"No, Captain."

"The source may be outside sensor range," Worf said. "The signal itself is tightbeam, being directed toward the Enterprise and nowhere else."

"Do what you can, Mr. Data," Picard ordered, frowning. Starfleet had experimented with tightbeam technology, which sent signals through subs.p.a.ce like a laser beam rather than broadcasting them in all directions, but they had never deployed it. Instead, the Federation had chosen to boost the power of their omnidirectional subs.p.a.ce transmitters and to place subs.p.a.ce relay stations throughout known s.p.a.ce. Tightbeam transmissions could have extended the range even further, but they had been considered impractical. For one starship to hail another via a tightbeam transmission, it would have to know the other ship's precise subs.p.a.ce coordinates, an obvious impossibility unless they were already in contact.

But in this timeline...

"Captain," Data said, "I have been able to key the long range sensors to the tightbeam transmissions and obtain some limited information. The ship is of no known type but has a number of characteristics that indicate a Romulan origin."

"Weapons?"

"Photon torpedoes and disruptors."

"Powered up?"

"Under these conditions it is impossible to tell, Captain."

Picard was silent a moment, wondering again why Guinan had absented herself from the bridge so suddenly. Wondering what her "feelings" had been telling her this time.

Or if it had simply been a delayed reaction to the suggestion that her home world might be asked to help engineer its own destruction.

"Mr. Worf," he said abruptly, "open a channel, on screen."

The viewscreen wavered a moment, as if having to adjust itself to properly utilize the incoming signal.

Then, suddenly, the image was crystal clear.

There were two people on the screen, standing on a starship bridge similar to the Romulan bridges Picard was familiar with but smaller, with an even more utilitarian look. In the foreground was a Romulan, sharp-faced with a skullcap of tightly curling gray hair, wearing a uniform that was and yet was not that of a Romulan commander.

In the background, standing just to one side and a meter behind the Romulan, stood a chocolate-skinned woman in a dark floor-length gown and a large, attached, elliptical head covering.

Unless his eyes-or his mind-was playing a vicious trick on him, it was Guinan.

Thirteen.

KIRK OF COURSE was full of questions after seeing what little there was to see in the G.o.ddard's briefing program about the Borg, but Scotty could only shake his head in reply.

"I asked the same questions and more," he explained, "but I got blessed few answers."

No one even knew for certain how the Borg had begun, Scotty went on. A race somewhere in the Delta Quadrant must have, for reasons no one could even guess at, decided to turn themselves into a "collective" of mentally linked cyborgs. What one Borg learned, they all soon knew. And once the collective had been created, apparently its only interest was in expanding. However, instead of simply contacting and trying to work with other races, or even invading or destroying them, they chose to "a.s.similate" them, taking total control of everything-bodies, minds, technologies, resources, entire biospheres, everything. No one-perhaps not even the Borg themselves anymore-had any idea what drove them to continue or what determined their "strategy" or much of anything else. Except that the Borg idea of a perfect universe was a universe that was one hundred percent Borg.

To make matters worse, the Borg apparently had the technology-transwarp conduits-to "jump" the tens of thousands of pa.r.s.ecs from their domain in the Delta Quadrant in a matter of hours or days, but it was rarely used. Slow and steady expansion seemed to be their long-term plan, moving outward inexorably like the event horizon of a black hole that grew by eating every star in its path, except that this black hole ate not stars but civilizations, swallowing them whole and, in effect, digesting them, transforming their billions of individual members into billions of interchangeable cells in the body of the Borg Collective.

Kirk grimaced. "They make the Klingons look downright benevolent by comparison, don't they? All the Klingons do is conquer and plunder. They don't steal your mind. But if the Borg are so h.e.l.l-bent on taking over everyone they run into, why didn't one of them a.s.similate us? They had every chance in the world, but they acted as if they didn't even know we were there."

"'Tis likely they did not. Oh, they can see us well enough, but as long as we don't match what the b.l.o.o.d.y things are programmed to look for, they just don't notice us."

Kirk nodded thoughtfully. "So they run on autopilot, like a bunch of big, high-tech ants. As long as we don't crash into one of their ships or do something stupid that forces them to notice us, they won't bother us. Right?"

