Chapter 37: Conspiracy — Part 3
[Starfleet Command — San Francisco, Earth — 2364, Day 162, 0900 Hours]
The transporter deposited them in Starfleet Command's main atrium, and Cole's perception lit up like a warning klaxon.
Three infected. Right there in the reception area—two Commanders flanking the entrance desk and a Lieutenant behind it, each carrying the parasitic overlay that burned against Cole's awareness like hot wires threaded through cold flesh. The bio-electric signatures pulsed in sync, coordinated, the subsidiary organisms communicating through a frequency that no Federation instrument could detect and no human eye could see.
"Two at the door. One at the desk." Cole's voice was low, clipped. His hand rested on his phaser—standard issue, set to heavy stun, the weapon a comfort and a backup for capabilities that no standard issue covered. "The rest of the atrium reads clean."
Picard nodded. One gesture. Worf's security team moved.
The takedowns were fast, professional, ugly. The compromised officers fought with the enhanced strength the parasites provided—the same unnatural power that had let Quinn throw Riker across a room. Commander Hayes took two stun bolts before dropping. The Lieutenant behind the desk lunged for an alarm panel and caught Worf's fist instead—a single, devastating strike that ended the fight and cracked the console.
The second Commander managed to draw his phaser. The beam discharged toward Tasha—reflex, not aim, the parasite's survival instinct overriding tactical sense. Cole caught the shot. His left hand came up and the energy poured into his palm, the familiar burn of directed phaser fire channeling through absorption pathways that had been designed for exactly this. The orange glow lasted half a second before he dispersed it through his body. His teeth ached. A headache bloomed behind his right eye.
Three down. First energy cost of the day. Minor. Sustainable. Keep moving.
"Clear." Cole scanned the corridor beyond. His perception reached—seventy-five meters of awareness, mapping every energy signature in range. "Next floor. Four infected. Corridor junction, two left, two right. Heavy concentration ahead—" He paused. The readings from the upper levels were dense, layered, the parasitic signatures overlapping in ways that made individual identification difficult. "It gets worse higher up."
"Then we go higher." Picard's jaw was set. The captain walked into Starfleet Command the way he commanded his bridge—with the particular authority of a man who believed in the institutions he served and was willing to fight for them when they failed.
---
[Starfleet Command — Third Floor, Admiralty Wing — Day 162, 0940 Hours]
They moved through Command floor by floor. Cole in front—the human tricorder, calling targets, separating the infected from the clean with a certainty that no technology could match. Worf's team behind—stunning, restraining, securing. Picard and Riker in the center—command presence, the authority that kept clean officers from panicking when they watched their colleagues get stunned by security teams from the Enterprise.
"Admiral Savar. Compromised." Cole's hand indicated the Vulcan at the end of the corridor. The parasitic signature was stronger in Savar—longer infection period, deeper integration. The Admiral's expression was placid. Perfectly Vulcan. Perfectly wrong.
"That one. Clean." A Captain, shaking, backed against the wall. "You—compromised. The aide behind you—clean."
The clean officers stared at Cole with expressions that ranged from gratitude to terror. The man with the black hands, pointing at people and declaring them infected by alien parasites—it was the kind of scene that would have been absurd if it weren't validated every time a stunned officer was scanned and the creature at their brainstem confirmed the diagnosis.
By the time they reached the third floor, they'd neutralized eleven infected officers. Cole's headache was a constant pressure behind his eyes—the sustained perception draining focus the way marathon running drained muscles, each scan requiring the same intensity as the first but with diminishing reserves. His hands shook when he lowered them. The black stains pulsed with every heartbeat.
"How many more?" Riker asked. The Commander had his phaser in one hand and a PADD mapping their progress in the other—the dual focus of a tactical mind running at full capacity.
"At least a dozen on this level. More above." Cole wiped sweat from his forehead. His body temperature was climbing—the sustained energy work pushing his metabolism into overdrive, the caloric debt accumulating with every scan, every absorption, every minute of combat-level awareness. "And something else. At the top. In the main conference chamber."
"Something else?"
"The readings are different. Larger. More concentrated. If the others are satellites, this is the transmitter."
Picard and Riker exchanged a look. The same calculation, reached simultaneously: the mother creature.
"Lead the way, Mr. Coleman."
