The black throng surrounded Erika Hernandez and pressed inward.

Then came the oppressive roar of a voice inside her mind. We are the
Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be exterminated. It was as intimate
to her thoughts as the gestalt once had been, but it was hostile,
savage, and soulless.

A spinning saw blade cut away the front half of her rifle, and the
weapon spat sparks as it tumbled from her grasp.

Hands closed around her arms and pulled her backward, off-balance. She
flailed and kicked, lashing out with wild fury.

More hands seized her ankles, her calves. The sheer weight of bodies
smothered her, and a sting like a needle jabbed her throat. Twisting,
she saw that one of the Borg drones had extended from between its
knuckles two slender tubules that had penetrated her carotid.

An icy sensation flooded into her like a poison and engulfed her
consciousness in a sinking despair.

Pushed facedown as the Borg’s infusion took root, she smelled the ferric
tang of blood spreading across the deck under her face. Then a hand
cupped her chin and lifted her head.

She looked into the eyes of a humanoid woman whose skin was the mottled
gray of a cadaver. Hairless and glistening in the spectral light, the
female Borg flashed a mirthless smile at Hernandez. “You are the one we
have waited for,” she said. “Surrender to the Collective…and become
Logos of Borg.”




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This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster,
Inc., under exclusive license from CBS Studios Inc.

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portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2336-2
ISBN-10: 1-4391-2336-5

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
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http://www.StarTrek.com


For Lerxst, G., and the Professor, who inspired me
to get on with the fascination; for Bryan, whose
remarkable generosity humbles me; and for Randy,
who made the introductions.




APPENDIX I
2156 <#filepos878340>

APPENDIX II
STARDATE 58100
(early February 2381) <#filepos880197>

ABOUT THE AUTHOR <#filepos884775>



    HISTORIAN’S NOTE

The main narrative of Lost Souls takes place in February of 2381 (Old
Calendar), approximately sixteen months after the events depicted in the
movie Star Trek Nemesis. The flashback story occurs circa 4527 B.C.E.


        Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble
        note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

        —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses



    2381



    1

It was the hardest decision William Riker had ever made.

He cast a suspicious glare at Titan’s unexpected visitor, a
human-looking young woman with a crazy mane of sable hair and delicate
garments that showed more of her body than they covered. She had claimed
to be Erika Hernandez, the commanding officer of the Earth Starship
Columbia, which had vanished more than two centuries earlier, thousands
of light-years from the planet where Titan was now being held prisoner.
Her tale seemed implausible, but she had offered to help his ship
escape, and so Riker was willing to accept her extraordinary claims on
faith…at least, until Titan was safe someplace far from here and he
could put her identity to the test.

Hers had been a proposition he couldn’t refuse, but freeing his ship
from the reclusive aliens known as the Caeliar would come at a price:
His away team—made up of most of his senior officers, including his
wife, his Imzadi, Deanna Troi—would have to be abandoned on the planet’s
surface.

But there was a war raging at home, and above all, he had a duty to
protect his ship and defend the Federation. No matter what he did, he
was certain his decision would haunt him for a long time to come.

“Take us home,” Riker said.

Hernandez snapped into action and took command of the situation.
Pointing at the display screen over the science station, she asked
curtly, “Who set up this tap on the Caeliar’s subspace aperture?”

“We did,” answered Commander Xin Ra-Havreii, Titan’s chief engineer,
gesturing to himself and the ship’s senior science officer, Lieutenant
Commander Melora Pazlar.

Hernandez stepped to the console and began entering data. The strange
young woman’s fingers moved with velocity and delicacy, as if she had
mastered the Federation’s newest technology ages earlier. “I need to
change your shield specs to protect you from radiation inside the
passage,” she said.

“Our shields already do that,” Ra-Havreii said.

“No,” Hernandez replied, her flurry of tapping on the console unabated,
“you only think they do. Give me a moment.” Her hands came to an abrupt
stop. “There.” She turned and snapped at Riker’s acting first officer,
Commander Fo Hachesa, “Which station controls onboard systems?”

Hachesa pointed at ops.

“Thank you,” she said to the stunned-silent Kobliad. Moving in rapid
strides, Hernandez crossed to the forward console and nudged Lieutenant
Sariel Rager out of her way. “I’m programming your deflector to create a
phase-shifted soliton field. That’ll make it harder for the Caeliar to
shift the aperture on us while we’re in transit.” She looked across at
Ensign Aili Lavena, the Pacifican flight-control officer. “Be ready to
go at your best nonwarp speed, as soon as the passage opens. Understood?”

Lavena nodded quickly, shaking loose air bubbles inside her
liquid-atmosphere breathing mask.

Watching the youthful Hernandez at work, Riker felt superfluous on his
own bridge.

“All right,” Hernandez announced, “I’m about to widen the subspace
aperture into a full tunnel. When I do, the Caeliar will try to shut it
down. Be warned: This is gonna be a rough ride.” She looked around at
the various alien faces on Titan’s bridge. “Everyone ready?” The crew
nodded. She met Riker’s gaze. “It’s your ship, Captain. Give the word.”

Nice of her to remember, Riker thought. He led Hachesa back to their
command chairs. They sat down and settled into place. Lifting his chin,
Riker said to Hernandez, “The word is given.”

“And away we go,” Hernandez said. She faced forward, fixed her gaze on
the main viewscreen, and lifted her right arm to shoulder height. With
her outstretched hand, she seemed to reach toward the darkness,
straining to summon something from the void. Then it appeared, like an
iris spiraling open in space: a circular tunnel filled with brilliant,
pulsing blue and white rings of light, stretching away to infinity.

Lavena pressed the padd to fire the impulse engines at full power. One
moment, Riker heard the hum and felt the vibrations of sublight
acceleration through the deck plates; the next, he was clutching his
chair’s armrests as the ship slammed to a hard, thunderous halt and
threw everyone forward.

“More power!” cried Hernandez over the alarm klaxons and groaning
bulkheads. “I’ll try to break their hold on us!” She closed her eyes,
bowed her head, and raised both arms.

Riker had witnessed some of Deanna’s psychic struggles in the past, and
he knew that whatever Hernandez was enduring to free his ship, it had to
be worse than he could imagine. “Give it all we’ve got!” he bellowed
over the chatter of damage reports pouring in via the ops and tactical
consoles.

Titan lurched forward, then it was inside the pulsating brightness of
the subspace tunnel. Lieutenant Rriarr gripped the side of the tactical
console with one paw as he reported, “High-level hyperphasic radiation
inside the tunnel, Captain. Shields holding.”

That’s why she had to modify our shields, Riker realized. Otherwise,
we’d all be handfuls of dust by now. Bone-rattling blows hammered the
ship. “Report!” Riker ordered.

“Soliton pulses,” Rriarr said. “From behind us.”

“They’re trying to bend the passage and bring us back to New Erigol,”
Hernandez said. “Keep that soliton field up!”

“Divert nonessential power to the deflector,” Riker said.

“Belay that, sir,” countered Ra-Havreii. “The gravitational shear inside
the tunnel is rising. We have to reinforce the structural integrity field!”

Hernandez shot back, “Do that, and we’ll lose control of the tunnel.
We’ll be taken back to New Erigol!”

“If we don’t, the ship might be torn in half,” replied the angry
Efrosian engineer. Punctuating his point, a console behind him exploded
and showered the bridge with stinging debris and quickly fading sparks.

Falling to her knees, Hernandez kept her arms extended and her hands up,
as if she were holding back a titanic weight. “Just a few more seconds!”
she cried in a plaintive voice.

The bluish-white rings of the tunnel began distorting as the black
circle of its terminus became visible. “Lieutenant Rager, all available
power to the deflector,” Riker said. “That’s an order.” Another round of
merciless impacts quaked the ship around him. “Hold her together, folks,
we’re almost out!”

An agonized groan welled up from within Hernandez as the egress point
loomed large ahead of Titan. She arched her back and lifted her hands
high above her head before unleashing a defiant, primal scream.

Outside the ship, in the tunnel, a massive ripple like a shimmer of heat
radiation coursed ahead of Titan, smoothing the rings back to their
perfect, circular dimensions and calming the turbulence. The shockwave
rebounded off the exit ring as the Luna-class explorer hurtled through it.

Energy surges flurried the bridge’s consoles, and displays spat out
chaotic jumbles. A final, calamitous blast pummeled Titan, and the
bridge became as dark as a moonless night. Only the feeble glow of a few
tiny status gauges pierced the gloom in the long moments before the
emergency lights filled the bridge with a dim, hazy radiance.

Smoke blanketed the bridge, and the deck sparkled with a fine layer of
crystalline dust from demolished companels. The deck was eerily silent;
there was no sound of comm chatter, no feedback tones from the computers.

“Damage report,” Riker said. He surveyed the bridge for anyone able to
answer him. He was met by befuddled looks and officers shaking their
heads in dismay.

Ra-Havreii moved from station to station, barely pausing at each one
before moving on to the next, growing more agitated every step of the
way. When he reached the blank conn, he gave his drooping ivory-white
mustache a pensive stroke, then turned to Riker and said, “We’re blacked
out, Captain. Main power’s offline, along with communications,
computers, and who knows what else. I’ll have to go down to main
engineering to get a better look at the problem.”

“Go ahead,” Riker said. “Power first, then communications.”

“That was my plan,” replied Ra-Havreii, heading for the turbolift. He
all but walked into the still-closed doors before making an awkward
stop, turning on his heel, and flashing an embarrassed grin. “No main
power, no turbolifts.” He pointed aft. “I’ll just take the emergency
ladder.”

As the chief engineer made his abashed exit, Riker got up and walked to
Hernandez’s side. In slow, careful motions, he helped her stand and
steady herself. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” she said. “That last pulse was a doozy. Guess I didn’t
know my own strength.”

Riker did a double-take. “You caused that final pulse?”

“I had to,” she said. “It was the only way to close off the passage and
destroy the machine at the other end once we were clear. That’ll keep
the Caeliar off our backs for a while.”

“Define ‘a while.’”

Hernandez shrugged. “Hard to say. Depends how much damage I did and how
badly the Caeliar want to come after us. Could be a few days. Could be a
few decades.”

“We’d better get busy making repairs, then,” Riker said.

She nodded once. “That would probably be a good idea.”

Riker turned to Lieutenant Rriarr. “As soon as the turbolifts are
working, have Captain Hernandez escorted to quarters and placed under
guard.” To Hernandez, he added, “No offense.”

“None taken,” she replied. “After eight hundred years with the Caeliar,
I’m used to being treated like a prisoner.”

 

Deanna Troi screamed in horror as Dr. Ree sank his fangs into her chest
just below her left breast, and Ree felt absolutely terrible about it,
because he was only trying to help.

The Pahkwa-thanh physician ignored Troi’s frantic slaps at his head as
he released a tiny amount of venom into her bloodstream. Then the
half-Betazoid woman stiffened under his slender, taloned feet as the
fast poison took effect.

Four sets of hands—one pair on each arm and two pairs on his tail—yanked
him backward, off Troi, and dragged him into a clumsy group tumble away
from her. He rolled to his feet to find himself confronted by the away
team’s security contingent, which consisted of Chief Petty Officer
Dennisar, Lieutenant Gian Sortollo, and Titan’s security chief,
Lieutenant Commander Ranul Keru. The team’s fuming-mad first officer,
Commander Christine Vale, snapped, “What the hell were you doing, Ree?”

“The only thing that I could, under the circumstances,” Ree replied,
squaring off against his four comrades.

Vale’s struggle for calm was admirable, if unsuccessful. She flexed her
hands and fought to unclench her jaw. “This had better be the best
damned explanation of your life, Doctor.”

A shadow stepped off a nearby wall and became Inyx, the chief scientist
of the Caeliar. The looming, lanky alien tilted his bulbous head and
permanently frowning visage in Ree’s direction. “I am quite eager to
hear your explanation as well,” he said. The deep inflation and
deflation of the air sacs that drooped over his bony shoulders suggested
a recent exertion.

Ensign Torvig Bu-kar-nguv cowered outside the door of Troi’s quarters
and poked his ovine head cautiously around the jamb to see what was
transpiring inside. Ree understood perfectly the reticence of the young
Choblik, whose species—bipedal runners with no natural forelimbs—were
descended from prey animals.

As Ree chose his words, Commander Tuvok, Titan’s second officer, entered
and kneeled beside Troi. The brown-skinned Vulcan man gently rested one
hand on Troi’s forehead.

“I confess it was an act of desperation,” Ree said. “After the Caeliar
destroyed all of our tricorders—including mine—I had no way to assess
the counselor’s condition with enough specificity to administer any of
the hyposprays in my satchel.”

“So you bit her,” Sortollo interrupted with deadpan sarcasm. “Yeah, that
makes sense.”

Undeterred by the Mars-born human’s cynicism, Ree continued, “Commander
Troi’s condition became progressively worse after she went to bed. Based
on my tactile measure of her blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, I
concluded there was a high probability that she had suffered a serious
internal hemorrhage.” He directed his next comments to Inyx, who had
moved to Troi’s side and squatted low, opposite Tukov, to examine her.
“She would not permit me to seek your help or request the use of your
sterile medical facilities for the procedure.”

“And that’s why he bit her,” Dennisar said, riffing on Sortollo’s dry
delivery. Commander Vale glared the Orion into a shamed silence.

Inyx rested his gently undulating cilia over Troi’s bite wound. “You
injected her with a toxin.”

Menace was implied in Vale’s every syllable as she said, “If you’ve got
a point to make, Doctor, now’s the time.”

“My venom is a relic of Pahkwa-thanh evolution,” he said to her. “It
places prey in a state of living suspended animation. Its purpose in my
species’ biology was to enable sires of new hatchlings to roam a large
territory and bring live prey back to the nest without a struggle, so
that it would be fresh when fed to our young. In this case, I used it to
place Counselor Troi in a suspended state to halt the progression of her
hemorrhage.”

Keru sighed heavily and shook his head. “All right, that does kind of
make sense.”

“What you did was barbaric and violent,” Inyx said. A sheet of
quicksilver spread beneath Troi like a metallic bloodstain. It
solidified and levitated her from the floor. “Your paralyzing toxin,
while effective in the short term, will not sustain her for long. If
that is what passes for medicine among your kind, I am not certain you
deserve to be called a doctor.”

Inyx began escorting the levitated Troi toward the exit.

Tuvok lurked silently behind Inyx, his intense stare fixed on Troi’s
face, which was frozen in a look of shock even though she was no longer
sensate.

Vale blocked Inyx’s path. The security personnel regrouped behind her,
fully obstructing the doorway. “Hold on,” she said to Inyx. “Where are
you taking her?”

“To a facility where we can provide her with proper medical care,” the
Caeliar scientist replied. He glanced at Ree and added in a pointed
tone, “You might be surprised to learn that our methods do not include
masticating our patients.”

Ree was a gentle being by nature, but the Caeliar seemed committed to
putting his goodwill to the test. “She needs the kind of medical care
that I can provide to her only on Titan,” he said to Inyx. “If you
really were the beneficent hosts you claim to be, you’d let us return to
the ship.”

Inyx halted and turned back to face Ree. “I am afraid that is quite
impossible,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” Ree groused. “Because of your sacred privacy.”

“No,” Inyx said, “because your ship has escaped and left you all
behind.” A gap opened in the ceiling above Inyx and Troi, who ascended
through it into the open air of the starless night. Inyx looked down and
added, “I will leave you to contemplate that while I try to save your
friend’s life.” He and Troi faded into the darkness and were gone.

A shocked silence filled the room as the remaining away-team members
regarded one another with searching expressions.

Dennisar asked no one in particular, “Do you really think Titan got away?”

Keru gave a noncommittal sideways nod. “The Caeliar haven’t lied to us
so far. Could be the truth.”

Vale said, “If they did, good for them. And it’s good news for us, too,
because you know Captain Riker will send help.”

Everyone nodded, and Ree could sense that they were all trying to put
the most positive possible spin on the cold fact of having been
abandoned by their shipmates and captain.

Torvig was the first to wander back to his quarters, and then Tuvok
slipped away, his demeanor reserved and withdrawn. Vale left next, and
Keru ushered his two men out of the room.

Ree followed the burly Trill security chief out of Troi’s quarters into
the corridor. Keru snickered under his breath. “I’m sorry, Doc,” he
said. “But for a second there, I really thought you were trying to eat
Counselor Troi.”

“I would never do such a thing,” Ree said, affecting a tone of greater
offense than he really felt. Then he showed Keru a toothy grin. “Though
I have to admit…she was rather succulent.” Noting the man’s anxious
sidelong glance, Ree added with a flustered flourish, “Kidding.”



    4527 B.C.E.



    2

A fiery mountain fell from the sky.

Deep thunder rolled above the snowy landscape as the behemoth of
scorched metal plunged through the low cover of bleak autumn clouds.
Wreathed in flames and ashen smoke, its angle of descent shallowed
moments before it caromed off the rocky mountainside. Eruptions of mud,
splintered trees, and pulverized stone filled the air. The dark mass cut
epic gouges into the alpine slope, and it broke apart on its descent to
the rugged coastline of the ice-packed fjord below.

An avalanche rushed before it. Millions of tons of snow, dirt, and ice
moved like water and then set like stone as they buried the shattered
crags of blackened metal. The ground shook, and the roar of the
collision and its consequences echoed and reechoed off the surrounding
peaks and glaciers, until it was swallowed by the deep silence of the
arctic wilderness.

Twilight settled on the fjord.

And there wasn’t a soul to bear witness.

 

“Stand back,” MACO Sergeant Gage Pembleton said. “I’m almost through.
One more shot ought to do it.”

He stood, wedged in a jagged rent in the foundation of the Caeliar
city-ship Mantilis. He aimed his phase rifle into the gap he had melted,
through the densely packed ice and snow that had entombed the wrecked
vessel after its calamitous planetfall on this unknown world, tens of
thousands of light-years from Earth. A quick tap on the rifle’s trigger
released a flash of heat and light, and then he saw open sky. Frigid,
pine-scented air surged through the new opening, and his whoop of
celebration condensed into wisps of vapor in front of his face.

Waiting inside the remains of a laboratory complex, behind and beneath
Pembleton, were the other five human survivors of Mantilis’s hard
landing. Three of them were privates from the Columbia’s MACO company:
Eric Crichlow, a bug-eyed and large-nosed son of Liverpool; Thom
Steinhauer, a German with chiseled features, close-shorn hair, and
little sense of humor; and Niccolo Mazzetti, a handsome Sicilian with
olive skin, black hair, and a reputation for never being lonely on shore
leave.

Huddled between the MACOs was Kiona Thayer, the only woman in the group.
She was a tall, raven-haired Québécoise with distant Sioux ancestry—and
a bloody, hastily bandaged mess where her left foot once had been.
Pembleton found her wound hard to look at—chiefly because he’d been the
one who’d inflicted it, on orders from his MACO commander, Major Foyle.

At the front of the group was the Columbia’s chief engineer, a
broad-backed Austrian man named Karl Graylock. He asked, “Is it safe to
move outside?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Pembleton said. He set the safety on his weapon and
rubbed his brown hands together for warmth. “But I can tell you it’s
cold out there.”

Graylock raised his eyebrows. “Coming from a Canadian, that means
something.” He glanced back at the others briefly before he added,
“Maybe you and I should have a look first.”

“Aye, sir,” Pembleton replied. “I’ll test the footing.” Taking careful
steps, he felt that the gravity was stronger than he was accustomed to.
He made a careful climb through the icy passage he had carved one shot
at a time. A few meters shy of the top, he called back to Graylock,
“It’s safe, Lieutenant.”

The chief engineer followed Pembleton up the slope and out into the
needle-sharp cold. The air was thin. As they stepped ankle-deep into the
snow outside, Pembleton was awed by the sheer majesty of the vista that
surrounded him: towering cliffs of black rock streaked with pristine
snow; placid fjords reflecting a sky that glowed on the horizon with
pastel hues of twilight; a few brilliant stars shining high overhead. It
was so beautiful that he almost forgot that his fingers and toes had
started going numb from the cold. “Quite a view,” he said, his baritone
voice reverentially hushed.

He looked sidelong at Graylock, who had turned to face in the other
direction. The beefy engineer stared up the slope, his jaw slack.
Pembleton did an about-face and beheld the swath that Mantilis had cut
down the mountainside, through the upper half of the tree line. The
devastation was impressive—in particular, the wounds that had been hewn
into the mountain’s rocky face—but it paled before the sight that filled
the heavens above it. Ribbons of prismatic beauty wavered behind the
distant peaks, against a black sky peppered with stars. The aurora was
breathtaking in its intensity and range of colors.

“Wow,” Pembleton muttered.

“Ja,” said Graylock, his voice barely a hush of breath.

Pembleton pushed his hands inside the pants pockets of his camouflage
fatigues. “We should probably wait until it gets a little brighter
before we bring the others out here,” he said. Pointing at the fjord, he
added, “Then we can head for low ground, by the shore. I’d suggest we
make camp there and sort out the basics—shelter, fire, potable water,
and as much food as we can stockpile. Then, if anything like spring ever
comes, we can head for warmer weather near the equator.”

“Why go so far, Sergeant?” Graylock asked. “Shouldn’t we hold position
until we figure out how to call for a rescue?”

Pressing his arms to his sides to quell his shivering, Pembleton said,
“There’s never going to be a rescue, sir.”

Graylock folded his arms across his chest and tucked his hands under his
armpits. “We can’t think like that, Sergeant,” he said. “We can’t give
up hope.”

“With all respect, sir, I think we can.” Pembleton tilted his head back
to look up at the stars. He remembered what the Caeliar scientist Lerxst
had told him just before Mantilis made planetfall. “We’re almost sixty
thousand light-years from home, and the year is roughly 4500 B.C.” He
turned his head toward Graylock and added, “This is where we’re going to
live the rest of our lives…and this is where we’re going to die.”

 

This nameless world had turned but once on its axis, and already Lerxst
and his eleven fellow Caeliar felt the ebb of their vitality. “We should
conserve our strength,” he said to his colleague Sedín. “Reducing our
mass will lessen the effects of this planet’s gravity on our movement.”

“Shedding some of our catoms is only a short-term solution,” she
replied. “Unless we find a new source of power, we’ll weaken to the
point where we can’t recorporealize.”

A pang of guilt impeded Lerxst’s thoughts; he had decided to jettison
the city’s main power source and much of its mass into subspace, rather
than risk inflicting its devastating potential on an unsuspecting world
in the crash. But divorced from the gestalt, and with their city in
ruins, he and the other Caeliar of Mantilis had no means of rebuilding
their lost generators. Without them to power the city’s quantum field,
the Caeliar’s catoms would swiftly exhaust their energy supply.

“At this extreme polar latitude, solar collection will not be a viable
alternative until after our reserves have been depleted,” Lerxst said.
“Do we have enough strength to tap and develop this world’s geothermal
resources?”

Sedín’s gestalt aura radiated doubt. “The bedrock here is deep, and
we’re far from any volcanic activity.” She shared an image of the
mountain atop which their city had been sundered. “There is a greater
likelihood of mining fissionable elements.”

“Not enough for our needs,” Lerxst replied. “I am also concerned that
their use might risk introducing toxins into this world’s ecosphere.” It
had been aeons since he had felt so vexed. “If only we hadn’t lost all
of the zero-point aggregators, we might have had time to build a new
prime particle generator.”

Another Caeliar, an astrophysicist named Ghyllac, entered the darkened
control center from behind Lerxst. He was followed by two of the human
survivors, Gage Pembleton and Karl Graylock. Ghyllac said, “Visitors for
you, Lerxst.”

Lerxst turned to greet their guests. “Welcome, Gage and Karl,” he said.
“Have you reconsidered our invitation to use what’s left of Mantilis as
a shelter?”

“Nein,” Graylock said. “There is no food for us at this altitude on the
slope. We need to move down to the fjord.”

His statement seemed to perplex Sedín, who replied, “There is no greater
variety of flora along the shoreline, Karl.”

Pembleton said, “We’ll try our luck at fishing.”

Sedín was about to apprise the humans of the folly of such a labor, but
Lerxst cut off her reply with a gentle emanation through their
tragically reduced gestalt. He asked Graylock, “Then to what do we owe
the privilege of this visit?”

“We need batteries,” Graylock said. “Large ones for charging equipment
and smaller portable ones.”

Apprehension passed like an electrical charge among the dozen Caeliar
inside the demolished control facility. Parceling out any of their
already scant stored energy to the human survivors would only hasten the
Caeliar’s fade into oblivion.

“We’ll share what we can, limited though it is,” Lerxst said, shutting
out the swell of anxiety from his colleagues.

The humans nodded. Graylock said, “As long as we’re here, we might as
well ask if we can salvage parts and materials from the city’s debris.”

Lerxst bowed and spread his arms slightly. “Be our guest.”

“Thank you,” Pembleton said. He lowered his voice as he looked at
Graylock and asked, “Anything else, sir?”

Graylock shook his head. “No.” To Lerxst, he added, “You’ll let us know
when the batteries are ready?”

“Of course.”

“Danke schön,” Graylock said with a nod. He turned and walked out, and
Pembleton followed at his side.

After the humans were far from the control center, Sedín asked, “Was
that a wise promise to make, Lerxst?”

“I obeyed the dictates of my conscience,” Lerxst said. “Nothing more.”

Ghyllac interjected, “We need that energy to live.”

“So do the humans,” Lerxst said.

 

The survivors’ first full day on the planet barely deserved to be called
a day at all, in Pembleton’s opinion. The colorless sun barely edged
above the horizon, turning the arctic sky marble gray above a wide,
slate-colored sea.

One by one, the rest of the group followed Pembleton from the rifle-cut
tunnel, out onto the wind-blasted mountainside. Everyone was garbed in
warm, silver-gray hooded ponchos provided by the Caeliar. Their
backpacks were jammed with blankets, a smattering of raw materials, and
battery packs of various sizes.

Lieutenant Thayer lay on a narrow stretcher. The task of carrying her
was shared by the MACO privates. At any given moment, two of them were
handling the stretcher while the third rested between turns of duty.

To what Pembleton had decided was the west, an advancing storm spread
like a purple-black bruise. “We’d better move if we want to reach low
ground in time,” he told Graylock.

“In time for what?” the engineer said.

“To build shelters and get fires lit,” Pembleton replied. “Before the
storm hits.” Surveying the sparsely wooded slope, he added, “We sure
don’t want to get caught in that up here.”

“Good point,” Graylock said. “Lead us down, Sergeant.”

The group trudged wearily toward the fjord, far below. In the slightly
heavy-feeling gravity, each step gave Pembleton a minor jolt of
shin-splint pain.

He glanced back to confirm that everyone else was faring all right.
Crichlow and Mazzetti had the stretcher steadily in hand, and Steinhauer
and Graylock were chatting amiably about something in rapid-fire German.

Along the way, the one resource whose supply exceeded demand was fresh
water. According to Graylock’s hand scanner, the snow that blanketed the
landscape was remarkably pure and undoubtedly safe to drink. “At least
we won’t dehydrate,” he said, trying to muster some optimism.

“That just means it’ll take us longer to starve to death,” Pembleton
replied, in no mood to have his morale boosted.

Within less than two hours, they were far enough down the slope that
other nearby peaks blocked out the feeble sunlight. Crossing into the
steel-blue shadows, Pembleton felt the temperature plummet several
degrees. His every exhalation filled the air ahead of him with ephemeral
plumes of vapor.

It was late in the day and quickly growing dark by the time they reached
the water’s edge. “Steinhauer, help Graylock set up by those big rocks,
up on that rise,” Pembleton said. “It’ll give us a break from the wind
and keep us dry when the runoff comes down the mountain. Mazzetti, you
and I will dig a latrine on the other side. Crichlow, take your rifle
and a hand scanner. Hunt for any kind of small animal—bird, fish,
mammal, I don’t care. Anything edible.”

“Right, Sarge,” Crichlow said. He stripped off his backpack, tucked a
hand scanner into a leg pocket of his fatigue pants, grabbed his rifle,
and stole away into the sparse brush.

By the time Graylock and the MACOs had finished building the group’s
shelter—a tenuous structure of hastily welded scrap-metal supports
overlaid by more of the Caeliar’s wonder fabric—the sky was pitch dark.
A vicious wind howled like a demon’s choir between the cliffs that
bordered the fjord, and the air was heavy with the scent of rain.

A snapping of twigs and crunching steps on snow turned Pembleton’s head,
and he aimed his rifle as a precaution. He lowered it when he recognized
Crichlow, who emerged from the brush looking tattered, scratched, and
dejected.

“Nothing out there?” Pembleton asked.

“Oh, they’re out there,” Crichlow said. The young private met
Pembleton’s disappointed gaze and shook his head. “But the little
buggers are so spry, I can’t get a bead on ’em.”

Pembleton fell into step beside Crichlow as they walked toward the
shelter. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Tomorrow, switch to snares.
See how that goes.”

“Right, Sarge,” Crichlow said. “Will do.”

They pushed through the front flaps that served as a door for the
shelter. The ground had been covered with large squares of the Caeliar
fabric, except for a circle in the middle, where large stones had been
piled and heated to a bright red glow that filled the enclosure with
smokeless warmth.

“Tighten your belts, folks,” Pembleton said. “Looks like bark soup for
dinner.” Groans of dismay were his reward for honesty. “Look on the
bright side,” he continued. “After we enjoy our tasty broth, you’ll all
get to sleep, because I’ll take the first watch, till 2100. Mazzetti,
second watch, till 0100. Steinhauer, third watch, to 0500. Crichlow,
last watch. We’ll rotate the schedule nightly.”

Mazzetti asked, “Can’t we just set a hand scanner for proximity detection?”

“We’re trying to save its power cell for things like finding food and
figuring out what’s toxic,” said Graylock.

“Exactly,” Pembleton said. “And Mazzetti? For asking that, you just
volunteered for bark-collection detail.”

 

The bark soup was hot but also bitter, like a raw acorn. Despite having
drained his canteen twice in the hour after dinner and spitting
furiously, Pembleton still hadn’t expunged the taste from his mouth.
Fortunately, I have the rain to keep my mind off it, he brooded.

Driven by brutally cold gales, a freezing spray slashed through the
night and found every gap in Pembleton’s salvaged-fabric poncho. His
phase rifle was slung across his back, and his hands were tucked inside
his camouflage fatigue jacket and under his armpits for warmth.

After Mazzetti had gone out for bark, Graylock had run a scan for any
kind of edible plants near the shelter. Nothing had registered on the
hand scanner. No berries, fruits, or nuts. Not even simple grasses. Just
poisonous fungi and lichens.

The weather’s only going to get worse, he predicted. The nights’ll get
longer, and the cold’ll get deeper. He looked at the mediocre shelter
that he and the others now depended on, and he frowned. If that thing
survives a winter in this place, it’ll be a miracle.

A short time before the end of his watch, the downpour was borne away on
the shoulders of a biting wind. In minutes, the precipitation abated to
a drizzle, and then it stopped. The air cleared, and as a parade of
fast-moving clouds transited the sky, he saw the hypnotic radiance of
the aurora behind the peaks. Then something beneath it, on the slope of
the mountain, caught his attention. Pale glows of movement.

He fished his binoculars from his fatigues and trained them on the light
sources high above his position. Magnified, the details of the scene
became clearly visible. The Caeliar had come out from their buried,
broken metropolis and were gathering atop a blackened crag that once had
been part of its foundation.

Pembleton wondered what they were up to, so he increased the
magnification of the binoculars to its maximum setting and looked again.
Then he realized they were gazing back at him.

They looked different—sickly. There was a spectral quality to them, an
otherworldly radiance and a lack of opacity.

He lowered the binoculars and thought of the millions of Caeliar who had
willingly sacrificed themselves to send Mantilis through the subspace
passageway, and through time, to this barren place; their city had
become a necropolis.

Lifting the binoculars again, he saw the Caeliar for the ghosts that
they’d become, and it filled him with despair.

I guess we’re not the only ones dying here.



    2381



    3

“Hail them again, Commander,” Captain Picard said to Miranda Kadohata,
the Enterprise’s third-in-command and senior operations officer.

Her lean, attractive Eurasian countenance hardened with frustration as
she worked at her console. “Still no response, sir,” she said, her
accent redolent of a Londoner’s inflections.

Medical and security personnel worked with quiet efficiency around and
behind Picard, clearing away the evidence of the ship’s recent pitched
battle with Hirogen boarders, two of whom lay dead in the middle of the
Enterprise’s bridge. A thin haze of smoke still lingered along the
overhead, and its sharp odor masked the stench of spilled blood on the deck.

On the main viewer, framed by streaks of warp-distorted starlight, was
the Vesta-class explorer vessel U.S.S. Aventine. Under the command of
Captain Ezri Dax, it was racing at its best possible warp speed toward
Earth. They were in futile pursuit of a Borg armada that had, only hours
earlier, slipped through a previously unknown—and since
collapsed—subspace passage from the Delta Quadrant. Picard feared that
at any moment Captain Dax’s crew would activate their ship’s prototype
quantum slipstream drive and rush headlong into a suicidal confrontation.

Lieutenant Jasminder Choudhury, the Enterprise’s chief of security,
directed four medical technicians entering from the main turbolift to
the Hirogen’s corpses. “Get those into stasis,” she said. “We’ll want
them for analysis later.”

“Aye, sir,” said one of the technicians, and the quartet set to work
bagging the enormous armored bodies.

While they worked, another turbolift arrived at the bridge, and four
engineers stepped out. They carried tight, tubular bundles that unrolled
to reveal long sheets covered with tools tucked into fabric loops and
magnetically sealed pockets. In moments, the engineers all were at work,
repairing ruptured duty consoles and bulkhead-mounted companels.

Commander Worf finished a hushed conference with junior tactical officer
Ensign Aneta Šmrhová and returned to the command chairs to take his seat
next to Picard’s. Speaking at a discreet volume, he said, “Sensor
reports confirmed, Captain. There are more than seven thousand Borg
cubes deployed into Federation, Klingon, and Romulan territory. Several
targets have already been engaged.”

“Thank you, Number One,” Picard said, though he was anything but
grateful for the update. He raised his voice and asked the flight
controller, “Mister Weinrib, time to intercept?”

“Actually, sir, the Aventine’s lead is increasing,” Weinrib said.
“They’re now point-eight-five past our top rated speed.”

Picard admired the sleek lines of the Aventine as it slipped farther
away from the Enterprise. He was almost ready to abandon hope of
reasoning with Dax when Kadohata swiveled her chair around from ops to
report, “Aventine is responding, sir.”

“On-screen,” Picard said.

Captain Dax’s face appeared on the main viewer. “Changed your mind about
joining us, Captain?”

“Far from it,” Picard said, rising from his chair and walking forward.
“I urge you to reconsider this rash action.”

The young, dark-haired Trill woman seethed. “The Federation’s under
attack,” she said. “We have to defend it.”

“We will,” Picard said. “But not like this. Sacrificing your ship and
your crew in this manner serves no purpose. Going into battle against
great odds can be brave or noble—but going into battle without a plan is
worse than futile, it’s wasteful.”

She heaved an angry sigh, and he sensed her frustration, her desire to
do anything other than stand and wait. “So, what do you propose we do?”

“We’ll contact Starfleet Command and request new orders,” he said. “They
may not even be aware that our ships are still in service after the loss
of the expeditionary force.”

A smirk tugged at one corner of Dax’s mouth. “Contact Starfleet Command?
No offense, Captain, but that’s not exactly the answer I expected, given
your reputation.”

“I’ll admit that when my orders have contradicted common sense,
morality, or the law, I have followed my conscience,” Picard said. “But
at the moment, Captain, we haven’t any orders at all—and I think we at
least ought to see if Starfleet knows where it needs us before we commit
ourselves to a potentially fatal course.”

Dax relaxed her shoulders. “I suppose it can’t hurt to ask,” she said.

“Then might I suggest we drop out of warp?” Picard said. “At least until
such time as we know where we ought to go?”

She narrowed her gaze for a moment, and then she nodded to someone
off-screen. “We’re returning to impulse,” she said. “Can you patch me in
when you’re ready to talk to Starfleet?”

“Of course,” Picard said. “Enterprise out.” The screen switched back to
the exterior view of the receding Aventine.

Picard nodded to Worf, who said to Weinrib, “Match their speed and
heading.” The conn officer nodded his confirmation.

On the viewscreen, the streaks of light shrank back to gleaming points
as the Aventine and the Enterprise returned to normal maneuvering speeds.

Another guarded victory for common sense, Picard mused. “Commander
Kadohata, raise Starfleet Command on any secure channel, priority one.”

“Aye, sir,” Kadohata replied.

He turned toward his ready room. “I’ll take it in my—” He stopped in
midstep and midsentence as he saw the burned and smoke-scarred interior
of his office, which had been set ablaze during the assault by the
Hirogen hunting pack. Picard frowned. The sight of his flame-scoured
sanctum resurrected unpleasant memories he’d hoped were long buried.

Time is the fire in which we burn.

Looking back at Kadohata, he said, “I’ll take it in the observation
lounge, Commander.” He walked to the aft starboard portal as he added,
“Commander Worf, you have the bridge.”



    4

“Battle stations!” roared Captain Krogan. The bridge lights snapped to
full brightness as the I.K.S. veScharg’a dropped to impulse one million
qelI’qams from the Klingon world Morska. Following close behind the
veScharg’a was its battle partner, the Qang-class heavy cruiser Sturka.

A firestorm of disruptor blasts raged up from the planet’s surface and
hammered the two Borg cubes in orbit. The impacts seemed to have no
effect on the cubes except to silhouette them and give them blinding
crimson halos. Then the Borg returned fire and wrought blazing emerald
scars across the planet’s surface.

Krogan’s first officer, Falgar, bellowed, “Raise shields! Arm weapons!
Helm, set attack pattern ya’DIchqa.”

“Ten seconds to Borg firing range,” answered the helmsman.

“All reserve power to shields,” Falgar ordered.

Time to find out if Starfleet’s secret torpedoes work for us, Krogan
brooded, watching the Borg cubes grow larger on his viewscreen. His foes
would have several seconds of advantage over his Vor’cha-class attack
cruiser, whose effective firing range was a few hundred thousand
qelI’qams shorter than that of the Borg cubes. The veScharg’a’s goal was
to survive the Borg’s initial barrage and get close enough to target the
cubes with the transphasic torpedo, which Admiral Jellico of Starfleet
had just ordered to be distributed to ships of the Klingon Defense Force.

“The Borg are firing,” Falgar said, sounding perfectly calm. Then
explosions shook the battle cruiser with the ferocity of Fek’lhr
himself. The bright battle lights flickered. Fire and sparks erupted
from aft duty stations, and the stink of burnt hair assaulted Krogan’s
nostrils.

Qonqar, the tactical officer, shouted over the clamor, “Weapons locked!”

Krogan slammed a fist on the arm of his chair as he pointed at the Borg
cubes on the screen. “Fire!”

A trio of blue bolts shot forth, spiraling erratically through the
Borg’s defensive batteries. As they closed on target, Falgar called out,
“Helm! Break to starboard! Qonqar, all power to port shields!”

More blasts shook the veScharg’a. Krogan grinned as he watched the
viewer and saw the aft-angle view of the torpedoes hitting home and
blasting one Borg cube to pieces in a sapphire flash. As the blue fire
cloud dissipated into the vacuum of space, another cerulean blast filled
the starscape behind it, as the second Borg cube was annihilated.

The bridge officers cheered and roared at their victory. Krogan
permitted himself a satisfied smirk and a nod of his head. It is a good
day to die…for my enemies.

The warriors’ revels were ended by the shrilling of an incoming subspace
message. Communications officer Valk covered his in-ear transceiver for
a moment, then looked up at Krogan. “Signal from General Klag.”

“On-screen,” Krogan said, lifting his chin to project pride and
confidence to his commanding officer.

The visage of General Klag, commander of the Fifth Fleet, filled the
viewscreen. “Report,” said the general, who was now also hailed as a
Hero of the Empire.

“Our foes are vanquished,” Krogan said.

“Excellent,” Klag said. “Your vessel is needed at a new battle. What is
your status?”

Krogan replied, “Minor damage but still battle-ready.”

Klag nodded, and then he asked, “What of the Sturka?”

Qonqar routed an after-action report from the Sturka to Krogan’s command
monitor. “Captain K’Draq reports they’ve taken heavy damage,” Krogan
said, reviewing the details.

The general’s brow creased beneath his scowl. “We need every ship. Can
they continue?”

“Doubtful,” Krogan said. “They’ve lost warp drive.”

“Leave them, then,” Klag said. “Rendezvous with the fleet in three
hours, at the coordinates I’m sending you now.”

At a glance, Krogan knew that the meeting point lay on a direct line
between the Azure Nebula, source of the Borg scourge, and the Klingon
homeworld. “The Borg are coming for Qo’noS, then,” he said.

“If they do, they come to die,” Klag said with an eager grin. “Get under
way now. That is an order. Klag out.”

The screen returned to the wounded orb of Morska and the smoldering,
battered hull of the Sturka, adrift in space. Krogan relayed the
rendezvous coordinates to the helmsman’s console. “Set a new course,” he
said. “Maximum warp. Go.” Stars swept across the screen and then
distorted into streaks as the veScharg’a jumped to warp.

Though Krogan would never say so—not to his crew, to his family, or to
his superiors—he knew that it had been sheer luck that had preserved his
ship even as the Sturka had fallen to the Borg. And if there was one
truth that every warrior knew, it was that no one’s luck lasted forever.

 

Chancellor Martok stepped off the transporter padd and was glad to be
back aboard his flagship, the I.K.S. Sword of Kahless. General Goluk, a
high-ranking member of the Order of the Bat’leth and the commander of
Martok’s venerated Ninth Fleet, gave him a nod of greeting. “Qapla’,
Chancellor.”

In his cutting growl of a voice, Martok replied, “Qapla’, General.
Report.” He marched out of the transporter room, in a hurry to reach the
bridge.

The gray-bearded general followed him and said, “Khitomer and Beta
Thoridor have fallen. Beta Lankal and the Mempa system are under attack,
as are several dozen smaller colonies.”

“And Morska?”

“Defended by the Sturka and the veScharg’a,” Goluk said. “The Borg are
also laying siege to Rura Penthe.”

“Who cares about Rura Penthe?” Martok said. “Is Klag gathering his fleet?”

“Yes, my lord,” Goluk said, following Martok up a steep crew ladder to
the command deck. “Our forces will assemble in three hours and engage
the Borg in four.”

Martok bounded up from the ladder and strode down the passageway toward
the bridge. Despite the absence of his left eye and his limited depth
perception, Martok knew the steps and corners of his ship so well that
he could navigate its corridors blind. “Has there been any word from our
forces at the nebula?”

“Not yet,” Goluk said. He remained close behind Martok’s shoulder as
they walked.

The two grizzled warriors arrived on the bridge. The command center of
the Sword of Kahless was packed with warriors, all of them intently busy
preparing for rapid deployment. Deep, muted voices mixed with the comm
chatter and the ambient hum of the ship’s power-distribution systems. On
the viewer, dozens of Vor’cha-class and K’vort-class cruisers moved in
tight formations, turning in unison like flocks of birds.

Captain G’mtor, a seasoned officer who proudly bore a deep facial scar
from his right temple to his chin, approached the chancellor and the
general. “New reports from Federation and Romulan space, Chancellor,”
G’mtor said. “Battles have begun at Nequencia Alpha, Xarantine, and
Jouret. The Borg armada is destroying all stray vessels it encounters.”

“We’ll find strength in numbers, then,” Martok said. He took his place
in the command chair. “How many ships are ready to follow us into
battle, Captain?”

“One hundred seventeen are gathered here at Qo’noS,” G’mtor said.
“Another three hundred sixty-one will meet us at the rendezvous
coordinates.”

General Goluk asked, “And how many Borg vessels have we detected inbound?”

“Four hundred ninety-two,” G’mtor said. He flashed a sharp-toothed grin.
“So already we enjoy an advantage.”

Immediately, Martok could tell that Goluk was performing the arithmetic
in his head. Then the general inquired of G’mtor, “How did you arrive at
that conclusion, Captain?”

Martok loosed a short roar of laughter and answered for G’mtor, “Because
we are Klingons!” Encouraging roars came from every warrior on the
bridge. These men were sharp and ready for battle, and it filled Martok
with pride to be among them. He stood and said to G’mtor, “Open a
channel, all ships.”

G’mtor nodded to another officer, who carried out the order with haste
and nodded in reply. “Channel open,” G’mtor said.

In a breath, Martok gathered himself and declared, “Warriors of the
Empire! A great hour is upon us, a foe to test our mettle. The Borg have
come not to plunder us but to destroy us—to leave our empire in flames,
our bodies broken, our spirits disgraced at the gates of Gre’thor.

“This is a mistake they will not live to regret. We will meet their
armada with our own and show them what it means to fight with honor. We
shall whip the Borg from our space and crush them. Our empire has risen
by the sword, and one day it might be felled by it. But if such a fate
awaits us, let us fall to warriors—not to these petaQpu’.

“Today is a good day to die, for a warrior—but not for a way of life.
The Klingon Empire will not fall today.” He slammed his fist and forearm
to his chest. “Fight well, and die with honor, sons and daughters of
Qo’noS! Qapla’!”

A roaring “Qapla’!” came back to Martok from his bridge crew, who broke
without preamble into a throaty and spirited rendition of “Soldiers of
the Empire.” Their proud voices echoed off the bulkheads and rang
through the corridors, where new choruses of singers picked up the tune
and carried it on.

General Goluk nodded to the communications officer, who closed the
channel as the singing continued. Martok settled into the command chair,
which sat on a dais above the rest of the bridge. The general placed
himself at Martok’s right side. Over the hearty song, he said, “All
ships ready to deploy, my lord.”

“Break orbit,” Martok said. “As soon as the fleet is in formation behind
us, coordinate our jump to maximum warp.”

Goluk let Captain G’mtor handle the details of marshaling the fleet into
warp speed. Martok, meanwhile, savored all the sensations of shipboard
life: the gruff singing voices, the warm aromas from the galley several
decks below, the rumbling of the impulse engines pushing the ship out of
orbit, the chimelike echo of boots stamping across duranium gratings.

This was not the war he would have chosen, but it felt good to be
leading his people into battle, all of them united under one banner. The
Kinshaya and the Elabrej had not been enough to give the far-flung
worlds of the Empire common cause. But the Borg were a menace without
equal in known space. The Collective’s attack had galvanized the noble
families and the common people, and it had quelled the resurgent
internecine struggles of the High Council.

Barked commands across the bridge were followed by the flash of
warp-distorted starlight across the main viewscreen.

When this war is over, Martok ruminated, the Empire will be stronger
than it’s ever been…or it will lie in ashes.



    5

Starfleet’s reports to the Palais de la Concorde grew worse with each
passing hour, and President Nanietta Bacco had tired of reading them.
She winced as her intercom buzzed, and her elderly Vulcan executive
assistant, Sivak, announced, “Admiral Akaar is here to deliver your
midday briefing, Madam President.” Bacco was about to concoct an excuse
to send the admiral away when Sivak added, “Ms. Piñiero and Seven of
Nine are with him.”

She sighed. “Send them in.”

Bacco got up from her chair and turned around to look out the panoramic
floor-to-ceiling window. Outside, the Tour Eiffel gleamed in the
afternoon sunlight above the sprawl of Paris. Wispy clouds raced low
along the horizon in the distance.

She pressed a padd on her desk to tint the window against the glare. As
the electrochemical shade descended between her and the City of Light,
the moment felt to Bacco as if it might be a tragically prophetic omen
of the hours to come.

One of the doors behind her opened. It took all of her resolve to turn
back and face her visitors, who she knew came bearing bad tidings.
Leading them in was Bacco’s chief of staff, Esperanza Piñiero, whose
black hair and olive complexion contrasted with those of the two people
who were following her.

Starfleet’s liaison to the Federation president, Fleet Admiral Leonard
James Akaar, was a tall, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered man of
Capellan birth. His pale gray hair fell in long natural waves on either
side of his weathered face.

Beside him was Seven of Nine. She was fair-skinned and blond. Her
striking good looks were marred by the presence of residual grafts of
silvery gray metallic Borg technology on her left hand and eyebrow.

Seven, whose name had been Annika Hansen before her early childhood
assimilation by the Borg, had been liberated from the Collective by the
crew of the Starship Voyager during their long journey home from the
Delta Quadrant. Now she was Bacco’s top security adviser on all matters
concerning the Borg.

“Good afternoon, Madam President,” Akaar said, resembling a talking
bronze statue in the honeyed light of her shaded window.

“Admiral,” Bacco said with a polite nod. She offered one as well to her
security adviser. “Seven.”

Piñiero feigned offense. “No greeting for me?”

“I see you all day, every day,” Bacco grumped.

Before Piñiero could continue their verbal volley, Admiral Akaar
interrupted, “Madam President, we have important news.”

“None of it good, I’m sure,” Bacco said, easing herself back into her
chair. She made a rolling motion with her hand. “Continue, Admiral.”

A despairing frown darkened his expression. “The Borg are moving even
faster than we could have imagined,” he said.

Seven added, “They likely assimilated new propulsion technologies while
replenishing their strength.”

Bacco asked, “How fast are they moving, Admiral?”

“We have confirmed attacks on Yridia, Hyralan, and Celes,” he said. “We
project the Borg will siege Regulus in two hours, Deneva in three,
Qo’noS in five. At this rate, they are only nine hours from Vulcan and
Andor and twelve hours from Earth. By tomorrow, they will be able to hit
Trill, Betazed, Bajor, and dozens of other worlds. Most of our
simulations suggest the collapse of the Federation in ten days, and the
fall of most of our neighbors in local space within a month.”

Bacco let her head fall forward into her hands. “Dear God.”

Piñiero pushed her fingers through her hair, back over her scalp. “We
have to evacuate those worlds,” she said. “Now.”

“Actually, Madam President,” Akaar interjected, “that will not be
feasible. It would entail trying to move tens of billions of people in a
matter of hours.”

Seven added, “It would be a futile effort. Any ships that fled those
worlds would be hunted down by the Borg.”

The ex-drone’s calm certainty only inflamed Piñiero’s anger. “So? Should
we just tell our people to sit quietly and wait for the end to come?
What kind of plan is that?”

Akaar’s shoulders slumped. “I agree in principle, Ms. Piñiero. But we no
longer have enough ships at our disposal for an evacuation effort. All
civilian ships that are able to flee have already done so, and all armed
vessels and their crews have been pressed into service for core-systems
defense.”

Bacco lifted her head and said to Akaar, “How many lives have we lost so
far, Admiral?”

“Ma’am?”

“How many civilian lives, Admiral?” She hardened her anger to hold her
despair at bay. “Do we even know?”

The admiral looked ashamed. “We have estimates.”

“How many?”

He asked, “Since the first Borg attack?”

“Yes,” Bacco said. “Since the beginning.”

“Including non-Federation worlds…approximately thirty billion.”

It was too vast a number for Bacco to grasp. Thirty billion was too
large even to be a statistic; it was an abstraction of death writ on a
cosmic scale. “Can Starfleet muster enough ships to intercept the Borg
armada?”

“It is not that simple, Madam President,” Akaar said. “There are no
isolated thrusts of enemy forces to intercept. The Borg have dispersed
on thousands of vectors across known space. We had organized Starfleet’s
defenses to shield the core systems. Unfortunately, the Borg have
committed enough ships to attack all our worlds at once.” He cast his
eyes downward. “I regret to say we have no defensive plan for that
scenario.”

Fixing her weary glare on Seven, Bacco said, “Care to offer any
strategic or tactical advice?”

“Our options are limited,” Seven said. “I have been unable to help
Starfleet pinpoint which cube is carrying the Borg Queen, which limits
our ability to launch a surgical counterstrike. Fortunately, none of the
ships in the Borg armada has displayed any of the absorptive properties
of the giant cube we faced last year. That suggests the Enterprise’s
mission to stop the assimilated vessel Einstein was a success.”

Piñiero threw a sour look at Seven. “Good thing,” she said. “Otherwise,
the Borg might have presented a threat.” The snide remark drew a stare
of cold fire from Seven.

Bacco frowned at Akaar. “Admiral, do you have any news to report besides
the end of the Federation as we know it?”

“Yes, Madam President,” he replied. “We have reestablished contact with
the Enterprise and the Aventine. They were in the Delta Quadrant on a
recon mission when the Borg armada attacked. They’ve returned and report
that all subspace passages have been collapsed. Admiral Jellico is
cutting them new orders now.”

At that news, Bacco leaned forward. “Can you pass along a message for me
to Captain Picard?”

“Of course, Madam President.”

“Tell him that if he has any idea how to stop the Borg, no matter what
he has to do, he has my unqualified authority to do it. If he has to
toss Starfleet regulations and Federation law out an airlock, so be it.
If we’re still here when the dust settles, he can count on full pardons
for himself and his crew, no questions asked. The same goes for anyone
working with him. Is that clear, Admiral?”

Akaar nodded once. “Exceptionally clear, Madam President.”

“Then let’s all hope Picard has one more miracle up his sleeve. Because
God knows we need it.”



    6

“The truth, Captains, is that Starfleet no longer has a plan.”

Picard didn’t remember Edward Jellico looking so old. In the scant
months since Jellico had ascended to Starfleet’s top flag office, he
seemed to have aged a decade. His already white hair had thinned, and
the lines in his face had deepened into gorges carved by the
never-ending anxieties of command. More alarming to Picard was that he
sympathized with how he imagined Jellico must feel. Standing in the
ready room of a captain less than half his years, Picard felt like a
relic of a bygone age.

Captain Dax replied, “Admiral, are you saying that Starfleet has no new
orders for us?”

“Not unless one of you has a bright idea,” Jellico said.

The two captains traded apprehensive looks across Dax’s desk. Picard
looked back at Jellico’s visage on the monitor and said, “We’re still
weighing our options.”

Dax interjected, “Should we set a course for Earth, sir?”

Jellico shook his head. “You won’t make it in time. You’re four days
away. The Borg’ll be here in twelve hours.”

“Actually, sir,” Dax said, “my chief engineer tells me she can bring our
prototype slipstream drive online within a few hours. There’s a chance
we could beat the Borg to Earth.”

Holding up one hand, Jellico replied, “One more ship won’t turn the
tide, Captain. We’re past that now.”

Picard tried to mask his profound frustration, but hints of it slipped
into his tone all the same. “Admiral, certainly Starfleet hasn’t
conceded the war already?”

“Of course not, Jean-Luc. We’ve distributed the schematics for the
transphasic torpedo to all ships and starbases, and we’ve given it to
the Klingon Defense Force.” Dax glanced nervously at Picard as Jellico
continued, “It might be too little too late, but we’re not going down
without a fight.”

“Admiral,” Dax said, “isn’t it dangerous to send those schematics via
subspace with so many Borg ships in the region? What if they’ve
intercepted and decoded them?”

A frown thinned Jellico’s lips almost to the point of making them vanish.

“It was a calculated risk,” he confessed. “It’s not what I wanted to do
or the way I wanted to do it…but at this point, not doing it is
tantamount to surrender. I gave the order to override Admiral Nechayev’s
security directive. If it turns out to be the wrong call, there’s no one
to blame but me.”

Hearing such humility from Jellico surprised Picard. He didn’t know
whether it was because Jellico, having reached the top of the Starfleet
career ladder, had finally relaxed or because crisis brought out the
most human facets of his persona.

“Admiral,” he said, “with your permission, I’d like to take the
Enterprise and the Aventine back into the nebula to search for survivors
from the expeditionary group. We’ve confirmed that half of Voyager’s
crew is still alive; there may be others.”

Jellico nodded. “By all means, Captain. Proceed at your discretion. But
make certain you have an exit strategy.”

Again, the admiral’s pessimistic turn of phrase captured Picard’s
attention. “An exit strategy?”

“Jean-Luc, if Earth falls…” Jellico choked on his words for a moment,
and then he continued, “If Earth falls, the war’s pretty much over. The
fighting might go on for a few more weeks, but the Federation as we know
it will be gone. If it comes to that, take your ship and anyone you can
carry, and try to get to safety. Don’t launch some quixotic mission to
liberate the Federation, because there’ll be nothing left. Just save
your ship and your crew.” A melancholy gloom settled in his eyes. “Don’t
die for a lost cause, Jean-Luc.”

Then he blinked away the sentiment and added, “Wish us luck, Captains.
Godspeed to you both. Starfleet Command out.”

The Federation emblem replaced Jellico’s face on the desktop monitor.
Dax deactivated the screen and sighed. “Nothing like a pep talk from
headquarters to boost morale.” She stood and turned to her replicator.
“I’m having a raktajino. Can I get you something?”

“Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” Picard said.

She turned to the replicator and said, “Raktajino, hot and sweet, and an
Earl Grey tea, hot.” The drinks formed in a whorl of golden light and
white noise. When the machine had finished, she took the drinks from the
nook and handed the tea to Picard.

He took a sip and savored the bitter flavor. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, easing back into her chair and taking a sip
of her caffeinated Klingon beverage. “Sorry to hear about your ready room.”

“Not as sorry as I am,” Picard said. He enjoyed another sip of his tea,
then added, “We should set course back to the nebula as soon as possible.”

Dax said, “All right, but I don’t think we’re going to find many
survivors beyond the Voyager crew.”

“Perhaps not,” Picard murmured, even as he was distracted by an
awareness of something new—something different—shining in his thoughts
like a beacon in the darkness of mere being. “But we need to get under
way, soon. There’s something there, and I need to know what it is.”

Slowly shaking her head, Dax replied, “If you say so. I just hate
feeling like we’re running for cover when everyone else is fighting for
their lives.”

“Running for cover?” Picard said.

She called up a short-range starmap overlaid with tactical data about
the Borg armada’s deployment into the surrounding sectors. Pointing at
the Azure Nebula, Dax said, “It’s the eye of the storm, Jean-Luc. All
Borg ships are moving away from it. It’s the safest spot in known space.”

He studied the star chart and nodded. “Indeed. Which makes it the ideal
location from which to plan our next move.”

“I wasn’t aware that we had a next move,” Dax said.

The sense that something was drawing him back to the nebula intensified.
“We don’t—at least, not yet. But I have a feeling that’s about to change.”



    7

Walking through darkened corridors, Riker felt like a shade haunting his
own ship. Two hours after returning to Federation space, most of Titan
was still without main power. The bridge and the main computer were back
online, but little else was.

He turned a corner into a small stampede of pressure-suited bodies and
was forced to step clear of the team of damage-control engineers, who
were quick-timing it to their next crisis du jour. All the way down from
the bridge, from deck to deck and from one emergency ladder to another,
Riker had seen similar frantic scrambles of activity by the ship’s
engineers.

They’re earning their pay today, he mused.

“Ra-Havreii to Captain Riker,” said the chief engineer, the richness of
his voice flattened by being filtered through Riker’s combadge.

Riker stepped to the side of the passage and stopped. “Good to hear your
voice. Are all comms back up?”

“No, sir,” Ra-Havreii replied. “I’m talking to you from the shuttlecraft
Gillespie. We’re currently routing all shipboard comms through the
shuttles’ transceivers.”

“Good thinking,” Riker said. “Can we use them to get a signal to
Starfleet Command?”

Ra-Havreii said, “Not yet, but soon. I’m interplexing their comm systems
now to boost their range. I expect to have it ready in a few minutes.
But that’s not why I hailed you, sir.”

Stepping down a short, dead-end side passage for a bit of additional
privacy, Riker said, “What’s on your mind?”

“We have some fairly systemic damage in a number of critical areas,
Captain,” Ra-Havreii said. “Without main power, we can’t replicate new
parts—but without replacement parts, we can’t restore main power. So I
need your permission to acquire the necessary components, sir.”

It took Riker a moment to pierce Ra-Havreii’s unusually subtle wording.
“You want to salvage from the wrecked ships in the nebula,” he said,
nodding with grim understanding.

“Aye, sir. I know it must seem a bit ghoulish, but we need those parts.
We’ve opened the shuttlebay doors using manual controls, and the
Armstrong, the Holliday, and the Ellington are ready to begin recovery
ops—on your order, sir.”

As distasteful as Riker felt it would be to plunder a fresh starship
graveyard, he knew that the chief engineer was right. It was an absolute
necessity. “Proceed, Commander. Do what you have to do, and keep me posted.”

“Aye, sir. Ra-Havreii out.” A barely audible click signaled the closing
of the comm channel.

Riker walked out of the dead end and back to the corridor, turned right,
and continued toward his destination.

The two female security guards posted outside the door watched Riker as
he approached. To the left of the door was Senior Petty Officer
Antillea, a Gnalish Fejjimaera. Aside from resembling a human-sized
bipedal iguana, her most noticeable physical characteristic was the
prominent fin on the top of her scaly, olive-hued head.

On the other side of the door was Lieutenant Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqabaa, a
statuesque and breathtaking Andorian shen who preferred to let her
flowing white hair frame her blue face. The only parts of her that
looked remotely fragile were her antennae, but Riker pitied the person
who dared try to lay a finger on them without permission.

He looked to sh’Aqabaa as he arrived at the door. “Any trouble, Lieutenant?”

“None, sir,” sh’Aqabaa said.

Riker nodded. “Good. I’m going in to talk to her.” He keyed in a
security code to unlock the door to the guest quarters. The portal slid
open ahead of him, and he walked in.

Once he was a few meters inside the compartment, the door hushed closed
behind him, and he heard the soft confirmation tone of it returning to
its locked state. He remained still for a moment while his eyes adjusted
to the dim illumination into which he’d stepped. Noting the cyanochrome
hues that surrounded him, he realized that all of the artificial
lighting was off. The only light came from the glow of the Azure Nebula
outside the row of rounded-corner windows that sloped along one side of
the living area. Silhouetted in front of them was Titan’s latest guest,
Erika Hernandez.

She didn’t look in his direction as she said with serene courtesy,
“Don’t bother to knock, Captain. Come right in.”

He felt abashed at his faux pas and slightly wary of this peculiar
stranger who had appeared without warning on his bridge. True, she had
done him and his crew a great favor, but it still felt too soon to trust
her. Feigning a casual demeanor, he sidled over to her in front of the
windows. “Now that my crew is able to work on repairs, I thought it was
time we talked.”

“I figured as much,” Hernandez said.

Outside the windows, in the middle distance, shuttlecraft from Titan
maneuvered through the roiling cobalt mists and snared large hunks of
starship debris in tractor beams. “We’ve been forced to scavenge, I’m
afraid,” Riker said.

“Don’t feel you need to apologize,” Hernandez said. “Out there, it’s
just wreckage. In here, it’s survival. That’s just the way it is. If
this had happened to my ship, I’d have done the same thing.”

Riker cleared his throat. “Since you’ve brought it up, let’s talk about
your ship,” he said. Gesturing toward the sofa beneath the window, he
asked, “Can we sit down?”

“Of course,” she said. She settled in at one end of the couch, and Riker
took a seat at the other end. She asked, “What do you want to know?”

“You said your ship was the Columbia,” Riker said. “You were talking
about the twenty-second-century Earth starship?”

Hernandez nodded. “Yes, the NX-02.”

“That ship went missing more than two hundred years ago,” Riker replied.
“And according to our records, its captain was in her forties. You look
a bit young for the part.”

The youthful woman flashed a bright, wide grin. “I’ve had some work
done,” she said with a playful lift of her eyebrows.

“Apparently,” Riker said, returning her smile with one of his own.
“Starfleet also discovered the wreck of the Columbia in the Gamma
Quadrant, more than seventy thousand light-years from here and even
farther from where we found you.”

She sighed. “Yes, I know. When Erigol’s star went supernova and created
this nebula in 2168, the Caeliar took off in their city-ships. Most of
them didn’t make it. I was in the capital, which did escape, but it
wound up a few hundred years in the past. My ship stayed in the present
and entered another passage; it got tossed across the galaxy, and my
crew was probably incinerated by the radiation inside the subspace tunnel.”

Riker was about to ask another question when she cut him off. “Why the
third degree, Captain? Can’t you just take a sample of my DNA and use
that to see if I am who I say I am?”

“I did,” he confessed. “My chief nurse recovered traces of your DNA from
the bridge consoles you touched and from some of your hairs we found on
the deck. I already know you’re the real Erika Hernandez—and the way you
turned Lieutenant Rriarr’s phaser into dust when you came aboard tells
me you’re also something more. What I want is to know more about your
history, so I can understand why you helped us escape.”

Her disarming smile returned. “You could have just asked.”

“What fun would that be?”

They laughed for a few seconds, and then Hernandez looked away and
became serious. “You really want to know why I helped you? The truth is,
there’s no one reason. I’ve wanted to get away from the Caeliar pretty
much from the first moment they told me I couldn’t leave. I also spent
the last several hundred years feeling I let down all the people I was
supposed to protect. The convoy the Romulans ambushed…my crew…Earth…my
friends in exile.” Hernandez became quietly introspective for several
seconds, and Riker let her collect her thoughts.

She continued, “Anyway, when the Caeliar took your people on the planet
prisoner, it was like seeing it happen to myself all over again. Then I
saw those black cubes destroy your fleet, and I remembered how much I
wanted to be there for Earth when the Romulans attacked. I figured you’d
feel the same way about this.” She looked up at him, and her expression
conveyed a deep sadness. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save your landing
party. Especially your wife. But there was no other way.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, and he meant it. “I made the decision.
You have nothing to apologize for.” He hesitated to ask what he really
wanted to know, but his need was too great to be denied. “Can you just
tell me…is Deanna all right?”

“She was pretending to be, but I noticed signs that she was in pain—and
when I listened in on the Caeliar, I heard them say she was in some kind
of medical distress.”

Riker wrapped his left hand over his fist and clamped down, focusing his
thoughts on remaining calm. Hernandez cast her eyes toward the floor,
away from his obvious emotional turmoil. She said, “I’m sorry the news
isn’t better.”

“I’m all right,” he said, and he pressed his fist over his mouth for a
second. It was an effort to lower and unclench his hand. “One more
question: If you were able to open a passage and bring us here, why
couldn’t you take us back to Earth?”

“Because I didn’t create the passage we traveled through,” she said. “I
only widened it, by amplifying the power to the machine that generated
it. If I had tried to open a new passageway, the Caeliar would have
detected it and shut it down. As it was, the gestalt was about to
collapse the tunnel that pointed here. So it really was this or nothing.”

“Good enough,” Riker said. He stood. “Thank you for your patience, Captain.”

“My pleasure,” she said. He started to leave but turned back as she
asked, “Now that you’re home, what’s your plan?”

He flashed a rueful smile. “I plan to call for help.”

 

Jean-Luc Picard stepped back onto the bridge of the Enterprise,
expecting an update on the ship’s repairs. Instead, Worf rose from the
command chair and said, “Captain, we are being hailed.”

“By the Aventine?” Picard wondered what could have happened in the
minutes since he had left Captain Dax’s ship.

Surrendering the center seat to Picard, Worf replied with an uncommon
gleam, “No, sir, by the Titan.”

The name of the ship was enough to provoke a double-take by Picard, who
cast an incredulous stare at his first officer. Titan was supposed to be
thousands of light-years away, months from Federation space. “What is
the signal’s point of origin, Number One?”

Worf said, “Directly ahead, sir. Inside the Azure Nebula.”

“Do we have a visual?”

“Affirmative.”

Picard stood tall and smoothed his uniform. “On-screen.”

Sickly colors fluctuated on the main viewscreen, and an oscillating
whine stutter-scratched through the speakers. Then the signal resolved
into an unstable image with mildly garbled sound, and Picard recognized
the haggard face of his old friend and former first officer, William
Riker. “Captain Picard?”

