Destiny: The Complete Saga: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls

by David Mack

  Entering the first few commands was easy. “Patching in all power,” she said, talking herself through the steps to reduce it to the level of mere process and avoid thinking about what it meant. “Intercept trajectory plotted,” she said. Making her fingers key in the next action was more difficult. She felt herself resisting the inevitable. Through will alone she entered the order and announced, “Course locked.”

  Then she froze, her hands hovering above the console.

  She stared at the main viewscreen. On it was the image of the Borg cube, accelerating away from them, opening the gap on its way to the historic planet of Khitomer, where the Federation and the Klingon Empire had taken their first, uncertain steps toward détente and, ultimately, alliance. But Khitomer was not merely a political landmark; that lush world was home to a thriving Klingon colony of more than half a million people, all of whom would now live or die based on what the crew of the Starship Ranger did next.

  Schultheiss leaned over from the ops console toward Nero. “Commander,” she said without raising her voice, “we have to attack in the next twenty seconds, or we won’t be able to stop the Borg without causing serious casualties on the planet.”

  Nero felt tears welling in her eyes as she faced the terrible finality of their situation. She looked around at the other bridge officers, all of whom were looking at her, waiting for the signal to proceed. Her voice faltered slightly as she asked, “Everyone ready?” Heads nodded in unison. She smiled sadly. “It’s been an honor serving with you all.” Turning back to face the main viewer, she poised her finger above the blinking control pad that would trigger the MPI and accelerate the ship to its rendezvous with the Borg. She paused just long enough to say to Schultheiss, “Thanks, Christine.”

  “My pleasure,” Schultheiss said.

  One deep breath in, one last breath out. I only have to be brave for a moment, Nero told herself. She triggered the MPI.

  A moment later, it was over.

  * * *

  Governor Talgar stood on the balcony outside his office and watched the sky of Khitomer. Age and political duty had robbed him of the chance to take up arms and meet the Borg in honorable combat, but he refused to be shepherded like some weakling into the secure bunker beneath the administrative complex. When death came for him, he wanted to meet it with a smile.

  The colony’s regiment of soldiers were defending all the checkpoints that led inside the walled section of Khitomer City, and manning the surface-to-space artillery units, for whatever good it might do. Talgar had no illusions about the Borg’s ability to eradicate his colony and the world on which it stood. Their preparations for war were little more than a formality.

  His aide, a tall Defense Force lieutenant named Nazh, lurked just inside the doorway behind him. The younger Klingon’s anxiety was palpable and irritating to Talgar, who had long resented being forced to employ the petaQ simply because Nazh was a kinsman of a member of the High Council. Talgar turned and growled at him, “Did you bring it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nazh said.

  “Then give it to me, yIntagh,” Talgar said, reaching out his hand. Nazh pushed a carved-onyx goblet into his grasp, and Talgar lifted it to his lips and guzzled three bitter mouthfuls of warnog, until all that remained in the cup were dregs.

  The sky was a blank slate, blue-gray like gunmetal, clear under the noonday sun, unblemished by clouds or air traffic. It seemed so serene, but Talgar knew that a deathblow was coming, a killing stroke that would fall without preamble. The Borg were not noble, and they neither had nor lacked honor; what they were was decisive and swift. The governor appreciated his enemy’s ruthless efficiency for what it was: a weapon.

  Inside his office, a shrill buzzing emanated from his desk. He grimaced at the disruption and said to Nazh, “Get that.”

  His lieutenant walked in quick strides to the desk, silenced the alert, and worked for a few moments at the desktop console. Then he looked up and declared, “Governor, it’s from Colonel Nokar. He says you should see this.”

  Talgar grumbled incoherently out of frustration, turned, and walked back inside to his desk. He brusquely pushed Nazh aside and eyed the data and images on his wide desktop display. Despite having been informed hours earlier by the High Command that there were no Defense Force vessels close enough to reach his world before the Borg attacked, he clung to the hope that a Vor’cha-class attack cruiser or two might have defied the Council or the limitations of their own engines to join the fight at the last minute.

