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

by David Mack

  They turned left at the end of the aisle and circled around to walk past a row of specialists who were performing precision calibrations on magnetic containment cores for variable-phase antideuterium. One mistake here could spark a blast that would destroy the Enterprise in a microsecond. Ion fusers in constant operation cast dull, ruddy glows beneath thick, rodinium glare shields while technicians monitored their work via nanocams.

  Crusher walked with one hand pressed protectively over her abdomen. The sight of Beverly, as the bearer of a new life, surrounded by instruments of death and destruction made La Forge want to hurry her out of the munitions plant and as far away from these infernal machines as possible.

  She sounded worn out as she asked, “What are we going to do if Jean-Luc loses control, Geordi? Where do we draw the line?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure I’m qualified to say if or when he’s crossed it. He’s always been hard to gauge when it comes to the Borg. One minute he’s ready to kill them all, the next he says wiping them out is wrong … and then, when you least expect it, he turns himself back into Locutus.” He stopped next to one of the photon chargers and stared into the rhythmic workings of the assembly line until his sense of depth flattened and its details fused together. “I’m just afraid we won’t know which Captain Picard we’ve got this time until it’s too late.”

  * * *

  “Whatever we’re flying toward, it’s big,” said Miranda Kadohata, “and eight minutes ago it started jamming all known subspace frequencies within thirty light-years of the Azure Nebula.”

  The announcement by the ship’s second officer added to the already grave mood of the emergency staff briefing. Dismayed glances were volleyed across the conference table, from Choudhury to Worf, and then from Kadohata to the captain. Absent from the meeting was Commander La Forge, whom Worf had excused so the chief engineer could give his full attention to making the ship itself ready for combat.

  Worf decided to try and preserve a sense of momentum in the meeting. He asked Kadohata, “What is our ETA to the nebula?”

  “Nine hours. We’re following the sirillium traces from the Borg ship we destroyed at Korvat, but the jamming field is blocking our sensors. We could be heading into a trap.”

  Captain Picard sat at the head of the table and regarded the senior officers with his careworn frown. “I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be facing stiff resistance when we reach the nebula,” he said. “We need to be prepared.”

  Lieutenant Choudhury replied, “The security division is good to go, sir. With your permission, I’d like to post extra guards on all decks, in case we get boarded.”

  “Granted,” Picard said, “but you might find their effectiveness limited against the Borg.”

  “I’m aware of that, sir, but in combat, sometimes a few extra seconds make the difference. My people are ready to give you those seconds if you need them.”

  Worf noted the captain’s dour nod of approval but no change in his mirthless visage. “Well done,” was all Picard said to the security chief. Then he turned to Lieutenant Dina Elfiki. “Can you break through the interference at short range?”

  “I think so,” Elfiki said. The soft-spoken science officer—whose brown hair framed her tanned, elegant cheekbones and dark, beguiling eyes—looked younger than her years. “The subspace interference shouldn’t stop us from finding transwarp signatures or anything similar. Once we close to within a few billion kilometers of the nebula, I can start my sweep.”

  “Good,” Picard said as he got up from his chair. He seemed pensive as he paced behind it and laid his hands on top of its headrest. After a few moments, he said, “Before we lost communications, I received a message from Starfleet Command. It was a reply to my request for reinforcements to rendezvous with us at the nebula.” He stepped to the wall panel and activated it with a touch of his hand. A starmap of the surrounding sectors appeared. “Starfleet’s losses have been heavier than expected,” he continued. “Less than an hour ago, a previously undetected Borg cube destroyed Starbase 24, along with the starships Merrimack, Ulysses, and Sparta. The only ship besides us in this sector is the Excalibur, and she’s all but crippled after stopping the attack on Starbase 343. Which means we’ll be facing this threat alone.”

  Tense anticipation filled the room. Worf could almost smell the anxiety—he was too polite to call it fear—of his human shipmates. “The Enterprise is ready, Captain. As are we.”

