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

by David Mack

  Worf made a low growl of protest and stepped aside. As Picard walked by him, the brawny first officer grumbled, “You know I am right. Sir.”

  Picard stood behind his desk and rested his hands on the back of his chair. “What I know, Mister Worf, is that you’ve been awake even longer than I have.”

  Worf grunted. “True. It would be best if you and I were both well rested before taking the ship into battle.”

  The dead weight of his own feet and the dull aching in his muscles persuaded Picard to admit that his first officer was right. “I trust you’ve assigned new watch commanders for the next two shifts?”

  “Yes, sir,” Worf said. “Commander Lynley is on the bridge now, and Lieutenant Commander Havers will relieve him at 0800.”

  Picard sighed. He found Worf’s new ability to anticipate his decisions both reassuring and irritating. “Very good. I’ll be in my quarters—and I’ll see you back on the bridge at 1600.”

  “Aye, Captain.” He walked toward the door and paused before stepping in range of its motion sensor, so that he could turn back and add, with his unique brand of irony, “Sweet dreams.”

  Picard’s valediction was a good-natured warning: “Good night, Number One.” Worf answered with a wry smirk and left the ready room. Picard sighed and returned to his desk. He picked up his half-consumed cup of tea, carried it back to the replicator, and keyed the matter reclamator. The cup and its cold contents vanished in an amber swirl of dissociated particles.

  Around him, the Enterprise resonated with the swiftly rising hum of the warp engines rapidly pushing the ship to its maximum rated velocity, and perhaps even a fraction beyond. The stretch of starlight outside the ready room window, normally a soothing backdrop, now raced by in frantic pulses. Even the stars knew that the Enterprise was headed into danger.

  Picard had promised Worf he would rest, but he doubted he would sleep tonight, with the Collective looming on the horizon.

  * * *

  The voice from the overhead comm roused Miranda Kadohata from her troubled, fitful slumber a few minutes shy of 0500.

  “Bridge to Commander Kadohata,” said Lieutenant Milner, the gamma-shift operations manager.

  Kadohata’s eyes snapped open. Her heart was palpitating furiously, and the muscles in her chest and arms twitched with nervous energy. Rescued from one of a night-long series of anxiety dreams, she was grateful to be woken. “Kadohata here.”

  “You asked for notice when we had a comm window,” Milner replied. “I have one coming up in twenty seconds. It’ll be short—a couple minutes, tops. You still want it?”

  She was already out of bed and scrambling into her robe. “Yes, Sean. Patch me through as soon as the channel’s up.”

  “Will do. Stand by.”

  Leaning left, she caught her reflection in the mirror beside her bedroom desk and finger-combed her straight, sable hair into a smooth ponytail and twisted it into a knot on the back of her head. Her eyes were a bit red, and the circles under them were too dark to hide. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. There’s no time. It’ll be fine.

  She had left standing orders with the junior operations managers to let her know whenever there was an opportunity for her to get a real-time signal out to her family on Cestus III. When she’d first come aboard the Enterprise, she’d made a point of speaking to her husband and children via subspace every day. Their infant twins, Colin and Sylvana, couldn’t understand her words, of course, but she wanted them to hear her voice as much as possible while she was away. She had recorded herself reading them bedtime stories while she had been pregnant, and Vicenzo, her husband, made a point of including those recordings in the twins’ nightly routine.

  Aoki, their first born, was another matter. It was chiefly for the five-year-old’s benefit that Kadohata was so diligent about these comms home, however brief they might be. The girl was old enough to miss her mother, to feel the ache of absence, and for Kadohata it was worth any amount of lost sleep and expended favors to keep herself in Aoki’s daily life.

  Her comm screen snapped to life, the bright blue-and-white Federation emblem almost blinding in the night-cycle shadows of her quarters. Milner’s voice filtered down from overhead as a string of numbers and symbols flashed past along the bottom edge of her screen. “Hang on,” he said. “I’m routing the signal through about four different boosters in the Klingon Empire.”

  “How’d you swing that?”