---
[Starfleet Command — Main Conference Chamber — Day 162, 1015 Hours]
Commander Remmick sat at the head of the table in the Federation's most important conference room and smiled at them like they were expected guests arriving for a dinner party.
The chamber was elegant—polished wood, tall windows showing San Francisco's skyline, the Federation seal mounted on the wall behind the chair that normally held the Commander-in-Chief. The windows threw morning light across the table's surface. The light caught Remmick's face and revealed nothing abnormal. Standard human features, standard Starfleet uniform, standard posture.
Cole's perception told a different story.
The energy signature inside Remmick was massive. Not the thin parasitic overlay of the subsidiary organisms—a fully developed bio-electric entity that occupied most of Remmick's torso, its neural tendrils extending from the cervical vertebrae down through the spinal column and into the abdominal cavity. The mother creature. The queen. The central intelligence that coordinated every parasite they'd encountered, communicating through a frequency that the smaller organisms received and obeyed.
Remmick's chest moved. Not breathing—something beneath the skin, shifting, adjusting, the physical reality of a human body serving as a shell for something that had never been human and never would be.
"Captain Picard." Remmick's voice was smooth. Controlled. The particular pleasantness of a host organism that had perfected its camouflage. "And Lieutenant Commander Coleman. You've been very busy today."
Lieutenant Commander. He knows about the promotion. The parasites share information.
"You see us, don't you?" Remmick stood. His movements were fluid—too fluid, the puppet-master coordination of a body being operated rather than inhabited. "We watched you through Quinn. Through Savar. Through every officer you've identified today. Your perception is... remarkable."
The infected admirals in the room—four of them, seated at the table, their parasitic signatures burning against Cole's awareness—hadn't moved. Waiting. The subsidiary organisms following the queen's lead, patient as hunting dogs before the command.
"We could use someone like you." Remmick took a step forward. His shirt shifted and the skin beneath rippled—the mother creature adjusting its position, pressing against the fabric with the casual obscenity of something that didn't understand or care about the body it occupied. "Your abilities. Your perception. You could be so much more with us. No secrets. No hiding. Just... communion."
Cole's response was a focused energy projection that caught Remmick in the sternum.
The blast wasn't the raw, desperate detonation he'd used against Armus. This was precise—the product of weeks of training with Data, calibrated to strike with maximum force at minimum energy cost. Golden light erupted from Cole's palm, crossed three meters of conference room, and slammed into Remmick's chest with enough kinetic force to throw him backward into the Federation seal.
The seal cracked. Remmick's body hit the wall and slid down, leaving a smear of something that wasn't entirely blood. The mother creature shrieked—not through Remmick's mouth but through the bio-electric frequency, a psychic scream that hit every infected officer in the building and sent them into immediate combat response.
The four admirals attacked. Enhanced strength, coordinated movement, the parasites overriding their hosts' inhibitions with the singular imperative of protecting the queen. One lunged for Picard. Another grabbed for a phaser. Two charged the security team.
Phaser fire. Worf's bat'leth—he'd brought it, because Worf brought a bat'leth the way other officers brought PADDs. Tasha's precision shots, each finding center mass, each requiring two bolts to overcome the parasite-enhanced resilience. Riker, moving with the combat instinct of a man who'd learned to fight on frontier colonies, stunning one admiral and dodging another.
Cole absorbed a phaser shot aimed at Picard's back. The energy entered through his right palm—the black-stained skin flaring amber, the now-familiar pathway accepting directed energy with a efficiency that still hurt but no longer threatened to overwhelm. He converted and returned: a projection that caught the attacker in the chest and dropped her.
That's four absorptions today. Six projections. The headache is a railroad spike behind my eyes. My hands are shaking. Keep going.
Remmick was getting up.
The mother creature inside him was resilient in ways the subsidiaries weren't. The energy blast had damaged the host body—Remmick's sternum was cracked, his breathing wet and wrong—but the creature itself was intact, drawing on reserves of bio-electric energy that dwarfed its children. Remmick's shirt tore. The skin beneath bulged. Something was emerging—the mother creature, deciding that camouflage was no longer useful, beginning to show its true form.
"Picard." Cole's voice was hoarse. "Hit it. Now. Everything you've got."