  “Of that I have no doubt, Commander. But I need to make clear that combat is not our principal mission. Our assignment is to find out how the Borg are reaching our space undetected, and then deny them that ability. Furthermore, we, and this ship, are to be considered expendable in the pursuit of that goal.” The captain looked at the faces around the table. “Clear?”

  Everyone nodded in confirmation.

  Picard’s already serious manner turned grim. “I’ve made no secret in the past of my … unusual connection with the Borg Collective, or that it’s as much a liability as an asset.” He strolled behind the officers seated on Worf’s side of the table as he continued, talking as if to himself. “I can sense them now. The voice of the Collective is getting stronger as we get closer. There are at least three Borg cubes waiting for us. Maybe more.” The captain avoided eye contact with everyone else as he paced around the far end of the conference table. “And they know we’re coming. We won’t enjoy the element of surprise.” Returning along the other side of the table, Picard stared into some deep distance only he could perceive. “If we had the luxury of time, I’d wait for the fleet. But I can feel the fury that’s driving the Borg. It’s like a whip of fire on their backs.”

  The captain returned to the head of the table, eased his chair aside, and stood tall before the group. “We don’t have long—hours, perhaps days—to stop this invasion before it goes any further. The Federation has suffered more casualties from hostile action in the past five weeks than in all the previous wars of its history combined. And it’s only going to get worse, unless we put an end to it. This ship is the Federation’s last line of defense, and nine hours from now we will have to hold that line, outnumbered by an enemy that doesn’t negotiate, won’t surrender, and never shows mercy. It’s an impossible mission.”

  Picard’s mien brightened as he added, “Fortunately, we have some experience with those here on the Enterprise.”

  19

  “Of course you don’t like it,” Vale said to Riker, Troi, and Ree. “I don’t like it, either. That’s how I know it’s a good compromise: We’re all equally unhappy.”

  Troi shifted uncomfortably on the end of the biobed where she was sitting. Riker stood beside her. They were both sullen, and their eyes searched Titan’s sickbay for everything except each other. Vale watched them, worried they might reject the agreement she had negotiated with Dr. Ree on their behalf.

  Ree carried himself with an even greater aura of menace than usual. The dinosaur-like physician’s tail waved behind him in slow, steady swishes, a Pahkwa-thanh affectation that Vale intuited was indicative of suppressed irritation.

  Standing between the vexed doctor and the unhappy couple, Vale was determined not to say anything more until one side or the other broke the standoff. As she’d hoped, the captain took the initiative. “How long will the stasis last?” Riker asked.

  “Strictly speaking, it’s not stasis,” Ree explained. “The treatment will slow your child’s growth almost to the point of halting it, but she will still draw nourishment from—”

  Troi interrupted, “Did you say ‘she’?”

  The doctor’s tail halted in mid-swing, and he seemed frozen, as if he were trapped by invisible amber.

  Vale knew from some of her earlier conversations with Ree that he had been avoiding using gender pronouns when referring to Troi’s terminally mutated fetus, because he felt that calling the child “it” would somehow depersonalize her and make her loss easier for Riker and Troi to cope with. Although Vale had no medical or psychia
tric training to speak of, she was convinced that Ree was crazy if he believed that his choice of pronoun would ease Troi’s and Riker’s pain one damn bit.

  A low rasp rattled deep inside Ree’s long, toothy mouth, and his head dipped in a gesture that Vale thought might suggest shame, disappointment, or perhaps both at once. “Yes,” he continued, with an air of resignation. “She will continue drawing sustenance from your body, even as her growth is impeded by the targeted synthetase inhibitor.”

  Riker nodded. “Is this a onetime treatment?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Ree replied. His tongue darted from between his front fangs, two quick flicks. “To avoid harming the fetus—and your wife—I have to keep the dosages very small. She will need daily injections to maintain a safe equilibrium. I also wish to make clear that this is not a solution, merely a delaying tactic. It will postpone the imminent risk of the fetus growing and puncturing the uterine wall, but it doesn’t change the fact that the pregnancy itself is unviable.”

  Troi asked, “How long can we use this treatment?”

