by Gene DeWeese
But she was not bound by the limitations of the drones who normally controlled the ship. Their orders were narrow and rigid, while hers were, basically, whatever she said they were.
In less than a second, she saw two things. First, if the Enterprise went to maximum warp the moment it emerged, the combined speeds of the two ships would be such that they would pass each other so rapidly she might not have time to fire.
Second, the course the Enterprise appeared to be following led directly to the Vortex.
And she realized something that would have meant nothing to any drone but which meant everything to her.
The two—the ones called Scott and Kirk—had “appeared” near the Vortex, and now Picard was apparently attempting to return them to that same spot. Would they then vanish the same way they had appeared, going back to wherever or whenever they had come from, taking Picard with them?
And how, she wondered as a new possibility suddenly arose out of her Locutus memories, could she even be certain that they were still on board? The three of them and any number of others could very easily have left the Enterprise and remained behind in the nebula in one or more of the smaller craft the Enterprise carried.
Craft that a normal Borg ship would ignore once the main craft had been destroyed.
But with her in control, this was not a normal Borg ship.
Whatever their plan, they would not escape.
With a renewed sense of urgency, she slowed the vessel, dropping out of warp just as the Enterprise’s projected emergence point came within weapons range. At this lower relative speed, she would have more than enough time to disable the Enterprise when it emerged, no matter how rapidly it was moving, no matter what evasive maneuvers it undertook. She could then determine whether the Picard creature and the other two were still aboard or had remained behind in the nebula in one of the smaller craft.
There was no way any of them could escape now.
Twenty-Three
SAREK’S HOPE of keeping the Alliance’s secret weapon a secret was short-lived. Seconds after the Wisdom’s sensors had picked up the Enterprise’s motion within the nebula, the Borg ship altered course slightly and dropped to sublight.
But Picard, Sarek realized instantly, would have no way of knowing the Borg ship had slowed prematurely. The Enterprise sensors would be as blinded by the nebula as the Borg’s. If, as Sarek expected it to do, the Enterprise emerged from the nebula at maximum warp, heading almost directly at the Borg ship, it wouldn’t shoot through the danger zone nearly fast enough to avoid Borg fire. Not only that, even if the Borg ship, now almost at a standstill, somehow failed to destroy the Enterprise and let it slip past, it would now be able to overtake it long before it reached the Vortex.
It was time to act. He had no choice.
Deliberately but rapidly, Sarek entered another code into the control panel. The neurobiosensor quickly verified his identity once again.
And cleared the signal to be sent.
On the screen, the five specks of light swarmed toward the Borg ship like angry insects, burrowing into it in the seconds before the Enterprise emerged from the nebula.
Now continuously monitored by the neurobiosensor, Sarek sent the de-cloak and detonate signals.
Focusing her entire attention on the Enterprise’s projected exit point from the nebula, the Borg Queen impatiently suppressed the countless unrelated signals that were clamoring for her attention. There would be time enough for them when her objective was accomplished. For the next few seconds, she wanted no distractions, nothing that would take even a tiny fraction of her attention from that objective: the complete and final destruction of the Picard creature and his ship.
But then, an infinitesimal instant after the Enterprise finally emerged from the nebula and went immediately to maximum warp, just as the intensity of a particularly insistent signal spiked violently, the ship’s sensors went dead.
A fraction of a second later, she was enveloped in something the remaining organic portions of her brain interpreted as searing pain.
The Borg ship reappeared on the Enterprise viewscreen, indistinctly at first as the sensors struggled to pierce the last fringes of the nebula. The cube wasn’t, Picard noticed with alarm, at the predicted coordinates or moving at the predicted speed. But there was no time to do anything but what they had hastily planned and programmed into the computer.
With virtually all power temporarily diverted to the warp drive and the shields, the Enterprise surged ahead, the Borg ship now crystal clear on the viewscreen, its course and position pinpointed by the sensors. While they had been inside the nebula, it had altered its course so that the Enterprise would pass within hundreds of kilometers, not the tens of thousands they had calculated. Worse, the Borg ship had dropped out of warp, which meant the relative velocity at which it and the Enterprise would pass each other would be far too low to—
Picard gasped as he suddenly felt invisible flames searing his flesh. For an agonizing instant he thought it might be some weapon the Borg of this universe used, but then, through eyes that barely functioned because of the pain, he saw what was happening to the Borg cube on the screen: It was expanding, beginning to disintegrate, shards of blinding light pouring out through dozens of widening fissures. Somehow, the cube was being destroyed!
And he knew the source of his pain: the Link to the Borg. Through that Link he was experiencing a feeble specter of what the tens of thousands of drones—and the ship itself?—were experiencing as they were vaporized.
As suddenly as it had descended on him, the agony was gone, shattered into a thousand bearable fragments that faded rapidly from his consciousness.
And the Borg cube was no longer a cube, not even a disintegrating one. It was little more than an expanding shell of fragments being vaporized by the massive fireball that was propelling them outward even as it destroyed them, like the shockwave of a miniature supernova.
