by Gene DeWeese
Suddenly, as if pulled by a mental rubber band, his mind shot back to the days immediately after the Jenolen, when the entire Enterprise had seemed like a giant technological candy store. Before his ham-handed ways had gotten him exiled from Engineering, one of his seemingly misguided enthusiasms had been holodeck technology. And one of the questions he’d asked, one of the questions that La Forge had politely laughed off as being too ridiculous to even consider—
Excited for the first time since this misbegotten universe had sprung into being around him, Scotty wiped the warp drive data from the terminal screen and began racing through specs and schematics of the holo generators.
After five minutes, his heart was pounding as if he’d run a mile, not sat transfixed as he scanned dozens of schematics and engineering specifications.
Standing up abruptly, he started to search the walls for the nearest intercom but then remembered the tiny device—combadge, they had called it—that Picard had given him.
“Bridge,” he said, giving it something closer to a slap than a tap, “I cannot be sure, but I may have found a wee something.”
Twenty-Six
“WELL, Mr. La Forge, will it work?” Picard asked as Scotty lurched to a verbal halt. They were gathered not on the bridge but in central engineering where a still-harried La Forge was constantly monitoring and occasionally adjusting several critical parameters in the warp drive.
“I honestly don’t know, Captain, but one thing is obvious. If we adjust the deflector fields to block sensor scans rather than incoming particle and energy weapons, we’d be defenseless. A single phaser hit in the right place, un-hindered by the shields, could destroy the warp core or turn the Enterprise into the biggest photon torpedo on record.”
Kirk, standing next to Scotty, shook his head, almost laughing. “And just how long would the deflectors, at full strength, hold up against what one cube, let alone dozens of them, can throw at us? I seem to recall that Sarek’s entire fleet didn’t last very long.”
“We’ve never had to find out,” La Forge began, “but—”
“Less than a minute,” Picard interrupted, drawing automatically on Locutus’s remaining memories, “if we were to be extremely lucky and only one Borg ship attacked. A matter of seconds if several fired on us simultaneously.”
“So what do you have to lose?” Scotty looked from one to the other while Kirk nodded his agreement.
Picard pulled in a breath, his eyes meeting Guinan’s for an instant, looking for an assent that may or may not have been there.
“As you say, Mr. Scott. Make it so. Quickly. At best, we have two hours before the nearest Borg ships are within weapons range.”
Unlike on the ill-fated Enterprise-B, the majority of the modifications and reroutings on the Enterprise-D could be done via the computer once the necessary safeguards were disabled.
The first and easiest step was to take some images—including that of a Borg cube—from the main computer memory and transfer them to the holodeck computers. Somewhat trickier—but right down La Forge’s alley—was overriding several additional, hard-wired safeguards in order to be able, at the last possible moment, to modify the phase and frequency of the deflectors, making the field opaque to subspace sensor scans rather than to the usual array of particles and energies.
Scotty himself, of necessity, took on the task of modifying the outputs of the holographic imagery subsystem, which normally drove the billions of holo diodes that lined the walls of the holodeck. What he needed the subsystem to do now was what La Forge had, a seeming lifetime ago, politely derided as impossible: provide a modulating input to the conformal transmission grids that lined the exterior hull and produced the spacial distortion that made the deflectors possible. Normally the distortion and hence the deflector field itself conformed to the shape of the hull, essentially producing an impenetrable “skin” covering every square centimeter of the ship’s exterior. With the inputs of the transmission grids modulated by the imagery subsystem, however, the grid system would be fooled into producing a deflector field not in the shape of the underlying Enterprise but in the shape of whatever image was being provided by the imagery subsystem computers.
In this case, a Borg cube.
Or so Scotty believed, based on what he feared might be a comparatively superficial understanding of the technology involved. He just hoped that it wasn’t, as some had suggested, a case of not knowing enough to understand why it wouldn’t work.
But it felt right, just as the countless shortcuts and “tricks” he had pulled off on the old Enterprise had felt right and had, when the crunch came, been proven right.
Unfortunately, no matter how well it worked, this particular trick would not produce a visual image of a cube. That would require lining the outside of the ship with specially augmented holo diodes, something that might be accomplished in a well-equipped spacedock but never in deep space under warp nine conditions. The transmission grids would, at best, produce a deflector field that would look to Borg sensors like a Borg cube. To someone near enough to get a visual sighting, however, it would look like what it really was: the Enterprise.
According to Picard’s Locutus memories, that might be enough.
If the nebula they had located in the Enterprise data banks existed in this universe.
If they could reach that nebula before the Borg reached them.
And if they were very, very lucky.
In any event, nobody had come up with a better idea.
For the first time since her arrival more than two hundred subjective years ago, the Borg Queen emerged, physically, from the solar system that had once been the home of Species 5618. She had faith in her armada for most things, but it was no better equipped to deal with the unexpected than was any other collection of Borg ships.
And the Picard creature’s very presence was the epitome of the unexpected. By all tenets of logic, he could not exist, and yet he was here. By those same tenets, “memories” of events that had not yet happened, “memories” of her own destruction, could not exist, and yet they existed.
Waiting to happen—unless she could prevent it.