  “I don’t know. It’s experimental, and there are many variables. We might be able to stall your pregnancy for months, or your body could reject the TSI, and we’d be back where we started. I can’t guarantee it will work for long, or at all.”

  “Until it does,” Vale said to Ree, “I need to insist you remove Commander Troi from active duty.”

  The captain cut off Ree’s reply. “Absolutely not. If this works, there won’t be any imminent threat to her health, so what would be the point?”

  Vale modulated her voice into a diplomat’s tones. “The point is that until Dr. Ree can observe her reaction to the treatment, we won’t know how safe she really is.”

  “Commander Vale is correct,” Ree said to Riker. Then, to Troi, he added, “A period of observation would be in your best interests, my dear counselor.”

  “Fine,” Troi said. “Monitor my bio-signs with a transponder and let me go about my business. I don’t need to be confined to a bed—here or in my quarters.”

  Riker added, “Would that be acceptable to you, Doctor?”

  “It won’t be ideal,” Ree said. “But it will be sufficient.” He reached over to a nearby surgical cart and picked up a hypospray and a biometric transponder implantation device. “Are we agreed, then, on this futile and utterly—”

  “Doctor,” Vale snapped, terminating another potentially inflammatory elocution of the doctor’s sarcastic rant about patients ignoring his advice.

  Ree’s tongue flitted twice in the cool, antiseptic-scented air of sickbay. Ostensibly accepting defeat, he sagged at the shoulders and said to Troi, “May I proceed?”

  The counselor nodded her assent, and Ree went to work. A gentle press of the hypospray against Troi’s left bicep injected her with her first dose of TSI. He switched to the transponder implantation device, manipulating it and the hypospray with one clawed hand, whose digits, Vale saw, were capable of surprising dexterity. Ree placed the tip of the squat, cylindrical device against Troi’s left forearm, a few centimeters above her wrist. “This might sting a bit,” he warned.

  A soft popping sound from the device was overlapped by Troi’s stifled yelp of discomfort. Then it was done. Ree put away his tools while Troi massaged her forearm. The doctor turned back with a medical tricorder in hand. He activated it, made a few adjustments, and mused aloud, “Yes, it’s working. Signal is strong and clear. Very good.”

  Riker sounded edgy as he asked, “Are we through here?”

  “You may leave any time you wish, Captain,” said Ree. “I need your wife to remain a few moments longer while I gather baseline data from the transponder.”

  “Just go,” Troi said to her husband, in a tired, resentful monotone. “I’ll be fine.” Riker seemed both angered and relieved by her dismissal, and he marched out of sickbay without so much as a glance backward.

  The door sighed closed after his departure, and Ree turned off his tricorder. “I’m finished,” he said to Troi. “Please come back for a more detailed checkup tomorrow at 0900.”

  “Thank you,” Troi said, without sounding the least bit grateful. She got up from the biobed, glared at Vale, and walked out of sickbay in a hurry.

  Vale waited until she was gone and the door once again closed before she berated the doctor. “A biometric transponder? Thanks a lot, Doc. I wanted her relieved of duty, not tagged for research.”

  “And I wanted her pregnancy terminated, not stuck in slow motion.” Ree plodded away from her in heavy steps. “As it is, we are only postponing the inevitable.”

  The first officer sighed. “Story of my life, Doc.”

  * * *

  As the phaser blasts started flying, Ranul Keru almost forgot that it was only a holodeck simulation.

  The passageways of the Borg transwarp hub complex were so close that he could touch both sides at once by extending his elbows. Through the open-grid framework that surrounded him, Lieutenant Gian Sortollo, and Chief Petty Officer Dennisar, he saw the fast-moving silhouettes of Borg drones. The enemy was converging on them from every direction, swarming on levels above and below them, harrying them with a steady barrage of energy pulses that screeched through the thin air and stung the back of his neck with hot sparks as they flashed off the dark bulkheads around him.

  Keru filled the corridor ahead of him with covering fire as he yelled to Dennisar, “Block the side passage!”

