Vale snapped out orders. "Tuvok, she needs you! Rager, we need a medic. Keru, tell Ree to check on all psi-sensitive personnel immediately."

The world around Troi seemed to fade behind a wall of anguished keening and wordless, angry roars of noise. It was all coming from the Borg, but they had none of the focused malice or icy detachment that had marked their previous encounters with the Federation. There was only tragic lamentation and sullen fury, emotional aftershocks of a shattered culture of slavery.

Then a comforting thought broke through the bedlam, and Troi became aware of warm fingertips against her temple and cheek. My mind to your mind, Tuvok projected, easily surmounting her crumbled psychic barriers. My strength becomes your strength. My calm becomes your calm. Our thoughts are fusing. Our memories are merging. We are united. We are one.

She opened her eyes and saw t.i.tan's bridge clearly. Everyone, it seemed, was watching her and Tuvok, who hovered on the edge of her vision, though he was foremost in her thoughts. Troi still sensed the mental turbulence of the millions of distressed souls in the Borg armada who were crying out for help, but the mind-meld with Tuvok had given her the strength to restore her telepathic barriers and recover her composure. She saw in Tuvok's mind that the meld had proved fortuitous for him as well; his own control also had faltered from the shock.

Inside the meld, he asked, Are you all right, Counselor?

Yes, Tuvok. Thank you.

The crew's attention was pulled away from Troi and Tuvok as Keru pointed at the main viewer and shouted, "Look!"

On the center screen, the Caeliar metropolis of Axion began to shine with an unearthly glow. It grew brighter in a rapid flash, like a star building up to a supernova, yet Troi found something about its penetrating white radiance comforting.

What she saw next was more than just a turning point in history. It was the end of an era and the dawn of another.

It was a moment too incredible to be coincidence.

It was a moment of destiny.

A trillion pairs of eyes bore witness.

It was a vision, a phantasm sprung fully formed from the void, a revelation of what had been and what was to come. The former Queen was no more, laid low, made common, deposed. In her place had risen a hue and cry of inconsolable sorrow.

A billion mothers awoke from the Collective's iron bondage to find their children riven from them. Billions of children opened their eyes to find their parents gone forever, along with worlds they could barely remember. Spouses, lovers, friends, and comrades sought one another through the gestalt and found few of their numbers still living. Billions of souls were alone.

There were no rich or poor. No one was famous, powerful, or privileged. There were simply those who had awakened. Liberated from the cold grip of the machine, they searched for the keys to their lost ident.i.ties. Then they found them, and the gestalt sang with a trillion names reclaimed from the fog, revealed by the blaze of light piercing the gloom.

Every mind touched by the gestalt looked to the source.

Where once a dark tyrant had reigned, a bright and dazzling queen now rose like the dawn, bringing illumination and comfort. Unfettered by the bonds of gravity, she soared freely, bursting with light, a splendor among shadows, exorcising six thousand years of night in a single moment of ineffable beauty.

The harsh chord of the Collective yielded to the harmony of the gestalt. Then there was no more pain, no more rancor, and no more sorrow, for those things had pa.s.sed away, leaving only the possibilities of the present and the promises of the future.

A living death was conquered, and for a trillion souls who had dwelled in night, it would never again hold dominion.

We are the Caeliar.

Riker kneeled beside Captain Picard and kept one hand on his friend's back and the other in a firm but gentle grip on his arm. Captain Dax was on the other side of the Enterprise's captain, in a pose that mirrored Riker's. It was Riker's suspicion that Dax was just as uncertain as he was about how to react to Captain Picard's inconsolable emotional collapse.

Picard was on all fours, doubled over, face almost touching the carpeting of the bridge, hyperventilating and sobbing. Then he stopped with a sharp intake of air, and he clawed at the deck for several seconds before bunching his hands into fists under his chin. His body quaked as if he'd just come in from the cold.

As desperately as Riker wanted to defend Picard's pride by concealing this display from the rest of the bridge crew, he knew that it would be even more damaging for them to see their captain carried off the bridge. In any event, this wasn't Riker's ship, and it wasn't his call to make, it was Worf's. Until the XO said otherwise, Picard would remain where he was.

Choudhury looked up from the tactical console and pointed at the main viewer as she shouted, "Something's happening!"

Axion had flared like a supernova, flooding the screen with light and all but bleaching the solid spherical formation of Borg hulls of their details. Then the armada of Borg ships-every cube, probe, and sphere-cracked open and bled light. Intense white radiance poured from every fractured vessel. In a flash, the Enterprise went from being huddled in a pit of starless metal darkness to dwelling in a heart of pure light.

As Riker, Dax, and the bridge crew watched, the mult.i.tude of imposing black ships imploded. Vast sections of every ship were sucked inward, and delicate spines of brilliant, gleaming metal jutted out from their cores, reaching in every direction. Within seconds, the Borg vessels had all become incandescent spheres surrounded by dense formations of long spikes. Squinting against the ships' blinding glare, Riker mused that they looked like ma.s.sive sea urchins cast from flawless silver.

