"No," Inyx said. "Most likely we would have shifted you to another galaxy, one relatively devoid of sentient forms but still capable of sustaining your lives." As the disk glided around a long, shallow curve, he continued, "For many of your millennia, we have lived in seclusion. In recent centuries, as the local forms began traveling the stars, we masked our power signatures and obstructed scans of our world, to preserve our privacy. Clearly, however, our efforts have been ineffective."

Major Foyle snapped, "So you were going to fling us into another galaxy?" He tried to step toward Inyx and was restrained by Hernandez's hand on his chest as he continued, "Why not just send us back to Earth?"

"Preventing you from coming here would only have aroused your interest," Inyx said. "Your curiosity would have compelled your inevitable return, and others would have followed. We could not permit this. Allowing you to depart now that you have been here would pose the same threat. For this reason, we cannot allow you to transmit any signals back to your people."

Seething, Foyle asked, "Then why don't you just kill us?"

"We will not destroy sentient life," Inyx said. "But we will protect our privacy. Only the fact that you could not reveal your discovery of our world enabled me to pet.i.tion the Quorum for leniency on your behalf."

The hoverdisk stopped in front of a tower and made a vertical ascent at a dizzying speed. A touch of vertigo left Hernandez unsteady on her feet, and Fletcher and Foyle each gripped one of her arms for a moment to steady her. Then the disk edged forward and docked at a rooftop garden that led to a sprawling interior s.p.a.ce of open floors, skylights, and walls of windows offering panoramic views.

Inyx stepped off the disk and ushered the landing party into the penthouse suite with a wave of his disconcertingly long arm and rippling fingers. "I hope that you find your new accommodations satisfactory," he said. "We have interfaced with your ship's computer to acquaint ourselves with your nutritional requirements and other biological needs. This s.p.a.ce has been configured accordingly."

"Nicest jail cell I've ever seen," Fletcher said.

"Do not think of yourselves as prisoners," counseled Inyx.

Hernandez fixed him with an icy stare. "What are we, then?"

"Honored guests," Inyx said. "With restrictions."

She had to know. "And my ship?"

"It will not be harmed," Inyx said. "But, like yourselves, it can never again leave Erigol."

2381.

11.

"The Borg cube is approaching Korvat," Lieutenant Choudhury announced to the rest of the Enterprise's bridge crew.

Picard felt the tangible malevolence of the Collective in his gut, and he heard its soulless voice whispering at the gate of his thoughts as his ship hurtled at high warp toward another hostile encounter. "Time to intercept?"

From the tactical station, Choudhury said, "Six minutes."

Against the Borg, Picard brooded, six minutes can be an eternity. "Status of the planet's defenses?"

Kadohata answered as she reviewed data on the operations console. "Orbital platforms charging, surface batteries online. Gibraltar and Leonov are moving to engage."

Watching the relayed tactical data scroll across his left-side command screen, Picard feared for the two Federation starships defending Korvat. Even though the Gibraltar was a Sovereign-cla.s.s vessel like the Enterprise, and the Alexey Leonov was a hardy Defiant-cla.s.s escort, neither was armed with transphasic torpedoes. Without that advantage, their part in the coming battle might prove tragically short-lived.

To Picard's right, Worf shifted with visible discomfort in the first officer's chair. The Klingon had always preferred to be on his feet during times of battle. Now, however, his place was here, beside Picard, coordinating the command of the ship's vast resources and hundreds of personnel.

"Number One, what's our status?"

Worf didn't need to look at his console as he answered. "Shield modifications active, Captain. All weapons ready."

"Take us to battle stations," Picard said.

"Aye, sir," Worf said, and he acted without delay. He triggered the Red Alert klaxon, which wailed once shipwide. Then he opened a shipwide comm channel. "Attention all decks, this is the XO. All hands to battle stations. This is not an exercise. Bridge out." He closed the channel and continued issuing orders in rapid succession around the bridge-raising shields, arming weapons, and preemptively deploying damage-control teams.