Picard and Riker fired simultaneously. Maximum setting. The combined phaser beams struck Remmick's torso with the focused intensity of two officers who'd served together long enough that their targeting was synchronized without discussion. The beams held—sustained fire, pouring energy into the host body and the creature within.
Remmick's chest exploded.
Not metaphorically. The host body came apart under the combined assault, and the mother creature—revealed, exposed, a writhing mass of segmented bio-electric tissue—burst free of its human shell with a shriek that hit Cole's perception like a hammer. The creature was larger than he'd expected. The size of a human torso, multi-limbed, its surface crackling with the bio-electric energy that connected it to every subsidiary parasite in the building.
It lunged. Not at Picard. Not at Riker. At Cole.
It knows. The queen recognized the threat. I'm the one who can see them, find them, disrupt them. Take out the detector and the rest can regroup.
Cole caught the creature with both hands.
The contact was electric—bio-electric energy surging through the physical connection, the mother creature trying to do to Cole what it had done to Remmick: infiltrate, connect, control. Its tendrils reached for his nervous system, probing for pathways, seeking the brainstem access that let it puppet human bodies.
It found the Armus residue instead.
The integrated fragment of alien consciousness—the piece of Armus that had embedded itself in Cole's cells, dormant for weeks, patient as the entity that spawned it—reacted to the intrusion with the territorial violence of a predator defending claimed territory. The Armus energy flared through Cole's nervous system, meeting the creature's invasion and burning it back with psychic hostility that had nothing to do with Cole's will and everything to do with two alien energies that recognized each other as incompatible.
Cole's hands glowed. Black-amber-gold, the three energies warring across his skin—the Armus fragment, the creature's bio-electric assault, and Cole's own projection capacity. The pain was extraordinary. His palms smoked. The creature thrashed against his grip, its tendrils recoiling from the Armus-tainted energy that turned every point of contact into a burning rejection.
He poured everything he had into the projection. Not absorption—destruction. Pure thermal energy, focused through hands that were already burning, directed into the creature's core with the precision of a man who'd spent months learning to control what lived inside him.
The mother creature ignited. Bio-electric tissue couldn't survive the thermal assault—the creature's organic structure superheating, its segmented body curling and blackening, the bio-electric core that connected it to every subsidiary parasite in the building sputtering and dying like a signal tower losing power.
It screamed. The frequency was agony—psychic, physical, the death cry of something ancient and alien hitting every parasite-connected nervous system in the building. Throughout Starfleet Command, infected officers collapsed as their parasites lost cohesion with the central intelligence.
The creature died in Cole's hands. He dropped it—charred, smoking, the remains of a queen that had controlled an infiltration reaching into the highest levels of Federation power. His palms were burned. Not the deep, structural damage of Vagra II—surface burns, painful but manageable, the cost of channeling sustained thermal energy through tissue that wasn't designed for it.
He sat down. The conference room floor was cold and he didn't care. His hands shook. His vision pulsed with each heartbeat. The headache that had been building all morning reached its crescendo and then, mercifully, began to recede as the sustained perception finally powered down.
Something's wrong.
His perception caught it even through the exhaustion—a burst of electromagnetic energy, brief, powerful, transmitted from the mother creature's remains in the fraction of a second before total death. A signal. Compressed data, fired into space on a frequency that punched through the atmosphere and into the void.
The signal. The one from the show. The parasites' last act—sending a distress call to... somewhere. Something.
The Borg? Someone else? I don't know. The show never answered that question.
But something received it. And something will come.
Picard knelt beside him. The captain's uniform was scorched. A cut above his eyebrow bled freely. His eyes held the particular intensity of a man who had just watched an officer do something that shouldn't have been possible.
"Lieutenant." A pause. Weight. Decision. "No. Lieutenant Commander. When this is processed, you'll find a field promotion in your record."
Cole's burnt hands rested on his knees. The black stains were darker than before—the Armus residue having flared during combat, the fragment more active than it had been since Vagra II. His palms smoked faintly. The smell was unpleasant.
"Thank you, Captain." His voice was raw. "Permission to sit here for a minute."
"Take all the time you need." Picard stood. Looked at the conference room—the destroyed table, the cracked Federation seal, the unconscious admirals, the charred remains of the mother creature. "You've earned it."
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