“Yes, Captain,” Picard said, unable to suppress a discreet grin. “It’s
good to see you again.”

Riker returned the smile. “Likewise, Captain. I wish it could have been
under better circumstances.” He nodded to someone off-screen and
continued, “We’re pretty banged up over here. My people are working a
salvage mission in the nebula, but if there’s any way you can lend us a
hand, we’d be grateful.”

“I think something can be arranged,” Picard said. Out of the corner of
his eye, he caught Worf’s confirming nod. “We’re on our way back to the
nebula with the Aventine. Have your people found any survivors during
your salvage?”

Frowning, Riker replied, “Only on Voyager, and they refused to abandon
ship or be rescued. They’re doing the same thing we are, scrounging for
parts, except they have to rebuild an entire warp engine, one coil and
bolt at a time.” He shook his head. “You have to give them
credit—they’ve got spirit.”

“Indeed,” Picard said. “Will…don’t think I’m not glad to see you, but
your arrival is rather unexpected. How did Titan come to be in the Azure
Nebula?”

The question pulled a tired sigh from Riker. “It’s kind of a long
story,” he said. “Do you want the full explanation?”

“I’m afraid we don’t have time for that,” Picard said. “Perhaps you
could sum up?”

Riker nodded and lifted his eyebrows in mild amusement. “Long story
short: We followed energy pulses that we thought would lead us to a Borg
installation. Instead, we found a species of powerful recluses called
the Caeliar, who took us prisoner. A fellow prisoner helped my ship
escape through a subspace tunnel, but I had to leave my away team behind.”

At the mention of a subspace tunnel, Picard’s attention sharpened. His
next question was driven not by logic but by a gut feeling, an intuition
that the presence he’d sensed a short time earlier had to be connected
in some way to Titan’s sudden arrival in the nebula. “Captain, by any
chance, did the prisoner who aided your escape come with you aboard Titan?”

“As a matter of fact, she did,” Riker said.

For a moment, Picard broke eye contact with Riker and concluded that his
feeling had been right. The timing of the two events was definitely not
a coincidence. Riker pulled him back into the conversation by inquiring,
“Why do you ask?”

“Simple curiosity,” Picard lied. “We’ll reach you in just over an hour.
If possible, have your chief engineer advance us a list of any parts or
personnel you need to effect repairs.”

“Will do, Captain,” Riker said, looking utterly exhausted. “We’ll be
looking forward to your arrival. Titan out.” The channel closed, and the
nebula’s distant blue stain on the starry heavens returned to the
Enterprise’s main viewscreen.

Picard returned to his chair and sat down. Worf took his own seat at the
captain’s right. “Mister Worf,” Picard said. “Please contact Captain Dax
and let her know that I would like her and Commander Bowers to join us
here on the Enterprise when we welcome Captain Riker aboard.”

“Aye, sir,” Worf said.

The captain added, “And instruct Commander Kadohata to coordinate with
the Aventine in the creation of spare parts for Titan and the assignment
of emergency crews.”

“She has already done so, sir.”

“Very good.” From his chair, Picard had an all but unobstructed line of
sight through the still-open door of his ready room, which remained a
darkened, carbonized cave just off the bridge. Nodding to his scorched
sanctum, he said to Worf, “I want that door closed, Mister Worf.”

Worf scowled at the open portal. “We have tried, sir. A plasma fire
warped the interior bulkhead. The door is stuck.”

Unable to rein in a surge of irrational anger, Picard snapped, “No
excuses, Worf! Get it done.” Embarrassed by his own outburst, he got up
and walked to the aft turbolift. “You have the bridge, Number One.” He
felt the eyes of the bridge crew on him as he made his exit. The lift
doors closed, granting him sanctuary in the solitude of the turbolift car.

“Deck Eight,” he said.

It took the turbolift less than ten seconds to descend seven decks. The
doors parted with a soft hiss. Picard walked quickly and was grateful to
return to the refuge of his quarters without encountering anyone else
along the way.

He moved in light, careful steps through the living area and poked his
head inside the bedroom. Beverly was asleep. Picard noted the time—just
shy of 0500—and wished he had the luxury of slumber. No time for that
now, he scolded himself. He undressed in the dark, kicked off his boots
at the foot of the bed, and lobbed his perspiration-soaked,
battle-soiled uniform into one corner, intending to put it in the
reclamator later, when Beverly was no longer trying to rest.

Stripped naked, he padded into the bathroom and shut the door. The light
faded up slowly, and he felt as if it were revealing him to himself, a
figure taking shape in the shadows. There were fatigue circles under his
eyes, darker than any he’d ever seen on his face before. Somewhere
beneath the mask of years that stared back from the mirror, there lurked
the younger man he’d remembered being not so long ago.

Keeping his voice down, he said to the computer, “Shower, forty-six
degrees Celsius.” Inside the stall, a fierce spray of hot water flooded
the small compartment with water vapor. Overhead, the ventilators purred
into action, drawing up the moist clouds to stabilize the humidity.

Picard stepped inside the shower and bowed his head under the pleasantly
sultry mist. If only I could just stay here, he thought. But with his
eyes closed, he continued to see the charred bulkheads and seared-bare
deck of his ready room. He shook his head, trying to cast off the
memory, which disturbed him for reasons he didn’t dare to let himself name.

Instead, he focused his mind on the new presence. He didn’t hear it the
way he heard the Borg. Where the Collective spoke in a roar, this was
but the faintest hush of a whisper, and it was all the more compelling
for its subtlety.

As the Enterprise continued toward its rendezvous with Titan, Picard
knew one thing for certain: Whatever this new intelligence was, every
moment was bringing him closer to it.

And one word echoed unbidden in his thoughts.

Destiny.



    4527 B.C.E.



    8

“The wind’s picking up,” Pembleton said with a wary eye on the gunmetal
gray sky. He and the rest of the survivors huddled around the campfire,
all bundled tightly against the frigid gale. “Smells like more snow.”

“God hates us,” Crichlow muttered. “That’s what it is.”

A week had passed since they left the wreckage of Mantilis and encamped
near the shoreline below. In that time, at least sixty centimeters of
snow had fallen. Temperatures had plummeted daily, and the fjord, which
had been crowded with pack ice, now was frozen solid. Adding to the
group’s misery was the fact that the days were growing shorter. Soon the
sunrises would cease altogether, and several months of night would be
upon them.

Flames crackled and danced around a tiny, gutted rodent carcass, which
was impaled on a scrap-metal spit mounted on a pair of Y-shaped
branches. Evaporating water inside the firewood hissed as it escaped,
and one of the logs fissured along its length with a sharp pop. The
aroma of cooking flesh had Pembleton’s stomach craving sustenance, but
it wasn’t his turn to eat. Every other meal was reserved for Kiona
Thayer, who needed to maintain her strength to fend off infection and
promote the healing of her wounded foot, which would soon be strong
enough for her to walk.

Mazzetti, who had become the group’s de facto cook, gave the broiled
rodent another quarter-turn on the spit. “Almost done,” he said to
Thayer, who nodded.

A chilling gust made the taut ropes of their shelter sing with
vibration. Graylock eyed the ramshackle mass of metal, fabric, and
microfiber rope. Then he turned with a glum expression back toward the
fire and scratched at his stubbled face. “We need to reinforce before we
get more snow,” he said.

The three MACO privates groaned, and Steinhauer hung his head in denial.
The chief engineer had sent them on daily hikes back up the slope, to
salvage everything they could carry back down from the debris of
Mantilis. Between the thin air and the strain of fighting this planet’s
gravity, it would have been a miserable assignment even in good weather.

Crichlow sighed, frowned, and shook his head. “Right, lads. Time for
another trip up Junk Mountain.”

“Steinhauer, make sure you check the traps before we go,” Pembleton
said. To the two officers, he said, “It’ll be faster work if I go with
them to lend a hand. Will you two be all right here on your own for a
few hours?”

Thayer harrumphed behind a cynical grin. “Sure,” she said. “We’ll have a
grand ol’ time. Maybe we’ll go ice fishing.”

Through chattering teeth, Mazzetti replied, “For what? More poisonous
seaweed?”

“I think she was kidding, Nicky,” Crichlow said.

Pembleton summoned all his willpower to stand and step away from the
comfort of the fire. “On your feet, men, we need to move. We’ll only
have about nine hours of daylight today. Let’s not waste them.” Watching
the privates lag and dawdle, he coaxed them. “Up, gents. With a purpose,
let’s go.”

Getting his men in motion was always the hardest part of the day. Once
they were walking, even uphill, they were fine. It was a simple matter
of overcoming their inertia.

 

Two hours later, they had settled into a rhythm, trudging single-file up
the easiest face of Junk Mountain. Their boots crunched through the
thin, icy crust and sank almost knee-deep into the wet, heavy snow
underneath. “We need snowshoes,” said Pembleton. “Any of you know how to
make snowshoes?”

Steinhauer replied, “I do, Sergeant.”

“Consider yourself volunteered when we get back to camp.”

“Jawohl, Sergeant.”

Crichlow, walking point, lifted his fist and halted the squad. He looked
back at Pembleton, made a V sign with two fingers under his eyes, and
pointed to something several meters away, to the right of their
position. Pembleton strained to pick out textural details in the vast
swath of white.

Then he saw them: fresh footprints. Animal tracks.

Something big. Maybe even edible.

Graylock’s infusion of parts and materials would have to wait. Their
shelter wasn’t perfect, but it would hold for another night. Food was a
far more pressing concern, one that needed to be dealt with as soon as
possible.

Pembleton eased his phase rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. The
three privates unshouldered their weapons and mimicked Pembleton as he
released his rifle’s safety. With a series of quick gestures, he gave
the order to move out and follow the animal tracks in the snow.

Crichlow remained on point, and the four MACOs remained in single-file
formation as they stalked their prey. The trail led uphill, along a more
treacherous section of the mountain’s face. Within an hour, it was clear
that the animal had taken refuge in a massive formation of jagged,
coal-black crags.

“Steinhauer,” whispered Pembleton. “Scanner.”

The private, whose formerly severe crew cut had started to grow out into
ragged shocks of fair hair, retrieved and activated his hand scanner. On
Graylock’s orders, the survivors had been sparing in their use of the
devices, and also their weapons, because recharging them in the weak
arctic sunlight was problematic. The team was supposed to resort to the
powered equipment only as an emergency measure.

Starvation counts as an emergency, Pembleton decided.

Thrusting and slashing with his arm, Steinhauer directed the squad
through a narrow pass in the crags. The men braced their weapons against
their shoulders and hovered their fingers over the feather-touch
triggers. Every step of the way, Steinhauer directed them toward the
animal’s life sign.

Then he held up a fist. The group halted.

He checked the scanner again. Looked up and around. Held up two fingers
and pointed in one direction, then another. Two signals, diverging.
Retreating deeper into the crags.

Pembleton gave the signal to advance in pairs, with each covering the
other. Steinhauer and Mazzetti pushed ahead, while Crichlow remained at
Pembleton’s side.

The pass grew narrow as the four men worked their way past several
irregular switchbacks, trading the point position at each one. Inching
around another corner, Pembleton saw the narrow trail open into a small
clearing. It was somewhere in the middle of the towering rock formation,
which jutted up on all sides toward the ashen sky.

In the middle of the clearing was a mound of gnawed-rough bones, half
buried in the bloodstained snow. It took him only a fraction of a second
to realize that he and his team were not hunters here in this frozen
wasteland but prey.

He turned to give the order to fall back. Then he heard Mazzetti scream.
The crags filled with the shrill echoes of a phase rifle firing on
automatic. He sprinted back through the pass, his muscles burning with
fatigue as they fought the gravity, his lungs screaming for oxygen in
the thin mountain air. Stumbling through a hairpin turn, he found
Steinhauer standing with his back to a slab of rock, snapping off short
bursts of charged plasma into random gaps between the sawtooth stones.
The man’s entire body was shaking with the effects of adrenaline overload.

A few meters farther down the pass, all around Mazzetti’s dropped rifle,
there were massive splatters of blood on the snow. Red chunks of viscera
dangled from rough edges between the crags, along a steady crimson smear
on the rocks—the kind of stain that would be made by dragging a mauled
man over them.

“Cease-fire!” said Pembleton. He laid a hand on top of Steinhauer’s
rifle, and the private relented in his pointless barrage. “Lead us out
of here, Private.”

Steinhauer regarded him with a horrified stare. “We can’t just leave
Niccolo to those…those things,” he said.

Pembleton took the hand scanner from Steinhauer’s belt, powered it up,
and made a quick sweep for life readings. Then he turned it off and
handed it back to the private. “Mazzetti’s dead,” he said. “Move out,
back to camp. That’s an order.”

With a keen awareness of now being the hunted, Pembleton retrieved the
dead man’s dropped rifle and herded his two shocked-silent enlisted men
back the way they had come, out of the pass, and back down the
mountainside. One man short, the squad retreated into the coming night.

Graylock will have to make do without any more spare parts, Pembleton
decided. Because if the predators on this planet are anything like the
ones on Earth, this isn’t over.

He feared it wouldn’t be long before he faced these creatures again. It
would be dark soon.

 

The line between existence and oblivion had become faded and permeable
for the Caeliar exiles. Robbed of mass, Lerxst now recalled physical
sensations only as abstractions. Texture and temperature were no longer
comprehensible to him since he had given up his frame of reference in
the material realm. Motion was all but imperceptible. Pressure had given
way to an almost unbearable dispersion of his essential being.

All that remained real to him was the emotional landscape of the
gestalt, his communion with the other eleven Caeliar.

“Time seems to move faster now,” said Sedín, her thoughts instantly
shared with the others.

Agreement resonated among them without words.

Ghyllac added, “I no longer sense a distinction between light and
darkness. Everything has turned to twilight.”

Assent came from Felef, Meddex, and Ashlok.

“I can’t remember twilight,” countered Denblas, drawing concurrence from
Celank and Liaudi.

Ripples of concern came from their youngest, least resolute
members—Dyrrem, Narus, and the trio’s speaker, Yneth. “We three cannot
remain coherent for much longer without an influx of new energy,” she
said. “Our thoughts are…” She submerged into a long pause. “Disordered,”
she added at last. “Entropic.”

“Without the anchor of mass, we cannot risk traveling this world,”
Lerxst told her. “Outside Mantilis, we could become dispersed by natural
phenomena such as wind or tides.”

Sedín replied, “And if we remain in Mantilis, we will slide toward chaos
without even trying to save ourselves.” Cradling the psionic presences
of Yneth, Dyrrem, and Narus in her gestalt projection, she continued,
“We must act to save our own.”

“There is nothing we can do,” Ghyllac said. “Our grounding in the
physical is now too fragile to tap this world’s resources or to move
toward stronger solar radiation at the equator.”

Felef replied, “That is not strictly true. In the most extreme
circumstances, there is always consolidation.”

A mental shudder traveled through the gestalt.

Liaudi asked with pointed curiosity, “And how would we decide who was to
surrender their energy to the gestalt? Would the strongest expire to
sustain the weaker among us? Or would we claim the weakest to bolster
the others?”

“It would be best if the selections were governed by dispassionate
logic,” said Meddex, “employing a calculation of how to achieve the
greatest degree and duration of good from the least amount of sacrifice.”

Ashlok said, “I have already made such an analysis. Despite the logic of
it, the sacrifices it demands feel arbitrary. I think it might be best
if we let ourselves be guided by our consciences rather than by a
tyranny of numbers.”

“Might that be because you find the verdict of the numbers troubling?”
asked Celank. “Do they call for your divestment?”

“No, not at first,” Ashlok said. “My concern is that, as Liaudi
speculated, the physics of the situation suggest that the maximum
survival rate is obtained by sacrificing the weakest for the benefit of
those requiring the least aid.”

“Regardless of whether we consolidate according to logic or to our
charitable impulses, it still amounts to a slow death by dissolution,”
argued Dyrrem.

Narus added, “The humans sustain themselves by consuming the local
fauna. Perhaps there is a biological solution to our dilemma as well.
Symbiosis, perhaps, rather than consumption.”

“Doubtful,” Sedín said. “Except for trace molecules, we crossed the
barrier from organic to synthetic aeons ago. It may not be possible to
backtrack on the path of our evolution.”

“Even if it was possible,” Ghyllac said, “we would need a sentient
life-form with which to bond, to guarantee sufficient neuroelectric
activity to power our catoms. Such a fusion would be a delicate and
dangerous undertaking. If it is mishandled, it might debase us or turn
our hosts into automatons—or both.”

Lerxst made it clear that his was to be the last word on the matter. “We
have neither the strength nor the facilities to perform the necessary
research for such a task,” he said. “If we wish to propose it to the
humans, we will need to have the ability to pursue it, and that will
entail consolidation. If that is the consensus of the gestalt, then we
should resolve now which few will donate their energy for the sake of
the others.”

The hesitation was brief. Dyrrem, Narus, and Yneth projected their
intention to release their catoms’ energy to the gestalt, condemning the
last afterimages of their forms to chaos and expiration. Gratitude and
sorrow came back to them threefold from those they were about to preserve.

It was a swift transition. Three minds withdrew from the gestalt, which
diminished in richness but grew in strength as power flowed through it,
restoring form to its remaining members. Dyrrem, Narus, and Yneth were gone.

Sedín asked, “Who will make our proposition to the humans?”

“I will,” Lerxst said.

Ever the cynic, Ghyllac asked, “And if they refuse?”

Lerxst replied, “Then we have just seen the fate that awaits us all.”

 

“Try bending it,” Graylock said, over an atonal howl of wind that
fluttered and snapped the fabric of the shelter’s walls.

Kiona Thayer flexed her ankle backward and forward in slow, stiff
movements. “It’s still fighting me,” she said, nodding at the
motor-assist brace Graylock had fashioned to enable her to walk normally.

“I think it’s just the cold,” Graylock said. “Gumming up the lubricant.
It’ll be fine once it’s been moving for a while.” He nodded toward the
glowing rock in the middle of the enclosure. “Keep it close to the heat,
and we’ll try it again in an hour.”

The weight of snow on top of the shelter had caused an unsupported
section to droop inward. Graylock ducked under it as he circled around
the heated rock to look over Private Steinhauer’s shoulder. The young
German man worked with pale, calloused hands, twisting together lengths
of separated wood fiber that had been soaked in hot water until they had
become flexible enough to manipulate. Woven together into a tight grid,
the fibers formed the walking surface of handmade snowshoes.

“Those are looking good, Thom,” Graylock said.

Steinhauer shrugged. “They’re all right.”

“How many pairs do you have finished?”

The private leaned forward and pulled open a folded blanket that
protected his finished work. “Two and a half pairs,” he said. Holding up
the unfinished, teardrop-shaped shoe frame in his hands, he added, “This
will make three.”

“Good, good,” Graylock said with a satisfied nod.

He continued around the shelter’s perimeter and kneeled beside Crichlow,
who lay almost on top of the heated rock. The young Liverpudlian was
swaddled in blankets, sweating profusely, and shivering with enough
force that he seemed to be suffering a seizure. Graylock removed the
damp but fever-warmed cloth from Crichlow’s forehead and used it to mop
some of the sweat from the sick man’s face and throat. Wringing it out
over the dirt near the hot stone, he asked his patient, “Do you prefer
it hot or cold, Eric?”

“Cold,” Crichlow said through chattering teeth.

Graylock stepped over to a bowl set near the outer wall. He used a tin
cup beside it to scoop out a small amount of cold water and pour it with
care over the cloth. Then he brought the cloth back to Crichlow, folded
it in thirds, and set it gently across the man’s forehead. “Feel
better,” he said to him.

As much as he was tempted to crawl inside his own bedroll and retreat
into slumber, Graylock knew when he checked his chrono that sleep would
have to wait. He pulled extra layers of Caeliar-made fabric over
himself, and he was careful to wrap his face, cover his nose and mouth,
and shield his eyes with lightweight goggles he’d borrowed from
Crichlow. Before he parted the overlapping folds of the shelter’s
entrance, he warned the others, “Bundle up, everyone. I’m heading out.”
When the others had draped themselves under covers, he made his exit.

Stepping outside had become an act requiring great willpower. In the
fortnight since Mazzetti had been killed, the days had grown noticeably
shorter on daylight, and the average temperature had gone from the kind
of cold that could give someone frostbite to the kind that could kill a
careless person in a matter of minutes.

Graylock watched his breath condense in front of him, filtered through
three layers of fabric. Underneath his scarves, the moisture collected
on his skin and chilled instantly, making his face feel clammy. He
followed a narrow path that Steinhauer and Pembleton had excavated from
the hip-deep snow that surrounded their camp. The footing was slick and
icy, and the fact that he was trudging uphill to the lookout position
made the short trip all the more difficult.

At the top of the rise, Pembleton paced in a circle around a stand of
tall boulders. From there, in clear weather, a sentry could see anything
that might approach within seventy to eighty meters of the shelter. Even
at night, with only starlight for illumination, it was possible for
one’s eyes to adjust and pierce the darkness to keep watch for predators.

The sergeant nodded to Graylock as they met at the mound’s peak.
“Evening, Lieutenant,” Pembleton said.

“I’m here to relieve you, Sergeant.”

Pembleton replied, “I wanted Steinhauer to cover Crichlow’s shift, sir.”

“Too bad,” Graylock said. “Steinhauer’s making good progress on those
snowshoes. I want him to rest and keep working. The sooner we have five
pairs of shoes, the sooner we can move out.”

Nodding, Pembleton said, “I understand, sir. But you’re in command—we
need to keep you safe in the shelter. Let me take the late watch.”

“You’ve stood two watches today already,” Graylock said. “It’s a wonder
you aren’t frozen solid. Go inside. I can spot motion and shoot a rifle
as well as anyone.”

A larger-than-usual plume of breath betrayed Pembleton’s frustrated
sigh. “Yes, sir,” he said. He removed the rifle that was slung over his
shoulder and handed it to Graylock. “How’s Crichlow doing?”

“Worse,” Graylock said. “I don’t know if it’s a medical issue, like a
congenital disease, or a virus or a parasite.”

Pembleton asked, “Can’t the hand scanner tell you that?”

It was Graylock’s turn to sigh, this time in dismay. “The power cell ran
out this morning.”

“Can we transfer power from one of the rifles?”

Graylock shrugged. “Not efficiently, and most of the rifles are getting
low, too. A few more weeks, and we’re unarmed.” He looked up at the
alpine peaks high above them. “Unless we want to make another trip up
Junk Mountain and ask the Caeliar for more batteries.”

“And risk running into our friends with the fangs and claws again? No,
thank you.” Pembleton leaned sideways and looked past Graylock,
surveying the rolling, snow-covered landscape that ringed the mountain’s
base. “Besides, I think the mountain’s coming to us.” He pointed, and
Graylock turned his head.

A single Caeliar moved quickly toward them, its wide, three-toed feet
bounding over the fresh-fallen snow without leaving so much as a mark.
The alien’s pale, mottled skin seemed made to catch the weak starlight.
Its bulbous cranium and long, stretched-frown visage became distinct as
it drew within a dozen meters of the sentries’ peak.

Pembleton asked Graylock with politic courtesy, “Are you planning on
challenging it, sir?”

Chastened, Graylock lifted the phase rifle, aimed it at the Caeliar, and
shouted, “Halt! Identify yourself!”

The Caeliar stopped moving a few meters away. Its ridged air sacs puffed
and deflated with the deep motions of respiration. “Karl, it is Lerxst.”

Graylock demanded, “What do you want?”

“To talk with your people, Karl—all of them. I am not exaggerating when
I say that our lives may depend on it.”



    2381



    9

Dr. Shenti Yisec Eres Ree paced back and forth on the terrace outside
the away team’s shared residential suite. It wasn’t easy for him to
negotiate such narrow turns with his therapodian build—semirigid tail
extended behind him for balance, head thrust forward, torso almost level
to the ground.

All around him, the Caeliar city of Axion was lit from within and
reflecting itself in its polished, vertical surfaces. Overhead, the sky
was perfectly black, unblemished by stars; only a few low-running clouds
bounced back the bluish-white glow of the metropolis. Natural scents
from the planet below traveled on the breeze, but Ree couldn’t dispel
the sensation of being caught up in a half-formed illusion of a real world.

Footsteps drew closer. Ceasing his perambulations, Ree turned to find
Commander Tuvok stepping through the open portal to the terrace. “Good
evening, Doctor,” said the Vulcan.

“Commander,” Ree said, watching Tuvok with a wary eye.

Tuvok continued past him to the low barrier, stopped, and rested his
hands on the wall’s shallow ledge. To Ree’s surprise, the tactical
officer said nothing else; he seemed content to stare out at the
cityscape in stoic silence.

Ree didn’t buy it. “You’re here to berate me, aren’t you?”

“Quite the contrary,” Tuvok said. “I feel that I owe you an apology.
However, I was not certain whether this would be an appropriate time to
express it.”

With exaggerated swoops of his long head and sinewy neck, Ree scoped the
entirety of their immediate vicinity. “No one here but us and the
invisible Caeliar who spy on us,” he said. “So speak freely, Mister Tuvok.”

Turning about to face Ree, Tuvok said, “Very well. I should have arrived
sooner to help you explain yourself to the others. I had been meditating
and monitoring Commander Troi’s mental state. Though I sensed her
distress, I understood that you were trying to help her. Unfortunately,
I did not realize that you were in danger because of the security team’s
misreading of your actions. By the time I extricated myself from my
telepathic link with Counselor Troi, I was too late to corroborate your
account of events before the matter got out of hand. So I ask your
forgiveness.”

Ree bowed his head. “Thank you, Tuvok. I don’t think you owe me any such
apology, but if you think it was called for, I accept it in the spirit
in which it was given.”

Tuvok nodded once, and then he pivoted again to face the needle-thin
towers and the gossamer-like metal filaments that linked them. With the
conversation apparently ended for the time being, Ree resumed pacing. He
took care not to swat the Vulcan man with his tail while making his turn
at the end of each lap. In the silence of the night, Ree’s claws clicked
with a sound like a low spark on the rough stone of the terrace.

He paused again when he heard more footsteps approaching. Commander Vale
emerged from the main corridor, trailed by the loping figure of Inyx.
Lieutenant Commander Keru followed them.

When the three were meters shy of the terrace, Ree flicked his tongue
twice in quick succession to taste the pheromones in the air. Vale’s
biochemical emissions matched her demeanor: aggressive. Keru’s scent
suggested he was calmer than she was. As usual, the Caeliar scientist
made no mark in the air, though Ree thought an odor of sulfur might have
been appropriate.

Behind Ree, Tuvok faced the oncoming trio.

“Doctor,” Vale said, “Inyx needs a sample of your venom.”

Openly suspicious, Ree asked, “Why?”

Inyx stepped around Vale and walked a few steps forward. “I’ve had
centuries to study human anatomy and biology in detail, but Deanna’s
heritage is of mixed ancestry. That made it more difficult for me to
make a diagnosis and select a course of treatment. However, I am also
unfamiliar with your species and its unusually complex venom. If I am to
save your friend’s life, I cannot afford to spend time separating your
biotoxin from Deanna’s bloodstream. A pure sample will enable me to
sequence its properties more quickly and develop an antivenom.”

“If you’re treating her medically, I demand to monitor the process,” Ree
said.

Inyx straightened and took on an imperious mien. “Given the crudity of
your methods, that is quite out of the question.”

“She’s my patient,” Ree said.

Vale replied, “I’m pretty sure she fired you when she told you to keep
your hands off her.”

“That was hardly an enforceable dictate, Commander,” Ree retorted. “The
good counselor was clearly non compos mentis.”

“Doctor, just give Inyx the venom,” Vale said. Beside her, Inyx
proffered a small sample jar with a cover of taut fabric.

Stalking forward, Ree said, “If you want a sample from me, you can draw
it in whatever facility you’re holding my patient.”

“Deanna is not being held,” Inyx said. “We are trying to help her, but
her condition has become critical. Though your venom may have preserved
her fragile status for a few minutes, it has complicated her treatment.
Your patient’s best interest is now best served by your cooperation,
Doctor.”

Ree paused and reflected that Inyx’s position was actually reasonable.
His reluctance to comply with the Caeliar’s request was rooted in the
simple fact that he didn’t trust them.

His ruminations were interrupted by the firm squeeze of a hand near the
nerve cluster above his shoulder. He swung his head back along his flank
to see Commander Tuvok. The Vulcan was clamping his hand and scrunching
a fistful of the Pahkwa-thanh’s leathery hide in his grip. Ree flashed a
toothy grin at the swarthy humanoid. “If you’re trying to render me
unconscious with a nerve pinch, Commander, don’t bother.” Tuvok released
his grip on Ree and backed off, his expression neutral. Ree added, “I
presume all that business about making an apology was a ruse to put you
in position in case I refused Commander Vale’s request?”

“No,” Tuvok said. “My apology was sincere.”

“And I’m not making a request, Doctor,” Vale said. “I’m giving you an
order: the venom sample, now.”

Taking a more conciliatory tack, Inyx said, “Had it not been for your
comrades’ recent attempt at escape, I might have been persuaded to
permit you to observe Deanna’s treatment. Under the circumstances,
however, I am under orders from the Quorum to restrict your access to
all information about our technology and methods. So I will ask you
again, as one healer to another, help me save Deanna’s life. I beg of you.”

“Give me the cup,” Ree said, holding out one clawed hand.

Vale transferred the container from Inyx to Ree, who impaled its fabric
cover with one incisor fang and released roughly fifty milliliters of
colorless, odorless venom into the cup. Inyx stepped forward, and Ree
handed him the sample. “Keep me apprised of Counselor Troi’s progress,
please.”

“Of course,” Inyx said. “And thank you.”

As the Caeliar turned to depart, Ree asked, “Why didn’t you send your
errand girl Hernandez to collect the sample?”

“Because she is the one who enabled your ship to escape,” Inyx said. He
walked out onto the terrace and levitated away into the night.

Keru shambled away, back toward his quarters, followed closely by Tuvok.
Vale lingered a moment and glared at Ree.

“Do you realize that every second you stood there arguing, Troi could be
dying?” she asked once the others had gone. “Is that really a chance you
wanted to take?”

“Not at all, Commander,” said Ree. “But you know the details of her
condition almost as well as I do, and you know what has to be done. But
what will the Caeliar do after they assess the situation? What if their
imponderable brand of moral calculus compels them to sacrifice Deanna to
save her fetus?”

Vale rubbed her eyes, signaling that she was not only tired but also
tired of their conversation. “Do you really think that if you were
there, you’d be able to sway their judgment in the slightest?”

“Of course not,” Ree admitted. “But at least I’d be in a position to
bite one of them.”

Rolling her eyes, Vale replied, “Now you tell me. If I’d known that was
your plan, I would’ve taken your side.”



    10

Erika Hernandez felt queasy as she stumbled in a panic through her
quarters on Titan. Screams echoed from the corridor, and she heard the
sounds of energy weapons being discharged in the corridor outside her
locked door.

Thunderclaps of impact shook Titan, knocking her to the deck. She
scrambled to her feet and staggered across the heaving floor. Something
had set upon the ship with such speed that there had seemed to be no
time to react.

Through the windows, she glimpsed a fearsome black cube moving through
the indigo fog of the nebula. It battered its way through the storm of
starship debris, firing brilliant green beams at Titan, which pitched
and lurched after every shot.

A direct hit rocked the ship. The lights stuttered out. Outside her
quarters, the clamor of battle grew more intense. On a gamble, she
dashed to the door, which opened ahead of her. One of the guards who had
locked her in, an Andorian shen, lay dead on the deck, her nubile form
butchered and bloodied. Hernandez grabbed the shen’s rifle and prowled
away, through the dark, smoke-filled corridors, following the din of combat.

Everywhere she looked, biomechanoid components seemed to have sprouted
from the bulkheads, as if the ship were diseased.

She turned a corner and stepped into a cross fire.

Emerald streaks screamed over her shoulder and seared crackling wounds
into the chests of two of Titan’s security personnel. Hernandez hit the
deck as two other security officers, of a species Hernandez had never
seen before, returned fire at their opponents. Shimmering beams of
phaser energy crisscrossed in the hazy darkness.

I should get to cover, Hernandez told herself, but she didn’t dare stand
to run, and her curiosity demanded to see who or what had boarded Titan.

She turned her head and saw the enemy. They were humanoid, clad in
formfitting black bodysuits and festooned with cybernetic enhancements.
Their optical grafts swept the corridor with red laser beams, and
several of the boarders had one hand replaced with complex machinery,
ranging from cutting implements to industrial tools.

They advanced into the phaser barrage at a quick march, moving with the
kind of precision she had only ever seen from jackbooted thugs in old
historical films. To her shock, the phaser beams had no effect on
them—they simply deflected them with personal energy shields.

Mustering her strength, she coiled to spring to her feet and sprint
toward the security team. Turning back, she saw that it was too late for
that. They had been ambushed from behind by more of the cyborgs, who
slashed and impaled with abandon. Cries of pain were swallowed by the
cruel whirring of machinery.

She rolled and tried to turn back the way she had come. There was
another squad of the malevolent invaders closing in from behind her.
Pivoting in a panic, she realized she had nowhere to run. Not without a
fight, she vowed, and she opened fire. None of her shots did any good.

The black throng surrounded her and pressed inward.

Then came the oppressive roar of a voice inside her mind. We are the
Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be exterminated. It was as intimate
to her thoughts as the gestalt once had been, but it was hostile,
savage, and soulless.

A spinning saw blade cut away the front half of her rifle, and the
weapon spat sparks as it tumbled from her grasp.

Hands closed around her arms and pulled her backward, off-balance. She
flailed and kicked, lashing out with wild fury.

More hands seized her ankles, her calves. The sheer weight of bodies
smothered her, and a sting like a needle jabbed her throat. Twisting,
she saw that one of the Borg drones had extended from between its
knuckles two slender tubules that had penetrated her carotid.

An icy sensation flooded into her like a poison and engulfed her
consciousness in a sinking despair.

Pushed facedown as the Borg’s infusion took root, she smelled the ferric
tang of blood spreading across the deck under her face. Then a hand
cupped her chin and lifted her head.

She looked into the eyes of a humanoid woman whose skin was the mottled
gray of a cadaver. Hairless and glistening in the spectral light, the
female Borg flashed a mirthless smile at Hernandez. “You are the one we
have waited for,” she said. “Surrender to the Collective…and become
Logos of Borg.”

The human part of Hernandez unleashed a defiant scream, a torrent of
pure rage. But her body lay still and silent, submerging into the
merciless grip of the Collective. Trapped inside herself, Hernandez was
tortured by her memory’s endless refrain of mute protest: No!

She awoke screaming. She covered her mouth with one hand.

The door signal was loud in the silence of her quarters. Lieutenant
sh’Aqabaa asked via the comm, “Captain Hernandez? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Hernandez said. “Just a bad dream.” A dream, she repeated to
herself, unable to believe it. The padd by her side still displayed the
file she had been reading—a declassified report about the Borg that
Captain Riker had suggested she take a look at. I must have drifted off
while I was reading.

It had been nearly eight hundred years since she had slept. After
bonding with the Caeliar gestalt, her body had no longer required sleep,
either for physical or mental rejuvenation. The catoms that infused her
cells regulated her neurochemistry and biological processes. Axion’s
quantum field had been the only solace or sustenance she had needed
since undergoing the Change.

Until now, apparently.

She recalled a threat the Caeliar had once made to Inyx, in order to
coerce him into thwarting her attempts at communication with Earth. They
had warned him that if he could not control her, they would exile her to
a distant galaxy, where, without Axion’s quantum field, she would age
normally and die alone.

I guess escaping from Axion has other consequences, she reasoned,
rubbing the itch of slumber from her eyes. I wonder what other surprises
I have to look forward to.

As if on cue, her belly gurgled loudly, its acid-fueled yodel resonating
inside her long-dormant stomach.

Naturally, she mused with a sardonic grin.

Hernandez got up and walked to a device that her Andorian guard had
called a replicator. “You can get your meals from here, and it’ll even
do the dishes,” sh’Aqabaa had said. It was time, Hernandez decided, to
put that claim to the test.

Standing in front of the machine, which resembled little more than a
polished-polymer nook in the wall, she muttered aloud, “How am I
supposed to use this thing?”

A feminine computer voice replied, “State your food or beverage request
with as much specificity as you desire or are able to provide.”

“A quesadilla with Jack cheese and black beans, with sides of hot salsa,
guacamole, and sour cream. And a mojito.”

The machine responded with a flurry of glowing particles and a thrumming
swell of white noise. When both had faded, a tray sat in the nook. On it
was a plate covered by a piping-hot quesadilla, some small bowls with
her condiments, and a glass with her minty-sweet rum beverage. She
removed the tray from the replicator and carried it to a small table.

The aroma of food awakened memories she had thought long faded—of her
childhood home and family dinners; the delicate texture of a flour
tortilla fresh from a skillet; the sublime flavor of stone-ground
guacamole made from ripe avocados, fresh cilantro, salsa, salt, garlic,
and a touch of lime juice; the cool, refreshing decadence of a perfect
mojito.

With great expectation, she sampled her replicator repast.

The quesadilla was rubbery, the salsa was bland, the guacamole was
greasy, the sour cream tasted like paste, and there was something subtly
but undeniably wrong with her mojito.

She pushed the tray away. Food that’s not food, booze that’s not booze,
she fumed. This is why I had a chef.

 

Sleep eluded Will Riker.

All he’d wanted was a short nap. He turned from his right side to his
left, flipped and punch-fluffed his pillow in search of a cool spot, and
slowed his breathing in an effort to cajole his mind and body into
letting go of consciousness. Closing his eyes, he focused on the white
noise he had requested on a loop from the computer, of a low wind
rustling the leaves of a tree.

It was all in vain. Rolling over, he let his arm splay across the empty
half of the bed. Deanna’s half.

Her absence had pierced him like a needle; his every thought was
stitched with its doleful color. Worse still was the guilt. He kept
picturing her expression when she learned that he and Titan had escaped
from New Erigol, leaving her and the rest of the away team behind.

I deserted them, he accused himself.

In the hours since Titan’s return to Federation space, he had begun to
second-guess himself. What difference will one more ship make now?
Especially one as beat-up as ours?

Lying alone in the darkness, he examined his decision with an
increasingly critical eye. On the face of it, it had seemed at first to
be the one that served the greatest good: It had freed his ship and the
hundreds of personnel still onboard. That was as far as his
justifications could take him, however. He couldn’t persuade himself
that he had really done any good for Starfleet or the Federation. In the
end, all he could say was that he had saved the many by sacrificing the few.

By sacrificing his Imzadi.

She would never have done that to me, he told himself. Vivid
recollections of his month of brutal captivity on Tezwa paraded through
the theater of his memory. In those dark hours, when he had been beaten
and broken, tortured and terrorized, only two things had kept him
anchored in himself. One had been the indelible memories of music, of
melodies and virtuoso performances by jazz master Junior Mance; the
other had been the unshakable certainty that his Imzadi would never give
up her search for him, that she would never abandon hope. Now he had
repaid her devotion with a hollow appeal to duty.

He threw off the covers and sat up on the side of the bed. Leaning
forward, he planted his face in his palms and imagined himself returned
to the fateful moment, hours earlier, when Hernandez had made her
proposition. Replaying it in his mind, he tried to conceive of how he
could have answered differently, of some case that he could have made
for not leaving the away team. There were no answers.

Every time he asked himself the question again, he was forced to admit
that no matter how futile it might seem to hurl his ship into a war that
was already all but lost, he was being driven by instinct—and drawn
toward something.

“Computer, cease white noise,” he said, and the breathy whisper of air
through leaves came to an abrupt end. “Unshade the windows.” The sloped,
rounded-corner windows above his bed lost their dark tint and became
transparent, revealing the backlit blue radiance of the nebula. Several
of Titan’s shuttlecraft were on their way back, their tractor beams
towing large sections of hull salvaged from demolished starships.

Watching the recovery operations in the nebula, he felt as if abandoning
Deanna had blasted him to bits and that he was now struggling to piece
himself back together from broken parts. He would do a fair job of
presenting himself as functional and whole, but he knew that without
Deanna, he would be like a phaser rifle field-stripped by a cadet and
then misassembled, with one vital component left out, forgotten on the
ground.

In other words, he castigated himself, useless.

A comm signal filtered down from the overhead speaker, followed by the
voice of Commander Hachesa. “Bridge to Captain Riker,” said the acting
first officer.

“Go ahead.”

“Update from the Enterprise, sir,” replied Hachesa. “They and the
Aventine will rendezvous with us in fifteen minutes.”

“Acknowledged,” Riker said. “Tell Lieutenant Commander Pazlar and
Commander Ra-Havreii to meet me in transporter room two in ten minutes.”

“Aye, sir. Bridge out.”

He stood and stretched. “Computer, fade up lights to one-half,” he said,
and the room slowly brightened. Shambling groggily toward the bathroom,
he hoped that a shower would revive him before it was time to meet with
his former captain. The chrono on his end table displayed the time as
0617 hours.

Not bad, he thought. I almost got an hour of sleep. Except it wasn’t
quite an hour, and I never actually slept. He tapped a padd next to the
bathroom sink and turned on the cold water. He cupped his hands, filled
them beneath the icy stream, and splashed his face, shocking himself to
full alertness.

He blinked at his dripping-wet, haggard reflection in the mirror. Who
needs sleep, anyway?

 

“Energizing,” said the transporter officer.

Jean-Luc Picard turned to face the raised platform. The system powered
up with a resonant hum. To his left stood Beverly and Worf, and on his
right were Captain Dax and Commander Bowers from the Aventine.

In front of them, three columns of sparkling bluish-white particles
surged into existence and adopted humanoid shapes. Even before the
radiance faded, Picard recognized the welcome sight of his old friend
and former first officer, William Riker, standing at the front of the
platform.

The transporter effect dissipated. Standing behind Riker were an
Efrosian man with long white hair and a flowing mustache to match, and a
slim, blond Elaysian woman who wore a motor-assist armature over her
uniform, from neck to ankles.

Riker descended from the platform, and Picard stepped forward to greet
him. “Welcome aboard, Captain,” Picard said, shaking Riker’s hand and
flashing a wide, friendly smile.

“Thank you, Captain,” Riker said, his own smile guarded and ephemeral.
He let go of Picard’s hand and gestured to the two officers who had
beamed in with him. “Allow me to introduce my chief engineer, Commander
Ra-Havreii. And I think you know my science officer, Lieutenant
Commander Pazlar.”

“Indeed, I do,” Picard said, nodding to the duo. “Commander Ra-Havreii,
it’s a pleasure. Your reputation precedes you.”

Ra-Havreii lifted his snowy brows. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said,
with a weariness that belied his jesting tone.

Dax stepped forward and met Riker with a smile. “It’s good to see you
again, Will,” she said. Nodding over her shoulder, she added, “This my
first officer, Commander Sam Bowers.”

Riker reached out and shook Bowers’s hand. “A pleasure.”

Pazlar stepped around Riker and offered her hand to Dax. “Nice to see
you again, Captain.”

“Likewise, Melora,” Dax said with a friendly smile. “You look wonderful,
as always.”

“Says the woman who gets younger every time I see her,” Pazlar said,
with a teasing roll of her eyes.

Worf stepped forward and greeted Riker with a firm and enthusiastic
handshake. “Welcome back, sir.”

Clasping the Klingon’s hand in both of his, Riker replied, “Thanks,
Worf. How’re you liking my old job?”

“Too much paperwork,” Worf said.

“Try being a captain,” Riker quipped. He released Worf’s hand and
accepted a quick, friendly embrace from Beverly.

“Welcome back, Will,” she said. As they parted, she added, “I thought
Chris and Deanna were coming. Are they all right?”

The stricken look that paled Riker’s face warned Picard that something
terrible had happened and that Beverly’s innocent question had salted an
open emotional wound. A sidelong glance at Dax’s sympathetic expression
made it clear to Picard that she, too, understood what was being left
unsaid.

Riker turned his eyes toward the deck. “I had to leave them behind to
save the ship…. It’s a long story.”

It was a terrible strain for Picard, in the aftermath of such losses and
tragedies as he had recently endured, to mask his own pangs of loss and
grief at this revelation. Deanna Troi was almost like a daughter to
him—even more so after her long-overdue (in his opinion) wedding to
Riker. He’d developed similarly paternal feelings for Christine Vale,
with whom he had suffered and been tested in several crucibles that had
claimed the lives of many Enterprise personnel—the bloody Dokaalan
colony incident, the planetwide riots on Delta Sigma IV, and, worst of
all, the protracted carnage of the Tezwa debacle.

If it’s this deep a wound for me, imagine how much worse it must be for
him, Picard thought, trying to impose some perspective on the matter. To
lose his wife and his first officer, both at the same time. How could
anyone bear that?

Bowers broke the uncomfortable silence. “I don’t mean to be callous, but
we have a lot to talk about and not much time. Maybe we should adjourn
to a more appropriate setting.”

“Wait a second,” Riker said to Bowers, and then he looked to Picard.
“The Voyager crew has more experience with the Borg than anyone.
Shouldn’t they be part of this?”

“I wish they could be,” Picard said. “Unfortunately, Captain Chakotay is
in critical condition, and many of his officers and crew were killed.
Voyager won’t be mobile for several days, and Commander Bowers is
correct, we can’t wait.” He turned to Worf. “Are the arrangements made,
Number One?”

“Yes, sir,” Worf said. He stepped toward the door, which opened with a
soft hiss. Turning back, he said to the group, “Everyone, please follow me.”

Dax and Bowers were the first to act on Worf’s invitation, and Picard
gestured to Riker and his officers that they should go ahead of him.
After the trio had stepped out of the transporter room, Picard and
Beverly followed them and remained at the back of the group.

Beverly didn’t say a word as she took Picard’s hand. She didn’t need to
explain why; he understood. In a crisis, Riker had made a decision that
would likely haunt him, no matter how the situation ultimately resolved
itself. It was a dilemma that could only be fully appreciated by another
captain whose wife served with him aboard the same starship. She gave
his hand a brief squeeze and then let it slip from her grasp.

Picard wondered if he could possibly have the courage to make the choice
that Riker had made—to desert his pregnant wife in the name of duty, in
the service of the abstraction known as the greater good. Then he
thought of how much time’s merciless fires had already taken from him,
and he knew that he couldn’t.

He walked in somber silence with Beverly…and wished that decorum had let
him hold her hand just a little bit longer.

 

Sequestered in the Enterprise’s crew lounge—a.k.a. the Happy Bottom
Riding Club—the three captains and their officers helped themselves to
hot and cold beverages that had been set out on the counter by the
lounge’s civilian barkeep, Jordan. He had ushered out the other patrons
before the officers’ arrival. Now that the VIP guests were inside, Dax
saw Jordan exit through the main portal, leaving the officers to confer
in privacy.

Dax filled a mug with fresh-brewed raktajino. She took a sip of her
piping-hot beverage and admired the lounge’s many decorative touches.
Among them were dozens of portraits of Enterprise personnel who had been
killed in the line of duty, with small bronze placards denoting their
names, ranks, and KIA dates; a map of California, with a star denoting
the location of the lounge’s twentieth-century-Earth namesake; a replica
of that bar’s liquor license; and memorabilia of past starships that had
borne the name Enterprise.

Worf stepped up to the bar on Dax’s left and filled a tall glass with
prune juice. Captain Riker sidled up on Dax’s right and poured himself a
mug of piping-hot coffee. Noticing her wandering gaze, he confided,
“Jordan spruced the place up, but I was the one who named it.”

As soon as he’d said it, Dax was certain she noted a glower from Worf
that was aimed in Riker’s direction.

That’s a story I’ll have to ask Worf about later, she decided, while
nodding politely at Riker.

Captain Picard raised his voice for the room and said, “Could we all
gather, please? We haven’t much time.” The officers convened and sat
down on either side of a row of small tables that Jordan and his staff
had pushed together at the forward end of the lounge, along a wall of
windows with a spectacular view of the nebula.

Dax only half listened as Picard summarized for Riker how the
Enterprise’s efforts to halt the Borg’s access to Federation space had
led him and his crew to the Azure Nebula.

After Picard finished, Dax quickly apprised Riker of the link between
her crew’s investigation of the downed Earth Starship Columbia NX-02 in
the Gamma Quadrant and the subspace passage that brought them to the nebula.

Then came Riker’s brief but gripping account of Titan’s detection of
energy pulses in a remote sector of the Beta Quadrant and the trap into
which he and his crew had been led as a result. Dax saw the anguish in
Riker’s eyes as he related in detail the circumstances that had
compelled him to abandon his wife and his away team. “I had to make a
snap decision, so I chose to bring my ship home,” he said. “But it was a
rough trip, and if what Captain Hernandez tells me is true, the Caeliar
gestalt put up a hell of a fight to keep us there.”

Two words leaped out at Dax, who interrupted, “Did you say ‘Caeliar
gestalt’?”

Riker did a surprised double-take. “Yes. Why?”

“The alien that stole the runabout from my ship,” Dax said. “The one who
led us here. He identified himself as Arithon of the Caeliar. He was
looking for something called the gestalt.”

“Well, I’d say we found it,” Riker said. “And the Caeliar.”

Pazlar interjected, “Captain Hernandez’s account of the destruction of
Erigol and the recorded date of the supernova that made this nebula are
a match. If the Caeliar created those subspace passages, it would
explain why this was their nexus.”

Bowers, whose body language telegraphed his impatience, replied, “I’ll
admit that’s all fascinating, but is any of it relevant to stopping the
Borg armada?” Unfazed by the group’s many stares of reproach, he
continued, “Seriously, what’s the plan here? What’s our next step?”

Captain Picard frowned but salvaged Bowers’s pride by answering, “The
commander has a point. We need to focus on the future, not dwell on the
past. I’ll open the floor to ideas.”

“Part of the problem,” Ra-Havreii said, “is that there’s little chance
we could reach any of the threatened worlds in time to make a
difference. The Borg outpace us by a wide margin. By the time we reach
Earth or Vulcan or any of the other core systems, the battles for their
fates will be long over.”

“Maybe not,” Dax said. “The Aventine’s carrying a prototype quantum
slipstream drive. We weren’t scheduled to start testing it until next
month, but I think we can bring it online now, with a few hours’ notice.
If it works, we could leapfrog past the Borg, maybe even beat them to
Earth by a few hours.”

With casual skepticism, Picard replied, “To what end? With all respect,
Captain, that’s not a plan—it’s just a tactic.”

“I was simply refuting Commander Ra-Havreii’s assertion that we’re too
slow to make a difference,” Dax said.

“I see,” Picard said. “You’re right. It’s important to know what
capabilities we have at our command. But before we deploy them, we owe
it to ourselves to be certain of our objectives.”

Dax summoned the calm confidence that her symbiont’s lifetimes of
experience granted to her. She quashed her initial defensive reaction
and let herself hear the wisdom in what Picard had said. “You’re
absolutely right,” she replied. “Before we make any plans, we need to
take stock of our strengths and resources.” Looking at Riker, she added,
“Starting with Captain Hernandez. After eight centuries among the
Caeliar, she might have knowledge of advanced technologies that could
help us fight the Borg. Before we do anything or set any plans in stone,
we should see if she’s able and willing to help us.”

Picard nodded. “An excellent point, Captain.” He pushed away his mug of
Earl Grey and stood up. “I think it’s time you and I met Captain
Hernandez.” Then he asked Riker, “Can I impose on you to make the
introductions?”

Riker nodded and said, “My pleasure.”

“Very well. Meeting adjourned.”

Everyone stood and moved in a loose group toward the exit. Bowers fell
into step close beside Dax and said confidentially, “What if she can’t
or won’t help us?”

Dax frowned as she pondered that scenario. “In that case,” she replied,
“I wouldn’t make any long-term plans if I were you.”



    11

The shortest battle of Martok’s life was rapidly becoming the costliest.
In the few minutes since his fleet had uncloaked and engaged the Borg
armada with a barrage of transphasic torpedoes, more than seventy
percent of both forces had been annihilated.

“Keep firing!” barked Captain G’mtor, over the rumbling of shockfronts
and debris buffeting the Sword of Kahless. “Set course, bearing
two-six-one! Don’t let that cube get away!”

Already, several Borg ships had broken through the line and were
accelerating deeper into Klingon space, their trajectories gradually
diverging as they zeroed in on different star systems. Just as they had
in the Azure Nebula, they had rammed their way through the Klingon
blockade, sacrificing a few cubes for the sake of the overall invasion
effort. Once they pass out of range, we’ll never catch them again,
Martok knew.

He watched the image of the receding Borg vessel shrink on the main
viewscreen. Then the tactical officer called out, “Weapons locked!”

“Fire!” snapped G’mtor. Six transphasic torpedoes slashed in blue
streaks up the center of the viewscreen and converged with lethal
alacrity on the cube. A sun-flash blanched the viewer. When it faded, it
showed a cloud of smoldering black wreckage being dispersed by the
navigational deflector of the victorious Sword of Kahless. “Hard about!”
bellowed the captain. “Tactical, acquire a new target!”

Fire and fury blasted through the bridge’s starboard stations. A slab of
metal struck Martok’s chair and knocked it off its pedestal. The impact
hurled him from the rushing jaws of spreading flame and slammed him
brutally across the deck, where the bulkhead fragment pinned him and
shielded him at the same time. Soldiers and parts of soldiers ricocheted
off the port consoles and collapsed in smoking heaps on either side of him.

The bright white battle-stations lighting went dark, and the ruddy glow
of standard illumination took its place. Gray static flurried on the
main viewscreen, and the air was bitter with smoke from overloaded
circuits and the stench of burnt hair. Martok spat out a mouthful of his
own blood and tried to drag himself out from under the metal slab.
Knifing pains alerted him to broken bones in his rib cage and left leg.

General Goluk stumbled over the rubble-strewn deck to Martok and yelled
to a pair of nearby warriors, “Help me lift this bulkhead plate off the
chancellor!” The tall, broad-shouldered duo did as the general ordered.
With three pairs of hands and deep grunts of pained effort, they raised
the slab high enough for Martok to free himself. Once he was clear, they
let it fall to the deck with a resonant peal of metal on metal.

Martok reached up and took Goluk’s offered hand. The general pulled
Martok upright and steadied him until he could balance himself on his
unbroken leg. To the two warriors, Martok said, “Get me damage reports
and a battle update.” Once they had stepped away, Martok asked Goluk in
a confidential tone, “G’mtor?” The general nodded at the smoking heap of
rubble and bodies from which Martok had been extricated.

Around the bridge, bloodied and scorched soldiers of the Empire
struggled to wrest data or responses from their consoles. A faint
crackle of comm chatter permeated the hazy compartment like an
undercurrent. The minute Martok spent waiting for reports from his crew
felt like an eternity.

One of the soldiers who had aided him returned. “Engines, shields,
sensors, and weapons are offline, Chancellor,” he said. “Life support is
failing.”

“What of the rest of the fleet?”

The warrior’s jaw tensed, as if he refused to let the words escape his
mouth. Then he bowed his head and said, “Broken.”

Goluk asked, “Do we have communications?”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier replied. “General Klag reports the Gorkon has
been crippled and is unable to continue pursuit of the escaping Borg
vessels.”

Martok heaved an angry sigh. “How many broke through?”

“Sixty-one,” said the soldier. “Ten heading to Qo’noS, two to Gorath,
and the others to targets not yet identified. Also, another wave of Borg
ships has been reported in the Mempa Sector, on course for more remote
parts of the Empire.”

Grim stares passed between Goluk and Martok. The general placed a hand
on Martok’s shoulder. “It was a glorious battle.”

“Yes,” Martok said. “But what will that matter if no Klingon remains to
sing of it?” Nodding to the soldier, he said, “Open a channel to Qo’noS.
We need to alert the home guard.”

The warrior moved briskly to one of the bridge’s few operational panels
and tapped in a series of commands. “Channel open, Chancellor,” he reported.

“On-screen,” Martok said.

The gunmetal hash of electronic snow on the viewscreen gave way to a
murky, unsteady signal from the High Council chamber in the Great Hall
of the First City. Looking back at Martok was his political nemesis,
Councillor Kopek. “What news, Chancellor?”

“Our fleet has fallen,” Martok said. “The enemy is en route to worlds
across the Empire. I trust you know where duty lies, Councillor.”

Kopek nodded. “Of course. We will defend Qo’noS, my lord.”

“Summon every ship that can reach you in time,” Martok said. “The fate
of our homeworld is now in your hands.”

“The Borg will not come to Qo’noS and live, Chancellor. When your fleet
returns home, your throne will await you.”

Martok smirked. “With you sitting on it, I presume?”

With no trace of mockery, Kopek replied, “Today is not a day for
politics, Chancellor. Today is a good day to die.”

Perhaps he longs for his place in Sto-Vo-Kor like the rest of us, after
all, Martok thought. He didn’t know whether Fek’lhr would permit such a
vile spirit as Kopek to redeem himself with a single hour of heroism,
but part of him wanted to believe that it was possible—and that every
warrior deserved such a chance.

He saluted him. “Qapla’, Kopek, son of Nargor.”

“Die with honor, Martok, son of Urthog. Qo’noS out.”

The signal ended, and the screen went dark.

I have fought the good fight, Martok told himself, but he found no
solace in the thought. With his leg broken and his ship adrift, there
was nothing more for him to do but stand and wait to see if the Empire’s
final hour had come around at last.

“Someone bring me a drink,” he said.



    12

Erika Hernandez sat alone at a dressing table in her quarters on Titan.
She stared at her reflection in the large oval mirror. With her hands
resting in her lap, she concentrated on her hair and felt the energy
demands of her catoms as she altered her coiffure to match her fickle whims.

Her wild mane of thick, curly black hair retreated toward her head and
turned an intense shade of indigo. Eyeing the more conservative spill of
deep blue hair over her shoulders, Hernandez frowned. “I don’t think
so,” she muttered to herself.

It took great effort to rein it back to a compact bob and shift its
color to an auburn hue that matched her memories of cinnamon, fresh from
the jar in her mother’s kitchen. A fleeting whimsy drove her to go blond
for all of eleven seconds.

She halted her hairstyling experiments as the door signal softly
disturbed her privacy. “Come in,” she said.

The door opened. Captain Riker entered, followed by two other officers—a
bald human man and a young Trill woman—who wore the same rank insignia
that he did. The trio was barely inside the room before Hernandez had
used her catoms to restore her hair to its previous state, a mass of
black waves that covered her back.

“Captain,” Riker said. “I hope we’re not interrupting.”

“Not at all,” she said. She added with a teasing grin, “And thanks for
knocking this time.”

The Trill woman gleamed with fascination. “How do you do that with your
hair?”

“Catoms,” Hernandez said. “Sophisticated nanomachines made and infused
into my body by the Caeliar. The catoms can direct energy and reshape
matter in remarkable ways, if they have enough power. Unfortunately,
this little parlor trick’s about all I have left in me—and to be honest,
it’s tiring me out.”

Folding his arms, Riker said to the other two captains, “She’s being
modest. When she showed up on my bridge a few hours ago, she turned
Ensign Rriarr’s phaser to dust with a glance.”

Hernandez shook her head and gave a tired grin. “Captain Riker’s giving
me a bit too much credit,” she explained. “When I did that, we were
still in orbit of New Erigol, where I had access to the Caeliar gestalt.
Without that power to draw from, I can barely curl my hair.”

The Trill cracked a smile, but the older man had the stern carriage of
one who had seen too many days of war. Hernandez wondered if he saw her
as clearly as she saw him.

He cleared his throat and threw a look at Riker, who dipped his chin at
the reproach and gestured at his colleagues.

“Captain Hernandez,” Riker said, “permit me to introduce Captain Ezri
Dax of the Federation Starship Aventine and Captain Jean-Luc Picard of
the Enterprise.”

Unable to mask her confusion, Hernandez cocked her head and eyed Picard
with suspicion. “But…you’re the one the voice calls Locutus,” she said.

Dax’s and Riker’s eyes widened in horror and surprise, and Picard froze
as they looked at him. His face became pale, and he looked lifeless,
Gorgonized. At last, he replied in a shocked whisper, “You heard a
voice…call me…Locutus?”

“Yes,” she said, listening to the inhuman chorus of distant voices that
filled every empty space in her thoughts. “Are you telling me the rest
of you don’t hear that?” She looked from one captain to another in an
effort to gauge their reactions. Their obvious dismay and withdrawn body
language told Hernandez that her revelation had left them ill at ease.
“Great,” she said. “You think I’m crazy, right? Think I’m hearing things?”

Picard stepped toward her. His voice was cautious and gentle. “Do you
know what you’ve been hearing? Its name?”

Anticipating the direction of his questions, she replied, “Yes. Do you?”

As if he were reading her thoughts, he said under his breath, “The
Collective.” He looked at Riker and seemed to draw strength from the
younger man’s quiet fortitude. Turning back toward Hernandez, he
continued, “When I hear the Borg, it sounds like a roar of voices, more
like a noise than a chorus. Then the strongest voice overpowers the
others. Is that what you hear?”

She shook her head. “No.” She closed her eyes and let the ever-changing
chaos of the Collective cascade inside her mind. “I hear all of them,”
she explained. “Every voice adding to the others, like a conversation.
But I also hear the unifying voice, both on its own and when it speaks
through the Queen.”

“I hear only the many,” Picard said.

“I hear what I choose to hear,” Hernandez said. “I can isolate lone
voices, if I try hard enough.”

Riker swapped excited glances with Dax and asked Hernandez, “Can you
communicate with them? Talk to them?”

“No,” Hernandez said. “I can eavesdrop on their party, but I’m
definitely not invited, if you know what I mean.”

Picard paced slowly. “Captain, have you ever encountered the Borg before
now?”

“Never even heard of them before today,” she said.

“But you can hear the Collective in your thoughts,” Picard said, lost in
his own musings as he reversed direction and kept pacing. “Even though
you’ve never been assimilated.”

Hernandez hadn’t encountered the term assimilated in the brief and
heavily redacted file that Riker had let her read, and she wasn’t
certain she wanted to find out what it meant.

Captain Dax interrupted Picard’s pensive perambulations. “It’s probably
related to the catoms the Caeliar put into her body. Somehow those
nanomachines let her tap in to the Borg Collective’s frequency, and—no
offense, sir—with greater precision than you can.” The sharp-eyed young
woman focused on Hernandez. “You mentioned that you can tell one voice
from another in the Collective. You also mentioned the Queen. Does that
mean you can tell if the Queen’s leading the attack on the Federation
right now?”

“Yes,” Hernandez said. “The armada’s under her direct control.” Closing
her eyes again, she attuned herself to the thoughtwaves of the Borg
monarch. “She’s young, newly installed,” Hernandez continued, even as
she struggled to glean more details. “Full of fury. She…she even thinks
of herself as being expendable—as long as Earth is destroyed.”

Desperate, Picard asked, “Why? What’s driving them?”

“I can’t tell,” Hernandez said. “It’s all too muddled.”

Riker and Dax pressed in closer, and Dax asked, “Can you tell us where
the Borg Queen’s ship is?”

Clearing her mind of all other questions, Hernandez sought that detail
and found it. “I know where she is,” she said. Then she opened her eyes
and let her tears fall. “She’s leading a phalanx of several dozen Borg
vessels.”

Riker’s voice was taut with urgency. “But where are they?”

Hernandez palmed tears from her face. “Destroying Deneva.”



    13

The Queen had emerged from her chrysalis with two mandates coded into
her being: Destroy Earth, and crush the Federation.

For too long, we have obsessed over Earth, she had directed her
trillions of drones, attuning the Collective’s will to her own. It has
lured us, tempted us, thwarted us. No longer.

She had projected her murderous fury to the drones and adapted them to
the lightning pace that she and the Collective now demanded of them. We
offered them union. Perfection. They responded with feeble attempts at
genocide. Earth and its Federation are not worthy of assimilation. They
would add only imperfection. Since they offer nothing and obstruct our
quest for perfection, they will be exterminated.

It was all coldly logical and mechanically precise, but none of that
mattered to the drones. They would follow the will of the Collective and
execute the Queen’s dictates without question or hesitation. No
justification had to be given to drones. The Queen, however…she made
different demands.

She was a conduit, a voice for something that no longer had one. Its
will existed outside her, and it was her, all at once. It was the
Collective—not a chorus of voices but one voice speaking through those
bound into its service.

The drones, the cubes, the Unimatrix, and even the Queen all were
nothing more than the trappings of the Collective’s true nature. It was
the authentic essence of the Borg, and It told the Queen that the time
had come for worlds to burn.

From her attack force, she dispatched six cubes toward the next
inhabited planet that lay along their course to Earth.

Leave nothing alive, she commanded her drones.

And she knew that they would obey, without question.

 

Captain Alex Terapane bolted from his command chair to point at his
preferred target on the main screen. “All ships, fire on the flanking
cube! Clear a path for the escaping transports!”

The bridge crew of the U.S.S. Musashi scrambled to carry out his order
as the ship bucked and shuddered under a fierce barrage by the Borg. His
first and second officers had both been killed in the opening minutes of
the battle, and there was no turning back now. With five other Starfleet
vessels—the starships Forrestal, Ajax, Tirpitz, Potemkin, and
Baliste—the Musashi was struggling to fend off an equal number of Borg
cubes. The enemy vessels had approached at such high speeds that there
had been almost no time to brace for the attack.

The Musashi slipped through a gap in the Borg’s firing solution as the
security chief, Lieutenant Commander Ideene, called out, “Torpedoes away!”

Terapane tensed to sound a victory cry. Then he watched the three
transphasic torpedoes slam into the Borg cube’s shields, which flared
and then retracted but didn’t fall. He snapped, “Hit them again!”

A thundering impact snuffed the lights and pitched the deck violently.
Terapane fell and landed hard on his left hip. White jolts of pain shot
through his torso. He forced his eyes to relax from their agonized
squint just in time to see the U.S.S. Tirpitz vaporized on the main
viewer. Seconds later, the Ajax suffered the same fate and vanished in a
flash of golden fire. Then came the Baliste’s blaze of glory, as it
followed the others into oblivion.

“Strigl,” Terapane shouted to his ops officer. “Tell Forrestal and
Potemkin to regroup—protect the transports!”

“Comms are jammed,” Strigl replied. “All frequencies.”

Pulling his brawny form back into his chair, Terapane snarled at his
security chief, “Ideene! Report!”

“Targeting scanners are gone, I have to aim manually,” said the
square-jawed Orion woman. “Firing!”

Another volley of transphasic torpedoes soared from the Musashi, slammed
through the nearest Borg cube, and pulverized it in a bluish-white
fireball. As the burning cloud dissipated, Terapane saw another cube
struck by a double volley from the Potemkin and the Forrestal. The black
hexahedron erupted and disintegrated. Spontaneous whoops of celebration
filled the Musashi’s dim, smoky bridge.

Then a scissoring crisscross of green energy blasts from the four
remaining Borg cubes slashed through the Potemkin and the Forrestal and
transformed both ships into chaotic tumbles of fiery wreckage. Dozens
more beams lanced through the hundreds of fleeing civilian transports,
reducing them to glowing debris.

With Starfleet’s defense forces shattered, the four remaining Borg cubes
accelerated away from the Musashi, into orbit of Deneva, millions of
kilometers away.

We’re all that’s left, Terapane realized. His ship was Deneva’s last
defender, and it was outnumbered and outgunned. “Arm all transphasic
warheads,” he said to Ideene.

“But I don’t have a target,” Ideene protested.

Terapane shot back, “Arm every warhead we have, right now, wherever they
are—in the tubes, in the munitions bay, I don’t care. Do it now.” He
took a deep breath. “Helm, put us smack in the middle of those cubes,
best possible speed, on my mark.” Throwing a look back at Ideene, he
snapped, “Well?”