  Instead, he saw a trio of Federation starships engaged in a futile, running battle with the Borg cube, which did not deviate from its course even as it pummeled their shields and blasted rents in their hulls. Over an audio channel, he heard Colonel Nokar remark with his typical snideness, “Looks like Starfleet’s in the mood to lose a few more ships today.”

  Nazh let out a sardonic harrumph and said, “At least they think Khitomer’s worth fighting for.”

  The governor punched the impudent lieutenant and sent him sprawling backward over a guest chair. “No one asked you.” He turned his attention back to his desktop, in time to see the first of the three Starfleet vessels disintegrate under a steady barrage from the black cube. Several seconds later, the second of the three vessels was sliced into fiery debris by the Borg, and the third began to fall steadily behind.

  “A valiant effort, friends,” Talgar muttered to the diminishing image of the last Starfleet ship as he watched the image of the enemy vessel grow larger. He expected the Federation cruiser to abandon its hopeless pursuit in a few moments, since there appeared to be no way for it to overtake the cube, and no means for it to fight the cube if it did.

  Then the Starfleet vessel, which the colony’s sensors had just identified as the U.S.S. Ranger, accelerated instantly to a velocity that was almost off the scale. The sensors tried to keep up with it, but all that Talgar saw on his display was a jumble of conflicting data—and then the Borg cube vanished in a blaze of white light. His display went dark, but from outside his office came a blinding flare at least twice as bright as Khitomer’s sun. It faded away within seconds, but a tingle of heat lingered in the air.

  Talgar poked at the unresponsive desktop interface for a moment before he glared at Nazh and said, “Get Colonel Nokar on the comm, now.”

  Nazh, for once, didn’t complain or procrastinate. He powered down the interface and triggered its restart sequence. It took nearly half a minute before the system was working again and a comm channel had been opened to the underground command bunker, from which Nokar had been directing his pointless, surface-based defense campaign.

  “Colonel,” Talgar said, “report!”

  “We’re still analyzing the Starfleet ship’s attack,” Nokar said. “It looks like they shifted their vessel just far enough out of phase to breach the Borg’s shields before sacrificing their ship in a suicide attack.”

  Wary of being too optimistic, Talgar asked in a neutral manner, “Status of the Borg vessel?”

  “Destroyed, Governor,” Nokar said. “Vaporized.”

  Talgar marveled at the news. “Qapla’,” he said, as a salute to the fallen heroes of the Ranger. Then, to Nokar, he added, “Where be your gibes now, eh, Colonel? A thousand times I’ve heard you mock our allies, and now you get to keep drawing breath because of them.” He wasn’t surprised that Nokar had no riposte for that, and as he cut the channel he imagined a sullen expression darkening the colonel’s weathered, angular face.

  Turning to Nazh, Talgar said, “The Empire hasn’t seen an act of courage like that since Narendra, and it’s time the High Council heard about it. Open a channel to Chancellor Martok.”

  Decades of diplomatic service had taught Talgar to make the most of opportunities when they presented themselves. For years, the chancellor’s foes on the High Council had been impeding his efforts to forge a tighter bond with the Federation. Their most recent obstructions had entailed diverting Defense Force ships and resources to avoid aiding the Federation in
its renewed conflict with the Borg. Calling the escalating struggle “an internal Federation matter,” a bloc of councillors, led by Kopek, had begun undermining Martok’s influence and authority in matters of imperial defense. But that was about to change.

  An image flickered and then settled on the governor’s desktop display—it was the stern, one-eyed visage of Chancellor Martok himself. “What do you want, Talgar?”

  “The Borg have come to Khitomer, old friend,” Talgar said, “and our allies have defended us with their lives.” Over the subspace channel, he sent Martok the colony’s sensor data of the three Starfleet ships’ battle and the Ranger’s decisive victory over the Borg cube. As he observed the chancellor’s reaction to the news, he knew that his assumption had been correct: This was the ammunition Martok had been waiting for to sway the Council.

  In his guttural rasp of a baritone, Martok asked rhetorically, “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Talgar said. “It means this is the hour when men of honor go to war.”

