"You didn't," she said. "I just woke up. Don't know why."

Jean-Luc nodded once and looked back at the flute. He pulled the ta.s.sel cord taut with one hand and placed the instrument back into its custom-cut indentation on the foam pad, taking care to lay the silken thread parallel to the metal body of the flute. Then he closed the lid gently, picked up the box, stood, and carried it to a nearby shelf. He bore it as if it was a holy relic. Setting the box beside some leather-bound volumes of cla.s.sic works, Jean-Luc was somber, like a man moving with great care because he might be doing everything for the last time. Crusher found the deliberateness of his manner worrying.

"You look exhausted," she said. "Are you coming to bed?"

He sighed. "To what end? I can't let myself sleep. Not with the Collective waiting for my guard to fall."

"I could prescribe a sleep aid that would-"

"No," Jean-Luc said. "No drugs. I have to be ready."

She stepped beside him and put her hands on his shoulder. "How ready will you be if you don't sleep?"

"Worf said the same thing." His eyes became distant, disengaged from the moment. "Neither of you can hear them, not the way I do." He frowned. "I can't sleep. Not now."

Crusher let him shrug off her hands. She didn't take it personally. Instead, she walked toward the replicator. "All right," she said. "If you're not sleeping, neither am I. Computer, lights one-half."

"Beverly," he said in protest as the room brightened.

"Shush." She stopped in front of the replicator. "Two peppermint herbal teas, hot." A singsong whine filled the room; two delicate porcelain cups took shape in a spiral of glowing matter inside the replicator nook. When the sequence ended, Crusher lifted the cups and carried them back to Jean-Luc. She offered him one.

"I'm not thirsty," he said.

"It'll soothe your nerves," she countered, but still he made no move to accept the tea. She set the cup down on an end table beside the sofa. "When was the last time you ate?"

He took a few steps into the middle of the room and gazed out the window at the pa.s.sing streaks of starlight. "I don't recall," he said. Then he added, "Breakfast, I think."

"Jean-Luc, you have to make time to take care of-"

"Beverly," he said. There was a deadness in his voice. Crusher had heard it before, in combat veterans suffering from shock. "In the past twenty-four hours, I've seen two worlds destroyed. Billions of lives, each one unique and irreplaceable, all extinguished." He turned to face her. "And it's only just started. Something terrible is coming, I can feel it. Watching Korvat burn was like seeing an omen."

She inched closer to him. "An omen? Of what? A disaster?"

His jaw trembled. "An apocalypse."

Closer now, she took his hands, tried to anchor him, keep him from being swept away by the undertow of his fears. "You don't know that," she said. "The worst of it might be over."

"No, Beverly. It's not." His voice fell to a whisper, as if he feared eavesdroppers. "The worst is still out there, waiting to fall, like a hammer in the dark." She watched his eyes glisten with tears as he freed his right hand and placed it softly against her cheek. "We're out of our depth, now."

"I can't believe that," she said. "I won't. Starfleet's destroyed six Borg cubes in the last few weeks, and five more today. We can stop them."

"And what have we lost in the bargain?" He lowered his hand from her face, and his tone became harder. "More than a dozen ships of the line. Three major starbases. Four worlds. Worlds, Beverly! Billions of lives." Pacing away from her, he continued, "I've read Kathryn Janeway's reports from her years in the Delta Quadrant. Her encounters with the Borg. They have thousands of ships." He stopped near the replicator and turned back to face Crusher. "They control vast regions of s.p.a.ce, have almost unlimited resources at their command. Beverly, the Collective dwarfs the Federation. They're gearing up to fight a war of attrition. That's a war we can't win. We just don't have the numbers. Not enough ships, not enough people. Not enough worlds." His voice deadened again. "We can't win."

Crusher crossed the room and stood in front of him. He looked up at her with a vacant, fearful expression.

She slapped his face.

