by Gene DeWeese
Picard smiled. “You certainly did that.”
“And so did you. Or should that be ‘so will you’? Don’t forget, the Guardian not only wants me in the Vortex. It wants you—or Scotty, or someone on this ship, maybe several someones—not in the Vortex. That has to mean something. Have you asked your friend Guinan about that?”
Picard shook his head. “I don’t think even she knows. Or if she does, she isn’t talking.”
“Time, Captain,” Riker’s voice came over Picard’s combadge.
“Acknowledged, Number One.”
After a moment’s silence, Picard put his hand out. Kirk’s eyebrows raised just slightly as he put his own hand out and the two captains shook firmly.
Despite his seemingly unruffled exterior, there was a lump in Picard’s throat to match the butterflies in his stomach as he released Kirk’s hand and watched him turn and, seemingly without a qualm, leave the ready room and head for the turbolift.
So, Kirk thought as the turbolift door opened on the corridor that led to the transporter room, it’s time. No more guessing what the Vortex was or what the Guardian really wanted or even whose side the Guinan twins were really on.
It was time to find out. Time to start the process.
Time to be stored in the transporter’s pattern buffer, where he would “wait” to be spat out when—if—the Vortex came within transporter range.
Not that he had any doubts…
Pulling in a breath, he stepped out into the corridor.
The Borg Queen was, once again, faced with the impossible.
The Picard creature’s ship had disappeared.
It had not been destroyed. It had disappeared.
Nowhere in the teraquads of sensor data received from the hundreds of ships that had been closing in on the Picard creature was there anything to indicate what had happened to it.
Halfway to the Vortex, it had suddenly changed course in an obvious—and seemingly futile—attempt to elude the cluster of Borg ships that would have intercepted it within minutes.
But then it had entered one of the tiny but highly ionized nebulae that dotted this quadrant. And, unlike when it had ducked into that other, even smaller nebula, it had not come out.
A phalanx of Borg ships had swept through the entire nebula not once but twice and then a third time. There was no way the Picard creature’s ship could have been missed, even with their ionization-limited sensors. Even if it had possessed its own version of the Alliance’s “secret” weapon and used it to shift to a different level of reality, the inevitable and spectacular energy leakage would only have made it that much easier to detect.
Nor could it have exited from the nebula. Every cubic centimeter of surrounding space had been constantly monitored by at least two of the ships deployed around the nebula, all sensors of which were fully functional.
Could Picard have simply returned to wherever or whenever it had come from, she found herself wondering? According to data from the ships that had been monitoring the Vortex, the other, smaller interloper had literally appeared out of nowhere, just as the Narisian Balitor’s information had claimed. And the smaller interloper had for some time now been stowed inside the larger. Who was to say that both could not then have returned to wherever or whenever they had come from?
But even if they had, were they no longer a threat? Or were they an even greater threat?
Unless she learned what had happened, she would never know the answer.
Until it was too late.
So completely connected to the cube that carried her that she had literally become a part of the ship, she began to reexamine the data, millisecond by millisecond, from each and every one of the more than a hundred cubes in and around the nebula.
Kirk stepped into the transporter circle.
Despite the suddenly churning stomach that had taken him by surprise as he stepped up onto the platform, he found himself grinning as he turned and looked down at Scotty and La Forge and the rest who had gathered to see him off. The only one that answered with even a subdued smile was Picard’s odd friend, Guinan.
Earlier, before his final conversation with Picard, he had been filled with nervous uncertainty despite his calm but impatient exterior. Could he really trust the logic that told him that the Vortex was not synonymous with death? Should he trust Guinan’s word that her twin had actually seen and spoken with the Guardian? And that this was indeed what the Guardian demanded?
But now, particularly after Picard’s comment about “making a difference,” Kirk’s uneasiness had given way to a growing curiosity and excitement. It was, in a way, not unlike how he had felt the very first time he had been aboard a starship waiting for the warp drive to be engaged, waiting for energies he could barely comprehend to hurl him through dimensions and distances only mathematicians could describe.
Except that here no one—except possibly the Guinans?—had any idea where or when he was about to be hurled.
Which, now that the moment was almost here, just made him all the more curious, all the more excited.
This must be, he thought abruptly, how Zefram Cochrane felt in the last few seconds before he took his life in his hands and engaged that very first, totally unproven, jury-rigged warp drive.
Winking at Guinan, he pulled in a deep breath and stood up a little straighter as he turned to look at Scotty. “Let’s get this show on the road, old friend, before whatever’s controlling those cubes sees through your little miracle. If I don’t see you again…” He shrugged lightly. Some thoughts didn’t require voicing.
A moment later, the tingle of anticipation was replaced by the grip of the transporter energies.
The shimmering curtain enveloped him, obscuring the faces looking up at him.
With a sudden surge of almost boyish eagerness he hadn’t felt since his retirement, he wondered what was going to happen next.