  “I know a bloke who knows a bloke who has friends on the High Council.” She understood his meaning: Worf had used some of his old diplomatic connections with the Klingon chancellor’s office to secure this extraordinary favor.

  She made a mental note to thank Worf the next time she saw him privately. Then the screen in front of her blinked to an image of her husband, Vicenzo Farrenga. She smiled at the sight of his round, jovial face and immaculate coif of dark hair. “What time is it there, love?”

  “We’re just sitting down to dinner,” he said. With a quick tap of a key, he switched the comm’s feed to a wider angle that revealed him, Aoki, and the twins around the dining room table. “How ’bout there?”

  “Middle of the night, as always.” She hadn’t worried about the differences in local times. As her calls home had become less frequent, Vicenzo had made it clear that he didn’t mind being woken at any hour. Ringing in at dinner had been a lucky break, though; it meant she got to see the children.

  Sylvana grabbed up fistfuls of strained-something and flung it in globs on the floor. Colin seemed content to smear his dinner on his bib. Aoki waved frantically from the far end of the table. “Hi, Mummy,” she said, her bright voice echoing.

  “Hello, sweetheart.” Kadohata wished she could teleport to her daughter’s side and just hold her. “Have you been helping Daddy with the twins?”

  Aoki nodded, and Vicenzo replied, “I couldn’t do it without her.” He winked at the girl, then continued, “She’s a natural.”

  “I’m happy to hear that, love. What’s for dinner tonight?”

  Vicenzo pointed out each dish. “Colin’s turning mashed peas into a fashion statement, Sylvie’s doing some redecorating with her strained carrots, and Aoki and I are enjoying some vegetable moussaka, fresh corn, and spinach salad.”

  “Impressive,” Kadohata said, nodding her approval. With a teasing lilt, she asked, “Real or replicated?”

  He gave a small shrug. “Mostly real. I think the dairy products are replicated, but all the vegetables were grown here in Lakeside, and the pasta’s made fresh at a market in town.”

  “Glad to see my lectures about eating healthy have stuck with you,” she said.

  Nodding, he replied, “We’re being good, I promise. Looks like you have, too. You look great.”

  She shook her head. “I look horrid.”

  “No,” Vicenzo insisted. “You really don’t.”

  It was true that she had lost weight in recent weeks, restoring the fine angles of her mixed European-Asian ancestry. What she didn’t want to tell him was that most of her weight loss had been stress-induced, as the Enterprise had become the Federation’s principal instrument of defense against the Borg.

  “Thank you, love,” she said, lowering her eyes. On the other end of the channel, Vicenzo sensed her fatigue and her fear, and like her he masked it with a sad smile of quiet desperation, for the sake of the children.

  Oblivious of the unspoken tension, Aoki asked in a loud and shrill voice, “When are you coming home, Mummy?”

  “Inside voice, honey,” Vicenzo murmured, hushing the girl.

  Kadohata shook her head. “Don’t know, love. Soon, I hope.”

  Aoki pressed on, “Where are you?”

  “She can’t tell us that, sweetie,” Vicenzo said, circling the table to pluck Aoki from her chair and into his arms. “It’s not safe for her to say things like that over the comm. Bad people might be listening.” Watching him comfort her made Kadohata miss the embrace of her little ones that much more.

&nbs
p; The little girl locked her arms around her father’s neck and rested her head on his large, rounded shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mummy,” she mumbled.

  “No need to be sorry, love,” Kadohata told her. Forcing a smile, she said to Vicenzo, “Happier thoughts, right? Big day coming up next month.”

  “I remember,” he said. “Eight years.”

  “What’s the gift for that anniversary?”

  He chuckled. “Bronze. Had a devil of a time thinking up a gift for that one.”

  “You’ve already bought my gift?” He nodded, and she grinned. Vicenzo had never been one to leave things until the last minute. “I should’ve known.” Feigning seriousness, she added, “I suppose you’ll expect me to get you something, now.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  She almost laughed. “Liar.”

  A double-beep over the channel heralded an interruption. From the overhead speaker in her quarters, Lieutenant Milner warned, “Twenty seconds, sir.”