The smack was sharp and loud against the quiet hum of the engines and made contact with enough force to knock Jean-Luc back half a step and leave her palm stinging. She fixed her husband with a feral glare. "Snap out of it, Jean-Luc! The man I married is a starship captain. He doesn't declare defeat when he's still fighting the war."

To her surprise, he smiled. Almost laughed. "You don't think I'm the man you married?"

"The Jean-Luc Picard I know would never talk this way."

His smile soured. "'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain mult.i.tudes.'"

"Don't quote Whitman at me. You don't even like Whitman." She sighed. "Do you want to know what I've always liked about you, right from the very first time we met?"

"Tell me," he said sincerely.

"Your faith that there was more good than bad to be found in the universe. I heard you once tell Jack on the Stargazer, 'That's why we do this-it's what makes going to the stars worthwhile.'"

Jean-Luc ma.s.saged his reddened cheek. "Perhaps I was wrong," he said. "Those are the beliefs of a young man. A man who hasn't felt the harsh embrace of cruel machines." He collapsed on the sofa. Crusher sat down beside him. "Words will never capture the horror of losing myself that way, Beverly. I can't describe what it's like to be erased. Absorbed. To have everything I am become lost inside a force untouched by love or joy or sorrow. To know that it's stronger than I am."

"That's where you're wrong, Jean-Luc," she said. "It's not stronger than you. It's not stronger than us." She grasped his hand and lifted it, moved it onto her belly, above her womb. "We'll survive as long as we have hope," she said, trying to project her shaken optimism onto him, hoping he would reinforce it with some small gesture, however minor. "As long as we don't let them take that from us, we can still fight. And they can't take it if we don't let them." She touched his face as tears rolled from her eyes. "Don't let them."

His free hand closed tenderly around hers. "I won't," he said, but some part of her knew that he was lying. He was clinging to hope for her sake, but she felt it slipping from him, as the Borg drove it from him by degrees.

"Don't let them," she said.

15.

Federation President Nanietta Bacco led a procession out of her chief of staff's office on the fourteenth floor of the Palais de la Concorde. "Don't tell me there aren't any ships available, Iliop," Bacco snapped at her secretary of transportation. "Your job is making ships available."

As soon as she stepped through the door, a phalanx of four civilian security guards fell into step around her. Iliop-a tall Berellian man whose spectacles, mussed hair, and ill-fitting toga made Bacco think of him as a cross between an absentminded professor and a Roman senator-lingered half a step farther behind her as he followed her out of the office. "Madam President, my mandate was to restore the avenues of commerce and normal-"

"We're way past 'normal,' Ili," said Esperanza Piniero, the president's chief of staff, who was the next person to exit the office. "Here's your new mandate: Get those twenty-nine thousand survivors off Korvat in the next three days." The Berellian opened his mouth to argue, and Piniero cut him off. "Get it done, Ili." He nodded and slipped away down a side corridor as Safranski, the Rigellian secretary of the exterior, and Raisa Shostakova, the secretary of defense, followed Bacco and Piniero from the office and down a central hallway to the turbolifts.

"Korvat's the least of our worries, Madam President," said Shostakova. "FNS is whipping up a panic with images of the attack on Barolia."

"The Borg are making the panic, Raisa," Bacco said. "The media just report it. Besides, corralling the media is Jorel's problem." To Safranski she said, "Any word on the summit?"

The Rigellian replied, "No."

As ever, his brevity bordered on the pa.s.sive-aggressive and added frown lines to Bacco's brow. "Why not?"

"No one's taking our calls."

"Not good enough," Bacco said. "Keep trying."

Shostakova shouldered her way past Safranski-not an easy feat for the squat, solidly built human woman from the high-gravity colony planet known as Pangea. "We've got an antimatter problem," she announced as Bacco turned a sharp corner.

Piniero replied for Bacco, "What kind of problem?"

"A shortage," Shostakova said. "We need fuel for the Third Fleet and the reserves are tapped out."