Picard's breathing steadied, and he looked up through tearstained eyes, first at Dax and then at Riker. In a knowing whisper, he said, "Everything's changed."

Then he turned his gaze to the image on the main screen. He stared in wonder, taking it all in...and then, ever so slowly and by infinitely cautious degrees, Picard cracked a smile.

"Everything's changed," he repeated.

And then he laughed. Not like someone amused by a joke or given over to the mirth of madness; he let out the triumphant, joyous gales of a man tasting freedom after living in chains.

Riker threw an amused, wary look at Dax.

She shrugged. "As long as he's happy," she said.

Of the fifty million Caeliar bonded through the gestalt, only Inyx was willing to do the unthinkable. He dissolved the last of Sedin's corrupted essence, condemning the last of her residual charge into the gestalt at large and returning her, in a poetic and somewhat entropic fashion, to the home she had unknowingly sought for six millennia, with trillions of innocent beings yoked to her unconscious purpose.

It is finished, Inyx declared, overcome with shame for his deed, sorrow for his friend, and relief for the end of her pain.

The gestalt empathically echoed his agonies, and from Ordemo Nordal, he felt the blessing of absolution. There was no other way, Ordemo said. It was too late to save her.

Then it was time to open themselves to the sentient minds they had set free, which they welcomed into the gestalt. It was a decision motivated partly by mercy; after all that Sedin's victims had endured, in light of all they had lost, the Quorum concurred that the gestalt had an obligation to alleviate their suffering and offer them a safe haven, a new beginning.

A more honest accounting of the situation demanded that the Caeliar admit the truth, however: They needed the emanc.i.p.ated drones as much as the drones needed them.

Hernandez had persuaded the gestalt to aid her by appealing to its own sense of self-interest. Standing before them only a short time earlier, she had argued her point with pa.s.sion.

"Your obsession with privacy is killing you," she'd said. "You made these catom bodies of yours, and you figured you'd live forever in your invulnerable cities, on your invisible planet. You never thought about what would happen if you had to procreate. It never occurred to you that your whole world could get shot out from under you and take ninety-eight percent of your people with it. Well, it did. And the law of averages says this won't be the last time something bad happens to you.

"How many more losses can you take and still be a civilization? What if another accident happens? Or a new, stronger enemy finds you? The Cataclysm nearly exterminated you. Haven't you ever stopped to consider that all your efforts on the Great Work will be lost if you die out?

"If you want to explore the universe, you'll need strength, and the best place to find that is in numbers. I don't know if there's any way for you to get back the ability to reproduce, but it's not too late for you to learn how to share. You need to bring non-Caeliar into the gestalt. You need to teach others about the Great Work-before it's too late."

Her proclamation had provoked a schism in the Quorum and sent shockwaves of indignation through the gestalt. The debate had been swift and bitter, but in the end, it had fallen to Ordemo Nordal to persuade the majority that Hernandez was right. It was time to expand the gestalt or accept that it was doomed only to diminish from this moment forward. The Quorum and the gestalt had to choose between evolution and extinction.

In the end, it proved not so difficult a choice, after all.

As the gestalt embraced the freed and bewildered drones in its protection, Inyx appreciated at last how right Hernandez had been. The Caeliar had granted to the Borg all it had sought for millennia: nearly unlimited power, a step closer to perfection, and the secrets of Particle 010. In return, the legions of drones who flocked into the warm sanctuary of the gestalt had given the Caeliar what they had most desperately needed: strength, adaptability, and diversity. In one grand gesture, the Caeliar had become a polyglot society with an immense capacity for incorporating new ideas, new technologies, and new species.

For the Borg, it was the end of aeons of futile searching.

For the Caeliar, it was the end of an age of stagnation.

The lost children had come home. The gestalt felt whole.

Now the Great Work can continue, Inyx announced, initiating the newest members of Caeliar society to its ongoing mission. More important, he added, now the Great Work can evolve.

Jean-Luc Picard was on his feet again. He felt taller than he had in ages. So many emotions were whirling in his mind that he couldn't name them all. Relief and joy were at the forefront of his thoughts, with wonder and grat.i.tude close behind.

The aft turbolift door opened, and Beverly stepped out. She hurried straight to his side. "Worf called me," she said.

She reached up, as if to touch his arm in a gesture of polite and dignified comfort.

Too full of life to settle for that, he embraced her, pulled her close, and pressed his face into the tender s.p.a.ce between her neck and shoulder. He reveled in the sweet scent of her hair, the pliant warmth of her body, the gift of her every breath, the miracle of their child-their son-growing within her.

At first, she seemed caught by surprise, and he understood why. Picard had never been one for public displays of affection, especially not in front of his crew. He no longer cared about that. She was his love, the one he had waited for, the one he had almost let slip away because he had been too timid to follow his heart, too cautious to indulge in hope.