“Warheads armed,” she replied.

On the main viewer, the four cubes were demolishing Deneva’s orbital
defense platforms, which had been heavily upgraded after the Dominion
War. Not upgraded enough, Terapane brooded, as he watched the Borg turn
them to scrap. Then the cubes spread apart in high orbit and turned
their formidable weaponry against the planet’s surface.

“Captain,” Ideene said, “because of the Borg’s deployment pattern, at
best we might be able to take out two of them.” She started to say
something, but she stopped and averted her eyes toward her console. She
swallowed. “Even in a best-case scenario, we can’t save Deneva, sir.”

“No, we can’t,” Terapane acknowledged. “But I won’t just hand the Borg
their victory. I plan on making them pay for it.” He used the controls
on his chair’s armrest to open a shipwide comm channel. “All decks, this
is the captain. All noncombat personnel, abandon ship. Medical teams,
evacuate sickbay, and split up to provide support for as many manned
escape pods as possible. All pods will be ejected in two minutes.” He
closed the comm channel. “Mister Strigl, prep the log buoy.”

Terapane sat and passed the final two minutes of his life in quiet
reflection while his crew readied the Musashi to make its futile
sacrifice. He thought of his wife and sons on Rigel IV, of the countless
lives being extinguished on Deneva, of the grim fate that seemed to lie
in store for all of the Federation. Watching the Borg cubes bombard the
world that he had been tasked to defend, he seethed. Every second you
wait, more die, his conscience scolded. His reason countered, They’re
all going to die today, anyway. Two minutes won’t make any difference.

The hull resounded with the metallic thumps of magnetic clamps opening.
Lieutenant Strigl swiveled his chair around from the ops console to
report, “All escape pods away, Captain.”

“Release the log buoy, Mark,” Terapane said.

Strigl keyed in the command. “Buoy’s away,” he said.

Terapane stared at the carnage on the viewscreen and saw no point in
lying to himself. He wasn’t about to work a miracle or save the day;
nothing would be gained by what he did next. But his ship had been named
for the famous samurai Miyamoto Musashi, and it seemed only right and
proper, in the aftermath of such a colossal failure, to fall on his sword.

If his figurative seppuku also happened to claim the lives of a few more
of his foes, so much the better.

“Helm, is the course plotted?” he asked.

“Aye, Captain,” replied the young Vulcan pilot.

He looked at Ideene. “Tactical?”

“Armed and ready, sir. Just say go.”

The atmosphere of preternatural calm on his bridge filled Terapane with
pride in his crew. “It’s been an honor, friends,” Terapane said.
“Helm…engage.”

In a flash of warp-distorted light, the pinpoint of Deneva became the
shallow curve of its northern pole, which sprawled beneath two Borg
cubes unleashing a cataclysm of emerald fire. The Musashi had dropped to
impulse directly between them.

In one word, Captain Alex Terapane fell on his sword.

“Go.”

 

Ione Kitain’s whole world was on fire.

Great peals of thunder overpowered the screaming that seemed to fill
every corner of Lacon City. The street outside her residential tower
heaved like a chest expanding with breath, and then it cracked and
collapsed into itself, swallowing dozens of people who had been fleeing
without direction.

Millions of people all around her, throughout Deneva’s lush Summer
Islands, were panicking, descending into a communal terror that assailed
her keen Betazoid senses like a tsunami.

Every animal impulse in her brain told her to run, to seek shelter, but
she knew there was no point. There were no hiding places to be found. So
she huddled in the arched entryway of her apartment complex and focused
her psionic senses through the maelstrom of fear to find her husband’s
mind amid the mayhem.

Sickly green pulses of energy fell from the heavens. Titanic mushroom
clouds billowed skyward at multiple points around the horizon, turning
the dusk to darkness. Every detonation rocked the city with the force of
an earthquake.

From high overhead, Ione heard the mournful whine of a failing engine.
She looked up in time to see a damaged personnel transport spiral out of
control and slam into a commercial tower, several blocks from her home.
Its impact shattered the entire façade of the building, and the
transport exploded in a flash, followed by gouts of flame. With the
tower’s center all but obliterated, its upper portion swayed like a
wounded giant before it plunged at an angle, crushed the lower half, and
toppled into the streets. A toxic cloud of pulverized debris, atomized
bodies, and glass and metal shards spread through the artificial canyons
of the urban center.

Lacon City reeked of smoke, death, and sewage.

The buzz of emergency-service aircars and other antigrav vehicles ceased
all at once. At first, Ione thought they had gone—and then she heard the
dull thuds and crunches of hundreds of vehicles falling to Earth and
caroming off buildings and the elevated pedestrian walkways above the
streets. Her best guess was that an energy-dampening field had blanketed
the city.

That means our shield’s completely gone, Ione realized. It won’t be long
now. Fear began to cloud her thoughts and dull her telepathic senses.
Then her husband’s thoughts touched her own.

I am near, wife. I am at the fountain.

She bolted from the archway and sprinted through streets littered with
broken, burning vehicles and mounds of smoldering debris. I’m coming, my
love, she projected to her Imzadi.

Another blast, closer than all the others. A deathly silence washed over
the street. Ione flattened herself against a pile of shattered asphalt
and covered her head with her arms as the shockwave hit. It ripped
through the upper sections of the buildings on either side of her. A
delicate music of destruction lingered behind it and deluged the
boulevard with a storm of broken glass. Most of it was sandlike, tiny
abrasive granules, but a few substantial chunks gouged her back and thighs.

She tried to be stoic, to contain the sharp agony of her wounds rather
than accost her husband’s own telepathic mind with them, but her control
was compromised by anguish and fear. Minuscule fragments of glass bit
into her palms as she forced herself up from the ground. Then a pair of
strong brown hands gripped her forearms and lifted her to her feet.

He’d found her.

“Elieth,” she said, smiling sadly at her husband.

He responded with typical Vulcan stoicism. “We must move,” he said,
pulling her into motion beside him. He ushered her out of the street and
toward the space beneath the overhang of an elevated promenade. His
peace officer’s uniform was ripped and stained with dust and blood. One
of his ears was mauled and bloodied. She reached toward it in sympathy.
“You’re hurt.”

“Quickly,” he said, applying gentle pressure with one arm on her back,
until they were sheltered under the promenade. A moment later, she
understood the reason for his urgency.

Bodies began falling into the street.

The sounds were more horrible than anything Ione had ever imagined. Her
stomach heaved in disgust with every wet, muffled impact, every dull
slap of flesh meeting stone. Just meters from where she stood, the
street became an abattoir.

When the grotesque percussion ceased, Ione realized she was weeping into
Elieth’s shoulder. At any other time, he would have radiated intense
disapproval for such an overt exhibition of emotion. Instead, he
imparted comforting thoughts.

Don’t be afraid. The worst is over.

Staring out at the apocalyptic cityscape, Ione replied, I sincerely
doubt that, my love.

Despite all the times that Elieth had argued to her that regret was a
worthless emotion, Ione wished that they had been on the last transport
out of Lacon City.

When the order had come from Deneva’s president to evacuate the planet,
however, she and Elieth had stayed behind to lend their expertise to the
Civil Defense Corps. She had applied her skills as a particle physicist
to improve the city’s defensive shields, to buy more time for the
transports to be loaded and launched. Elieth’s job had been to maintain
order at the launch site and make certain that the most vulnerable
citizens had been given priority, especially families with young children.

The plan had been to meet back at home after the last transport was
away. Looking back, she saw their apartment tower being consumed from
within by a raging blaze.

“We could have left,” she said, knowing it wasn’t true.

“There was insufficient room on the transports,” Elieth said, calm in
the face of calamity. “We also did not fit the criteria for prioritized
rescue.”

Spite and selfishness surged inside her. “I’m a daughter of the Fourth
House of Betazed, and you have a badge. We could have left.” As soon as
she’d said it, she felt ashamed.

Elieth let her remarks pass.

A deep rumbling resonated in every solid surface, and the city was
bathed in a terrifying monochromatic green radiance.

Ione trembled, and her heart pounded furiously. Adrenaline coursed
through her, but she had no use for it. Embracing her Imzadi, she opened
her mind to his. What will you miss most?

I will not be aware of any loss after I have ceased to exist, Elieth
responded. So I will miss nothing.

Unswayed by his resolute devotion to logic, Ione shared, I’ll miss
music. And you.

It was only a blink, a micro-expression that vanished almost as soon as
it manifested, but Ione saw the crack in Elieth’s façade. Beneath his
carefully trained discipline, he was grieving just as deeply as she
was—and perhaps far more. He made a silent confession: If it were
possible for one with no awareness to miss something…I would miss you
most of all.

He tightened his embrace, and Ione shed grateful tears for that one last
moment of proof that Elieth, youngest son of Tuvok and T’Pel, truly
loved her.

Her tears cut trails across her grime-covered face. Then the viridian
glow from above brightened, and she cringed. “I didn’t think it would
end like this.”

Nor did I.

A pulse of light and heat penetrated every atom of the city, and then
there were no more tears.

 

The sun was sinking below the horizon and painting all of Paris with a
single shade of salmon-pink light, when President Nan Bacco heard her
office door open behind her.

She turned to face her lone visitor, Esperanza Piñiero. Tears ran in
streaks from Piñiero’s dark brown eyes. The chief of staff crossed the
room to the president’s desk. Agent Wexler remained outside and closed
the door behind her. By the time Piñiero reached the desk, she looked
too distraught to speak. She bowed her head and struggled to control her
breathing.

Bacco anticipated Piñiero’s news with deep anxiety. She didn’t want to
know the truth; she didn’t want to make the disaster real by allowing
its tragedies to be spoken. But what she wanted didn’t really matter
anymore.

“Esperanza,” she said. “Tell me. In simple words.”

Piñiero palmed her eyes dry and forced herself into a ragged facsimile
of composure. “We’ve lost Deneva,” she said.

A churning tide of sickness and a destabilizing feeling of emptiness
struck Bacco at the same time. Overwhelmed, she sank into her chair,
faltering like an invalid. There had been no surprise in Piñiero’s
report, but it was still devastating to confront it as a hard truth.
Billions more dead. Billions.

“What’s coming next?” Bacco said.

“Regulus is under siege now, and an attack on Qo’noS is imminent,”
Piñiero said. “Martok’s fleet is gone. All he has left is a rear guard
at the Klingon homeworld.”

Even if it would amount to merely going through the motions, Bacco was
determined to serve a purpose until the bitter end. “Do we have any
forces close enough to help them?”

“Admiral Jellico redeployed the Tempest and its battle group from Ajilon
to Qo’noS six hours ago. Admiral Akaar can’t guarantee they’ll get there
in time to make a difference.”

Bacco felt like a chess player who knew she had already been checkmated
but was obliged to continue until the endgame. “Which worlds are getting
hit next?”

“Elas and Troyius are both facing attacks in two hours,” Piñiero said.
“So are Ajilon, Archanis, Castor, and Risa.”

I feel like I’m drowning. Bacco closed her eyes for a moment. “What
about the core systems?”

“Borg attack groups are on course for Vulcan, Andor, Coridan, and Beta
Rigel. ETA five hours.”

It would be negligent of me not to ask, Bacco reminded herself. “And Earth?”

“Eight hours, Madam President.” Despair loomed over Piñiero like a black
halo. “Ma’am, this might be a good time to consider moving your office
into the secure bunker at Starfleet Command.”

Bacco sighed. “I think it’s a bit late for that.” She reached forward
and activated the comm to signal her assistant. “Sivak, round up the
cabinet members and the senior staff, and have them meet me in the Roth
Dining Room in one hour.”

“Certainly, Madam President. Should your guests inquire, shall I tell
them that formal dress is demanded or optional?”

“They can show up naked for all I care. And tell the chefs I want to see
the best of everything they’ve got. If they’ve been waiting for a chance
to impress me, this is it.”

“Yes, Madam President. I’m sure the kitchen staff will find your
enthusiasm for their work deeply inspiring.”

“And have them set a place for you as well, Sivak.”

She savored the moment of stunned silence that followed. It was rare
that Sivak spoke without sarcasm or a subtle jab of wit, so hearing him
reply with courtesy was a rare delight. “Thank you, Madam President,” he
said. “The dining room will be ready to receive you and your guests in
one hour.”

“Thanks, Sivak,” Bacco said, and she closed the channel.

Piñiero planted one hand on her hip and gesticulated with the other.
“Ma’am, what was that about?”

“Dinner,” Bacco said. “If you have a special request, I suggest you send
it to the kitchen sooner rather than later.”

The chief of staff blinked. She looked as if Bacco had just swatted her
in the back of the head with a baseball bat. “Do you really think an
impromptu state dinner is what we need right now? We’re eight hours away
from seeing Earth get turned into a glowing ball of molten glass.”

“Exactly,” Bacco replied. “It’s an old Earth tradition. The condemned
get to enjoy a final meal, so they can savor what it means to be alive
one last time before they die.” She stood and circled around her desk to
join Piñiero. “This might be our last supper, Esperanza—so let’s dine
with style.”

A bittersweet smile broke through Piñiero’s veil of gloom. “I like the
way you think, ma’am.”

Bacco shrugged and said with a wry grin, “It’s my job.”



    4527 B.C.E.



    14

Pembleton and the other human survivors pushed into the middle of their
shelter, closer to the pile of fire-heated rocks, and listened with
unease and suspicion as Lerxst answered their questions about the
Caeliar’s bizarre proposal.

“Help me understand,” Graylock said, holding out his empty palms. “You
want to use us as batteries?”

Lerxst replied, “Engines would be a better analogy. Even that falls
short of the mark, however. What we are suggesting is a fusion of our
strengths, for our mutual survival.”

Thayer narrowed her eyes at Lerxst. “But you did say that you’d be using
our bodies as a source of power.”

“In the short term, yes,” Lerxst said.

Steinhauer, who kept his hands busy threading fibers into the loop of a
snowshoe, looked up and said, “Why not use one of those creatures that
killed our man Niccolo?”

“It is not merely biochemical reactions that we require,” Lerxst said.
“The interaction of our catoms is similar in many respects to the
synapses of your brains. To sustain ourselves and maintain the integrity
of our consciousness, we would need to bond with a sentient being, one
with enough neuroelectric activity to power our catoms. Mere animals
will not suffice.”

Pembleton said, “So we’ve established why you need us. Why do we need you?”

The Caeliar lifted his arm and made a sweeping gesture at the confines
of the shelter. “Your current situation appears to speak for itself,” he
said. Directing their attention to the ailing Crichlow, he added, “Our
catoms could enhance your immune systems and enable you to adapt to this
world’s aggressive pathogens.” He pointed at Thayer’s mechanically
augmented foot. “They would also speed your recovery from injuries and
prolong your ability to survive a famine.”

“I presume that’s a best-case scenario,” Graylock said.

Lerxst bowed slightly to the engineer. “Yes, it is.”

Graylock shook his head slowly. “Now let’s hear the worst-case scenario.”

“The fusion of our catoms and gestalt with your organic bodies does
carry significant risks,” Lerxst said. “Normally, we would not attempt
anything so complex without first conducting extensive research and
testing. Given the primitive nature of our surroundings and the urgency
of our respective crises, we would have to attempt this bonding without
such preparations.”

Thayer’s anger put an edge on her voice. “Get to the point. What happens
if it goes wrong?”

Tense silence followed her question. Lerxst’s demeanor was subdued as he
replied, “An unsuccessful fusion could result in the death of the
intended host, the dispersal of the Caeliar consciousness, or both. It
could also inflict brain damage on the host, turning him or her into an
automaton under the control of the bonded intelligence; or the bonded
entity might prove incompatible with the host and would become
corrupted. It is also remotely possible that your bodies’ immune systems
might reject the catoms as foreign tissue and treat the fusion as a form
of infection. Any or all of these outcomes might occur.”

“Great,” Steinhauer said. “Just great.”

Graylock scowled at the grousing private before saying to Lerxst, “Brain
damage? Death? It sounds as if the risks of this ‘fusion’ far outweigh
the benefits.”

“The alternative is death,” Lerxst said.

“For you, maybe,” Pembleton replied. “As soon as we have enough
snowshoes to go around, we’re going south.”

“Or north,” Graylock said. “Whichever way the equator is.”

The Caeliar turned his inscrutable visage toward Pembleton. “How far do
you think you’ll get? Shall I draw you a map of what lies ahead?” Lerxst
hadn’t raised his voice, but there was something smug and angry in his
manner. “This is an island, Gage, more than a hundred kilometers from
the nearest major continent. You and your friends can no more flee from
your predicament than we can from ours.”

Pembleton looked at Graylock. “Your call, sir.”

The lieutenant’s brow tensed, and a V-shaped wrinkle formed between his
thick eyebrows. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “To hell with rank
for a minute,” he said. “This is all of our lives on the line. We’ll put
it to a vote, a show of hands. Who wants to risk becoming a Caeliar meat
puppet?”

A look around the room revealed not a single raised hand.

“All right,” Pembleton said. “Who votes to look for a way off this
island?” He lifted his own arm, and four others reached for the drooping
fabric ceiling.

Graylock nodded, and they put their arms down. “The ayes have it,” he
said to Lerxst. “Escape, five; meat puppets, zero.”

“Please reconsider, Karl,” Lerxst said. “If we don’t join together now,
while my people still have the strength to control the process of the
fusion, we might never have another chance.”

“Sorry,” Graylock said. “We’ve made our decision.”

“Then both our peoples will die,” Lerxst said.

The Caeliar envoy stood and walked out of the shelter. As he exited
through the overlapping flaps of the shelter’s portal, a gust of
subfreezing air slipped past him and momentarily cut through the pungent
miasma of body odor, bad breath, and mildew.

Graylock got up, tied the flaps closed, and returned to the heated rocks
with the other survivors. He reached forward, picked up the makeshift
cooking pot, and poured himself a bowl of bitter bark soup. He had a
worried look on his face as he confided to Pembleton, “If Lerxst is
telling the truth about this being an island, we’re in big trouble.”

“Relax, sir,” Pembleton said, pretending to be confident. “We’ll be
fine. After all, you’re an engineer, aren’t you?”

Exhausted and perplexed, Graylock replied, “What does that have to do
with anything?”

Pembleton shrugged. “So there’s an ocean. How hard can it be to make a
raft?”

The lieutenant sipped his soup and winced. “Harder than you think,
Sergeant. A lot harder.”

“Didn’t Thor Heyerdahl cross an ocean on a raft?”

“Yes, he did,” Graylock said. “But that was the Pacific in high summer,
not an arctic sea in deep winter. Also, Heyerdahl built his raft in
Peru, where he had access to the right kinds of wood and fabric. At the
rate we’re going, we’ll probably end up drifting out to sea on ice
floes, like dying Inuit.”

Pointing in the direction of Junk Mountain, Pembleton said, “Do you want
me to go get Lerxst and bring him back? Should we just give up now and
ask the Caeliar to mulch our brains and put us out of our misery?”

Graylock sighed. “No.”

“Then we’d better start thinking of ways to stay warm, dry, and afloat,”
Pembleton said, “because the only way we’ll survive until spring is if
we get off this island.”

 

“Let the inner edges slide over each other as you step,” Steinhauer
said, coaching Graylock. “And roll your foot a bit when you lift it.
Exaggerate your stride a little.”

Graylock did his best to turn the young MACO’s directions into actions,
but he continued to stumble and teeter as he trudged across the
snow-covered plain by the fjord. “Scheisse,” he said under his breath.
“I feel like I’m drunk.”

“It takes some getting used to,” Steinhauer said. “Of course, if you
think going forward is hard, wait until it’s time to learn how to turn
around.”

Glaring in frustration, Graylock muttered, “I can hardly wait.” He took
another halting step forward, supporting his weight with two walking
poles. The snow settled under his feet.

“Right now, it’s harder because you’re breaking a trail,” Steinhauer
said. “It’ll be easier when you’re following.” He watched Graylock make
a few more clumsy lunges and said, “Sir, stop a second. Watch me.”
Graylock halted and turned his head to observe the private, who moved in
gliding strides. “As you finish each step,” Steinhauer said, “pause a
bit before you put your full weight on the shoe. It helps smooth the
snow and pack it better for the person behind you.”

Nodding, Graylock said, “Okay. Noted.”

“Give it a try,” the MACO said.

The engineer did as Steinhauer had said, easing into each step, keeping
his eyes on the terrain ahead so that he could train his muscle memory
to feel when his stride was correct. After a few minutes of exhausting
pushing against the wet snow, his movements became more graceful, though
still tiring.

“Now you’re getting it,” Steinhauer said. “Hold a second. It’s time to
learn how to turn.”

Graylock was grateful for a chance to stop, even if only for a minute.
He was the only one of the survivors with no previous experience at
snowshoeing, so he had committed himself to an intensive training
regimen. Once he mastered the basics of the skill, the only barrier to
the team’s departure would be Crichlow’s fever.

Steinhauer shuffle-stepped alongside Graylock. “When you have a lot of
room to turn around, like we do here, the easiest thing is to walk a
wide semicircle,” he said. “But in a forest or on a slope or narrow
trail, that might not be possible. In those situations, you’ll have to
do a kick turn, like so.” He lifted one of his snowshoes high off the
ground while keeping the other firmly planted. Then he set his lifted
shoe down at a right angle to the other, and brought the second one up
and set it down parallel to the first. In a few kicks, he had done an
about-face. “It’s hard on the hips,” he said. “And it’s easier with
poles than without. Use them to keep yourself steady.”

As Graylock emulated the MACO’s athletic leg lifts and turns, he
strained a muscle in his groin, stopped, and doubled over. Through
gritted teeth, he said, “I hate you.”

“Wait till tomorrow, when your whole body starts aching,” Steinhauer
said. “Then you’ll really hate me. Breathe a minute, then we’ll head
back to the slope near the shelter, and I’ll teach you how to use kick
steps to make climbing easier.”

Graylock squatted and watched his breath form white clouds while he
waited for his pain and nausea to subside. He had almost recovered his
equilibrium when he saw someone in the distance, standing outside the
shelter and frantically beckoning him and Steinhauer to return.

Steinhauer made a few comical hop steps sideways and placed himself
directly in front of Graylock. “I’ll break the trail back, sir,” he
said. “Are you ready to move?”

“I’m fine,” Graylock said, masking his lingering discomfort. “Move out.
I’ll be right behind you.”

The MACO cut a fast path across the open snow, and Graylock did his best
to keep his eyes on the man’s back and his feet in the smooth rut
Steinhauer’s snowshoes had carved. Just as the private had said minutes
earlier, following a trail was far less taxing than breaking one. Less
than two minutes later, he aped the young German’s sidesteps up the
slope to the camp. Once they were in the cleared area around the fire
pit, they unwrapped the snowshoes’ crude bindings from their boots and
hurried inside the weather-beaten, ice-covered shelter.

As soon as Graylock was inside, he saw Pembleton and Thayer hovering
over Crichlow, who was deathly pale and breathing in short, weak gasps.
Graylock freed himself from the bulky layers of fabric in which he had
wrapped himself for the afternoon of outdoor training. Wiping cold sweat
from his beard, he said, “Sergeant. Report.”

“He’s dying,” Pembleton said. “We tried keeping him warm and cooling him
off. Nothing works.”

Graylock frowned. He’d feared the worst a few days earlier, the morning
after Lerxst had left their camp. Crichlow’s symptoms had been steadily
worsening, and without a doctor or the hand scanners, they’d had no idea
what was wrong or how to help him. They’d fallen back on the basics:
keep him warm, dry, and hydrated, and let him rest. It hadn’t helped.

Crichlow had always been pale, and his face had always had a gaunt and
awkward quality. Now, despite the wiry scraggle of beard whiskers on his
chin and upper lip, he looked almost skeletal. Lying on his back, partly
mummified in his bedroll, he stared up at his comrades with dull eyes
that lay deep in their sockets. His lips parted, and a weak tremor shook
his jaw as air hissed from his mouth. Everyone leaned closer to hear him
as he said in a hoarse whisper, “Kiona…”

Thayer reached out and pressed her palm to his face. “I’m here, Eric,”
she said.

“Sorry, love,” Crichlow said.

She shook her head. “For what?”

He was looking in Thayer’s direction, but his eyes didn’t seem to be
focusing on her, or on anything else. “For my part,” he rasped. “For
what…we did to you.”

His apology made Thayer wince. She hadn’t spoken to any of the MACOs
since the failed attempt to commandeer the control center of Mantilis,
but she had confided to Graylock her fear and her resentment of
them—Pembleton in particular, since he had been the one who’d pulled the
trigger and maimed her.

“Not your fault, Eric,” she said. “You’re the only one who didn’t point
a weapon at me.”

“Still…sorry.”

She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “No worries.”

A reedy breath passed from his lips, and then he was perfectly still.
For a moment, the only sound was the low cry of the wind and the
snapping of loose fabric on the outside of the shelter. Steinhauer and
Pembleton both touched forehead, chest, and each shoulder with their
right hands. Thayer reached over and nudged Crichlow’s eyelids closed.

Pembleton wasted no time on sentiment. “Steinhauer,” he said, “sanitize
Crichlow’s gear, and parcel it out to the rest of the team. When you’re
done, we’ll take him up by the rocks and bury him in the snow.”

“That’s it?” asked Graylock. “We’re just going to toss his naked body in
a drift?”

Steinhauer and Thayer both turned away and pretended to be busy with
other tasks as Pembleton replied, “What would you prefer, Lieutenant?
Should I dump him in the fjord?”

“He deserves a proper burial,” Graylock said.

“I agree,” Pembleton said, “but the ground is frozen solid, and we’re
short of food. We need to save our strength for the trip, not waste it
digging a hole.”

“What about a funeral pyre?” asked Graylock.

“We’re low on firewood, too, remember?”

Graylock sighed and nodded. “I know. It just feels heartless to throw
him aside like this.”

Pembleton replied, “Heartless would be carving him up as food. But since
we don’t know what killed him, we can’t risk it.” He pulled the flap of
Crichlow’s bedroll over the dead man’s face. “After we put him outside,
we should break down everything but the main shelter and get ready to
travel. We need to be on the move by daybreak tomorrow.”

“So soon?” asked Graylock.

“We’re losing light every day, sir,” Pembleton said. “At this rate,
we’re looking at God only knows how many months of night, starting in
just a couple of weeks. If we aren’t floating to warmer climes by
then…we’re finished.”

 

A few days later, during their journey south, the survivors passed
another interminable night huddled for warmth inside a crude shelter,
which they had insulated from the wind by burying it inside a snow drift.

Rows of metal poles and sheets of taut fabric lashed together kept their
fresh excavation from imploding on them while they slept. It didn’t keep
the cold out, though. Drafts of air so frigid that they felt like razors
slipped through gaps in the shelter and always seemed to find Kiona
Thayer, no matter how deep in the huddle she hid herself.

Tucked in that cluster of bodies, hidden in the dark, she stayed close
to Karl Graylock, her fellow officer. She relied on him not just for
heat but to act as a barrier between her and the MACOs, whom she still
viewed with anger and anxiety.

Though she had never been attracted to Graylock, the tickle of his beard
on her shoulder was a comfort as he wrapped himself around her. She
dreaded awakening each morning to another day in exile with Pembleton
and Steinhauer. At night, she dreamed of the only thing she truly cared
about any longer: Earth, home soil, so far away now, farther than she’d
ever imagined it would be.

Memories of Earth haunted Thayer’s every waking moment, so she tried to
spend as much of her time as possible asleep. Growing up in Québec, she
had often thought of herself as being acclimated to the cold, perhaps
even impervious to it. This world’s arctic circle had taught her
differently. Now the bitter wind was the enemy, and sleep’s gray realm
was her only haven from the constant discomfort of numb fingers and toes.

Some of her dreams took her to tropical locales; others put her fireside
in her father’s home, outside Montréal. She often dreamed of being back
aboard the Columbia or in training on Earth or reliving her first day on
campus at Dartmouth. Sometimes she was young again, and sometimes she
was her current age but revisiting a past chapter of her life, like a
tourist.

The one detail that was consistent in all her dreams, however, was that
her left foot was whole. And that made it all the more terrible to
awaken to her scarred, mangled extremity, which now required mechanical
reinforcement.

She was running through tall grass in a Vermont apple orchard with her
older sister, Winona, when a hated voice shattered the moment. “Up and
at ’em,” Pembleton barked, his baritone voice filling the tent. “Only
five hours of light today! We can’t waste a second of it. Everybody up!
Let’s go!”

Québécois epithets flew to her lips and no further.

Breakfast barely qualified as a meal. Steinhauer lit a small fire to
reheat some weak broth they had saved from their last boiled rodent of
several days earlier. They also drank as much wretched bark tea as they
could swallow, because Graylock had noted that Crichlow, who had made a
point of spurning the foul-tasting beverage, had been the one to grow
sick and die.

“No more,” Steinhauer said after half a cup. “One more drop, and I swear
I’ll vomit.”

“Drink it,” the engineer said. “Quinine tastes terrible, too, but it
helped people fend off malaria.”

“I think you only make us drink this piss to take our minds off the
cold,” Thayer said between lippursing sips.

Graylock smiled at that. “Is it working?”

“No,” she said.

Minutes later, all traces of their camp had been cleaned up, stowed
away, and hefted onto their backs for the continuing march toward the
equator. Steinhauer returned from checking and collecting the traps,
which he put out each night in the hope of snaring a few more small
rodents to sustain them another day. That morning, unfortunately, he
returned empty-handed. He packed away the traps, and Pembleton led the
team onward, into a landscape concealed by dense, spinning flurries of
falling snow.

The quartet moved in single file, with the three men taking turns as
trail breakers, sometimes in shifts as short as five minutes. Thayer
slogged along behind them, doing her best to keep up but knowing full
well that she was slowing them down.

The survivors hugged the coastline rather than try to scale the rugged
slopes and peaks of the barren arctic landscape. As a result, their
journey often seemed to entail long periods of little to no forward
progress, as they trekked parallel to their course, and occasional
periods of backtracking, when the shoreline switched back around one
body of water or another.

A few hours out of camp and less than two hours shy of nightfall, they
found themselves circumnavigating a frozen, narrow fjord. When it was
Graylock’s turn to take the lead, he started breaking a trail across the
ice sheet.

Pembleton shouted ahead, “Lieutenant! What the hell are you doing?
Trying to get us killed?”

“It’s less than a kilometer across,” Graylock said. “But it’s got to be
at least nine kilometers long. It’ll take hours to go the long way
around, but if we take the shortcut, we can reach those trees and still
have time to set traps before dark.”

Despite the fact that Pembleton was swaddled in layers of fabric that
looked like a portable tent, his contemptuous slouch was easy to detect.
“That’s a saltwater fjord, Lieutenant,” he said. “There’s no guarantee
it’s frozen solid all the way across or that the ice is thick enough to
hold your weight. If you feel like taking a bath in water that’ll shock
you dead in less than thirty seconds, be my guest, sir.”

Graylock reversed course with a series of kick turns and waved Pembleton
ahead on the original trail around the fjord. “Lead on, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” Pembleton replied, moving down the desolate shoreline,
breaking a trail through the snow with smooth but flagging strides. On
either side of the fjord, high cliffs of bare, black rock ascended into
the violet sky.

From the back of the line, Steinhauer said, “I would give anything to be
on Earth right now.”

“Right now, it’s around 4500 B.C.,” Pembleton replied as he fell back
behind Thayer and let Graylock take the lead again. “You’d be living in
the Neolithic period.”

“That’d be fine,” said Steinhauer. “Someone in Sumer is inventing beer
about now.”

“That’s right!” Graylock hollered back from the point position. “Mein
Gott, I could use a beer.”

Trying to distract herself from the acidic churning and pathetic
growling of her empty stomach, Thayer asked, “What about agriculture and
written language? The Sumerians are inventing those about now, too.”

Her observation drew a few moments of thoughtful silence from the three men.

Then Steinhauer replied, “I’d rather have the beer.”

“And some barbecue,” Pembleton said.

Graylock added, “With a side of beer.”

“Well,” Thayer said, rolling her eyes, “I’m happy to see we at least
have our priorities straight.”

 

Lerxst had sacrificed the corporeal bonds of his body to preserve the
integrity of his memory and awareness—and now those, too, were starting
to slip forever from his grasp.

I’m losing myself, he shared with the gestalt.

Their communion had been winnowed to four voices. Of these, Lerxst was
the strongest, with only Sedín as his close equal. Ghyllac and Denblas
clung to vestiges of coherence, but their thoughts had become
increasingly disjointed as they faded.

All four knew that they were dim shadows of their former selves, but the
quality of their past lives now eluded them. They wandered together
through lightless catacombs of twisted metal and shattered stone, always
near one another, like bodies united in deep space by a weak but
undeniable gravity.

This place had a name, Denblas thought, disguising his plea for
information in the form of a declaration.

His query lingered in the gestalt, but none of the four minds submerged
into the bond could produce the answer. Denblas repeated himself. This
place had a name.

So did we, once, replied Ghyllac. It’s lost now, like us.

All of them felt the depths of history yawning below them, but not one
of them could recall the events that had delivered them to this gray
purgatory. They were simultaneously one in the gestalt and four in the
world but only to the extent that they still sensed themselves as
separate beings. Lerxst tried to mask his shame as he realized that
although he remembered his name, the specifics of what he had considered
his identity had become fragmented and opaque in his memory.

He wondered with naked confusion, Who are we?

Sedín answered his question with a question: What are we?

We are those who are and that which is, Denblas added.

It was an evasion. The four knew that they were the same, but none could
name their species. They defined themselves now in the hollow context of
knowing what they weren’t.

A swift current of images and sounds surged through the gestalt. Lerxst
couldn’t tell if they were real memories or delusions, snippets of
history or the products of a deranged imagination. They all were rooted
in the physical and tangible, the empire of crude matter and the
illusion of solidity, and they ran like a river flowing into a canyon,
like vast jets of energy sinking into the insatiable maw of a singularity.

Light and sounds, artifacts of the tangible, passed from the grasp of
the gestalt and vanished into the darkness.

Then came a terrible moment of clarity, as one cluster of catoms and
then another released their energy reserves to bolster the gestalt. Our
core catom groups are breaking down, Lerxst realized. Our memories are
collapsing into entropy.

We’re really dying, Sedín replied.

Deep, flat notes of dismay droned in the gestalt, and Lerxst extended
himself to call for harmony’s return. Then he sensed the diminished
scale of the gestalt, and he understood the cost at which his clarity
had been purchased.

Denblas was gone.

Lerxst and Sedín both seemed to have been fortified by their
consolidation with their lost colleague, but Ghyllac appeared to have
reaped no benefit from Denblas’s demise.

Worse still, Ghyllac was no longer Ghyllac.

Where the essence of Ghyllac once had blazed, there was now a dark
spiral of confusion, a mind trapped in the endless discovery of the
present moment, with no sense of its past and no anticipation of its
future. The echo of Ghyllac would spend the rest of its existence
imprisoned in a limbo of the now.

Without thought, without memory, his catoms serve no true purpose, Sedín
lamented. They are expending energy without gain.

The implications of her statement troubled Lerxst. Is it our right to
decide when his existence no longer has meaning?

He doesn’t even have existence, Sedín argued. Without the mind, his
catoms are an empty machine. A waste of resources. If you won’t take
your share of their reserves, I’ll take them all.

Lerxst understood the deeper threat implicit in her words. If she
absorbed all of the residual energy from Ghyllac’s catoms, it would
reinforce hers to a level of stability much greater than his own.
Inevitably, he would find his catoms depleted far ahead of hers, and the
only logical choice would be for her to consolidate his remaining energy
into herself. He could either hasten Ghyllac’s premature demise or else
guarantee his own.

Very well. We’ll consolidate his energy reserves into our catoms. There
was no masking the deep regret he felt at his decision. They weren’t
killing Ghyllac, whose essence had already been lost, but taking the
last of his catoms’ power made Lerxst feel as if he had crossed a moral
line.

Were we ever friends, Sedín?

I don’t remember. Why do you ask?

Lerxst hesitated to continue his inquiry. When you and I begin to
fade…will you consolidate me as you did Ghyllac?

As we did Ghyllac.

I will concede your semantic point if you’ll answer my question. Are we
mere fodder to each other? Will we meet our end united or as mutual
predators?

We’ll improvise, Sedín said. It’s how we survive.

But what of the moral considerations?

They need to be secondary, Sedín replied. All that matters is that we
survive until the humans return. Then we shall bond with them, for their
own good. Their synaptic pathways can be easily mapped and made
compatible with our needs. As soon as it becomes practical, we will
facilitate their journey toward this planet’s populated middle latitudes.

You underestimate the humans’ natural antipathy for enslavement, Lerxst
warned.

And you overestimate the strength of their free will.

He suspected that only bitter experience would disabuse Sedín of her
illusion of omnipotence. Heed me, he told her. If you try to yoke them,
they will fight back.

Let them, Sedín replied. They will lose.

 

It had been hours since Karl Graylock had been able to feel his toes.
For a long time, they had been painfully cold, and then for a while, he
had been aware of their being numb. Now they felt like nothing at all.
The harder he tried not to think about frostbite, the more he dwelled on it.

Pembleton fell back from the trail-breaker position and slipped into the
line behind Graylock, who now had Steinhauer’s back to focus on. One
shuffling, ankle-rolling step followed another. Graylock’s stride was
well practiced after only five short days of snowshoeing along the
island’s coast. He no longer needed to look at his feet while he was
slogging forward against the ice pick wind and through hypnotic veils of
falling snowflakes.

He had started the journey with an appreciation for the austere beauty
of the empty arctic landscape, but he had since come to think of it as
the proscenium to his traveling misery show. To one side lay low hills
blanketed in snow, stretching away in gentle white knolls toward the
distant mountains. On the other side was a sheer drop down fearsome
cliffs of black rock, to a relentless assault of surf against the
sawtoothed, obsidian boulders that jabbed up from a sea as black as the
night sky.

Steinhauer led the foursome up a gradual rise. He kicked with the sides
of his snowshoes and made a diagonal stair in the snow. After a few
minutes, he began to fall backward. Graylock caught him and heard the
labored gasps of the younger man’s breathing. “It’s all right, Thom,” he
told the private. “It’s my turn to break. Fall back a while.” Graylock
handed the man into Pembleton’s grasp and then stepped forward.

Each sideways chop at the hillside buried Graylock’s feet in snow, which
he carefully stamped down to make solid steps for the others. It was
harder than regular snowshoeing, and for much of their journey they had
avoided it when possible, opting for the most level paths they could
find. As they’d neared the far southern end of the island, however, they
had been forced to climb several shallow inclines to avoid plunging over
sheer cliffs and to detour around impassable formations of rock that cut
across the beaches and extended out into the turbulent sea.

Each step brought Graylock closer to the top of the hill and revealed
more of the vast seascape that lay beyond. The ocean at night was pitch
dark. The jagged cliffs on his right became more gradual, and ahead of
him they descended in a steep but no longer vertical drop to the water.

Then he stepped over the crest and beheld the easy slope down to the
rocky beach. The snow thinned and then ended roughly sixty meters before
reaching the water, revealing miles of black sand. Majestic rock
formations knifed up from the sea less than a hundred meters from shore.
Great swells of black water curled around the rocks like ripples in a gown.

The vista possessed a stark beauty—but it was a wasteland.

And, as Graylock had feared, there wasn’t a tree in sight.

He felt light-headed. Was it from not having eaten for three days? Or
was it the result of six days of forced march over snow and ice, through
an unforgiving wilderness? He reasoned it was probably both, colliding
inside his frostbitten body and overwhelming his already sapped will.

The rest of the team huddled close beside him. They all stared at the
wind-blasted shoreline. Coal-black sand and stones were lapped by inky
waves, which broke into gray rolls of foam. Then a fierce wind blasted
stinging particles of sand and ice into their faces, and the survivors
shuffled clumsily about-face to protect themselves from the scouring gales.

Graylock said, “We have to go back.”

“We’re not going back,” Pembleton said. “We have to go forward, across
the water, or we’ll die.”

With a sweep of his arm toward the beach, Graylock snapped, “What am I
supposed to build a raft from, Gage? Rocks? At least when we were on the
mountainside, there were trees.”

Thayer snapped, “Then why didn’t we build the raft there?”

“Because the goddamned fjords are frozen!” Graylock stopped himself. He
took a breath and said to Pembleton, “Even if we make it back to Junk
Mountain, we’re stuck until spring.”

Pembleton’s voice started out soft and grew louder as he repeated,
“No…no…No…NO!” Overcome by frustration, he spun away from the group,
then pivoted back. “Don’t you get it?” He made wild gestures with his
outstretched hands. “We have to go forward! It’s our only chance. We
won’t make it to spring—not here and not on the mountain.”

“Not without help,” Graylock said.

“Tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying,” Pembleton said.
“Are you suggesting we bond with the Caeliar?”

Graylock hunched his shoulders and lifted his hands in a plaintive
gesture. “What choice do we have, Gage? You said it yourself, we won’t
make it to spring. And I’m telling you, we can’t sail until the ice
thaws. Remember what Lerxst said. The catoms would help us survive
famine and fight off disease.”

“Only if we’re lucky,” Thayer cut in. “If we’re not, we’ll either end up
dead or brain-fried. Is that what you want, Karl?”

“Dammit, be logical about this,” Graylock said. “If we don’t bond with
the Caeliar, we’ll die for certain. If we do, we might die anyway, just
differently. But there’s also a chance we could live. We’d be changed,
but at least we’d be alive. Don’t you think that it’s at least worth
taking the risk?”

Pembleton and Thayer exchanged dubious glances, and then each gave
Graylock a grudging nod of agreement. The engineer looked around for
Steinhauer, to confirm his assent to the plan.

The first things Graylock saw were Steinhauer’s abandoned snowshoes. His
eyes followed the deep, ragged bootprints that led away from them down
the slope. One discarded layer of Caeliar fabric after another lay
beside Steinhauer’s trail. Then he saw Steinhauer, who was halfway to
the water’s edge, peeling off his protective layers of clothing as he went.

“Scheisse,” Graylock muttered. “Steinhauer’s losing it.” He stumbled
over his own feet in his haste to turn around, and Pembleton and Thayer
did little better. By the time they began breaking their own haphazard
trails down the slope, Steinhauer had almost reached the water. He had
stripped to his jumpsuit and boots, and he carried his phase rifle in
one hand.

“Thom, stop!” called Pembleton as he charged downhill. “Put your gear
back on, Private! That’s an order!”

Steinhauer ignored them and kept walking toward the sea.

The trio in pursuit kicked free of their snowshoes when the snow became
too shallow to hold a trail. Graylock and Pembleton sprinted the rest of
the way to catch up to Steinhauer, while Thayer limped awkwardly far
behind them.

The two men were still several meters away from catching Steinhauer when
the private turned and aimed his rifle at them. “Don’t come any closer,”
he said.

Pembleton and Graylock slowed to a careful walk. “Calm down, Thom,” the
sergeant said. “We just—”

The phase rifle blast struck the ground at their feet with a deafening
shriek. Both men recoiled and halted. Behind them, Kiona slowed her own
approach and then stopped at a distance.

Standing ankle-deep in the frothing surf, Steinhauer looked like an
emaciated wild animal dressed in human clothing. His face was gaunt, and
his eyes, though sunken in their sockets, burned with feral desperation.
Spittle had turned to ice in his ragged beard whiskers. Behind massive
clouds of exhaled breath, he shivered violently, and his jaw chattered
loudly. The tips of most of his fingers were black and blistered with
frostbite almost to the first knuckle. Graylock was amazed the man could
still hold a rifle in his condition, never mind fire it.

“I won’t go back,” he said, his voice breaking into a near-hysterical
pitch. “I can’t. Too far. Too cold.” He shook his head from side to side
with mounting anxiety. “Can’t do it. Won’t.”

With slow, cautious movements, Graylock extended his open hand to
Steinhauer. “Thom, please. Put down the rifle, get dressed, and come
with us. We have to go back to the Caeliar. It’s the only way.”

“Not for me,” Steinhauer said.

In a fluid motion, he flipped the barrel of his phase rifle up and back,
held its muzzle inside his mouth with his right hand, and pressed down
on its trigger with his left thumb.

A flash of light and heat disintegrated most of his head.

The weapon fell from his hands. His decapitated body collapsed and fell
backward into the pounding surf.

Graylock and Pembleton stood in silence for a minute and watched the
waves wash over Steinhauer’s corpse. Then Pembleton waded out to the
body, retrieved the phase rifle and a few items from the dead man’s
jumpsuit, and returned. “We’ll collect the fabric he left behind on the
way down,” he said. “A few more layers might make the trip back a bit
less miserable.”

As he followed the sergeant back up the beach to their snowshoes,
Graylock felt a pang of regret at leaving Steinhauer unburied. He
interred his guilty feelings instead. With no food left and temperatures
dropping daily, he and the others could no longer afford to be
sentimental; death was a simple reality in the hard land of the winter.

Thayer picked up Steinhauer’s cast-off snowshoes. “These’ll make good
firewood,” she said. “Where should we make camp?”

“We should get moving,” Graylock said. “Right now.”

Thayer looked askance at him. “In the dark?”

“Might as well,” he said. “Because if my math is right…for the next five
months, dark is all we’re going to have.”



    2381



    15

Riker and Picard stood behind the desk in Titan’s ready room and watched
Admiral Alynna Nechayev on the desktop monitor. “We just broke through
the Borg’s jamming frequencies,” she said, her lean and angular features
now drawn and pale. “It’s confirmed. Deneva’s been wiped out. It’s gone.”

Maybe I did Deanna a favor by leaving her with the Caeliar, Riker
brooded. At least she’s safe from all of this.

“How much time until the Borg reach Earth?” asked Picard.

Nechayev replied, “About seven hours. Maybe less. Why? Have something up
your sleeve, Captain?”

“That remains to be seen,” Picard said. “But Captain Dax informs us she
has an idea in the works.”

“Say no more,” Nechayev said. “Unless you need us to play a part,
maintain operational security. You’ve all been given full presidential
authority to do whatever it takes. I’m counting on you two and Captain
Dax to make the most of it.”

Riker nodded. “Understood.” His door signal chimed softly. “If you’ll
excuse us, Admiral, Captain Dax has arrived.”

“By all means,” Nechayev said. “Nechayev out.”

Riker turned off his desktop monitor and said, “Come.”

The door sighed open. Dax entered, followed by Hernandez. The two women
seemed to project an aura of excitement mixed with apprehension. They
stopped in front of Riker’s desk. “We have something,” Dax said. “As
always, it’s a long shot.”

“Naturally,” Picard said. “What is it?”

Hernandez replied with confidence and élan, “Supersedure.”

The term meant nothing to Riker. He threw a confused glance at Picard,
who looked similarly befuddled, then said to Hernandez, “I’m afraid
you’ll have to explain that to me.”

“I was telling Erika about some of the oddities of Borg social
structures,” Dax said. “And she immediately drew the comparison to a
bees’ nest.”

Picard reacted with a dubious frown and said to Hernandez, “I trust
Captain Dax also explained that you’re not the first person to apply
that flawed analogy to the Borg.”

“Yes, she did,” Hernandez said. “But I still think you ought to hear the
details of our plan.”

“Hell,” Riker cut in, “I just want to find out what ‘supersedure’ means.”

Making small gestures as she spoke, Hernandez replied, “It’s a technical
term for the process by which bees replace old queens with new ones.”

“I got the idea when Erika mentioned her ability to hear the individual
drones,” Dax said. “That suggests that her link with the Borg is precise
and deep. If we could give her a way to talk to the Borg, maybe we could
use that ability to introduce her to the Collective as a new queen.”

Picard walked out from behind the desk to face the two female captains
more directly. “I’m hardly an expert on the subject of bees,” he said.
“But I seem to recall learning in elementary school that most beehives
react to the arrival of a strange queen by killing the intruder.”

“That’s why I won’t be presenting myself as a stranger,” Hernandez said.
“I’ll use my catoms to impersonate the Queen’s presence inside the
Collective.”

Riker replied, “Forgive me, but that sounds a bit vague. You said you’d
never encountered the Borg before. What makes you so sure you can trick
them into thinking you’re their queen?”

“Her voice,” Hernandez said. “It’s unique within the Collective, much
like the piping a queen bee uses to direct her hive. My catoms can
resonate on an identical frequency and make my thought patterns a dead
ringer for the Queen’s.”

Dax added, “There are two stumbling blocks to linking Erika to the
Collective without losing her to it. First, we’ll need to physically
patch her into a vinculum. Second, she’ll need a lot of raw power to
help her drown out the Queen’s voice.”

Hernandez continued, “The Aventine has more than enough power to help me
pump up the volume, so to speak.”

“Once she does, she can take control of the Borg armada, or part of it,
at least. Then she turns the Borg against themselves. It’d be like
someone with multiple personality disorder whose personas start
attacking each other.”

Riker grinned. “Leave it to a joined Trill with psychiatric training to
make that comparison.”

Returning his smile, Dax said, “Go with your strengths—that’s what my
mom always said.”

Picard paced past the two women, stopped, and turned back. “I admire
your proposal for its audacity, Captains, but I can’t endorse it.” He
looked Hernandez in the eye. “The technology you carry within your body
is too advanced, too potent, to risk letting it be assimilated by the Borg.”

The youthful woman blinked with confusion. “Assimilated?”

Captain Picard cast an accusing stare at Dax. “Didn’t you tell her what
the Borg do when they encounter new species and technologies?”

Dax averted her eyes and replied in a humbled tone, “I may have skipped
that part of Borg 101.”

Riker could see the strain on Picard’s face. Clearly, in the course of
trying to formulate an explanation of assimilation for Hernandez, Picard
was reliving the various ordeals he had suffered at the Borg’s hands. To
spare his former commanding officer that effort, Riker spoke up instead.

“With organic beings, it’s a physical process,” he said. “A Borg drone,
queen, or sometimes even one of their ships, injects its victims with
nanoprobes. These nanomachines bind with the subjects’ RNA and effect a
number of biological changes. More important, they suppress the
subjects’ free will and make them extensions of the Borg Collective,
which gains access to its drones’ memories and experiences. On a more
practical level, the Borg assimilate technologies and concepts by
stealing them.”

Hernandez nodded and looked somber. “In other words, the Borg take all
your best toys and make you a zombie.”

“Basically, yes,” Dax said.

Picard’s countenance was haunted by his memories. “It’s far more
terrible than anything you can imagine,” he said, though not to anyone
in particular. “Part of you remains trapped inside yourself. You become
a spectator to the hijacking of your mind and body. It’s like a
nightmare from which there’s no awakening. You see everything, and you
can’t even shut your eyes.”

A grim silence descended on the room.

Dax coughed to clear her throat. “Well, we weren’t planning on risking
Erika, for whatever that’s worth.”

“Any time you enter a Borg ship, it’s a risk,” Riker said. “And unless
the Aventine has another amazing innovation we don’t know about, I’m
guessing you’ll need to board a Borg ship to gain access to a vinculum
for Captain Hernandez.”

“You’re right,” Dax said. “I do plan on boarding a Borg ship to use its
vinculum. But first, I plan to have my people eliminate every drone on
the ship and neutralize its defenses. Erika won’t set foot on it till
it’s been secured.”

With his composure recovered, Picard replied, “That’s a tall order,
Captains. How do you intend to carry it out?”

Nodding toward Hernandez, Dax said, “Erika has a very keen sense for
where the Borg are. If we give her natural gifts a boost, she can help
us pinpoint a small scout cube or some other smaller Borg vessel
traveling alone.”

“I’d need energy and equipment to extend my range and enhance my
precision,” Hernandez said. “If I could make a direct interface with
Titan’s sensor module, it’d be a big help.”

Riker nodded. “All right. I’ll have my science officer help you set it up.”

Picard sounded doubtful and dismissive. “Even a brief infiltration of a
Borg cube is dangerous,” he said to Dax. “What, may I ask, is your plan
for capturing such a vessel?”

Dax’s voice took on an aggressive edge. “We’ll fight them with the same
tactics the Hirogen used on us,” she said. “Erika picks a target, and
the Aventine uses its slipstream drive to catch it. We fire a few
low-yield transphasic torpedoes to knock out their shields. Then our
strike teams beam in with projectile weapons, chemical explosives, and
energy dampeners replicated from the ones we captured. The Aventine
emits an energy-dampening field to suppress the Borg ship’s regenerative
capacity and defensive systems. Then my people go deck by deck, section
by section, and secure the cube. Once we eliminate all the drones and
access the vinculum, we send over Erika to do her thing—and coronate a
new queen for the Borg.”

The grimace on Picard’s face was sterner than any Riker had ever seen.
Picard heaved a deep sigh. “I can’t fault you for a lack of ambition,”
he said, “but I remain unconvinced. Your plan is beyond dangerous; it
runs the risk of granting the Borg access to a staggering new level of
technology. Furthermore, you grossly underestimate their speed and
ferocity.”

Riker thought he heard an undercurrent of fear in Picard’s voice, and he
wondered if perhaps the captain’s recent brief reassimilation had
inflicted deeper wounds than Picard let on.

Picard continued, “Put simply, Captain Dax, your plan is foolhardy.”

Undaunted, Dax replied, “It’s also our only chance.”

 

From the first moment Hernandez stepped inside Titan’s stellar
cartography lab, she was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. Standing
beside Melora Pazlar at the end of the widow’s-walk platform, she
watched the galaxy appear from the darkness and take shape in reduced
form all around them.

Pazlar freed herself from her metal motor-assist armature and said with
a smile, “When you’re ready, just give a push to come up and join me.”
Then she vaulted straight up, off the platform, with the same ease that
Hernandez herself had once taken for granted in Axion.

Hernandez hesitated to follow the science officer, unsure of how much
freedom of movement she would have in her new clothing. At Captain
Riker’s request, Hernandez had exchanged her Caeliar-made attire for the
current Starfleet duty uniform. The black jumpsuit with gray shoulder
padding and a burgundy-colored undershirt had appeared in her quarters’
replicator, complete with the rank insignia for a captain.

She took a breath, bent her knees a bit, and sprang with grace into the
open space above. It felt strange, she thought, to be back in a uniform
after eight centuries of wearing gossamer. She added it to the other
aspects of her past—sleep and hunger—that had caught up with her since
she’d fled her captivity in Axion. A lifetime of sensations had come
back to her in a matter of hours.

Within moments, she was beside Pazlar, who reached out and manipulated
elements of the simulation in much the same way that Inyx had plucked
stars from the darkness in the Star Chamber, during the century that
Hernandez had helped him seek a new homeworld for the Caeliar. I hope
he’s all right, she thought. The Quorum must’ve been furious at him for
letting me get away.

“It’s easy to configure,” Pazlar said. She raised an open palm and
extended it. As she drew her hand back, a low-opacity holographic
interface appeared. “You can alter any of the simulation parameters with
this. Just be careful if you start messing with the gravity.” She cocked
her head and gestured at the lower part of her body. “I’m a bit fragile,
you see.”

“Understood,” Hernandez said. She reached forward and expected to find
herself miming physical interaction with the projected controls.
Instead, when she pushed her fingers on the various padds and slider
panels, they met with the same resistance she would have expected of a
physical console. Muted feedback tones followed each of her inputs.
“It’s very intuitive,” she said.

“I know,” Pazlar said. “Xin—I mean, Commander Ra-Havreii—designed the
interface himself.” The slender blond Elaysian averted her eyes when
Hernandez glanced over at her.

“All right,” Hernandez said. “I’ve set up a signal feed on the same
frequency as my catoms. How do I activate the sensors?”

Pazlar pointed at a radiant blue panel on the interface. “Press that,
and the sensor module switches into high gear. You’ll be able to pull up
high-resolution scans on anything within a hundred light-years.”

“Then the only thing I still need is a simulated quantum field to power
my catoms.”

Nodding, Pazlar said, “We can’t generate even a fraction of the energy
that the Caeliar were making at New Erigol, but we’ll give you
everything we can.”

“It’ll be enough,” Hernandez said. “Axion had to sustain itself,
millions of Caeliar, and who knows what else. I just need enough to
boost my catoms back to full strength. A fraction ought to do the trick,
I’d think.”

The science officer tapped her combadge. “Pazlar to Ra-Havreii,” she
said, and Hernandez noted a subtle shift in the woman’s vocal
inflection—it became gentler and a bit higher. “We’re ready for the
simulated quantum field.”

“Perfect timing, Melora,” Ra-Havreii replied. “Stand by while I bring it
online…. Charging the deflector.” The channel closed with a soft double
beep a few seconds later.

Hernandez waited to feel the infusion of new strength. Several seconds
passed with no change. Pazlar filled the silence by explaining, “It
might take a few minutes to bring the main deflector up to full power as
a quantum-field generator.”

“I know,” Hernandez said. “I was the one who wrote the plan for the
reconfiguration.”

“Right,” Pazlar said, flashing an embarrassed grin. After another
awkward moment, she added, “I’m sure Commander Ra-Havreii was able to
make the changes. You can count on him.”

Overcoming her aversion to meddling in others’ business, Hernandez said,
“Commander, may I make an observation?”

“Of course,” Pazlar said.

“I’ve noticed that you and Commander Ra-Havreii seem to have a very
cordial working relationship.”

Immediately, Pazlar became tense and defensive. “So?”

“Don’t misunderstand,” Hernandez said. “I’m not making any assumptions
about your relationship with—”

“Xin and I don’t have a relationship,” Pazlar said. “We’re just friends.”

Unable to suppress a knowing smile, Hernandez replied, “If you say so,
Commander.”

Pazlar crossed her arms and spent a moment looking flustered. “All
right, there was one time when he tried to kiss me, but it didn’t
happen, and it was all a big misunderstanding—just crossed wires, you
know? It didn’t mean anything.”

“Forget I mentioned it,” Hernandez said. “It’s none of my business,
anyway. Sorry I pried.”

Apparently unwilling to drop the subject, Pazlar added, “I made it very
clear that I don’t feel that way about him.”

“No doubt,” Hernandez said.

A fresh silence yawned between them. Then came Ra-Havreii’s voice,
filtered through the overhead comm. “Engineering to Pazlar. Quantum
field stabilizing at full strength…now.”

Again, Hernandez opened her senses to the state of the local ambient
energy potential. She was rewarded by a flood of strength and focus as
her catoms pulsed with renewed vigor. Nodding to Pazlar, she said, “I’m
ready.”

“Sensors online and ready,” Pazlar said. “The system’s all yours now,
Captain.”

Hernandez closed her eyes and felt a rush of raw data from Titan’s
sensors being transmitted directly to her catoms, which processed all of
it and accelerated her synapses to keep pace. Then she extended the
range of her senses and let herself hear the intimidating chorus of the
Borg Collective.

Millions of voices—some near, some distant. Clustered in groups as small
as three or as large as thousands, a roar of minds yoked to the will of
something that included them all and yet remained apart from them, aloof
and domineering. She fought to parse their cacophony and subdivide it
into manageable blocs. With effort, she began to separate them by
sectors, and then by subsectors, and then by individual ships.

“I hear them,” she said to Pazlar. “I see them.”

Holding the snapshot of the Borg armada in her mind, she began to search
it; she combed it for lone vessels, stragglers, outriders, or scouts.
Her mind raced from one target to the next, flitted from sector to
sector at the speed of thought.

Each time she found a promising lead, she targeted Titan’s sensor module
on the coordinates that she heard echoing from that link in the
Collective. Her first effort found a trio of small Borg
vessels—ostensibly a light attack group but still too formidable for the
Aventine to challenge alone. Several subsequent leads proved to be
massive assault cubes en route to major star systems; such targets would
be too heavily manned by drones for the Aventine’s limited strike forces
to overcome.

Then she found it. The ideal target.

Zeroing in with Titan’s sensors, she said to Pazlar, “Have a look at
this.” The simulated galaxy expanded and flew away as the holographic
projection enlarged a detailed sensor scan of a small Borg probe,
traveling alone. “I’m not reading any major targets along their
trajectory,” Hernandez said. “They might be a long-range recon vessel.”

Pazlar summoned a new command interface and made a quick evaluation of
the ship. “Definitely a scout of some kind,” she said. “Probably no more
than fifty to a hundred drones onboard. What are their coordinates?”

“Bearing zero-one-three, approximately ten-point-five light-years from
Devoras.” She felt a profound trepidation as she added, “Inside Romulan
space.”

Grinning, Pazlar replied, “Good thing they’re on our side in this fight.”

That’s right, Hernandez reminded herself, ashamed that she had succumbed
so easily to old fears. Things changed while I was gone. The Romulans
aren’t the biggest problem anymore.

Pazlar tapped in more commands. “Target locked in,” she said. “Sending
its coordinates to the Aventine.” A moment later, she added, “Aventine
confirms: target acquired.”

“Now all we have to do is go get them,” Hernandez said, with a bit more
brio than she had intended.

Throwing a cautionary look in her direction, Pazlar said, “I wouldn’t be
in such a hurry to meet the Borg if I were you. Finding them was easy.”
She eyed the image of the black ship in front of them and frowned. “What
comes next won’t be.”

 

The transporter beam released Hernandez as her new surroundings took
shape around her. The transition felt smoother than it had in her days
aboard the Columbia. It helped that the process was faster, but she was
certain that the confinement beam had been made less oppressive—a change
for which she was grateful.

Freed from its paralyzing hold, she found herself in a transporter room
aboard the Aventine. Several security personnel from Titan had beamed
over with her. Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa and Senior Petty Officer Antillea
flanked Hernandez, and Lieutenant Shelley Hutchinson stood behind her.
The Andorian and the reptilian female, whom Hernandez had been told was
of a species known as the Gnalish, stepped off the padds. Hutchinson, a
trim woman with short brown hair, walked around Hernandez and followed
her colleagues out of the transporter room.

Waiting to greet Hernandez were Captain Dax and a lean man with short
black hair whose face was defined by parallel drooping ridges on his
cheeks. “Captain Hernandez,” Dax said. “Welcome aboard the Aventine.
This is my second officer and senior science officer, Lieutenant
Commander Gruhn Helkara.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Hernandez, stepping down from the platform.
She offered her hand to Helkara, who shook it. “Pleasure to meet you,
Mister Helkara.”

“Likewise, Captain,” Helkara said with a polite nod.

“Well,” Dax said, “I hate to beam and run, but I need to get back to the
bridge. Mister Helkara will escort you to main engineering, where you
can offer Chief Engineer Leishman the benefit of your technical expertise.”

Hernandez nodded. “I understand, Captain. Thank you.”

Dax smiled, turned, and left the transporter room. Hernandez reflected
on how much Dax reminded her of herself at that age, as a young starship
captain, brimming with confidence and as-yet-unrealized potential.

Behind Hernandez, the transporter’s energizer coils came alive with a
deep hum. She pivoted on her heel and saw five more shapes materialize:
two human men, a Vulcan woman, and a male and a female of different
species that she didn’t recognize. All carried imposing-looking rifles
and other combat equipment.

Helkara touched Hernandez’s elbow to guide her. “Captain,” he said. “We
should go. Lieutenant Leishman is waiting for us.”

“Of course,” Hernandez said. She followed him out of the transporter
room into the corridor. Security personnel, attired in padded and
reinforced all-black uniforms, moved past her and Helkara in groups.
Most of them were armed with the same rifles that she had seen in the
hands of the officers who had beamed in after her. A few carried
stockier weapons with wide barrels. As she and Helkara turned a corner,
they passed a squad of security personnel who were field-stripping their
weapons, making modifications to them, and reassembling them.

She and Helkara stepped inside a turbolift. “Main engineering,” he said
as the doors closed. A high-pitched pulsing hum accompanied their descent.

“Your people look pretty confident with those rifles,” she said. “But
how’re they going to fire them once they’re inside a dampening field?”

“TR-116s fire chemical-propellant projectiles ignited by a mechanical
firing pin,” Helkara said. “Gas-capture recoil drives the reloader at a
rate of nine hundred rounds per minute. No power needed except a pull on
the trigger.”

“In other words, they’re primitive firearms.”

“I wouldn’t call them primitive. More like a modern update of a classic
idea. They were designed during the Dominion War for use against the
Jem’Hadar, but they didn’t make it much past the testing phase until the
Tezwa conflict.” He caught her quizzical glance and grinned sheepishly.
“None of what I’m saying means anything to you, does it?”

Hernandez grinned. “Not really, no.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Maybe when this mess is over, we can hook you up with
some light reading to bring you up to speed.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said.

The turbolift stopped, and the doors opened on the manic activity of the
Aventine’s main engineering deck. Helkara led Hernandez into the middle
of the commotion. Sparks fell from upper levels around the warp core as
critical components were welded back into place, and the bulkheads were
lit by infrequent flashes of acetylene light. A dozen discussions—some
between people in the compartment, some over the comms—overlapped
beneath the low-frequency throbbing of the antimatter reactor.

In an alcove opposite the warp core, a group of engineers were gathered
around a hip-height table of control consoles. At the far end was a
young, brown-haired human woman doling out assignments. “Selidok, tell
your team they have ten minutes to finish adjusting the yields on the
warheads,” she said to an alien who wore a mist-producing apparatus in
front of his nostrils. To a diminutive lieutenant who resembled an
upright pill bug, she continued, “P7-Red, we need at least twenty more
of those energy dampeners replicated and distributed, on the double.”
Turning toward a looming Vulcan man—Hernandez guessed the ensign was at
least 193 centimeters tall—the chief engineer said, “Navok, what’s the
status of the slipstream drive?”

“All components are operating within expected parameters,” Navok said.
“However, we continue to have difficulty predicting the phase variances.”

Hernandez blurted out, “You can control the pattern of the phase
variance by projecting soliton pulses ahead of you, inside the slipstream.”

Everyone at the table looked in Hernandez’s direction, and Helkara said
to the woman at the end of the table, “Lieutenant Leishman, allow me to
introduce Captain Erika Hernandez, our new technical adviser.”

Leishman’s reaction was barely noticeable. “All right,” she said to her
team. “You have your assignments. Navok, see if you can apply Captain
Hernandez’s suggestion for a soliton pulse.”

“Aye, sir,” Navok replied.

“Meeting adjourned,” Leishman said. The junior officers split up and
left the compartment. The chief engineer circled around the table to
greet Hernandez. “Captain. A pleasure.”

“Glad to be of service, Lieutenant.” Hernandez motioned toward the table
of consoles. “Care to show me your biggest technical hurdles?”

“Sure,” Leishman said. She turned to the console and called up several
sets of schematics on adjacent displays. “We have two small problems to
deal with. The first is that we need to shore up our transphasic
shielding to keep the Borg from slicing us in half before we hit them
with the energy dampener.”

Hernandez reached forward to input some commands. She paused before
touching the interface. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” Leishman said.

After centuries of dissecting and trying to improve on Caeliar
technology, Hernandez found it easy to analyze and reconfigure
twenty-fourth-century Starfleet software and hardware, which was much
simpler by comparison. She rewrote power-distribution algorithms and
adaptive shield-harmonic subroutines as if by instinct. By her
reckoning, she had, in a matter of seconds, advanced Starfleet defensive
technology by at least a decade.

She turned to the wide-eyed chief engineer and asked, “What’s your
second problem?”

Neither Leishman nor Helkara responded right away. They were both
mesmerized by the designs and formulas that Hernandez had crafted in
front of them. After a few seconds, Leishman grinned and snorted with
amusement. “Something tells me you’re gonna have a bright future at
Starfleet Research and Development, Captain.”

“We’ll see,” Hernandez said. Then she prompted Leishman, “Your second
‘small problem,’ Lieutenant?”

