agent.
Chloe shrugged. She tried to move him to his room, but he was too heavy for her to move effectively, so she just propped him up against the wall. She was going to find someone to help her move the unconscious techie when she heard a loud cry and a lot of shouting... Ben had returned to the Library Arcanium.
No comments:
Post a Comment