But not quite the whole truth...

"What the devil are you talking about, Sarek?" he asked, putting on his best puzzled frown while surrept.i.tiously laying what he hoped was a restraining hand on Scotty's arm. "Scotty and I've known you for thirty years. Your son is one of our best friends."

Watching Sarek's eyes closely, Kirk was virtually certain he saw a flicker of reaction but couldn't tell if it was surprise, anger or disbelief. Sarek-his Sarek-had always been even harder to read than his half-human son, and this version was obviously no easier.

"Explain," the Vulcan said. "I have no son, and, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen either of you until a few moments ago."

"What is this, some kind of Vulcan mind game?" Kirk asked, escalating his frown to a scowl. "d.a.m.n it, Sarek, there's more than enough craziness going on without you pretending not to know us!"

"To what 'craziness' are you referring?"

Kirk snorted, chancing a sideways glance at Scotty to see if the engineer was on board yet. "You mean besides you beaming us into some kind of high-tech dungeon for no reason? Where do I start? For one thing, there aren't supposed to be any Borg within thousands of pa.r.s.ecs, but there they are. Worse, they just appeared, quicker than a bird-of-prey can decloak. Where'd they come from? For another, what kind of ship is this Wisdom? That is where we're being held, isn't it? You said it was an 'Alliance' ship, whatever that is. Did Vulcan pull out of the Federation when Earth wasn't looking and start its own- "

"I a.s.sure you I am not playing games of any kind," Sarek interrupted. His voice was still under tight control but his face was beginning to take on a pallor Kirk had never seen on a Vulcan. "Tell me what you were doing when you say the Borg vessels 'appeared.'"

Kirk let out an exasperated sigh but inwardly he exulted. "We were investigating that thing back there, that ribbon of energy," he said, giving his voice the angry impatience of someone being forced to waste his time answering foolish questions. "Whatever it is, it's already destroyed at least two ships and killed hundreds of people. We were trying to get a closer look at it, trying to find out what it is, but mostly we were looking for a way to get rid of it before it had a chance to incinerate anything else!"

"The Vortex," Sarek said, half turning to the viewscreen behind him and entering a series of commands into the control panel beneath it. A moment later, the screen was filled with the now familiar maelstrom of crackling energy.

Visual aids, no less, Kirk thought as he nodded with feigned impatience. "If that's what you Vulcans call it, yes, that's what we were trying to get a good look at. We were observing it from what we thought was a safe distance when... something happened. That thing-the Vortex-must've reached out and done something to us. For a second, it flickered, and the next thing we knew, there were those two Borg ships. Obviously, we weren't inclined to stick around to see what they were up to."

"Do you have sensor records of the events you describe?"

"We'd just gotten there, Sarek. We were just getting set up when things went crazy. Now are you going to tell us what the devil is going on? And why you're treating us like strangers? Or enemies, even?"

Sarek turned abruptly back to the screen. "Here," he said as his fingers tapped in more commands, "is an enhancement of what one of our observation platforms recorded in the vicinity of the Vortex at the time you say the Borg ships appeared."

The image of the Vortex vanished, replaced by a motionless starfield. Within seconds, something flickered into existence and vanished, but it was enough to draw their eyes to that spot on the screen. A moment later, the object appeared again and again faded, but this time Kirk recognized it, and he didn't have to fake his look of astonishment.

It was the G.o.ddard.

Another appearance, another fade, and finally it remained, solid.

"It would seem," Sarek said as the image of the G.o.ddard froze on the screen, "that you are the ones who appeared out of nowhere, not the Borg."

Which should not have been a surprise, Kirk realized abruptly. From his and Scotty's point of view on the G.o.ddard, this entire universe had suddenly appeared around them, brought into existence by something Picard had done far in the past. It was only logical that, from this universe's point of view-from Sarek's point of view-Scotty and he were the ones who had come into existence, suddenly and inexplicably.

Which would, Kirk realized with relief, fit perfectly with the idea that he had been trying to hint at-the idea that the G.o.ddard had accidentally been transported here from an alternate reality, perhaps by some side effect of the energy ribbon, which looked to be the only thing that existed, unchanged, in both universes. If he could sell that idea to Sarek-or better yet, if Sarek came up with it himself-it would then be only logical for Scotty and himself to try to find out where and when the two realities had parted company. Scientific curiosity would demand it. They could simply lay out the history of their reality and compare it to the history of this reality, with particular emphasis on when and where the Borg first appeared.