“Right,” Leishman said, calling up a new array of complex computations
on the tabletop’s assorted display screens. “We’re tracking the Borg
ship you located, but it’s pretty far away from here.” She directed
Hernandez’s attention to a specific equation. “The problem is one of
control. Once we engage the slipstream drive, we’ll catch up to the Borg
in a matter of minutes. But if we come out of slipstream too soon or too
late, we’ll be too far away to make a sneak attack. They’ll have time to
raise their defenses, and we might end up the hunted instead of the
hunter. Unfortunately, our sensors and conn weren’t made to drop in and
out of slipstream with that degree of precision.”

Hernandez studied the data on the screens and considered what Leishman
had said. “Yes,” she replied. “I see the problem.”

Leishman said, “Does that mean you can help us?”

“That depends,” Hernandez said. “Do you think you can persuade Captain
Dax to let me fly her ship into combat?”

The chief engineer threw a questioning look at Helkara, who smirked and
replied, “I think that can be arranged.”

 

Dax emerged from her ready room feeling charged and impatient. Captain
Picard had told her to have a plan before taking her ship into action;
with her plan in place, she wanted to be in motion, tearing through a
quantum slipstream for a rendezvous with a Borg ship whose minutes now
were numbered.

Taking her seat beside her first officer, she asked, “How much longer,
Mister Bowers?”

“Ten minutes at the most, Captain,” Bowers said. “We’re beaming over the
last of the reinforcements from Enterprise and Titan right now.”

She leaned closer to him and lifted her chin toward Erika Hernandez, who
was seated at the conn. In a whisper, she inquired, “How’s our new pilot
doing?”

“Fine, so far,” came Bowers’s hushed reply.

“Good,” Dax said. She swiveled her chair toward the tactical station,
where Lieutenant Lonnoc Kedair was working with an intense focus on her
console. “Tactical, report.”

The Takaran security chief snapped her head up and answered with poise
and calm, “Transphasic warhead yields adjusted for shield collapse only.
Our own shields have been updated to stay a few steps ahead of the
Borg’s weapons”—she nodded toward Hernandez—“courtesy of our guest.”

Dax grinned at Hernandez. “Sounds like you’ve had a busy morning, Captain.”

“Haven’t we all?” replied Hernandez.

Looking to ops, where Ensign Svetlana Gredenko was filling in for the
critically wounded Lieutenant Mirren, Dax asked, “Ops, do we still have
a solid lock on the Borg scout vessel?”

“Aye, Captain,” Gredenko said.

“Helm,” Dax said, “is the slipstream drive online yet?”

“Affirmative, Captain,” said Hernandez. “Main deflector is fully
charged, and chroniton integrator is online. Ready to engage on your order.”

A signal chirruped on Bowers’s armrest display. He silenced it with a
tap of his index finger and said to Dax, “The last of the strike-team
members are aboard, sir.” Something on his screen made him do a
double-take. “And you have a visitor.”

“A what?”

Bowers relayed the message to her command display, at the end of her
chair’s right armrest. He lowered his voice. “It’s Commander Worf from
the Enterprise, sir. He beamed aboard with the last squad of
reinforcements, and he’s waiting for you in transporter room one. Says
he won’t leave till he sees you.”

Dax stood from her chair. “Tell him I’ll be there in a minute. Until
then, hold the attack.”

“Understood,” Bowers said.

“You have the bridge, Commander,” Dax said.

She strode to the turbolift as quickly as she could without looking as
if she was in a hurry. The ride to Deck Three took only a matter of
seconds, and then she walk-jogged to transporter room one. The door slid
open ahead of her, and she entered to see Worf standing alone in front
of the transporter platform. In one hand he held his bat’leth, in the
other his mek’leth. He regarded her with quiet resolve. “I request
permission to join your attack on the Borg, Captain.”

Dax looked at the transporter operator, an imposing male Selay whose
cobralike cranial hood was marked by a colorful pattern that reminded
Dax of hourglasses. “Dismissed,” she said.

“Aye, Captain,” the Selay replied. He put the transporter console into
standby mode and made a quick exit. The door closed with a muffled hiss
behind him.

Dax walked slowly toward Worf as she asked, “Does Captain Picard know
you’re here?”

“Yes,” Worf replied. “He granted my request to volunteer for this mission.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Dax said. “Captain Picard doesn’t think
we should even attempt this mission. So why would he loan me his first
officer?”

Bristling at the naked suspicion in her tone, Worf broke eye contact and
lifted his chin in a display of defiant pride. “When it comes to
fighting the Borg, I am one of the most experienced tacticians in
Starfleet. Even if the captain does not approve of your plan, he wants
you to have the best possible chance of success.”

“Can I let you in on a little secret, Worf?” Dax smirked as he looked
back at her. “The way you lifted your chin and looked away just then?
That’s one of your tells. Every time you do that, I know you’re hiding
something.” The abashed look on Worf’s face—and the speed with which he
averted his fuming stare—told Dax she had scored a verbal direct hit.
“Why don’t you try telling me what you’re really doing here?”

Worf sighed and set his weapons on the transporter platform behind him.
“Captain Picard did ask me to try to change your mind about the attack.
He considers it a foolhardy effort.”

“And what do you think of it, Worf?” She tried to look into his eyes,
but he turned his head to show her his stern profile.

“What I think is not important,” he said.

“In other words, you agree with me, but you don’t want to dishonor your
captain by second-guessing his orders.” His silence told her more than
anything he might have said in response. “Let me ask you a question,”
she continued. “If we don’t take the offensive in this battle, what are
we supposed to do? If Captain Picard objects to my plan, what’s his?”

The Klingon’s prodigious eyebrows knitted together above the bridge of
his nose as he frowned in irritation. “The captain has not yet presented
his plan,” he said.

Dax reached out and placed her hand on his arm. “Let me save us both a
lot of talking, Worf. I’m sure that if you tried, you could give me a
dozen good reasons not to go forward with the attack, and I could give
you a dozen good reasons why I should. But in the end, it’ll all come
down to one simple fact: This is my command; I call the shots here.
Starfleet protocol demands that I show Captain Picard deference because
of his seniority, but if push comes to shove, he doesn’t outrank me,
Worf. I’m a captain, the same rank as him. This is my ship, and I am
taking her, and her crew, into battle. And that’s final.”

He looked at her with both respect and pride. “That is exactly as it
should be,” he said. “And I will be proud to serve under your command.”

“That’s kind of you to say, but you’re not coming with us,” Dax said.
“The Enterprise needs you more.”

Worf became bellicose. “Do not be foolish, Ezri. You will need every
advantage you can get against the Borg.”

“I already have an advantage,” she said with a broad smile. “I’m a Dax,
remember?”

A proud gleaming broke through his wall of gloom. “It is at times like
this that I see Jadzia in you,” he said. “Are you certain you will not
reconsider my petition?”

“Positive,” Dax said.

He stood. “Then I wish you success and glory in the battle to come.
Qapla’, Ezri, daughter of Yanas, House of Martok.”

She got up and stood in front of him. “Qapla’, Worf, son of Mogh.” Then
she wrapped her arms around his barrel-thick torso and hugged him with
all the strength she could muster. He returned her embrace for several
seconds, and then they parted.

He picked up his weapons from the platform, climbed the stairs, and
stepped onto a transport pad. Turning back, he said, “Victory against
these odds will be almost impossible.”

Dax narrowed her eyes. “I wouldn’t say impossible.”

Worf replied with a smirk, “I meant for the Borg.”

 

There were a thousand potential distractions on the bridge of the
Enterprise, but every time Captain Picard looked up from the padd in his
hands, his eyes found the blackened cavity of his ready room. Engineers
and mechanics carried out scorched bulkhead panels and the charred
remains of his chair and a crate’s worth of his personal effects, all
incinerated.

He fixed his eyes once more on the padd, which felt cold in his palm.
Updates from the Aventine confirmed that Captain Dax and her crew would
be ready to launch their bold—and possibly suicidal—attack on the Borg
within a matter of minutes.

It’s an audacious plan, he admitted to himself. I only wish it didn’t
seem so…futile. Perusing its details, he feared all the ways that it
could fail. If the Borg adapt to the transphasic torpedo, the Aventine
will be an exposed target, he brooded. Even if the strike teams board
the probe, there’s no guarantee they’ll prevail. And those crude weapons
are bound to produce friendly-fire casualties. He frowned as he scrolled
through a summary of the plan’s later phases. Worst of all, it could
backfire beyond our worst nightmares. If the Borg assimilate Captain
Hernandez, there’s no telling what kind of evil we might unleash on the
galaxy.

A female voice with a vaguely British accent interrupted his pessimistic
musings. “Excuse me, Captain.”

He looked up to see Miranda Kadohata, the ship’s second officer,
standing in front of him. “Yes, Commander?”

“The final roster of personnel who’ve transferred to the Aventine is
ready, sir,” she said. “I routed the report to your command screen.”

He nodded and started calling up the file. “Thank you.” After a few
moments, he realized Kadohata was still there, as if she was waiting for
something. He looked up at her. “Something else, Commander?”

She raised her eyebrows as she glanced away. The gesture accentuated the
normally subtle epicanthic folding around her eyes, emphasizing her
mixed European-Asian human ancestry. “Starfleet Command passed along a
suggestion from Seven of Nine, but I’m not sure you’d approve of it, sir.”

Her apprehensiveness piqued his curiosity. “Go on.”

“There is one weapon we haven’t considered using on the Borg,” she said,
“and maybe we should.”

“And that would be…?”

“A thalaron projector,” Kadohata said. “Like the one Shinzon had aboard
the Scimitar.”

Picard recoiled slightly. “A thalaron weapon,” he muttered. “Rebuilding
such a device would antagonize every power in the quadrant—an outcome
your predecessor died to prevent.”

“I’m aware of that, sir,” Kadohata said. “However, a cascading biogenic
pulse powered by thalaron radiation would, in theory, be able to destroy
the Borg’s organic components. Without their drones or the organic
portions of their ships—”

Picard cut her off with his raised hand. “Point taken, Commander,” he
said. Then the port turbolift door opened, and he saw Worf step onto the
bridge. “We’ll continue this another time.”

“Aye, sir,” Kadohata said, and she turned and walked back to ops. As
Kadohata settled in at her post, Worf offered a discreet nod of greeting
to Lieutenant Choudhury at tactical, then sat down in his chair beside
the captain.

“I talked to Captain Dax,” Worf said.

“And…?”

“She declined to approve my transfer,” Worf said. “And she is proceeding
with the attack.”

Picard breathed a disappointed sigh. “Of course she is.”

“You do not approve of her plan,” Worf said.

“It’s not up to me to approve or disapprove, Mister Worf,” Picard said.
“I simply lack Captain Dax’s confidence in her odds of success.”

Worf shifted his posture, straightening his back. “I reviewed her attack
profile,” he said. “It is bold, but I believe it has a reasonable chance
of securing the Borg probe.”

“Yes, but what then, Number One? Does pitting Captain Hernandez in
mortal psychic combat with the Borg Queen strike you as a viable
strategy? Or as yet another in a long line of hopeless delaying tactics?”

Undaunted by the captain’s pessimism, Worf replied, “I will not know
until I see how the fight ends.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, Mister Worf.” Picard frowned. “Are you
certain you tried every argument to dissuade Captain Dax from going
forward with this?”

“She did not give me the chance,” Worf said. In a more diplomatic tone,
he asked, “May I offer some advice, Captain?”

“By all means, Commander.”

“A lesson I learned while I was married to Jadzia remains just as true
today about Ezri: She is a Dax. Sometimes they do not think—they just do.”



    16

Ezri Dax took a breath and settled her thoughts. Within moments, she and
her ship would plunge headlong into the chaos of battle. She was
determined to take one brief moment of quiet before the storm in order
to steel herself for whatever followed.

Months earlier, when Captain Dexar and Commander Tovak had been killed,
Dax had stepped up to fill the void at the top of the Aventine’s chain
of command. That moment had inaugurated her captaincy. The one that was
about to unfold—an arguably insane, all-or-nothing assault on which
depended the survival of everything she had ever known—would define her
captaincy.

On the main viewer, stars stretched past, pulled taut by the photonic
distortions of high-warp travel.

She wiped the sweat from her cold palms across her pant legs and set her
face in a mask of resolve. It was time.

“Helm,” Dax said, “engage slipstream drive on my mark.”

Erika Hernandez keyed the commands into the conn and answered, “Ready,
Captain.”

Dax looked at Bowers. “Sam, tell the transporter rooms and strike teams
to stand ready. Tactical, raise shields and arm torpedoes.” She lifted
her voice. “Three. Two. One. Mark.”

Hernandez patched in the slipstream drive.

It was like being shot through a cannon of blue and white light or a
faster-than-light patch of whitewater rapids. A peculiar, quasi-musical
resonance filled the ship, like the long-sustained peal of a great iron
bell but without the note that started it ringing. Dax detected no real
difference in the sensations vibrating the deck under her feet, but
adrenaline and anxiety were enough to crush her back against her chair.

Then the rush of light became the black tableau of space, and at
point-blank range in front of the Aventine was the Borg reconnaissance
probe. As promised, Hernandez had guided them out of their slipstream
jaunt with surgical precision, into a perfect ambush position against
the Borg.

Dax sprang to her feet. “Fire!”

“Torpedoes away,” replied tactical officer Kandel.

Three electric-blue streaks arced toward the Borg ship and flared
against its shields, and a fourth sailed through with no resistance and
hammered the long, dark vessel amidships.

Kandel reported, “Direct hits! Their warp field’s collapsing!”

“Stay with them, helm,” Dax said, before she realized that Hernandez was
already compensating for the changes in the Borg ship’s velocity. Not
bad for a person who learned to fly starships in a different century,
Dax mused.

Hernandez matched the Borg’s course and speed almost perfectly, then
said, “We’re at impulse, Captain.”

“Strike teams, go,” Dax said.

Gredenko relayed the order from ops to the Aventine’s twenty transporter
sites, which included four upgraded cargo transporters and six
emergency-evacuation transporters. More than two hundred Starfleet
security personnel were, at that moment, being beamed inside the Borg
probe. If the estimate of the ship’s drone complement was accurate, her
people could expect to outnumber the enemy by a ratio of four to one.

Dax hoped that it would be enough, because once they were deployed,
there would be no reinforcements—and no turning back.

“Transports complete,” Gredenko said.

“Helkara, activate the dampener field,” Dax said.

The Zakdorn science officer keyed in the command and replied, “Field is
up and stable, Captain.”

She nodded. “Good work, everyone.”

Bowers watched Dax as she returned to her seat. Once she had settled, he
said, “Now comes the hard part: the waiting.”

The single drawback to Dax’s plan lay in the dampening field that the
Aventine was projecting toward the probe. By using the Hirogen’s
tactics, her crew had neutralized the Borg ship’s weapons, shields,
communications, and ability to repair itself. However, the field also
prevented contact with the strike teams inside the vessel, and it made
it impossible to beam them out or to send reinforcements. Unless and
until the strike teams gained control of the ship and established visual
contact with the Aventine, there would be nothing for Dax to do but sit
and wait—and keep a volley of transphasic torpedoes armed and ready to
fire, in case her captaincy’s defining moment turned out to be a
historic blunder.

 

The shimmering haze of the transporter beam dissolved into the darkness
of the Borg ship’s interior, and Lieutenant Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqabaa felt
her antennae twitch with anticipation.

Heat and humidity washed over her. “Flares!” she ordered, bracing her
rifle against her shoulder. “Arm dampeners!”

Ensign Rriarr moved half a step ahead of sh’Aqabaa and snapped off
several quick shots from the flare launcher mounted beneath the barrel
of his T-116 rifle. Pellets of compressed, oxygen-reactive illumination
gel made glowing green streaks across the deck, bulkheads, and overhead
of the Borg vessel’s frighteningly uniform black interior.

Clanging footsteps echoed around the strike team of Titan security
personnel, and the ominous footfalls grew closer. Through tiny gaps in
the ship’s interior machinery, sh’Aqabaa caught sight of drones
advancing on their position at a quick step. Red beams from Borg ocular
implants sliced through the dim and sultry haze. “Activate dampeners,”
sh’Aqabaa said.

She and the rest of her strike team keyed the replicated dampeners
attached to their uniform equipment belts. Senior Petty Officer Antillea
switched on several more of the small spheres and lobbed them down the
passageways and around corners. All around them, and everywhere one of
the spheres rolled, the faint lighting inside the scout ship faltered
and went black, along with any powered machinery or data relays.

The intimidating thunder of converging footsteps slowed. Looking out
through the vast empty space in the middle of the probe’s hull, toward
sections along its opposite side, sh’Aqabaa saw dozens more sites going
dark. Then the entire probe shuddered, and darkness descended like a
curtain drop.

“Seek and destroy,” sh’Aqabaa said, advancing toward the enemy, her
finger poised in front of her rifle’s trigger.

Then the Borg drones quickened their pace. In the uneven light of the
flare plasma, shadows both massive and misshapen crowded in her
direction. As she turned the corner to her right, Antillea was at her
left shoulder, while Rriarr and Hutchinson broke down the left corridor.
In unison, they opened fire.

Muzzle flashes lit the passageway like strobes, and the explosive
chatter of the rifles was deafening. High-velocity monotanium rounds
tore through the oncoming wall of Borg drones, spraying blood across the
ones advancing behind them.

Gunfire echoed from every deck of the ship.

Another rank of drones fell, holes blasted through their centers of
mass, vital organs liquefied by brutal projectiles. And still the next
waves never faltered, never hesitated. Not a glimmer of fear or
hesitation crossed their pale, mottled faces, and sh’Aqabaa knew they
would never retreat or surrender. This was a battle to the death.

Her rifle clicked empty. A push of her left thumb against a button
ejected the empty magazine as her right hand plucked a fresh clip from
her belt and slapped it into place.

In the fraction of a second it took her to reload, the drone in front of
her charged, grabbed the barrel of her rifle with one hand, and forced
it toward the overhead. His other hand shot forward, and sh’Aqabaa
caught the glint of emerald light off a metallic blade. She twisted from
the waist and pivoted, dodging a potentially fatal stab.

A staccato burst of gunfire flew past her and perforated the drone, who
let go of her rifle as he collapsed backward.

Sh’Aqabaa nodded her appreciation to the Bolian officer who had fired
the rescuing shot, then leveled her weapon and felled another rank of
drones.

Lines of tracer rounds overlapped in the deep green twilight. Drowned in
the buzzing clamor of the assault rifles were the distant alarums of
struggle and flight from other sections of the ship. Can’t let ourselves
get pinned down, sh’Aqabaa reminded herself. Have to keep moving.

She shouted over the buzz-roar of her rifle. “Second Squad! Advance,
cover formation, double-quick time!”

Behind her, the second six-person team that had beamed in with hers
hurried down a corridor perpendicular to the one in which she and the
rest of First Squad were fighting. Within seconds, the rapid clatter of
weapons fire reverberated from Second Squad’s new position.

Then came an agonized caterwauling from behind her. She glanced over her
shoulder. Rriarr had been impaled by a drone’s deactivated drill, which
had penetrated the Caitian’s armored combat-operations uniform by sheer
force.

A scaly hand shoved her to the right. “Move, sir!”

As she slammed against the bulkhead, sh’Aqabaa saw Antillea suffer a
killing jab that had been meant for sh’Aqabaa herself. A drone plunged a
stationary but still razor-sharp rotary saw blade attached to the end of
his arm into the Gnalish’s throat. Antillea twitched and gurgled as
blood sheeted from her rent carotid, but she still managed to squeeze
off a final burst of weapons fire into the drone. Then the reptilian
noncom and her killer fell dead at sh’Aqabaa’s feet.

The Bolian ensign tried to provide sh’Aqabaa with covering fire, but she
could see that he was beginning to panic.

Feeling the battle rage of her Andorian ancestry, sh’Aqabaa screamed a
war cry and resumed firing, eschewing safe center-of-mass shots for
single-round head shots. Each sharp crack of her rifle sent another
bullet through another optical implant, terminated another drone,
dropped another black-suited killing machine to the deck missing half
its head. Then her rifle clicked empty again. She ejected the exhausted
clip and jabbed the butt of her rifle into the face of the drone
charging at her, knocking him backward. Then she fired a round of flare
gel into the face of the next-closest drone.

It bought her only half a second, but that was all she needed. She
slammed a fresh magazine into her weapon and unloaded in three-round
bursts on the remaining drones in front of her. When her third clip was
empty, so was the corridor.

“Tane, collect Antillea’s belt,” sh’Aqabaa told the Bolian, who nodded,
despite his face being frozen in an expression of shock. Without a word,
he kneeled beside the slain Gnalish, removed her equipment belt, and
strapped it diagonally across his chest as if it were a bandolier.

On the other side of the intersection, Lieutenant Hutchinson was doing
the same for Rriarr. Her backup, a Zaldan enlisted man, stood sentry,
checking up and down the various passageways for any sign of new
attackers. The probe resounded with far-off gunfire.

Loading a fresh clip into her TR-116, sh’Aqabaa stepped beside
Hutchinson. “Ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Hutchinson said. “Now what?”

“Reload, regroup, and go forward,” said sh’Aqabaa.

Hutchinson and the others fell into step behind sh’Aqabaa, who led them
back up the main passage. Second Squad was several intersections ahead
of them, apparently having made quick work of whatever they’d
encountered along the way. “Check all corners,” sh’Aqabaa said to her
team. “Take no chances.”

Around the first few corners, they found only dead drones. As they got
closer to Second Squad, the area looked clear. The passage was open on
their left to a wide, yawning space in the middle of the probe. In its
center, on an elevated structure, was the secure area where the cube’s
vinculum was housed.

Ahead of sh’Aqabaa and First Squad, a spark flashed off the edge of the
partial left wall. She and the others pressed against the bulkhead to
their right and crouched for cover.

“Stray shot?” Hutchinson speculated.

“Maybe,” sh’Aqabaa said, peering into the shadows on the far side of the
ship. “Be careful, and watch the flanks.” She stood and led her team
forward to catch up with Second Squad.

A burning sledgehammer impact in sh’Aqabaa’s gut knocked her backward
before she heard the crack of gunfire or saw the flash of tracer rounds
slamming into her and her team.

Then she was on the deck, doubled over and struggling to hold her
abdomen together. A sticky blue mess like the core of a smashed kolu
fruit spilled between her fingers.

She heard heavy footfalls drawing closer, and she wondered if it was the
Borg coming to finish them off.

I won’t be assimilated, she promised herself. She fumbled with one
blood-slicked hand to pry a chemical grenade from her belt. She barely
had the strength to pull it free.

Dark shapes hove into view above her.

Sinking into a dark and silent haze, she decided it didn’t matter
anymore. It’s over, she thought. Her strength faded, and the grenade
slipped from her grasp, along with consciousness.

 

The oppressive monotony of the Borg probe’s interior was one of the most
disorienting environments Lonnoc Kedair had ever seen, and the
near-total darkness enforced by the energy dampeners only made it more
so. Every time her eyes began to adjust to the shadows, another blinding
flash of rifle shots or another stream of tracers made her wince and
turned the scene black again.

Marching footsteps echoed from a few sections ahead of her and her squad
from the Aventine. Red targeting beams from Borg ocular implants
crisscrossed erratically in the dark.

Kedair waved her squad to a halt with raised fist. At her back was
T’Prel, and across from them were Englehorn and Darrow. With quick,
silent hand gestures, Kedair directed Darrow and Englehorn to alternate
fire with her and T’Prel. Then she looked back and signaled ch’Maras and
Malaya to guard the rear flank.

She detached an energy dampener from her belt and primed it. Twenty-odd
meters away, at the intersection, a platoon of Borg drones rounded the
corner, spotted her and the rest of her team, and sprinted toward them,
firing green pulses of charged plasma from wrist-mounted weapons.

Their flurry of bolts dissipated into sparks as it made contact with the
outer edge of the squad’s dampening field. Then Kedair lobbed her spare
dampener at the drones, aimed her rifle, and waited for the Borg’s
roving ocular beams to go dark. They all went out at once, like snuffed
candles.

With a tap of her finger against the trigger, a stutter-crack of
semiautomatic fire dropped two drones to the deck.

T’Prel crouched beside Kedair and snapped off a fast series of single
shots, and each one found its mark at a drone’s throat, just above the
sternum.

The rear ranks of drones hurdled over their dead, in a frenzy to reach
the intruders.

Whoever said this ship would have only fifty drones was either lying or
out of their mind, Kedair decided as she fired the last few rounds in
her clip. There was no break in the buzz of weapons fire while she and
T’Prel reloaded; Englehorn and Darrow had started firing just in time to
overlap them.

Two more drones down. Four. Six. They kept getting closer.

Darrow set her weapon to full auto and strobed the corridor with a
steady stream of tracers. Then her clip ran dry.

Kedair and T’Prel snapped fresh clips into place. Able to count the rear
rank of drones in a glance, the Takaran security chief switched over to
full automatic and mowed down the final handful of Borg in the corridor.
She released the trigger as the last drone fell in a bloody, shredded
heap. The tang of blood and the acrid bite of sulfur hung heavily in the
sweltering darkness.

“Like clockwork,” Kedair said to her team. “Nice work. Let’s keep
moving. Malaya, ch’Maras, on point.”

The rear guard moved past Kedair and the others and advanced through the
passage, occasionally peppering the overhead or the bulkheads with
streaks of flare gel. As she followed them, Kedair retrieved her spare
dampener from the deck, deactivated it, and put it back on her belt.

At the end of a long corridor, they arrived at a T-shaped intersection.
The perpendicular passage was open on one side into the great empty
space that surrounded the vinculum, which was housed in an
hourglass-shaped structure at the probe’s center. Kedair stared out at
the other sections of the ship. From the highest deck to the lowest, the
interior of the probe was almost as dark as space, except where weapons
fire flashed white, explosions blossomed in crimson, or flares bathed
their surroundings in lime green. The constant, echoing rattles of rifle
fire reminded Kedair of the sound of construction work.

Movement caught her eye from the opposite side of the ship. A group of
black shapes moved in quick steps through the murky shadows, heading
straight toward a Starfleet strike team that had its back turned to the
ambush. Out of force of habit, Kedair reached toward her combadge before
she remembered that the energy dampeners had cut off all communications.
She considered shouting a warning to the other strike team, but then she
thought better of advertising her squad’s position, and she doubted that
her voice would carry all that distance with enough volume to pierce the
din of the ongoing battle.

There’s more than one way to get someone’s attention, she realized, and
she lifted her rifle, put her eye to the scope, and targeted a bulkhead
support beam near the Starfleet team. Her single shot pinged off the
metal beam, startling the other Starfleet team, whose sharpshooter
immediately turned his weapon toward her. Kedair looked up from behind
her scope and pointed emphatically in the direction of the coming ambush.

The sharpshooter and his fellows dropped into covered positions and took
aim at the approaching pack of drones. From a distance, all Kedair saw
was a blaze of tracers and the violent, twitching dance of the mortally
wounded. Then the Starfleet squad’s commander was up and shouting, but
Kedair couldn’t hear what the man was saying. The shooting came to an
abrupt stop, and the squad fired some flare rounds down the passageway.

As soon as the corridor brightened, Kedair saw what she’d done. A
bullet-riddled Starfleet strike team lay on the deck in a spreading pool
of its own blood. Four of her brothers and sisters in arms had been shot
down on her command.

Kedair wanted to scream as if she had been the one who was shot. Denial
and guilt collided in her thoughts while she stared wide-eyed at the
carnage she’d carelessly provoked.

“Sir,” T’Prel said, “we need to keep moving and clear this deck.” The
Vulcan woman’s flat, uninflected manner of speaking conveyed no sympathy
or pity for Kedair’s tragic mistake, and that suited Kedair perfectly.

“All right,” Kedair said. “Take point with Englehorn.”

T’Prel and the human man stepped away and continued the sweep through
the Borg probe. Kedair turned her back on the bloody consequence of a
moment’s error, already knowing she would bear its memory with shame
until the day she died.

 

Enterprise security officers Randolph Giudice, Peter Davila, Kirsten
Cruzen, and Bryan Regnis stood guard beside an opening that led to the
probe’s center. Two of their shipmates—an acerbic Vulcan woman named
T’Sona, and Jarata Beyn, a hulking Bajoran man whom Giudice had
nicknamed “Moose”—used compressed-gas tools to sink self-sealing anchor
bolts into a bulkhead opposite the gap.

Giudice winced at the series of sharp pneumatic hisses and reverberating
thunks of metal piercing metal. “Hurry up,” he said, impatient to be on
the move again.

He tried not to think about the fact that Dr. Crusher had told him he
shouldn’t be moving around at all for a few more days; it had been less
than ten hours since she and the rest of the Enterprise’s medical staff
had spliced him, Davila, and Regnis back together after their harrowing
fight with the Hirogen boarding party.

Hiss-thunk. Hiss-thunk. “Anchors secure,” T’Sona said.

Jarata threaded four thin but resilient cables through the eyes of the
anchor bolts, then affixed the cables to grapples cocked in the barrels
of four handheld launchers. “Ready to go,” he said to Giudice.

“Nice work, Moose,” Giudice replied. He slung his TR-116 across his back
and picked up one of the grapple guns. Davila, Regnis, and Cruzen did
likewise. “Time to go to work,” he said, bracing the device against his
shoulder. He shut one eye and peered with the other through the
launcher’s targeting scope. “On count of three. One…two…three.”

Four grappling hooks soared away through the bulkhead gap, down toward
the hourglass-shaped vinculum tower at the heart of the Borg ship. Each
grappling hook penetrated the black tower’s chaotic twists of exterior
machinery and stuck fast, directly above an entrance passage whose
access walkway had been retracted into the tower’s foundation.

Working quickly, Giudice and his team took up the slack from the cables
and secured them as tightly as they were able. “Moose, T’Sona, watch our
backs. We’re going in.” He locked a handheld pulley over his cable and
then attached himself to it with a safety line that was looped through a
carabiner on his belt. In a few seconds, the other three humans had also
hooked up their pulleys and safety loops to their zip lines.

“Now the fun part,” Giudice said with a smirk. Gripping his pulley with
both hands, he pulled himself up onto the ledge of the barrier that
stood between him and the great emptiness on the other side. He waited
until Davila, Cruzen, and Regnis were perched beside him atop the
barrier. “Three…two…one.”

They tucked their knees toward their chests and let gravity do the rest.
The incline was fairly shallow, less than fifteen degrees, but within
seconds, they were hurtling through open air at an exhilarating speed.
Deep aches and sharp pangs—aggravated by his sudden, extreme
exertion—reminded Giudice of the impaling wound he’d suffered hours earlier.

He stole a glance at Davila and saw that the older man, who had been
slashed across his chest, was also in considerable pain. I guess even
Starfleet medicine has its limits, Giudice mused. Only Regnis had
recovered fully from the Hirogen attack, despite having been garroted
nearly to death. Giudice scowled. Some guys have all the luck.

The vinculum tower loomed ahead of them. Giudice clutched the braking
clamp on his pulley and slowed his descent. On either side of him, the
rest of his team decelerated. Moments later, their feet made contact
with the tower, and they braked to a halt as they bent at the knees to
absorb the impact. With practiced ease, they detached their safety lines
and dropped down onto the platform in front of its recessed entrance.

Davila nodded at the bulkhead which had sealed the tower’s entrance.
“Looks like they were expecting us.”

“I guess we’ll have to knock,” Giudice said. “Cruzen, want to do the
honors?”

While her comrades took cover around the corners from the entrance
alcove, Cruzen moved forward. The petite, innocent-looking brunette
removed her backpack, opened it, and retrieved a peculiar demolition
charge. It was a malleable chemical explosive with a binary chemical
detonator. Though less powerful than Starfleet’s most advanced photonic
charges, it would suffice to open the passage—and it had the advantage
of being able to function despite the energy-dampening fields being
generated by the Aventine and its strike teams.

Cruzen primed the detonator and fixed the charge in place against the
barricade. She made a final tap of adjustment and then sprinted back
toward Giudice and the others. “Fire in the hole!”

She ducked around the corner with Giudice half a second before a massive
explosion spouted orange fire out of the alcove and rocked the entire
Borg probe. The cloud of fire and oily, dark smoke persisted for several
seconds. Aftershocks trembled the vinculum tower as the blast effects
dissipated.

“Hell of a boom, Cruzen,” Giudice said. “I hope the vinculum’s still in
one piece.”

“Should be,” she said. “I used a shaped charge.” She peeked around the
corner. “Looks okay from here.”

He heard the heavy percussion of approaching footsteps. “And what about
the drones guarding it?”

“They’re fine, too,” she said.

“Great.” He unslung his rifle and thumbed off the safety. In a smooth
pivot step, he rounded the corner and fired several controlled bursts
directly into the advancing company of Borg. There were so many, in so
dense a formation, that he didn’t need to aim. All he had to worry about
was running dry on ammo. Glaring left and right at his teammates, he
snapped, “What’re you waiting for? Invitations?”

As if suddenly remembering why they’d come, Davila, Regnis, and Cruzen
stepped out on either side of Giudice and formed a skirmish line. Davila
and Cruzen fired while Giudice reloaded, and Regnis held his fire until
he and Giudice could cover for the others. Working together, they cut
down rank after rank of drones. For a moment, Giudice almost felt guilty
about it, as if he and the others were shooting defenseless foes. Then
he remembered what any one of those drones would do if it laid hands on
him or any member of his team, and he resumed firing.

Regnis said to Giudice between blazing salvos, “Lieutenant? You know
we’re all down to our last two clips, right?”

Giudice shouted back, “Yes, Bryan, I see that.”

“Well, I still see a lot of drones coming, sir.”

“I see that, too, Bryan. Everyone, aim for effect!”

The team’s shots became more precise, but the attacking drones drew
inexorably closer. Then, all at once, there seemed to be only a
half-dozen of them left standing. Unfortunately, that was when all four
of the team’s rifles clicked empty.

The drones prowled forward, pale revenants of malice.

“Crap,” Giudice muttered.

Davila said, “We were close, too.”

“Too bad the Borg don’t give mulligans,” Regnis said.

Reaching toward her belt, Cruzen asked, “Grenades?”

“No,” Giudice said. “It might damage the vinculum.”

The six Borg were only a few meters away. Giudice and his team had
retreated to the edge of the platform and had nowhere left to go.
Giudice wished he could just shimmy back up the zip line. He glanced
upward and had an idea. “Everybody down!”

He used his weapon’s gel-flare attachment to paint all six advancing
drones with radiant green splatters, and then he hit the deck beside his
team.

Less than two seconds later, an overpowering barrage of sniper fire from
the distant sides of the probe tore through the six drones. As Giudice
had guessed, sharpshooters from other strike teams had wanted to help
him take the vinculum—they just hadn’t been able to identify their
targets in the dark.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Giudice said as he and the others stood
and eyed the captured vinculum. “Teamwork.”

 

Erika Hernandez manned the Aventine’s conn and eyed the black, oblong
vessel on the main viewer with dread and enmity.

Her hatred was fueled by what the probe and the other Borg vessels had
done at the Azure Nebula. She was beginning to understand the threat
that the Borg Collective posed to Earth and its Federation. She could
only hope that her wrath would be strong enough to overcome her fear
when the time came to add her voice to the Collective’s dissonant
chorus, in an effort to bring at least part of it under her control.

At the aft stations of the bridge, Captain Dax and her first officer,
Bowers, conferred in muted tones with the Aventine’s science officer,
Helkara. They and the other officers on the bridge all presented calm
appearances, but there remained a palpable undercurrent of tension. No
one wanted to speculate about what might be happening inside the Borg
ship. We’re all hoping for the best and expecting the worst, Hernandez
brooded.

An alert beeped on the ops console. Ensign Gredenko silenced it with a
feather touch and said, “The Borg ship just vented a small amount of
plasma.”

Dax and Bowers hurried back to the center of the bridge. “Magnify,” Dax
said.

The image on the viewscreen snapped to a close-up view of a small
exhaust portal low on the Borg ship’s aft surface. Another brief jet of
rapidly dissipating plasma appeared. Moments later, two short plumes
occurred in quick succession. “The delay between ventings has been
exactly five seconds,” Gredenko reported. The bridge crew watched with
anticipation. Then came three rapid spurts of plasma. “Five-second
delay,” Gredenko repeated. “Counting down to next venting.
Three…two…one.” Right on cue, a series of five fast plasma ejections
sprayed from the port. “Fibonacci pattern and timing confirmed.”

“All right,” Bowers said. “Mister Helkara, lower the dampening field.
Kandel, keep the shields up and the weapons on standby, just in case
it’s a trap.”

Helkara tapped at his console and replied, “Dampening field is down, sir.”

Immediately, Hernandez heard a few lonely Borg voices from aboard the
probe. They had been cut off from the roar of the Collective, and they
sounded disoriented and afraid. She stole nervous glances at the rest of
the bridge crew and quickly realized she was the only one who heard the
panicked drones.

“Lieutenant Kedair is hailing us from the Borg ship,” Kandel reported.

“On speakers,” Dax said.

Kandel replied, “Channel open.”

“Lieutenant,” Dax said, speaking up toward the comm, “this is Aventine.
Go ahead.”

“The Borg probe is ours, Captain,” Kedair replied. “The vinculum is
intact, and we’ve taken it offline while we make our modifications for
Captain Hernandez.”

Dax nodded. “Good work. Is it safe for her to beam over?”

“Not yet,” Kedair said. “There are still a few drones kicking around in
here, but we have them cornered. Once we finish them off, we’ll be ready
to proceed to phase two.”

“Well done,” Dax said. “Keep us posted. Aventine out.”

The channel closed with a barely audible click from the overhead
speaker. Hernandez’s thoughts drifted as she tuned out the bridge’s
muffled ambience of urgent business. Her mind reached out as if to the
Caeliar gestalt, the way it had in Axion when she’d eavesdropped on her
captors. Now, however, she was listening to the Borg drones on the probe
ship.

A bond was formed, a communion of sorts…and then she was seeing through
the drone’s eyes.

It was wounded and immobilized, lying on a deck inside the Borg ship. To
her eyes, the interior of the probe vessel looked more like an automated
factory than a starship. A celadon glow suffused its vast, deceptively
open-looking architecture.

She felt the drone’s labored breathing, the dull pain throbbing in its
abdomen, the quickened beating of its heart. Its thoughts were chaotic
and wordless, little more than surges of emotion and confusion. Then it
reacted to the presence of Hernandez’s mind with a desperate attempt to
merge. It reminded her of the way a hungry infant might reach for its
mother.

Its vulnerability and fear took hold of her, and she felt a deep swell
of compassion for the mortally wounded drone. Don’t be afraid, she
assured the drone, acting on a reflexive desire to provide comfort. The
drone relaxed; its pulse slowed. As its breaths became deep and long, it
began to feel to Hernandez like a psychic mirror that reflected her will
and desires.

Then a pair of Starfleet personnel turned the corner a few meters away.
They had weapons braced at their shoulders as they advanced on the
fallen drone.

Hernandez lost sight of the difference between herself and the drone.
Its fear became hers as it stared into the barrels of two rifles,
pointed at its face from point-blank range.

A shocked half-whisper passed her lips, and she felt the drone speaking
with her, as if they shared a voice: “No…”

The bond was broken in a crack of gunfire.

Slammed back into the solitude of her own consciousness, Hernandez
recoiled with a violent shudder. She gripped the sides of the console to
steady herself. Her eyes glistened with tears of anguish and fury, as if
she had just witnessed the slaughter of her own flesh and blood. She
knew that the Borg were still the enemy of humanity and its allies and
that the Collective had to be stopped, but now she was also convinced
that there was more to this implacable foe than she had been told—and
perhaps more than Starfleet and its allies realized.

A brown hand settled gently on her shoulder. Bowers leaned down and
asked quietly, “Are you all right, Captain?”

For a second, she considered telling him about her vision of the drone,
but then she thought better of it. These people are terrified of the
Borg, she realized. If they think I’m bonding with the enemy or
sympathizing with them, there’s no telling what they might do to me.

“I’m fine,” she lied. “Just nerves, I guess.”

Bowers nodded. “It’ll be a while before they’re ready for you on the
Borg ship,” he said. “Maybe you should go back to your quarters and rest
a bit before we start phase two.”

Hernandez forced herself to muster a grateful smile. “Sounds like a good
idea,” she said. She got up and walked to the turbolift as Bowers
summoned a relief officer to the conn.

Before she stepped inside the lift, Dax intercepted her. “I just wanted
to thank you for all your help today,” Dax said. “I doubt we’d have
succeeded without you at the conn.”

“You’re welcome, Captain,” Hernandez said. “Could I ask a favor in return?”

Dax’s eyebrows peaked with curiosity. “Depends. What’d you have in mind?”

“Seeing as you mean for me to pose as the Borg Queen in an hour or two,
it would help if I knew as much about the Borg as possible,” Hernandez
said. “Can you give me clearance to review all your files about them?
Including the classified ones?”

“Consider it done,” Dax said. “But be warned—there’s a lot of it. I
doubt you’ll get through it all in an hour.”

That drew a genuine smirk of amusement from Hernandez.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m a fast reader.”

 

Lonnoc Kedair’s first order after the Aventine deactivated its dampening
field had been to have wounded personnel beamed back to the ship for
emergency medical treatment.

Her second order had been to make sure every drone on the probe vessel
was “one-hundred-percent dead.”

“As opposed to mostly dead?” T’Prel had inquired with her trademark arid
sarcasm. Kedair had responded with a withering glare that made it clear
she was in no mood for witty repartee.

She stood in front of the vinculum, which a team from the Enterprise had
captured and taken offline. The vertical shaft was capped at its top and
bottom by diamond-shaped, emerald-hued polyhedrons. An intricate cage of
protective black metal surrounded each major component, and the core
shaft was surrounded by several rows of horizontal bands. It vaguely
reminded Kedair of a warp core on a Federation starship.

Irregular impacts echoed in the cavernous space outside the vinculum’s
tower. Kedair looked down the passage and through the blasted-open
entrance to see her people clearing the corpses of Borg drones from the
tower by tossing them over the edge of the entrance’s exterior platform,
into the belly of the ship, which was a random-looking pit of snaking
pipes and jutting machinery.

Kedair fought the urge to contact sickbay on the Aventine and pester Dr.
Tarses for an update on the wounded personnel. Just let the medics work,
she told herself. She dreaded going back to the ship. Sooner or later,
she would have to write and submit her after-action report for this
mission, and she was torn over whether to describe her blunder as the
result of incompetence or of negligence. All that really mattered to her
was that the officers who had obeyed her order to fire not face a
court-martial; as far as Kedair was concerned, they were as much victims
as the people they’d shot.

“All squad leaders have checked in, Lieutenant,” T’Prel said,
interrupting Kedair’s guilty ruminations. “All drones have been
neutralized, and all decks have been secured.”

“Good,” Kedair said. She stepped away and tapped her combadge. “Kedair
to Aventine. We’re ready for the engineers.”

“Acknowledged,” Commander Bowers replied over the comm. “They’re beaming
in now.”

There was a faintly electric tingle in the air before the first sparkle
of a transporter beam appeared in the darkness. Then six figures took
shape in a flurry of particles and a euphonic wash of sound. The effect
brightened the entire vinculum chamber for several seconds. When it
faded, Lieutenant Leishman and five of her engineers stood before the
mysterious Borg device, holding toolkits and eyeing their surroundings
with equal parts apprehension and professional curiosity.

“This ought to be interesting,” Leishman said, smirking at the vinculum.
“Assuming Voyager’s technical specs are accurate.”

Unable to stomach Leishman’s good mood, Kedair extinguished it with a
glower as she said, “Whatever you’re gonna do, Mikaela, do it fast. It’s
time to give the Borg a new queen.”



    17

A flash of movement and a snap of jaws, the sting of fangs breaking
flesh, a rush of terror—

Deanna Troi awoke with a shudder and pulled her arms up and in, striking
a defensive pose. Her hands and feet were stiff and cold, and a tingling
of chilled gooseflesh traveled up her legs. Exhaled breaths became white
clouds above her. Shaking off her disorientation, she realized she was
no longer in her quarters.

The room was narrow, but its ceiling was far above, at a dizzying
height. A clamshell-shaped skylight was directly over Troi, who tucked
her chin to her chest and examined her own situation. She was lying on a
dull metal slab and surrounded by bizarre machines, which pulsed with
violet light and whose purposes she couldn’t begin to divine. An
especially large and fearsome-looking contraption hovered near the
ceiling, above a point several meters past the foot of what Troi
surmised was an operating platform. Along the top of one wall, in the
only area uncluttered by machines and unobstructed by crisscrosses of
drooping cables, was a broad observation window.

Inyx stood behind a transparent barrier to her right. He appeared to be
engrossed in a complex task and did not yet seem to be aware that Troi
had regained consciousness.

She reached slowly toward her chest and gingerly touched where Ree had
bitten her. Searching with her fingertips, she found the rips in her
uniform but no corresponding wounds in her flesh. Though the air in the
laboratory felt cold to her, she wasn’t in any real discomfort. Closing
her eyes, she focused on the sensations from within her body, in an
effort to assess her own condition. No pain, she realized. That’s good…I
hope.

Troi opened her eyes to find Inyx looming over her.

“You’re awake,” he said in his mellow baritone. “Good.”

Inyx, like the other Caeliar, projected no emotional aura that Troi’s
empathy could detect. If his intentions were sinister or duplicitous,
she had no way of knowing beforehand. She propped herself up on her
elbows and asked, “Where are we?”

“In my lab,” Inyx said. “It was the only sterile facility in Axion that
was properly equipped to assist you.”

She tried to swallow, but her mouth felt too dry. “The last thing I
remember, Ree attacked me.”

“A misunderstanding, apparently,” Inyx replied. “He used his species’
natural venom to place you temporarily in a suspended state. It was a
crude solution to your dilemma, but it did briefly stave off the
immediate crisis.”

Panic quickened her pulse. “Venom?”

“There is no danger, Deanna,” Inyx said. “I’ve purged the toxins from
your system and stabilized you—for the moment. I didn’t wish to take any
further steps without your informed consent, however. That’s why I’ve
revived you.”

Pondering the degree to which Inyx must have examined her to be able to
cleanse her system of Pahkwa-thanh venom, Troi surmised that he had
likely become privy to all of her extant medical issues. “You know that
I’m pregnant…don’t you?”

“Yes, Deanna.”

After days of running from the heartbreaking truth of her situation,
confessing it almost felt like a relief. “Do you also know that it’s not
going well?”

“That much was clear when I saw that its mutation had threatened your
life,” Inyx said. “I would like to help you.”

Tears rolled from her eyes and blazed fiery trails across her cold
cheeks and over the edge of her jaw. “The captain of Titan is my husband
and the father of my child,” she said. “I want to go back to my ship and
be with him.”

“I’m sorry, Deanna, that won’t be possible.” Before Troi could protest,
Inyx added, “Titan escaped orbit and returned to your Federation
approximately ten hours ago.”

The news cut through her like a blade. Shock dominated her thoughts. My
Imzadi left me? He’s gone? Denial took hold. “How could Titan be back in
the Federation already?”

“It repurposed a subspace passage that we had created for reconnaissance
purposes,” Inyx said. “With assistance from Erika Hernandez, Titan’s
crew enlarged the subspace aperture and used it to make a
near-instantaneous journey home. As I’m sure you can imagine, the Quorum
is feeling rather vexed.”

Troi lay back on the slab and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t
believe he left me,” she muttered.

The part of her that was an officer understood Riker’s actions
perfectly. No doubt, he’d been forced to choose between saving the ship
and the majority of its crew or risking their freedom for the sake of
the already captured away team. Viewed in that light, Troi knew that her
captain’s decision had been logical. But the part of her that was a wife
shrank beneath the crushing emotional blow of Will’s abandonment.

Inyx said, “Deanna, we really can’t afford to wait any longer. I am
ready to assist you medically, but I require your permission to proceed.”

She lowered her hands and folded them protectively across her abdomen.
“Dr. Ree wanted to do this days ago,” she said. “I wouldn’t let him. I
don’t know why not. Maybe I was hoping for a miracle.” A surge of
emotion constricted her throat. It took her a few tries before she could
continue. “But I guess it’s time to accept that maybe some things
weren’t meant to be.”

“I don’t understand,” Inyx said.

Troi replied, “I’m giving you permission to proceed. To terminate my
pregnancy.”

The imposing Caeliar scientist recoiled from her, as if in horror.
“Deanna, I think you’ve mistaken my intentions.” He recovered a small
measure of his composure and continued, “As I’ve explained to you
before, the Caeliar abhor violence and will not terminate sentient life
for any reason. Likewise, for us to abandon a life in peril that could
be saved is also anathema.” Resuming his proud bearing, he finished, “I
was not asking to end your pregnancy, Deanna, but to repair it.”

“You could do that?” she asked, amazed at the very idea.

“And more,” Inyx said. “I have spent a considerable fraction of the past
several centuries learning about humanoid biology, mostly for Erika’s
benefit. However, I am certain that I possess the knowledge and
expertise to restore the proper, natural genetic pattern of your fetus
and to repair the damage in the unfertilized ova of your uterus. While I
won’t impose my cures on you or your child without consent, I am not too
proud to beg you to accept my help.” He transformed the waggling cilia
at the end of one of his arms into a semblance of a long, bony humanoid
hand, and he extended it in invitation toward Troi.

“Grant me your permission, Deanna,” he said, “and I will heal you—and
your child.”

 

The passage through the catacombs of Axion grew narrower with every step
Keru and Torvig took. “Where are we going, Vig?”

“Just a bit farther, Ranul,” Torvig said. “If my senses are accurate,
there should be an opening twenty-two meters ahead.”

Their voices and scuffling steps echoed and carried in the pitch-dark
tunnel. “I wish you’d told me we were going spelunking,” he said to the
Choblik engineer, his voice echoing off the close walls. “I’d have
brought one of the palm beacons.”

“Not necessary,” Torvig said. “There is an increase in the ambient light
ahead, at the tunnel’s terminus.”

Keru’s eyes saw nothing but the same pools of darkness broken by
occasional patches of deep shadow. “I’ll take your word for it, Vig.” He
looked back over his shoulder and found the path back just as dark as
the path forward. “I wonder which one of our Caeliar observers is
trailing us right now.”

“You could simply ask them,” Torvig said.

“I don’t really care that much,” Keru replied.

They continued walking without speaking for thirty seconds, the two of
them shades barely visible to Keru’s eyes, and then Torvig said, “The
passage slopes downward here. Mind your step.”

Keru slowed his pace just enough to adjust his stride to the new
descending grade. He noticed the sharpness of Torvig’s silhouette in
front of him, and he realized that he, too, could now see the growing
illumination ahead. The air was getting warmer as they advanced toward
the pale blue flicker.

“Vig, how’d you even find this passage?” he asked.

“I would rather not answer with too much specificity, since we are being
monitored,” Torvig said. “Let it suffice to say that the senses I was
granted by the grace of the Great Builders enabled me to perceive a
shift in Axion’s quantum field. I attuned my senses to its particular
properties and traced the field to its source point. Which is
six-point-two meters ahead.”

The ensign’s explanation drew a smile from Keru. It hadn’t occurred to
the Trill security chief until that moment that though the Caeliar had
destroyed the away team’s tricorders, Torvig’s bionic
enhancements—including his cybernetic eyes and his assortment of
advanced computing and sensory devices—made him an ideal, self-mobile
substitute for the lost equipment. Only a few months earlier, Torvig had
put his implanted systems to good use saving Titan after an ill-fated
encounter at Orisha with the Eye of Erykron. After a feat like that,
Keru mused, filling in for a tricorder must seem like child’s play.

The duo reached the bottom of the sloped passage and made a hard
switchback turn. Then they moved from the shadows into twilight and into
the heart of a blue sun in a few short steps.

Keru lifted his arm to shield his eyes. The duo stood on a ledge
overlooking a vast, hollow sphere of a chamber. Hovering at its center
was a huge, brilliant orb of electric-blue fire. Its deafening roar,
like an endless thunder of crashing waves and the angry buzz of a
hundred billion bees, overpowered him.

Averting his gaze, Keru looked at Torvig, whose metallic eyes blazed
with reflections of majestic azure lightning. “Vig!” Keru shouted over
the sonic assault of the hidden sun. “What is that thing? Is it the
Caeliar’s power source?”

“I believe so, Ranul,” Torvig said, his normally quiet voice
cybernetically amplified and frequency-shifted to cut through the noise.
“Its output exceeds my ability to measure.”

Another squinting look around convinced Keru that sabotage was out of
the question. The distance from their ledge to the burning orb was at
least a hundred meters, and if the scorching tingle on his skin was any
kind of warning, he was certain he didn’t want to get any closer to the
object than he already was. There appeared to be no other vulnerable
points or exposed systems inside the polished silver-gray chamber. He
also suspected that whatever the orb proved to be, destroying it would
no doubt prove to be a death sentence for every living thing on New
Erigol, starting with himself and Torvig.

He patted Torvig on the back and nodded for the ensign to follow him.
They returned the way they had come, and after gazing into such intense
light, the darkness seemed much deeper to Keru’s eyes. “I don’t get it,”
Keru said, his ears still ringing from exposure to the bone-shaking wall
of sound. “If the Caeliar have that much power at their command, why go
to the trouble of harnessing a sun and a planet?”

Torvig replied, “I suspect that the planet and the star were shelled in
order to mask this source, sir. If it were possible to study the link
between the two shells, I might hypothesize that the harnessed star
provides the energy to support the shell around the planet, whose
purpose is to contain the emissions of this exotic-particle generator.”

“Exotic particles?” echoed Keru. “What kind of particles?”

“I have not yet identified them,” Torvig said. “They are more energetic
than anything I have observed before now.”

Keru wished that he and Torvig had access to Titan’s main computer and
sensor module. He asked, “If the planet wasn’t covered up, how
detectable would those particles be?”

“To anyone with the ability to scan that frequency, they would be the
brightest energy source in the galaxy.”

It took a moment for Keru to process Torvig’s report, and when he did,
he began chuckling at the irony of it.

The engineer seemed perturbed by Keru’s reaction. “I was not aware that
I had committed a faux pas or spoken in jest.”

Regaining control of himself, Keru stifled his chortling and said, “I’m
not laughing at you, Vig. I’m laughing at the Caeliar.” He imagined his
friend’s bemused reaction concealed by the darkness. “I just think it’s
funny that a species that puts such a premium on going incognito uses a
power source that can be seen from across the universe.”



    18

Beverly Crusher stepped inside the holodeck and found herself surrounded
by green leaves, blue sky…and mud.

The portal closed behind her with a deep, soft rumble of servomotors and
a muffled thud of contact. Then all she heard was blissful quiet. A mild
breeze susurrated through the thick walls of leaves and grapes and
rippled the shallow puddles in the muddy lanes between the vineyard’s
rows. The rich aroma of turned earth mingled with the sweet scent of
country air after a night of spring rain. Tattered clouds sped by, high
overhead.

Verdant hills rolled one beyond another, along the horizon, past the far
end of the straight lane between looming stands of grapevines. The only
signs of technology in the otherwise pastoral landscape of La Barre,
France, were a handful of metallic towers linked to Earth’s
weather-control grid.

She turned in the other direction, toward the closer end of the row. Her
small, pivoting steps squished and slipped in the slick, peaty muck. As
far as Crusher could see, she was alone in the vineyard. There was no
sign of workers, and no robotic tenders or harvesters were in use. The
vineyard looked deserted.

But she knew better.

Walking slowly and taking care to plant her steps on tiny islands of dry
ground scattered along the path, she skulked down the dirt lane until
she spied Jean-Luc, two rows over, through a tiny gap in the leafy
vines. Her vantage point came and went from view as the breeze rustled
the greenery, by turns momentarily revealing him and concealing him with
foliage.

Crusher tried to keep her voice down as she said, “Computer, modify
program. Give me a temporary passage through the vines, to the row where
Captain Picard is standing.”

A two-meter-wide path appeared without a sound through the two rows of
vines that separated her from her husband. She moved in gingerly steps
through the passage. As soon as she reached her desired row, the
holodeck closed the route behind her, silently knitting shut the walls
of branches.

The suction of mud on her boots made it impossible for Crusher to sneak
up on Jean-Luc, so she didn’t try. Still, she approached him slowly,
with caution, to gauge his reaction. When she was a few meters away, he
turned his head and acknowledged her with a melancholy look. “Beverly.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked, stepping beside him.

He gazed into the foliage. “I needed a place to think.”

She rested her left hand against his lower back and took a few seconds
to look around at the bucolic simulation of his childhood home. “Why
here, Jean-Luc? Why now?”

“Because it might soon be gone forever,” he said.

“Not without a fight,” she said. “The war’s not over yet.”

Jean-Luc inhaled sharply and stepped away from her. “Are you certain of
that?” He walked slowly along the muddy trail, his hands brushing
through the leaves and vines, his fingertips lingering delicately over
the fragile Pinot Noir grapes. “Why should I believe that Captain Dax’s
plan will amount to anything more than another postponement of the
inevitable?” He stopped and pulled a small bunch of grapes toward him.
“At this point, I suspect it’s all a matter of too little, too late.”
Pinching one tiny, violet fruit between his thumb and forefinger, he
continued, “No one heeded my warnings when it might have made a
difference. Not the admiralty, not the president, not the council. I
told them this day would come, but no one listened.” He crushed the
grape into skin and juice, and dropped it on the ground. Then he looked
away, past the end of the row. “Now all of this…history…will be lost.
Trampled underfoot.”

He resumed walking, moving in quick strides. Beverly stayed close beside
him, refusing to let him leave her behind. “So, is that it?” she asked.
“You’ve already lost, so why finish the battle? What happened to the man
who demanded we draw a line in the sand and say ‘no further’? Is this
all that’s left of him?”

Near the end of the lane, Jean-Luc stopped and frowned as he gazed
toward the distant hills. Avoiding eye contact with Crusher, he reached
over and pulled toward him a length of the vine that was thick with
leaves and heavy with fruit. Rolling its rough skin between his fingers,
he sighed. “A vine is like a person, Beverly,” he said, his voice
somber. “Some of its nature is the product of heritage, but its
personality also reflects its experiences. A gentle season can give it a
mellow quality, and adversity can add depth to its character”—he looked
up at her—“but only up to a point. There’s a limit to how much damage
and pain one vine can absorb before it turns bitter and brittle…and
before it withers and dies.”

He let the vine snap back into the embrace of its mother plant and
continued walking, though much more slowly this time. Beverly was
certain now that the dark mood that traveled with Jean-Luc was more than
just anxiety about the apparent unstoppability of the Borg invasion. Her
suspicion was confirmed as they emerged from the narrowed field of
vision enforced by the vineyard row, to behold the sight on the nearest
hill.

Where she had expected to see Château Picard, there stood only the
scorched ruin of a house, a pile of charred timbers toppled at oblique
angles over the pit of a black and broken foundation. Its interior was
nothing but mounds of ash and rubble, cinders and shattered
stone—exactly as it had been nearly ten years ago, the morning after the
fire that had killed Jean-Luc’s older brother, Robert, and his young
nephew, René.

She took his arm. “You shouldn’t do this to yourself.”

There were tears in his eyes, and his face looked stricken as he placed
his hand over hers. “I’m all that’s left.”

“No,” she said sternly, commanding his attention. “We’re all that’s
left.” She touched her belly, where their son grew. “Us, Jean-Luc. Us.”

He shut his eyes as tightly as he could to stanch the flow of his tears,
and he clenched his jaw to hold back the flood of bitter grief and fear
that Beverly knew raged inside him.

She pulled him to her and forced him to turn away from the grim vision
of his sundered home. He embraced her as he buried his face between her
neck and shoulder, but Beverly still felt as if she were standing
outside the wall of his despair, making futile efforts to peek inside.

There wasn’t a millimeter of space between them, but it felt to her as
if the man she loved were light-years away—and growing more distant by
the day. And the Borg were to blame.

“I won’t let them take you from us,” she said.

“Neither will I,” he said.

It wasn’t what he’d said but how he’d said it that made Beverly tremble
and fear that the worst was yet to come.

 

Worf pressed the door signal outside Jasminder Choudhury’s quarters and
waited patiently. Seconds later, he heard her invitation, shaken by
grief’s vibrato: “Come in.”

He stepped forward, and the door opened. Jasminder stood in front of the
sloped windows of her quarters, one arm across her chest, the other hand
half hiding her face. Worf took slow, cautious steps toward her. Behind
him, the door sighed closed.

Exorcising all edge and aggression from his voice, he asked, “Are you
all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“It is unlike you to leave your post, even with permission,” he said. “I
was concerned.”

She brushed a tear from her cheek and looked at him. “What about you? I
thought you had the bridge?”

“I gave the seat to Kadohata,” he said.

Turning back toward the windows and the nebula beyond, she said, “I just
needed a few moments. No telling when we’ll get another lull, right?”

“True,” he said. He stepped closer to her as she folded her arms
together in front of her and lowered her head. On the coffee table in
front of her, a small hologram projector displayed a miniature, ghostly
image of a majestic, multilimbed oak tree in front of a quaint rural
home. Settling in beside Jasminder, Worf noticed that she was staring at
the hologram.

He didn’t need to ask where the image had been recorded. It was easy
enough to guess. “It is possible your family escaped Deneva before the
attack,” he said.

“Possible,” she said, choking back a hacking sob. “Not likely.” Her eyes
were red from crying. “But that’s not what’s killing me.” She nodded at
the hologram. “It’s the tree.”

“I do not understand,” he said.

Her jaw trembled, and she covered her mouth with her hand for a moment
until she was steady enough to talk. “Thirty-two years ago, my father
and I planted that tree in front of our house. My mother used to have a
picture from that day in our family album—my dad with his shirt off and
a shovel in his hand, me holding up the new tree while he filled in the
dirt. Dad used to joke that he couldn’t remember which was skinnier that
day, me or the sapling.” Her face brightened behind a bittersweet burst
of laughter. “I don’t remember, either. It was barely a tree, not even
as thick as my arm.” Sorrow overtook her face again. “See those two
figures under the tree in the hologram? That’s me and my dad, last year,
when I was home on leave. Look how big that tree is: almost sixteen
meters tall, nearly two and a half meters around at the base. It’s just
amazing…or it was. Now it’s gone, and I’ll never see it again.”

Fresh tears rolled from her eyes, but the emotion flowing behind them
was anger. “I just feel so damned stupid,” she said. “I should be crying
for my mother or my father or my sisters, all my cousins, my nieces and
nephews…and what am I crying over? A tree. I’m going to pieces over a tree.”

She was shaking, and Worf saw then that Jasminder’s aura of serene
detachment and dispassionate resolve had been shattered. The sudden loss
of her home and family and the violent rending of every tangible
connection to her past were pains he knew well. The murders of Jadzia
and K’Ehleyr were old wounds for him, but the pain they brought him had
never diminished.

“You do not mourn the tree,” he said.

She shot a defensive glare at him. “Then why am I crying?”

“You weep for what it represents.”

Jasminder regarded him with a stunned look for a few seconds, then
turned her searching gaze at the hologram. “Myself?” she wondered aloud,
and shook her head. “My home?”

“I see many trees on your family’s property,” Worf said.

“But this is the one I…” Her voice trailed off as she followed his
leading question to her own understanding. “It’s my father,” she
whispered, her eyes fixed on the spectral image. “A symbol of our bond,
our relationship.”

Worf nodded. “For a Klingon warrior, there are few things more important
than one’s father and how one honors him.”

She turned toward him, and he saw the dawning of a terrible
understanding in her eyes. “My father’s gone, Worf.”

The outpouring of her grief was incremental for a few seconds, and then
it cascaded out of her, like an avalanche exploding without warning from
a fractured mountainside.

He pulled her toward him as she howled with rage and sorrow. Her
guttural wails made him think of the Klingon warriors who were storming
the fields of Sto-Vo-Kor that day.

Her cries subsided, but still she lingered in his embrace, as deathly
still as someone in deep shock. In a voice hoarse and raw, she said, “I
just can’t believe it, Worf. Everything I ever called home is gone.” She
looked up at him with tearstained eyes. “Do you have any idea what
that’s like? To have your whole world blown away? Your whole family
taken from you?”

His early childhood came back to him in bitter flashes. Memories of fire
and fear on Khitomer. Bodies and blood.

“Yes,” he said in a sympathetic whisper. “I do.”



    19

Dr. Simon Tarses felt his feet slip-slide for the third time in a minute
while he struggled to close Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa’s shredded torso. He
shouted over his shoulder, “Somebody mop up this blood before I break my
neck over here!”

Turning back toward Nurse Maria Takagi, who was assisting him, he
snapped, “Clamp the aorta, dammit!”

His temper was flaring, but he couldn’t afford to waste precious seconds
reining it in. There were five different colors of blood pooling on the
deck between the biobeds, and the air was filled with pained cries,
delirious groans, and panicked screams. Then the main doors gasped open,
and a troop of medics carried in four more security personnel who were
broken and saturated with their own blood.

A triage team led by the Aventine’s assistant chief medical officer, Dr.
Lena Glau, descended on the new arrivals. They worked in rapid whispers
and grim, meaningful glances. At the end of several seconds’ review,
Glau pushed a lock of her sweat-stringy dark hair from her face and
called out directions to her gathering flock of nurses and medical
technicians. “Move the chest wound to the O.R., stage the bleeders in
pre-op, and call the time on the head wound.”

Sealing off a major tear in sh’Aqabaa’s vena cava while dark blue ichor
oozed over his gloved fingers, Tarses called over to Glau, “Lena,
what’ve you got?”

“More friendly-fire victims,” she said, following her patient with the
chest wound as he was moved on his antigrav stretcher toward the O.R. “I
have two minutes to save this guy.”

“Let me know if you need a hand,” Tarses said, and then he gritted his
teeth while he struggled to work around the tattered remains of his
Andorian patient’s traumatized pericardium.

Glau replied, “Looks like you’ve already got your hands full, but
thanks, anyway.” She, her patient, and her surgical-support team
vanished inside the O.R.

He grimaced at the critically wounded Andorian shen on the biobed
between himself and Takagi. Ideally, he’d have performed her operation
in the Aventine’s main surgical suite, but sh’Aqabaa’s vitals had
crashed too quickly. There hadn’t been time to move her to O.R. before
the need to operate had become imperative. He didn’t know who was to
blame for the shortage of surgical arches, but as Tarses rebuilt
sh’Aqabaa’s chest cavity by hand, he promised himself that someone at
Starfleet Medical would get an earful about this.

Assuming Starfleet Medical still exists tomorrow, he reminded himself.
Or, for that matter, assuming we still exist tomorrow.

The other three members of sh’Aqabaa’s squad were in the hands of the
Aventine’s chief resident physician, Dr. Ilar Prem, and its surgical
fellow, Dr. Nexa Ko Tor. Dr. Ilar was a Bajoran man with a slight build,
finely molded features, and dark eyes capable of snaring one with a
sudden, shockingly direct stare. Dr. Nexa was a female Triexian with
ruddy skin and deep-set eyes that seemed custom-made for keeping
secrets. Her most impressive quality as a surgeon was the ability to use
her three arms to operate on two patients with equal efficacy at once.

Prem’s patient was a human woman, and Nexa was working on two men, a
Zaldan and a Bolian. Even from across the room, Tarses could tell that
none of the three surgeries was going well. The vital-signs displays
above the biobeds fluctuated wildly, and then they began to go flat.

“Cortical failure!” called Ilar’s nurse.

A medical technician who was assisting Nexa with the Bolian patient
scrambled for resuscitation gear as he declared, “Cardiac arrest!”
Meanwhile, Dr. Nexa and Nurse L’Kem were turning all their attention to
the Zaldan, whose body was twisted by a series of gruesome convulsions
while he gagged on an overflowing mouthful of maroon blood.

