Engines of Destiny

by Gene DeWeese

  The chief engineer shook his head. “Not here, and not without at least one interphase generator to work with. We’re going to have to make do with the alarm system and a fast getaway.”

  Ten

  SAREK OF Vulcan, Supreme Arbiter of the Alliance, looked up from the viewscreen in his uncomfortably luxurious shipboard quarters as the harsh yet deferential tones of the Wisdom’s commander, a Romulan named Varkan, erupted from the intercom.

  “My apologies for disturbing you, Arbiter, but Deputy Koval insists he must speak with you.”

  “Put him through, Commander,” Sarek ordered, controlling his annoyance at the obsequious commander’s misguided protectiveness.

  Turning back to the viewscreen, he watched as the flashing, crackling maelstrom that was the Vortex vanished and was replaced by Koval’s granite-like features set against the background of his spartan office on Alliance Prime. The image flickered briefly, then took on a slight reddish tint, a sign that the Deputy Arbiter had initiated the ultra-secure link that was made possible by the special equipment that was always installed on any ship the Arbiter traveled on. Attempts to tap into the signal would now yield only static, even on the bridge of the Wisdom itself, where the tightbeam subspace signals were received and relayed to Sarek’s quarters.

  “What is it, Deputy?”

  “Your suspicions appear to have been justified, sir. We have just learned that three of the Cardassian members of the Council have held at least one clandestine meeting only hours after your departure. Unfortunately, we do not as yet have any indication as to what was discussed.”

  “And Zarcot?”

  “There is still no evidence that he has returned to Alliance Prime.”

  “But no evidence to the contrary, either, I imagine?”

  “None as yet, sir. Nor is there any clear evidence of unusual activity within the Cardassian contingent of the Alliance fleet.”

  Sarek was silent a moment, considering. In the year since Zarcot had stormed out of the Council, the Cardassian had gained far more influence than he had ever exercised as a member. Unfettered by Council rules and traditions, he had also been provoking more confrontations than ever before, all seemingly designed to undermine Sarek’s authority. In his latest efforts, Zarcot had convinced the gullible and thoroughly illogical majority of Council members that “no one could possibly claim to be a true leader of the Alliance without personally observing the object that could well prove even more dangerous than the Borg.”

  Zarcot himself had “set an example” and traveled to the Vortex to make just such a “personal observation” several weeks ago and had sent back reports filled with dire but totally unfounded warnings that “worlds would likely be destroyed by the Vortex long before the Borg made their next move.” He was supposedly on his way back to Alliance Prime with more information and the beginnings of a plan he wanted to present to the Council, but no one knew for certain where he was. As he had on the journey out, he was maintaining radio silence, supposedly for security reasons but actually, Sarek was almost certain, in order to enhance the drama of his so-called mission.

  And perhaps to allow him to make a sidetrip to meet secretly with other Cardassians.

  In any event, the need for “personal observation” by Zarcot or by Sarek or any other official was of course utter nonsense, as all Vulcans knew. Unfortunately, the vast majority within the Alliance and on the Council were not Vulcans and were therefore all too often ruled not by logic but by that most destructive and most easily manipulated force in all of nature: emotion.

  And Zarcot, obviously, was a master manipulator.

  Logically, everyone knew that the scientists who had been tracking and observing the Vortex ever since it first entered Alliance space decades ago were far more qualified observers than any politician or soldier. Unfortunately, Zarcot could claim—with only slight exaggeration—that in those decades the scientists had learned essentially nothing beyond the blindingly obvious: The Vortex destroyed or absorbed anything and everything in its path without being slowed, diverted or weakened to any observable degree. Nor did weapons have any effect, neither the phasers and photon torpedoes of Alliance cruisers like the Wisdom nor the disruptors favored by Klingons and Cardassians.

  Even so, Alliance scientists from a dozen worlds assured Sarek that the Vortex was a distraction and nothing more. Unlike the Borg, it was a natural phenomenon and posed no danger to any Alliance worlds—unless, of course, it departed radically from its projected trajectory, something it had shown no inclination whatsoever to do. The most effective way to “deal” with it, therefore, was simply to study it from a safe distance and stay out of its path, which was precisely what the scientists had been doing and continued to do. A half dozen automated probes constantly monitored the Vortex and transmitted all data to Alliance Outpost No. 3 for analysis and storage, and its projected path was recalculated continually. Other than minuscule refinements, there had been no changes to that predicted path since the observations had begun.

  But those who opposed Sarek and lusted for his title—particularly Zarcot and the other Cardassians, whose worlds likely wouldn’t be threatened by the real menace, the Borg, for millennia—would have none of it. Logic be damned, the leader of the Alliance had to demonstrate his concern over this spectacular but easily avoidable danger.

  And so he was here, parsecs from Alliance Prime and Vulcan, wasting precious time while the Wisdom cautiously eased its way closer to the Vortex and he learned absolutely nothing other than the utter futility of urging non-Vulcans to act logically.

  And wondering how much longer the Alliance could be held together, with or without Sarek himself as Supreme Arbiter.