He was done being careful. More than fifty years earlier, it had taken a Nausicaan's blade through his heart to teach him that lesson the first time. It had taken a trip to the edge of annihilation to remind him that life was not only far too short, but also far too beautiful and far too precious to enjoy alone.

"I'm all right, Beverly," he whispered. "We all are." He pulled back just far enough to kiss her forehead and then her vibrant red lips. Parting from her, he looked around the bridge and saw a dozen faces bright with mildly embarra.s.sed smiles. He brightened his countenance to match and said, "Carry on."

Riker and Dax stepped forward to pat his shoulders. Just as Riker was about to say something, he was interrupted by Lieutenant Choudhury. "Captain," she said to Picard. "Incoming hail, sir. It's Captain Hernandez."

"On-screen," Picard said, stepping forward behind the center of the conjoined conn and operations consoles.

Erika Hernandez's girlish features and enormous, unruly mane of sable hair appeared on the main viewer. "Will, Ezri, Jean-Luc, I just wanted to speak to you one last time before we go, to tell you that I'm okay-and to say good-bye."

"Before 'we' go?" Picard said, echoing her. "You mean you and the Caeliar?"

A sly grin tugged at Hernandez's mouth. "You don't need to speak of us as separate ent.i.ties anymore," she said. "I am one of the Caeliar now. In fact, I have been for a long time; I just hadn't been able to really accept it until now."

Riker stepped forward on Picard's left and asked, "Erika, what's happened to the Borg?"

"There are no more Borg," Hernandez said. "Not here, or in the Delta Quadrant, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are only Caeliar." Her wan smirk became a broad smile. "And if you'll excuse us, we have a new mission to begin."

Dax edged forward and said, "What mission?"

"To find and protect cultures of peace and nonviolence-so that perhaps someday in the distant future, the meek really can inherit the universe."

"Good luck," Riker said.

"You, too," Hernandez said, and then the signal ended.

The screen switched back to the view of magnificently glowing, urchin-like Caeliar vessels huddled around the miniature star of Axion. Then, though Picard wouldn't have thought it possible, all of the ships and the Caeliar metropolis flared even more brightly, scrambling the main viewer image into a distorted crackle of white noise. Less than a second later, the light had vanished-and so had Axion and its brilliant new armada.

On the screen, tiny and alone in the cold majesty of the cosmos, were t.i.tan and the Aventine. The rest was silence.

Worf relaxed his shoulders a bit and said to Choudhury, "Cancel Red Alert."

Whoops of jubilation erupted from the other officers around the bridge. Picard and Riker clasped each other's forearm and slapped each other's shoulders. "We did it," Riker said.

"No," Picard said. "Erika did it. We just lived through it." He smiled. "And that's good enough for me."

He and Riker let each other go, and Riker turned to help Dax coax Worf into joining the celebration. Picard fell back into Crusher's arms and treasured the moment. There was a lightness in his spirit, an exuberance and an optimism he hadn't felt since the earliest days of his command of the EnterpriseD.

It took him a moment to put a name to this sublime feeling.

I'm free, he realized. I'm free.

Admirals Akaar and Batanides were pressed against the situation monitors in the Monet Room and surrounded by a clutch of junior officers, all of whom were scrambling to confirm the latest reports from the Enterprise, t.i.tan, and the Aventine.

If the subs.p.a.ce messages from the three starships were true, it would be nothing less than a miracle. It would be one of the most stunning reversals in the history of the Federation.

President Bacco knew she ought to be waiting on the admirals' report with undivided attention, but she was focused on a different spectacle. She and the other civilians in the room had gathered in a tight huddle in front of the painting Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies.

Tucked in a fetal curl on the floor beneath the painting was Seven of Nine.

The statuesque blonde was normally so intimidating-Jas Abrik had described her with the less forgiving adjective "castrating"-that it shocked Bacco to see her like this.

Only minutes earlier, Seven had been conferring with the admirals and a.n.a.lyzing the reaction of the Borg armada to its sudden dislocation across vast reaches of s.p.a.ce. Then, before anyone had realized anything was wrong, Seven had staggered away from the situation consoles, dazed and trembling. Seconds later, she had collapsed to the floor and folded in on herself.

Most of the people in the room had reacted by backing away from Seven, as if she might be transforming back into a drone bent on a.s.similating or a.s.sa.s.sinating them all.

Bacco had dashed from her chair toward the fallen woman, only to be forcibly intercepted by her senior protection agent.

"Ma'am, you should stay back," Wexler had said.

"Stay close, Steve, but get your hands off me."

Wexler let go of Bacco's arms and backed off. "Sorry, Madam President." She'd continued past him to Seven's side, and he had fallen in right behind her. His presence had seemed to rea.s.sure the others, who had slowly regrouped in a clutch around Seven.

Now Seven lay on her left side, with her arms wrapped around her head, unable or unwilling to respond to the gentle queries from Bacco and the others.

Piniero asked Seven, "Can you hear us?"

No answer.

"I think she's hyperventilating," Abrik said.

Secretary Iliop said, "Maybe she's having a seizure."