Tarses wanted to sprint across the room to intervene, to take charge, to
try to save three lives at once, but he knew there wasn’t anything he
could do for those patients that his fellow physicians weren’t already
doing. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on the bits of shattered bone,
the ragged flaps of rent skin, and the semiliquefied jumble of damaged
organs that he and Takagi were racing to reassemble inside sh’Aqabaa.

Minutes passed while he blocked out the tense, barked orders and the
rising tide of desperation that surrounded him. Then the sharp clanging
of a medical instrument ricocheting off the bulkhead and the clatter of
it bouncing across the deck made him look up. Dr. Ilar tore the bloody
gloves from his hands and hurled them to the floor, cursing under his
breath. He stormed out of the main sickbay and into the triage center.

Dr. Nexa accepted her forced surrender to the inevitable with a greater
modicum of grace. She looked at Nurse L’Kem and said, pointing to the
human, the Bolian, and then the Zaldan, “Time of death for Lieutenant
Hutchinson, 1307 hours; for Lieutenant Tane, 1309 hours; and for Crewman
Doron, 1311 hours.” L’Kem noted the times in the charts and gave the
padd to Nexa, who reviewed it, signed it, and handed it back to the
Vulcan nurse.

Tarses had just finished stabilizing sh’Aqabaa and was making some
temporary closures to the incisions as a precaution before moving the
Andorian lieutenant to the O.R. He looked up as Dr. Nexa sidled up to
the biobed beside Nurse Takagi and asked, “Is there anything I can do to
help, Doctor?”

“No,” Tarses said, surprised at how cold and unfeeling his own voice
sounded. “She’s stable. Go help Ilar with those two bleeders who came in.”

The slender Triexian nodded and ambled silently away. It still amazed
Tarses that for a person with three legs, Nexa made so little sound when
she walked.

“Okay,” he said to Takagi. “She’s ready. Have the medtechs come move her
to the O.R., and tell them to find me another surgical arch, stat.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Takagi said, stepping away to summon help.

He stood beside the biobed as he peeled the gloves off his hands, and he
thought of Ilar’s outburst minutes earlier. A stickler for regulations
would put Prem on report for that, Tarses thought. He looked down at
sh’Aqabaa and brooded on how hard he’d already fought to save her; then
he pondered how he might react if she didn’t make it out of surgery.

If she dies, I’ll probably start throwing things, too.

 

Tuning her mind to the frequency of the Borg Collective was proving more
difficult than Erika Hernandez had expected. She felt she was close to
being able to link with it, as she had with the Caeliar gestalt
centuries earlier, but the closer she got, the more elusive the Borg’s
voice became.

She stared at her access to the vinculum and asked engineer Mikaela
Leishman, “Are you sure this thing is set up correctly?”

“Positive,” Leishman said. “It’s responding to your own biofeedback,
just like you asked.”

Beside the Aventine’s chief engineer was its second officer and science
department head, Gruhn Helkara. The Zakdorn clenched his jaw, pushing up
his facial ridges. “If you don’t feel up to this, we should scrub the
mission now.”

“I’m fine,” Hernandez said. “Just let me concentrate.”

She closed her eyes and focused on aligning her brainwaves with those of
the Collective. She blocked out the muggy climate inside the Borg ship,
the discomfort of her semi-invasive neural interface with the vinculum,
and her own fear.

Two oscillating tones, slightly mismatched, served as her guide. Hers
was the shorter, faster wave of sound; the more she relaxed, the closer
her alpha-wave tone matched that of the Borg.

Perfectly measured, crisp footfalls approached. She knew before she
heard the voice that it was Lonnoc Kedair, the security chief. “The
transphasic mine is armed,” she said to Leishman and Helkara. “How’s our
royal infiltrator doing?”

“She’s working on it,” Leishman said.

Hernandez was very close to bringing her psionic frequency into synch
with the Collective’s when Helkara’s combadge beeped and broke her
concentration. Dax’s comm-filtered voice sliced through the low
thrumming and anxiety-filled silence inside the vinculum. “Commander
Helkara, report,” she said.

Opening her eyes to glare at Dax’s three officers, Hernandez noted the
abashed look on Helkara’s face.

“We’re almost there, Captain,” he said.

“Well, get there faster,” Dax said. “The Borg are minutes away from
hitting five major targets, including Andor, Vulcan, and Qo’noS. If this
plan’s gonna work, it has to happen now.”

Leishman and Helkara traded glances of dismay. Kedair stared intently at
the pair, awaiting their reaction. Helkara replied to Dax, “We need a
few more minutes, Captain.”

“We’re out of time,” Dax said. “What do you have now?”

Hernandez beckoned to Leishman. “I have an idea.”

The engineer arched her eyebrows. “I’m listening.”

“I’ll be able to adjust my modulation faster if you remove the feedback
buffer from my interface,” Hernandez said.

Helkara dismissed the suggestion with the energetic waving of both
hands. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Without that, you’ll run the risk of
a counterattack by the Borg.”

“I’m a big girl, I can handle it,” Hernandez said. “Look, the buffer is
most of what’s slowing me down. If I don’t get inside the Collective’s
head right now, billions of people are going to die. Risking my life to
save all of theirs makes sense, at least to me.” She raised her voice.
“Captain Dax, I’m asking permission to remove the buffer and face the
Borg head-on.”

“Granted,” Dax said. “Gruhn, Mikaela, get it done.”

“Aye, Captain,” Helkara said, acquiescing with reluctance.

“Aventine out,” Dax said, closing the channel.

The wiry Zakdorn frowned and ran a hand through his thatch of black
hair. He pointed at the interface jury-rigged to the vinculum and said
to Leishman, “Remove the buffer, Lieutenant.”

Leishman stepped forward, tapped a few buttons on the control panel, and
reached under the console to pull free a sheet of isolinear circuits,
from which dangled a bundle of optronic cables. Holding the deactivated
component in one hand and leaning on the other, Leishman shook her head
at Hernandez. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Captain,” she said.

“So do I, Lieutenant,” Hernandez said.

Then she turned her thoughts to fusing with the Borg.

 

A crowd of frazzled bodies and fearful faces had gathered in the combat
operations center in the secure bunker below Starfleet Command.

Towering screens high on every wall showed images from orbital platforms
above five different worlds, and a sixth hard-line feed showed President
Bacco and her cabinet gathered in the Monet Room at the Palais de la
Concorde in Paris.

Admiral Edward Jellico leaned against the room’s enormous central
strategy table, flanked by his colleagues, Admiral Alynna Nechayev and
Admiral Tujiro Nakamura. Together, they watched the majestic displays
that surrounded them and awaited a catastrophe. An undercurrent of comm
chatter and muted voices droned beneath the pall of fear that filled the
room. For the junior officers working in the command center, there was
still work to be done, something to focus on, tasks to distract them
from the terror of speculating about what would happen next.

For Jellico and the other admirals assembled in the command center,
there was nothing left to do but wait. They had drafted their plans and
moved thousands of starships and hundreds of thousands of people like
pieces on a chessboard—all in what felt to Jellico like an increasingly
pointless effort to escape what they all knew was really checkmate.

Quietly, he said to Nechayev, “We’ve done all we could.”

“Yes, Ed, we did.” She smiled sadly in his direction and then, with
tremendous subtlety and discretion, placed her hand on top of his. It
was a small gesture of friendship and comfort, but in the pressure of
the moment, it touched Jellico profoundly.

And for just a few seconds, he almost smiled, too.

Then a masculine voice boomed from the overhead comm, “Borg attack
fleets are within two minutes of Vulcan, Andor, Coridan, Rigel, and
Qo’noS.” The subspace feeds switched to show nearly identical images, of
five groups of eight to ten Borg cubes. An electric prickling raised
every hair on Jellico’s body, and fear washed through him like a surge
of ice water in his veins.

“Order all ships to intercept and engage,” he said.

History will say we tried, he brooded, as his order was relayed to the
fleets above five distant worlds. Assuming that history remembers us at
all after the Borg get done with us.

 

The coming battles all were light-years away, but watching them unfold
on the desktop monitor in his ready room on Titan, William Riker felt as
if he were in the thick of the melee.

Less than a few light-minutes from four Federation member worlds, fleets
of allied ships rallied in formation and raced to meet the enemy. Riker
watched them speed toward the Borg cubes and was both grateful and
enraged that he and his ship weren’t there to do their part.

I should be watching this on the bridge, he told himself. He got up from
his chair, took a few steps toward the door, and stopped. What if the
battle goes against us? Morale’s bad enough as it is. Do I really want
to make my crew watch the end of Vulcan or Andor?

Then he imagined what Troi would say: They’re strong, Will. They can
handle it. Trust them—and let them see your trust.

He forced himself back into motion and out the door, onto the bridge.
Lieutenant Commander Fo Hachesa vacated the center seat as Riker
approached. “Repairs are continuing on schedule, Captain,” said the
Kobliad acting XO.

“Very good,” Riker said, taking his seat. “Patch in the feed from
Starfleet Command on the main viewer.”

Hachesa pulled his hands to his chest as a nervous frown creased his
brow. “The battle in the core systems, sir?”

“Yes, Commander,” Riker said. Noting the man’s discomfort, he continued,
“Is there a problem with that?”

Spreading his hands, Hachesa said, “Lieutenant T’Kel suggested that
earlier, but I disagreed.”

Riker glanced toward the tactical console, where T’Kel was directing an
icy stare at Hachesa. Looking back at Hachesa, Riker asked him, “On what
grounds?”

“I did not want to jinx it,” Hachesa said.

It took a few seconds for Riker to be certain that Hachesa was, in fact,
utterly serious. “Overruled,” Riker said. “This isn’t like quantum
mechanics, Fo. We won’t affect the outcome by observing it.” He nodded
to T’Kel. “Put it on-screen.”

While the Vulcan woman carried out the order, Hachesa confided to Riker,
“I also feared it might be bad for morale.”

“Thousands of Starfleet personnel are about to put their lives on the
line,” Riker said, loudly enough for all on the bridge to hear. “Many of
them are about to make the ultimate sacrifice. Since we can’t be there
to fight beside them, we owe it to them to bear witness—and to remember
their courage.”

Images of the five battles appeared on Titan’s multi-section main viewer.

That was when Riker realized that maybe Hachesa’s instincts had been
right after all.

 

Picard stood at the center of the Enterprise’s bridge, his posture
erect, his bearing proud, and his soul mired in despair.

On the main viewer, enormous Borg cubes moved in clusters. The sheer
mass of each attack group was more daunting than Picard had ever dared
to imagine.

The sight of even a single cube was enough to set his pulse racing and
fill his stomach with acid. Instantly, he was back in the hands of the
Collective, being absorbed, erased, violated, and entombed inside
himself. He was lording over the slaughter of Wolf 359. He was hearing
the voices whispering below the fray at the Battle of Sector 001. He was
alone.

Lieutenant Choudhury’s voice pulled him back into the moment. “Klingon
and allied forces have engaged the Borg at Qo’noS and Beta Rigel,” she
said. “Allied battle groups moving into attack formations at Andor,
Vulcan, and Coridan.”

Worf stepped forward to stand on Picard’s right side. Out of the corner
of his eye, Picard saw that his first officer was emulating his stance,
in a show of solidarity and dignity. It was to Worf’s credit, Picard
thought, that he saw no need to sully the moment with words, and Picard
showed Worf the same stoic courtesy in return.

The images of battles far removed blazed with the cold fire of
transphasic torpedoes.

Picard wanted to believe that Starfleet was ready for this fight. He
wanted to believe that the Federation would endure this crisis, as it
had so many others before it.

Then the torpedoes found their marks…and he knew that the only truth
left to believe was the one promised by the Borg.

Resistance is futile.

 

“Torpedoes are away,” announced the tactical officer of the U.S.S.
Atlas, and Captain Morgan Bateson clenched the armrests of his chair as
he watched the missiles on the main viewer spiral toward their targets.

“Reload and keep firing, Reese,” Bateson said. “Don’t give them time to
regroup.” He stole a quick look at his fleet’s deployment pattern on his
command monitor. “Kedam, tell the ships on our port flank to spread out.
They’re too close.”

The Antican operations officer replied, “Yes, sir,” as he relayed the
order to the other ship’s commanding officers.

“Five seconds to impact,” said Lieutenant Reese.

Bateson’s hands were coated in cold sweat. He’d fought at the Battle of
Sector 001, which had taught him a costly lesson about how devastating a
single Borg cube could be in battle. Now he was leading an attack
against ten cubes.

We outnumber them four to one, he reminded himself as the transphasic
torpedoes detonated against the Borg ships with a blinding flash.
Please, God, let it be enough.

He didn’t expect more than a handful of the cubes to emerge intact from
the blistering blue firestorm that engulfed them. Then a black corner
pierced the dissipating fog, followed by another…and then by six more.

“Two cubes destroyed,” reported Lieutenant Kedam. “The remaining eight
cubes are still on course for Vulcan.”

Commander Sophie Fawkes, the Atlas’s first officer, said, “Helm, attack
pattern Foxtrot Blue!”

“Second salvo’s away,” Reese declared from tactical.

Fearing the worst, Bateson said, “Ready another.”

On the main viewer, he saw the fleet’s second barrage of transphasic
warheads flare like a blue sun…

…and all eight cubes burst from its flames unscathed.

Dear God. “All ships, break off!” Bateson ordered. “Fall back to Vulcan
orbit and regroup!”

“Sir,” Kedam said. “The Billings is leading the reserve wing on a
collision course with the Borg ships.”

Bateson looked to his XO. “Fawkes, hail them! Tell them to break off!”
She tried to do as he asked, but Bateson knew it was too late. He
watched in horror as the U.S.S. Billings and more than a dozen
Federation starships were blasted into scrap and vapor by the Borg
cubes, which rammed their way through the spreading cloud of smoldering
debris.

Reese cried out, “The Borg are locking weapons!”

“Helm, evasive!” Fawkes shouted.

The young Andorian chan at the conn struggled to guide the
Sovereign-class vessel through a series of rapid and seemingly random
changes in speed and direction, but the hull rang under a succession of
crushing blows from the passing Borg cubes. A brutal impact sent the
Atlas spinning and rolling and plunged its bridge into darkness for
several seconds.

When the overhead lights and bridge systems came back on, Bateson was
crestfallen as he confronted the grim scene on the main viewer. Only a
handful of ships from his attack fleet were intact, and even fewer
appeared to be operational.

“Kedam, open a channel,” Bateson said, fuming mad at his failure to halt
the Borg’s genocidal march. “Warn the Vulcans: The Borg will reach orbit
in one minute.”

 

President Bacco, her cabinet, and her advisers stood and traded nervous
whispers around the conference table in the Monet Room, sequestered
below the Palais de la Concorde. Esperanza Piñiero positioned herself to
monopolize access to the president.

“We still have time to get you to safety, ma’am,” she said, her tone
more insistent than it had been the last three times she had made this
suggestion. “There’s a high-warp transport standing by. We can have you
halfway to Rhaandar by the time the Borg reach Earth.”

“Enough,” Bacco said. “One more word about this, and I’ll have Agent
Wexler put you on that transport by yourself.”

Piñiero scowled. “You say that like you think it’d be a punishment, ma’am.”

“Hush,” Bacco said. “There’s nowhere to retreat to, anyway. We’re making
our stand here, Esperanza. Besides, if the Federation falls, I don’t
want to live to see it. Now, step aside. You’re blocking my view.”

She didn’t really want to see any more of the developing calamity, but
it was as good an excuse as any to end their conversation. The room’s
multiple display screens all showed similar images, telling the same
story. Starfleet vessels were broken and burning or scattering in
confused retreat. A Klingon fleet was making one valiant sacrifice after
another to defend Qo’noS. Borg cubes advanced all but unopposed on the
strongholds of the Federation and its allies. And volley after volley of
transphasic torpedoes made not one blessed bit of difference.

The Borg were winning the war.

Off to one side, Admirals Akaar and Batanides conferred with Seven of
Nine, who had joined them to review the latest dispatches from Starfleet
Command. The admirals’ faces were easy to read: naked fear. Seven, as
usual, maintained an inscrutable mien as she whispered to the two flag
officers. The statuesque former Borg drone turned, took a few steps
toward the table, and faced Bacco. “Madam President,” she said, snaring
everyone’s attention. “The Borg have adapted to the transphasic torpedo.”

The admirals joined Seven, and Akaar said, “We’ve confirmed it, Madam
President. As of this moment, the Federation no longer has a defense
against the Borg.”

 

Energy and signals from the Borg Collective coursed through the catoms
that infused Erika Hernandez’s body and mind. A surge of raw power
flooded her senses, giving flavor to colors and sounds to the cold touch
of wires against her flesh. It was narcotic and addictive, and the ocean
of tiny voices that was swept up in the psychic wave of the Collective’s
imperial will was both suffocating and awe-inspiring.

She had expected it to be more like the gestalt, but its similarity was
only superficial. Many voices had been fused into a single
consciousness, but not willingly. Unlike the Caeliar, who had united
their minds for the elevation of their society as a whole, the Borg
Collective subjugated sentient minds and then yoked their hijacked
bodies to serve its own aims.

The deeper she delved into the Collective, the more she realized that it
was nothing like the gestalt. It was darker, almost primordial in its
aggression, brutally authoritarian, and utterly domineering. She hadn’t
realized how much she had taken for granted the benign nature of the
Caeliar gestalt; where it had linked individuals with a warm bond of
common purpose that respected its individuals’ right to free will, the
Collective hammered disparate entities together with cold force, like a
blacksmith crafting a sword in a forge of ice.

Hernandez wanted to flee from its casual cruelty, free herself from its
oppressive embrace, but there was too much at stake. I have to keep
going, she told herself. Pushing her mind into deeper levels of
connection with the Collective, she felt her thoughts taking on its
primal hues. I have to surrender myself to the Collective and experience
it the way the drones do. I need to hear the Queen and know what she
sounds like.

Surrendering to the gestalt had been like returning to the womb and
becoming a fluid in an endless stream of consciousness. Submitting to
the Collective felt more like being swallowed in a tar pit, enclosed in
oily darkness, smothered, and silenced.

Then, alone in the dark, Hernandez heard it.

The voice of the Borg Queen.

Harsh and autocratic, it was a psychic whip of fire on the backs of the
drones. Even the cube-shaped ships answered to its unswerving command.
Hernandez let herself see what the Queen wanted her to see: fleets of
Starfleet and Klingon starships being crushed without mercy or regret,
orbital defense platforms above five worlds being obliterated with ease,
and the cubes’ preparations for surface bombardments that would turn
those worlds into lifeless slag.

Vulcan. Andor. Coridan. Beta Rigel. Qo’noS.

In moments, they would all be gone.

Erika Hernandez directed her catoms to vibrate in harmony with the
essential frequency of the Borg Queen and steeled herself to speak to
the Collective.

Only then did she realize she had no idea what to say.

 

Charivretha zh’Thane watched green bolts fall from the sky above Therin
Park on Andor. As the matron of her clan, she had refused to abandon her
home. It would have served no purpose, she’d decided. There was nowhere
safe to go, and her chei, Thirishar, and his bondmates and their
offspring all were long gone from Andor. There was nothing left here for
her to protect.

She’d still hoped it wouldn’t end like this, that Starfleet would devise
some brilliant tactic to repel or thwart the Borg’s latest incursion.
During her years as Andor’s representative on the Federation Council,
she had often been amazed by Starfleet’s seemingly endless resourcefulness.

Not endless after all, she admitted, as a viridescent fireball descended
toward the park. Strikes beyond the city’s perimeter trembled the ground
under her feet.

Too jaded to mourn the loss of her own life, zh’Thane felt a profound
sorrow for the doomed beauty that surrounded her and the several
thousand other Andorians who had chosen to await their end in Therin
Park. Cloistered in the heart of the capital city, it was a place of
great natural beauty. Its aquatecture filled the air with the gentle
burbling of flowing water, and its sprawling gardens and terraced
waterfalls were designed to create secluded enclosures. Exotic, colorful
fish in its ponds nipped and leaped at floating transparent spheres that
housed dancing flames. Though portions of the park had been damaged by
terrorist bombings years earlier, it had been rebuilt into something
even more beautiful than what had been lost.

Vretha doubted that would be the case this time.

She drew her last breath of cool, floral-scented night air.

Then she and the park, along with the fish and the flowers and the soft
music of flowing water, were gone.

All that remained was fire.

 

The skies of Vulcan wore many colors. At daybreak, brilliant shades of
pink and vermillion ruled the lower degrees of the heavens. At midday,
faded hues of amber and cinnamon set the tone. Come sunset, gold and
crimson owned the horizon.

At every longitude of Vulcan, the red and bronze dome of the sky was
split by jade-colored thunderbolts from orbit.

T’Lana had ventured alone into the vast wasteland of the Forge in search
of solitude and healing. Her judgment as a counselor and as a Starfleet
officer had been compromised by her ego and by her own surety that she’d
known better than everyone around her, about everything. It had taken a
failed—and, in retrospect, disastrously misguided—mutiny against her
commanding officer to make clear to her just how skewed her reasoning
had become. Faced with the inexcusable nature of her actions, she had
done the only logical thing: She had transferred off the Enterprise,
requested an indefinite leave of absence, and returned to Vulcan to
place herself in the care of experts who could guide her back to the
path of selfless reason and logic.

She saw the death stroke falling and wondered, Did I play some part in
this tragedy? Were my actions part of a series of errors that led the
Federation to this moment?

Logic suggested that she was succumbing to egotism again. In any
reasonable evaluation of the matter, her own role would likely prove to
be so small as to be inconsequential. Only a rank egotist would seek to
accept solitary blame for an event of such epic proportions, she assured
herself.

Her inner eyelids blinked shut as the blast of burning emerald plasma
slammed down into the heart of ShiKahr and turned the city to slag,
vapor, and rubble. The shockfront from the detonation raced from the
vanished metropolis as a kilometers-tall mushroom cloud reached into the
soot-blackened sky.

T’Lana watched the tsunami of pyroclastic ash, displaced sand, and toxic
fallout surge across the flatlands, toward the rocky peaks and canyons
of the Forge. At its current rate of speed, the blast wave will reach me
in six-point-two seconds, she deduced. I will not reach sufficient cover
in time.

She had come home to complete the Kolinahr and purge herself of emotions
and prejudice. It therefore struck her as ironic that her final musings
were so deeply emotional. She was filled with regrets for her life’s
unrealized possibilities.

I can never make amends for betraying Captain Picard.

I can never apologize for insulting Ambassador Spock.

A blast of heat kicked up the sand and seared her skin, a stinging
harbinger of the lethal onslaught to come.

I will never be able to tell Worf how I desired him.

The roar of the explosion struck with stunning force. T’Lana shut her
eyes…and accepted what she could not change.

 

Erika Hernandez gave orders without speaking, in a voice that wasn’t
hers, to an army that had no choice but to obey.

Cease-fire.

It was like opening the clamshell skylight in Inyx’s lab. She pictured
an event, an outcome that she desired, and the Collective turned itself
to fashioning her wishes into reality.

The barrages against the planets stopped. She was anguished to see how
much damage had already been wrought. Great glowing scars on the
surfaces of five worlds spread horrid, ash-packed clouds through their
atmospheres.

The symptom addressed, Hernandez looked to the cause.

The cubes. The hostile drones. The Queen.

Destroy them, she commanded, and throughout the Collective, her legions
of followers complied without question, oblivious of the fact that they
were the targets in their own crosshairs.

Firefights erupted inside Borg ships throughout known space. Drones cut
one another down, pummeled one another with ruthless efficiency, slashed
and shattered and impaled one another with mindless abandon. The cubes
turned their awesome batteries against one another and blasted
themselves to pieces.

Borg attack fleets in deep space dropped from warp as they hammered one
another with weapons fire. The Collective stood divided, every cube a
battlefield in an instant civil war.

Aftershocks rocked the Collective. So many drones being extinguished at
once was an excruciating jolt, and Hernandez felt her mind recoil and
shrink from the horror of it. Without the feedback buffer, she was
forced to experience every Borg drone’s death, every violent end, every
lonely submersion into darkness. With each passing second, a thousand
more voices cried out in the night, and her guilt felt like knives in
her heart.

Then one voice rose above the carnage, that of a presence unlike any
other Hernandez had encountered.

It was indomitable. Amoral.

Seductive and insidious.

The Queen answered Hernandez’s challenge.

In a blinding flash of agony, Hernandez understood the true nature of
the Borg…and for the first time in more than eight centuries, she was
afraid.

 

A second queen. In all its millennia of expansion, assimilation, and
steady progress toward perfection, the Collective had never before found
itself torn between two monarchs.

Even when the Borg Queen had been forced in times past to manifest in
multiple bodies at once, all of her avatars had represented the same
will, the same mind, the same purpose. The guiding voice had always been
unique and inimitable.

Now, on the cusp of the Collective’s latest triumph, an impostor had
risen. Harmony became discord; unity turned to conflict. Perfection had
been tainted.

The Borg Queen quelled the millions of confused plaints and imposed order.

Sleep, she decreed. Regenerate.

These were the most basic directives the drones knew. They were among
the first to be written, the building blocks for all that had come
afterward. Willed by the Queen, they were irresistible fiats that
overrode all other directives.

Throughout the enemy’s territory, her drones halted their
self-destructive struggles and sought out alcoves in which to replenish
themselves and aid the restoration of their vessels. As the drones
dropped out of the Collective, the Queen searched the still-waking minds
for her rival.

Cube after cube went dark, slowed, and stopped in space, as the drones
hibernated. The Queen pushed the blank spots in the Collective from her
mind and raced among the swiftly dwindling points of consciousness. Then
there was but one besides herself.

Not human, not Borg. Something familiar but still alien.

Designation is irrelevant, the Queen decided. The intruder must be
removed. She searched the isolated scout vessel for any remaining drones
to serve her, but she found none. There were many humanoid interlopers
on the ship, however. She decided they would suffice as replacements.

The ship awakened slowly to the Queen’s will. It had not been engineered
to play such a singular role, but it had been designed to support and
create new drones—and to destroy all that opposed it, within and without.

More important, as with all creations of the Borg, it had been made to
do one thing above all else: adapt.

 

Everyone in the combat operations center was talking at once, and
Admiral Jellico could barely hear what Admiral Nechayev was saying from
across the room. “Speak up, dammit!” he shouted.

“It’s confirmed, sir,” Nechayev hollered back. “The Borg cubes fired on
each other, and now they’ve all stopped, dead in space.” She turned away
as a harried-looking Arcturian captain thrust his padd into her hands.
Turning back toward Jellico, Nechayev lifted her voice to add, “All the
Borg cubes are showing heavy damage—most of their cores are exposed.”

We might never get another chance, Jellico realized. “All ships,
reengage! Press the attack while we can!”

His legion of officers snapped into action, rallying the fleet and
directing an immediate counterattack. Watching the massive screens full
of tactical diagrams shift to represent the recommitted battle forces,
Jellico dared to hope.

If we’re fast enough, we might just survive this.

 

“Fawkes, we need to strike now!” Captain Bateson bellowed, as the Atlas
accelerated on an attack heading. “Who’s left?”

His first officer studied her tactical monitor and frowned. “Exeter,
Prometheus, and Kearsarge.”

“Well, tell Prometheus to do its three-way-split trick. We need to hit
as many of those cubes over Vulcan as fast as we can.” Too energized to
stay seated, he sprang to his feet and prowled forward. “Helm, attack
pattern Theta-Red. Weapons, hit the Borg with everything we’ve got:
transphasic torpedoes, phasers, bad grammar—whatever it takes!”

The reddish orb of Vulcan grew swiftly larger in the frame of the
Atlas’s main viewscreen, and within seconds, the mangled and immobilized
Borg cubes lingering in orbit became visible.

At tactical, Lieutenant Reese’s youthful and delicately feminine
features hardened with resolve. “Targets locked, sir.”

Lieutenant Kedam at ops added, “Kearsarge and Exeter have their targets,
and Prometheus has initiated multivector assault mode.” A signal beeped
on Kedam’s console. He eyed the display and glanced back at Bateson with
a crooked grin. “New orders from Starfleet Command, sir: Reengage the Borg.”

“Typical brass,” Bateson said, rolling his eyes.

“Prometheus has its targets, sir,” Kedam said.

Bateson decided that if ever a moment had called for the invocation of
Shakespeare, this was it. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once
more! Fire at will!”

His blood was hot in his veins and his pulse heavy in his temples,
almost to the point of vertigo, as he gazed in awe at the staggering
volume of sheer firepower that the Atlas and its allies loosed upon the
Borg cubes. Great clusters of blazing warheads and brilliant slashes of
phaser energy lanced through the black monstrosities in orbit of Vulcan
and pummeled them into wreckage and dust. Any piece large enough to be
detected by a scanner was targeted and shot again, until every hunk of
bulkhead and every vacuum-exiled drone had been disintegrated.

“All targets eliminated,” reported Lieutenant Reese.

“Secure from Red Alert,” Bateson said, cracking his first smile in
weeks. He gleamed with satisfaction at his first officer. “Thank
Starfleet Command for their permission to engage—and tell them the
attack on Vulcan is over.”

 

Erika Hernandez gasped for breath and couldn’t fill her lungs. Her mind
was empty of thoughts but filled with white agony. All at once, dozens
of cubes and countless thousands of drones had been annihilated, and
their savagely curtailed suffering was too much for her to shut out or
shunt aside.

Then came the real pain.

Psionic attacks pierced her memories like spears of fire, searing her to
the core of her soul. Every engram jolted into action was transformed,
bastardized, tainted into a memory of torment and violation.

She was a child again, screaming for rescue as her family’s home went up
in flames, and blistering licks of orange heat consumed her beloved
stuffed-animal companions…

No, our house never burned…

A dank basement, a dust-revealed shaft of dull gray light through a
narrow window, her uncle sitting beside her on a sofa with torn
upholstery and old stains, his hand resting somewhere that it shouldn’t
have been…

He never did that! It’s a lie!

She was sixteen and on her back in the snow, on a slope in the Rocky
Mountains. Kevin, the boy she’d adored since eighth grade, was on top of
her—with his hands at her throat and a narcotic haze clouding his crazed
countenance. Her flailing and kicking and twisting bought her no
freedom, not even one more tiny breath. She scratched at his wrists but
couldn’t reach his face. He was exerting himself, and clouds of exhaled
breath lingered around his head, which was backlit by a full moon,
giving him an undeserved halo as he throttled her.

That’s not what happened! He was my first love!

None of her protests mattered. Each stab into her psyche twisted another
cherished moment of her life into something sick and shameful. Every
milestone of achievement, every fleeting moment of tenderness and
connection, was trampled. It was the psionic warfare equivalent of a
scorched-earth policy. Her foe intended to leave her no safe haven, no
place to retreat, nowhere she could go to ground.

Hernandez didn’t know how to fight something like this. It was too
powerful, too ancient, too cruel. It had no mercy, and it possessed
aeons of experience with shattering minds and devouring souls. A
destroyer of worlds, an omen of the end of history, it was not merely
the Borg Queen—it was the singular entity beyond the Queen, the very
essence of the Collective.

A cold darkness enveloped her, and she felt her fear being leached from
her, along with joy and sorrow, pride and shame. This is assimilation,
she realized. It’s even worse than Jean-Luc said. All you can do is
surrender.

Physical sensations returned with an excruciating spasm.

Hernandez’s back arched off the deck, and fiery needles shot through her
arms and along her spine. A scream caught in her constricted throat,
behind her clenched jaw. Sickly green light was all she saw in the dark
blur that surrounded her.

Helkara shouted, “Pull the rest of the leads! Now!”

“Not yet!” Leishman said. “Too much residual charge!”

Hands pulled at cables that snaked under Hernandez’s skin, and she heard
the hiss and felt the tingle of a hypospray at her throat. “We’re losing
her,” Helkara fumed. “Somebody get a medic! Chief, get that first-aid
kit over here!”

The convulsions ceased, and Hernandez let her body relax on the deck.
Her vision started to clear and sharpen, but she felt utterly drained,
and she began shivering intensely.

“Bring blankets,” Leishman said to someone running past.

Hernandez reached out and took Leishman’s forearm in a weak grasp.
“Queen,” she croaked, surprised at how difficult it was for her to form
words. When she tried to speak again, all that issued from her lips were
reedy gasps.

Helkara leaned in and asked Leishman, “What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘Queen.’ I guess the Borg Queen shook her up.”

“No kidding,” the Zakdorn science officer said.

Vexed by their obtuseness and quickly losing consciousness, Hernandez
let go of Leishman’s arm and grabbed Helkara’s collar. She yanked his
face down to her own and stammered in a brittle whisper, “The Qu…Queen…”

Helkara pried her hand from his uniform and straightened his posture.
“Is on her way to Earth—we know, Captain,” he said, placing her
weakening hand on her chest and patting it in a patronizing manner.
“We’ll deal with her next. Right now, you need to rest. Just hang tight
till the medics get here.”

The sedatives they had given her were kicking in, and the edges of her
world were growing soft and fading away.

Morons! she raged, imprisoned inside her tranquilized body. She wanted
to warn them, but then she sank into the smothering arms of dark bliss,
unable to convey a simple report:

The Queen is here.

 

The news was almost too good for Nan Bacco to believe it. She kept
waiting for the correction, the retraction, the nuanced clarification
that would negate what she and her people had just witnessed on the
subspace-feed monitors in the Monet Room.

A hushed conference between Seven of Nine and Admirals Batanides and
Akaar ended, and Akaar strode to the head of the conference table. He
lifted his large hands and silenced the nervous chatter that had filled
the room.

“We’ve just received confirmation from Starfleet Command,” he said,
lifting his chin and letting his long gray hair frame his squarish
features. “The Borg attack fleets at Vulcan, Andor, Coridan, Beta Rigel,
and Qo’noS have been routed.”

He had more to say but was cut off by the room’s thunderous applause and
whooping cheers of jubilant relief. Bacco permitted herself only a
tight, grateful smile, for fear of tempting the Fates with premature
celebration. She caught sight of a deep frown on Piñiero’s face, and
then she noticed that similarly grave expressions were worn by
Batanides, Akaar, and Seven.

Akaar lifted his palms again and hushed the assembled cabinet members
and advisers. “There were reports of infighting among several other Borg
battle groups, but those have now ceased—and all remaining Borg attack
fleets are once again on the move.” He met Bacco’s questioning look and
added, “Including the one on its way to Earth.”



    4527 B.C.E.



    20

Karl Graylock, Kiona Thayer, and Gage Pembleton were desperate and dazed
with hunger after eight days of exhausting snowshoeing in a brutal deep
freeze. Walking on unraveling snowshoes, they trudged through the
endless night, up the side of Junk Mountain, their every step resisted
by frigid knives of screaming wind and pelting sleet.

Less than two hundred meters up the slope of Junk Mountain, Graylock’s
snowshoes finally came apart beneath him. First his left foot plunged
through the sagged webbing, and then his right foot tore free of its
rotted binding. “Scheisse,” he cursed under his breath, fearful of
triggering an avalanche.

Pembleton poked at the snow with his walking stick. “It’s pretty
hard-packed,” he gasped in the thin air. “You didn’t sink much past your
ankles.” He tapped the side of his snowshoe with the stick. “We probably
don’t need these anymore.”

“Probably not,” Graylock said. Thayer and Pembleton pulled off their
snowshoes. Graylock gathered up the broken pieces of his footwear and
stuffed the fragments into folds and under flaps on his backpack; they’d
make decent kindling once they dried. Looking up the slope, directly
into the path of the gale-driven sleet, he winced and said, “Let’s keep
going.”

Graylock remembered the way to the Caeliar’s redoubt as well as
Pembleton did, so he took the lead as they ascended into the lashing
gusts of the storm. It was up to Pembleton to keep watch for the local
predator that had slain Mazzetti weeks earlier. All Thayer had to do was
keep herself upright while hiking uphill over ice and snow with her
braced foot.

From a distance, the three survivors would have looked all but
identical. Mummified in multiple layers of the now-sullied silver-gray
Caeliar fabric, only their heights distinguished them; Pembleton was the
tallest, followed by Graylock, and then Thayer. It occurred to Graylock
that they had not seen one another’s face in more than a week. As the
temperatures had plummeted, they had resisted removing any but the
tiniest strips of their swaddling, and then only for absolute necessities.

In the mad swirls of sleet that surrounded him, his view of the path
ahead was limited to its next few meters. Fighting gravity to push his
weakened body up the mountainside left his head spinning. The next thing
he knew, he was on his hands and knees, dryheaving through his face
wrappings.

Hands closed tentatively around his arms. Thayer and Pembleton labored
to pull Graylock back to his feet.

“Don’t quit on us now, you Austrian clod,” Thayer said.

He wobbled as he found his footing. “Well, since you asked so nicely,”
he mumbled to her. “Gage, can you…?”

“Take point? Sure.” Pembleton stepped past Graylock and led the trio up
the slope, past icicle-draped rock formations. Towering snowdrifts had
formed against the windward side of the huge black crags that jutted
from the pristine slope.

Concealed beneath a deep blanket of snow, the shape of the terrain had
become unfamiliar to Graylock’s eyes. He hoped that Pembleton’s
wilderness combat training would enable him to find the entrance to the
Caeliar’s buried laboratory.

The effort and the exhaustion, the hunger and the pain…they all blurred
together as Graylock forced his aching muscles to go through the
motions: taking one step and then another, walking where Pembleton had
walked, never looking back.

His eyes felt leaden, and an overpowering desire for rest sapped his
will to continue. So cold I can’t even feel it anymore, he mused, poised
on the edge of a hallucination. He was all but ready to collapse
face-first into the snow when a mitten-wrapped hand yanked him forward.

“I found it,” Pembleton said. “The tunnel’s pretty slick, but I think we
can make it down. Come on!”

The three survivors doffed their backpacks and huddled around a cave in
the snow. It looked like an enlarged version of a trapdoor spider’s
lair. The sides of the opening were sheathed in ice and dusted with
clinging snow that had gathered in a long, shallow slope at the bottom.
Graylock peered cautiously over the edge and down the icy incline. “It’s
mostly clear,” he said. “But how—”

A quick push sent him headfirst over the edge. He put out his hands by
reflex. They slipped over the ice and did nothing to slow him down as he
caromed off the sides, but the snow piled at the end broke his fall, and
he was able to use his arms to guide himself down the slope on his
chest. Then he slid to a stop in the pitch-dark corridor that led to the
shielded lab.

He got up, dusted himself off, and walked back to the opening. When he
glared up at his two comrades, Kiona said, “Sorry. Impulse.”

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” he said, projecting wrathful sarcasm.
“Get down here.”

Graylock stepped back and waited. Seconds later, Thayer slid feet-first
onto the snow and glided on her buttocks into the corridor. He helped
her up, and she called back up to Pembleton, “Clear!” Next, the trio’s
backpacks were dropped, and Thayer helped Graylock recover them and move
them to one side. After the third one, Thayer again yelled back, “Clear!”

Then Pembleton joined them, landing and sliding as Thayer had. Graylock
and Thayer pulled him to his feet. He brushed the snow off the backs of
his legs as he asked, “Where do you think the Caeliar would be?”

“Probably near whatever energy-storage system they were living from,”
Graylock said. “We should probably start looking in the lab.” The
engineer opened his pack and removed the fire-making kit. They quickly
fashioned small torches from their remaining thick branches of firewood
and some strips of their old uniforms soaked in salvaged machine oil.
Pembleton lit two torches with a flint and steel, passed them to Thayer
and Graylock, then lit his own. Weak firelight and massive shadows
danced on the metallic walls.

Graylock started down the corridor, and the others followed him. It felt
strange to him to be back inside an artificial structure again. Their
footsteps were loud and crisp on the hard floors, and they reverberated
in the empty passages. The wind sang mournful songs in the dead city’s
empty spaces.

Away from the ice chute and the brunt of the wind, Graylock peeled off
the layers of fabric wrapped around his head. The final layers felt
glued to the front of his face, and he teased the fabric loose with
gingerly tugs. As it came free, he saw why it had held fast. It was
crusted with dried blood. Exposed for two weeks to extreme cold and
aridity, his sinuses and lips had cracked like salt flats in the desert.

Thayer and Pembleton coaxed off their own bandages, revealing the same
kind of cold-weather damage to their faces. What alarmed Graylock,
however, wasn’t the blood but the bones. Their cheekbones looked as if
they might pierce their skin at any moment. Touching his own face,
Graylock realized with horror how gaunt they all had become. We look
like walking corpses.

They turned a corner, entered the lab, and found the cavernous space
deserted. Every corridor and chamber they had explored had deepened
Graylock’s profound unease; as they wandered through the open space, he
felt as if he were lurking in a crypt. “I think we’re too late,” he
said. “They’re gone.”

“Maybe if you tried calling for them,” Thayer said. “What was the name
of the one you knew?”

“Lerxst,” Graylock said. He looked to Pembleton for an opinion. The man
shrugged as if to say, Why not? Raising his voice, Graylock called out
for the Caeliar scientist. “Lerxst?”

There was no answer but the keening of the wind.

He tried again: “Lerxst?”

His voice echoed several times.

Then a sepulchral groan shook the ruined city.

“Maybe we should leave,” Pembleton said, turning a wary eye toward the
ceiling, while Thayer threw frightened glances in every other direction.

“Not the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Graylock said.

They turned to retreat from the lab—and saw a specter looking back at
them. It was barely there at all, a ghostly approximation of a Caeliar’s
shape, as if made of steam.

Unable to mask the fear choking his voice, Graylock squeaked out, “Lerxst?”

An electric jolt spiked through Graylock’s mind and rooted him to the
floor. Thayer and Pembleton stood shaking beside him. Then a voice—at
once feminine, malevolent, and invincible—whispered inside his thoughts
as a chill like death crusted the trio’s bodies and faces with a
delicate layer of frost.

Sedín.

Pinpricks of cold fire became unbearable stabs of pain across every
square centimeter of Graylock’s body. He wanted to scream and run, but
he couldn’t move. There was nowhere for his agony to go, so it rebounded
on itself, creating a feedback loop of suffering that drowned out every
other sensation. He kept expecting to pass out, to implode under the
strain, but Sedín wouldn’t let his mind shut down. She wouldn’t let him
escape; she just hammered and hammered.

No! he raged. I won’t be…won’t become…a…cy—

 

—borg.

The hunger had found new strength. Three drones, easily controlled. Two
males, one female. Properly replenished, they would serve. But these
were nearly depleted. The female must be preserved to produce more
vessels, decided the hunger. One of the males must be consolidated for
the collective good.

It read the chemical engrams of the males’ minds. One was a warrior, the
other an engineer. The engineer’s knowledge is more valuable, the hunger
concluded.

The drones’ tools were crude and clumsy, but they would suffice. Organic
nourishment, though inefficient, also would have to do until a more
efficacious means of sustenance and maintenance could be devised. Until
then, adjustments to these beings’ simple genetic code would maximize
their longevity and facilitate needed energy-saving biological processes.

Operating the drones as though they were limbs, the hunger used the
female and the engineer to terminate the warrior. Its loss was
regrettable but necessary. With care and precision, its body was cut
apart, meat and fat separated from bone, the edible from the inedible.
When all of the warrior’s digestible fuels had been isolated, the hunger
recharged her two remaining drones with the resources liberated from the
third.

When warmer weather returned, the search could begin for a new source of
energy. Until then, these vessels of the hunger had to be protected and
their energy conserved.

Survival would depend on patience.

Sleep, the hunger bade its drones. Sleep.

 

Icy seawater crashed over the gunwales of the launch as it neared the
shore. Sedath, the second-in-command of the private icebreaker Demial,
took the brunt of the chilling spray but turned his head and shut his
eyes until the stinging mist abated. He opened his eyes and saw the
rowers smirking at him.

“Pick up the pace, men,” he said, his voice as level and professional as
ever. He didn’t begrudge his men a bit of amusement at his expense, but
discipline had to be maintained.

At the rear of the launch sat Jestem, the Demial’s athletic and
weathered commanding officer, and Karai, a nervous and evasive young
executive from the consortium that owned the icebreaker and employed its
officers and crew. Both men were eager to be ashore, though for
different reasons. Jestem was a glory seeker, always on the lookout for
another chance to grab a measure of fame and acclaim. Karai’s ambition
was more prosaic: He was in it for the money.

Sedath looked up at the pale sky. The sun had just peeked over the
horizon, casting a golden glow on the arctic mountains. The landing
party would have barely enough time to climb the slope to the lowest
edge of the astounding scar that something had gouged into the primeval
rock.

The scar fascinated Sedath. He had studied dozens of old topographical
maps and surveyors’ drawings of this peak on the Demial’s months-long
sea journey, and he was certain that the multitude of jagged,
semi-vertical rock formations that dotted the lower slope had not been
there just a few decades earlier.

It’s a meteorite, he surmised. Has to be. The distribution of the debris
on the slope suggests an oblique impact from above. Although the
Demial’s principal mission was to search the seabed for carbon fuel
deposits, Sedath had always viewed his work aboard the arctic explorer
as an opportunity to conduct scientific research far away from the
meddling of the company’s sponsored labs or the ideologically extreme
halls of academia.

Let the commander have the glory, he mused. Karai can keep the money. I
just want to run some tests on those meteorites.

The hollow scrape of aluminum over pebbles and sand told Sedath that the
launch had reached the shore of the fjord. Malfomn, the ship’s graying,
square-jawed gendarme, got up from his seat next to Sedath and vaulted
over the side of the launch. The older man landed with a splash in the
frigid, knee-deep water, grabbed the prow of the launch, and towed it
farther onto the shore. Sedath stood, laid a plank from the front
benchboard to the bow, walked across it, and made a short hop to dry land.

Jestem and Karai were the next out of the launch, followed in short
order by the rowers and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Marasa. To the same
degree that Karai, Jestem, and Sedath himself were overcome with
enthusiasm for the consortium-ordered fact-finding mission, Marasa had
wanted no part of it. The weary-looking physician shivered as he took in
his surroundings. “Okay, we’ve seen it,” he grumped. “Can we go back now?”

“Quit complaining, Doctor,” Jestem said. “We’re heading up the slope for
a closer look at whatever hit this mountain.”

Marasa narrowed his eyes. “I bet it was a rock.”

Jestem replied, “Just put your snowshoes on, Doctor.”

Malfomn, Karai, Sedath, Jestem, and Marasa set down their backpacks,
unstrapped their snowshoes, and started putting them on. Jestem was the
first to finish securing his bindings. He began slide-stepping away,
heading for the incline. “Come on,” he called back. “We’re losing the
light, gentlemen!”

The rest of the group was about to set out after him when Malfomn called
out, “Hold up! Everybody, stop!” All eyes turned toward the gendarme,
who pointed at a nearby rocky outcropping. “What’s that, between the rocks?”

It was difficult at first for Sedath to see what Malfomn was talking
about. Then he began to discern artificial-looking shapes and angles
lurking beneath the deep, driven snow. “Malfomn, come with me, we’ll
check it out.”

Sedath and Malfomn split away from the group and sidestepped up a
gradual hillside to the rock formation. As they got closer to it, he saw
pieces of metal jutting up out of the snow and catching the morning
sunlight. As soon as he was close enough, Sedath reached out with one
gloved hand and tugged on the narrow beam. It shifted a bit in the snow.
“Help me pull this up,” he said to the gendarme.

Together they took hold of the metal bar and pulled it free of the snow.
It was half again as long as Sedath was tall, and its edges were twisted
and jagged, as if from shearing stress.

“Do you recognize this alloy?” he asked Malfomn.

The older man shook his head. “Never seen anything like it.” Nodding at
the snow where they’d found it, he added, “Maybe we ought to do a little
digging here, see what we find.”

“Good idea,” Sedath said. They retrieved their entrenching tools from
the back of their packs and started shoveling away the snow and ice.
Within a few minutes, beneath only a thin layer of the snow cover, they
had exposed more metal pieces and a large patch of tattered,
metallic-looking fabric. Lifting it and eyeing it in the sunlight,
Sedath speculated, “Part of a shelter, you think?”

“Maybe,” Malfomn said. “But I don’t know anybody anywhere who makes
shelters with materials like this—do you?”

Sedath bunched the shredded fabric and stuffed it into his pocket. “No,
I don’t,” he said. He cast an apprehensive look up the mountainside at
the raw wound in the stone and turned back to Malfomn. “We should get
back to the others,” he said. “Jestem wants to climb that slope and make
it back to the Demial before sundown.” Stepping closer to the gendarme,
Sedath added in a confidential tone of voice, “Have the rowers come up
here and finish digging this out while we’re gone. Whatever they find, I
want it wrapped in a tarp and stowed in the launch.”

“Yes, sir,” Malfomn said. “It’ll be good for them to have work to do
while we’re up on the mountain.”

“My thoughts, exactly,” Sedath said.

The two men kick-stepped back down the hillside. Back on level ground,
they split up; Sedath cut across the plain to rejoin the commander, and
Malfomn detoured to the shore and relayed Sedath’s orders to the rowers
before regrouping with the climbing expedition at the base of the mountain.

“What’d you find?” Jestem asked Sedath.

“I’m not sure yet,” Sedath said, and it was an honest, if evasive,
answer. “Some metal and some fabric.”

Jestem frowned inside his fur-lined parka hood. “Metal and fabric? Like
you might find in a hastily concealed base camp?”

“Possibly,” Sedath said, not refuting the commander’s hypothesis, even
though he had a more exotic idea of his own.

Karai shot a worried glance at Jestem. “Commander, the consortium has to
defend its rights to all claims in this territory, mineral or chemical,
or else we’ll lose them.”

“I know that,” Jestem said.

“If another landing party has arrived ahead of us, we can’t let them
seize any materials or stake any—”

Jestem cut in, “I get it!” He nodded to Malfomn. “Keep your weapon
handy, Mal. Seems like we might not be alone up here.” To the rest of
the group, he declared, “Let’s go! Follow me.”

As the climb began, Sedath pulled a corner of the fabric from his pocket
and stole another look at it. It was lightweight but substantial enough
that no light penetrated its weave; it slipped easily between his gloved
fingertips, like gear oil. Its metallic threads reflected a rainbow of
colors as they caught the light. He truly had never seen anything like
it before, and he had no idea how it had been made. But if his
hypothesis about its origin proved to be correct, then Sedath was about
to make a great discovery for science.

Of course, if we actually find an alien spaceship, he admitted to
himself, the commander will be the one who gets famous, and Karai’ll
probably end up the world’s richest man. The best I can hope for is to
get the first look at the thing before it gets shut away in some company
lab.

He grinned beneath his balaclava. I can live with that.

 

“Over here!” Jestem was far ahead of the rest of the group, standing
near an ice fissure at the bottom of a steep cliff patched with snow.
Sedath and the others hurried their pace, but only with difficulty. None
of them had snowshoed in a long time, and the hike up the slope had
proved exhausting for everyone—except the commander, apparently.

Malfomn and Sedath reached the fissure, where Jestem stood at the mouth
of a narrow ice cave, staring into its depths. Sedath looked back and
admired the view of the fjord. At its far end, near the channel, the
Demial lay at anchor, silhouetted on quiet waters that reflected the
dusky afternoon sky. A whistling gale sparkled the air with a dusting of
ice crystals lifted from the slope around the landing party.

Karai and Marasa arrived looking wilted and sounding out of breath. The
doctor said, “I promise to rig a clean drug test for anyone willing to
carry me back down.”

Before anyone could take Marasa up on his offer, Jestem turned and said
to Sedath, “Give me your palmlight, will you?”

Sedath undid the loop that held his portable light on his belt and
handed the device to Jestem—who, as a privilege of his rank, usually
traveled light and expected everyone else to come prepared with whatever
he might need. The commander switched on the palmlight and aimed its
narrow beam down the ice shaft. He squinted and said, “Sedath, do you
see that surface down there?”

Peering into the foggy gloom, Sedath replied, “I think so.”

“What does that look like to you?”

He watched the way the light reflected off a bare patch of the cave’s
floor, and he nodded. “Metal,” he said.

Jestem turned off the light, tucked it into his own belt, and said,
“We’re going down there. Secure some safety lines in the cliff face, and
relay our coordinates to the Demial.”

“Yes, sir,” Sedath said. He nodded to Malfomn, who set himself to work
hammering spikes into the stone cliff face and securing sturdy ropes to
them. Sedath removed his pack and dug out the radio. He turned it on,
set it to the ship’s frequency, and pressed the transmit button.
“Landing party to Demial, acknowledge.”

The watch officer’s voice squawked and crackled over the barely reliable
portable transceiver, “Demial here. Go ahead.”

“Our coordinates are grid teskol seventeen, azimuth
three-fifty-six-point-two, elevation one thousand three hundred nine.”

“Noted,” said the watch officer. “Any details for the log?”

“We’ve found an opening in a cliff wall,” Sedath said, and then he
paused as Jestem snapped around and glared at him, as if to say, Not
another word—not yet. Composing himself, Sedath continued, “We’re going
underground to see where it leads, so we’ll be out of touch for a bit.”

“Got it. Watch your step down there.”

“Count on it. Landing party out.” He switched off the radio and tucked
it back inside his pack. He walked back to the others and saw that
Malfomn had finished securing two safety lines and was hurling their
coils of slack down the ice shaft. Sedath sidled up to Jestem, who was
still gazing down into the subterranean darkness. “Sir,” Sedath said,
“maybe I should go first, just this once.”

“Nonsense,” Jestem said, slipping back into his practiced persona of
nonchalant bravery. “I was just getting my bearings, that’s all. Let’s
get down there before we lose the light.”

There was no time for Sedath to protest. Jestem locked his jacket’s
climbing loop around the safety line and started down the shaft, his
boots slipping clumsily across the snow-dusted ice as he worked his way
down the rope, using his hands as a brake. Half a minute later, the
commander was at the bottom, shining his borrowed palmlight down the tunnel.

Sedath directed and supervised the descents, and he was the last person
down. After a few strides away from the ice, his footsteps echoed
against metal, much as they did aboard the Demial. He halted in midstep
as Jestem, Karai, and Malfomn spun around and shushed him. As soon as he
stopped, they turned away and seemed to be listening intently, so Sedath
did the same.

Faint sounds reechoed in the darkness, so softly that they almost became
lost in the melancholy moaning of the wind through the passages. Then
the sounds became closer and clearer: a soft scrape and several light
footfalls.

“Lights,” Jestem said, switching on his palmlight. Karai, Malfomn, and
Marasa did the same. Empty-handed, all that Sedath could do was stand to
one side and try to gaze past the crisscrossed beams to see what might
emerge from the darkness.

Two shapes shuffled into the penumbra of the palmlights. At first, all
Sedath could see were their dark outlines, but even from those, he was
certain that he was looking at a man and a woman. They were emaciated
and garbed in tattered, loose-hanging bits of fabric, which fluttered in
the chilly breeze that never seemed to cease. The beams from the
palmlights were reflected in the pair’s eyes, which even from a distance
had a disconcerting emptiness that sent a shiver of fear down Sedath’s
spine.

“Identify yourselves,” Jestem called out.

Karai said with venomous anger, “We know who they are—corporate spies.”
Sneering at the disheveled figures limping and walking stiffly out of
the darkness, he added, “Looks like they already got what they deserve,
too.”

Then the mysterious duo stepped fully into the harsh glare of the
palmlights. They were definitely a male and a female, but Sedath was
certain they weren’t Kindir. For one thing, their hands each had only a
single opposable thumb instead of the normal two. Even more shocking to
him were their pallid, mottled-gray complexions. Kindir skin varied in
pigmentation from golden brown to ebony, and no one in the history of
the world had ever had eyes the color of the sky—but this woman did.

The landing party was still and silent, dumbfounded by the significance
of this encounter: They were face-to-face with living, intelligent
beings not of their world.

The alien woman spoke in a monotonal voice. Her words didn’t sound like
any of the dozens of major languages on Arehaz. She repeated herself as
she and her companion advanced on the landing party.

Jestem muttered to Sedath, “Any idea what she said?”

“No clue,” Sedath said.

The aliens stopped at arm’s length from the landing party. The woman
spoke again, repeating her monotonal declaration. Then she and the man
each extended one hand to the landing party.

“I think it’s some kind of greeting,” Sedath said.

He stepped forward to take the man’s hand, but Jestem grabbed his
shoulder and stopped him. “Looks like she does the talking around here.
Let me handle this.” Jestem took half a step forward and offered his
hand to the woman. “I am Salaz Jestem of the icebreaker Demial,” he
said. “On behalf of Kindir around the world, welcome to Arehaz.”

The woman grasped the commander’s extended hand. Slender metallic
tubules broke through the skin between her knuckles and leaped like
serpents into the fleshy part of Jestem’s wrist. He convulsed and then
became rigid. The light left his eyes.

Sedath and Malfomn sprang to Jestem’s aid. The male alien’s hand struck
in a blur, locked around Sedath’s throat, and lifted him off the ground.
The female let go of Jestem and snared Malfomn’s arm before he could
land his punch.

The two men struggled in vain to free themselves. Despite the aliens’
gaunt appearances, they were amazingly strong. Out of the corner of his
eye, Sedath saw Dr. Marasa spring to catch Jestem, who had staggered
away from the melee in a daze.

Marasa shook Jestem by his shoulders. “Commander? Are you all right? Are
you hurt?”

Jestem looked up at Marasa—and then he lifted one hand to the doctor’s
throat and skewered it with two silver tubules from his own knuckles.
Marasa twitched in Jestem’s clutches, and next to Sedath, Malfomn was
quaking and wearing a glazed look as the female alien withdrew her
tubules from his wrist.

Then Sedath felt a bite on his own neck, like a pair of tiny fangs
piercing his carotid. A dark, muffling curtain of terror descended on
his thoughts as the female spoke again. This time, hearing her inside
his mind, he understood her perfectly.

You will be assimilated.



    2381



    21

Gredenko looked back from ops and said, “Starfleet Command is confirming
all reports, Captain.”

Dax smiled and heaved a deep, relieved sigh. Applause and cheering
filled the Aventine’s bridge, and even Bowers let down his guard for a
moment to pump his fist and shout, “Yes!”

It really worked. Dax could barely believe it. Assaulting the Borg probe
ship had been a terrible risk and the wildest of long shots, but they
had done it—and played a decisive role in saving five allied worlds from
annihilation.

As the applause tapered off, Dax joined Lieutenant Kandel at tactical
and asked, “How long before Captain Hernandez can tap into the Borg
vinculum again?”

The Deltan woman replied, “We don’t know yet, Captain. The last report
from Lieutenant Kedair said that Captain Hernandez had to be
disconnected from the vinculum for her own good.”

“Has the captain regained consciousness?”

“Yes, a few moments ago,” Kandel said.

“Then I want her patched back into the vinc—” A thunderclap and a
jarring impact knocked the bridge into a confused jumble of bodies
falling and tumbling in the dark.

Bowers shouted, “Shields! Tactical, report!”

Several more blasts shook the Aventine in rapid succession. “Taking fire
from the Borg ship,” Kandel called back over the din of explosions.

“Return fire!” Dax said. “Target their weapons!”

“Firing,” Kandel said. On the main viewer, blue streams of phaser energy
skewered the Borg scout’s hull, vaporizing its primary and secondary
armaments. Dax hoped she wasn’t inflicting more friendly-fire casualties
on her boarding teams.

The lights flickered back to full strength as Bowers said, “Helm,
evasive pattern sigma. Give tactical a clear shot at the other side of
the Borg ship.”

“Aye, sir,” replied Lieutenant Tharp. The Bolian guided the ship through
a series of rolling maneuvers that dodged the Borg’s next barrage. Then
a fresh wave of phaser and torpedo hits from the Aventine halted the
Borg’s attack.

“Cease-fire,” Bowers ordered. “Gredenko, damage report.”

The ops officer’s hands moved lightly and quickly over her console as
she compiled data flooding in from several decks and departments.
“Weapons grid overload,” she said. “Shields offline. Direct hit to the
main deflector—minor damage, but we’ve lost the ability to generate a
dampening field.”

“I’ll bet that was the Borg’s intention,” Dax said.

Gredenko added, “There’s more, Captain. We’ve also lost our long-range
comms. Complete system failure.”

“Sam, start beaming our people back,” Dax said. “I want them off that
ship, on the double. Then I want it fragged.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Bowers, relaying the order to Kandel with an urgent
nod.

A moment later, Kandel looked up from the tactical station and said,
“Scattering fields are going up in the core of the Borg ship—and the
boarding parties report they’re under attack!”

Bowers snapped, “By whom?”

Kandel’s reply confirmed Dax’s fear: “By the ship, sir.”

 

The walls were alive, and the floors couldn’t be trusted. Hungry maws
filled with shining cables writhing in viscous black fluids had started
to appear in the middle of bulkheads and corridors, as if invisible
knives were slashing wounds into the ship’s metal flesh and revealing
its biomechanoid innards.

Helkara looked around the transforming vinculum tower in shock. Over the
deafening screeches of wrenching metal, he shouted, “What the hell is
going on?”

“The ship’s adapting,” Kedair said, looking around in terror at the
collapsing catwalks and wildly undulating wires that whipped like angry
serpents in the space around the ship’s hollow core. “That means it’s
about to start either killing us or assimilating us. Either way, I’d
rather not stick around to find out.” A booming groan from the ship
seemed to answer her.

Leishman and a Mizarian paramedic named Ravosus strained to lift Erika
Hernandez to her feet. “C’mon, Captain,” Leishman said, grimacing under
the effort of lifting the semiconscious woman. “We have to get you out
of here.”

As they carried her toward the exit, Hernandez’s eyes snapped open, and
her hand lashed out and snared Kedair’s sleeve. “The Queen,” she said.
“She’s here. On this ship.”

Kedair tapped her combadge, intending to order the rest of the boarding
teams to evacuate the Borg ship. Her metallic insignia returned a
dysfunctional-sounding chirp that signaled an error. “Must be a
scrambling field,” she said, thinking out loud. She pried Hernandez’s
fingers off her arm, then pointed across the narrow causeway that had
been extended to link the vinculum tower to the interior structure of
the Borg vessel. “You three, get Hernandez to a beam-out point. Go!”

Helkara blocked the exit and protested, “What about you?”

“I have to set the detonator on the transphasic mine,” she said. Then
she added a lie: “I’ll be right behind you. Go!” A hard slap on the
Zakdorn’s back impelled him into motion. Leishman and the medic hurried
along behind him, supporting the dazed but now weakly ambulatory
Hernandez between them.

One minute for them to cross the bridge, Kedair calculated, two minutes
to the nearest enhanced transport site. Add a minute for insurance. She
turned back and faced the dark heart at the center of the Borg vessel.
The inside of the vinculum tower was now a horror show of biomechanical
viscera spreading like a cancer, metastasizing into every open space. To
reach the transphasic mine and set its detonator, she would have to
fight her way through that snaking mass of lethal, merciless
pseudo-flesh and hold her ground for at least four minutes.

There was no point sending anyone else to do it; she was the only one
likely to have a chance of success…and she decided that she’d gotten
enough of her people killed for one day.

From a sheath on the back of one of her slain comrades, she drew a sword
with a monomolecular edge. Alone and resolved, she gazed into the
yawning cavity of steel teeth, slithering sinew, and oily black death.
It taunted her with evil whispers, as if daring her to rush in where all
others feared to tread.

She lifted her blade and charged.

 

Every turn seemed to lead to a dead end. Dark chords of panic rang out
from all directions, echoing and vanishing into the shadowy recesses.
The inside of the Borg probe was a maze of snaking conduits and sliding
walls. Great slabs of machinery moved of their own volition behind the
façades, traveling with deep rumbles and ear-splitting screeches.

Erika Hernandez had recovered most of her strength and was sprinting
behind Leishman and Helkara, with Ravosus close behind her. She wished
they could run faster. In theory, Helkara was leading them out of the
industrial-style labyrinth, back to one of many secured platforms where
a quartet of transporter-pattern enhancers had been set up to facilitate
a rapid evacuation of the ship. In practice, he was steering them down
passages to nowhere.

They rounded a corner, and Helkara slammed into a solid wall of layered
metal plating and overlapping conduits. Leishman ran into him, and
Ravosus collided with Hernandez and then awkwardly backed away, into the
corridor from which they’d come.

Helkara stumbled backward and squinted in pained confusion at the
barrier. “What the…?” Staring in dismay at his tricorder screen, he
said, “There should be a passage here.”

“We were warned about this,” Leishman said, pulling Helkara back the way
they’d come, past Hernandez, around the corner. “The ship’s reshaping
itself, corralling us.” As soon as she had turned the corner, she
stopped, looked around, and asked with obvious alarm, “Where’s Ravosus?”

Hernandez opened her catom senses to the energies that dwelled inside
the Borg vessel’s vast machinery, all of it guided by a sophisticated
inorganic intelligence. She saw the patterns in its alterations of form,
and she felt it focusing itself to strike. Behind all of it, she heard
the voice of the Queen.

“He’s gone,” Hernandez said. “Follow me.”

She led her two remaining comrades down a narrow pass between two
bulkheads. It was barely wide enough for Leishman to pass; her shoulders
scraped the sides, and Helkara had to shuffle-step at an angle to
follow. Several meters away, at the end of the sliver-thin passage, the
sickly green glow of the ship’s energy-transfer systems lit the way.

Leishman called out in alarm, “I’m snagged on something!”

Hernandez stopped and looked back. Black tendrils squirmed up through
holes in the waffle-grid deck plates and snaked around Leishman’s ankles
and up her legs. Hurrying back to the trapped engineer, Hernandez saw
Helkara reaching for his phaser. “Stop,” she said, holding out one hand.
“You could hit Mikaela!”

Helkara stared past her, and his jaw went slack as a shadow fell over
him. “I think we have bigger problems,” he said.

Her catom senses had already told her what was happening, but she needed
to see it for herself.

She looked over her shoulder.

The path ahead went black. The passage was closing on them.

Resistance is futile, hissed the Queen, invading the sanctum of
Hernandez’s thoughts.

We’ll see about that, Hernandez projected in reply.

“Take my hand, Mikaela!” she shouted. “Gruhn—you, too!”

The two officers reached out for Hernandez’s outstretched hands. She
grasped their wrists.

The walls pressed inward and reached for the trio with eager tentacles.
The deck fell away beneath them.

And another took its place.

She had found the royal frequency and made it her own.

For every trap the Borg Queen triggered, Hernandez improvised a defense.
Rebuilding the lost deck behind her, she pulled Leishman and Helkara
with her as she fought for each step. Prehensile twists of tubing as
thick as her arms wrapped around her throat, Leishman’s waist, Helkara’s
legs. Hernandez answered each attack with a focused mental image of its
opposite. The physical reality of the Borg ship, for aeons the solitary
domain of the Borg Queen, now bowed to her imagination. Tentacles
withdrew or broke apart. Vanished decks rebuilt themselves. The lethal
pressure of closing bulkheads became the freedom of open space. Then her
back struck the final barrier, and at her command, it turned to
coal-black dust.

The trio collapsed onto the secured platform, which had been partitioned
from the rest of the Borg ship by directional dampening field
projectors. Arranged in a large square formation were four
transport-pattern enhancers, all blinking in their ready standby mode.

Hernandez dropped Leishman and Helkara into the middle of the enhancers,
tapped the combadge on Helkara’s chest, and said, “Boarding party to
Aventine. Two for emergency beam-out!”

“Acknowledged,” said a voice made small by being filtered through the
combadge. “Stand by for transport.”