In the time since the idea had first occurred to her, she had only become more convinced that she was right despite the fact that under ordinary circumstances she would have dismissed it as impossible.
But the current situation was far from ordinary, even farther from predictable. Making use of the time sphere harvested from Species 1429 was by itself enough to introduce a measure of unpredictability, but that was only the beginning. When she had used it, in the aftermath of her matrix’s takeover of Earth, she had intended to go back only a few days to warn her earlier self about the unexpectedly effective defense of Earth the Federation had mounted. The damage it had inflicted was such that, when the inevitable second wave of Federation ships would attack, her entire matrix would almost certainly be destroyed, and that was simply unacceptable. But instead of taking her back a few days, the time sphere had somehow malfunctioned, sending her back more than three centuries.
And now she was living through those three centuries again while—she assumed—her earlier self simultaneously lived through them for the first time. Knowing what her earlier self had done, she had for the most part been able to keep from interfering with that earlier self, particularly her work with the Narisians and others. Once the earlier self had obtained the time sphere and abandoned the Narisians and all the others, she had taken them over, continuing the control, knowing that her earlier self would never contact them again.
But the mere fact that she was living two lives simultaneously, the fact that she had crossed three centuries of time, meant that time was not inviolable. If she herself could physically travel back in time, then her mind, perhaps altered by that travel, could do the same—but without the assistance of the time sphere.
Therefore it was only logical that these “memories” of her own death at the hands of Picard were nothing less than a warning of that death sent back by her own future s
elf, its final conscious act.
It was essential, therefore, that she tend to this matter herself, that she make absolutely certain that Picard was destroyed, once and for all.
The latest information indicated that Picard’s ship, instead of continuing to flee, had turned about and was once again on a direct course for the Vortex. Which strengthened another of her theories, that Picard was attempting to reach the Vortex so that he and his ship could “disappear” the same way the other ship had “appeared” there. The ship, the Enterprise, would almost certainly be intercepted and destroyed, reduced to a spreading cloud of dissociated atoms by other Borg ships long before it could reach the Vortex.
She was, however, taking no chances. If the impossible came to pass and Picard’s primitive ship eluded the dozens of Borg ships closing in on it, she and more dozens of ships would be waiting at his destination, the Vortex.
She would be waiting, and this time she would make no mistakes…
Twenty-Seven
PICARD could almost feel the impatience radiating from Kirk as Ensign Raeger guided the Enterprise into the nebula. The Borg were still almost five minutes distant, but Kirk, seated where Counselor Troi normally sat, was leaning forward tensely, gripping the arms of the chair as if he thought he could speed up the ship by sheer force of will.
“All stop,” Picard ordered as the last vestige of the external universe disappeared from the now completely blank viewscreen.
“The nebula is essentially identical to its counterpart in our own timeline, Captain,” Data said. “Its extremely high levels of ionization severely restrict the range of our sensors as well as the Borg’s. In most areas, the range appears to be less than one hundred thousand kilometers. However, because of the size and energy differentials between the Enterprise and the Borg ships, we will be able to detect approaching cubes at least twenty thousand kilometers before they can detect us.”
Picard nodded tensely as Data switched to a broad-sweep, directional sensor scan, giving them, they hoped, a few additional thousands of kilometers of warning. Once that was done, there was nothing to do but wait and hope that the fragmentary memories left behind by Locutus were reliable and that his own extrapolations from those memories were valid. If not, the nebula they had searched out would be the grave not only of the Enterprise but of the Federation and the Alliance and probably much more.
Ten minutes later, the first cube appeared on the screen, moving toward them through the nebula at the Borg equivalent of minimum impulse. At a word from Picard, Raeger maneuvered the Enterprise laterally, keeping out of the hypothetical range of the Borg sensors. Soon a second cube appeared, its nebula-limited sensor scan overlapping that of the first.
Then a third appeared, and a fourth. The Borg were doing just as the Locutus memories had suggested: using the bulk of the fleet to methodically sweep the entire nebula while a smaller number remained outside, waiting to vaporize the Enterprise the moment it was flushed out, like a rabbit out of a briar patch.
Picard pulled in a breath as Raeger positioned the Enterprise halfway between the projected paths of two of the approaching Borg. “Now, Mr. La Forge,” he said.
Picard waited, hardly breathing, as Scott’s and La Forge’s jury-rigged modifications were switched in, routing the outputs of the holodeck computers through a maze of buffers to the circuits that controlled the deflectors.
Abruptly, the viewscreen shimmered and went blank.
An instant later a half dozen warning lights flared. The Enterprise was, according to the sensors, surrounded by an impenetrable cube-shaped shell.
Which was precisely what they had been hoping for.
“Go to visual subsystems,” Picard ordered.
The viewscreen remained blank, but the warning lights went out.
“Computer,” La Forge said, “show projected positions of approaching vessels.”
The four cubes reappeared, their images blinking to indicate they were not real, merely an indication of where the computer thought the actual objects were.
They waited.
Finally, Data spoke. “We are almost certainly within the area in which their sensors overlap.”
Picard held his breath for another few seconds, as did almost everyone else on the bridge, until the images of the two nearest Borg cubes drew even with the Enterprise.