"Aye, I'm no expert, but that's the way I understood it."

"Then we likely have all the freedom we need."

"Freedom to do what? If the Borg have wiped out the entire b.l.o.o.d.y Federation, what can- "

"From loose cannon to fatalistic stick-in-the-mud in one easy leap?" Kirk said, shaking his head in mock despair. "Scotty, old friend, if you'd had this att.i.tude back on the old Enterprise, we'd have all been dead a hundred times over. And from what you told me about that little adventure of yours with the Dyson Sphere, that brand spanking new Enterprise of Picard's would be nothing more than a plasma cloud if you hadn't pulled a rabbit out of the Jenolen's hat. Now snap out of it before I'm forced to have the Engineers' Guild revoke your Miracle Worker permit!"

"You have a plan, then, Captain?"

"Of course, Scotty. A starship captain, even one without a starship, always has a plan. It's included in the job description. In any case, who says the Federation has been wiped out? The Enterprise disappears and those two s.p.a.ce-going ant hills show up in its place, and you jump to the worst possible conclusion. But no matter how many worlds have been 'a.s.similated,' there has to be someone out there still on their own. You're certainly not going to tell me that no one ever eludes them or falls through the cracks."

When Scotty didn't argue, Kirk continued. "Once we find a world they haven't gotten around to yet, we talk to people and find out when the cubes showed up. And, if we're lucky, why they showed up. At the very least, we find out about anything unusual that might've happened just before they started showing up, something that Picard and his Enterprise might have been responsible for. And then- " He paused and shrugged.

"Then I guess we play it by ear and hope for the best," he finished with a grin obviously intended, like much of what he'd been saying in the last few minutes, to buck up the troops. "Will that new Bounty of yours hold up to another slingshot maneuver or two?"

"Do you really think- " Scotty began, the worried frown that had never quite gone away still creasing his brow.

"Nothing's a sure thing, Scotty," Kirk said, cutting him off with a wave of his hand, "but I frankly don't see what other choice we have. You certainly can't want us to just throw our hands up and do nothing. I wouldn't think that would have much appeal for you either. Or maybe you have a plan of your own that you haven't told me about?"

When Scotty only shook his head, Kirk went on. "All right, then. We're agreed. Any plan is better than nothing. Now let's see if we can come up with something even better. For a start, fill me in on everything else. For instance, how the devil did you end up in that Klingon bird-of-prey? It's not the same one we used to s.n.a.t.c.h those whales, is it?"

Scotty shook his head. "Not unless someone removed the tanks and put everything back the way it was."

"Then where did you find it? It's not the sort of thing you normally find floating around waiting to be picked up."

"Aye, it's not, and that's not the half of it," Scotty said, going on to explain about the fleeing Narisians and the equally ancient shuttlecraft.

Kirk was frowning thoughtfully by the time Scotty finished. "If I didn't know it was impossible, I'd say it was a setup. It's almost as if someone wanted you to have it."

Scotty suppressed a shiver as Guinan's cryptic smile flashed through his mind. "You could be right," he said, remembering. "I don't see how she could have managed it, but there's a woman on Picard's Enterprise called Guinan, and strange things happen when she's around."

Scotty went on to tell a bemused Kirk about his seventy-five-years-apart meetings with Guinan. He was almost finished when a light started blinking on the control panel and the shuttle dropped out of warp. A moment later the computer's voice announced that the coordinates of the Bounty 2 had been reached.

Kirk briefly eyed the starfield, noticeably dimmed by the dusty presence of the pocket nebula. "It's a little late to ask, Scotty, but you do have something on board that's able to spot a cloaked ship. Right?"

"Aye, I tweaked the G.o.ddard's sensors a wee bit when Picard first gave me the keys, but we shouldn't need to use them," the engineer said, tapping a command into the control panel. "I set the Bounty 2's controls so I can decloak it from here."

But the viewscreen remained empty except for the stars.

Scowling, Scotty tried again.

And again.

"Maybe we should try Plan B," Kirk suggested after the fourth try produced no more evidence of a decloaking bird-of-prey than had the first three.