  In truth, he was amazed that it had held together as long as it had. The sole reason for its existence was the presence in its midst of the Borg. There had been no choice but to unite against a common enemy so powerful it could destroy any individual world with no more effort than it would take to swat a fly.

  Even the threat of total annihilation at the hands of the Borg, however, had not been enough to eliminate opportunism and backstabbing and a hundred other thoroughly illogical behaviors, particularly among the Klingons and Cardassians and even now and then the Romulans.

  Part of the problem was the extremely deliberate pace at which the Borg moved. They would take decades to complete their assimilation of a world before moving on to the next. This took away from the sense of urgency that was essential to keep Alliance members from each other’s throats as they competed for short-term advantages that would prove utterly meaningless in the long run if the Borg were not stopped.

  The Klingons, for example, had kept their success with interphase cloaking a closely guarded secret for decades, using the technology only to “protect”—i.e., to surround with interphase-cloaked space mines—Klingon-claimed worlds whose resources they also refused to share. As a result, a golden opportunity to destroy the embryonic Borg fleet in its cradle, the Terran system, had been lost. And by the time the rest of the Alliance developed the technology, the Borg fleet was no longer embryonic, nor was it even accessible. Dozens of cubes watched over each of the worlds that had since been assimilated, and an unknown number were hidden behind the sensor-opaque shield they had erected around the entire Terran system, enclosing even its Oort cloud of comet nuclei. Behind it, Terra and every other body in the system almost certainly continued to be strip-mined for the raw materials needed to construct more Borg cubes.

  And every few decades, the shield would vanish, just long enough for a new fleet of those cubes to emerge and head for another nearby world. Vulcan, if the pattern of the last two centuries continued, would be next.

  Vulcan’s only hope—the Alliance’s only hope—was that, before it was too late, they could build and deploy a sufficient number of interphase-cloaked photon torpedoes to carry out a belated and much more difficult version of the plan that the Klingons had thwarted originally by their illogical refusal to share their cloaking te
chnology.

  And the Alliance fleet would have only one chance.

  If any Borg ships escaped the attack, they would soon return.

  And they would be immune to the cloaked torpedoes.

  That was how the Borg operated. The Alliance had learned this early on when they had made the mistake of “testing” a new weapon on a lone Borg cube parsecs away from the others. The test had been successful, the cube destroyed, but the next time the fleet attacked an even more isolated cube, the weapon had no effect. That cube—and presumably all the others—had somehow adapted and were no longer vulnerable. The attacking ships were of course destroyed.

  So, now, all the Alliance could do was continue to build as many photon torpedoes and as many cloaking devices as possible.

  And hope.

  And all Sarek could do was try his best to retain control and prevent ambitious and myopic fools like Zarcot from fragmenting the Alliance and throwing away the one small hope they all had for long term survival outside a Borg Collective.

  “Very well, Deputy Koval,” he said at last, “keep me informed and keep trying to locate Zarcot. I will cut this so-called mission as short as I can. In the meantime, if any Cardassian ships approach Alliance Prime, keep them in high orbit, out of transporter range. And if Zarcot reappears, assign him a bodyguard detail. For his own protection, of course. Do the same for the Cardassian members of the Council.”

  Signing off, Sarek deactivated the ultra-secure link and allowed the chaos of the Vortex to re-form on the screen.

  It took Picard and the others—with the notable exception of Guinan, who had not reappeared since she had retreated from the bridge—only a few minutes to reach a decision: Set a course for Earth.

  First, that was where, in 2293, Starfleet Headquarters had been located for decades. If anything was left of Starfleet, with or without subspace radio, it would be there.

  Second, records showed that Kirk’s death had occurred less than a parsec from Earth. That was where he had encountered the energy ribbon that had killed him and very nearly destroyed the Enterprise-B.

  If Scott was going to show up anywhere in this timeline, it would be there.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the words Scotty had been waiting for came. “That’s it!” Kirk shouted to Demora Sulu on the bridge of the Enterprise-B. “Go!”

  Scotty instantly activated the Goddard’s transporter, which was already locked onto Kirk’s coordinates. In the split seconds he had to operate, he would not have had time to achieve a lock as well as perform the actual transport.

  Kirk’s dematerialization was barely completed when a klaxon-like alarm, deafening in the confines of the shuttlecraft, assaulted Scotty’s ears.

  Heart suddenly pounding even more violently, he tore his eyes from the shimmering energies that were forming above the transporter pad and looked down at the control panel—and saw a red light flashing in time to the alarm.

  Radiation! The intense, wildly fluctuating gravimetric radiation generated by the energy ribbon must have—

  But it wasn’t gravimetric!

  The gravimetric radiation was high and fluctuating wildly, but that wasn’t what had triggered the alarms.

  It was a sudden surge of chronometric radiation.

  Chronometric!

  And it was dozens of times higher than even in the first moments after he and the Bounty 2 had emerged from the slingshot trajectory that had deposited them in this era!

  Belatedly, his eyes darted up to the forward viewscreen. Only moments before, it had been filled with the Enterprise as the ship began to pull away from the coruscating space-borne tornado that was the energy ribbon.