“All stop!” Picard ordered sharply.
The Enterprise dropped out of warp, the image on the viewscreen wavering momentarily as the sensors adjusted to the sublight environment.
Then the viewscreen dimmed as automatic filters kicked in to protect the screen and its watchers from the eye-searing glare as the fireball consumed the last remnants of the shell before beginning finally to fade.
A moment later, Sarek’s voice erupted onto the bridge. “Picard, is it your intention to return Kirk to the Vortex?”
After a moment of shocked silence, Picard recovered his voice. “Wisdom on screen,” he snapped, and Sarek’s face appeared instantly. “What happened, Sarek?”
“If you wish to restore your timeline, Picard, answer my question.”
Darting a look at Kirk, who seemed as puzzled as himself, Picard scowled. “That was the plan,” he said, “but if you can—”
“There is no time for discussion, Picard,” Sarek said, more tension in his voice than Picard had ever heard in any Vulcan’s. “Proceed to the Vortex if such is your wish.”
“I won’t know if it is or not—unless you answer my question: Did you destroy that Borg ship? If you did, I would say we have more options than you led us to believe.”
Before Sarek could reply, his image vanished from the viewscreen.
For a seemingly interminable moment the Borg Queen was paralyzed with shock and pain as the distant ship that had for a few minutes served as her body was torn apart and vaporized. Like the equally impossible sensation of exhilaration, it had been resurrected from a past that, until these last few hours, she had thought dead and forgotten.
But then it was over, and she was once again whole, once again fully rational.
And she knew instantly what had happened.
The ship she had been controlling had been destroyed—because of her!
Anger—yet another unwelcome ghost from that distant past—swept over her. But not anger at the Picard creature or whoever had triggered the destruction of her ship but at herself, at her rashness, at the sheer ir
rationality of her actions.
The alarms she herself had put in place decades ago in every Borg vessel had been warning her. She had sensed those warnings, but she had brushed them aside. She had been so absorbed in her obsessive pursuit of Picard that she had failed to instantly comprehend their meaning or their importance. Worse, her control of the ship had been so complete, the ship so much an integral part of herself, that she had, unknowingly, kept the ship from reacting.
She had kept the ship and its thousands upon thousands of drones from saving themselves.
It would not happen again.
Her actions from this point on would be dictated by strict logic.
And that logic now overwhelmingly dictated that, in order to be absolutely certain that she would achieve her primary goal, she would have to scale back the magnitude of her intermediate goal by hundreds of worlds. Instead of waiting another hundred years for thousands more ships to be built, she would have to be satisfied with the thousands already built. Without the assistance of the Narisians, she would no longer have any way of learning what new weapons some Alliance world might secretly devise in those hundred years, and that kind of uncertainty was unacceptable. To accept it would be to accept the very system that she had spent the last several subjective centuries proving wrong.
No, she had no choice. She had to initiate the final phase of her plan not a hundred years from now, but now!
The shrunken image of the Enterprise bridge vanished abruptly from the corner of Sarek’s viewscreen, leaving only the full screen display that indicated the locations of the interphase-cloaked photon torpedoes. At the same moment an ear-piercing alarm erupted from his control panel, sending even his heart racing.
Because he knew instantly what it meant.
He had never before heard it except in simulations, but its meaning was unmistakable: Someone, somewhere had broken through the layers of security that surrounded the interphase-cloaked fleet.
With the neurobiosensor still continuously confirming his identity, he sent the signal that would freeze the entire system, locking out all incoming signals until everything could be analyzed and the source and nature of the intrusion determined.
Automatically, the system began spewing out teraquads of data, detailing the status and history of every interphase-cloaked device, including source, destination and content of every signal they had ever sent or received.
But before Sarek could even begin to search through the avalanche of data, another alarm went off.
And one of the specks of light on the screen winked out.
Followed by another.
And yet another.
As close to panic as a Vulcan could come, Sarek zeroed in on the final readings transmitted from the now-missing ships, scanning them rapidly. Everything appeared completely normal until—
Impossible! With the system frozen, not even he could force a detonation command through.
But someone had.
Milliseconds before the datastreams ended abruptly, all three devices had received—and accepted—an unauthorized detonation signal.
And on his screen, still more lights were winking out.
His heart only now beginning to slow, he re-transmitted the signal that would—should!—freeze every single device, making it impossible for them to detonate or decloak or even move.
But it had no more effect than the first such signal. The remaining thousands of lights continued to vanish in ever greater numbers until, after less than sixty seconds, every single one was gone, leaving only the muted specks that were the Borg vessels.
Though he knew it wouldn’t help, Sarek called up another set of readings and yet another.
The same detonation signal appeared in every one, just milliseconds before the readings ended.
But no decloaking signals.