Kirk put a look of suspicion on his face as Sarek turned away from the screen to face them again. "I thought you said you weren't playing games with us, Sarek," he said accusingly, gesturing at the viewscreen. "Then what the devil do you call that?"

"It was precisely what it appeared to be: a record of your arrival. What we have yet to determine is where you arrived from and by what means you traveled."

Kirk snorted. "We didn't arrive from anywhere. Unless it's from a whole different universe, a sane universe where- "

He stopped abruptly, scowling at Sarek. "Is that what you're trying to tell us? That we are from a-from an alternate universe? That's ridiculous."

"Under normal circ.u.mstances I would agree, even though our scientists have long suggested that realities alternate to our own could theoretically exist. However, the circ.u.mstances I find myself confronting now are hardly normal. That you came from an alternate universe appears, in fact, to be the only logical explanation-if, that is, you are telling at least an approximation of the truth when you say you have known a Vulcan named Sarek for three decades."

"And if those images you showed us are real." Kirk shook his head stubbornly. "Look, Sarek- "

"The images are quite real, I a.s.sure you. As are these." Once again Sarek's fingers darted across the controls and the image on the viewscreen changed. The miniature G.o.ddard vanished and was replaced by- Earth.

But not an Earth Kirk had ever seen before.

The shapes of the continents and oceans were instantly recognizable, but all traces of green and blue were gone, as was the pristine white of the clouds Kirk had seen from orbit a thousand times. Continents and oceans from pole to pole were smothered in a mottled brownish-yellow haze streaked with cancerous gray clouds.

"This is the last image we have of Terra before the Borg erected a sensor shield around the Terran system," Sarek explained. "The transformation to a Borg world had been underway for several years at that time. It has almost certainly been completed in the century since."

Kirk's stomach knotted. He had long since accepted the likelihood that, in this universe, Earth was a Borg slave world, a part of their so-called collective, but until that image appeared on the screen, his acceptance had been at a sanitized intellectual level, the way one can intellectually accept the reality of the bodies buried beneath the neatly mown gra.s.s and flower-bedecked headstones of a cemetery without actually visualizing the decaying bodies in the darkness below or considering the grisly mult.i.tude of ways they had died. But now the image of the actual dying Earth-a murdered Earth-shattered the fragile barrier between intellect and emotion and brought with it a vivid image of the grotesque Borg cubicles he had seen in the G.o.ddard's briefing program. For a moment all Kirk could see in his mind's eye were the zombie-like faces of the friends and family he had left behind on Earth, now nothing more than cyborg slaves that had once been human but now retained only enough of their humanity to be aware of the nightmare in which they were trapped.

If any of them had even been born in this universe.

This universe that had come into existence at the very moment when he should have been going out of existence, consumed by the nucleonic fury of the Vortex.

His stomach knotted even more painfully in a sudden spasm of guilt. Was the logic he had outlined to Scotty both facile and faulty? There was no way, it said, that his own rescue could have caused this universe-shattering change. It had to be something that Picard and that other Enterprise had done, centuries further back in time.

But no one truly knew what kind of logic governed the rules of time travel. No one even knew if such rules existed.

Above all, there was the disconcerting "coincidence" that the changes had occurred-the Enterprise-B had vanished, the Borg cubes had appeared-in virtually the same instant Scotty had s.n.a.t.c.hed him out of the path of the Vortex.

The everyday logic of cause and effect had plenty to say about that. However, if you got deep enough into the mathematics of quantum physics and all the other arcane disciplines that theoreticians dabbled with in hopes of learning how the universe really worked, you would find evidence that even normal time-whatever "normal time" was-didn't necessarily have to flow in one direction only. That which was cause when time flowed in one direction became effect if time flowed in the opposite direction. Overlay that with the mathematical descriptions of warp drive and slingshotting through high intensity gravity fields, and theoreticians in even the most ivory of towers could only speculate on how it all would apply to the so-called "real world."

All of which was several light-years over his head and even over Scotty's, not to mention the heads of virtually everyone else he had ever known. As far as Jim Kirk was concerned, it all came down to a resounding: "Who knows?"