In the midst of his crew's preparations for combat, Picard was paralyzed in his chair, his face slack, his thoughts erased like scratches on a beach washed smooth by a rising tide. Control, composure, and focus all vanished as the voice of the Collective spoke to him, its malice and contempt undiluted by the gulf of empty s.p.a.ce it had bridged to touch his mind. All its hatred for him was expressed in a single word, one that always made him recoil in disgust, as if from an unspeakable obscenity.

Locutus.

The memory from which he could never hide. The atrocity he could never forget. It had been fifteen years since the Borg had first a.s.similated him and appointed him to speak on their behalf to humanity and the Federation. For a brief time he had been their unwilling intermediary, their instrument of conquest and intimidation. They had stolen his knowledge and experience and used them against his friends and fellow Starfleet officers; as a result, thirty-nine starships were destroyed and more than eleven thousand people were slaughtered at Wolf 359.

Picard's former first officer, Will Riker, along with the senior officers of the EnterpriseD, had liberated him less than a day after he had been taken. The physical wounds of his brief a.s.similation had healed soon thereafter, but the true scars of that horrible violation had lingered ever since, like a shadow on his psyche-a shadow with a name. Locutus.

It revolted him to hear the Collective in the privacy of his thoughts; he despised it as much for what it had done to him as for what it was. There was no shutting it out, no matter how hard he tried. Some part of that horrid, soul-devouring nightmare had left its imprint in his memory, its mark upon his essential nature, and now it could compel Picard's attention whenever it so desired.

One voice stood apart from the hive mind: the Queen. Once she had tried to seduce him. Now her voice was dark with spite.

The hour for humanity's a.s.similation is past, Locutus. The time has come for you and your kind to be exterminated.

He refused to respond to her in thought or deed. Instead, he took advantage of his momentary intimacy with the Collective to eavesdrop on its secrets, to use its intrusions to his own advantage against his old adversary. It seemed fitting to him that, in keeping with the Borg's culture of interdependency, his perpetual weak spot should be its Achilles' heel, as well. Eight years earlier, during the Battle of Sector 001, he had sussed out a vulnerability in the design of the Borg's ubiquitous cube-shaped vessels. To stop a gigantic Borg cube months earlier, he had risked letting himself become Locutus once again, to restore his link to the Collective and gain access to its secrets.

He hoped to uncover another such tactical advantage now, in the crucial moments before the battle.

A dark revelation unfolded in his mind's eye.

The Collective's agenda-in its alacrity, aggression, and scope-surpa.s.sed his worst fears. Aghast, he retreated from the vision, into the redoubt of his own thoughts. Denial was the natural response, but he knew better than to indulge it; there were no lies within the Collective, only certainties.

A gentle shaking dispelled the susurrating group voice of the Collective from his thoughts, and he blinked once to reorient himself. He was still seated in his chair on the bridge; Worf leaned down beside him, with one large hand on Picard's shoulder. He asked, "Are you all right, Captain?"

"No," Picard said, his emotions numbed from contact with the Collective. He stood, took a step forward, and said in a low voice, "We've underestimated them." Then he turned to face Worf and Lieutenant Choudhury. "We've made a terrible mistake."

Choudhury looked taken aback by the captain's words. "Well," she said with a glance at the image of Korvat on the main viewer, "at least we were right about their next target."

Picard felt his countenance harden with anger and regret. "No," he said. "We weren't." He faced the main viewscreen and continued, "Korvat isn't the target, it's a target-one of five the Borg are about to attack in unison. Commander Kadohata: Send code-one alerts to Khitomer and Starbases 234, 157, and 343."

"Aye, sir," Kadohata replied, her hands already translating his order into action on her console.

"Captain," Worf said. "There might still be time to send the new torpedo designs to the starbases."

"We can't," Picard said, his frustration churning bile into his throat. "Admiral Nechayev's orders were quite specific." His hands curled into fists. "All we can do is fight the battle in front of us."