The photon torpedoes had been detonated, every one, but not in this dimension, where the explosions would have at least damaged the Borg cubes they were clustered around. Instead, their deadly power had been released in that other dimension, where it had no effect whatsoever on the Borg or on anything at all in this dimension—except for extinguishing the specks of light on his viewscreen.
They knew, Sarek thought bleakly. All this time, they knew.
They must have known for years, perhaps from the very beginning of the program. Even the Borg couldn’t have found a way to defeat the fleet’s entire security system in the few minutes that had passed since he had revealed its existence by destroying the one Borg ship.
It had been the spies, of course. There were Narisians on every Alliance world and on virtually every Alliance ship. They must have long ago informed the Borg of the interphase-cloaked torpedoes. And the Borg had devised a way to destroy them despite the security measures. They had been watching and waiting ever since, letting the Alliance waste its resources on a weapon they knew they could destroy in seconds.
If only he had destroyed both nearby Borg vessels, the Enterprise could at least have reached the Vortex, and there would have been a chance to restore the timeline Picard and Kirk and Scott and the rest had come from.
But now, with that remaining Borg vessel more than capable of destroying any Alliance ship—any fleet of Alliance ships!—there was no way Kirk could be returned to the Vortex.
But the being they called Guardian…
Sarek was reaching for the control panel to enter the command that would re-open the channel to the Enterprise when yet another alarm went off.
Contact had still not been reestablished with the Wisdom when a rapidly flashing readout clamored for Data’s attention. Kirk abruptly cut off his restless pacing and peered over the android’s shoulder.
“Captain,” Data said as he scanned the information, “chronometric radiation is once again decreasing. The timeline would appear to be achieving even more stability.”
What now? Kirk wondered as Picard turned toward Guinan.
“Could the destruction of the Borg cube be causing this?” Picard asked.
“I do not know, Captain.”
“Your feelings—”
She shook her head, momentarily lowering her eyes. “They are telling me nothing.”
“Captain,” Data broke in, “this may be the cause. The sensor shield around the Terran system has just fallen.”
Kirk’s stomach suddenly knotted and he involuntarily averted his eyes as the image on the viewscreen shifted, centering on distant Earth. For a moment all he could see in his mind’s eye were the zombie-like faces of his friends and family, even of himself, now nothing more than creatures that had once been human but now retained only enough of their humanity to be sickened by what had happened to them.
And all apparently because of him.
With an effort that he hoped was invisible to Picard and the others, particularly Scotty, Kirk regained control of himself and raised his eyes to the viewscreen, where Data was rapidly increasing the magnification, zooming in on a single point of light at the center of the screen.
“That is Terra’s sun,” he said, pointing out the obvious.
But then, as the magnification continued to increase, countless tiny dots began to appear all around the brightening star, all moving relentlessly outward.
For a timeless moment, Picard felt as if he were paralyzed, suffocating in a poisonously unbreathable atmosphere, unable to either resist or die.
As if he had once again been absorbed by the Borg, whose ships now swarmed across the Enterprise viewscreen by the hundreds, perhaps thousands.
For that was what each dot represented: a Borg ship.
He knew without having to ask. In the aftermath of the pain inflicted on him by the one Borg ship’s destruction, he had once again heard the Borg whispering in his mind. The link forged by that destruction had persisted, outlasting the destruction itself for a brief moment. There had been no specific words like those that had filtered into his half-waking mind earlier, nor even the wordless intuitions he had reluctantly become accustomed to
. Instead, it had been a myriad of distant voices, like the murmur of a vast and invisible crowd, rising and falling, imparting nothing but an overwhelming feeling of restlessness, of apprehension.
Orders, his Locutus memories told him, an ocean of orders sweeping out in massive waves, setting in zombie-like motion millions of drones and the ships they controlled and maintained.
“How many?” he asked when he was once again able to speak.
“Two-thousand-three-hundred-eleven, Captain,” Data said.
“Borg?” Kirk asked, somehow keeping his voice steady.
“Almost certainly,” Data agreed, glancing briefly at Picard, “but we are too distant for a reliable visual identification. The sensor readings, however, are consistent with Borg cubes.”
“And what of Earth?” Picard asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Its atmosphere matches that of other Borg worlds,” Data said matter-of-factly as the now-unblocked sensors began to take the measure of the distant star and its attendant worlds. “Its overall mass is approximately five percent less than in our universe. The other terrestrial planets have also lost—”
“We get the picture, Data,” Riker snapped. “They’ve been strip-mining the solar system to build their damn cubes. And using what’s left of Earth as a breeding colony to fill them.”
“From what you people told me about this bunch,” Kirk said, “I can’t believe you were expecting anything less.” He pulled in a ragged breath. “But what’s important now is, where the hell are they going?”
“They are moving in several directions,” Data said as his eyes darted across the readouts. “However, ninety-three of them are heading directly for the Enterprise.”
“Picard!”
Sarek’s image reappeared abruptly on the viewscreen.
“Sarek, what—” Picard began, but the Vulcan cut him off unceremoniously.