  Kadohata looked away from the image of her family on the screen and said, “Thank you, Sean.” Then she looked back. “Time’s up, loves. I have to go.”

  Vicenzo looked as if he’d had his heart cut out. “Stay safe, Miranda. We miss you.” Aoki lifted her head from his shoulder and crowed, “We miss you, Mummy!”

  “I miss you all, too,” Kadohata said. “Very much. I’ll comm again as soon as I can, but I don’t know when that’ll be.”

  “We’ll be waiting.… Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  She and Vicenzo reached out and each pressed a fingertip to their comm screen, an illusion of contact transmitted across light-years, for the last few seconds before the signal was lost and the channel cut to black and silence.

  A sinking feeling became an emptiness inside of her as she plodded back to her bed and slipped under the covers. It had been barely two hours since she’d watched the Borg lay waste to Korvat. If they weren’t stopped, sooner or later they would reach Cestus III. It would only be a matter of time.

  Visions of her beautiful children being turned to fire haunted her when she closed her eyes. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to prevent that, she was certain of it. She would kill, die, or sacrifice the ship and whoever or whatever was necessary, if doing so saved her children.

  But tonight, alone in her quarters, her face buried in the soft clutch of a pillow, all she could do was sob with rage for the lives she had already failed to defend.

  * * *

  From dead asleep to wide awake—Beverly Crusher blinked her eyes open wider and inhaled. There had been no sound, no sudden change in her surroundings. She had been on the edge of slumber’s gray frontier, inching her way over the border, when a jolt and a shiver had pulled her back.

  Rolling over, she looked for her husband. Jean-Luc’s side of the bed was empty, his pillows untouched. He hadn’t come to bed yet. It was just after 0500. She had gone to bed at 0315, after the ship had secured from general quarters. I guess I did doze off, she realized. For a little while, at least.

  A small, soft bump of a sound carried into the bedroom, through the doorway that led to the suite’s main room. Crusher pushed off the lightweight but pleasantly warmed sheets and blanket and eased herself out of bed, into the relatively chill air. She suspected that Jean-Luc had been at the climate controls again; he preferred a crisp coolness in their living quarters, a temperature a few degrees below where she was comfortable. And so they wrangled. It had been the same way with her first husband, Jack, decades earlier.

  The skin on her arms and legs turned to gooseflesh until she shivered into her bathrobe and tied it shut. She was grateful that at least the deck in their living area was carpeted. The plush, synthetic fabric was warm under her feet as she padded to the doorway and peeked into the main room.

  Jean-Luc sat on the floor with his back to her. He was still wearing his uniform. On the floor beside him, a tarnished, engraved copper box with a foam-pad interior lay open and empty. In his hands he held his Ressikan flute, a keepsake recovered from an alien probe that years earlier had gifted the captain, in the span of a few minutes, with the memories of another lifetime, the last message of a dying world and people.

  In that other life, he’d lived as a man named Kamin, raised a family, and learned to play the flute. Its music, he’d told Crusher, often soothed his nerves and dispelled his sorrows. She knew how much he treasured that instrument. He turned the narrow, bronze-hued flute in his hands and gently straightened a twist in the silken cord of its white tassel.

  Taking sudden note of her presence, he looked over his shoulder. “Beverly,” he said in a hushed voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “I just woke up. Don’t know why.”

  Jean-Luc nodded once and looked back at the flute. He pulled the tassel cord taut with one hand and placed the instrument back into its custom-cut indentation on the foam pad, taking care to lay the silken thread parallel to the metal body of the flute. Then he closed the lid gently, picked up the box, stood, and carried it to a nearby shelf. He bore it as if it were a holy relic. Setting the box beside some leather-bound volumes of classic works, Jean-Luc was somber, like a man moving with great care because he might be doing everything for the last time. Crusher found the deliberateness of his manner worrying.

  “You look exhausted,” she said. “Are you coming to bed?”

  He sighed. “To what end? I can’t let myself sleep. Not with the Collective waiting for my guard to fall.”