The chief of staff pulled a personal comm from her jacket pocket, flipped it open, and pressed it to her ear. "Ashante," she said, addressing one of her four deputy chiefs of staff. "We need an executive order authorizing Starfleet to commandeer civilian fuel resources, on the double. Work up a draft with Dogayn and have it in the Monet Room in thirty minutes." She slapped the device closed and tucked it back into her pocket in a fast, well-practiced motion.

The group pa.s.sed through a set of frosted double doors into a comfortably furnished reception area. Its honey-hued wood paneling and warm lighting cast a pleasant glow over the off-white carpet, which was adorned by a pale blue outline of the Federation emblem. Long sofas and a few armchairs surrounded a C-shaped formation of coffee tables.

Standing between them and the bank of turbolifts was a presence as austere as the surroundings were relaxed. Shoulder-length gray hair framed his proud countenance, and the pristine blacks and grays of his Starfleet uniform flattered his tall, heavily muscled frame. He nodded to Bacco, who strode ahead of her security detail, hand outstretched to greet him.

"Admiral," she said, shaking the hand of Leonard James Akaar, the official liaison between Starfleet and the Office of the Federation President. "Any good news to report?"

He pressed his lips together, making his chiseled features appear even more stern. "I am afraid not, Madam President."

She frowned. "Why should you be any different?"

The doors of a large turbolift gasped open a few meters away. A burly Zibalian man from Bacco's security detail stepped inside, made a quick scan with a handheld device, and motioned everyone inside. Bacco entered and moved to the back of the turbolift. Akaar, Piniero, Shostakova, Safranski, and the other three security men followed close behind. The doors hissed shut. The senior agent on the detail, an ex-Starfleet officer named Steven Wexler, issued the turbolift command with a whisper via his subaural implant. The lift began a swift descent.

Bacco said to Akaar, "Give me the bad news, Admiral."

"We've lost three critical starbases near the tri-border," Akaar said in his rich rumble of a voice, referring to the region of s.p.a.ce where the territories of the Federation, the Romulan Star Empire, and the Klingon Empire collided. "In the past hour, Epsilon Outposts 10 and 11 have gone dark. We're proceeding on the a.s.sumption that they've been destroyed."

"What about Khitomer?" asked Shostakova. "What went right at Khitomer?"

Akaar directed his reply to the diminutive defense secretary. "The Starship Ranger used phase-inversion technology to penetrate the Borg's shields and sacrificed itself as a single, ma.s.sive warhead to vaporize the cube."

Shostakova recoiled, shut her eyes, and inhaled sharply, almost as if by reflex. Safranski, unfazed by the report, replied curtly, "Can we do it again?"

"Too late," Akaar said. "Captain Calhoun tried to sacrifice the Excalibur using the same strategy, but the Borg had already adapted. His chief engineer rigged a salvo of torpedoes with phase-inverters, each set to a different variance. Enough made it through to destroy the cube, but it's safe to a.s.sume the Borg will be ready for that tactic next time."

The doors sighed open, revealing a windowless corridor with soft, indirect lighting. Agent Wexler was the first person out of the turbolift, followed by another agent, an Andorian thaan. They sidestepped clear of the others who were exiting the lift, and remained just ahead of Bacco on her left and right as she led the rest of the group toward the Monet Room.

Bacco said to the admiral, "What's Starfleet doing before there is a next time?"

"The Enterprise is following a lead that may reveal how the Borg are reaching our s.p.a.ce," Akaar said. "We've deployed every available ship to reinforce the Enterprise, but it will take a couple of days before they arrive. Until then, she'll be on her own, out by the Azure Nebula."

From behind Bacco and Akaar, Safranski inquired, "That's near the tri-border, isn't it?"

"It is the tri-border," Akaar replied.

Antic.i.p.ating the president's next order, Safranski said, "I'll have K'mtok and Kalavak summoned to the Palais." Bacco nodded her approval; she expected that she would soon have an urgent need to talk to the Klingon and Romulan amba.s.sadors.