  * * *

  The command center of Starbase 234 was collapsing in on itself, and all that Admiral Owen Paris could think about was finding a working comm terminal.

  Fire-control teams scrambled past the admiral on both sides as he stumbled over the wreckage strewn across the floor. Flames danced in the shadows between buckled walls, and a cloud of oily smoke gathered overhead, obscuring the ceiling.

  Paris grabbed a lieutenant whose black uniform was trimmed at the collar in mustard yellow. “Is your console working?”

  Grime and blood coated the woman’s face, which contorted in frustration as she replied, “No, sir.” She freed herself from his grasp with a rough twist and continued on her way.

  He tightened his left fist around the data chip he’d carried from his office and staggered forward, through the mayhem of firefighters shouting instructions over the tumult of tactical officers issuing battle orders. A thunderclap of detonation rocked the station with the force of an earthquake.

  Someone called out above the din, “Shields failing!” Then another bone-jarring blast knocked Admiral Paris off his feet and reminded him that even a bunker of cast rodinium was no match for the weapons of the Borg. He landed hard atop a mound of twisted metal and shattered companel fragments that tore through his uniform and lacerated his forearms and knees.

  With only his right hand free, he found it difficult to push himself back to his feet. Then a pair of delicate but strong hands locked around his bicep and pulled him upright.

  He turned his head and saw the base’s chief of security, Commander Sandra Rhodes, nod toward a short stairway to the command center’s lower level. “This way, sir,” said the lithe brunette. “I’ve got a channel ready for you.” A resounding boom seemed to tremble the foundations of the planet, and more chunks of debris fell from above, crashing to the deck all around them. One close call coated them in dust. Rhodes stayed by Paris’s side as she pressed one hand into his back to keep him moving forward.

  Scrambling down the steps, Paris cursed himself for leaving something so vital until it was long past too late. He’d made his share of mistakes in life—not least among them the Tezwa debacle, in which he’d actually conspired with other Starfleet officers to unseat a sitting Federation president—and he’d borne his guilt and his regrets in silence. But there was one burden he could not bear to take with him to the grave.

  The lights stuttered and went out, plunging the underground chamber into darkness. Only the pale, faltering glow of a few duty consoles remained lit, beacons in the night. From behind, Rhodes’s insistent but gentle pressure guided him forward.

  His ankle caught on something sharp and hard, and he tripped. By instinct he reached out to break his fall—

  The data chip fell from his hand and plinked brightly across the rubble-covered floor, its tiny sound the only clue to where it had landed. Scuttling back and forth on all fours, he began to hyperventilate. Owen Paris, the model of stoicism, was on the verge of tears, his chest heaving with panicked breaths.

  “I dropped it,” he called out to Rhodes. “God help me, Sandy, I dropped it!”

  He swirled his hands over the stinging shards of shattered polymer on the ground as he searched in blind desperation for the chip. His palms grew sticky with caked dust and his own blood. From close by he heard Rhodes shout to the firefighters, “We need some light over here! Now!”

  Sharp cracks heralded the ignition of several bright violet emergency flares in various directions around him. Some were held by members of the base’s command team, some by engineers struggling to contain the fires. A few of them worked their way toward Paris, who continued rooting through the debris until the scarlet glow cast everything into harsh monochrome shadows and highlights. Then a glint of light caught the data chip’s edge, and he snatched it from the dust.

  A deafening concussion was followed by the roar of an implosion that brought down half the command center’s ceiling. More than a dozen Starfleet personnel vanished beneath the cascade of broken metal and pulverized rock.

  No time to lose now, Paris admonished himself, and he left Rhodes behind as he lurched and barreled ahead toward the still-illuminated console. With his last steps he fell against it, and he fumbled the data chip in his bloody fingers for a few seconds until he inserted it into the proper port on the panel.

  As he began entering the transmission sequence, another station nearby exploded. Shrapnel from the blast raked his face and body, and a dull thud of impact on the side of his neck was the last thing he felt before he landed, numb, on the deck.

  Stupid old man, he chastised himself. Slow and stupid.