  “I could prescribe a sleep aid that would—”

  “No,” Jean-Luc said. “No drugs. I have to be ready.”

  She stepped beside him and put her hands on his shoulder. “How ready will you be if you don’t sleep?”

  “Worf said the same thing.” His eyes became distant, disengaged from the moment. “Neither of you can hear them, not the way I do.” He frowned. “I can’t sleep. Not now.”

  Crusher let him shrug off her hands. She didn’t take it personally. Instead, she walked toward the replicator. “All right,” she said. “If you’re not sleeping, neither am I. Computer, lights one-half.”

  “Beverly,” he said in protest as the room brightened.

  “Shush.” She stopped in front of the replicator. “Two peppermint herbal teas, hot.” A singsong whine filled the room; two delicate porcelain cups took shape in a spiral of glowing matter inside the replicator nook. When the sequence ended, Crusher lifted the cups and carried them back to Jean-Luc. She offered him one.

  “I’m not thirsty,” he said.

  “It’ll soothe your nerves,” she countered, but still he made no move to accept the tea. She set the cup down on an end table beside the sofa. “When was the last time you ate?”

  He took a few steps into the middle of the room and gazed out the window at the passing streaks of starlight. “I don’t recall,” he said. Then he added, “Breakfast, I think.”

  “Jean-Luc, you have to make time to take care of—”

  “Beverly,” he said. There was a deadness in his voice. Crusher had heard it before, in combat veterans suffering from shock. “In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve seen two worlds destroyed. Billions of lives, each one unique and irreplaceable, all extinguished.” He turned to face her. “And it’s only just started. Something terrible is coming, I can feel it. Watching Korvat burn was like seeing an omen.”

  She inched closer to him. “An omen? Of what? A disaster?”

  His jaw trembled. “An apocalypse.”

  Closer now, she took his hands, tried to anchor him, keep him from being swept away by the undertow of his fears. “You don’t know that,” she said. “The worst of it might be over.”

  “No, Beverly. It’s not.” His voice fell to a whisper, as if he feared eavesdroppers. “The worst is still out there, waiting to fall, like a hammer in the dark.” She watched his eyes glisten with tears as he freed his right hand and placed it softly against her cheek.
“We’re out of our depth now.”

  “I can’t believe that,” she said. “I won’t. Starfleet’s destroyed six Borg cubes in the last few weeks, and five more today. We can stop them.”

  “And what have we lost in the bargain?” He lowered his hand from her face, and his tone became harder. “More than a dozen ships of the line. Three major starbases. Four worlds. Worlds, Beverly! Billions of lives.” Pacing away from her, he continued, “I’ve read Kathryn Janeway’s reports from her years in the Delta Quadrant. Her encounters with the Borg. They have thousands of ships.” He stopped near the replicator and turned back to face Crusher. “They control vast regions of space, have almost unlimited resources at their command. Beverly, the Collective dwarfs the Federation. They’re gearing up to fight a war of attrition. That’s a war we can’t win. We just don’t have the numbers. Not enough ships, not enough people. Not enough worlds.” His voice deadened again. “We can’t win.”

  Crusher crossed the room and stood in front of him. He looked up at her with a vacant, fearful expression.

  She slapped his face.

  The smack was sharp and loud against the quiet hum of the engines and made contact with enough force to knock Jean-Luc back half a step and leave her palm stinging. She fixed her husband with a feral glare. “Snap out of it, Jean-Luc! The man I married is a starship captain. He doesn’t declare defeat when he’s still fighting the war.”

  To her surprise, he smiled. Almost laughed. “You don’t think I’m the man you married?”

  “The Jean-Luc Picard I know would never talk this way.”

  His smile soured. “‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.’”

  “Don’t quote Whitman at me. You don’t even like Whitman.” She sighed. “Do you want to know what I’ve always liked about you, right from the very first time we met?”

  “Tell me,” he said sincerely.

  “Your faith that there was more good than bad to be found in the universe. I heard you once tell Jack on the Stargazer, ‘That’s why we do this—it’s what makes going to the stars worthwhile.’”