Dropping his voice, Worf protested, "Sir, if the starbases try to fight the Borg without transphasic torpedoes-"

"It's too late," Picard said, as another flash from the Collective a.s.saulted him with images of carnage. "It's begun."

"They're locking weapons again, Commander! What do we do?"

Smoke and fumes filled the bridge of the U.S.S. Ranger. Voices crying out for orders or for help buffeted the ship's first officer, Commander Jennifer Nero, as she kneeled beside the fallen Captain Pachal and searched in vain for his pulse.

Another blast from the Borg cube rocked the Nebula-cla.s.s starship hard to port, hurling Nero's crewmates toward the bulkhead and sprawling her atop the burned and bloodstained body of the captain. She pushed herself off him and struggled to her feet. "Schultheiss, th'Fairoh, get back to your posts!"

As the shaken human woman and timorous Andorian thaan scrambled back to their seats at the ops and conn consoles, Nero moved to take the center seat. She sat down and swept stray wisps of her red hair back behind her ears. "Ankiel," she said, looking over at the sinewy, crew-cut tactical officer, "where are the Constant and the Arimathea?"

"Coming up behind the Borg," replied Ankiel, whose eyes stayed on his console. "They're firing." He shook his head. "No effect. The Borg's shields are adapting too fast."

"Let's see if we can adapt faster," Nero said. "Bridge to main engineering."

"Braden here," answered the chief engineer over the comm.

Nero crossed her fingers. "Is the captain's plan ready?"

"Almost," Braden said. "One minute till we arm the MPI."

Unable to remain seated, Nero got up and strode forward. "Th'Fairoh, overtake the Borg cube. Schultheiss, transfer weapons power to the warp drive. Ankiel, stand by to activate the MPI on my command."

The MPI-molecular phase inverter-wasn't a device that had seen much use on the Ranger. On the rare occasions when it had been put into service, it had been used to restore phase-shifted matter to the normal s.p.a.ce-time continuum. Typically, objects were knocked a few millicochranes out of phase by transporter mishaps or by exposure to severely miscalibrated warp fields. It had taken the imagination and rare technological expertise of the Ranger's now-slain commanding officer, Peter Pachal, to conceive of a new use for this obscure piece of technology: They would employ it to turn their ship into an unstoppable missile with catastrophic destructive potential.

In the end, it would be all about timing-intercepting the Borg cube before it got too close to Khitomer, and activating the MPI late enough in the attack that the Borg wouldn't have time to adapt to the tactic and counteract it.

Ankiel called out, "The Constant's been hit!"

Nero watched the main viewer as lifeboats ejected from the Akira-cla.s.s vessel like spores from a dandelion. A fiery conflagration erupted from the ship's aft section and broke the ship into wreckage before consuming it in a blinding flash. The explosion was vast, and in seconds it swallowed the loose cloud of lifeboats, none of which emerged from its burning embrace. Then the firestorm pa.s.sed below the bottom edge of the viewer, left behind as the Ranger continued its desperate pursuit of the Borg ship speeding toward Khitomer.

Between the Ranger and the Borg was the Arimathea, which continued to harry the Borg with woefully ineffective phaser fire and steady photon-torpedo barrages.

"Schultheiss," Nero said, "tell the Arimathea to break off before they-" She was cut off by the sight of emerald-hued beams from the Borg vessel crisscrossing the Centaur-cla.s.s cruiser and obliterating it in a flash that would spread its wreckage across millions of cubic kilometers as its warp field collapsed.

Grim silence fell over the Ranger's bridge crew. It's up to us, now, Nero realized. "Bridge to engineering, report."

"Arming the MPI now," Braden said. "Make sure we keep her steady-we'll be getting a pretty big boost in speed once we slip out of phase."

"Noted," said Nero. "Schultheiss, stand by to trigger the MPI. Mister Ankiel, arm all quantum warheads and release the log buoy. Th'Fairoh, lay in a ramming trajectory for the Borg cube and prepare to increase speed to maximum warp."