And what it all led Kirk to was the inevitable question he had been avoiding since the moment he had learned what this timeline contained: If I were to go back and pitch myself into the Vortex, would that put things back the way they're supposed to be? Would it rescue those billions on what had once been Earth from the Borg h.e.l.l it had become?

If he was certain that that was the case-and if he could get out of this seemingly escape-proof prison-he would do it in an instant. Not gladly, not even without regret, but without hesitation. He literally couldn't live with himself if he didn't.

But what if, he couldn't help but think, his being saved from the Vortex wasn't the key? What if he'd been right all along? What if it was Picard's doing, not his and Scotty's? Or something different altogether, unrelated to either of them? What if he allowed himself to be plunged into the Vortex and the timeline continued unchanged, ignoring his sacrifice altogether?

Or what if the timeline did change-but into something even worse?

No, the time might come when they would know enough to say with certainty that his own death was required to set things right, but that time hadn't come yet, not by a long shot, not until they found out what Picard and that other Enterprise had done.

But in order to find that out-in order to do anything-he had to get Sarek to let them out of this cage.

"It looks like you're right, Sarek," Kirk said somberly, for once not having to disguise or exaggerate his true feelings when he spoke. "This is an alternate universe, one in which our whole world has been destroyed. I hope you won't mind if we try to find out why."

With an eagerness she hadn't felt in centuries, yet with an almost equally intense uneasiness, the woman calling herself Guinan waited on the D'Zidran's bridge for the Enterprise to come within transporter range.

She had lived with the ghost of the one who called himself Picard for more than four hundred years. Until a few minutes ago she had a.s.sumed it had been a dream, despite the fact that her people seldom dreamed. It was likely a result of her many years on Picard's world, she had often told herself. Humans were-had been-a dreaming race if nothing else, and it wouldn't be the first time she had temporarily acquired traits of the races she observed and listened to. Some inner part of herself, she had always suspected, was listening as intently as her outer sh.e.l.l, temporarily adapting itself to different worlds in ways that made her observations, her "listening" more... complete.

After all, what better way to understand a race than by not only partic.i.p.ating in the conscious lives of its members but by also emulating their generally more honest inner lives? This would have been particularly useful on a world like Earth, where inner and outer lives were often so different as to be almost irreconcilable.

But this particular dream had been so vivid that for decades she had had only to close her eyes for it to return and play itself out on the russet glow of her lowered eyelids.

And in her heart.

In the dream, the one who called himself Picard and a strange, artificial companion had come from hundreds of years in the future, on an errand that she could never quite remember. What she did remember was that he declared with absolute certainty that the two of them would meet in that same distant future he had come from, that they would develop a relationship deeper than any she had experienced even in her long life. She also remembered that, in the dream, she had been injured, and Picard had not only risked his life to save her but had risked being trapped for the rest of that life hundreds of years in his own past.

In the centuries that followed she had often been driven, inexplicably, to return to Earth, not only to observe or listen but to search for anything that would indicate the dream had been more than a dream.

But there had been nothing.

And then Earth itself was no more. In its place was only the utter desolation of a Borg world, its billions of newly created drones toiling mindlessly on the poisonous remnants of the planet they were systematically destroying.

All hope that the dream had been more than a dream ended with Earth.

And she had moved on, finding herself drawn to the Alliance as it slowly and contentiously brought itself into existence, hoping someday to do battle with the Borg.

And now...

Now not only had her dream, dead for centuries, been resurrected, but it had brought with it the possibility that she had been wrong all those years. If this Picard was telling even an approximation of the truth, perhaps the "visit" she remembered had been more than a dream. Perhaps Picard and the pale almost-human had come to her not from her universe's future but from another's, from the future of a universe in which the Borg had not yet come and Earth still had a future.

The universe that this Picard claimed to have come from.

A universe that might no longer exist.

The bridge wavered around her as the D'Zidran dropped out of warp and an alien craft with startlingly graceful lines filled the viewscreen.

A craft which, to her relief and dismay, looked eerily familiar.

Tensing, she waited for the touch of the alien transporter.

Fifteen.