  The Orion security guard pulled a finger-sized metallic cylinder from his equipment belt, thumbed open its top cap, and pressed its arming button. Then he pitched the capsule underhand down an intersecting corridor that led to a ramp from the upper level. He leaped past the corner and yelled, “Fire in the hole!”

  Sortollo and Keru ducked against a solid block of infrastructure and turned away.

  A thunderclap and a brilliant flash. The plasma blast rocked the structure, and a rolling cloud of fire spilled out into the main passage, between Dennisar and Keru. Through gaps in the walls, Keru watched several levels of the Borg facility collapse inward, glowing hot and dripping with slag.

  Then a deep groaning resonated around the three men, and a powerful tremor robbed them of solid footing. A grinding of metal was underscored by a deep, steady rumble. The walls around them began moving, reshaping themselves, sealing off the damaged area and making new paths inside the complex.

  “Sortollo,” Keru shouted over the din, “send in the scouts.”

  The human security officer detached a hexagonal block from his equipment belt and pressed a button in its center. Then he hurled it with a sideways toss and sent it skidding along the deck ahead of them. In the span of seconds it seemed to break apart into thousands of pieces—and then all the pieces skittered away in different directions, vanishing into the tiny spaces between the machines, the slots in the deck grilles, and the open ports of various machines.

  Moments later, the lights began to flicker, plunging entire levels of the complex into darkness. Some of the deep hum of machinery faded, making the clanging footsteps of approaching drones all the more ominous.

  Sortollo pulled his phaser rifle from its sheath on his back and checked the tactical tricorder mounted on the top of the weapon. “Nanites are working,” he said. “I’ve got a signal. Ahead and right to the central plexus.”

  Keru motioned the two men forward. As he followed them, he plucked a cylinder from his own equipment belt, twisted its two halves each a half turn in opposite directions, and lobbed it behind them. He heard its soft pop of detonation and knew that Ensign Torvig’s cocktail of virulent neurolytic pathogens was spreading in a thick, syrupy puddle across the deck, a lethal greeting for any Borg drone that came into contact with it. Then he drew his own rifle and quickened his step.

  Ahead of him, Dennisar stopped short of passing a T-shaped intersection, poked his rifle around the corner, and fired off a fusillade of shots to cover Sortollo, who jumped forward and tumble-rolled to safety on the other side.

&nbs
p; It was Sortollo’s turn to lay down cover fire as Dennisar waved Keru to continue past him. “Go ahead, sir,” the Orion said. “We’ll cover your—” His eyes went wide and his body started to twitch. Then snaking tubules erupted from the wall behind him and mummified him in a blur of black movement. The wall split open, transformed into a biomechanoid maw, and the hideous tendrils pulled Dennisar inside.

  Sortollo lurched away from his corner as more assimilation tubules sprang from it, writhing like ravenous bloodworms. He fired frantically at the wall, vaporizing chunks of it.

  Keru sprinted forward, trying to find a position from which he could cover Sortollo, but then the floor was no longer beneath his feet. He fell forward into a pit of churning cables, tubing, and wiring that coiled like serpents around his legs and pulled him downward. Struggling to steady his aim and avoid shooting off his own foot, Keru pumped a dozen full-power shots into the tangled mass that held him. The blasts had no effect.

  “Go forward!” he shouted to Sortollo. “Get to the plexus!”

  Sortollo hesitated, clearly torn between a desire to try and save Keru and his training to obey orders. As the synthetic tentacles of the Borg complex yanked Keru’s rifle from his hands and pulled him down until only his head was left exposed, Sortollo turned to continue down the pitch-dark corridor—and was felled by a single, massive pulse of green energy.

  Only after the shot had struck home did the telltale red targeting beam of a Borg’s ocular implant slice the darkness.

  Then everything halted, frozen in time and space.

  From behind Keru came the deep thunks of magnetic locks being released, followed by the hiss and whine of the holodeck doors opening. A broad shaft of warm light from Titan’s corridor spilled into the chilling, hostile darkness of the simulated Borg facility. Then a long shadow bobbed into view, and Ensign Torvig said, “Computer, end program.”