  Rhodes was at his side a moment later, looking frightened for the first time that Paris had seen since his transfer to Starbase 234 four months earlier. “It’s a neck injury, sir,” she said. “Don’t try to move.” Over her shoulder, she cried out, “Medic! The admiral’s down! I need a medic over here!”

  Paris’s voice was a dry whisper of pain. “Sandy,” he rasped, fearful that she might not hear him over the crackling of flames and the settling of debris. He said again, “Sandy.”

  She leaned down and said, “Don’t talk, sir. Moving your jaw might do more damage in your neck.” She was trying to sound unemotional, but in his opinion she was doing a lousy job of it.

  “Listen to me, Sandy,” Paris said. “It’s important.”

  “All right,” she said, steeling herself.

  He tried to swallow before he spoke, but his mouth was dry and tasted of dirt. “Message on the data chip,” he said, his voice growing reedier with each word. “Send it. Hurry.”

  It was to her credit, he thought, that she chose not to argue with him. Instead, she clambered over to the console and wiped off the fresh blanket of soot and crystalline dust. After a glance at the settings he had already keyed in, she shook her head. “Encryption protocols are down without the main computer.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Paris said. “Send it.”

  This time she resisted. “Sir, if we send a signal in the clear to Starfleet Command, the Borg—”

  “No,” Paris protested, marshaling the last of his strength to make sure she understood. “Not … to Starfleet.… To my boy.”

  Rhodes’s teary eyes reflected Paris’s sorrows as she replied, “Aye, sir.” She worked at the failing console for several seconds, and then she returned to Paris’s side, kneeled beside him, and took his hand. “It’s done, sir.”

  “Thank you, Sandy,” Paris said, the last vestiges of his ironclad composure deserting him as his strength faded. “I needed him to know,” he confessed, “… that I’m sorry.”

  She cupped her hand under his cheek. “I’m sure he knows.”

  “Maybe. But I had to say it.… I had to say it.”

  As a final eruption of stone and fire engulfed the command center, Owen Paris was grateful that he’d been spared the indignity of tears.

  * * *

  Picard f
elt like the calm at the center of a hurricane. He had plunged his ship and crew into battle with a single order: Destroy the Borg cube. Telling his officers what to do was his role; telling them how to do it, he left to Worf.

  “Helm, lay in attack pattern Sierra-Blue,” Worf said over the steady comm chatter of tactical reports from Gibraltar and Leonov. The two vessels were already engaged in a losing battle against the Borg cube that had entered Korvat’s orbit and begun bombarding the surface. Worf continued, “Lieutenant Choudhury, arm transphasic torpedoes.”

  “Armed,” Choudhury replied, entering commands with fast, quick touches on her console. “Twenty seconds to firing range.”

  Picard stared at the magnified image of Korvat on the main viewscreen. The planet’s orbital defense platforms had all been reduced to tumbling clouds of glowing-hot junk. Crimson blooms of fire erupted on the planet’s surface. From ops, Kadohata reported, “The planet’s surface defenses have been neutralized.”

  Picard flashed back for a moment to the scenes of devastation he’d witnessed on Tezwa less than two years earlier. Then the damage had been inflicted by Klingons using photon torpedoes; he shuddered to imagine what horrors the Borg had just wrought. If only we’d been here a few minutes sooner, he cursed silently as the situation unfolded around him.

  “The Borg are locking weapons on the planet’s capital,” Choudhury said. Then she added with surprise, “The Gibraltar’s maneuvering into their firing solution!”

  Everyone on the Enterprise’s bridge turned their eyes to the main viewscreen as the other Sovereign-class ship positioned itself between the Borg cube and its target, rolling to present as broad a barrier as possible. A searing beam of sickly green energy from the cube slammed into the Gibraltar just behind its deflector dish. The Gibraltar’s shields collapsed, and the green energy beam ripped into its underside. Fissures spiderwebbed across its exterior, spread through its elliptical saucer section, and buckled the pylons of its warp nacelles. Vermillion flames and jets of superheated gas erupted from broad cracks in its hull. Picard winced as if he were watching his own ship fall beneath a mortal blow.