“Match their speed and course,” Picard said even though Ensign Raeger was already doing precisely that.
Finally, the nebula began to thin and the blinking images vanished, replaced by real images provided by the visual observation subsystem. A dozen more cubes came into view in rapid succession as the nebula continued to thin. Finally, the stars reappeared.
By now the Borg sensors had almost certainly regained full function.
And directly ahead, well outside the nebula, another Borg cube came into visual range. One of the sentries, waiting to blast the Enterprise when it emerged.
Still holding his breath, Picard waited.
Nothing happened except that the cubes that had just emerged from the nebula turned and reentered at a different angle so they would sweep a different corridor.
Picard resumed normal breathing. Captain Scott’s jury-rigging had worked.
And the fragmentary Locutus memories had been right. None of the cubes, not even the ones posted outside the nebula where their sensors were fully effective, had “noticed” the one additional cube that all their sensors must have detected. Like drones that were not programmed to detect humans inside a Borg ship unless they tripped over them, these ships were programmed only to detect the Enterprise or other similar ships. They were not programmed to detect a Borg ship that appeared out of nowhere—unless that ship was on a collision course with one of the others or posed some obvious, programmed-for threat.
“Set a course for the Vortex,” Picard said into the relieved silence, “impulse power until we’re past the sentries.” Standing up abruptly, he looked down at Kirk, still seated in Troi’s chair. “Could I speak with you a moment, Captain? In my ready room?”
Kirk glanced at Data and the viewscreen in front of him. “Sure, if there’s time. This is one deadline I don’t dare miss, much as I might like to.”
Annoyed at himself for feeling uncomfortable, Picard watched as Kirk leaned close to the ready room’s softly lit aquarium and the fish gliding gracefully back and forth. He had brought Kirk here to—
To what? Not apologize, but…make sure that they…understood each other? Kirk, he suspected, would be far better at this, whatever “this” was. Kirk might be too impulsive for Picard’s taste, but the man’s obvious skills in dealing with people—
“Its own containment field?” Kirk asked, looking up from the aquarium.
Picard nodded, relieved that the other had spoken first. “We would’ve lost it a hundred times over if it didn’t have one.”
Kirk grinned. “So things still get shaken up when something gets through the shields.” He looked back at the shimmery-finned swimmers. “They are sort of soothing. I could’ve used something like that now and then in the old Enterprise. But I can’t imagine that you got me in here to show me your fish.”
Picard pulled in a deep breath, a sigh in reverse. “I just didn’t want you to think that, when I first saw you and Captain Scott—” He paused, sucking in another breath. “You no doubt sensed occasional…”
“Disapproval?” Kirk asked, smiling.
“That’s as good a word as any,” Picard admitted.
Kirk made a sound just short of a chuckle. “Understandable. Scotty and I had just screwed up an entire quadrant of the galaxy, maybe more.”
“Understandable, perhaps, but what I wanted you to know is, I suspect there was also a touch of envy involved in my reaction to you. Envy for the kind of bond you obviously developed with your crew, something so strong it would lead Captain Scott to do what he did. I didn’t realize it at the time, though. Or couldn’t admit it to myself. In any event, when I first realized what Captain S
cott was attempting, long before I first laid eyes on you, I was thinking things about you that I shouldn’t have, and it showed through in my attitude toward you when we did finally meet. I had even found myself wondering how you felt about what Captain Scott had done. Were you appalled? Or gratified? I knew you would never—”
“To tell the truth, Picard—we are telling the truth, right? To tell the truth, I was—well, gratified isn’t quite the right word, but flattered? Hell yes! A bit appalled, too, of course, knowing that he’d taken that kind of risk—and lost—just to save one person. And don’t think I didn’t tell him so.”
“But it obviously didn’t affect your relationship. Guinan told me what you did down in Ten-Forward, convincing Captain Scott to keep trying.”
Kirk shrugged. “What can I tell you? We were together a long time. On the Enterprise.” An almost dreamy looked seemed to swoop across Kirk’s face like a shadow but was gone before Picard could be sure. “We were on that ship—those ships—a long time, went through a lot. It does something to you, the Enterprise. To everyone who serves on it, no matter what incarnation. Look at what Spock did for his first commander, Captain Pike. Risked court-martial and worse. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it now and then.”
He had, Picard realized, belatedly remembering the tremendous risks Riker, Data, and Worf had taken to rescue him after he had been assimilated by the Borg. But even then, as Locutus was purged from his body and mind, it hadn’t been something he could have comfortably put into words, even to himself. And therefore he hadn’t. Now, he nodded.
“I have,” he said, resisting the compulsion to qualify his admission with a “perhaps” or an “it seemed.”
“In any event,” Picard continued abruptly, “I wanted you to know that, now, I have only the greatest admiration for you.”
“Likewise, Captain. And under any other circumstances, I’d say it would be a privilege to work with you again someday.” Kirk shrugged. “But who knows? No more than we know about the rules of time travel—or about the Vortex, for that matter—maybe we will. Or already have. But whatever happens,” he added with another grin, “it’s always nice to know that you made a difference.”