Leishman and Helkara were still staggering weakly to their feet as
Hernandez bounded away, clear of the pattern enhancers, and landed with
preternatural grace atop a centimeters-thin railing. Perched on it, she
felt the same rush of power that she’d had in Axion. Having attuned the
catoms in her body to the Borg’s unique wavelength, she had usurped
their strength.

The images in Hernandez’s mind were absolutely clear.

She saw Kedair being smothered inside the vinculum tower, her life
fading, her mission to trigger the transphasic mine on the verge of
failure. There was no direct route to the transport-shielded tower, no
way for anyone to come to Kedair’s aid…no one except Hernandez.

She coiled and tensed to leap off the railing into the moving parts of
the Borg ship, already visualizing herself negotiating its grinding
gears with impunity.

The whine of a transporter beam began to fill the air.

“Where are you going?” Leishman asked over the eerie wails and
mechanical clankings of the ship’s infernal works.

Hernandez looked over her shoulder. “To save Kedair.”

Helkara and Leishman became pillars of swirling particles as the
transporter beam took hold, and Hernandez leaped off the railing and
fell willingly into the belly of the beast.

 

Lonnoc Kedair knew that she was close to the detonator controls for the
transphasic mine, but she couldn’t see it. Entombed in the squirming
black tangle that surrounded the Borg vinculum, all she saw was
darkness, as if she’d drowned in tar.

There was no air to breathe, nowhere to move, no way to get any leverage
for a counterattack. Her feet had been pulled from under her, and
stinger-tipped tentacles began impaling her from the front and from behind.

Horrendous grinding sensations filled her torso as the Borg ship’s
mechanical limbs pierced her body in several places at once. Almost as
quickly as the wounds were inflicted, her body fought to heal them, but
it was a losing battle. Several centimeters thick, the tentacles
battered her with blunt force, snapping her bones, rending her skin, and
pummeling her last hoarded breaths from her lungs.

She cried out in agony and felt her scream buried in the smothering,
oily lubricant of the Borg machine. The foul liquid seeped into her
nostrils and poured into her mouth. Reflex and instinct told her to spit
it out, but she had no more breath left to push with.

Needling jabs pricked her skin with sharp, icy twinges. Assimilation
nanoprobes, she realized. For a moment, she regretted the aggressive
combination of antiassimilation implants and injections she and the
other boarders had received. Although the Borg’s nanoprobes had faced
and overcome some of these prophylactic measures in the past, they had
never encountered this precise amalgam of genetic and neurological
blockades. Lucky me, Kedair realized. Since I can’t be assimilated, I
get to spend more time being chewed up. Great.

Tentacles at either end of her torso pulled in opposite directions, and
she realized only then that it meant to rip her in half. Then the
shearing tension began, and excruciating pain expelled everything from
her mind except agony.

No amount of rapid-healing possessed by any Takaran could keep pace with
what was being done to her; the Borg ship was breaking down her
resilient body by degrees. Kedair’s mouth contorted as the pressure
intensified, and the dark, metallic-smelling fluid found its way inside
her ears. Then, fully submerged inside the horror, she heard it.

Beneath the frantic pounding of her pulse, a malevolent whisper lurked
in the suffocating fluid of this dark womb. Its message penetrated her
thoughts, and she knew that it couldn’t be debated or bargained with.
Strength is irrelevant, it told her. You are small, and we are endless.
You are one, and we are legion. You will become as we are. You will
become part of us.

Kedair was ready to surrender to the darkness.

Then there was light.

The vile tentacles pulled out of her flesh and retreated into the walls.
The crushing press of machines and needles and saws fell away, and some
of the contraptions that turned humanoids into drones fell to pieces and
scattered across the deck. Kedair’s body fell free, and she landed in a
twisted, mutilated heap on the floor. Through the cloudy stains in her
vision, she saw that her left arm was partially severed and dangled by a
tendon just below the elbow. Everything had a flat, distorted quality,
and when she tried to blink away the slime, she realized she had only
one working eye. The other had been gouged out to make way for some
monstrous implant.

She heard footsteps approaching.

Turning her head, she saw Erika Hernandez striding back into the
vinculum tower, heading directly toward her. The woman’s uniform had
become stained and tattered, but Hernandez herself looked none the worse
for whatever she’d endured. She asked Kedair, “Can you walk?”

Kedair sputtered through a mouthful of filth, “Both my legs are broken.”
She jerked her head toward the transphasic mine, which had been securely
affixed to the Borg ship’s central plexus—essentially, its nerve center.
“Set the detonator. We—” She paused to hack up a mouthful of viscous
black oil and spat several times to clear her mouth. “We have to frag
this ship.”

Hernandez walked toward the mine. “Tell me what to do.”

“It’s already armed,” Kedair said, wincing as her back and chest muscles
began pulling shattered bones back into place before mending them.
“Enter a delay in seconds using the touchpad, then press ‘Enable’ to
start the countdown.”

Standing at the detonator, Hernandez keyed in the data. She hurried back
to Kedair. “It’s running,” she said, kneeling beside Kedair’s mangled body.

Kedair asked, “How long?”

“Seventy-five seconds,” Hernandez said.

“Are you crazy?” Kedair snapped. “That’s not—”

A three-clawed biomechanoid tentacle lunged at Hernandez from behind.
Kedair meant to shout or point or give a warning—then, without seeming
to notice or care, Hernandez lifted a hand in a dismissive gesture, and
the tentacle shredded into scrap metal. Hernandez straightened Kedair’s
mauled limbs and prompted her, “You were saying?”

It took Kedair a second to recover her wits. “It’s not enough time to
reach a transport site,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Hernandez replied. She slid her hands under Kedair, who at
first felt no contact—and then she realized that she was floating a few
centimeters above the deck. She was in Hernandez’s arms and being lifted
gently over the woman’s shoulder. “Hang on,” added Hernandez. “This part
won’t be fun.”

Kedair’s full weight rested on Hernandez’s shoulder, and the youthful
woman carried Kedair out of the vinculum tower at a brisk pace. The
bobbing cadence of Hernandez’s stride and the pressure on Kedair’s
abdomen made the Takaran cough up more of the bitter, toxic black fluid
she’d inhaled while snared in the Borg ship’s grasp.

Between hacking coughs, she saw more serpentine appendages lash out at
Hernandez, who deflected each attack with the slightest motions of her
fingers, like a sorcerer cowing demons. Passages and exits closed
themselves with piping and components that spread like black metallic
ivy, but the hastily risen barriers retreated ahead of Hernandez, who
parted them with broad waves of her hand.

They passed through the last portal and reached the platform outside the
tower. The bridge back to the ship’s outer superstructure had been
retracted. The space above them, which only minutes earlier had been
empty, now was alive with moving metal and blue-black clouds of some
primordial matter that flashed with static electricity.

“Are you afraid of heights?” Hernandez asked.

“No,” Kedair said.

Hernandez grinned. “Good.”

She stretched one hand toward the distant top of the ship’s interior,
and then they were aloft, rising away from the platform and accelerating
toward the shadowy maelstrom overhead.

Kedair, still draped over Hernandez’s shoulder, watched the vinculum
tower shrink beneath them. “How in the name of Yaltakh are you doing this?”

“Easy,” Hernandez said. “I imagine I’ve already done it.”

They arrowed through the center of the ship’s brewing thunderhead, and
an eye of calm swirled around them as they passed. Then they were near
the top deck of the ship, and a dampener-secured platform equipped with
transporter-pattern enhancers hove into view.

“Ten seconds,” Kedair said. “No pressure.”

Hernandez alighted on the platform, leaned forward, and shrugged Kedair
off her shoulder. Catching the wounded woman with one arm, she tapped
her combadge with her free hand. “Hernandez to Aventine! Two to beam up!”

“Energizing,” replied a transporter chief over the comm.

Kedair clasped Hernandez’s arm and grinned. “In case we don’t make it,”
she said, “nice try.”

The paralyzing embrace of the transporter’s annular confinement beam
found them, and the Stygian steelscape of the Borg ship began to fade
behind a glittering veil—then a flash turned everything white.

 

The Borg scout ship vanished from the Aventine’s main viewer in a fiery
blue detonation.

Dax paced in quick steps behind Lieutenant Kandel, manic with anxiety.
“Tell me we got them,” she said, pestering the tactical officer for the
third time in fifteen seconds.

From the other side of the console, Bowers tossed a sidelong frown in
Dax’s direction. “And you wonder why I don’t let you go on away missions.”

Pressing herself against the tactical panel beside Kandel, Dax said to
Kandel, “Report, Lieutenant.”

The Deltan woman finished reviewing the data on her screen in a calm,
unhurried manner, looked up at Dax, and said, “Transporter room two
confirms Captain Hernandez and Lieutenant Kedair are aboard. The
lieutenant is being rushed to sickbay.”

“Where’s Captain Hernandez now?”

Kandel nodded at her companel. “In the transporter room.”

“Patch me through to her,” Dax said. She waited for Kandel to confirm
that she had opened a channel, and then she said, “Captain Hernandez,
this is Captain Dax. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but I need to meet with you, alone, right now.”

Bowers glanced at Dax, as if she needed reminding of the damage her ship
had just taken and the dire need for repairs and a new plan. “Can this
wait an hour, Captain? We have a lot—”

“Right. Now. In my quarters.”

The vehemence of Hernandez’s demand left Dax taken aback. She twitched
her eyebrows at Bowers, who shrugged in return.

“All right, then,” Dax said. “I’m on my way.”

 

The door to the VIP guest quarters opened at Dax’s approach, and she
entered unannounced. A few paces into the compartment, she saw Hernandez
leaning against the bulkhead.

Hernandez regarded Dax with a dour frown. “You’re the second captain to
barge into my quarters without knocking today,” she said. “Doesn’t
Starfleet teach courtesy anymore?”

“My ship, my rules,” Dax said. “Besides, you made it pretty clear—on an
open channel—that you were in a hurry to see me.” Spreading her arms in
a sarcastic pantomime of openness, she added, “Well, here I am. Talk.”
She folded her arms across her chest while she waited for the other
woman’s reply.

As she meandered toward Dax, Hernandez wore a troubled look. “Bear with
me, Captain,” she said, her voice quieter than it had been. Her shredded
uniform hung loosely on her slender frame. “What I need to tell you is
vital, but it’s hard for me to come at a problem straight. After eight
hundred years with the Caeliar, keeping secrets becomes a virtue.”

“I understand,” Dax said. Hernandez stopped a mere arm’s length in front
of her. Looking more closely at her, Dax saw that despite the youthful
appearance of her face and physique, Hernandez’s eyes possessed an
ancient light. It was a curious trait Dax had seen in joined Trills with
very old symbionts.

Rubbing her palms slowly against each other, Hernandez said, “I read
everything in your files about the Borg before I went to that ship. I
thought I was ready for whatever I’d find. I was wrong.”

“If you’re blaming yourself over what happened during the counterattack,
don’t,” Dax said. “As far as I’m concerned, you deserve a medal for
saving three of my officers—especially going back for Kedair like you did.”

Hernandez averted her eyes and stepped away from Dax, toward the windows
that looked out on the deceptively placid starfield. “I’m not talking
about what the Borg do,” she said. “I’m talking about what they are. I
wasn’t ready to believe it.” Her voice fell to a hush, and Dax inched
closer behind her to listen as she continued. “I was expecting a group
mind, but that’s not really what the Borg is. It’s one mind, one tyrant
consciousness enslaving all the others. What it does to individuals is
beyond cruel—it’s sadistic, barbaric. And it’s so…empty. It’s a hunger
void of form, a frozen pit that can never be filled, no matter how much
it eats—and the larger it gets, the more it wants.”

She looked at Dax. “It was like a melody I’d heard before, but now it
was changed—darker, more dissonant. Instead of uniting the minds, the
way a conductor guides the musicians in a symphony, it buries them,
makes them into mute spectators, while it uses their bodies as tools.
It’s like a prison of lost souls, with trillions of beings chained to
the will of something that doesn’t even know what the hell it wants.”

“Sounds like a bad Joining,” Dax said. Noting Hernandez’s
uncomprehending head shake, she added, “Sometimes, when a Trill symbiont
is incompatible with its new host, it creates a persona so terrible that
the only proper response is forced separation.”

“That about sums it up,” Hernandez said. Sorrow darkened her expression.
“The worst part is how familiar it felt.”

Suspicion percolated in Dax’s gut. “Familiar?”

Stepping away, perhaps hoping to insulate herself from Dax with a bit of
distance, Hernandez said, “I first noticed it a few hours ago, after the
boarding teams contacted us. When we lowered the dampening field, I was
able to sense one of the dying drones on the Borg ship in the same way
that I used to be able to sense the Caeliar. And when I was inside the
Borg ship and it regained full power, it was like I was back in Axion.”

Dax kept a wary eye on Hernandez. “Is that all?”

“It’s just the beginning,” Hernandez said, stopping at her quarters’
wall-mounted companel. She activated the screen with a gentle tap. It
was crowded with multiple side-by-side windows of information—starmaps,
ships’ logs, and more.

“Records from Voyager and the Enterprise-D both suggest the origin of
the Borg is somewhere deep in the Delta Quadrant,” Hernandez said.
Swapping one starmap for another, she continued, “When the Caeliar
homeworld was destroyed, the event created a number of passages through
subspace—the tunnels you and your people were trying to shut down. Those
were the stable ones.”

A diagram of a subspace passage took on a distorted twist. Hernandez
explained, “Some of the tunnels cut through time as well as space; that
made them unstable, and they collapsed shortly after the Erigol
cataclysm, from which only three Caeliar city-ships escaped.” She drew
bright, straight-line paths across the starmap with her fingertip. “One
of those passages tossed the city of Axion deep into the Beta Quadrant,
about eight hundred and sixty-odd years ago. A second one threw the city
of Kintana into another galaxy at the dawn of time.”

“And the third city…?”

“Mantilis,” Hernandez said, inscribing another line across the map, from
the Azure Nebula to the Delta Quadrant. “Several members of my landing
party were trapped in that city when it vanished. Until now, the Caeliar
believed that Mantilis was lost or destroyed in some distant past. Now,
based on my analysis of Borg nanoprobes and my own experiences with the
Collective, I have a new theory. Through some kind of botched version of
the process that made me what I am…they became the Borg.”

Dax approached the companel to study the data up close. She imagined the
horrified reaction it would provoke in Captains Riker and Picard—and
likely in any human who was made aware of it. The origin of the Borg was
a tragic confluence of long-past human actions and errors. “Are you sure
about this?”

“Positive,” Hernandez said with a satisfied smirk.

Shaking her head as a frown creased her brow, Dax said, “According to
Captain Riker, we wouldn’t stand a chance against the Caeliar, so why
are you acting like this is good news?”

“Because now I know which of the Borg’s weaknesses we can exploit,”
Hernandez said. “And if Caeliar technology made the Borg, maybe it can
un-make them, too.”



    22

Riker was waiting for the punch line. Still grappling with disbelief, he
said, “The Caeliar created the Borg?”

“I don’t think it was intentional,” Hernandez said. She stood, attired
in a new Starfleet duty uniform, in front of the companel in the
Enterprise’s observation lounge and faced Riker, Dax, and Picard.
Nodding at the side-by-side images displayed on the screen behind her,
she said, “The similarities between Borg nanoprobes and Caeliar catoms
are too profound to be coincidence. But they’re not obvious, because
their exterior configurations are completely different, and inside, in
their cores, the nanoprobes have been badly corrupted.”

Picard sat at the head of the curved table on Riker’s left, his
countenance stern as he listened to Hernandez. “Your evidence is
compelling, Captain,” he said. “But how does this knowledge help us or
the Federation in the time we have left?”

Across the table from Riker, Dax folded her hands on the table in front
of her and said, “We have a plan.”

“You had a plan several hours ago,” Picard replied. “It nearly cost
Captain Hernandez her life.”

Dax bristled. “It also saved five planets and cut the Borg invasion
force in half.”

“But if the Borg had assimilated her Caeliar technology—”

Riker interrupted, “They didn’t, and there’s no point arguing about
something that didn’t go wrong. We need to plan our next move, not
dissect our last one.” Realizing that he had only added to Dax’s smug
air, he looked at her and continued, “But the limited success of one
reckless plan doesn’t mean we should embrace another.” With the room’s
tensions balanced, he added, “That said, we should at least hear what
they have in mind.”

“Very well,” Picard said. He looked at Dax and waited.

Dax volleyed the expectant look toward Hernandez and said, “It was your
idea.”

“It’s simple,” Hernandez said to Picard and Riker. “We need to prevent
the Borg from attacking any more planets and put them in a position
where we can deal with all of them at once. I’m proposing that we end
their invasion by luring them all back here to us, in deep space.”

Picard telegraphed his skepticism with one arched eyebrow. “And how,
precisely, do you propose that we do so?”

Dax interjected, “By tempting them with the one kind of bait they can’t
resist: the Omega Molecule.”

Riker asked, “How are we supposed to create one without any boronite?
Replicators can’t make it, and the nearest source is over two hundred
light-years away.”

Hernandez said, “We’re not going to make Omega Molecules, we’re going to
bring them to us. More precisely, we’re going to make the Caeliar bring
them to us, by persuading them to move their city-ship here from New
Erigol.” She reached over to the companel and keyed in some new
commands. An image of an Omega Molecule appeared on the screen. “After I
came back from the Borg ship, I remembered reading in your files that
the Borg worship ‘Particle 010’ as a symbol of perfection. I knew there
was something familiar about it, so I bypassed your security protocols
and accessed your data on the molecule. When I did, I knew where I’d
seen it before, and it all made sense.

“The Caeliar power their city with an Omega Molecule generator,”
Hernandez continued. “All the energy they harness from the shells around
their planet and its star is used to mask the OMG’s emissions. If I can
get them to bring Axion here, free of that shielding, it’ll be like a
beacon for the Borg. They won’t be able to resist it.”

Grim-faced, Picard replied, “And once the Borg armada converges on
us…what then?”

“We let the Caeliar deal with them,” Hernandez said.

Picard got up from the table and paced away, visibly agitated. “Your
last plan was reckless,” he said to Dax. “This one is insane. Have you
considered the risks? Never mind the damage the Borg could do if they
assimilate Caeliar catoms. What if they gain control of an Omega
Molecule generator? They’d have unlimited power to wreak havoc
throughout the galaxy—and beyond. And if they were to lose control of
the generator, an Omega Molecule explosion of that magnitude would
destroy subspace for millions of light-years in every direction. Warp
flight as we know it would cease to exist in this galaxy and several
others.”

Dax replied, “Yes, it’s dangerous. We know that. But it’s not like we
have any better options. It’s the best chance we have of stopping the
Borg while there’s still something left of the Federation to save.”

“There are other options,” Picard said. “We haven’t tried using thalaron
weapons against the Borg, and there’s every reason to think thalaron
radiation will affect the drones the same way it affects all other
organic matter. If Commander La Forge can rig our deflector to emit a
large enough thalaron pulse, we could wipe out the entire Borg armada.”

Riker shot a dubious look at his former captain. “That’s what Starfleet
said about the transphasic torpedo, and the Borg have already adapted to
that. Hell, for all we know, the Borg already have a defense against
thalaron radiation.”

“Perhaps,” Picard said. “But we have to try, and it might buy us the
time we need to organize and fight back.”

“It’s too late for that,” Hernandez retorted. “We’re long past settling
for half-measures and stopgaps. We need to end the war with the Borg,
Captain—and we need to end it now.”

Leaning forward, Riker said, “I’m not convinced thalaron weapons are the
best choice. Once that technology’s unleashed, it’ll be impossible to
contain ever again.” Looking at Dax and Hernandez, he continued, “But I
also think we’re forgetting one important fact about the Caeliar. First
and foremost, they’re isolationists, and just as important, they’re
pacifists. Not only will they not use force against the Borg, they might
prevent us from defending ourselves.”

Hernandez shook her head. “No, you’re misreading them. They may be
pacifists, but they’re not suicidal. They won’t let the Borg assimilate
them or hijack their technology.”

“What makes you so certain they could stop them?” asked Picard, his
voice rich with cynicism. “I read the report you gave to Captain Riker.
A squad of MACOs from your ship got the better of the Caeliar in 2168
and destroyed one of their cities. I guarantee you, the Borg will pose a
far deadlier threat than your ship’s military company.”

“The MACOs took the Caeliar by surprise,” Hernandez said, a deep
bitterness infusing her words. “The Borg won’t.”

With sharp suspicion, Picard said, “What if they sympathize with the Borg?”

“I think that’s unlikely,” Hernandez said.

“But not impossible,” Picard countered. “You said yourself that Caeliar
technology was the likely foundation of the Borg’s nanoprobes. What if
the Caeliar see the Borg as a kindred race?”

“Actually,” Dax said, “we’re counting on it.”

Riker and Picard exchanged befuddled stares. Then Riker said to Dax,
“Come again?”

“No offense, Captains,” Dax said, “but we—and Starfleet—have been
pursuing the wrong strategy against the Borg. We’ve tried to match
strength with strength, violence with violence. We keep getting suckered
into battles of attrition we can’t win.”

Hernandez added, “The key to securing the Caeliar’s help is to change
our mission. Instead of destroying the Collective, we should liberate
it. The Borg don’t need to be wiped out, they need to be saved. The
Caeliar can help us do that.”

“Are you mad?” Picard said. “The Borg are laying waste to worlds, and we
need to save them?”

“I’m disappointed,” Hernandez said. “You of all people should know this.
You were assimilated and came back; you know from experience what it’s
like to be smothered in that nightmare. Now imagine trillions of beings
like yourself, all trapped in that hell. They’re slaves, Jean-Luc, and
we might have the power to release them.”

Dax added, “I think that as Starfleet officers—as sentient beings—we owe
it to them, and to ourselves, to at least try.”

Picard turned away and stared out a window at the stars. “As you pointed
out so eloquently, Captain Dax, we hold the same rank. I can’t compel
you not to pursue this course of action.” He looked over his shoulder at
her and Hernandez. “You ignored my advice before, and I expect you’ll do
so again. So be it.”

“If only it were that simple,” Dax said. “Unfortunately, this time, I
actually need your consent.”

Picard turned back to face the other captains. “Why?”

“Because we need your help,” Dax said. “The Aventine’s subspace
transmitter got fried when the Borg hit us with our shields down, and
Titan’s transmitter is too badly damaged to be repaired in time.” She
traded dismayed looks with Hernandez and added, “Our only hope of
contacting the Caeliar is to reconfigure the Enterprise’s transmitter to
create a subspace microtunnel, through which Erika can link with their
gestalt.”

Frowning, Picard returned to the table and rested his hands on the top
of his chair. “So…if I refuse, this plan cannot proceed?” Dax and
Hernandez nodded. “Then consider it vetoed.”

The two women looked dejected, and Riker knew how they felt. He was
certain something was wrong with Picard. In as diplomatic a tone as he
could muster, he said “Captain Dax, Captain Hernandez, would you give us
the room, please?”

Dax got up from her chair as Hernandez switched the companel screen back
to its standby mode. The two women left the observation lounge. After
the door hushed closed behind them, Riker reclined his chair a bit and
let the silence weigh on himself and Picard, to see if his old friend
and former commander had any desire to elaborate.

Finally, Picard said, “I take it you disagree with my decision, Will.”

“Frankly, yes,” Riker said.

Picard pulled back his chair and settled into it. “We can’t take that
kind of risk with the Borg,” he said. “This is bigger than the
Federation. If we give the Borg a chance to acquire the kind of
technology the Caeliar possess, we might condemn the entire galaxy to
suffer our fate—and maybe others, as well.”

“If we don’t stop the Borg now, that’s all pretty much guaranteed,”
Riker said. “Besides, you’re talking like the Federation’s already gone.
If the Caeliar can help unmake the Borg, we can end this without more
bloodshed and save the Federation. Isn’t that what we ought to be aiming
for?”

Hatred hardened Picard’s frown. “I’m not sure the Borg deserve such
mercy,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Riker said. “But what about the individuals trapped inside
the Collective? Do they deserve it?”

Swiveling his chair away from Riker, Picard mumbled, “Perhaps. I don’t
know.”

“Captain Hernandez seems to think they do. And given a choice, I’d
rather try to save lives than destroy them.”

“It’s not so simple a calculus,” Picard said. “How can I commit myself
to aiding the enemy when my people are poised on the brink of
destruction?” He turned and looked Riker in the eye. “Maybe you can
explain that to me.”

An unspoken accusation seemed to lurk in Picard’s words, and it struck
an uneasy chord in Riker. “What’s really bothering you, Jean-Luc?”

“Aside from Borg invasion fleets marauding through Federation space?”

Riker replied, “Yes, besides that. You sounded as if you were blaming me
for something. More than that, you don’t sound like yourself—not like
the man I served with for fifteen years. Where’s that Jean-Luc Picard?”

“Et tu?” Picard breathed a heavy, defeated sigh. “First Beverly, now
you. Who was this other man you all claim to have known? I thought it
was me, but I keep hearing otherwise.”

“The man I know isn’t afraid to risk taking the high road,” Riker said.
“He wouldn’t let fear make him choose certain defeat instead of a shot
at victory, just because success might mean mercy for an enemy that had
hurt him.”

“Is that what you think this is about? A vendetta? Or some simple
phobia? I wonder, then, whether you ever knew me at all.”

“You keep pushing me away,” Riker said. “Did I do something to offend
you? Was it something I said?”

Picard shook his head. “Of course not.”

“But there is something that’s bothering you, isn’t there?”

“It’s not my place to interfere,” Picard said.

“It’s not interference if your advice is invited.”

Wound up with tension, Picard turned his chair away from Riker, stood,
and paced along the bulkhead opposite the windows. He folded his hands
together in front of him as he walked the length of the observation
lounge, turned back, and retraced his steps. He stopped in front of the
companel. “I don’t really have advice, Will. Just confusion.”

“About what?”

“How could you abandon Deanna?” Picard fixed Riker with a forlorn stare.
“You left her behind, Will, and your away team.”

“I did what I had to do,” Riker said, pushing back against the rising
tide of his guilt.

Picard moved in slow steps toward the windows. “Had I been in your
place,” he said pensively, “I’m not sure I could have chosen duty over
Beverly so easily.”

“I never said it was easy,” Riker replied. “But I’ve seen you make
decisions like that before. With Nella Daren, for one.”

Holding up one hand, Picard replied, “That was different. For one thing,
I wasn’t married to Nella.” He folded his arms. “For another, Nella
wasn’t pregnant. Beverly is.”

A surge of grief and anger clenched Riker’s jaw. All the feelings he had
suppressed since Deanna left Titan rushed back in force, crowding his
thoughts. He pressed his fist to his mouth as he fought to master his
bitter, desperate emotions.

Picard took note of Riker’s reaction and froze, his face a mask of
embarrassment and sympathy. “What have I said, Will?”

The last thing Riker had wanted was to make this conversation about him.
He inhaled sharply and set his still-clenched fist on the tabletop.
“Deanna and I…,” he began, before his voice trailed off, swallowed up in
his sorrow. He composed himself and continued in a clipped, strained
voice. “We—we’ve been trying to start a family. It was hard. Hormone
injections. Fertility treatments. Gene therapy.” Finding a dispassionate
frame of mind from which to continue was difficult. “We thought we’d
done it,” he said. “About half a year ago. But it…Deanna…we had a
miscarriage.”

“Mon dieu,” Picard whispered, and he seemed to deflate as he let go of a
deep breath. He looked stricken by the news as he settled back into his
chair. “I’m so sorry, Will.”

“It’s been a wedge, forcing us apart,” Riker confessed. “After she
recovered, we tried again. We thought this time it would all be okay,
but it wasn’t. The new embryo was deformed, and it’ll miscarry, too—it’s
only a matter of time. But Deanna won’t terminate the pregnancy, even
though this one could kill her. And I think it’s my fault.”

“How is any of that your fault?” asked Picard.

“I was supposed to be the voice of reason,” Riker said. “After the first
miscarriage, I should have said enough and put an end to the whole
thing. But the empathic bond between me and Deanna makes it hard to say
no to her. I don’t even remember anymore which one of us wanted a
family. All I know is that I’m supposed to protect her.” He slammed his
fist on the table. “And when she needed me most, I left her behind!
Alone, on the other side of the goddamn galaxy!” He finally unclenched
his hand, but only so he could use it to cover his closed eyes.

Sotto voce, Picard asked, “Have you tried talking with anyone about this?”

“Yeah,” Riker said. “I talked to Chris. What a mistake.”

“Not an easy subject for a captain to discuss with a member of his
crew,” Picard said, acknowledging Riker’s dilemma. “Not even with a
trusted first officer.”

Lowering his hand, Riker opened his eyes and nodded at Picard.
“Exactly,” he said. “Until now, I didn’t really get how vital it is to
keep some things from my crew—how valuable personal privacy is.”

“I understand,” Picard said. “Believe me.”

“So, now you know what’s eating me alive,” Riker said. “Are you ready to
tell me what’s bothering you?”

Picard grimaced and drummed his fingertips on the table for a few
seconds. “Our problems are similar but not the same,” he said. “What
they have in common…is fatherhood.” He turned himself a few degrees
closer to facing Riker and spoke in a measured hush. “For a long time, I
told myself that I didn’t want a family, that I didn’t need one.
Certainly, there were fleeting moments, days when I’d wonder, ‘What
if…?’ But I never took them seriously. Not until Robert and René died.”

Riker recalled the day when Picard had received the news that his
brother and nephew had perished in a fire on Earth. He saw in his
friend’s eyes that the pain of that tragedy still lingered in Picard’s
psyche, an open emotional wound.

“I even told myself I didn’t need love,” Picard continued. “Part of me
actually believed it. Then I met Anij…” Mentioning the Bak’u woman’s
name brought a wistful, fleeting smile to Picard’s face. “She showed me
what I had given up and how much I really needed it. But I was still
afraid. I should have just reached out to Beverly right then and made up
for lost time, but I hesitated—and I almost lost her. That’s what it
took for me to see what she really meant to me.” Powerful emotions
threatened to crack Picard’s stoic façade, and Riker grasped how
traumatic this discussion had to be for him. Picard’s eyes gleamed with
the threat of tears. “So I let her into my life. And it’s been a wonder
and a joy, Will. I curse myself daily for not having invited her in
sooner. But when she suggested we have a child together, I panicked. The
idea terrified me.”

With gentle curiosity, Riker asked, “Why?”

“I concocted so many arbitrary reasons that you’d laugh if I told you
half of them,” Picard said. “But the truth is, I was afraid it would be
like tempting fate.” A haunted expression settled on him like a mask.
“After all these years and excuses, for me to start a family…it seemed
like a portent of doom. And no sooner did Beverly and I conceive our son
than the Borg began their invasion.” He shook his head and permitted
himself a bitter chuckle. “I feel like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner,
after he shot the albatross. I indulged myself with one selfish act, and
in the process, I’ve condemned countless others to suffer and die for my
mistake.”

Shaking his head in denial, Riker replied, “You can’t be serious. You
don’t really believe the Borg invaded because you and Beverly conceived
a child?”

“No, of course not,” Picard said, his tone sharp with frustration. “It’s
not about logic, or reason, or causality. It’s about creating new life
and then being afraid you’ll have to watch it die.” He lifted his hands
and covered his face for several seconds while he slowed and deepened
his breathing. Then he lowered his hands and said, “It took me so long
to let something real into my life, and now all I can think about is the
Borg taking it away. Even if we stop this invasion, what then? What of
the next one, Will? Must my family, must my son, live in the shadow of
this menace every day of his life?” The anger left Picard’s voice; in
its place was nothing but quiet desperation. “When will it end?”

“It will end when we end it.” Riker leaned forward and stared at Picard
until his old friend looked back at him. “I’ve seen what the Caeliar can
do, Jean-Luc, and I think Hernandez is right. If anyone can stand up to
the Borg, they can. I also agree with Dax. If we can end this war and
save the people assimilated by the Collective, we have a duty as
Starfleet officers to try.”

Picard frowned. “And if Dax and Hernandez are wrong, we’ll unleash the
greatest horror the galaxy has ever seen.”

“So, we hasten the inevitable,” Riker said, fed up with Picard’s
impenetrable pessimism. “The Borg are less than two hours from Earth.
Could our plan backfire? Yes, but we can’t let that paralyze us. It’s
time for a leap of faith.”

The older man shook his head dismissively and said, “You’re talking
about hope.”

“Yes, I am.”

“We’ll need more than hope to fight the Borg.”

“True,” Riker said. “But without it, we might as well just give up.” He
got up and walked to the door, which hissed open ahead of him. Standing
in the doorway, he looked back at Picard. “We can fight for hope, or we
can give in to despair. The choice is yours, Jean-Luc. Let me know what
you decide.”



    23

Deanna Troi felt as light as air and more fully alive than she had in
months. She stood on the center of the silver disk, behind Inyx, who
guided it through the breathtaking vertical spaces between Axion’s
grandiose platinum towers. A firm breeze whipped her hair behind her.
Tossing her head back and basking in the soothing warmth of New Erigol’s
artificial sun, it was all she could do to contain herself and not laugh
out loud.

The disk neared the tower where the away team had been housed. As she
and Inyx began their gentle descent toward the penthouse’s open terrace,
she saw someone approaching from the main room. A familiar psionic
presence brushed against her mind, and she knew with her empathic senses
before she saw with her eyes that it was Tuvok. He looked up and saw
her, and then he called back inside the suite to summon the others.

By the time she and Inyx touched down on the terrace, the entire away
team had gathered to meet her. Vale, Keru, and Tuvok were at the front
of the group, and Ree was close behind them. Dennisar and Sortollo
flanked the doctor, and Torvig, as usual, lingered at the rear of the
group, curious but also cautious.

“Hello, everyone,” Troi said with a beaming smile.

Keru stepped forward and bear-hugged her. “To hell with protocol,” he
said. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

It was as if he’d opened a floodgate. Within moments, Troi found herself
in the center of a group embrace with the broad-shouldered Trill, Vale,
and the two security guards. Torvig kept his distance, however, and
Tuvok remained aloof, as usual.

Ree sidled over to Inyx. “What is her current condition?”

“She is in perfect health, Doctor,” Inyx said.

The Pahkwa-thanh physician replied, “I’d be grateful if you could show
me her internal scans and serum profile.”

Inyx looked at Troi, who was extricating herself from her friends’ arms.
She nodded to the Caeliar. “It’s okay.”

“Very well,” Inyx said. He gestured with an outstretched arm toward the
far end of the terrace. “Doctor, if you’ll join me over here, I’ll brief
you in full.” The scientist and the surgeon stepped away to confer.

“How long was I gone?” Troi asked.

Vale shrugged. “About thirteen hours.”

Tuvok added,” And twenty-one minutes.”

“Nice to know I was missed,” Troi said. “What have you been doing since
I left?”

“Keru and Torvig went sightseeing,” Vale said. “The good doctor’s been
working on his tan, Dennisar and Sortollo played about three hundred
games of checkers, and I’ve been catching up on my reading.”

Troi smirked. “Anything good?”

“Believe it or not, a former ‘guest’ of the Caeliar wrote a bunch of new
Captain Proton novels,” Vale said. She chortled softly. “I feel like I
found a latinum mine.”

“I’ll bet,” Troi said. She looked up as Inyx and Ree returned to the
group. “Everything all right, Doctor?”

Ree tasted the air with a flick of his tongue and said, “To my
amazement, everything appears to be perfect.”

Vale discreetly rested her hand on Troi’s shoulder and gave it a
congratulatory squeeze. “Finally, some good news.”

Inyx made a rattling rasp of a sound and commanded the team’s attention.
“I apologize in advance for ruining your jubilant mood,” he said, “but
now that Deanna’s medical crisis is resolved, I think it might be time
to share news of a less celebratory nature.”

Keru asked, “About what?”

“About your home, the Federation,” Inyx said. He conjured an oval
surface of liquid metal that immediately came alive with sharp, clear
images of distant worlds being assaulted by Borg cubes. “It appears that
an enemy is waging a successful attack on your nation. Many of your
worlds have been destroyed, including some known as Regulus, Lorillia,
and Deneva.”

At the mention of Deneva, Troi felt a pang of psionic alarm from Tuvok.
It was acute enough to pierce the veil of the group’s shared anxiety as
they watched the images of destruction unfold on the hovering screen
before them. The scene shifted to a starship graveyard in a blue-gas
nebula. Hundreds of smashed, blackened vessels tumbled erratically on
the screen.

“I thought you should know,” Inyx continued, “that this information was
what compelled your captain to take his ship home and leave you in our
custody. In the past, the Quorum has restricted our guests’ access to
this kind of information. However, I found that Erika placed a great
deal of importance on staying informed about events affecting her home,
and I thought you might share her interest in such matters.”

Vale stepped forward and interposed herself between the away team and
the oval screen. “All right, that’s enough. Everyone, fall out, find
something else to do. Commander Troi and I will brief you all later.”
The others looked at her and were reluctant to leave. “That’s an order.
Dismissed.”

Torvig turned and gamboled off at a quick step, while Dennisar and
Sortollo glowered and slunk away from the terrace. Ree, Keru, and Tuvok
made grudging exits, leaving Vale and Troi alone with Inyx. Vale sighed
and said to him, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, but that
kind of news can be bad for morale. It would be better if the counselor
and I could discuss it with you and ascertain what the facts are before
we decide what to share with the rest of the team.”

“As you wish,” Inyx said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” He looked at the
images flashing across the screen. “I should have realized how
distressing this would be.”

Troi noted a melancholy undertone in his voice. “Are you also concerned
by this news?”

“Yes, a great deal,” he said.

Touching Inyx’s arm in what she hoped would be construed as a gesture of
compassion, Troi said, “You’re worried about Captain Hernandez.”

“I am. That far from Axion, Erika’s vulnerable.” Inyx’s voice resonated
with sadness. “She could be harmed…or killed.” He looked away from the
screen, at Troi and Vale. “It would be such a waste. Erika was the most
vital, vibrant being I’d met in dozens of millennia.”

A knowing look passed between Vale and Troi, and the first officer
sounded surprised as she asked, “Inyx, are you in love with Captain
Hernandez?”

The looming alien bowed at the waist and half turned away, as if to
conceal his ever-dour visage. “I don’t know if our species experience
love the same way,” he said. “All I can say is that for me, she made
eternity worth contemplating.”

Vale threw a wry look at Troi and said, “That’s about as good a
definition of love as I’ve ever heard. Counselor?”

“Yes,” Troi said with a grin. “I’d have to agree.”

 

Nanietta Bacco’s office was dark except for the pale light of a waning
gibbous moon and the amber glow of Paris at midnight.

Bacco stood at the far western end of the spacious, crescent-shaped room
and leaned her shoulder into the nook between the wall and the
floor-to-ceiling window.

The cityscape looked serene, partly because the night sky was unusually
empty of air traffic. Most of the people who had some other place to go
were there already.

The last report from Secretary of Transportation Iliop had indicated
that nearly six hundred million people had fled Earth in the past six
days. Some of the planet’s smaller cities reportedly had taken on the
airs of ghost towns. Paris was no exception, and neither were London,
New York, Tokyo, and Mumbai.

On Bacco’s order, most of the Federation Council had been ferried
offworld, along with the majority of her cabinet, as part of the
official continuity-of-government plan. Scattered to dozens of remote
sites throughout—and, in a few cases, just beyond—Federation territory,
dozens of elected and appointed officials awaited the final signal from
Earth that would begin the process of presidential and legislative
succession.

The interoffice comm on her desk buzzed. Bacco sighed, plodded back to
the desk, and opened the channel with a poke of her index finger. “What
is it, Sivak?”

“Admiral Akaar and Ms. Piñiero are here, Madam President,” replied her
elderly Vulcan executive assistant. “They insist on presenting your
midnight briefing.”

“Fine,” Bacco said. “It might be the last one they ever make, so we
might as well get it over with. Show them in.”

She jabbed at the switch and closed the comm. A moment later, the east
door of her office slid open. Agent Wexler stepped in ahead of Fleet
Admiral Akaar and Esperanza Piñiero, and the door closed behind them.

“Computer,” Bacco said. “Lights, one-third.” The recessed light fixtures
in the room slowly brightened to a lower-than-normal level, allowing her
to see her guests with a bit more clarity and without having to squint
like a blind woman.

As soon as her eyes adjusted, she got a good look at Akaar and couldn’t
suppress a resentful frown. She gestured at his crisp, perfect-looking
uniform and salon-perfect mane of pale gray hair. “How do you do it?”

“Madam President?”

“You’ve been awake the past two days, just like the rest of us,” Bacco
said. She nodded at Piñiero. “But Esperanza and I look like we’ve been
chasing a fart through a bag of nails, and you look like you just
stepped out of a replicator. What gives?”

Akaar shrugged. “Good genes?”

“You’re not endearing yourself to me, Leonard.”

“My apologies, Madam President.”

Circling behind her desk, Bacco replied, “Bring me some good news, and
maybe we’ll call it even.”

“We have some,” he said, “but not much. Thirty-six minutes ago, the
Imperial Romulan Warbird Verithrax sacrificed itself to halt the Borg
attack on Ardana. Casualties on the surface are still disastrously high,
but if not for the heroism of the Verithrax’s crew, our losses there
would have been total.”

“Which Romulan fleet was the Verithrax loyal to?”

“Donatra’s,” Piñiero said.

Bacco nodded, as if it were all perfectly normal, but she knew that it
was nothing shy of extraordinary. If the Federation and the Imperial
Romulan State both survived this war with the Borg, there would be no
denying that Donatra and those loyal to her had committed fully to an
alliance, in both word and deed. “Has there been any reaction from the
Romulan Star Empire?”

“No,” Piñiero said. “Praetor Tal’Aura probably hasn’t heard the news
yet. For that matter, Donatra might not even know.”

“Then make sure we’re the ones who tell her,” Bacco said. “Send an
official expression of gratitude on behalf of myself and the Federation
to Empress Donatra.”

Piñiero nodded and made a note on a small data padd she kept handy in
her jacket pocket.

Looking back at Akaar, Bacco asked, “Anything else?”

He blinked once, slowly, and cocked his head at a slight angle. “We have
received a credible if not entirely corroborated report that the planet
Troyius was spared from a Borg attack, thanks to an intervention by the
Corps of Engineers.”

Bacco’s eyes widened; her curiosity was piqued. “How?”

“According to preliminary reports,” Akaar said, “the U.S.S. da Vinci
made the planet disappear.”

“Forgive me for repeating myself,” Bacco said. “How?”

A perplexed glance was volleyed between Akaar and Piñiero, and then
Bacco’s chief of staff replied, “No one knows, ma’am. But as soon as
Captain Gomez and her crew bring the planet back, we’ll be sure to ask her.”

“Unfortunately, that is the end of the good news, Madam President,”
Akaar said. “A Borg attack fleet is eighty-four minutes from Earth, and
our perimeter defense groups have been unable to slow its approach. As
we feared earlier, the Borg have completely adapted to the transphasic
torpedo. And whatever had them shooting at one another has stopped.”

An imaginary but still unbearable weight pressed down on Bacco’s
shoulders, and she sank into her chair. “Admiral, is there any
reasonable possibility that Starfleet can halt the incoming Borg fleet?”

The question left Akaar’s face reddened with shame. “No.”

“Then order all remaining vessels in Sector 001 to break off and
disperse,” Bacco said. “Stop wasting ships and lives. Redeploy your
forces to protect refugees and outlying systems.”

Akaar clenched his jaw, and Bacco suspected the hulking flag officer was
struggling not to protest a direct order. A few seconds passed. He
relaxed with a deep breath, and then he answered, “Yes, Madam President.”

Bacco sighed. “Esperanza, do the people of Earth, Luna, and Mars know
what’s happening right now?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Piñiero said.

Propping her elbows on the desk and steepling her fingers, Bacco asked,
“How are they coping with it? Panic? Riots?”

A soft huff of amusement brought a bittersweet smile to Piñiero’s face.
“Nope, not a one. There are silent, candlelight vigils on the
Champs-Élysées, in Aldrin Park on Luna, and at the Settlers’ Monument in
Cydonia on Mars. Some people are gathering in the wilderness parks or
attending impromptu concerts.” Her voice broke, and she looked hastily
at the floor. “Families are having reunions,” she continued, her voice
unsteadied by grief and fear. “Outgoing data traffic is spiking as
people send farewell messages to friends and family offworld.” She
sniffled loudly, and then she looked up and wiped the side of her hand
under her nose. Her eyes shone with tears. “I guess the world is ending
with a bang and a whimper.”

Shaking her head, Bacco said, “Not a whimper, Esperanza, with dignity.”

Feeling her own emotions rising, Bacco swiveled her chair around to look
out upon Paris. She stared through her ghostly reflection into the
night. An entire world stretched out before her, facing its imminent
annihilation and displaying more grace under pressure than she could
ever have imagined possible.

In that moment, she was as proud as she had ever been to call herself a
citizen of the Federation.

Akaar broke the silence. “I should excuse myself and relay your orders
to Starfleet Command, Madam President.”

“Of course, Admiral,” said Bacco. “Thank you.”

He turned on his heel and made a quick exit. Agent Wexler, lurking in
the shadows as always, opened the door ahead of Akaar and closed it
behind him. Then the compact protection specialist faded back into the
dim spaces along the periphery of the room.

Piñiero palmed her tear-stained eyes dry and stiffened her posture. “We
still have eighty minutes before the Borg arrive, ma’am,” she said.
“Would you like to make a final address to Earth or the Federation?”

Bacco admired the nightscape outside her office window and found at last
a place of serenity within herself. “No,” she said with a sad grin. “Why
ruin a perfectly good apocalypse?”



    24

Picard stood in the open doorway of his ready room, with his back to the
bridge. The interior of his office had been gutted to the bare bulkheads
and deck plates. All traces of the fire had been meticulously scoured
away, leaving the antiseptic shell of the compartment harshly lit by
new, uncovered lighting fixtures. It was utterly devoid of any trace of
the mementos he’d stored there before the blaze. New carpeting and
furniture were scheduled to be installed in a day’s time, after the
ship’s engineers and technicians had attended to mission-critical
repairs elsewhere throughout the Enterprise.

His thoughts remained fixated on Captain Hernandez’s revelation of the
Borg’s true origin. Learning of humanity’s complicity in the
Collective’s creation only made it harder for him to accept the
staggering devastation the Borg had wrought throughout the galaxy.

He remembered succumbing to the hive mind when it had made him into
Locutus. His secret shame in all the years since then had been how easy
it had felt to give himself over to it. He had thought it was proof of
some vile defect in his character, some classically tragic flaw. Now he
understood why it had been so easy, why it had felt so familiar: The
heart of the Collective was just the dark side of humanity itself. Even
then, his subconscious mind had understood what he had been too ashamed
to admit: Despite its pitiless, remorseless drive to crush and possess
and devour, the Collective had a human soul.

He heard the soft tread of footfalls on carpeting behind him. Turning
his head just a bit, he saw, on the edge of his vision, Worf approaching
with a padd in his hand. “Yes, Worf?”

Worf stopped a respectful distance from Picard and said, “La Forge and
Kadohata are completing their modifications to the subspace transmitter
and the main deflector.”

“How much longer?”

Worf said, “Both systems will be online in two minutes.”

“Excellent,” Picard said. He looked at the indentation in the ready
room’s bulkhead where a replicator once had been. The sight of the empty
space made him want a cup of Earl Grey tea.

Refocusing his mind on work, he asked, “Have we heard from Titan or the
Aventine?”

“Titan has locked in the coordinates of the Caeliar’s home system,” Worf
said. “The Aventine has given us the software to generate and maintain a
subspace microtunnel stable enough for a high-complexity signal.”

Turning away from the hollowed memory of his ready room to face Worf,
Picard asked, “Is Captain Hernandez ready?”

“Almost,” Worf said. “Lieutenant Chen will help Lieutenant Commander
Pazlar monitor the link to the Caeliar from Titan. When they signal
ready, we can initiate the soliton pulse.”

Picard nodded and walked to his chair. Worf followed, always close at
his shoulder. They settled into their chairs, and Picard regarded the
battle-scarred hull of the Aventine; every scorch and breach was
rendered with perfect clarity on the main viewscreen. “Any news from
Starfleet Command?”

“No change,” Worf said. “The Borg attack fleet is thirty minutes from
Earth and Mars.” He took a cautious look around the bridge, where
everyone was working with quiet determination. Lowering his voice, he
continued, “I have a question, sir.”

In the same confidential tone, Picard replied, “About?”

“Admiral Jellico’s orders.”

“How did you…?” It took Picard a moment to reason it out. “Captain Dax
told you.”

“Yes, sir,” Worf said. “A few minutes ago.”

Picard frowned and nodded. “I take it you don’t approve.”

The semirhetorical statement provoked a scowl from Worf. “Running away
would not be my first choice.”

“We’re long past first choices, Worf,” Picard said. “The idea of
surrender doesn’t sit well with me, either, but the admiral may be right
this time. When Earth falls, the war’s over.” Sensing Worf’s protest, he
held up a hand and continued, “Naturally, there’s a plan for the
continuity of government, but once the core worlds are gone, there’ll be
little holding the Federation together. Betazed and Trill will try, as
will Bajor, but only until the Borg reach them, a few days from now.”

Worf looked away from Picard and directed his intense stare at the
forward viewscreen. “And what will become of us?”

“You mean the Enterprise?”

“And the Aventine and Titan,” Worf replied.

“That’s a very good question,” Picard said. “To be truthful, I haven’t
really thought that far ahead.”

Grim anticipation mingled with dark amusement in Worf’s expression.
“Then it might interest you to know that we are surrounded.” He pointed
at the tactical display on the armrest of Picard’s command chair. “The
Borg armada dispersed in a radial deployment from the Azure Nebula. At
present, all sectors adjacent to this one are under Borg control.”

Seeing the situation rendered as a simple graphic made Worf’s point
clear to Picard. “We have nowhere to run.”

“Precisely,” Worf replied. “Neither can we remain here. The Borg will
seek us out. So…if we cannot flee, and we cannot hide, logic dictates
that we should attack.”

Picard smirked at his XO. “Channeling Spock again, are we?”

“I am merely stating the facts,” Worf said.

Tugging his tunic smooth, Picard replied, “Be that as it may, we won’t
be doing any of those things just yet—not until we see the results of
our current undertaking.”

A muted tone beeped from the ops console. Commander Kadohata silenced it
and swiveled her chair around to report to Worf and Picard, “Commander
La Forge confirms the subspace transmitter and the deflector are online
and ready to go, sir.”

“Very good,” Picard said. He looked left, toward Choudhury at tactical.
“Lieutenant, hail Captain Hernandez on the Titan. See if she’s ready to
proceed.”

“Aye, sir,” Choudhury replied. She keyed the message into her station’s
companel, and a few moments later she was answered by a bright synthetic
tone. “Captain Hernandez and Lieutenant Commander Pazlar both confirm
they’re ready to go.”

Standing up, Picard said, “Then it’s time. Commander Kadohata, power up
the transmitter and the main deflector. Lieutenant Elfiki, prepare to
generate the soliton pulse. Lieutenant Choudhury, signal the Aventine
and Titan, and give them the countdown.”

As his officers snapped into hushed, efficient action around the bridge,
Picard noticed that Worf, as usual, had followed his lead and risen from
his chair to stand at Picard’s right shoulder. “Captain,” said Worf, “I
have another question.”

“Speak freely, Commander.”

“It is my understanding that we are not, in fact, sending a message
through the subspace microtunnel.”

Picard nodded. “Correct.”

Worf went on, “However, the mission profile requires us to provide
Captain Hernandez with a high-bandwidth channel, on a frequency very
much like the one used by the Borg.”

“Also correct,” Picard said, his manner dry and matter-of-fact. “What’s
your question?”

“What, exactly, are we doing?”

A wry, crooked grin pulled at Picard’s mouth. I’ve asked myself the same
question a hundred times in the last hour. He threw a sidelong look at
Worf. “We’re making a leap of faith.”

 

Melora Pazlar moved in slow, graceful turns through the zero-gravity
sanctuary of Titan’s stellar cartography hololab. She reconfigured the
lab’s holographic interfaces on the fly, to take direct control of the
subspace transmitter hardware on the Enterprise while regulating an
influx of beamed power from the Aventine. At the same time, she had to
coordinate with several officers on all three vessels to maintain a
real-time FTL datalink, in order to multiply their shared computing power.

A few meters away, between her and the micro-gravity catwalk that led to
the corridor portal, Captain Erika Hernandez and Lieutenant T’Ryssa Chen
floated in the weightless space. Chen, a cultural-contact specialist
from the Enterprise, was supposed to be helping Hernandez set up her own
interface with the hololab, but the half-human, half-Vulcan young woman
seemed more focused on floating upside-down while talking Hernandez into
a stupor.

“Eight hundred sixty years,” Chen gushed, staring wide-eyed at
Hernandez. “Wow! You must’ve learned so much about the Caeliar living
among them for so long.”

“Sometimes I think I’ve barely scratched the surface,” Hernandez said.
The youthful-looking octocentarian shot a pleading glance at Pazlar.
“Commander, are we ready to send the soliton pulse yet?”

Pazlar gave an apologetic shrug. “A few more minutes, Captain.
Sorry—we’re working as fast as we can.” In an effort to keep Chen
distracted, Pazlar added, “Lieutenant, have you calibrated the
alpha-wave receiver to the captain’s brainwave frequency yet?”

“Yup, did it,” Chen replied, before turning her intense focus back
toward Hernandez. “I read a sanitized report of your time with the
Caeliar, and I really need to ask, if their bodies are composed of
programmable matter—”

“Catoms,” Hernandez interrupted.

“Right, catoms—but they told you they made replicas of their old organic
bodies and that they perceive the physical world the same way after
their transition to synthetic bodies as they did before—but is that
really possible? I mean, okay, they can defy gravity and become
noncorporeal, and that’s cool—but could they do that before?”

An exasperated reaction fleeted across Hernandez’s face. “I don’t know,”
she said.

“But what does it feel like, to be able to do that?”

Hernandez sighed. “Slipping free of gravity is like being one with the
wind,” she said. “I don’t know a better way to explain it. As for their
little trick of actually becoming one with the wind, I have no idea what
that’s like. I can’t do that.”

Before Chen could ask a follow-up question, Pazlar cut in, “Lieutenant,
synchronize the delta-wave receiver frequency with the operating
frequency of the captain’s catoms.”

“Already done,” Chen said, doing an inverted zero-g pirouette, and then
she continued to Hernandez, “If the Caeliar have a steady stream of—no,
wait, that’s not what I mean. If they have a…an unbroken—a continuity of
memory dating back to their organic selves, but their bodies are
completely synthetic now, how did they keep their memories? Was each
memory engram individually copied and replaced? Did the old Caeliar
brain even use engrams to record memories, like most humanoid brains, or
did it use a…um…a cranial-fluid medium, like the Sogstalabians? Or
something else, like a crystalline matrix?”

“Honestly, Lieutenant, it never came up.”

“Never?”

“Well, I was only with them for about eight centuries.”

Chen frowned for just a moment at the derailment of that line of
inquiry, but then she soldiered on with her enthusiasm undiminished.
“What about making little Caeliar? After they became synthetic, did they
stop having kids, or did they find a way to simulate that, too? If their
population is zero-growth, is it by choice, or was it a trade-off for
going synthetic? Do they still have sex for pleasure?” At Hernandez’s
pointed stare, Chen added, “Not that you’d have any reason to know.”

“I’ll answer that,” said Hernandez, “except for the last few parts—on
one condition.”

“Name it,” Chen said, floating perpendicular to Hernandez.

“That you won’t ask me any more questions about the Caeliar until after
I’m finished in here.”

The perky young human-Vulcan hybrid nodded. “Deal.”

Pazlar caught Hernandez’s eye and nodded at the interface controls while
holding up an index finger to convey the idea We’ll be ready in a
minute. Hernandez noted the signal with an almost imperceptible glance
and then said to Chen, “I asked my Caeliar friend Inyx about this, after
the city of Axion went into exile. I wanted to know how long he thought
it would take his people to repopulate. He said they wouldn’t, that the
fifty-two million Caeliar in Axion were all that was left. They’d
stopped reproducing after making the shift to synthetic bodies. As you
guessed, it was a side effect of the Change. Since they weren’t really
worried about dying, they’d figured a population of about a billion
people could keep their civilization going indefinitely. But when the
cataclysm destroyed Erigol, ninety-eight percent of their species was
killed.”

Chen blinked a few times, as if doing so would erase her stunned
reaction. “Wow,” she said. “Would you happen to know what their peak
population was prior to—”

“We had a deal, Lieutenant,” Hernandez said.

Hanging her head, Chen replied, “Right, sorry.”

Pazlar finished the last of her modifications to the hololab’s systems.
Twisting and turning in a balletic inversion of her body relative to her
guests, she locked in the power feed from the Aventine and confirmed
that its computers were in synch with its counterparts on Titan and the
Enterprise. “We’re ready,” she declared. “Captain, would you care to
test your connection to the interface?”

Hernandez nodded, closed her eyes, and became very still. Then, as if
moving of their own accord, multiple elements of the lab’s holographic
interface reorganized their layout; some faded out and were replaced by
others, and some became flurried with data. After a few seconds, all of
the changes reversed themselves, and the interfaces returned to Pazlar’s
final configuration. Hernandez opened her eyes. “Feels good.”

“All right,” Pazlar said. “I’m signaling the Enterprise and letting them
know we’re ready to do this thing.”

Chen grinned at Hernandez, held up a hand to show her entwined index and
middle digits, and said, “Fingers crossed.”

“Do you make a special effort to confound expectations about your Vulcan
heritage?” Hernandez asked.

“Yes, actually,” Chen said.

“Don’t try so hard.”

Suppressing a grin at Chen’s expense, Pazlar said, “Stand by, Captain.
Enterprise is generating the soliton pulse now.”

The semitransparent gauges around Pazlar peaked with massive surges of
energy and torrents of data. The Elaysian science officer marveled at
the complexity and sheer power of the signal the three vessels had
united to create—chiefly because the most robust part of the outgoing
stream was flowing directly through the mind of Captain Erika Hernandez.

 

Reaching across darkness and distance, Erika Hernandez felt the
transmission systems of Titan and the Enterprise harmonizing with her
catoms, vibrating in sympathy, reacting to her will like old limbs
finally set free to move.

Safe in the redoubt of her own psyche, she opened her psionic senses.
The gestalt was barely audible to her. A tremolo infused its every
nuance and lent it a quality of dread. Though she was tempted to renew
her contact with the Caeliar’s shared mindspace, she regretted the need
to surrender control again. Accepting the Change had meant letting go of
her autonomy. At the time, she had felt broken, defeated, and
diminished. Only with the benefit of centuries of hindsight did she
appreciate the riches with which she’d been blessed in return, out of
all proportion to her sacrifice. All the same, having once more tasted
freedom, she savored it and was loath to give it up.

She guided her consciousness past the elaborate defenses of the gestalt
and heard its voices. They were in disarray, a tumult of anger and
anxiety. It felt to Hernandez like a surreal nightmare, as if she were
one of the victims at the mythical sundering of the Tower of Babel, one
of thousands milling about in confusion, each unable to understand any
of the others.

Then the Caeliar sensed her mental presence among them, and the
pandemonium was silenced. Their minds pulled away from hers as if by
reflex, like a layer of grease on dishwater retreating from a drop of
detergent.

Surges of shock and bitterness came in waves from the Caeliar. Bright
anger emanated from Ordemo Nordal, their tanwa-seynorral, or “first
among equals.” Counterpointing his dudgeon was Inyx’s conflicted mix of
emotions—his resentment at her deception, his relief to be back in
contact with her, and his amused pride at the true scope of her abilities.

Hernandez’s thoughts took shape in the gestalt with the clarity of
spoken words. “As long as I have your attention,” she projected with
obvious disdain, “let me apologize for my fly-by-night exit. I would
have left a note, but there wasn’t time.”

Ordemo replied, “Your sarcasm remains as blunt as ever. No matter. Even
if you had been sincere, mere words would hardly repair the damage
you’ve inflicted.”

“Still exaggerating for effect, I see,” she shot back.

“For once, Ordemo has understated the matter,” Inyx answered. “The
feedback pulse you and Titan’s crew created caused significant harm to
much of the apparatus we use for the Great Work. However, I suspect he
and the majority of the Quorum are more aggrieved by your irreparable
violation of our privacy.” Though his words were chastising her, the
aura of his emotions betrayed his lack of animosity.

The rest of the Quorum, however, blazed with indignation, and they were
the ones she would have to persuade if humanity was to be saved from
annihilation. “I won’t pretend to seek your forgiveness,” she said,
addressing the whole of the gestalt. “That’s not why I’ve come. I’m
contacting you to ask for your help—and to tell you why you should give it.”

“You’re referring to the hostilities that currently threaten your
homeworld, we presume,” Ordemo responded.

“That’s part of it.”

The tanwa-seynorral channeled the Quorum’s chilly reproof. “Then you’re
wasting your time and ours, Erika. We don’t meddle in the affairs of
others—you know that.”

“Yes, I do,” Hernandez said. “But I’m not asking you to help Earth—not
directly. I’m asking you to help the Borg.”

She started sharing images with the gestalt, aeons of memories she’d
obtained from her union with the Borg Collective. Worlds plundered,
technologies taken by force, all homogenized without mercy. Entire
species and cultures violently adapted to service the Borg’s
single-minded pursuit of perfection, which its guiding intelligence
defined as unfettered power.

Her plea was met with silent rejection. The gestalt recoiled en masse
from her request. Even Inyx sounded perplexed by her entreaty. “Erika,
the Borg are a brutal, rapacious culture. Why would you ask us to aid them?”

“Because you created them,” she said. “And in a way, so did we. Look
closer.” She painted a mental image of the Borg’s nanoprobe technology,
and then she pushed past its cluttered outer shell to reveal its core
components. “Their Collective operates on a frequency that is so close
to the gestalt that I heard it from light-years away. It’s not as
sophisticated as your little psychic commune, but it’s a lot more powerful.”

She presented them with visions of sentient beings being assimilated.
“Watch how that technology alters organic beings. Does that look
familiar? It should. That was one of the outcomes Inyx warned me about
before he Changed me—the suppression of higher brain functions, a
mindless existence as an automaton. But the worst part of it is that
they aren’t really mindless. All those individual minds are still in
there, each one a prisoner.”

A pall of horror swept through the gestalt, and Hernandez realized with
grim satisfaction that the Caeliar finally understood the truth.

“Mantilis,” Inyx said, his telepathic voice muted by shock. “It must
have survived its journey through the temporal disruption.”

“With both human and Caeliar survivors aboard,” Hernandez said,
completing her mentor’s thought. “Something happened that drove them to
try to unite for survival, but instead of fusing their strengths, it
amplified the ugliest parts of both species, made them into a diseased
reflection of us. Your paranoia and fanatical desire for conformity got
tangled up with human barbarism and aggression. It was a recipe for
disaster.”

Inyx replied with dark melancholy, “No, Erika, it’s nothing less than a
complete abomination.”

“Call it what you want,” she said. “The Borg Collective has abducted
trillions of sentient beings over the past several thousand years and
laid waste to vast swaths of the galaxy. But I can guarantee you, the
drones aren’t to blame. Every last one of them is a slave, living in
perpetual suffering. The real culprit is whatever’s controlling the
Collective and speaking through its Queen. That’s the root of the
problem, and to deal with it, I’m going to need your help.”

Ordemo’s stubborn refusal to accede to her request held the Quorum’s
reaction in abeyance. “Though it seems likely that an unfortunate
accident created this atrocity you call the Borg, that doesn’t compel us
to interfere. The timeline is as it was; if the Borg were meant to
exist, then the natural order of events must be respected.”

“Let me tell you two things you ought to consider,” she said. “First,
think about the threat the Borg will pose to you and your Great Work if
they assimilate my catoms and my memories of your technology. Second,
I’m not asking you to tamper with the timeline. As you might say, what’s
done is done. We can’t change the past, but we still have a chance to
shape the future.”

Hernandez felt the mood of the gestalt shifting into alignment with her,
but the tanwa-seynorral continued to resist her arguments. He said,
“What, precisely, would you ask of us?”

“Bring Axion here, to my coordinates in Federation space, and I’ll
explain everything in person.”

“And if we refuse?”

“Then you can stay hidden and afraid, until the Collective finds you.
And mark my words, Ordemo, it will find you.”



    25

“The Borg attack fleet has passed Jupiter,” said Fleet Admiral Akaar,
his sonorous voice filling the cold, anxious silence in the Monet Room.
“Four minutes to Earth.”

President Bacco sat at the end of the conference table. She stared down
its length at the faces of the few members of her cabinet and staff who
had stayed behind to face the end with her. Jas Abrik, her top security
adviser, occupied the chair to her left. Clockwise around the table from
Abrik, with several empty chairs between each guest, were transportation
secretary Iliop, press liaison Kant Jorel, special security adviser
Seven of Nine, and Esperanza Piñiero, who was close at Bacco’s right.

Sivak lingered a few paces behind Bacco’s shoulder, and Agents Wexler
and Kistler remained nearby, along the wall, trying without much success
to be inconspicuous.

Bacco stared at the famous Impressionist painting on the room’s north
wall. Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies was one of Claude Monet’s
masterpieces, a gently arcing bridge of spare blue beams over a pond
crowded with pastel splashes of floral colors. The artist had painted
the scene late in his career, when he had gone almost completely blind.
Its complex but gentle beauty fascinated Bacco, and she lamented that it
would soon pass into oblivion, with almost every other significant
artifact of Earth’s rich, troubled history.

“Why do you think Zife left that painting in here?” Bacco asked,
startling the room’s other occupants out of their own melancholy
reflections.

Piñiero looked at the painting and then back at Bacco. “Are you serious,
ma’am? Earth is three minutes away from being blown to bits, and you
want to critique Min Zife’s interior-decorating choices? With all
respect, I don’t think now is the best time.”

“Relax, it’s only a question,” Bacco said. “This used to be just another
meeting room before the Dominion War. Then Zife came along and had it
rebuilt with every fancy gizmo he could find. The whole room got a
makeover, top to bottom, but he left that painting right there. I’m just
curious why.”

Everyone in the room fixated on the painting—all except Seven of Nine,
who afforded it a fleeting glance and no more. Bacco noticed the former
Borg drone staring at the tabletop, her face a grim cipher, as usual.

“Seven?” Bacco prodded. “Any opinion on the matter?”

Looking up with stern formality, Seven replied, “The rationale for its
continued display seems quite apparent.”

“Really? Would you mind letting the rest of us in on it?”

The statuesque woman sighed. “Its placement opposite the chair of the
president suggests that it was retained for his benefit. I suspect he
found its muted palette and soft details helpful as a point of focus
when attempting to concentrate.”

Her answer provoked a frown from Admiral Akaar. Bacco noted his reaction
and said, “You disagree, Admiral?”

“I served under President Zife, and I know exactly why it’s there,”
Akaar said. “He loved that painting, and he wanted it displayed in this
room as a reminder to himself, and the rest of us, that this is what’s
at stake if we fail—art, history, beauty, and everything we think of as
our legacy.” Lowering his gaze, he added, “It was one of his first
decrees as president, at a time when everyone else in this building was
obsessed with numbers and strategies and casualty reports. Our job was,
and still is, to decide how to fight our enemies. But he left that
painting there so we wouldn’t forget why we fight.”

Bacco regarded the nineteenth-century painting with a new, deeper
appreciation. Though she had never been impressed with Zife as a
president, she felt a pang of sympathy for him. Clearly, he had been
more than the popular caricatures of his faults. After succeeding him in
the presidency, she had learned the truth of how Zife had been removed
from office, in a coup abetted by Admiral William Ross. Speaking
privately with Bacco, Ross had implicated himself in the ouster of Zife,
chief of staff Koll Azernal, and the Federation’s secretary of military
intelligence, Nelino Quafina, there in the Monet Room.