  Now there was only the ribbon, itself receding.

  The Enterprise was gone!

  Impossible! The ribbon couldn’t have swallowed it up!

  It hadn’t!

  And yet the Enterprise was gone!

  But there was something else out there, the sensors indicated. Two somethings, and they were huge, hundreds of times the size of the Enterprise!

  Hastily, Scotty redirected the scanners, and the other objects appeared on the viewscreen.

  They weren’t where the Enterprise had been, but a hundred eighty degrees around, apparently trailing the energy ribbon from a safe distance.

  He recognized the behemoths instantly from the images in the Goddard’s briefing program, and they were virtually the last thing he had expected—or wanted—to see.

  Borg cubes.

  What had he done that could possibly have resulted in this?

  A hand on his shoulder almost sent his heart into his mouth. Turning, he found himself facing a smudge-faced and very puzzled looking Jim Kirk.

  Commander Varkan’s image had just appeared on Sarek’s viewscreen when the world seemed to go mad around him, setting his heart to pounding. The Romulan commander’s image blurred almost into anonymity and the lushly carpeted floor undulated beneath Sarek’s booted feet. For just an instant, the entire Wisdom seemed to vanish, leaving him floating helplessly in the darkness of empty space, surrounded only by thousands of pinpricks of starlight.

  But almost before the images of the stars could register in his mind, they were gone, leaving him to wonder if it had all been illusion. Logically, it had to have been.

  He was obviously still surrounded by the thankfully solid walls of—

  Of what?

  A jolt of pure terror shot through him, turning his muscles to rubber as he realized he didn’t recognize anything around him, not the face peering at him from the meter-wide viewscreen, not the holo-portraits on the walls, not anything!

  Where was he?

  How had he gotten here?

  Somehow controlling the panic that threatened to overwhelm him, he tried to think back to the last thing he remembered.

  And realized he had no conscious memory at all.

  No past.

  Not even a name!

  For what seemed like an eternity, he stood frozen, unable to move or even to generate a rational thought beyond the obvious:

  Where am I?

  Who am I?

  But then, almost as quickly as his mind had emptied, a torrent of memories came flooding back, threatening to drown his still-struggling consciousness.

  Limp with a relief that did not question the source of the memories, he thought: I am Sarek of Vulcan, ambassador to—

  No! Not ambassador! Arbiter! Supreme Arbiter of the Federation and—

  Alliance, not Federation!

  He shook his head violently as he tried to make sense of the returning memories: The Borg. The Vortex. The Alliance Council.

  But what was this “Federation” that had suddenly appeared in his mind, like a parasite that had attached itself to his returning memories? What—

  But it was not something that had just appeared, he realized, and with the realization came the beginnings of calmness and control. The “Federation” was just one small part of a long string of illusory memories that had plagued him for decades.

  Memories of dreams.

  Dreams that were not even dreams, merely shadows of dreams that he must have had even though he could not remember ever actually having them.

  How could he have forgotten, even for an instant? He had been victim to them throughout most of his adult life, he now remembered. At odd times, day or night, on the rare occasions when he allowed his mind to wander, he would find himself “remembering” events that had never happened, events that couldn’t have happened, events totally at odds with his true memories and with the world around him but otherwise virtually indistinguishable from his real memories.

  He had, he remembered now, tried at various times to dismiss them as visions, which Vulcans, having limited telepathic abilities, were sometimes subject to, but that illogical effort had always failed. The most he could logically say was that they might conceivably be memories of visions, but of visions he could not consciously remember having had in the first place.

 
In the end, his only salvation had been to tell himself, as he did now, that the false memories were simply products of his subconscious and that therefore they were nothing more than a rare and peculiar form of dreaming, a series of wish fulfillment fantasies produced by his subconscious. What else could they be but fantasies, he had asked himself a thousand times? They had simply seeped up from his subconscious through the imperfectly formed barriers all Vulcans erect early in life to keep their emotions from breaking free of the prison of their inner, secret selves and into the real world of their logical, conscious minds.

  He could not allow them to be anything else, just as he could not allow the momentary lapse of memory he had just suffered to be anything more than that: a lapse, a brief misfire of a cluster of otherwise healthy neurons.

  It was his only choice if he wished to retain his sanity, if he wished to retain his ability to make logical decisions and act upon them.

  And now—now, with the possibility of a Cardassian attempt to unseat him growing daily—he needed that ability more than ever.

  Without it, without all the logic and decisiveness he could muster, the Alliance could well be doomed. Without it—

  “Arbiter Sarek?” Commander Varkan’s uneasy voice penetrated his whirling thoughts. “What is it you wish?”

  Sarek came to himself with a start as he realized how long he had been standing silently before the viewscreen.

  And remembered why he had contacted Varkan. He had decided to cut this ludicrous “mission” short.

  “Prepare to return to Alliance Prime,” he said. “I will join you on the bridge in a moment.”

  Signing off, Sarek broke the connection and thumbed open the door to the corridor. He had wasted more than enough time on this fool’s errand, he thought grimly as he strode toward the bridge, the memory of his recent lapse slipping more deeply into his subconscious with every step.