She turned left at an intersection and neared the door to the Monet Room. "Admiral," Shostakova said, "we need an update from Starfleet on its evacuation plan for the core systems in the event of a full-scale Borg invasion."

"We don't have one," Akaar said, and his matter-of-fact tone made Bacco bristle. "If the Borg get past us at Regulus, there will be nothing between them and the core systems. In essence, Madam President, if the Federation had what was once called, in Earth history, a 'doomsday clock,' its hands would now be set at one minute to midnight."

A grim pall settled over the group, which became very quiet as they strode the final few paces to the Monet Room. Agent Wexler stopped just shy of reaching its door, letting President Bacco move past him.

Bacco resolved not to surrender to the paralysis of despair. "All right, Admiral," she said. "If we can't evacuate the core systems, we d.a.m.ned well better find a way to defend them. Which is why I've brought you all down here to meet my new deputy security adviser." She stepped to the door, which slid aside with a soft swish, and she led the group into the Palais's unofficial war room.

On one wall hung an impressionist painting from earth's preunification period, Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies, by Claude Monet. Panoramic viewscreens dominated the other walls. Most of the middle of the dimly lit room was taken up by the long, dark wood conference table, which comfortably seated up to twenty people. The group filed in and spread out to Bacco's left and right on one side of the table.

Standing on the other side were two people. The middle-aged Trill man was her senior security adviser, Jas Abrik. An irascible former Starfleet admiral, he actually had managed the presidential campaign of Bacco's opponent, Fel Pagro, during the special election the previous year. In exchange for his silence on a potentially explosive matter of national security that had emerged during the election, she had appointed him to this key position in her cabinet. He had treated it like a coup.

He didn't seem quite so enthused about his new deputy.

Bacco introduced the statuesque, fair-haired human woman, who had jarring patches of silver machinery grafted to her left hand and temple. "Everyone," said the president, "this is Seven of Nine. She's here to help us stop the Borg."

Struggling bodies and flaring tempers added to the musky heat of the Klingon High Council Chamber. Shouts of "Federation lackey!" were met with angry retorts of "Traitorous petaQ!"

Instead of calving into partisan ranks on either side of the dim, sultry meeting s.p.a.ce, as the councillors normally did, they were a shoving, bustling ma.s.s in the brightly lit center of the room, atop the enormous red-and-white trefoil emblem that adorned the polished, black granite floor.

Elevated above the mob, on a dais at the end of the chamber, Chancellor Martok struck the metal-jacketed end of his ceremonial staff on the stone steps before him. Explosive cracks of noise resounded off the angled walls and high ceiling, to no avail. With his one eye he glared at the disgraceful thrashing and longed for days of honor that had long pa.s.sed into history.

Martok stepped forward and hammered the end of his staff down on one of the marble tiles, harder than before. This time the percussive banging was loud enough to halt the melee and shatter one of the square tiles into dusty, broken chunks. The councillors all set their feral gazes on him.

"This is war!" he boomed. Then his voice turned to gravel. "The hour for debate is over. You stand for the Great Houses of the Empire. It's time you showed our enemies what greatness is!"

The chancellor descended the stairs and prowled forward through the muddled ranks, which parted, disturbing the humid air and creating a current that was rich with the odors of sweat and warnog-tainted breath, and the traditional scents of targ-tallow candles and braziers of sulfur and coal. "Some of you"-he aimed a lacerating stare at Kopek, his longtime bitter political rival-"say this is not our war. That it's an internal matter for the Federation. Use our strength for conquest, you say, and let the Federation defend itself." He spat on the floor and scowled at Qolka and Tovoj, who in recent months had become vocal backers of Kopek's verbal sabotages. "I never want to hear that excuse again." He continued stalking through the knot of councillors, making eye contact with each one as he pa.s.sed-with Mortran and Grevaq, Krozek and Merik. "Don't pretend you haven't heard the news from Khitomer," Martok growled. "The Borg came gunning for us. It was no accident. No coincidence."