Scotty swallowed uneasily as he turned to the sensor controls and tapped in the code that would switch in the "tweakings" he had programmed back in the future. The "normal" sensor readings would lose a little of their precision, the way an image seen in infrared isn't as sharp as an image seen in visible light, but anything that was cloaked would become visible, the way that any heat source would become visible, even in total darkness, to an infrared sensor.

The already fuzzy image of the nebula grew even fuzzier, turning the stars beyond it from pinpoints to pin heads. Otherwise, the viewscreen remained blank.

"I don't suppose you have a Plan C, old friend?"

His stomach twitching painfully, Scotty began making further adjustments to the sensors, going well beyond anything that could be called "tweaking." The swirls of the tiny nebula alternately thinned and thickened, completely blocking the stars at one point.

But no matter how many nudges and tweaks he inflicted on the controls, there was no indication that anything was out there other than the nebula and the stars.

The Bounty 2, the increasingly leaden feeling in his stomach told him, had probably accompanied the Enterprise-B into whatever s.p.a.ce-time limbo it and the rest of the Federation now existed in.

If any of it existed at all anymore.

His shoulders slumped, feeling older than he had ever felt, Scotty was starting to turn toward an expectant Kirk when the starfield on the G.o.ddard's viewscreen was suddenly blotted out by the distinctive burst of energy that indicates a ship has dropped out of warp drive.

Another instant, and his eyes recovered enough to see a ship about the size of a bird-of-prey but with a decidedly Vulcan look appear in the center of the viewscreen.

So the Borg do have other ships beside their city-sized cubes, Scotty thought but did not have the time to say before the G.o.ddard's comm system, totally silent until that moment, crackled into life.

"This is the Alliance vessel Wisdom," a muted sounding voice proclaimed. "Identify yourself."

Scotty, provisionally relieved that the words and voice sounded totally unlike what he imagined the Borg would sound like, moved quickly to one side, gesturing for Kirk to take his place and respond. They'd agreed shortly after setting out that any contact would be better handled by a captain with moderate diplomatic and first contact experience than by a retired engineer with limited interpersonal skills and a sometimes counterproductive penchant for telling the unvarnished truth.

"This is the shuttlecraft G.o.ddard," Kirk said but froze a moment later as the ship on the viewscreen vanished and was replaced by an image that was as startling to him as the first glimpse of a Borg cube had been to Scotty. This image, however, was infinitely more welcome. Over his shoulder, he could hear Scotty gasp at the sight.

"Sarek!" the engineer blurted out before his mind caught up with his tongue or Kirk had a chance to signal him to stay quiet.

On the screen, the Vulcan looked as startled as a Vulcan could look in the brief moments before his familiar but disturbingly haggard features resumed their normal impa.s.sive facade.

An instant later, the screen went blank.

"Now what?" Kirk wondered aloud, frowning puzzledly as he turned toward Scotty.

But before the engineer could more than shrug his shoulders, they both felt the antic.i.p.atory tingle of a transporter field locking onto them.

Picard tried with limited success to keep his racing thoughts from descending into chaos. First and most obvious was the simple realization that if this timeline had its own Guinan, she could be an immeasurably valuable source of information. And if she was anything like his Guinan-not that he or anyone else could actually lay claim to her-it was no accident that she was here. It wouldn't surprise him to learn that she had prevailed upon this Romulan to bring her to this particular place, just as her other self had prevailed upon Picard to follow Captain Scott through time.

Then his mind darted back to San Francisco on nineteenth-century Earth and their "first" meeting, and he wondered for an instant why she didn't appear to recognize him. Even if Captain Scott had made a second jump, surely he had not gone back that far, another four hundred years, and changed history so much that Guinan had been kept from visiting nineteenth-century Earth.

But then the obvious answer slammed into him. It was he who had been kept from visiting Earth of that era!

In this timeline, Starfleet did not exist in the twenty-fourth century. Therefore the Enterprise did not exist. Most likely Picard himself did not exist, except perhaps as a Borg drone. And if he and the Enterprise didn't exist in the twenty-fourth century, he could hardly have gone back to the nineteenth to meet Guinan for the first time.

Then the Romulan on the screen was speaking, and Picard wrenched his thoughts out of the labyrinth that this Guinan was rapidly becoming. "I am Commander Tal of the Alliance vessel D'Zidran," the Romulan said. "Who and what are you?"

"Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise," Picard said, recovering, wondering what the "Alliance" might be. This timeline's version of the Federation?

"And where are you from?" the Romulan asked, his eyes darting momentarily toward that other Guinan, whose own eyes revealed a moment of surprise.

When Picard did not respond instantly, the Romulan continued. "From the warp trail you left as you fled the Arhennius system, I can tell that your ship is not one I am familiar with. Nor is the bridge I see around you now. And the fact that your warp trail seems to begin somewhere within the Arhennius corona also strikes me as... unusual."

"Captain," Data broke in, "I have been able to penetrate the planet's shadow with our sensors. In addition to another twenty-two Borg cubes, there are eleven ships similar to Commander Tal's. Their weapons appear to be powered up and ready."

"Thank you, Mr. Data," Picard said evenly, never taking his eye off the Romulan on the screen. "Commander?"

The Romulan's startled eyes still looked directly, if a little uncomfortably now, at Picard. After a moment, he lowered them, then cast another brief glance at the Guinan standing behind him.

"I told you," she said, mild sarcasm in her tone, "that these people are not agents of the Borg."

The Romulan flushed slightly but did not rebuke her.

"Is that why we were attacked in the Arhennius system?" Picard asked. "Someone thought we were a.s.sociated with the Borg?"

Tal shook his head. "You were not attacked. You simply triggered one of the s.p.a.ce mines the Klingons deployed during their dilithium mining operations in the system."

"Our sensors showed only traces of dilithium," Picard pointed out. "And no mining operations, no activity of any kind, for nearly a century. Why haven't the things been removed? Or at least deactivated?"

Tal's eyes shifted toward Lieutenant Worf briefly. "As I'm sure you know, Captain Picard, Klingons do not gladly hand over their food bowls, even after licking them clean."

True enough, Picard thought, ignoring the faint ba.s.s rumble-the Klingon equivalent of mumbling under one's breath-that came from behind him.

Tal, after another moment of silence, turned to speak to someone out of range of the viewscreen. "Tell Sub-commander Volak to have all ships stand down. And to come out of their obviously ineffective hiding place and resume monitoring the Borg." He turned once more to face Picard. "Is that satisfactory, Captain Picard?"

Picard nodded. "Thank you, Commander," he said, then shifted his gaze to the Guinan on the screen. "Are you the commander's advisor?"

"In some matters," she said softly, "when he desires it." For an instant their eyes met, and a shimmer of puzzlement-perhaps recognition?- rippled across her face. "I am called Guinan."

The Romulan waved her aside as he leaned closer to the viewscreen, half blocking her image. "You have told us your name and the name of your ship, Captain," he said brusquely, "but you have not yet named your native world. One of your officers is obviously a Klingon, but you and your second in command are not as easily identified. You obviously cannot be what you appear to be."

"Why is that? What do we appear to be?"

"Terrans. Are you familiar with that unfortunate species?"

Picard nodded expressionlessly. "We are."

"Then you certainly understand why we would find it difficult to believe you are what you appear to be."

Picard hesitated as he realized what the Romulan meant. He thought briefly of professing ignorance but, after a brief glance at that other Guinan, decided against it. "Terra has been a.s.similated by the Borg," he said. "Therefore we cannot be Terrans unless we are agents of the Borg."

"Precisely," the Romulan said, nodding in approval.

"Does this mean, then," Picard went on, "that no Terrans survived the Borg invasion? None were offworld when the Borg came?"

"We were not witness to the first Borg incursions, but we have always a.s.sumed Terrans had not yet developed a star drive when the Borg a.s.similated their world. They had certainly not made official contact with any who are now in the Alliance. Nor has anyone in the Alliance ever encountered a Terran who was not also a Borg drone. So, if you cannot be a Terran, what is your homeworld?"

Picard hesitated again, his eyes once again drawn to that other Guinan's enigmatic face. He could hardly tell the truth, at least not the whole truth-that he had come from the future with the sole purpose of wiping this entire timeline out of existence. While Guinan, in any guise, might be able to accept it, he doubted there were many others that were similarly capable, particularly among the Romulans. He needed a story that was not entirely true but was true enough to pa.s.s muster.