How fitting, she brooded. Zife’s presidency ended here, and so will
mine. There’s a certain perverse symmetry in that.

A rapid series of changes flickered across a wall of screens, updating
the Palais de la Concorde on Starfleet’s current status. Admiral Akaar
reviewed the new information with a cursory look and then turned to face
Bacco.

“Ninety seconds until the Borg fleet is within firing distance of Earth,
Madam President,” Akaar said. “The attack force is beginning to split
into two groups, with one adjusting course and accelerating toward Mars.”

Clammy sweat coated Bacco’s hands. She dried them against the tops of
her thighs. Her pulse quickened, throbbed in her temples, and left her
dizzy and overheated. It was a battle to comport herself with the
dignity befitting her office when an event of such unutterable gravity
was imminent. For a moment, she regretted not having chosen to flee
Earth when her advisers had suggested it, but then she resolved herself.
This is what I chose. No turning back now. Besides, if Earth falls, I
wouldn’t want to live past today, anyway—because whoever takes this job
next is gonna have a lousy first press conference.

Another fast shift in the tactical situation cascaded across the west
wall’s bank of situation monitors. Akaar studied them. Then he made a
stunned double-take and froze.

Unable to imagine how the news could get any worse, Bacco called to
Akaar, “What’s happening, Admiral?”

He looked over his shoulder with his mouth agape and eyes wide with
shock. “We’re not sure, Madam President. All Borg ships in this system
have stopped, and we’re getting reports that all Borg vessels we’ve been
tracking have halted as well.”

She asked, “Well, do we—” A shrill alert on the tactical console stole
Akaar’s attention from her, and she let her unfinished query trail off
as the admiral raced to assemble a deluge of tactical information and
situation maps into a concise report.

Then she heard him mumble, “I don’t believe it.”

“Admiral, I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’d really like to know what the
hell is happening, if you don’t mind.”

Akaar straightened his posture and walked back to the conference table.
His voice was pitched with surprise. “Madam President…our scans at this
time indicate that all ships in the Borg armada have reversed course and
are heading at maximum speed toward the Azure Nebula.”

 

Only one obsession held greater sway over the Borg Collective than its
perverse fixation on Earth. Nothing less than the promise of perfection
could eclipse the impulse to eradicate an enemy that had hobbled the
Collective’s quest too many times.

Now that exquisite lure blazed in the cold void between the stars. Its
siren call was unmistakable. For ages the Collective had listened for
it, patiently forded millennia of silence, tuned out the random noise of
the universe’s abandoned creations, anticipated the call of something
whose power and beauty beckoned from across space and time.

It was tantalizingly close. In centuries past, the detection of even a
single molecule of Particle 010 would have been enough to divert any and
all cubes to its acquisition and assimilation. No matter how many
permutations of adaptation the Collective endured, that essential fact
of its nature had never changed. The devotion to one cause above all
remained inviolate.

Reports from thousands of cubes dispersed throughout local space all
relayed the same urgent message to the Borg Queen. A harnessed source of
the revered particles had been pinpointed, its mass estimated at several
million times greater than the largest previously known sample of
Particle 010. A source of almost incalculable power, its potential
output dwarfed that of the entire Borg Collective by several orders of
magnitude.

The end of the Federation would have to be postponed.

Converge on the energy source, the Borg Queen commanded. All other
priorities and directives are rescinded. She felt the far-flung vessels
and drones snap into obedient action. Assimilate Particle 010 at any cost.

 

The heavens had twisted open in front of the Enterprise, and a storm of
light had burst forth and enveloped the ship, whiting out the main
viewer and momentarily blinding Picard. He’d raised his hand to block
the glare, and he’d lowered it a few seconds later, as the prismatic
eruption withdrew into the spiraling-shut aperture of the massive
subspace tunnel.

The bridge crew was quiet as the majestic city-ship hovered in space,
dwarfing the Sovereign-class starship and its two companion vessels.
Picard found it difficult to estimate its size, because it more than
filled the viewscreen. All he saw was a narrow slice of its middle,
which was packed with shining metallic towers blessed with a graceful,
fluid architectural style. Delicate walkways linked many of them, and
the façades of the metropolis reflected the jet black of the void and
the crisp, steady light of the stars with equal and perfect clarity.

Worf eyed the alien megalopolis with alarmed suspicion. “Should we raise
shields, Captain?”

“No, Mister Worf,” Picard said, still somewhat awestruck by the
spectacle of the great city, which had traversed thousands of
light-years with apparent ease. “They’ve come at our invitation. I think
we owe them a measure of hospitality.” He looked left toward Choudhury.
“Hail them, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, sir,” Choudhury said.

Picard admired the aesthetic sophistication of the Caeliar city, and he
found himself wondering whether Riker might be right, whether the
Caeliar might, in fact, be able to stand firm in a confrontation with
the Borg. He stepped forward and stood behind Kadohata at ops.
“Commander,” he said to her, “are we picking up any…unusual energy
readings from the city-ship?”

“Affirmative,” Kadohata said, working with haste to keep pace with the
information appearing on her console. “Massive readings, of a kind the
computer can’t identify.”

“All scans of the Caeliar ship are to be treated as classified
information,” Picard said, “to be reviewed only on my authority.
Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Kadohata said, entering the appropriate command-level
encryptions, which, once engaged, even she would be unable to deactivate.

So far, so good, he concluded. He had taken the precaution of bypassing
the main computer’s automatic Omega Directive protocol, which normally
would have frozen command systems and duty stations throughout the ship
the moment the Omega Molecule was detected by the sensors. It was a
heavy-handed safeguard against anyone other than the ship’s commanding
officer having access to the potentially calamitous knowledge of the
dangerous and notoriously unstable high-energy particle. In this case,
such a measure would have drawn unnecessary attention—and since the
presence of the Omega Molecule was integral to Captain Hernandez’s plan
to halt the Borg assault, being saddled with the Omega Directive was a
distraction Picard wished to avoid.

Choudhury looked up from her station. “Sir, the Caeliar have
acknowledged our hail but are refusing audible or visual contact.
They’ve asked Captain Hernandez to return to the city.”

“Dare I ask how she responded?”

“She agreed—on the condition that the Caeliar release Titan’s away team.
They’ve accepted her terms.”

He nodded. “Understood. Keep me informed of any developments in the
situation.”

“Aye, sir.”

Worf took a small step to stand closer to Picard, and he dropped his
voice to a confidential level. “Once the Caeliar have Captain Hernandez
back in their custody, they might go back where they came from—and
abandon us to the Borg.”

“Possibly,” Picard said. “Though the departure of the Caeliar is hardly
the worst outcome in this scenario. I’m more concerned about the risk of
the Borg assimilating the Caeliar’s technology, which appears to be
formidable.”

A muted tone from the tactical console signaled an incoming
transmission. Choudhury silenced the alert with a brush of her fingertip
and said, “New reports from Starfleet Command, sir. The entire Borg
armada has reversed course.”

“In other words,” Worf said, “they are converging on us.”

“Correct,” Choudhury said, her tone dry but droll.

Picard asked, “How long until they reach us?”

“Fourteen hours,” the security chief said.

The captain frowned. As powerful as the Caeliar appeared to be, Picard
was unable to let go of his doubt that anything could truly stop the
Borg. Worse, if the Caeliar either refused or proved unable to help,
fourteen hours didn’t leave him or his crew much time to formulate a
backup plan.

He saw only one remaining alternative: to build a thalaron projector.
The biogenic weapon might prove futile, but he doubted he would ever
again be in a position to strike so many Borg cubes at the same time. He
judged the risk worthwhile.

If it failed, then he, his crew, and the rest of the Federation were
already as good as dead, anyway.

And if it worked…all it would cost him was his soul.



    26

The shuttlecraft Mance ascended from Axion and passed through the
city-ship’s protective force field with hardly a bump.

Christine Vale sat at the aft end of the shuttlecraft’s passenger cabin,
across from Deanna Troi. Chief Dennisar and Lieutenant Sortollo from
security sat at the forward end, and Dr. Ree and Ensign Torvig stood and
awkwardly filled the space in the compartment’s center. In the cockpit,
Tuvok was at the controls, and Ranul Keru occupied the mission
commander’s seat.

Inyx had delivered the news of the away team’s release from Axion with
as little preamble as when, days earlier, he’d told them of their
incarceration. One moment, they had thought of themselves as prisoners,
and the next, their shuttlecraft was hovering beside their terrace, its
boarding ramp extended.

At the urging of the Caeliar, they’d remained inside the Mance and had
kept it landed inside Axion’s shield perimeter while the city had risen
from the surface of New Erigol. The sky had opened above them. At first,
it had looked like a mere dark sliver, and then it had widened. The
complex details of its inner mechanisms had become visible. Within
moments, Axion had climbed into orbit, and then space-time itself had
been torn asunder and sent pinwheeling into a blinding vortex.

The twist of light and color that had raged around Axion was unlike
anything else Vale had ever seen. The vortex had exhibited a fluid
quality, but it also had shimmered and pulsed. Before her eyes had been
given an opportunity to adjust, Axion had sped free of the passage, back
into normal space-time.

Waiting there, brilliant and still against the backdrop of stars, had
been Titan, accompanied by two other vessels. The first was a
Sovereign-class starship that Vale had recognized as her previous
billet, the Enterprise-E; the other was a new Vesta-class explorer, a
ship class she’d heard about but until that moment hadn’t actually seen
with her own eyes.

Via the shuttlecraft’s comm, Inyx had delivered his terse valediction:
“You may go now.” Tuvok had wasted no time accepting the invitation. As
soon as the channel had clicked off, the Mance had been airborne and on
its way home.

Seeing Titan growing larger and sharper in front of the shuttlecraft
brought a smile of relief to Vale’s face. “I don’t know how Will did it,
but I’m glad he didn’t make a liar out of me,” she said to Troi. “I knew
he wouldn’t give up on us.”

“So did I,” Troi said, through her own bittersweet smile.

Vale leaned forward to keep their conversation discreet. “Are you sure
you’re okay?”

“Yes, Chris,” Troi said, matching Vale’s posture. “Better than okay.”

“Good,” Vale said, sincere in her concern. “You had us all pretty
worried there—especially Will.”

“I know,” Troi said, lowering her eyes for a moment. “It’s been hard on
all of us. And I made it even worse for him. But it’ll be all right now.
I’m sure of it. I can hear him in my thoughts, and I know he’s waiting
for me to come home.”

Unable to bury her envy, Vale blinked and looked away aft. She felt
Troi’s inquiring stare. Turning back to face her, she said, “Sorry. I’m
happy for you, really. It’s just hard for me to hear about your amazing
bond with Will when I…” She hesitated, at a loss for words. “When I’m…”

“When you’re still mourning Jaza?”

Vale’s emotional barrier faltered enough for a single tear to escape
from her eye. She palmed it away and laughed once, softly, because the
alternative was to weep like a child. “Right to the heart of it, as
always,” she said. “Brava, Deanna.”

“It’s kind of my job,” Troi said. “I know you’ve been under a lot of
stress since we lost Jaza. The troubles Will and I have been going
through left him…” She rolled her eyes toward the overhead, apparently
searching for the most diplomatic word. “Not at his best,” she finished.
“And that left you to pick up the slack, for a lot longer than you
should have. You had to do most of his job as well as your own. I’m
sorry for that.”

Shaking her head, Vale replied, “Not your fault.”

“In a way, it was,” Troi said. “I sensed what you were going through,
but I was so caught up in my own pain and problems that I didn’t get you
the help that I should have.”

“Apology completely unnecessary but accepted all the same,” Vale said. A
recent memory nipped at the edge of her thoughts: the moment, a few days
earlier, when she had tried to comfort the distraught Will Riker in his
ready room, only to come within millimeters (and a momentary lapse of
reason) of kissing him. She balked at the idea of confessing her
near-miss indiscretion to Troi. Then she considered the possible
consequences if she tried to hide it and it came out in a less candid
manner—or, even worse, if at some point she did something as
monumentally stupid as to make out with her married commanding officer.

“Deanna,” Vale said, “there’s something I should probably get off my
chest. It was nothing, really, but I feel kind of strange about it, and
even stranger about feeling like I should hide it, and I—”

“You mean when you almost kissed Will a few days ago,” Troi said, as if
it were some mundane detail of ship’s business.

“Um, well, yeah.” It took a moment to push through the shock and realize
how transparent she must seem to the half-Betazoid counselor. “How did
you know?”

A broad grin lit up Deanna’s face. “I haven’t felt Will panic like that
since he met my mother.”

Troi laughed, and Vale found her friend’s mirth contagious. Their
self-conscious chortles drew curious stares from the rest of the away
team and a disapproving arch of one eyebrow from Tuvok. The muscles in
Vale’s face hurt from the effort of reining in her laughter. “So, you’re
not angry with me?”

“Of course not. You were still missing Jaza, and I’d been pushing Will
away for months. It’s an almost textbook example of transference, with a
touch of displacement.”

Vale nodded and flashed an abashed smile. “I’m glad to hear you say
that. I have to admit, I was worried there for a while.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Troi said. “It’s all in the past.” Then she
narrowed her eyes and added in a joking caricature of a threat, “But if
you ever make a pass at him again, I will have to kill you. Nothing
personal.”

Answering Troi’s stare with a knowing smirk, Vale felt an almost
sisterly bond with her. “Understood,” she said.

 

Geordi La Forge stopped at the door to Captain Picard’s quarters. He
looked at the padd in his hand. He’d been driven by a righteous
indignation to come this far, but standing on the precipice of action,
he considered turning back, surrendering in silence, and chalking it up
to the cruel compromises of war.

Not this time. He pressed the visitor signal by the door.

A moment later, he heard Picard’s voice call out from behind the door,
“Come.”

The portal sighed open, and La Forge stepped inside the captain’s
quarters. Everything was clean and well ordered, as usual. Picard stood
in front of a set of shelves. He was holding his Ressikan flute; its
burnished metal surfaces caught the light as it shifted slightly in his
grasp. The captain looked up from the instrument in his hands and seemed
pleasantly surprised to see La Forge. “Geordi,” he said. “What can I do
for you?”

La Forge took a few steps farther inside, and the door hushed closed
behind him. “We need to talk,” he said.

“Of course,” Picard said, setting down the flute inside its protective
felt-and-foam-lined box. He gestured toward the sofa and some chairs.
“Please, come in, sit down.”

Picard took a step toward the sofa before La Forge stopped him by saying
in a firm tone, “I’d rather stand, sir.”

Sensing the grave nature of La Forge’s visit, Picard put on a wary mien.
“Is something wrong, Mister La Forge?”

“Yes, sir,” La Forge said. He held up the padd in his hand. “These
orders you sent me a few minutes ago.”

The captain hardened his countenance. “What of them?”

“You ordered me to turn the main deflector into a thalaron radiation
projector, like the one Shinzon had on the Scimitar.”

“I know what I told you to do, Commander.”

Frustration made La Forge clench his jaw and his fist as he fought to
find words for his outrage. “How could you give me an order like that?
How can you possibly expect me to obey it?”

Picard slammed the lid of the flute box shut with an earsplitting crack.
“I am not in the custom of explaining my orders, Mister La Forge! And I
expect you to obey them because you’re a Starfleet officer.”

La Forge shook his head. “Sorry, Captain. Not good enough. Not for
this.” He tossed the padd at Picard’s feet. “I won’t insult you by
pretending I have any standing to question your order. I’ll just say it
to your face: I refuse to obey it.”

With quiet menace, Picard replied, “You’re treading on dangerous ground
here, Mister La Forge.”

“You want to talk about dangerous? Unleashing a metagenic
superweapon—that’s dangerous.” The captain glared at La Forge, who
continued, “Consider this. We’re developing shields against thalaron
radiation, and it’s a good bet the Borg can, too. And the moment they
do, this weapon becomes useless.”

“But not until then,” Picard snapped. “And when their armada surrounds
us, we’ll be able to eradicate them.”

The thought of such a tactic horrified La Forge. “You’re talking about
mass murder.”

Picard bellowed, “I’m talking about survival, Geordi! You can’t
negotiate with the Borg. You can’t bargain with them, or seek a truce,
or a cease-fire. There’s no other way.”

“I refuse to believe that,” La Forge said. “After all we’ve done and all
we’ve seen, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that there are always
alternatives to killing.” He felt the captain’s silent resistance and
knew that he would never get him to concede the point, so he moved on.
“Say you’re right, and we wipe out the Borg with a thalaron weapon. What
then? You know you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. Once the
Klingons and the Romulans find out about it, we’ll be back at war.”

Walking past La Forge on his way to the replicator, Picard replied,
“That’s a problem for the diplomats and the politicians.”

“I’d say the politicians are the problem. Access to a weapon like that
would give them ideas. Power corrupts, and a thalaron weapon that can
fry a planet is a lot of power.”

The captain seemed to ignore La Forge’s remark as he stood in front of
the replicator and said, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” His drink appeared from
a singsong flurry of particles, and he picked it up and took a sip. He
carried the cup to a table and set it down. “Your concerns and
objections are noted for the log, Mister La Forge, but we don’t have
time to debate this. I need that weapon operational immediately.”

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, Captain. I didn’t come up here just
to register a complaint so I could work with a clean conscience. When I
say I won’t do it, I mean it.”

Incensed, Picard shot back, “The Federation is a democracy, Mister La
Forge, but this starship is not. I gave you a direct order, and I’ll
repeat it for the last time: Turn the main deflector into a thalaron
projector before the Borg arrive.”

“No,” La Forge said. “Repeat it as many times as you want, it won’t make
any difference. I will not resurrect that…that abomination. I won’t be
party to whatever atrocities it winds up being used for.” He stepped
closer to the captain and gestured emphatically as he continued, “When
Shinzon had one, you were ready to die to stop it. Data gave his life to
destroy it. For me to rebuild it now would be an insult to his memory
and a betrayal of his sacrifice. I can’t do that. I won’t.

“You want to put me in the brig? Fine. I’ll walk down there and turn
myself in. But I absolutely will not follow that order. It’s immoral.
It’s illegal—and since no illegal order is valid, it’s my duty to refuse
to obey it. And yes, I know that you’ll just get someone else to do it,
someone who won’t put up a fuss, who won’t question orders, who’ll just
get it done.

“But it won’t be me.”

La Forge didn’t wait for the captain’s response. He turned and walked
out, and he kept walking, down the corridor and into the turbolift,
which he directed to main engineering. Reflecting on his outburst toward
the captain, he half expected to find armed security personnel waiting
there to take him into custody.

Assuming we live till tomorrow, I may have just ended my career, he
realized. He was surprised to find the thought didn’t scare him as much
as he had thought it would. If that’s how it has to go, he decided, so
be it.

Then his bravado faded, and he felt an overpowering desire to hide
someplace dark and have a drink…or two…or six.

“Computer, halt turbolift,” he said. “New destination: the Riding Club,
on the double.”

 

Riker was about to walk into Erika Hernandez’s guest quarters
unannounced, until he remembered his earlier faux pas and stopped at the
private comm panel. He pressed the visitor signal and waited until
Hernandez responded from inside, “Come in.”

The door shushed open, and he walked in to find Hernandez sitting on the
floor behind her living area’s coffee table, whose top was covered from
edge to edge with nearly a dozen plates of food and several beverages
both hot and cold.

He grinned at the sight of her one-woman feast. “I’m glad to see someone
likes the food on this ship.”

She returned his jovial look and said, “It took a while, but I found a
few things your replicator actually makes well. Since the Caeliar won’t
make any of these in Axion, I figured I’d better enjoy them while I
can.” She speared a hearty chunk of light-colored meat dressed with rich
brown gravy. “Care for a bite of the milk-braised pork loin? The sauce
is fantastic.”

“No, thanks,” he said, watching her devour the forkful and then swoon
with gustatory ecstasy. “I’m saving my appetite for dinner with Deanna.”
Lifting his chin toward her expansive repast, he added, “Do you want to
take some of that to go?”

She swallowed and said, “I guess that means your away team is on its way
back?”

Riker nodded. “Commander Hachesa just confirmed the Mance is on its
final approach.”

“Then I’d better get ready to go,” Hernandez said. She grabbed a glass
with a wide, shallow body atop a narrow stem and downed half its pale
chartreuse contents in a long draught. She smacked her lips and let out
a satisfied gasp. “It’s not quite right with synthehol, but it’s still
the best margarita I’ve had in eight hundred years.” She set down the
glass and stood up.

“Before you go, I want to thank you,” Riker said. “I don’t know what you
told the Caeliar or what you promised them, but however you did it,
thank you for helping free my people.”

She looked embarrassed by his gratitude. “It was the least I could do,”
she said. “It’s what I wished someone could have done for my crew.”
Turning her gaze toward the floor, she added, “But what’s done is done,
I guess.”

He empathized with her sense of loss and her guilt, and his gut impulse
was to change the topic. “Will you be coming back?”

“I don’t know,” she said, stepping out from behind the coffee table to
join him in the middle of the room. “There’s a lot to do once I get back
to Axion. Convincing them to come out of hiding was only the first step.
Now that they’re here, they might not like what I have to say.”

The apprehension in her voice stoked his concern for her. “Is it safe
for you to go back?”

“Of course,” she said. “They won’t hurt me.”

“But will they take you prisoner again? If you go back, will they ever
let you leave?”

A shadow of melancholy settled upon her. “I don’t know,” she said. “But
to be honest, that’s the least of our worries.”

“True,” Riker said. “Can you even guess at what the Caeliar will say
about helping us stop the Borg?”

“No, I can’t. I know they won’t help the Borg hurt us, but beyond that,
it gets complicated. The Caeliar prefer to stay out of other people’s
business, but now that I’ve shown them their own link to this mess, they
might take responsibility for it. Or they might not. For all I know,
they might hear me out and choose to stay neutral.”

Riker frowned. “In which case, we’re all pretty much dead.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

A few meters behind Hernandez, there was a rippling effect in the air,
like heat distortion. It blurred the image of the bedroom behind it, and
within seconds, it was like looking at something through a deep pool of
water. The shimmer took on a metallic quality, like a hovering, vertical
puddle of mercury. Then the effect stabilized, and Riker saw himself and
Hernandez reflected on its serene, silvery surface.

Hernandez looked over her shoulder as if she were being called by a
voice that only she could hear. She sighed and looked back at Riker.
“Time for me to go,” she said, favoring him with a coy grin. She turned
and walked toward the liquid-metal oval that hovered a few centimeters
above the deck, and she stopped in front of it and looked back. “Before
I leave, I ought to thank you, too,” she said. “Fifteen hours ago, you
didn’t know me, and you had no reason to trust me. But you did. Because
of you, I got to be free again, even if just for a moment. Thank you for
taking a chance on me.”

He smiled with sincere admiration and affection. “You’re welcome,” he said.

She lingered a moment, and then she turned and stepped forward, passing
through the quicksilver membrane without so much as a ripple. As soon as
she had vanished into it, the liquid portal faded into vapor.

Riker stood and stared at the empty space in front of him, and he was
startled as Commander Hachesa’s voice crackled over the comm, “Bridge to
Captain Riker.”

“Go ahead.”

“The deck officer in shuttlebay one reports the Mance is aboard, and all
away team personnel are safe and accounted for.”

“Acknowledged,” Riker said, jogging toward the door to the corridor.
“Riker out!” He was through the door, and as soon as he was in the
corridor, he broke into a full-out sprint for the turbolift. Enlisted
crew-members and junior officers froze in his path ahead of him, caught
by surprise. “Make a hole!” he shouted, and everyone reacted by reflex,
pressing their backs to the bulkheads as he tore down the middle of the
passageway.

He knew that it was unseemly for him to be seen running like this, to be
so loud and so frantic in front of his crew, but he didn’t care. His
Imzadi was home, and she was safe—he could feel it.

Decorum be damned, he thought with a joyful grin.

 

La Forge stood in front of the forward-facing windows in the
Enterprise’s crew lounge, which Will Riker had named the Happy Bottom
Riding Club before he left to take command of Titan. Riker had said he’d
chosen the name as an homage to a famous social club for aviators and
early Earth astronauts, but La Forge suspected his real intention had
been to annoy Worf.

The vodka tonic in La Forge’s hand had become diluted as its ice cubes
melted, but it hardly mattered, since the beverage had been made with
synthehol.

He’d taken only a few sips from it in the half hour since he’d come from
the captain’s quarters, because his attention had been fixed on the
massive Caeliar city-ship looming in space before the Enterprise, the
Aventine, and Titan. The alien metropolis was kilometers wide and
breathtaking in its elegance. It was packed with slender towers, sloping
and curved structures that evoked waves and aquatic themes, and sky
bridges that, from a distance, looked like gossamer filaments.

Behind him, the Riding Club was much less busy than usual. Most of the
ship’s crew was on duty or on a much-needed rest cycle, as repairs
overlapped with preparations for the imminent confrontation with the
Borg armada. Tensions were high. La Forge knew that he ought to be in
main engineering, supervising the dozens of major projects currently
under way, but he was confident that Taurik had matters well in hand.

The scent of fresh prune juice and the thump of deliberate footfalls
alerted him to Worf’s approach, and he looked for the Klingon first
officer’s reflection in the window. Worf had approached from directly
behind La Forge and had revealed himself only with his last few steps.
La Forge continued to face forward as Worf settled to a halt on his left.

“I guess you’ve spoken to the captain,” La Forge said.

“I have.” Worf sipped his prune juice.

La Forge looked at his drink. “Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Worf said. “You are not.”

He didn’t elaborate, which worried La Forge.

“So what happens next?”

“The captain has rescinded his order.”

That caught La Forge off-guard. He turned and looked at Worf.
“Rescinded? Because of what I said?”

“Yes,” Worf said, staring straight ahead into space.

“And he sent you down here to tell me that?”

“No. I came of my own accord. To thank you.”

Recoiling in mild surprise, La Forge asked, “For what?”

“For saying what I should have said,” Worf replied. “I feel as you do.
Making such a weapon is a risk, and it would be an insult to Data’s
sacrifice.” He clenched his jaw and huffed angrily. “I did not wish to
confront the captain. But I should have.” He turned his head and met La
Forge’s stare. “It takes courage to challenge authority on a matter of
principle. What you did—for yourself and Data—was an act of great honor.”

La Forge bowed his head and said, “Thank you.” He looked up and out at
the Caeliar city-ship. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

“It is…large,” Worf said.

“When I first saw it, I’d thought about asking the captain permission
for a visit,” La Forge said. “Just to see what makes it tick, y’know?
And then I wondered what Data would think of it…and suddenly, I didn’t
want to go anymore. Not because the city wasn’t interesting, but because
I knew that every time I saw something new, I’d want to turn and tell
Data about it—and then I’d have to remember he’s gone.”

Worf regarded the Caeliar metropolis with a somber look. “I understand,”
he said. “I, too, often wish that Data were still alive. Usually in the
morning, when Spot wishes to be fed.”

La Forge chuckled, recalling Worf’s pained expression when he’d learned
that Data’s last will and testament had named the Klingon as the
guardian of his pet. “How’s the cat doing?”

“Spot is well—and his claws are sharp,” Worf said with a prideful smirk.
Then he softened his expression and clasped La Forge’s shoulder in a
friendly grip. “Data is gone, and it is not wrong for us to mourn him.
But we must not cling too tightly to the past. We are still alive,
Geordi, and we have each other. Perhaps that will be enough.”

Nodding, La Forge said, “It’s everything, Worf. Thanks.”

Worf dipped his chin and removed his hand from La Forge’s shoulder. The
silence between them was calm and comfortable, and La Forge felt no need
to disturb it. It was enough to stand next to his old friend, watching
the stars and waiting to see what the future would bring.



    27

One scan after another yielded nothing but good news.

“It’s truly remarkable, Captain,” Dr. Ree said to Riker, who stood with
him in Titan’s sickbay, on the other side of the biobed, holding Troi’s
hand. Gesturing toward the vital-signs monitor above her head, the
reptilian physician continued, “All of Deanna’s readings are optimal,
across the board. There’s no sign of damage in the uterine wall and no
abnormalities in the fetus.”

Troi reclined on the biobed, her face beaming with joy as she looked at
Riker. “She’s okay, Will,” Troi said. “Our daughter is okay.” Tears
rolled from her eyes.

Riker, still reeling from the revelation of his wife’s recovery, asked
Ree, “This is the Caeliar’s work?”

“Yes, sir. And I’ve only told you part of the good news.” He called up a
new screen of information on the overhead display. “In addition to
healing Deanna and her child, the Caeliar saw fit to restore all of her
unreleased ova as well. Which means that if the two of you so desire,
there’s no reason you couldn’t have more than one child.”

Riker asked, “What about the risk of miscarriage?”

“I’m happy to report that’s no longer an issue,” Ree said. “Your
complications were genetic in nature, and the Caeliar have amended
that—quite ably, I might add. They’ve also rejuvenated much of Deanna’s
internal physiology.”

It was Troi’s turn to react with surprise. She sat up quickly as she
said, “Rejuvenated?”

“Yes, my dear counselor,” Ree said. “Inyx reversed much of the
age-related deterioration in your tissues and organs. If one were to
judge your age based solely on an internal scan, you would register as a
woman of thirty, in the prime of your life.”

A giddy smile brightened her face as she looked at Riker and said, “I
guess that explains why I feel so amazing.”

“Guess so,” Riker said, mirroring her happiness. He looked at Ree and
asked with intense interest, “How did they do it? Genetic therapy?
Nanosurgery?”

Ree cocked his head sideways and tasted the air with a flick of his
tongue. “I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “Deanna’s treatment was
performed in secret. If I seem impressed by Inyx’s amazing results, I’m
positively stunned by the fact that he left no discernible trace of how
he did it.” He switched off the biobed, and the overhead screen went
dark. “If you want, I can keep running tests to see if I can uncover his
methods, but I doubt I’ll find anything.”

“Don’t bother,” Riker said, helping Troi to a sitting position on the
edge of the bed. “We’ve had enough tests.”

“I quite agree,” Ree said, empathizing with the suffering Riker and Troi
had endured over the past several months, from the invasive rigors of
fertility therapy to the heartbreak of a miscarriage and the close call
of a second failed pregnancy. “My prescription for the two of you is
simply this: Go spend some time alone, and assuming the universe doesn’t
come to a fiery end tomorrow, come back next month for a routine
prenatal exam—with an emphasis on routine.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Troi said, wrapping her arm around Riker’s waist.
“For everything—including biting me.”

“You’re welcome,” Ree said.

Riker did a double-take. “He bit you?”

“Let’s go,” Troi said, cajoling Riker gently as she pulled him out of
sickbay. “I’ll tell you all about it…in private.”

 

Will Riker’s relief was so profound, the burden that had been lifted so
ponderous, that he felt breathless, as if he’d gone from the pit of the
sea to the peak of a mountaintop.

His Imzadi was home and healed.

Their child was safe.

The future was theirs again, something to look forward to instead of
fear. They’d stepped to the precipice, faced the fathomless darkness,
and come back whole.

He and Deanna stood in the main room of their quarters on Titan and held
each other. The fragrance of her hair, the warmth of her body, and her
empathic radiance of well-being combined in his senses to mean one
thing: home.

She hugged him with greater vigor and pressed her face to his chest.
“You don’t need to say it,” she said, reacting to his unspoken,
still-forming thoughts and confirming for him that their telepathic bond
was as strong as it had ever been.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “You know I do.” He kissed the top of her head.
“I’m so sorry I left you. I didn’t want to.”

“I know,” she said, reaching up to stroke his cheek.

“Please forgive me,” he said.

Deanna pressed her palms softly on his cheeks and pulled his face to
hers. She planted a delicate kiss on his lips and another on the tip of
his nose. “I forgive you,” she said. “It was a terrible choice. I’m
sorry you had to make it.”

Clasping her hands in his own, he felt the sincerity of her forgiveness
and the intensity of her elation. Lost in a giddy haze, he asked, “Are
you hungry?”

“Not at all,” she said, shaking her head and smiling.

“Neither am I,” he said, and they laughed for a moment. It was goofy
laughter, like an unmotivated overflow of joy.

In a blink, Deanna’s mood turned bittersweet, and tears welled in her
eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

“For…?”

“For supporting me when we argued with Dr. Ree a few days ago. I know
you disagreed with my decision, for all the right reasons, but in
sickbay, you always took my side. You trusted me.”

“I believed in you,” he said, looking with wonder at the amazing woman
who had deigned to spend her life with him. “And, as always, my faith in
you has been richly rewarded.”

She relaxed back into his arms, and he was glad to support her weight.
It had been months since they’d felt this close, this in tune with each
other, and he found it deeply gratifying to feel wanted—and needed—again.

“After everything,” Deanna said, “I still can’t believe it’s finally
happening for us. A family, Will. Children. We can even have more than
one if we want.”

“If I didn’t know it was thanks to science, I’d call it a miracle,” he
replied with a grin.

Deanna reacted with a sigh and a look of concerned dismay. “Now all we
have to fear is the Borg,” she said. Riker tried to think of some way to
defuse her anxiety, but he was at a loss, because he knew she was right.
She continued, “We’re so close, Will. So close to living the life we’ve
always wanted, and now we’re hours away from the biggest confrontation
with the Borg we’ve ever seen. We’ve fought so hard for this child, for
us, for a second chance. I can’t stand the thought of seeing it taken
away.” She implored him as much with her gaze as with her words, “Please
tell me we have a plan, Will. Please.”

“I know Captain Hernandez does,” he said. “And Jean-Luc might be cooking
up one of his own. So, yes, there is a plan.”

“Okay, so they have plans,” she said. “What about us? What are we going
to do?”

Riker shrugged, glib humor his defense of last resort. “The same thing
we always do,” he said. “The impossible.”

 

Ranul Keru found Torvig—with guidance from Titan’s main computer—in a
remote, hard-to-reach forward compartment located just above the main
deflector dish. The young Choblik engineer stood on a narrow catwalk and
gazed through a broad sliver of a view-port. He turned his ovine head in
Keru’s direction as the tall, brawny Trill approached him. Light from
the surrounding machinery glinted off Torvig’s metallic eyes and
cybernetic enhancements. For once, the normally loquacious young ensign
remained silent and resumed staring out into space.

The security chief stepped carefully across the grid-grated catwalk,
mindful of its low guardrails and the precipitous drop into the workings
of the deflector dish. Shuffling along for the last few steps, he sidled
up to Torvig and asked, “Hiding?”

“I desired an isolated place in which to think.”

“Your quarters aren’t private?”

“I’ve not yet earned enough seniority to receive private
accommodations,” Torvig said. “Since my return, Ensign Worvan has asked
me one hundred thirty-four questions about what I observed during our
incarceration in Axion. He’s been most persistent in his efforts.”

Keru tilted his head and smirked. “Gallamites are like that.” He looked
out the narrow gap to see the majestic lines and mass of Axion, shining
against the sprawl of the cosmos. “Is something bothering you, Vig? You
seem…out of sorts.”

“I’m unaware of any direct irritation to my person.”

“No, I mean, are you experiencing anxiety about something?”

Torvig shifted his weight back and forth, from one foot to the other,
and his mechanical hands clenched the railing in front of him. “Is it
true that the Borg armada has reversed course and is on its way here?”

“Yes,” Keru said.

“Then my answer is yes. I’m feeling anxiety.”

“It could be worse,” Keru said, heaving a disappointed sigh. “While we
were in Axion, a lot of people from here and the Enterprise and the
Aventine boarded a Borg scout ship and fought in close-quarters combat.
We lost Rriarr, Hutchinson, Tane, Doron, and about half a dozen other
really good people. And sh’Aqabaa might live through surgery, or she
might not.” It was a bitter sting for Keru that he had been denied the
chance to fight the Borg face-to-face. Even after so many years, he
would have found such violence deeply cathartic for his beloved’s death
at their hands. Now, facing much less forgiving odds, he doubted he
would have such an opportunity again.

He looked at Torvig and realized the squat, short ensign was quaking.
“Calm down, Vig,” he said. “Officers don’t shiver.”

“I apologize, Ranul,” Torvig said. “I’m having trouble remaining
objective about our circumstances. Until now, I’d considered the Borg as
a phenomenon, or as an abstraction of accessories and behavioral
subroutines for a holodeck program. Now that I’m about to face them, I
realize that I’m not ready.”

Keru squatted next to Torvig and patted the Choblik’s armored back.
“You’ll be fine, Vig. Nothing to be scared of.”

“At the risk of sounding insubordinate, I disagree,” Torvig said. “Do
you recall my tests of the crew? The ones I used to verify a link
between my crewmates’ anxious behaviors toward me and their feelings
about the Borg?”

Rolling his eyes, Keru said, “How could I forget?”

“I now have a greater understanding of one part of that equation,”
Torvig said. “Now I’m afraid of the Borg, too. It was a mistake for me
to compare their cybernetics with those of the Choblik. The Great
Builders’ technology was a boon to my people—it gave us individuality
and sentience. The Borg’s technology takes away those things. It debases
its members.” He let go of the railing and lifted his bionic hands in
front of his face, flexing them open and shut. “I imagine my mechanical
elements betraying me, and it frightens me. That’s what it would be to
become one of the Borg.” Looking plaintively at Keru, he added, “Don’t
let them do that to me, Ranul.”

Keru reached out and clutched Torvig’s bionic hand, thumb to thumb,
flesh to metal, and he looked his friend in the eye. “I won’t let it
happen, Vig. To either of us. You have my word.”

 

Most of the beds in the Aventine’s sickbay were still full when Captain
Dax walked in, and Dr. Tarses and his medical staff looked wrung out by
a day of gruesome surgeries. She caught his eye with a wave and waited
while he walked over to her.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

Up close to Tarses, Dax saw that the young doctor’s hair was matted with
sweat, and his eyes were red from exhaustion. She nodded and said,
“Where is she?”

Tarses took a few steps and motioned with a tilt of his head for Dax to
follow him. She walked with him past one row of biobeds, and then past a
triage center, into a recovery ward. All of the beds in this compartment
were occupied as well. Near the far end of the ward was the person Dax
had come to talk to. She reached out to Tarses and tugged his sleeve.
“I’ll take it from here,” she said, and he acknowledged the dismissal
with a polite nod and let her continue past him.

Dax approached the problem patient without hesitation and placed herself
at the foot of the bed. “What’s this I hear about you not wanting to
return to duty?”

Lonnoc Kedair stirred from her torpid, dead-eyed languor to meet Dax’s
accusing stare. “It’s not about what I want,” the Takaran woman said.
“It’s about what I deserve.”

“If I could, I’d give you a month’s liberty,” Dax said. “I read Simon’s
report. You got mangled pretty bad on that Borg ship. Unfortunately, we
have about four thousand more of them on their way here, and I need my
security chief back at her post.” She frowned as Kedair turned her head
and averted her eyes. “In case I wasn’t clear, I’m talking about you.”

“You were clear,” Kedair said. “I wasn’t. I’m not saying I deserve time
off. I’m saying I deserve to be in the brig.”

Just what I didn’t need, Dax brooded behind a blank expression.
Something to make my day a little more interesting. “Care to elaborate,
Lieutenant?”

Kedair seemed unable to look Dax in the eye. The security chief shut her
eyes, massaged her green, scaly forehead, and combed her fingers through
her wiry black hair. “On the Borg ship,” she began, and then she paused.
After a grim sigh, she continued, “I made a mistake, Captain.”

“Stay here. I’ll convene a firing squad,” Dax quipped.

“Curious choice of words,” Kedair said. “Because that’s basically what I
did.” Looking up, she added, “I caused at least three friendly-fire
deaths during the attack, sir. Maybe more.”

Dax stepped to the side of Kedair’s bed and moved closer to her, so that
they could speak more discreetly. “What happened, Lonnoc? Specifically,
I mean.”

“I was looking out across that big empty space in the middle of the
ship,” Kedair said, her eyes turned away while she searched her memory
for details. “I thought I saw an ambush closing in on one of our teams.
It was so dark, and everybody was wearing black, and with TR-116s in
their hands, at a distance, they looked like Borg with arm attachments.”
Dax nodded for her to go on. “With the dampeners, we didn’t have any
comms, so I fired a warning shot at the team that was—that I thought was
being ambushed. I signaled them to turn and intercept.” Kedair closed
her eyes, and her jaw tensed.

Wary of pushing too hard, Dax asked, “What happened next?”

“The first team took cover and waited for their targets to close to
optimal firing distance. Then they—they lit ’em up.” She shook her head.
“A few seconds later, the squad leader called cease-fire, and they
popped off a few gel flares. That was when I saw what had happened.” She
bowed her head into her hands for a few seconds, then she straightened
and added, “Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa’s still in critical condition. The rest
of her squad from Titan is dead.”

The rest of Kedair’s actions on the Borg scout ship after the boarding
op were starting to make sense to Dax. “Is that why you volunteered to
stay behind when the Borg Queen attacked? To try and make up for your
mistake?”

“I did that because it was my duty, and because it was the right
tactical choice,” Kedair said defensively. “Please don’t psychoanalyze
me, Captain. I can always go see Counselor Hyatt if I’m in the mood for
that.”

“I think Susan might echo my diagnosis,” Dax said. “But you’re right,
it’s not my job to give you therapy. It’s my job to give you some
perspective and put you back at your post.”

“You ought to put me out an airlock,” Kedair grumped.

Sharpening her tone, Dax said, “That’s enough, Lieutenant. Listen to
what I’m telling you. You did not pull the trigger on Lieutenant
sh’Aqabaa and her team. It’s not your fault.”

“How can you say that? I flagged my own people as a target. I gave the
order to fire. How can it possibly not be my fault?”

“It’s called the ‘fog of war,’” Dax said. “You go into sensory overload.
Everything happens so fast, you can’t process it. Mistakes happen.” She
sighed as she confronted painful memories from her years on the Destiny
and on Deep Space 9. “I saw it a lot during the Dominion War. It had
nothing to do with how well trained someone was or the quality of their
character. In combat, you have no time to think. Information gets
scrambled. You’re surrounded by chaos, and you try to do the best you
can—but no one’s perfect.”

Kedair’s eyes narrowed. “Sounds like an excuse,” she said. “And not a
very good one, either. I don’t want to make excuses, Captain. I should
have verified the target before I told my people to fire.”

“I’ve read a lot of reports from squad leaders who were on that ship,”
Dax said. “I doubt you really had the time to check every target. No one
did. Under the circumstances, I’d say your actions were entirely
reasonable.”

Angrier, Kedair replied, “I was sloppy. I lost track of where my people
were. It was my job to know.”

Vexed by Kedair’s toxic brew of self-pity and self-loathing, Dax leaned
forward and took hold of the security chief’s collar. “I’m trying to be
patient, Lonnoc, but you’re not making this easy. Stop feeling sorry for
yourself. This is war. It gets bloody. People die. Deal with it.” With a
shove, she released Kedair and continued, “The team on the other level
could have fired gel flares first, just to see who they were shooting,
but they didn’t. That was their call, not yours.

“Add up the facts. You had no communications, in the dark, in hostile
territory, while under attack, and you made an honest mistake. You want
to blame yourself? Go ahead. Wail and gnash your teeth and cry yourself
to sleep at night—I don’t give a damn. There was no criminal negligence
here and no criminal intent—in other words, absolutely no basis for a
court-martial.

“So I’m giving you a direct order, Lieutenant: Get your ass out of that
bed, and report to your post on the bridge. We’re less than ten hours
from facing off with a quarter-billion Borg drones in more than four
thousand cubes, and I don’t plan on letting you gold-brick your way
through it. Understood?”

Kedair stared at Dax in shock, her eyes wide, her jaw slack, her back
pressed as deeply into her pillows as she had been able to retreat in
the face of Dax’s harangue. The Takaran woman blinked, composed herself,
and sat up. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up,
facing Dax.

In a level, dignified voice, she said, “It’s a damned good thing you
switched to the command track, Captain. Because if this was you as a
counselor, you suck at it.”

“That is called insubordination, Lieutenant. And if you keep it up, it
will get you a court-martial.”

The security chief smirked. “Good to know. Now, at least I have
something to shoot for.”

 

Axion was windless and silent beneath the endless night of deep space.
Erika Hernandez drifted alone through the motionless air that surrounded
the city-ship inside its invisible force field.

Darkness and starlight were reflected to perfection on the brilliant
façades of the metropolis, which gleamed with its own inner light.
Hernandez felt the awareness of the millions of Caeliar who dwelled in
the city. Now conscious of her bond with the gestalt, they shied from
her in subtle ways. They would never deny another mind in their
communion, but many of them radiated discomfort at the discovery that it
now included a non-Caeliar.

As meticulous as the Caeliar kept their city, to Hernandez, it still
felt less antiseptic than either of the Starfleet vessels she’d visited
in the past several hours. Inside the sheltering embrace of the city,
she caught the fragrance of green plants—grass and trees, bushes,
flowers—and the rich scent of fertile earth. Water still danced in the
fountains.

None of that distracted her from her search.

Inyx had left the Quorum hall before she’d finished her proposal to the
tanwa-seynorral. As soon as he’d gone, he’d started masking his thoughts
from the gestalt, withdrawing from contact. Apparently, the Caeliar
appreciate privacy on a personal level as well as a cultural one,
Hernandez realized. Nonetheless, she suspected that she knew where he
would be.

She was correct.

She descended without a sound, her posture relaxed, legs crossed at the
ankles, arms at her sides. Air displaced by her passage tousled her mane
of dark hair and fluttered the fabric of her Starfleet uniform. For the
sake of nostalgia, she alighted on the glossy black water of the
reflecting pool by the petrified tree. Inyx stood beneath the tree’s
bare boughs, in whose ragged shadows he seemed to have partially vanished.

Without causing so much as a ripple, Hernandez walked calmly across the
pool to the tree’s small island at the far end. She bounded onto the
isle with her last step and landed with balletic grace in front of Inyx.

Feigning boredom, he said, “I wondered how long it would take you to
master that trick.”

“Not long,” she said. “Less than eight hundred years.” She cocked a
teasing eyebrow. “Told you I was a fast learner.”

“About some things,” he said.

She ambled past him and made a slow circle of the tree, letting her hand
play across its glassy, obsidian surface. “I’ve never seen you in such a
hurry to leave the Quorum hall,” she said. “Did my proposal bother you
that much?”

“I made my objections to the gestalt,” he said, and then he added, with
an extra degree of sarcasm, “But of course, you know that, since you
are, apparently, completely attuned to the gestalt and can share in it
whenever you please.”

She took his rebuke in stride, because she had already sensed his pride
in her accomplishment. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Inyx,” she said. “But
your people aren’t the only ones who value privacy.”

He made a derogatory huffing noise inside his air sacs, which puffed up
around his shoulders. “There is a difference, Erika, between privacy and
secrets—and between secrets and deceptions.” His ire dissipated. “What’s
done is past. I’m more concerned about your next potentially fatal mistake.”

“I know it’s a risk, but I think it’s worth taking,” she said. “And the
Quorum agrees with me.”

“By a narrow margin,” Inyx replied.

“I’m certain it will work,” she said.

“Certainty is not the same thing as infallibility,” he said. “If you’re
wrong, or if you’ve underestimated the Borg’s capacity for adaptation,
you might be condemning this galaxy and many others to aeons of oppression.”

“If I’m wrong—if I fail—I’m counting on you to persuade the Quorum to
honor the spirit of our agreement and protect the galaxy from the Borg.”

He said with grim regret, “I can’t promise that, Erika.”

“Promise me that you’ll try,” she said.

With a small bow from his waist, he said, “You have my solemn pledge. I
will try.” Melancholy seeped into his voice. “I wish it didn’t have to
be you taking this risk.”

“Well, it’s not like anyone else is in a position to do it,” she said.
“You sure can’t, and neither can those starship crews.” She shook her
head. “Believe me, if there was another way, I’d take it.”

“If you do not wish to make such a sacrifice, why go?”

“Because my people need me, Inyx. They need me to step up and do
something no one else can. And all those people trapped in the
Collective need me even more than the Federation does. I failed a lot of
people when I let the Romulans get the drop on me and destroy my convoy.
I led my crew into captivity, and then I failed to control them, and
millions of your people died. All these centuries, I’ve been living with
those failures, with no way to atone for any of them. Now, I might have
that chance.”

Inyx passed a long moment in somber reflection.

“The consequences of failure seem clear enough,” he said. “But what
would be the price of success? If your plan goes as intended, what will
become of you, Erika? Will you ever come back to Axion? Will I ever see
you again?”

Unable to hold back the tears welling in her eyes, she replied, “I don’t
know.”

“Then perhaps you’ve finally received your wish,” he said, with a tenor
of defeat. “You’ll finally be free of Axion…forever.”

She placed herself directly in front of him. “Maybe,” she said. “But
that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

With both hands, she reached up and gently pulled Inyx’s ever-frowning
visage down to hers. “I probably won’t get a chance to do this later.”

She kissed his high, leathery forehead with tender affection. “Good-bye,
Inyx.”



    28

“Whatever Captain Hernandez is planning, it involves the Borg, and that
means it has the potential to go horribly wrong.”

Picard stood at the head of the table in the Enterprise’s observation
lounge and watched the seated Captains Riker and Dax nod at what he had
just said. At his invitation, they had beamed over to meet with him in
private aboard the Enterprise, so that they could confer without risking
the interception of their conversation by the Borg—or by the Caeliar.

Exasperated, Dax replied, “You want a contingency plan for what to do
after we’re surrounded by more than four thousand Borg cubes?”

“Better than not having one,” Riker said, scratching pensively at his
salt-and-pepper-bearded chin.

Dax blinked, conceding the point, and replied, “For that matter, we’ll
need one even if she succeeds. I mean, have we even thought about how
we’re supposed to repatriate a quarter-billion ex-Borg from across the
galaxy?”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Picard said. “Frankly, as powerful
as the Caeliar seem to be, I doubt they—or any other entity, short of
the single-letter variety who shall not be named—can effect such a
change by force.”

“There’s another scenario to consider,” Riker said. “What if they
succeed but only temporarily? The Borg Collective is based on
adaptation. Even if she frees all the drones from the Collective’s
control, who’s to say it’ll be a permanent shift?”

Nodding, Picard said, “Those are all valid concerns. In success or in
failure, Captain Hernandez’s proposal—what little we know of it—will
present us with staggering logistical and tactical crises. In just over
eight hours, the first wave of the Borg armada will reach us. Whatever
backup plan we intend to prepare, it needs to be ready by then.”

Riker leaned forward and folded his hands together. “If this turns into
a shooting match, I think the Caeliar can take care of themselves,” he said.

“Against these odds?” asked Dax.

“That I don’t know,” Riker said. “But if the fight turns against them,
the Caeliar can open a subspace tunnel and slip away. Which doesn’t help
us but would keep the Omega Molecule generator out of the Borg’s hands.”

Dax frowned. “Captain Picard made a good point the last time we talked
with Captain Hernandez. A team of twenty-second-century MACOs outflanked
the Caeliar and destroyed one of their cities. That gives me the
impression that strategy and tactics aren’t the Caeliar’s forte. What if
the Borg get the better of them? What if they can’t escape to safe ground?”

“Then we have a problem,” Riker said.

“More than a problem, Will,” Picard said. “A disaster.” Resting his
hands on the headrest of his chair, he continued, “If Hernandez fails to
disband the Collective, our top priority must be to prevent the Borg
from assimilating anything of the Caeliar. If that means abetting their
escape, so be it. But if the only way to keep their city-ship from the
Borg is to destroy it, then we need to be prepared to take that step.”

Dax keyed in some commands on the tabletop interface at her seat. She
called up a map of Axion on the wall companel behind Riker. “This is
based on scans and observations made by Captain Riker’s away team while
they were in Axion,” she said. “It shows the approximate position of the
Omega Molecule generator. That’s what powers the Caeliar’s civilization,
and it’s probably our best chance of destroying them if we have to. If
we can destabilize the generator when the armada’s on top of us, we
could vaporize them instantly.”

“Along with the rest of the galaxy,” Riker said. “We’d also end warp
flight in most of the local group. Not exactly what I’d call a plan for
victory.”

Arms out, palms up, Dax said, “If you know another way to destroy Axion
and the Borg at the same time, let’s hear it.”

He rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Well, we know the Caeliar can modify
their subspace passages for time travel.”

“Tell me you’re not serious,” Dax said. “What do you plan to do? Go back
in time, find the origin of the Borg, and wipe them out before they ever
existed?”

“Why not?” Riker said. “They tried to do it to us.”

“And look what that got them,” Dax said.

Picard raised his voice. “Captains, please.” He waited for Dax and Riker
to calm down and acknowledge him. “We need to consider every alternative
at this stage, no matter what the ethical or broader tactical consid—”

“Bridge to Captain Picard,” Worf said over the comm.

“Go ahead, Commander.”

“We are detecting extreme levels of local subspace disruption,” Worf
said. “And we are being hailed by Axion.”

“Red Alert, Mister Worf. I’m on my way. Picard out.” As the channel
clicked off, he added to Dax and Riker, “Captains, will you join me on
the bridge, please?” Picard was already stepping through the door to the
bridge by the time Dax and Riker had risen from their seats. He had no
idea what fresh calamity was unfolding, but he had a sinking feeling
that, as with so many events of late, it would be one for which he had
no plan.

 

Riker hurried onto the bridge of the Enterprise several seconds behind
Captain Picard, who was met at the trio of command chairs by Commander
Worf. Picard and Worf conferred in tense whispers as Riker and Dax moved
past them, down to the center of the bridge. Then came Picard’s
authoritative baritone: “Commander Kadohata, put Captain Hernandez
on-screen.”

Kadohata tapped a sequence of commands into the ops console, and the
main viewer blinked from an image of Axion to the youthful beauty of
Erika Hernandez.

Beside her was an alien with a bony, skeletal body and an enormous,
bulbous head fronted by a stretched, frowning visage. Riker looked at
the being’s pearlescent sea-green eyes, its skin of mottled purple and
gray, and the tentacle-shaped ribbed air sacs draped over its shoulders,
and he realized that its head reminded him vaguely of an octopus.

“Hello, Captains,” Hernandez said. “I’m glad I found you together, as
this concerns all of you.”

Picard stepped forward, passing between Dax and Riker to place himself
at the forefront of the conversation. “Captain Hernandez,” he said,
“have the Caeliar agreed to help us?”

“Yes,” she said. “After a fashion.”

Suspicious, questioning looks passed between the captains on the
Enterprise bridge. Turning back toward the main viewer, Picard asked,
“Would you care to be more precise, Captain?”

“First, I should apologize to all of you and your crews for misleading
you, but I give you my word that I believed it was in everyone’s best
interest for me to do so.”

Holding up one hand, Picard cut in, “Misleading us? About what, Captain?”

“It would take too long to explain,” she said. “Besides, you’ll see for
yourselves soon enough. All I can say is that old habits die hard, if at
all, and if I learned anything living with the Caeliar, it was how to
play my cards close.” She looked at Riker and then at Dax as she
continued, “Will, Ezri, thanks for treating me like part of your crews.
It was nice to feel like I was home again, back in Starfleet. I knew I’d
missed it, but until today, I hadn’t realized just how much.”

“Captain,” Picard said, “what’s going to happen?”

“I honestly don’t know for certain,” Hernandez said. “No matter how this
plays out, you and I probably won’t see each other again. If I and the
Caeliar fail, then we’re all about to have a very bad day. And if we
succeed, then something new awaits us—all of us.” She smiled. “Wish us
luck.”

Riker eyed Picard’s profile. The elder captain was standing slackjawed
and at a loss for words as he watched Hernandez close her eyes and lift
one hand in front of her, fingers spread wide, as if she were reaching
for some unseen object.

Just as Riker was about to ask Picard what was wrong, Inyx spoke and
snared everyone’s attention with his mellifluous baritone. “Captains,
for your own safety, I recommend you move your vessels to within one
kilometer of Axion—immediately.”

Picard still seemed frozen, so from the aft deck of the bridge, Worf
called out, “Helm, put us alongside Axion, distance eight hundred fifty
meters. Commander Kadohata, relay those orders to Titan and the Aventine.”

Kadohata and Lieutenant Weinrib gave overlapping replies of “Aye, sir”
as they carried out Worf’s orders.

On the main viewer, Hernandez’s raised hand began to glow. A nimbus of
light formed around it, growing so bright that it shone through her
fingers, making them blaze red like hot coals. Her face was the very
portrait of serenity. She opened her eyes, which burned with an inner
fire, and she said, “It’s time.”

A hush fell over the bridge.

Captain Picard tensed with a sharp intake of breath.

Proximity alerts shrilled from multiple consoles.

“Massive energy surge from the Caeliar city,” called out Lieutenant
Choudhury at tactical.

“Subspace tunnels,” added Lieutenant Dina Elfiki, who was racing to keep
up with the rush of data on her console. “Thousands of them, opening in
a spherical distribution around Axion.” The attractive, chestnut-haired
science officer added, “The city is definitely controlling them, Captain.”

“Incoming vessels,” Choudhury announced.

Worf replied, “Shields up!”

Riker wished that he was on the bridge of his own ship at that moment,
but he was also grateful that his crew at least had Vale, Tuvok, and
Keru back aboard to lead them in his absence. On the viewscreen, Erika
Hernandez maintained a steady countenance.

Choudhury looked at Worf. “Borg cubes are emerging from the subspace
tunnels, sir—thousands of them. The entire armada.”

“Split screen,” Worf said. Kadohata adjusted the main viewer to show two
images: Hernandez and Inyx on the right and, on the left, the arriving
Borg armada surrounding Axion and blotting out the stars with their
sheer numbers.

Dax sounded as if she simply couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “The
Caeliar brought the Borg here sooner? Why?”

Riker shrugged, equally dumbfounded.

Then he looked at Picard, who nodded slowly, as if with a dawning
comprehension. Riker sensed that something unspoken was transpiring
between Picard and Hernandez.

Finally, Picard said to Hernandez, “You’re not disbanding the
Collective…are you, Captain?”

“No,” Hernandez said. “We’re assimilating them.”

A two-meter-tall oval of mirror-perfect quicksilver took shape behind
Hernandez, who turned and stepped through it without so much as a
ripple. Then the oval faded into vapor, sublimated into nonexistence,
leaving only Inyx on the screen.

Riker snapped, “What’s going on? Where’d she go?”

“To the source,” Picard muttered.

Glaring at Inyx, Riker said, “Show me where she is!”

“As you wish,” Inyx said.

The Caeliar’s image dissolved to that of a view from deep inside a
massive Borg vessel. A haphazard, slapdash collage of metal, tubes,
wires, ducts, and random machinery filled the screen, all of it
illuminated through its narrow gaps by a sickly viridian light. The
point of view roved through the dark, industrial-looking labyrinth until
it found open space and arrowed down toward the vessel’s core. Passing
like a phantom through solid matter, the image speared its way into the
central plexus, to the most elaborate Borg vinculum Riker had ever seen.

In the bowels of that biomechanoid horror, Erika Hernandez walked
without fear toward an advancing phalanx of Borg drones. Behind them,
atop a dais festooned with regeneration pods and a plethora of bizarre
devices, stood the Borg Queen, commanding her foot soldiers forward to
intercept her rival.

“No!” Riker shouted. “You have to stop her! She doesn’t know what she’s
doing!”

Inyx replied, “I assure you, Captain, Erika knows exactly what she is
doing. And I would have stopped her if I could.”

Riker watched, horrified, as the drones set upon Hernandez in a savage
pack—and impaled her with assimilation tubules.



    29

Hernandez fell into the arms of the drones and gave herself up,
surrendering to their violations. Viselike hands seized her arms and
ripped every loose fold of her clothing. Assimilation tubules extended
from the drones’ knuckles and pierced Hernandez’s flesh, each puncture
as sharp as a serpent’s bite.

A cold pain coursed through her, surged in her blood, and clouded her
thoughts. There was no fury in the drones as they smothered her, only
the brutal, simple efficiency of machines subjugating flesh and bone.

Beyond the one-sided melee, the Borg Queen stood on her dais and
regarded Hernandez’s fall with haughty dispassion.

The voice of the Collective flooded Hernandez’s mind like seawater
pouring into a sinking ship, and her thoughts drowned in the aggressive
swell of psionic noise. Panic bubbled up from her subconscious. For a
moment, she wished she had prevented the drones from injecting her. It
would have been within her power to turn them back, to wrest them from
the will of the Borg Queen, but instead she had let them strike
unopposed—because that was the plan and had been from the start.

A black fog of oblivion enfolded her.

This is the only way, she told herself. The only path.

None of the Caeliar could do this for her. Hernandez knew that only she
could serve as the gestalt’s bridge to the Borg. The Caeliar, with their
bodies of catoms, were immune to assimilation; the Borg’s nanoscopic
organelles needed at least some trace amounts of organic matter to
invade and transform as part of the assimilation process. In the body of
a Caeliar, the organelles would find only other nanomachines—all of
which would be far more advanced and powerful than the organelles and
utterly impervious to them.

It would have been equally futile for any member of the Starfleet crews
to volunteer for Hernandez’s mission. Without the Caeliar catoms that
infused her body, and which had altered her genetic structure, another
organic being would be unable to survive the assimilation process while
acting as a conduit for the focused energies of the gestalt.

Only I can do this, Hernandez reminded herself. I have to hang on. Can’t
give up…not yet.

The icewater in her veins turned to fire as assimilation organelles and
Caeliar catoms waged war for possession of her body. Needles of pain
stabbed through her eyes, and a burning sensation pricked its way down
her back.

Every inch of her was consumed with excruciating torments. Two deafening
voices raged inside her head: the soulless roar of the Collective and
the hauntingly beautiful chorus of the gestalt.

As the Collective became more aware of the gestalt through its bond with
Hernandez, the singular intelligence behind the Borg launched a
mind-breaking assault on her psyche. Unlike the first time the Borg had
assailed her, however, Hernandez wasn’t alone. Reinforced by the shared
consciousness of the Caeliar, she dispelled the Borg’s demoralizing
revisions of her memories. Its lies broke like waves against an
unyielding seawall.

She felt the Caeliar gestalt reassert its primacy in her mind and body,
and then it landed its own first blow against the Collective, dredging
up fragments of an ancient memory—bitter cold and empty darkness,
loneliness and despair, fading strength and dwindling numbers. And,
above all, hunger.

Paroxysms of rage shook the Collective, and Hernandez knew, intuitively,
that the Borg armada was firing en masse at Axion, unleashing every bit
of destructive power it could marshal. All of the Collective’s hatred
and aggression was erupting, and the Caeliar had become its sole focus.
As the bombardment hammered Axion’s shields, however, there wasn’t a
glimmer of distress or even concern in the gestalt. At best, the Caeliar
reacted to the fusillade with equal parts curiosity and pity.

So much sorrow and anger, opined the gestalt. Such a desperate
yearning…but it doesn’t know what it seeks, so it consumes everything
and is never satisfied.

A surge of strength and comfort from the gestalt flowed through
Hernandez, and the chaos of its struggle with the Borg gave way to a
sudden peace and clarity.

Then the Caeliar projected their will through her fragile form and
usurped control of the Borg Collective.

 

The Caeliar gestalt beheld its savage reflection.

The Collective looked back, hostile and bewildered, like a wild thing
that had never seen a mirror nor caught sight of itself in still waters.

Inyx perceived the shape of the Collective and was shocked at how it
could be both so familiar and so alien. Two great minds, the Collective
and the gestalt, had shared a past until their paths had diverged. The
Borg had been forced down a road of deprivation and darkness, while the
Caeliar, despite being wounded, had been afforded the luxury of a more
benign destiny. Now their journeys, separated by time and space, had
converged.

A roar of voices spoke the will of the Borg.

You will be assimilated. Your diversity and technology will be adapted
to service us. Resistance is futile.

The gestalt was overwhelmed with pity for the primitive and autocratic
posturing of the Collective. Like a child that had never been
disciplined, it laid claim to all it surveyed, seized everything within
reach in rapacious flurries of action, and never once questioned if it
had the right to do so.

Brute force was the Collective’s tactic. The drones that surrounded
Axion outnumbered the Caeliar population five to one. Across the galaxy,
there were trillions of drones, in tens of thousands of star systems, on
innumerable cubes and vessels. Had the Collective’s conflict with the
Caeliar been one of simple numbers, there would have been no contest.

How tragic, Inyx mused openly in the gestalt. It doesn’t understand at all.

Ordemo Nordal replied, All it sees is power to be taken.

Edrin, the architect, asked, Do we know who it is?

It’s time we found out, said Ordemo.

The tanwa-seynorral focused the gestalt’s attention on breaking through
the noise of the Collective, penetrating to the true essence of the
Borg, exposing its prime mover, revealing the mind at its foundation and
the voice behind its Queen.

Wrapping herself in the shelter of a hundred million hijacked minds, the
Borg Queen sought refuge from the scalpel-like inquisition of the
Caeliar. With patience and precision, the gestalt evaded the crude
latticework of enslaved minds and found the Queen lurking in the dark
heart of it all. Then it pushed past even her, in search of the truth.

Cut off from the Collective’s core essence, the Borg Queen stumbled in
confusion—deposed, disoriented, directionless.

Locked in the core of every Borg nanoprobe was the key to the Borg’s
ethereal shared consciousness, an invisible medium that spanned great
swaths of the galaxy. Unseen, it was never heard directly except through
the Queen. Its presence was always felt by every drone, and every
sentient mind it pressed into service amplified its power.

At first, it seemed less a personality than a collection of appetites.
It was fear and hatred and hunger, and beneath even those primal urges
lurked a deeper wound, the impetus for its insatiable appetites: an
inconsolable loneliness.

It had no memories of its own, no name beyond Borg, but as the gestalt
took its full measure, it was recognized by one and all for what and who
it truly was.

Sedín, said Inyx, baring his grief for what had become of his confidante
and beloved companion of several aeons. Sedín had been brilliant,
imaginative, and ambitious. To see her debased into a violent scavenger
was both horrifying and heartbreaking. Even worse was contemplating the
atrocities she had wrought on other sentient beings. Those were crimes
beyond atonement.

Once, she had been a Caeliar scientist and poet. All that remained of
her now was a tormented fragment of consciousness, a suffering with no
name and no connection to its own greatness. Inyx imagined that Sedín,
in a moment of weakness, had been unable to let herself disincorporate.
She had clung too fiercely to life, lingering even after her faculties
of reason had faded, rendering her little more than a sophisticated
machine bent on feeding its own ravenous energy needs and perpetuating
its own existence.

Taking the initiative, Inyx projected comforting impulses to Sedín,
quieting her rage. Then he counseled her, It’s time to let go, Sedín.
Let yourself rest. Let the light fade.

She fought. Rage and fury pulsed through the Collective. Driven by fear
and habit, Sedín lashed out, to no effect.

Inyx calmed Sedín’s psychic rampage with a dulcet tone, a harmonizing
thoughtwave of love. The Collective fell silent.

He reached out across space and found Erika, teetering on the edge
between resistance and surrender, and bolstered her with the will of the
gestalt. Balance has been achieved, he told her. The next step is yours.

 

Hernandez’s mind was clear as she got up from the deck inside the
vinculum. The pack of drones that surrounded her retreated in confusion
as she looked past them and met the panicked gaze of the Borg Queen, and
they parted before her as she walked forward to speak to Sedín through
the deposed monarch.

“Can’t you see what you’ve done here, Sedín?” she said. The drones all
were watching her, and through her bond with the gestalt—and the
gestalt’s new link to the Collective—Hernandez realized that everything
she did and said here would be known by every Borg drone throughout the
Milky Way.