On his way back to the dais steps, he pa.s.sed Kryan, the youngest member of the Council. Behind him, and closest to the dais, were Martok's three staunchest allies in the chamber: K'mpar, Hegron, and Korvog. He nodded to them, ascended the steps, and turned to face the a.s.sembled councillors en ma.s.se.

"When the Borg came to destroy one of our worlds, our allies bled for us. They died defending us. Three Federation starships sacrificed themselves for Khitomer, a colony world of less than half a million Klingons. Do you remember the last time that happened? I do." He let the implication sink in before he pointed at his nemesis, Kopek. "And so do you." Over his opponents' shamed silence, Martok said simply, "Narendra III."

Grunts of acknowledgment came back to Martok in reply.

He pressed on, "Blood shed for a friend is sacred, a debt of honor. And if you won't stand and fight beside a friend in blood, then you are not a Klingon. You are not a warrior. Run home to your beds and hide, I have no use for you! I won't die in the company of such petaQ'pu. The sons of our sons will sing of these battles. Time will erase our sins and fade our scars, but our names will live on in songs of honor.

"The Borg are coming, my brothers. Stand and fight beside me now, and let us make warriors born in ages to come curse Fek'lhr that they were not here to share our glory!"

His partisans in the chamber roared the loudest, but even Kopek's allies joined the chanting war cries, their bloodl.u.s.t inflamed with rhetoric. Martok would never admit it aloud, but he suspected that a full-scale conflict with the Borg might be enough to push the Empire past its breaking point. It did not matter; better to die in the struggle than to surrender. As long as he and his people perished with honor and not as jeghpu'wI', he would not consider it a defeat.

Unity in the Council would be critical to the war effort, Martok knew. He saw Kopek step forward, away from the others. Martok took one step down to meet him, maintaining his one-up power position for its symbolic and psychological advantages. Making eye contact with his adversary, he said, "Choose, Kopek."

He saw that the choice was galling for Kopek, and that pleased him. Despite years of political maneuvering, Martok had never been able to halt Kopek's dirty tricks. It had taken a Borg invasion to outflank the ruthless yIntagh. Where scheming and coercion had failed, circ.u.mstance had prevailed.

With a clenched jaw and bitter grimace, Kopek extended his open right hand to Martok, who took it. "Qapla', Chancellor." A feral gleam shone in his eyes as he released Martok's hand, turned, and declared with a raised fist, "To war!"

The councillors roared their approval, and Martok flashed a broad, jagged grin. "It is a good day to die...for the Borg."

Lieutenant Commander Tom Paris sat alone in his quarters aboard the U.S.S. Voyager and picked lethargically at his dinner. He had ordered a platter of deep-fried clams with a side salad of spinach and sliced tomatoes. The clams were rubbery and tough, but he knew that was because he had let them sit too long and get cold. Can't blame the replicator for that, he brooded.

More troubling to his palate was that the clams seemed to have no flavor. They were just a texture without a taste. He felt the same way about the salad. The leaves were the perfect color and crispness, but they were an empty crunch. The grape tomatoes felt right as his teeth cut through them, but they delivered none of the sweetness that he'd expected.

Can't blame that on the replicator, either.

He didn't figure there was anything wrong with the food itself. The problem was him. Nothing had been right since B'Elanna had left and taken Miral with her.

Food no longer tasted good. Synthehol had no effect. Sleep brought no rest, only dreams of loss and regret.

It had been several months since he'd last seen his wife and daughter. He had wondered if B'Elanna would return for Kathryn Janeway's memorial service. Captain Chakotay had been there, of course, along with Seven, and just about everyone else who had served with Janeway on Voyager-with the exception, of course, of Tuvok, who by that point was already hurtling away into sectors unknown as the new second officer of the U.S.S. t.i.tan under Captain Riker.