"Trigger ready," Schultheiss replied. "At helm's command."

From the tactical console, Ankiel said simply, "Armed." Nero forced herself not to dwell on the fact that the Ranger's sizable inventory of quantum torpedo warheads had been linked to the ship's antimatter fuel pods. If the captain's plan worked, and they slipped inside the Borg's defense screens long enough to detonate the warheads-and themselves-even the Borg's amazing regenerative abilities would be unable to withstand total, instantaneous subatomic annihilation.

She was about to give the order to proceed with the final attack when she eyed the conn and saw that the intercept course had not been locked in. "Th'Fairoh," she said, "lay in the course. It's time."

The wiry young Andorian sat with his blue hands side by side in his lap and stared at his console. He made slow, almost imperceptible swivels of his head, side to side, the movement so fluid that it didn't impart the slightest quiver to his antennae. "No," he muttered, his voice below a whisper.

Nero spoke in sharper tones this time. "Mister th'Fairoh, I gave you an order. Lock in the course and prepare to engage."

Her directive made his head tremble in nervous microturns, and his hands curled closed, with his fingernails biting into his palms. "No," he repeated. "I can't." He looked up at her, his countenance fearful and his eyes wide. "This is pointless! Don't you get it? It's a lost cause. We can't beat them! They'll just keep coming, over and over. Why throw our lives away? What good will stopping one Borg ship do?" Growing more hysterical, he continued, "We don't even know if this plan'll work! The captain's already dead, we've lost a third of the crew, and Khitomer's not even a Federation planet! What are we still doing here? We have to break off, we have to run-"

The Andorian thaan scrambled up from his seat. Nero yelled, "Stay at your post!" It didn't stop him. She stepped forward to restrain him, to force him back into his chair at the conn, but she underestimated the strength advantage that panic had given him. He tried to push past her, and it was a struggle to hold him back. "Dammit, th'Fairoh! Sit dow-" His fist caught her in the chin and knocked her backward onto the deck.

The angry screech of a phaser was loud enough to be painful in the confines of the bridge. Nero watched as the blazing orange beam slammed into th'Fairoh's torso and held him paralyzed, twitching in front of the energy stream like a puppet on a taut wire. Then the beam ceased, and the Andorian collapsed face-first to the deck.

A few meters away, Ankiel stood with his arm outstretched and his sidearm still aimed at the unconscious flight controller. Seconds later he seemed satisfied that th'Fairoh would not be getting up any time soon. He holstered his weapon. "Looks like you'll have to do the honors, Commander," he said.

Nero grabbed the seat of the conn officer's chair and pulled herself up into it. A deep, throbbing pain blossomed in her jaw, and she tasted the salty-metallic tang of blood between her loosened molars. Rather than spit it onto the deck of the bridge, she forced herself to swallow it. Then she coughed once to clear her throat and eyed the controls in front of her.

Entering the first few commands was easy. "Patching in all power," she said, talking herself through the steps to reduce it to the level of mere process and avoid thinking about what it meant. "Intercept trajectory plotted," she said. Making her fingers key in the next action was more difficult. She felt herself resisting the inevitable. Through will alone she entered the order and announced, "Course locked."

Then she froze, her hands hovering above the console.

She stared at the main viewscreen. On it was the image of the Borg cube, accelerating away from them, opening the gap on its way to the historic planet of Khitomer, where the Federation and the Klingon Empire had taken their first, uncertain steps toward detente and, ultimately, alliance. But Khitomer was not merely a political landmark; that lush world was home to a thriving Klingon colony of more than half a million people, all of whom would now live or die based on what the crew of the Starship Ranger did next.

Schultheiss leaned over from the ops console toward Nero. "Commander," she said without raising her voice, "we have to attack in the next twenty seconds, or we won't be able to stop the Borg without causing serious casualties on the planet."