Twenty-Eight
WITH PAINSTAKING deliberateness, the Borg Queen continued to re-examine the data, evaluating every aspect of every cube’s sensor readings, not just those that the drones had been instructed to watch and act upon.
Finally, she found what she was looking for. Not Picard’s ship, but a Borg cube—a cube that seemed, impossibly, to not be part of the armada she had just sent forth.
According to the data, it had first been sensed at the periphery of the stunted, overlapping sensor fields of two of the cubes sweeping the nebula and had then quickly taken up a position midway between the two. The interloper was not part of the phalanx performing the sweep and in fact was not itself producing a sensor scanning field of any detectable kind.
Sensor records of the cubes posted around the periphery of the nebula did not show the cube entering the nebula. They did, however, show it leaving. It had emerged from the nebula in company with the cubes performing the sweep. As the next sweep began, however, it had broken out of formation and headed away from the nebula on impulse power, moving in the general direction of the Vortex.
It took only seconds to confirm with a matrix-wide Link that all cubes were accounted for, not only those in the Terran armada but every single one she had constructed since the moment the time sphere had deposited her in the Terran system over two hundred years ago.
With growing uneasiness, she directed the sensors to focus on the projected path of the errant cube.
As she had expected, it had gone into warp drive minutes after leaving the nebula and was now only minutes from the Vortex and the cubes guarding it.
And it was still on a course that would take it within a few thousand kilometers of the Vortex.
Just as she had expected.
And feared.
“Time to transporter range, Mr. Data?” Picard asked, his eyes fixed on the image of the transporter room confined to the corner of the bridge viewscreen. Even as he spoke, Kirk, on one of the transporter pads, shimmered into nonexistence.
“Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds, Captain.”
Even without the tweak
ing of the pattern buffer control circuits by La Forge and Scott, the matter stream that now contained all that currently existed of Captain James T. Kirk would be safe in the buffer for nearly seven minutes before the pattern began to degrade.
“Ready to complete transport, Mr. La Forge?” he asked redundantly.
“Standing by, Captain. Transporters are operating on internal backup power.”
Having Kirk already in the pattern buffer would essentially cut transport time—sitting-duck time—in half. Transferring to internal backup power in advance would avoid even momentary interruptions if they were hit and main power was lost. Even Picard’s Locutus memories didn’t tell him how much time would elapse between the moment he deactivated the deflectors and the moment the cubes, suddenly picking up the undisguised Enterprise, would begin firing. Every millisecond, however, could be critical.
On the viewscreen, the Vortex was already visible, even without sensor input. The image, derived from visual subsystems only, was of course out of date by the several days it took light to travel the intervening distance through normal space. But it couldn’t be helped. The Borg cube being simulated by the deflectors was sensor-opaque in both directions. Borg sensors couldn’t see in and Enterprise sensors couldn’t see out.
The two Borg cubes that had until hours ago been the only Borg ships in the vicinity of the Vortex appeared as tiny specks at approximately three and a half minutes out. The Wisdom and the Alliance observation platforms were of course still too small to be picked up. The new Borg cubes that had in reality positioned themselves around the Vortex several hours ago wouldn’t be seen “arriving” until moments before the Enterprise dropped out of warp—within transporter range.
“Two minutes, Captain,” Data said. “Chronometric radiation is increasing exponentially.”
Picard’s tension eased just slightly. Increased chronometric radiation was, according to unproven theory, indicative of increased instability. At some level, the timeline was already coming unraveled. The effects of whatever was about to happen were spreading in both directions through time, triggering the radiation just as their own “arrival” from the future had triggered a burst of radiation.
Whatever was about to happen…
Without warning, a half dozen Borg cubes appeared, not around the still-distant Vortex but around the Enterprise itself. Smoothly, effortlessly they matched its course.
Obviously the Enterprise, despite its “disguise,” had been detected.
“Sixty seconds, Captain.”
Before he could acknowledge Data’s words, something closed around Picard’s mind like an icy net, sending a new jolt of adrenaline through his body.
For a moment, he couldn’t imagine what was happening to him, but as he tried instinctively to pull free, his Locutus memories recognized it:
A Borg Link.
Pausing only long enough to direct all the cubes surrounding the Vortex to “see” the approaching cube and to lock onto it as soon as it came within weapons range, the Borg Queen focused her mind on the approaching cube to the exclusion of all else.
And found herself Linked directly to the Picard creature!
Even though some part of her had been expecting precisely that, the reality was still a shock, momentarily freezing her thought processes as the “memories” of her own death at the creature’s hands once more threatened to overwhelm her.
Recovering, she considered for another moment the possibility of using that Link to extract the information she wanted directly from Picard’s mind, to find out where he had come from and how he had come to be here, but caution won out over curiosity. A Link might be precisely what the creature wanted. The Link would allow information to flow both ways, and she was at the point now where she feared that nothing was impossible in her dealings with this creature, whoever or whatever it really was, whenever and wherever it had come from.
