Avenger by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ranchers, Star Trek Fiction, Space Opera, General, Romance, Science Fiction, Fiction, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9780671551315
Publisher: Star Trek
Published: 1973-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

It was a transporter beam that had claimed him, and that had ripped him from the Node.

Kirk knew all that the instant he reformed in darkness, felt the physical burden of reality return to him.

Then he had dropped a full two meters.

Into mud.

He opened his mouth for air and the stench of the mud choked him.

It reeked of sewage. Of death.

He struggled as the heavy, freezing sludge engulfed him. From instinct more than thought, he strained to keep his head above the suffocating grasp of whatever held him. He had no idea where he was.

An ordinary transport lasted scant seconds at most, accompanied by a slight vertigo, a glittering spray of light, and then solidity again.

But an ordinary transport could beam matter only twentyfive thousand kilometers.

This transport had lasted longer than any he had experienced before. Long enough that he had actually been conscious of his immaterial state.

There were other technologies possible, other rules, Kirk knew. Once his ship had intercepted a transporter beam that had originated from across the galaxy.

But how far had Kirk been transported within this beam? And by what or whom?

Then any thoughts as to where he might be, how far from the Borg homeworld he had come, and who or what might be responsible were vanquished by the sudden incredible pain that convulsed his body, nearly submerging him in the odiferous mud.

The nanites were still at their work in Kirk’s body. Submicroscopic machines of Borg and Romulan origin. The machines that renegade Romulans had used to reconstruct his body according to the template laid down in his own DNA. Once activated, the nanites could not be stopped, or removed. They would continue their work of restructuring him until they had played out their function by accelerating the genetically programmed apoptosis that brought death by aging to all living beings.

When Kirk had pulled the lever in the Borg Central Node, he had had only hours to live. And though he had escaped the explosion that devastated the Borg homeworld, he was not going to escape his fate.

Kirk contorted in agony as he felt the organs of his body shift and twist in response to the burrowing, cutting, rearranging nanites. His fingers spread into useless claws to dig against the clinging mud.

From the surrounding darkness, he could hear the groaning sounds of other struggles. And in the distance, the rumble of vast explosions and unceasing machines. He lay back, half-buried in the muck, gulping for air. Whatever part of Kirk that had lived in him as a child and had made him think there might be something under the bed or lurking in the closet, it whispered to him now.

He was dead.

This was hell.

And it was here he would spend eternity.

The nanites ate away at him as the eagle tore at the liver of Prometheus. But in the void, he chose neither the comforts of mysticism, nor the escape of desperate fantasy.

Instead, a single word emerged from Kirk’s frozen, mudoaked lips.

… no…

He was not dead.

There was no hell.

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