Nero felt tears welling in her eyes as she faced the terrible finality of their situation. She looked around at the other bridge officers, all of whom were looking at her, waiting for the signal to proceed. Her voice faltered slightly as she asked, "Everyone ready?" Heads nodded in unison. She smiled sadly. "It's been an honor serving with you all." Turning back to face the main viewer, she poised her finger above the blinking control pad that would trigger the MPI and accelerate the ship to its rendezvous with the Borg. She paused just long enough to say to Schultheiss, "Thanks, Christine."

"My pleasure," Schultheiss said.

One deep breath in, one last breath out. I only have to be brave for a moment, Nero told herself. She triggered the MPI.

A moment later, it was over.

Governor Talgar stood on the balcony outside his office and watched the sky of Khitomer. Age and political duty had robbed him of the chance to take up arms and meet the Borg in honorable combat, but he refused to be shepherded like some weakling into the secure bunker beneath the administrative complex. When death came for him, he wanted to meet it with a smile.

The colony's regiment of soldiers were defending all the checkpoints that led inside the walled section of Khitomer City, and manning the surface-to-s.p.a.ce artillery units, for whatever good it might do. Talgar had no illusions about the Borg's ability to eradicate his colony and the world on which it stood. Their preparations for war were little more than a formality.

His aide, a tall Defense Force lieutenant named Nazh, lurked just inside the doorway behind him. The younger Klingon's anxiety was palpable and irritating to Talgar, who had long resented being forced to employ the petaQ simply because Nazh was a kinsman of a member of the High Council. Talgar turned and growled at him, "Did you bring it?"

"Yes, sir," Nazh said.

"Then give it to me, yIntagh," Talgar said, reaching out his hand. Nazh pushed a carved-onyx goblet into his grasp, and Talgar lifted it to his lips and guzzled three bitter mouthfuls of warnog, until all that remained in the cup were dregs.

The sky was a blank slate, blue-gray like gunmetal, clear under the noonday sun, unblemished by clouds or air traffic. It seemed so serene, but Talgar knew that a deathblow was coming, a killing stroke that would fall without preamble. The Borg were not n.o.ble, and they neither had nor lacked honor; what they were was decisive and swift. The governor appreciated his enemy's ruthless efficiency for what it was: a weapon.

Inside his office, a shrill buzzing emanated from his desk. He grimaced at the disruption and said to Nazh, "Get that."

His lieutenant walked in quick strides to the desk, silenced the alert, and worked for a few moments at the desktop console. Then he looked up and declared, "Governor, it's from Colonel Nokar. He says you should see this."

Talgar grumbled incoherently out of frustration, turned, and walked back inside to his desk. He brusquely pushed Nazh aside and eyed the data and images on his wide desktop display. Despite having been informed hours earlier by the High Command that there were no Defense Force vessels close enough to reach his world before the Borg attacked, he clung to the hope that a Vor'cha-cla.s.s attack cruiser or two might have defied the Council or the limitations of their own engines to join the fight at the last minute.

Instead, he saw a trio of Federation starships engaged in a futile, running battle with the Borg cube, which did not deviate from its course even as it pummeled their shields and blasted rents in their hulls. Over an audio channel, he heard Colonel Nokar remark with his typical snideness, "Looks like Starfleet's in the mood to lose a few more ships today."

Nazh let out a sardonic harrumph and said, "At least they think Khitomer's worth fighting for."

The governor punched the impudent lieutenant and sent him sprawling backward over a guest chair. "No one asked you." He turned his attention back to his desktop, in time to see the first of the three Starfleet vessels disintegrate under a steady barrage from the black cube. Several seconds later, the second of the three vessels was sliced into fiery debris by the Borg, and the third began to fall steadily behind.

"A valiant effort, friends," Talgar muttered to the diminishing image of the last Starfleet ship as he watched the image of the enemy vessel grow larger. He expected the Federation cruiser to abandon its hopeless pursuit in a few moments, since there appeared to be no way for it to overtake the cube, and no means for it to fight the cube if it did.