Breaking the Link with Picard, she returned her full attention to the Link with the rest of the cubes. Their weapons systems, she noted with satisfaction, were already locking onto whatever it was that was carrying the Picard creature.
First one and then another fired, but the phaser blasts seemed to pass through the object with no effect.
After those two shots, before the other cubes could fire, all weapons locks were lost.
Impossibly, the object was gone!
In its place was not another ship, not even Picard’s, but an irregular, pock-marked ovoid, apparently a small planetesimal traveling at warp speed.
A trick!
She had no idea how Picard had done it, but it had to be a trick of some kind, an illusion.
But it was an illusion that registered on Borg sensors and would prevent their weapons from even trying to regain their lock. The target they had been instructed to fire upon had vanished after two bursts of phaser fire. There was therefore no reason to fire again, no reason to lock onto this new and totally different object.
She couldn’t take direct control of all weapons systems on all cubes quickly enough, but she was already in control of those in her own cube. Unlike the drones and the automated weapons systems, she was not limited to what was programmed into her. She could act independently.
And she did.
But even as she trained the weapons on the object and fired, it dropped out of warp.
And disappeared.
An instant later, the Enterprise appeared in its place, a tiny speck within the volume of space that had been occupied by the illusion. Her initial phaser blast shot through the area previously occupied by the vanished illusion but went harmlessly past the comparatively tiny ship offset several hundred meters from its center.
It took only seconds to redirect the phasers and fire a second salvo, followed by a series of photon torpedoes.
To her utter surprise, the ship’s shields offered no resistance. It was as if they didn’t exist.
Another trick? she wondered as one of the phaser blasts caught the ship solidly, sheering off one of the two linear extensions at the rear, sending the remains of the ship tumbling out of control.
Another illusion? she wondered as a substantial piece of the forward part of the saucer section was vaporized and a half dozen explosions erupted from other areas of the saucer.
And even as she continued to wonder, even as the remnants of the ship began to break up, the entire universe seemed to waver around her, as if it and not the ship being destroyed before her eyes was the illusion.
“Thirty seconds to transporter range,” Data announced as a searing lance of phaser fire shot by only a few hundred meters away.
And another.
“Second image,” Picard snapped.
An instant later, the holodeck computers switched from the image of a Borg cube to that of an asteroid slightly larger than the cube had been. The visual subsystem images on the viewscreen shimmered for a split second but were otherwise unaffected by the reshaping of the deflector fields.
The Borg sensors, however, would see the asteroid, just as they had, until that moment, seen the cube. If Picard’s Locutus memories were correct, the Borg ships would lose interest the moment the image changed—as long as they had not been programmed to deal with the new image. The Locutus memories had already been proven correct when the cubes had paid no attention to the sudden appearance of a new cube in their midst, so there was every reason to believe that this seemingly transparent subterfuge would also work. The Borg, at least at the drone level, did not deal well with the unexpected. Nor did they very often look out the window, so to speak, in order to see what was really happening.
All they needed was a few more seconds.
“Transporter range,” Data announced.
Four things happened virtually simultaneously.
The Enterprise dropped out of warp drive.
Grimly, Worf disabled the deflectors, leaving the Enterprise both visible and defenseless.
Another bolt of phaser energy skimmed by, missing the Enterprise by less than
a hundred meters.
And La Forge initiated the delayed second stage of Kirk’s transport into the Vortex.
From the transporter room, Picard could hear—or at least imagined he could hear—the warble of the transporters as the matter stream that was Captain James Kirk was ejected from the pattern buffer and sent on its way to the heart of the Vortex more than ten thousand kilometers distant. Red warning lights were undoubtedly blinking wildly on the transporter console, indicating the destination was hazardous and unacceptable, but La Forge had already taken away the computer’s ability to shut down the transmission and return the matter stream to the pattern buffer.
The ship shuddered as it was struck by the nearest cube’s phaser fire. Lights flickered as emergency backup power came on line and what was left of the ship began to tumble helplessly.
A moment later, it shuddered again, even more violently from a second hit. Sparks erupted from every power bus as the viewscreen and all displays went dark for a moment, then briefly recovered.
“Hull breaches on all decks,” the computer voice announced calmly in the moments before the last of the emergency power sources failed and the only light was the harsh glare of incoming fire.
In the transporter room, the last thing Geordi La Forge saw before everything went black was the barest flicker of the display indicating that transport was complete.
Twenty-Nine
THE BORG QUEEN watched as the dispersing fragments of the Picard creature’s ship seemed to melt and vanish into the now violently shifting background of stars while in the same instant the Borg ships that had destroyed it twisted into impossible shapes before they, too, vanished and the Borg Queen was enveloped in a terrible darkness that even her augmented senses could not penetrate.