Ascending the steps of the Queen’s dais, she continued, “Did you forget
everything you stood for? Nonviolence, pacifism, the Great Work…did they
all lose their meaning for you?” As she reached the top of the dais, the
Borg Queen stumbled backward and collapsed before her. Hernandez felt
the Queen’s dismay and discerned its cause: She was unable to make sense
of what was happening. The nature of the Caeliar had caught the
Collective by surprise; despite having believed they could assimilate
nigh-omnipotent beings, the Borg had met their betters.

Standing over the fallen Queen, Hernandez understood that the Borg’s
figurehead was powerless now; she had become little more than another,
glorified drone.

Hernandez turned away from her, shut her eyes, and extended her senses
within the Borg vessel, throughout its armada, and then, with the power
of the Caeliar gestalt, across the entirety of the Collective—all of
which was one mind, one damaged sentience craving peace but not knowing
how to find it. She lifted her hand, fingers parted wide, as a somatic
cue to focus and direct the power of the Caeliar.

“Sedín, have mercy on all these souls you’ve stolen. You’ve held them
all long enough, and you’ve done enough damage—to them, to the galaxy,
and to yourself. This has to end.” She quelled Sedín’s fear and let the
gestalt begin to place the wounded Caeliar sentience fully under
control. “We have to lift this cruel veil from your victims’ eyes,” she
continued. As the gestalt wrested the last vestiges of control from
Sedín, the Collective dissolved, leaving behind trillions of minds still
bound to one another by a shred of shared awareness.

She spoke now to the drones. “Awaken…and know yourselves.”

 

Across the galaxy, a trillion drones reeled at the sudden absence of the
Collective, as if an invisible hand had released its throttling grip on
their throats and let them all breathe for the first time in six
thousand years.

In unison, they inhaled and tasted freedom. Their numerical designations
were stripped away, leaving some with nothing—and giving others back
their names.

Clarity brought awareness…and then came bitter memories. Staggering
multitudes of liberated psyches remained inextricably linked, their
thoughts exposed and crowded in on one another, and the result was
pandemonium.

A billion minds panicked without the Collective’s guidance, and a
billion more laughed in triumph at the fall of their oppressor. Tens of
billions emotionally imploded and filled the shared mindspace with their
plangent wails of grief. Searing tides of rage swelled and swept like a
force of nature through the emancipated drones. What one felt, all felt,
all at once.

The entire Borg civilization was in chaos. In the span of a single
breath, it had descended into madness.

 

Hernandez couldn’t breathe. She was only one woman, one mind, one spark
of consciousness trying to stand against a tsunami of sorrow and terror.

She could hear the psychic voice of every drone calling out for succor,
the doleful cries of those who had awakened to find their lives
shattered beyond recognition, the misdirected fury of those who had
tasted revenge and hungered for more.

A flood-crush of feelings and memories pummeled the gates of her mind.
Souls masculine, feminine, neuter, and wholly alien to her all turned
toward the light, the radiance of the Caeliar and their Omega Molecule
generator, and they all saw Hernandez as the conduit to those
long-sought perfections.

I can’t finish this without your help, she told the gestalt. We’ve come
this far. Take the final step.

The gestalt struggled to cope with the onslaught of negative emotions
from the freed Borg drones. Such cacophony offended their precious
harmony of mind, and all that Hernandez could do was hope that they
would rise to the challenge it presented. Then came Inyx’s reply. We’re
ready, Erika.

Strength surged in her chest like a river breaking through a dam. She
felt Axion’s generator increase its output by orders of magnitude, and
suddenly the overmatched gestalt had assumed control. Its energy flowed
within her and empowered her, and through her it found the Borg.

Hernandez gave the power a purpose. She shaped it, molded it, directed
it. She spread it across the galaxy, to every last drone, on every cube,
in every complex, on every assimilated world. In every corner of the
galaxy that had been darkened by the scourge of the Borg, Hernandez
opened the way.

Her body rose from the deck and ascended quickly toward the high ceiling
above the vinculum. Freedom, she thought, and the core of the Borg cube
obeyed her. The massive supports and exterior structures of the vinculum
peeled away and opened like a steel flower in bloom, revealing the great
hollow core of the Borg Queen’s domain. Her catoms burning brightly with
the light of the Caeliar, Hernandez soared into the great emptiness above.

Open your eyes, she told her new brothers and sisters in the gestalt.
See the future. It’s here. Its time has come.

 

Jean-Luc Picard had never broken down like this. Not when Robert and
René had died, not when he’d gone home after being liberated from the
Borg for the first time, not when Gul Madred had nearly shattered him
beyond recovery.

He collapsed onto his knees, unable to stand against the storm of
emotions that raged against him. All thoughts of pride were forgotten
now. He had no sense of the other people on the bridge of the
Enterprise. In the final moments before he had been felled by the
psionic barrage, Riker and Worf had moved to his sides to shield him
from the crew’s sight.

It doesn’t matter, he realized, submerging into the ocean of his
hopelessness. The center didn’t hold. It’s all falling apart. There’s
nothing we can do.

Doubts and fears dragged him deeper into his own bottomless despair. How
could he ever have hoped to fight the Borg? He was only one man, mortal
and weak, and the Borg were a force of nature. He’d failed to challenge
them in System J-25, when he first encountered them. He’d underestimated
them a second time and had ended up facilitating the slaughter of his
own people at Wolf 359. If not for Data, he’d have been beaten by the
Borg Queen. Arrogant enough to think he could fool them long enough to
infiltrate one of their ships, he had tried to impersonate Locutus, only
to succumb to assimilation again.

I’m a failure, he berated himself. I might have lived out my life in
peace, but I had to tempt fate by starting a family. I’ve doomed us all.

Heavy sobs wracked his chest. He cried into his palms until his ribs
hurt and his eyes burned and mucus filled his sinuses.

And across the galaxy, a trillion drones wept with Locutus.

 

A quarter-billion voices were screaming at Deanna Troi.

She pitched forward to the deck of Titan’s bridge, and Christine Vale
was at her side in an instant. “What’s wrong, Deanna?” Vale asked. Troi
wanted to reply, but she could barely breathe through the avalanche of
wild emotion smothering her.

Vale snapped out orders. “Tuvok, she needs you! Rager, we need a medic.
Keru, tell Ree to check on all psi-sensitive personnel immediately.”

The world around Troi seemed to fade behind a wall of anguished keening
and wordless, angry roars of noise. It was all coming from the Borg, but
they had none of the focused malice or icy detachment that had marked
their previous encounters with the Federation. There was only tragic
lamentation and sullen fury, emotional aftershocks of a shattered
culture of slavery.

Then a comforting thought broke through the bedlam, and Troi became
aware of warm fingertips against her temple and cheek. My mind to your
mind, Tuvok projected, easily surmounting her crumbled psychic barriers.
My strength becomes your strength. My calm becomes your calm. Our
thoughts are fusing. Our memories are merging. We are united. We are one.

She opened her eyes and saw Titan’s bridge clearly. Everyone, it seemed,
was watching her and Tuvok, who hovered on the edge of her vision,
though he was foremost in her thoughts. Troi still sensed the mental
turbulence of the millions of distressed souls in the Borg armada who
were crying out for help, but the mind-meld with Tuvok had given her the
strength to restore her telepathic barriers and recover her composure.
She saw in Tuvok’s mind that the meld had proved fortuitous for him as
well; his own control also had faltered from the shock.

Inside the meld, he asked, Are you all right, Counselor?

Yes, Tuvok. Thank you.

The crew’s attention was pulled away from Troi and Tuvok as Keru pointed
at the main viewer and shouted, “Look!”

On the center screen, the Caeliar metropolis of Axion began to shine
with an unearthly glow. It grew brighter in a rapid flash, like a star
building up to a supernova, yet Troi found something about its
penetrating white radiance comforting.

What she saw next was more than just a turning point in history. It was
the end of an era and the dawn of another.

It was a moment too incredible to be coincidence.

It was a moment of destiny.

 

A trillion pairs of eyes bore witness.

It was a vision, a phantasm sprung fully formed from the void, a
revelation of what had been and what was to come. The former Queen was
no more, laid low, made common, deposed. In her place had risen a hue
and cry of inconsolable sorrow.

A billion mothers awoke from the Collective’s iron bondage to find their
children riven from them. Billions of children opened their eyes to find
their parents gone forever, along with worlds they could barely
remember. Spouses, lovers, friends, and comrades sought one another
through the gestalt and found few of their numbers still living.
Billions of souls were alone.

There were no rich or poor. No one was famous, powerful, or privileged.
There were simply those who had awakened. Liberated from the cold grip
of the machine, they searched for the keys to their lost identities.
Then they found them, and the gestalt sang with a trillion names
reclaimed from the fog, revealed by the blaze of light piercing the gloom.

Every mind touched by the gestalt looked to the source.

Where once a dark tyrant had reigned, a bright and dazzling queen now
rose like the dawn, bringing illumination and comfort. Unfettered by the
bonds of gravity, she soared freely, bursting with light, a splendor
among shadows, exorcising six thousand years of night in a single moment
of ineffable beauty.

The harsh chord of the Collective yielded to the harmony of the gestalt.
Then there was no more pain, no more rancor, and no more sorrow, for
those things had passed away, leaving only the possibilities of the
present and the promises of the future.

A living death was conquered, and for a trillion souls who had dwelled
in night, it would never again hold dominion.

We are the Caeliar.

 

Riker kneeled beside Captain Picard and kept one hand on his friend’s
back and the other in a firm but gentle grip on his arm. Captain Dax was
on the other side of the Enterprise’s captain, in a pose that mirrored
Riker’s. It was Riker’s suspicion that Dax was just as uncertain as he
was about how to react to Captain Picard’s inconsolable emotional collapse.

Picard was on all fours, doubled over, face almost touching the
carpeting of the bridge, hyperventilating and sobbing. Then he stopped
with a sharp intake of air, and he clawed at the deck for several
seconds before bunching his hands into fists under his chin. His body
quaked as if he’d just come in from the cold.

As desperately as Riker wanted to defend Picard’s pride by concealing
this display from the rest of the bridge crew, he knew that it would be
even more damaging for them to see their captain carried off the bridge.
In any event, this wasn’t Riker’s ship, and it wasn’t his call to make,
it was Worf’s. Until the XO said otherwise, Picard would remain where he
was.

Choudhury looked up from the tactical console and pointed at the main
viewer as she shouted, “Something’s happening!”

Axion had flared like a supernova, flooding the screen with light and
all but bleaching the solid spherical formation of Borg hulls of their
details. Then the armada of Borg ships—every cube, probe, and
sphere—cracked open and bled light. Intense white radiance poured from
every fractured vessel. In a flash, the Enterprise went from being
huddled in a pit of starless metal darkness to dwelling in a heart of
pure light.

As Riker, Dax, and the bridge crew watched, the multitude of imposing
black ships imploded. Vast sections of every ship were sucked inward,
and delicate spines of brilliant, gleaming metal jutted out from their
cores, reaching in every direction. Within seconds, the Borg vessels had
all become incandescent spheres surrounded by dense formations of long
spikes. Squinting against the ships’ blinding glare, Riker mused that
they looked like massive sea urchins cast from flawless silver.

Picard’s breathing steadied, and he looked up through tearstained eyes,
first at Dax and then at Riker. In a knowing whisper, he said,
“Everything’s changed.”

Then he turned his gaze to the image on the main screen. He stared in
wonder, taking it all in…and then, ever so slowly and by infinitely
cautious degrees, Picard cracked a smile.

“Everything’s changed,” he repeated.

And then he laughed. Not like someone amused by a joke or given over to
the mirth of madness; he let out the triumphant, joyous gales of a man
tasting freedom after living in chains.

Riker threw an amused, wary look at Dax.

She shrugged. “As long as he’s happy,” she said.

 

Of the fifty million Caeliar bonded through the gestalt, only Inyx was
willing to do the unthinkable. He dissolved the last of Sedín’s
corrupted essence, condemning the last of her residual charge into the
gestalt at large and returning her, in a poetic and somewhat entropic
fashion, to the home she had unknowingly sought for six millennia, with
trillions of innocent beings yoked to her unconscious purpose.

It is finished, Inyx declared, overcome with shame for his deed, sorrow
for his friend, and relief for the end of her pain.

The gestalt empathically echoed his agonies, and from Ordemo Nordal, he
felt the blessing of absolution. There was no other way, Ordemo said. It
was too late to save her.

Then it was time to open themselves to the sentient minds they had set
free, which they welcomed into the gestalt. It was a decision motivated
partly by mercy; after all that Sedín’s victims had endured, in light of
all they had lost, the Quorum concurred that the gestalt had an
obligation to alleviate their suffering and offer them a safe haven, a
new beginning.

A more honest accounting of the situation demanded that the Caeliar
admit the truth, however: They needed the emancipated drones as much as
the drones needed them.

Hernandez had persuaded the gestalt to aid her by appealing to its own
sense of self-interest. Standing before them only a short time earlier,
she had argued her point with passion.

“Your obsession with privacy is killing you,” she’d said. “You made
these catom bodies of yours, and you figured you’d live forever in your
invulnerable cities, on your invisible planet. You never thought about
what would happen if you had to procreate. It never occurred to you that
your whole world could get shot out from under you and take ninety-eight
percent of your people with it. Well, it did. And the law of averages
says this won’t be the last time something bad happens to you.

“How many more losses can you take and still be a civilization? What if
another accident happens? Or a new, stronger enemy finds you? The
Cataclysm nearly exterminated you. Haven’t you ever stopped to consider
that all your efforts on the Great Work will be lost if you die out?

“If you want to explore the universe, you’ll need strength, and the best
place to find that is in numbers. I don’t know if there’s any way for
you to get back the ability to reproduce, but it’s not too late for you
to learn how to share. You need to bring non-Caeliar into the gestalt.
You need to teach others about the Great Work—before it’s too late.”

Her proclamation had provoked a schism in the Quorum and sent shockwaves
of indignation through the gestalt. The debate had been swift and
bitter, but in the end, it had fallen to Ordemo Nordal to persuade the
majority that Hernandez was right. It was time to expand the gestalt or
accept that it was doomed only to diminish from this moment forward. The
Quorum and the gestalt had to choose between evolution and extinction.

In the end, it proved not so difficult a choice, after all.

As the gestalt embraced the freed and bewildered drones in its
protection, Inyx appreciated at last how right Hernandez had been. The
Caeliar had granted to the Borg all it had sought for millennia: nearly
unlimited power, a step closer to perfection, and the secrets of
Particle 010. In return, the legions of drones who flocked into the warm
sanctuary of the gestalt had given the Caeliar what they had most
desperately needed: strength, adaptability, and diversity. In one grand
gesture, the Caeliar had become a polyglot society with an immense
capacity for incorporating new ideas, new technologies, and new species.

For the Borg, it was the end of aeons of futile searching.

For the Caeliar, it was the end of an age of stagnation.

The lost children had come home. The gestalt felt whole.

Now the Great Work can continue, Inyx announced, initiating the newest
members of Caeliar society to its ongoing mission. More important, he
added, now the Great Work can evolve.

 

Jean-Luc Picard was on his feet again. He felt taller than he had in
ages. So many emotions were whirling in his mind that he couldn’t name
them all. Relief and joy were at the forefront of his thoughts, with
wonder and gratitude close behind.

The aft turbolift door opened, and Beverly stepped out. She hurried
straight to his side. “Worf called me,” she said.

She reached up, as if to touch his arm in a gesture of polite and
dignified comfort.

Too full of life to settle for that, he embraced her, pulled her close,
and pressed his face into the tender space between her neck and
shoulder. He reveled in the sweet scent of her hair, the pliant warmth
of her body, the gift of her every breath, the miracle of their
child—their son—growing within her.

At first, she seemed caught by surprise, and he understood why. Picard
had never been one for public displays of affection, especially not in
front of his crew. He no longer cared about that. She was his love, the
one he had waited for, the one he had almost let slip away because he
had been too timid to follow his heart, too cautious to indulge in hope.

He was done being careful. More than fifty years earlier, it had taken a
Nausicaan’s blade through his heart to teach him that lesson the first
time. It had taken a trip to the edge of annihilation to remind him that
life was not only far too short, but also far too beautiful and far too
precious to enjoy alone.

“I’m all right, Beverly,” he whispered. “We all are.” He pulled back
just far enough to kiss her forehead and then her vibrant red lips.
Parting from her, he looked around the bridge and saw a dozen faces
bright with mildly embarrassed smiles. He brightened his countenance to
match and said, “Carry on.”

Riker and Dax stepped forward to pat his shoulders. Just as Riker was
about to say something, he was interrupted by Lieutenant Choudhury.
“Captain,” she said to Picard. “Incoming hail, sir. It’s Captain Hernandez.”

“On-screen,” Picard said, stepping forward behind the center of the
conjoined conn and operations consoles.

Erika Hernandez’s girlish features and enormous, unruly mane of sable
hair appeared on the main viewer. “Will, Ezri, Jean-Luc, I just wanted
to speak to you one last time before we go, to tell you that I’m
okay—and to say good-bye.”

“Before ‘we’ go?” Picard said, echoing her. “You mean you and the Caeliar?”

A sly grin tugged at Hernandez’s mouth. “You don’t need to speak of us
as separate entities anymore,” she said. “I am one of the Caeliar now.
In fact, I have been for a long time; I just hadn’t been able to really
accept it until now.”

Riker stepped forward on Picard’s left and asked, “Erika, what’s
happened to the Borg?”

“There are no more Borg,” Hernandez said. “Not here, or in the Delta
Quadrant, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are only Caeliar.”
Her wan smirk became a broad smile. “And if you’ll excuse us, we have a
new mission to begin.”

Dax edged forward and said, “What mission?”

“To find and protect cultures of peace and nonviolence—so that perhaps
someday in the distant future, the meek really can inherit the universe.”

“Good luck,” Riker said.

“You, too,” Hernandez said, and then the signal ended.

The screen switched back to the view of magnificently glowing,
urchin-like Caeliar vessels huddled around the miniature star of Axion.
Then, though Picard wouldn’t have thought it possible, all of the ships
and the Caeliar metropolis flared even more brightly, scrambling the
main viewer image into a distorted crackle of white noise. Less than a
second later, the light had vanished—and so had Axion and its brilliant
new armada.

On the screen, tiny and alone in the cold majesty of the cosmos, were
Titan and the Aventine. The rest was silence.

Worf relaxed his shoulders a bit and said to Choudhury, “Cancel Red Alert.”

Whoops of jubilation erupted from the other officers around the bridge.
Picard and Riker clasped each other’s forearm and slapped each other’s
shoulders. “We did it,” Riker said.

“No,” Picard said. “Erika did it. We just lived through it.” He smiled.
“And that’s good enough for me.”

He and Riker let each other go, and Riker turned to help Dax coax Worf
into joining the celebration. Picard fell back into Crusher’s arms and
treasured the moment. There was a lightness in his spirit, an exuberance
and an optimism he hadn’t felt since the earliest days of his command of
the Enterprise-D.

It took him a moment to put a name to this sublime feeling.

I’m free, he realized. I’m free.

 

Admirals Akaar and Batanides were pressed against the situation monitors
in the Monet Room and surrounded by a clutch of junior officers, all of
whom were scrambling to confirm the latest reports from the Enterprise,
Titan, and the Aventine.

If the subspace messages from the three starships were true, it would be
nothing less than a miracle. It would be one of the most stunning
reversals in the history of the Federation.

President Bacco knew she ought to be waiting on the admirals’ report
with undivided attention, but she was focused on a different spectacle.
She and the other civilians in the room had gathered in a tight huddle
in front of the painting Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies.

Tucked in a fetal curl on the floor beneath the painting was Seven of Nine.

The statuesque blonde was normally so intimidating—Jas Abrik had
described her with the less forgiving adjective “castrating”—that it
shocked Bacco to see her like this.

Only minutes earlier, Seven had been conferring with the admirals and
analyzing the reaction of the Borg armada to its sudden dislocation
across vast reaches of space. Then, before anyone had realized anything
was wrong, Seven had staggered away from the situation consoles, dazed
and trembling. Seconds later, she had collapsed to the floor and folded
in on herself.

Most of the people in the room had reacted by backing away from Seven,
as if she might be transforming back into a drone bent on assimilating
or assassinating them all.

Bacco had dashed from her chair toward the fallen woman, only to be
forcibly intercepted by her senior protection agent.

“Ma’am, you should stay back,” Wexler had said.

“Stay close, Steve, but get your hands off me.”

Wexler let go of Bacco’s arms and backed off. “Sorry, Madam President.”
She’d continued past him to Seven’s side, and he had fallen in right
behind her. His presence had seemed to reassure the others, who had
slowly regrouped in a clutch around Seven.

Now Seven lay on her left side, with her arms wrapped around her head,
unable or unwilling to respond to the gentle queries from Bacco and the
others.

Piñiero asked Seven, “Can you hear us?”

No answer.

“I think she’s hyperventilating,” Abrik said.

Secretary Iliop said, “Maybe she’s having a seizure.”

Agent Kistler joined the huddle. “A doctor’s coming.”

Press liaison Kant Jorel asked, “Should we take her pulse?”

Piñiero threw a glare at him. “Are you a doctor now?”

Abrik cut in, “I wouldn’t touch her if I were you. Last time we checked,
those Borg implants of hers still work.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Bacco grumbled. “Move.” She reached a hand
toward Seven but paused as Akaar called to her.

“Madam President,” the gray-haired admiral said, his voice loud and
bright with the promise of good news. “The all-clear signals have been
verified, and Captain Picard has confirmed that the Borg threat is over.”

Piñiero asked with naked cynicism, “For how long?”

“Forever,” Akaar said. “Captain Picard reports that the Borg…no longer
exist.”

Wide-eyed, Abrik stammered, “H—how?”

“The captain assures me it is ‘a long story,’ which he will explain
fully in his report.”

“He damned well better,” Bacco said. “Because that’s a story I want to
hear.” The sound of the secured door opening prompted her to look over
her shoulder. One of the Palais’s on-call doctors and a pair of medical
technicians hurried inside, and Agent Kistler waved them over toward Seven.

“All right, everyone,” said Agent Wexler. “Move back, please. Let the
medical team through. Thank you.”

Even as the others retreated to make room for the medics, Bacco stayed
by Seven’s side. The stricken woman was whimpering and sobbing into her
shirt-sleeves.

The doctor, a young Efrosian man who sported a haircut and a goatee that
were trimmed much shorter than was customary in his culture, kneeled
beside Bacco. “Madam President, we can take it from here,” he said,
opening his satchel of surgical tools.

“Just give me a moment,” Bacco said. She reached out and placed her hand
lightly on Seven’s shoulder. Leaning down, she whispered in as soft and
soothing a voice as she could muster, “Seven, it’s Nan. Are you all
right? Can you hear me, Seven?”

Bacco waited, her hand resting with a feather touch on Seven’s shoulder.
Then she felt a stirring, a hint of motion.

Seven’s breathing slowed but remained erratic. In gradual motions, she
lowered her arms, pushed herself from the floor, and rolled onto her
back. As her face and left hand came into view, Bacco gasped.

The Borg implants were gone. A tiny mass of fine, silvery powder lay on
the floor where Seven had rested her head, and a glittering residue
clung to her left hand and temple.

“Seven,” Bacco said, stunned. “Are you all right?”

With her beauty no longer blemished by the biomechanical scars of the
Borg, Seven looked up at Nanietta Bacco with the tear-streaked face of
an innocent.

“My name is Annika.”



    30

Rubble and dust crunched under Martok’s boots and cane as he struggled
to the summit of a great mound of shattered stone and steel, which only
that morning had been the Great Hall.

He ignored the bolts of pain shooting up his broken leg. It had been
crudely set and splinted with long, inflexible strips of metal salvaged
from a ruptured bulkhead on the Sword of Kahless. His flagship’s sickbay
and all of its medical personnel had been killed during the calamitous
battle against the Borg hours earlier. Without any of the advanced
surgical tools that could repair his fractured femur, he had been forced
to settle for a more old-fashioned treatment of his wound.

At the peak of the smoldering mound of debris, he steadied himself and
kept his weight on his good leg. Pivoting in a slow circle, he drank in
the devastation around him. The First City was a husk of its former
self. Only the scorched, denuded skeletons of a few prominent
architectural landmarks were still recognizable. Where once the city’s
main boulevard, the wo’leng, had cut like a scar from the Great Hall to
the smooth-flowing waters of the qIJbIQ, its second great river,
significant portions of the broad thoroughfare had been erased by
chaotic smears of smoking wreckage and crashed transport vessels.

Thick clouds of charcoal gray and deep crimson blanketed the sky. A
sharp, acrid bite of toxic smoke was heavy in the air, and the profusion
of airborne dust left the inside of Martok’s mouth dry and tasting of
chalk. It reminded him of historical accounts of Qo’noS in the years
immediately following the Praxis disaster, which had pushed the Klingon
homeworld to the brink of environmental collapse. This was a catastrophe
almost on par with that one. Seven major cities on Qo’noS had been
destroyed before the Borg cubes had, inexplicably, withdrawn on
reciprocal courses, back toward the Azure Nebula.

Councillors Kopek, Qolka, and Tovoj had died with the home guard fleet
and a force of their allies defending Qo’noS. Councillors Grevaq,
Krozek, and Korvog had died with Martok’s fleet. Most of the other
members of the High Council were at that moment missing in action, and
Martok had no idea which of them would turn up alive or dead.

For the moment, Martok alone was the High Council, and the temptation to
wield unitary power was taxing his will; the call of ambition was
powerful, and it was all he could do to remind himself that succumbing
to it was what had fatally undermined his predecessor, Chancellor Gowron.

I will not make that mistake, he vowed. I will not be that man. That
will not be my legacy.

He limped across the ruins to stand with General Goluk.

“Do we have casualty reports yet, General?”

“Only preliminary numbers, my lord,” Goluk said, poking at the portable
computer in his hand.

Martok scowled to mask a sharp jolt of pain from his leg. “Tell me,” he
rasped.

“Sixteen million dead in the First City. Another seven million in
Quin’lat, eleven million in Tolar’tu. Based on rough estimates from
Krennla, An’quat, T’chariv, and Novat, we believe their combined death
tolls will exceed forty-three million.”

A dour grunt concealed Martok’s dismay. “So, seventy-seven million
worldwide?”

“Yes, my lord. Though, as I said, that’s just an estimate.”

Nodding, Martok looked away and let his eyes roam across the vista of
death and destruction. Despite the solemnity and tragedy of the moment,
he permitted himself a sardonic grin.

Goluk asked, “Is something amusing, Chancellor?”

“This is the second time since I became chancellor that the Great Hall’s
been leveled,” Martok said. “I could be wrong, but I think I might be
the only chancellor who can make that claim.” He stabbed the rubble with
his cane, and bitter laughter welled up from his throat. Shaking his
head, he continued, “Do you know what irritates me most?” He glanced at
Goluk and then looked at the shattered stone under their feet. “I’d
finally learned my way around this maze, and now I have to start over
again.”

Both men laughed, though Martok knew neither of them had any mirth in
his heart. Though the Borg had been routed, to call this a victory would
at best be an exaggeration.

The day was theirs, but no songs would be sung.

 

President Nanietta Bacco closed her eyes and drew a long breath to calm
her frazzled nerves and steady her shaking hands. She waited until the
pounding of her heart slowed by even the slightest degree, and she
nodded to her press liaison, Kant Jorel, and her chief of staff,
Esperanza Piñiero. “I’m ready.”

Piñiero said to Agents Wexler and Kistler, “Let’s go.”

The two presidential bodyguards stepped forward and were the first ones
through the door at the end of the hallway. A deep susurrus of echoing
conversations filled the air. Bacco walked with her shoulders back and
her chin up, leading her entourage into the main chamber of the
Federation Council, which occupied the entire first floor of the Palais
de la Concorde.

Her eyes adjusted to the dimmer lighting in the chamber and to the glare
of the spotlight pointed at the lectern on the podium along the south
wall. Every seat in every row on both the east and west sides of the
chamber was filled, including those in the supplemental rows. The
visitors’ gallery was packed to capacity, and a row of security
personnel held back a standing-room-only crowd of Palais staff and VIP
guests along the north side of the speakers’ floor.

Bacco wondered if the intensity of interest demonstrated by the staff,
diplomats, councillors, and guests was any indicator of the public’s
interest in the address she had come to deliver. I guess I’m about to
find out, she decided.

She moved to the lectern at the front of the podium and waited while the
Council’s leaders called for quiet. A constellation of small red lights
snapped on in the shadows on the opposite side of the room, informing
her that live subspace feeds of her address were being transmitted
throughout known space.

From her right, Piñiero gave her the ready signal.

Speaking to the half-shadowed faces in the gallery and the focused
stares of the councillors, Bacco intoned in her most stately voice,
“Members of the Federation Council, foreign ambassadors, honored guests,
and citizens of the Federation…this day has been a long time in coming.”

As the glowing text of her speech crawled up a holographic prompter
situated just off-center in front of the lectern, Bacco continued almost
from memory, delivering the first address in decades that she’d composed
without the aid of her chief speechwriter, Fred MacDougan, and his
staff, who were all still light-years away from Earth, caught up in
postevacuation chaos.

“It is my pleasure and my honor to be able to bring you good news,” she
said. “The Borg threat is over.

“The officers and enlisted crews of three starships have done what so
much of our marshaled might could not. A joint effort by the Starships
Enterprise, Titan, and Aventine has turned the tide this day, bringing
an end not just to the Borg invasion of our space but to the tyranny and
oppression of the Borg throughout the galaxy.”

Spontaneous, powerful applause and cheering erupted from the gallery and
the councillors’ tiers. Bacco basked in the roar of approval for a few
seconds, and then she motioned for silence. Gradually, the room settled,
and she continued.

“In keeping with the finest traditions of Starfleet, these three crews
accomplished this not through violence, not through some brute force of
arms, but with compassion. This war has been brought to an end not by
bloodshed but by an act of mercy.

“They took a chance on the better angels of their natures, reached out
to a new ally, and transformed the Borg Collective into something
benign, perhaps even noble. I am informed that across the Milky Way,
trillions of drones have been liberated, their free will restored.”

As quickly as she had earned the room’s praise, now she felt its
condemnation. Bitter whispers traveled among the councillors, and
disapproving noises hissed in the gallery.

“This outcome might feel inadequate to those among us who want revenge
on the Borg. I understand, I assure you. There is no minimizing the
scope of the tragedy we have endured. According to even our most
conservative estimates, more than sixty-three billion citizens of the
Federation, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, and the
Imperial Romulan State were slaughtered by the Borg during this invasion.”

She paused to compose herself, and she swallowed to relieve the dryness
in her mouth and throat. “Sixty-three billion lives cut short,” she
said. “The mind boggles at the scope of it. Such a horrific crime
against life seems to demand payback, in the form of a proportional
response. But we must move beyond hatred and vengeance. The Borg
Collective no longer exists, and we must remember that those who carried
out its atrocities were victims themselves, slaves taken from their own
worlds and their own families. Now the force that controlled them has
been disbanded, and its emancipated drones have vanished to points
unknown. There is, quite simply, no one left to blame.”

A deep and thoughtful silence hung over the chamber, and Bacco took it
as a positive sign as she pressed on.

“Let us instead remember those whose actions have earned our trust and
our gratitude. Our staunch allies, the Klingons, stood with us in our
hour of need and inspired us with their fearlessness. We witnessed great
acts of gallant bravery and sacrifice by starship crews from the
Imperial Romulan State and the Talarian Republic. The Warbird Verithrax
sacrificed itself in the defense of Ardana, and the Talarian third fleet
was all but destroyed holding the line at Aldebaran, halting the Borg’s
advance in that sector. These heroic gestures must never be forgotten.”
Murmurs of concurrence filled the room.

Bacco found it difficult to read the next portion of her address, but
she had no choice. The truth had to be faced.

“It is unfortunate,” she continued, “that at a time when we should be
rejoicing in our victory, we must mourn losses so tragic. It’s natural,
at a time such as this, for us to think of ourselves. We had not yet
completely recovered from the Dominion War, and now dozens of
worlds—including Deneva, Coridan, Risa, Regulus, Korvat, and Ramatis—lay
in ruins. Dozens more, including Qo’noS, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar,
suffered devastating attacks. And we must remember that the Borg did not
discriminate between us and our unaligned neighbors. They inflicted
widespread damage on Nausicaa, Yridia, and Barolia. It is all but
impossible to quantify the true scope of this calamity, to calculate the
unestimated sum of sentient pain.

“In the aftermath of such a monumental catastrophe, the prospect of
rebuilding appears daunting. Some might say it’s impossible to recover
from such a disaster. I say it is not only possible, it is essential. We
will rise anew. We will rebuild these worlds, and we will heal these
wounds. We will reach out not only to our own wounded people but to
those of our allies and our neighbors and even to those who have called
themselves our rivals and our enemies.”

Polite applause interrupted her, and she accepted it with a humble nod
of thanks and acknowledgment. Then she lifted her voice and declared,
“We will not shrink from the challenge of raising back up what the Borg
have knocked down. We will honor the sacrifices of all those who fought
and died to defend us, by committing ourselves to repairing the damage
that’s been done and creating a future that they would have been proud of.

“We will also rebuild Starfleet, to guarantee that all we have gained,
with so much suffering and sacrifice, shall be preserved and defended.”

This time, the clapping and cheering from the gallery were thunderous.
Emboldened, she spoke more strongly, punching her words through the clamor.

“More important, though Starfleet is needed for recovery and
reconstruction and to render aid, we will renew our commitment to its
mission of peaceful exploration, diplomatic outreach, and open
scientific inquiry. The Luna-class starships will continue—and, in
Titan’s case, resume—their missions far beyond our borders: seeking out
new worlds, new civilizations, and new life-forms and offering, to those
that are ready, our hand in friendship.

“There are those who might doubt our ability to do all of these things
at once. To them, I would say, don’t underestimate the United Federation
of Planets. Just because we have suffered the brunt of the injuries in
this conflict, do not assume that we are weak or vulnerable. Don’t
mistake optimism for foolishness or compassion for weakness.

“With patience and courage, this can become a time of hope. As long as
we remain united, we will emerge from these dark and hideous days into a
brighter tomorrow, and we will do so stronger, wiser, and safer than we
were before. Together, we can become the future that we seek and build
the galaxy we want to live in. It will not come about quickly or easily.
But until it does, never flinch, never weary, and never despair.

“Thank you, and good night.”

Bacco stepped back from the lectern as the chamber shook with deafening
applause. Shading her eyes with one hand, she saw that the councillors
and the visitors in the gallery all were standing as they delivered
their roaring ovation. She waved to both tiers of councillors, then to
the far end of the room, before Piñiero and Wexler coaxed her to leave
the podium and follow them out of the Council Chamber.

Her entourage, including security adviser Jas Abrik, fell into step
around her as they moved to the exit and quick-stepped into the hallway
beyond.

Only once they were through the door did Bacco realize that the corridor
was now lined with members of the press. Questions were shouted at her
from both sides, the words overlapping into a muddy wash of sound. Jorel
and Piñiero repeatedly hollered back, “No comment! No questions, please!”

At the far end of the hallway, Wexler and Kistler ushered Bacco and her
senior advisers into a secure turbolift, then stepped in after them,
placing themselves directly in front of the doors as they closed,
muffling and then erasing the hubbub of pestering press run amok.

Bacco sighed heavily. “Thank God that’s over.”

Kant Jorel replied, “It went well, Madam President.”

“Yes, Jorel, I know. I was there.”

Rebuked, he bowed his chin. “Yes, ma’am.”

“It was a wonderful speech, ma’am,” Piñiero said.

“It was all right,” Bacco replied. “If Fred and his people had been here
to polish it, it would’ve been great.” She threw a pointed look at
Abrik. “Whose idea was it to put them all on the transport to Tyberius?
Was it Iliop? I’ll throttle him.”

He replied, “No idea, ma’am, but I thought the Churchill homage at the
end was a nice touch.”

“Absolutely,” Piñiero agreed. “It’s what people needed to hear.”

Frowning, Bacco replied, “It’s what I needed to hear.” The pressure of
the past month, far from being lifted, only seemed to weigh heavier on
her shoulders. “The Borg are gone, but now everything else is up for grabs.”

Abrik tilted his head sideways. “There’s certainly the potential for a
period of instability.”

She looked at the middle-aged Trill as if all his spots had just fallen
off. “Instability? When there’s a water shortage on Draylax, that’s
cause for instability. We’ve got a dead zone for a hundred light-years
in every direction around the Azure Nebula. More than forty percent of
Starfleet’s been destroyed. Sixty-three billion people are dead.
Deneva’s been wiped out, and our economy’s about to implode. We’re long
past unstable. When the shock of all this wears off, I think we’ll look
back on the last sixteen years with longing and envy.”

The turbolift doors opened onto the top floor, and the group stepped
from the lift into the lobby outside Bacco’s office. Wexler and Kistler
entered the presidential office first. They stepped clear of the doorway
to let Bacco, Abrik, Jorel, and Piñiero file in, and then the two agents
faded into the woodwork, as always.

Bacco stepped behind her desk and looked out the panoramic window at the
nighttime cityscape of Paris. She was filled with a sense of foreboding,
a feeling that there was always some new evil lurking in the darkness.
“It’s a whole new ball game,” she said. “But we have no idea who’s
playing—or what the rules are.”

Piñiero grinned and replied with a shrug, “That’s what keeps the job
interesting, ma’am.”



    EPILOGUE

Mourners moved in slow packs, their steps leaving crisp prints in the
fine-ground regolith of pulverized stone and flesh. Tuvok noticed that
the graphite-colored powder stuck to everything—his boots, his pants,
his wife’s shoes, the hem of her jacket, the tips of her close-cropped hair.

He had seen Deneva’s lush Summer Islands years earlier, when they had
boasted pristine white beaches, dazzling cities, and a thriving culture
of visual arts and live music. It had been a vibrant, stimulating, and
prosperous place.

When his youngest son, Elieth, had told him and T’Pel of his intention
to take up residence there, it had seemed an unlikely locale for such a
serious young Vulcan man. Then, after Elieth had moved, he had revealed
his ulterior motive: He had gone to Deneva to persuade Ione Kitain, a
daughter of the Fourth House of Betazed, to become his bride. At the
time, T’Pel had decried Elieth’s actions as “illogical.” Tuvok suspected
that his wife had used the term as a euphemism for “disappointing.”

Elieth and Ione had wed while Tuvok was presumed lost with the rest of
Voyager’s crew, and over the next few years, T’Pel had learned to accept
her new, non-Vulcan daughter-in-law. Ione’s sophisticated telepathic
skills had helped matters along, but what had finally earned T’Pel’s
respect and acceptance was the great contentment and peace of mind Ione
seemed to bring to Elieth, whose logic had long felt troubled during his
youth.

Squatting low to the ground, Tuvok scooped up a palmful of gray-brown
dust, which had the consistency of greasy flour. It clung to his skin
even as he tried to clap it off.

T’Pel looked away, past the distant clusters of roving kith and kin to
the dead. “Why did we come here, husband? Starfleet told us nothing
survived in the Summer Islands and that there would be no remains or
relics to recover.”

“I wished to see this for myself,” he said, rubbing his hands clean on
the front of his trousers. He stood straight. In every direction, the
Summer Islands lay like flat smears barely raised from the ocean, which
now was stained brown and black.

Mastering the turmoil of his thoughts had become taxing for Tuvok.
Despite the psionic therapy he had done with Counselor Troi to fortify
his psychic control and telepathic defenses, which had been compromised
by years of neurological trauma, he felt overwhelmed. Primitive emotions
threatened to crack his dispassionate veneer. Rage and grief, despair
and denial—they were black clouds blotting out the light of reason.

Resolved not to embarrass himself or T’Pel or to disgrace the memory of
his slain youngest son, Tuvok stood firm against the darkest tides of
his katra, even as he feared drowning in them, submerging into madness
and never surfacing again.

“We should return to Titan now,” T’Pel said.

“No,” Tuvok said. “I am not ready yet.”

T’Pel was confounded by his reply. “There is nothing else for us to find
or do here. Staying longer serves no purpose.”

“I do not wish to explain myself, T’Pel. I will remain here while I
reflect on what has happened. I would prefer that you stay with me, but
if you wish to depart, I will not stop you.”

In pairs and trios or in small groups, people both young and old, male
and female, and pilgrims of all species milled in stunned shock across
the level stretch of total desolation. Tuvok watched them all seek in
vain for something that was no longer to be found, for tangible
artifacts of loved ones now gone.

An empty hush of wind off the sea roared in Tuvok’s ears, and the breeze
kicked up clouds of foul-smelling, choking dust.

When it died down and the heavy cloud started to settle, T’Pel said, “If
you are pondering the details of our son’s death, I would urge you to
consider that most likely, it was swift and entailed only fleeting pain.”

“The specifics of his demise are not important,” Tuvok said. “I question
his decision not to escape with Ione when it might still have been
possible.”

“Elieth was committed to law enforcement and to the service of others,”
T’Pel said, as if she were telling Tuvok something that he didn’t
already know. “If he and Ione stayed behind after the final transports
left, he must have thought their choice to be the one that was most
logical.”

Tuvok’s sea of troubled emotions swelled and threatened to swallow him
whole. He grappled with a surge of irrational fury provoked by T’Pel’s
remark. His fists clenched white-knuckle tight, and his face hardened
with bitter anger.

“I can see no logic in this, T’Pel. My son is dead.”

 

Dark clouds were pulled taut across the leaden skies of Deneva. The
ash-covered peaks of the Sibiran Range were obscured by tin-dull mists,
and a diffuse light cast a dim gray pall over the desolate hills and
plains that spread south from the mountains.

Worf tried not to inhale too deeply. The entire planet had a dusty,
smoky odor, like a lingering tang of burnt hair. During his approach
from orbit, via shuttle with Jasminder Choudhury, he had seen no traces
of green on the planet’s surface. Until they had pierced the bottom of
the cloud cover, in fact, they had barely seen the surface at all. All
but the most extreme polar latitudes of Deneva were encircled by rings
of ash, dust, and smoke—the airborne residue of its vaporized cities.

He stood on the scorched plain and watched myriad shuttles and small
ships descend from the death-polluted sky and seek out remote places to
set down. Hundreds of thousands of people had come to Deneva in the past
few days, since the travel interdiction had been lifted. The Federation
had quarantined its surface until Starfleet had verified that visitors
and returning denizens would face no lingering threats, either from the
Borg or from radiation and other toxins. According to a message he had
received that morning from his son, Alexander, conditions were much the
same on Qo’noS and many worlds of the Klingon Empire.

A few meters away from him, Jasminder kneeled and scanned a patch of
soil with her tricorder. She switched off the device. “Close enough,”
she said, standing up as a gust of warm air pelted them both with sand.

Worf squinted against the stinging breeze. “Are you sure?”

“The whole planet’s a cinder,” she said. “One patch of dirt will serve
as well as another. We should get started.”

They walked together to the back of their borrowed shuttle from the
Enterprise and opened its rear hatch. Most of the passenger compartment
had been filled with tools, supplies, and their one piece of precious
cargo. Jasminder grabbed two shovels and handed one to Worf. “Thank you
for coming with me.”

“I am honored…and moved…that you invited me.”

She favored him with a small, bittersweet smile, and then they stepped
out of the shuttle and returned to the spot she’d selected. This, she’d
told him during the flight down, was where her family home had stood,
before the Borg had erased it from existence. They circled the spot
she’d marked until they stood on either side of it, facing each other.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Shovel tips were pressed into the dry, blackened soil and driven deep
with pushes from their heels. The parched skin of the planet cracked and
broke as Worf and Jasminder pulled on the shovels’ handles. The two
officers lifted thick clumps of dirt and heaved them to one side. They
dug at the hard ground for a few minutes, until they had excavated a pit
three-quarters of a meter deep and half a meter wide.

Setting aside the shovels, they returned to the shuttle and retrieved
more supplies. Jasminder brought a large, clumsy-heavy pouch of
chemicals, and Worf hefted a small drum of water onto his shoulder. They
methodically emptied both into the hole.

Worf waited behind while she returned to the shuttle for the last and
most crucial element.

She returned carrying in one hand a diminutive twig—Worf thought it
hardly deserved to be called even a sapling, let alone a tree. He waited
while she lowered it into the soaked and fertilized hole they’d
prepared, and he held it upright and steady while she shoveled the dirt
back in around its linen-wrapped roots. She tamped down the dirt with
her boots, and then she piled more on top, until at last she had crafted
a gently sloping round island around the skinny oak’s wrist-thick trunk.

By the time Jasminder had finished, tears were flowing from her eyes,
but she herself was quiet. She took a few backward steps, setting
herself at a remove to survey her handiwork.

Worf stood beside her and said nothing. Across the blood-hallowed
ground, the wind whispered its benedictions.

Jasminder wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand,
without once taking her eyes off the tree.

“It’s so…” Grief robbed her of words. He reached out and rested his arm
across her shoulders. She huddled beside him, under his embrace, and
then she started over. “It’s so tiny.”

With a firm yet gentle clasp of her shoulder, he pulled her close and
said, “It is a beginning.”

 

Xin Ra-Havreii stood at the forefront of a throng gathered at the broad,
starboard-facing windows in Titan’s arboretum. Much of the ship’s crew
had departed two weeks earlier for extended shore leave, after it had
limped home to the Utopia Planitia yards above Mars for repairs and
upgrades—all to be made under Ra-Havreii’s expert supervision.

The Efrosian chief engineer stroked one long droop of his ivory-white
mustache and speculated that his absent shipmates would regret not
having been aboard to see that day’s event with their own eyes.

Sometimes videos do history no justice, he mused.

A majority of the personnel who had packed into the high-ceilinged
compartment to take advantage of its unobstructed view were not regular
Titan personnel but technicians, mechanics, and engineers assigned to
the Utopia Planitia facility. Among them, Ra-Havreii recognized many
former friends and colleagues of his, from his days working there as a
project director and starship designer. He hadn’t spoken to many of them
since the accident years earlier aboard the Luna, and he felt no desire
to do so now. For their part, they seemed content to ignore him as well.

A whiff of delicate perfume stood out from the scents of flowers and
green plants, and it turned Ra-Havreii’s head. Standing behind his left
shoulder was Lieutenant Commander Melora Pazlar, once more outfitted in
her powered armature. Ra-Havreii smiled at her. “Good morning, Melora,”
he said.

“Good morning, Xin. Room for one more up front?”

The young Catullan man standing on Ra-Havreii’s left glanced at Pazlar
and then at the chief engineer, who furrowed his snowy brows and
growled, “Make a hole, Crewman.”

“Aye, sir,” said the Catullan, as he nudged the rest of the line down a
few steps to free up room for Pazlar.

She inched forward and pressed in close beside Ra-Havreii. “Thanks, Xin.”

“My pleasure,” he said. Looking around at the crush of spectators, he
added, “I thought you hated crowds.”

“I do,” she said. “But I hate missing out even more.”

Over the soft murmuring of the crowd, someone at the aft end of the
compartment shouted, “Here they come!” Everyone leaned toward the
windows and craned their necks, straining to see past everyone else, to
bear witness to history.

Pazlar and Ra-Havreii shifted their weight and stood at matching angles
while staring out at the stars, awaiting the main attraction. Facing
aft, the blond Elaysian woman had her back to Ra-Havreii, who savored
the fragrance of her hair.

“It’s too bad they had to shut down my holopresence network while making
repairs,” she said over her shoulder, making eye contact as she noticed
how close their faces were.

He nodded. “Yes, it’s a shame. But the interruption is only temporary.
Oh! Did I tell you about the new asymmetric interaction mode I created
for it?”

“No, I don’t think you did.”

“You’re going to love it,” he said with unabashed pride in his work. “It
lets your holographic avatar inflict amplified physical damage on real
opponents while preventing any harmful effects from being transmitted
back to you. It could prove very useful if Titan ever gets boarded again.”

She smiled at him. “I have a theory about the holo-presence system, you
know.”

“Really?” His eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “Do tell.”

“I think it’s proof you’re in love with me.”

Affecting a nonchalant air, he replied, “Ridiculous.” Noting the amused
glimmer in her gaze, he added with some hesitation, “I mean…love is, um,
such a strong word, and we hardly—that is, we…”

“Simmer down, Commander,” Pazlar said. “It’s not the least appealing
idea I’ve heard lately. And some of your past conquests have assured me
that you know how to be gentle.” Another teasing grin. “Which is
important for a gal like me.”

“Well, obviously,” he said. Tamping down his surging excitement, he
decided to handle the matter with delicacy. “I find your invitation
almost irresistible,” he began.

She sounded insulted. “Almost?”

“Nigh irresistible,” he corrected himself. “But before I surrender to my
passions—and yours—it’s absolutely vital that I be completely honest
with you.”

“About what?”

“Well, about me,” he said. “I am deeply attracted to you, Melora, and in
ways that I haven’t felt about someone in a long time. But I’m afraid
it’s simply not in my nature to be, well, monogamous.”

She snickered, and then she laughed. “Who’s asking?” Shaking her head,
she turned aft and added softly, “Let’s just see how our first date
goes, okay?”

The more he learned about her, the more he adored her.

“Okay,” he said. “Sounds like a plan.”

Shining brighter than the stars, a white point grew larger as it neared
the Utopia Planitia orbital shipyard. Edges resolved into forms and then
into two distinct shapes linked by a glowing beam. At the forefront, a
Sabre-class starship. Towed behind it, and held together by who knew
what kind of high-tech legerde-main, was a twenty-second-century
NX-class starship, its hull and nacelles scarred but still together.

An announcement over the intraship comm echoed from the overhead
speakers. “Attention, all Titan personnel,” said Commander Vale. “Muster
starboard for passing honors.”

Outside, the Sabre-class vessel adjusted its course to glide past
overhead, giving Ra-Havreii and the other spectators a perfect view of
the registry on the ventral side of its primary hull: U.S.S. da Vinci
NCC 81623. With precision and grace, its tractor beam guided its ward,
the Columbia NX-02, past Titan to safety inside a docking slip.

Ra-Havreii didn’t feel foolish or embarrassed to have tears brimming in
his eyes while he watched the Columbia’s long-overdue homecoming,
because everyone else in the arboretum did, too. With a solemn nod of
salute to the old vessel, he whispered, “Welcome home, old girl.”

 

The personal transport pod had barely settled to the ground near Vicenzo
Farrenga’s home in Lakeside on Cestus III when his five-year-old
daughter, Aoki, was out the pod’s side hatch and sprinting for the front
door of their house.

He called after her, “Sweetie, wait for Daddy!”

The sable-haired little girl stopped on the snaking path of organically
shaped paving stones that led away from the landing area. Vicenzo and
his cousin, Frederico—more commonly known as Fred—pulled themselves out
of the vehicle with the stiffness of men tasting their first years of
early middle age.

“If you want to take the twins, I’ll grab your bags,” Fred said, using
his handheld control to open the rear hatch.

“That’d be great, thanks,” Vicenzo said.

He released the magnetic locks that held in place the horizontal bar of
his infants’ tandem safety seat. Then he lifted them out one at a
time—Colin first and then Sylvana—and guided them into a double-pouch
baby sling that enabled him to carry both children at once, one against
his chest and the other on his back, while keeping his hands free.

As he straightened under the weight of his heavier-by-the-day scions, he
saw that Fred had finished unloading the luggage and apparently was
pondering which pieces to take inside first. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he
said to his cousin. “Start with Aoki’s bags—she mostly has pajamas and
stuffed animals.”

“Right,” said Fred, who stacked Aoki’s smaller flowered bags on top of a
large one with wheels, extended the bottom bag’s towing handle, and
pulled it behind him as he followed Vicenzo toward the broad, immaculate
A-frame cedar house.

Vicenzo breathed in the cool early morning air and admired the view of
Pike’s Lake surrounded by mostly undisturbed forest. Sunlight sparkled
on the water, and a breeze brought him scents of wood smoke and pine.

His was one of few homes that had been built around the lake. One of the
most attractive features of this piece of property, in his opinion, was
that none of the houses around the lake had a view of another. Each was
sequestered in a nook of the shoreline and sheltered by the forest.

He checked and confirmed that his two canoes and one rowboat were still
tied to the small dock behind his house. The lawn furniture didn’t
appear to have been pilfered during his absence, and that much more was
once again right in his world. He’d just spent seventeen days making an
arduous, impromptu round-trip journey with his children, who had
pestered him with an endless barrage of questions. There had been no way
to tell them that they had, in fact, been running for their lives from
the Borg, because Mommy had said to leave Federation space.

Even after President Bacco’s startling address, when it had become clear
that the Borg threat was over, getting home hadn’t been easy. By then,
he and the children had reached Pacifica, along with several million
other hastily displaced refugees. It had taken six days to get there,
then five days to book passage on another transport back to Cestus III.
And, as he’d feared, he’d been deprived of communications every step of
the way, up to and including the moment he and the kids had landed.

Fortunately, Fred had never even considered being evacuated from Cestus
III and had been home with nothing better to do, as usual. After a
gentle browbeating, he had agreed to come pick up Vicenzo and his brood
from the starport in Johnson City.

Trudging up the walk to the house, Vicenzo winced as both twins began
crying at once. In front of him, Aoki hopped with manic energy after
barely plodding along behind him for two weeks. She cut the air with a
shrill plea: “Faster, Daddy!”

“Hold your horses, Pumpkin,” he said.

It’s good to be back at the house, he thought with relief. It’ll be nice
to sleep in my own bed. And eat my own cooking.

As he approached the front door, it swung open ahead of him, and he
stopped in midstride.

His breath caught with hope and surprise.

Aoki spun around toward the house and shrieked, “Mommy!” She ran at a
full gallop into Miranda Kadohata’s wide and waiting arms. Miranda
scooped the girl off her feet, kissed her, and spun her around and
around as they laughed with glee.

Vicenzo desperately wanted to sprint to his wife, but he didn’t want to
risk shaking the twins, so he trotted in a funny way that minimized the
bouncing of his hurried steps.

Miranda turned, perched Aoki on her sundress-clad hip, and held the girl
steady with her right arm; she used her left to embrace Vicenzo and the
babies. She felt amazing in his arms, and she smelled even better. He
had missed every inch of her.

“Welcome back, love,” she said, her eyes gleaming with grateful tears.
She kissed the top of Colin’s head, and then she touched her fingertips
to Sylvana’s sparsely covered scalp and massaged it, in a peculiar
flexing gesture that Vicenzo had nicknamed the hand spider. Within
moments, both twins had stopped crying. She smiled at Vicenzo. “It’s
good to be home.”

He kissed her again. “It is now.”

 

“A toast,” Picard said, standing up from the table and raising his
champagne glass. He waited for his dining companions to lift their own
flutes, and he continued, “May our friendships, like fine wine, only
improve with time’s advance, and may we always be blessed with old wine,
old friends, and young cares. Cheers.”

“Here, here,” replied Will Riker, who saluted Picard with his glass and
then took a sip, cuing the other guests to drink.

Picard returned to his chair beside Beverly, who sat on his left. Riker
occupied the other seat beside her, and past him was Deanna Troi. An
empty chair separated Troi from Ezri Dax.

“What an amazing dinner,” Dax said, gathering another spoonful of
chocolate mousse. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Every new commanding officer deserves to be treated at least once to a
meal in the Captains’ Lounge,” Picard said with a collegial grin. “Not
only is the cuisine exquisite, but the view is spectacular.”

His comment turned everyone’s eyes to the vista beyond the restaurant’s
concave wraparound wall of flawless transparent aluminum. Set against a
perfect black curtain of star-flecked space was the majestic, looming
curve of Mars’s southern hemisphere.

The real focus of attention, however, was the newly arrived vessel in
the docking slip below the VIP guests’ table. The Columbia NX-02 was
being swarmed over and doted on by a small army of engineers, mechanics,
and technicians, who had begun the task of restoring the ship so that it
could return under its own power to Earth orbit, completing the
ill-fated journey it had started more than two centuries earlier.

Riker sighed with admiration of the vintage starship. “They really knew
how to make ’em back then, didn’t they?”

Dax replied with mock injured pride, “I think they make ’em just fine
now, thank you very much.”

“It is amazing, though,” Troi said. “To think of how much of history was
shaped by the fate of that one ship.”

“Like the butterfly effect,” Beverly interjected. “One decision today
can spell life or death for a billion people a hundred years from now.
You just never know.”

“True,” Riker replied. “Maybe the universe is more like the subatomic
realm than we normally think—full of invisible effects and unseen
consequences.” He smirked at Picard. “What do you think, Jean-Luc?”

“I think perhaps you’ve all had enough champagne,” he said, trying to
hold a stern poker face and failing as a smile cracked through his mask
of propriety. It felt good to grin and laugh and be the man he’d hidden
from view for so many years. He felt as if he had come home to himself
at long last.

His friends chortled good-naturedly with him, and then Riker said,
“Seriously, though, what do you think?”

Picard permitted himself a moment of introspection. Until recently, he
had dreaded such self-reflection, because his inner life had been
haunted by the shadow of the Borg. Now, granted a measure of peace and
solitude, he thought about the sensations and impressions that had
lingered after the Caeliar’s transformation of the Collective. He sipped
his demitasse of espresso and appraised his newly altered worldview.

“I think that we’re all echoes of a greater consciousness,” he said.
“Cells of awareness in a scheme we can’t understand. At least, not yet.”

Beverly seemed taken aback by his answer. Leaning toward him, she rested
her hand on his forearm and said, “Is that really what you believe,
Jean-Luc?”

He arched one eyebrow. “I hesitate to call it a belief,” he said. “Let’s
just say it’s an idea that I’m entertaining.”

“Pretty big idea,” Riker said, flashing his trademark smile behind his
close-cut salt-and-pepper beard.

Picard shrugged. “Why think small? Thinking is free.”

Dax folded her napkin and set it on the table. “Sorry to eat and run,
but I have to get back to the Aventine by 1900. We’re expecting new
orders from Starfleet Command.”

As she got up, Picard and Riker stood as well. Smoothing the front of
his tunic, Picard said with genuine optimism, “An exploration mission,
perhaps?”

“Not likely, I’m afraid,” Dax said. “I spoke to Admiral Nechayev before
I came to dinner. She told me the Aventine’ll be needed to help
coordinate rescue and recovery efforts inside the Federation for at
least the next few months.” She frowned. “Seems like a waste of a
perfectly good slipstream drive, if you ask me. Now that it’s fully
online, I was hoping we’d get to visit a new galaxy or something.”

Riker gently chided her, “A new one? Do you mind if we finish exploring
this one first?”

“Don’t be silly, William,” Dax teased, standing on tiptoes to plant a
chaste kiss on his cheek. “That’s what Starfleet has you for.” The
sweetness of her smile took the sting out of her jibe. To Picard, she
said, “Captain, it’s been a pleasure and an honor. I hope our paths get
to cross again someday.”

“I’m certain they will,” Picard said. With a nod at the table, he added,
“But next time, you’re buying dinner.”

“You’re on,” the diminutive Trill captain said. Then she turned, said
her farewells with Beverly and Troi, and left the restaurant in quick
strides, without a backward glance. By the time she had finished her
exit, Troi and Beverly had risen from the table to stand with Riker and
Picard.

“She’s something else,” Beverly said, with a combination of admiration
and exasperation.

“Yes,” Troi said. “She’s exceptionally sure of herself.”

Picard and Riker traded amused glances, and Picard said to the two
women, “She can’t help it—she’s a Dax.”

Crusher poked Picard’s chest. “And I’m a Howard woman.”

“And I’m a daughter of the Fifth House, heiress to the Sacred Chalice of
Rixx and the Holy Rings of Betazed,” Troi said. After a horrified pause,
she added, “And I’m turning into my mother.”

“God, I hope not,” Riker muttered.

“What was that?” Troi snapped.

“Nothing.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Sensing that it might be a good time to change the subject, Picard said,
“Does Titan have its new orders yet?”

“Nope,” Riker said. “We’re moving to McKinley Station tomorrow at 0800
for some upgrades and refits. We’ll find out what’s next once we’re done
with repairs.” He shook his head and after a rueful grin, added, “I do
love a surprise.”

“Listen to you two,” Beverly said to the men. She and Troi looked irked
with them as she continued, “You talk like the biggest things in your
lives are light-years away.”

Troi added, “Did you forget your new assignments already?”

Knowing glances of mock dread passed between the two men.

“Parenthood…,” Riker began.

“…the final frontier,” Picard finished.

Beverly smirked at their exchange but pretended to ignore them as she
asked Troi, “Have you two picked out a name yet?”

“No,” Troi said. “You?”

Beverly shook her head. “Not yet. It’s been a matter of some…contention.”

“I know the feeling,” Troi said, wrinkling her brow in frustration at
her husband, who rolled his eyes.

“We should go,” Riker said. He reached forward and shook hands with
Picard. Before the elder captain could speak, Riker added, “Don’t tell
me to be careful.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Picard said. “Be bold.”

“That sounds like the Captain Picard I know.” He let go of Picard’s
hand, slapped his shoulder, and added more softly, “Good to have you
back.” He and Troi bade Beverly farewell, and Picard saw them off with
the hopeful valediction, “Au revoir.”

Then he and Beverly were alone in the Captains’ Lounge, which had been
closed for his private event. Sometimes being a famous savior of the
Federation had its perquisites.

Beverly took his hand, and they stood together, staring in wonder at the
austere majesty of the universe. A grim chapter of his life now felt
closed, and a new, brighter chapter was about to begin. Old debts had
been settled, and old promises had been kept. His obligations to the
past were fulfilled, and for the first time in decades, he was free to
contemplate the future.

Wistfully, Beverly asked, “What will you do in a universe without the
Borg, Jean-Luc?”

He didn’t answer right away. It was not a glib question.

Squeezing her hand in his firm but gentle grip, he met her reflected
gaze in the window and said, “I’ll hope that our son is born healthy….
I’ll hope that we can be good parents…. I’ll hope that he can grow up in
a galaxy of peace.”

He regarded his own reflection with a smile.

“I’ll hope.”


Terminat hora diem, terminat auctor opus.



    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Kara, my lovely and patient wife, thank you for being so good to me, and
so understanding even as I spent most of my nights for more than fifteen
months secluded behind closed doors writing this trilogy. It would have
been unbearable without you.

Marco Palmieri and Margaret Clark, my esteemed editors, I thank you for
tolerating my bouts of uncertainty, my moments of dudgeon while I
received your eminently reasonable story notes, and my adolescent
practical jokes. (“All work and no play makes Mack a dull boy.”) I
couldn’t have done this without you both.

Geddy Lee, thank you for taking an hour of your time to talk with a
stranger, and for sharing your lovely anecdote about French vineyards,
and the way that vines are like people, in that adversity adds depth and
complexity to their characters. I hope you will forgive me for making
use of it in this tale, and that you will approve of the manner in which
it was applied.

Keith R.A. DeCandido, Kirsten Beyer, and Christopher L. Bennett, thank
you one and all for going above and beyond the call of duty to help me
vet all three books of this trilogy. My thanks also go out to Michael A.
Martin and Andy Mangels, who graciously tweaked their novel Kobayashi
Maru to track with situations I had established, and for suggesting that
Ree ought to bite Counselor Troi. Nice idea, gents!

To revive an old tradition of mine, I wish to thank the composers who
helped create the numerous original film and TV scores that serve as my
link to my muse while I write. Many of my favorite moments throughout
the trilogy were coaxed from my imagination by the music of Bear
McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Season Three), Tyler Bates (300), Alan
Silvestri (Beowulf ), Javier Navarette (Pan’s Labyrinth), Thomas Newman
(The Shawshank Redemption), Hans Zimmer (the Pirates of the Caribbean
scores) and Dario Marianelli (V for Vendetta).

Last, I need to thank author Robert Metzger for having made me aware of
the concept of catoms, in an article he wrote for the SFWA Bulletin.
Astute readers might have wondered if the character of Johanna Metzger
in Gods of Night and Mere Mortals was named in his honor; she was.

Until next time, thanks for reading.



    APPENDIX I
    2156

Featured Crew Members

Columbia NX-02

Captain Erika Hernandez
(human female) commanding officer

Commander Veronica Fletcher
(human female) executive officer

Lieutenant Commander Kalil el-Rashad
(human male), second officer/science officer

Lieutenant Karl Graylock
(human male) chief engineer

Lieutenant Johanna Metzger
(human female) chief medical officer

Lieutenant Kiona Thayer
(human female) senior weapons officer

Ensign Sidra Valerian
(human female) communications officer

Major Stephen Foyle
(human male) MACO commander

Lieutenant Vincenzo Yacavino
(human male) MACO second-in-command

Sergeant Gage Pembleton
(human male) MACO first sergeant



    APPENDIX II
    STARDATE 58100
    (early February 2381)

Featured Crew Members

U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-E

Captain Jean-Luc Picard
(human male) commanding officer

Commander Worf
(Klingon male) executive officer

Commander Miranda Kadohata
(human female) second officer/operations officer

Commander Geordi La Forge
(human male) chief engineer

Commander Beverly Crusher
(human female) chief medical officer

Lieutenant Hegol Den
(Bajoran male) senior counselor

Lieutenant Jasminder Choudhury
(human female) chief of security

Lieutenant Dina Elfiki
(human female) senior science officer

Lieutenant T’Ryssa Chen
(Vulcan-human female) contact specialist

U.S.S. Titan NCC-80102

Captain William T. Riker
(human male) commanding officer

Commander Christine Vale
(human female) executive officer

Commander Tuvok
(Vulcan male) second officer/tactical officer

Commander Deanna Troi
(Betazoid-human female) diplomatic officer/senior counselor

Commander Xin Ra-Havreii
(Efrosian male) chief engineer

Lieutenant Commander Shenti Yisec Eres Ree
(Pahkwa-thanh male) chief medical officer

Lieutenant Commander Ranul Keru
(Trill male) chief of security

Lieutenant Commander Melora Pazlar
(Elaysian female) senior science officer

Lieutenant Pral glasch Haaj
(Tellarite male) counselor

Lieutenant Huilan Sen’kara
(Sti’ach male) counselor

Ensign Torvig Bu-kar-nguv
(Choblik male) engineer

U.S.S. Aventine NCC-82602

Captain Ezri Dax
(Trill female) commanding officer

Commander Samaritan Bowers
(human male) executive officer

Lieutenant Commander Gruhn Helkara
(Zakdorn male) second officer/senior science officer

Lieutenant Lonnoc Kedair
(Takaran female) chief of security

Lieutenant Simon Tarses
(human-Romulan male) chief medical officer

Lieutenant Mikaela Leishman
(human female) chief engineer

Lieutenant Oliana Mirren
(human female) senior operations officer



    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Mack is the author of numerous Star Trek books, including
Wildfire, A Time to Kill, A Time to Heal, and Warpath. With editor Marco
Palmieri, he developed the Star Trek Vanguard literary series, for which
he has written two novels, Harbinger and Reap the Whirlwind.

His other novels include the Wolverine espionage adventure Road of Bones
and his first original novel, The Calling, which is scheduled for
publication in 2009 by Simon & Schuster.

Before writing books, Mack cowrote with John J. Ordover the Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine fourth-season episode “Starship Down” and the story
treatment for the series’ seventh-season episode “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

An avid fan of Canadian progressive-rock trio Rush, Mack has attended
shows in all of their concert tours since 1982.

Having recently fled corporate servitude, Mack now resides in a secret
location with his wife, Kara. Learn more about him and his work on his
official Web site (www.infinitydog.com) and on his blog,
http://infinitydog.livejournal.com.