BALITOR, THE Wisdom's Narisian communications officer, was barely able to keep the fur on the back of her neck and shoulders from rippling like gra.s.s in the wind, so great was her feeling of eager antic.i.p.ation. From the moment the Proctors had accepted her into the Inner Circle, she had known that a moment like this might come, but she had never truly thought that it would come, not for her. Her mother had spent half her life on Alliance ships and Alliance worlds, working alongside explorers and scientists and warriors of all kinds, and not once in all those decades had she encountered anything that prompted her to consider, even for a split second, attempting to establish a Link with the Wise Ones. Nothing had come even remotely close to meeting the criteria drummed into her during her months of training and conditioning.

But now, after less than two years, Balitor herself had been presented with the most clearcut case she could imagine: a never-before-seen craft, appearing out of nowhere and containing never-before-seen beings who nonetheless appeared to know the Arbiter and were now being held prisoner. This was precisely the sort of "unexpected" or "unpredictable" thing she had been instructed to watch for. There was no doubt in her mind that her Link would be accepted and that she would soon experience that which even the Proctors are denied.

Until now she had a.s.siduously avoided even wondering what the Link itself would be like, knowing as she did the overwhelming odds against her ever having the chance to actually experience it. Her mother had thought about it-dreamed about it, longed for it-for all those empty decades, growing ever more dispirited as it became ever more evident that her opportunity was never to come. Balitor had seen it happen, had seen the hope gradually fade from her mother's eyes, replaced by steadily growing disappointment. Her mother should have lived another thirty years after leaving the service of the Proctors, but she was gone in five, her fur as dull and lifeless at the end as a woman decades older.

It wasn't fair, Balitor thought, a twinge of bitterness over her mother's fate dulling her own elation, but it lasted only seconds. Nothing-short of having this opportunity s.n.a.t.c.hed from her at the last minute-could dampen her barely-controlled euphoria for long. In a few hours, as soon as her shift on the bridge was over, she could retreat to her quarters where, safe from prying Alliance eyes and constant interruptions, she could, at last, initiate the process that would give her life meaning.

Just a few short hours...

Guinan-his Guinan-was waiting for Picard behind the bar in a darker than usual Ten-Forward. Even the luminescence of the bartop itself was dimmer than he had ever seen it, but the scimitar-shaped bottle and two half-filled triangular Denebian gla.s.ses that waited with her were plain enough. Saurian brandy, he remembered, had been one of Captain Scott's favorites. Not surprisingly, the two of them were alone in the bar.

"Have a seat, Captain," she said, nudging one of the gla.s.ses toward his side of the bar. "I can't say I haven't been expecting you."

"I rather imagined you would be," he said, picking up the gla.s.s, savoring the aroma for a moment and then setting it back down without drinking. "Do you have any answers?"

"None that you want, I imagine. Certainly none that will make the situation any less difficult for either of us. For one thing, since I left the bridge, I've realized that I wasn't as open with you as I promised I would be."

"Something to do with that other version of you?" he asked with a slight smile.

Guinan shook her head almost imperceptibly. "I didn't know she existed, although I suppose I should have. No, it's something I should have told you the moment Captain Scott was rescued from the Jenolen." She paused, lowering her eyes for a moment, then bringing them back up to meet his. "You see, Captain, I was very likely responsible for his being on the Jenolen in the first place."

"You?" Suddenly his mind was spinning again. "How? And for G.o.d's sake, why?"

"The 'how' is easy," she said and quickly told him about her meeting with Scott in the late-twenty-third-century Glasgow bar and his subsequent meeting with Matt Franklin, the young ensign from the Jenolen.

"As for the 'why,'" she went on, "I'm sure you're as tired of hearing it as I am of saying it, but I simply do not know. All I know is, if it hadn't been for me-and those d.a.m.nable feelings that brought me there-Captain Scott would in all likelihood have lived out his retirement peacefully, if unhappily, on Earth. But he didn't. And now he's somewhere in the past turning history inside out, causing your homeworld to be destroyed and mine to be saved."

Picard was silent a moment, trying to take in this latest revelation. "And you think that was the ultimate reason for what you did? To bring your world back from the dead?"

"I have no idea, Captain. That's what is so frustrating about the feelings. They never include a reason. What's worse, I have no idea where they come from or why. For all I know, they could be bubbling up out of my own subconscious. But wherever they come from, I don't see how saving my world and destroying yours could be the reason for my meddling in Captain Scott's life."

"Because those same feelings now tell you that the current timeline is 'wrong' in some way? That we should try to set it right?"

She nodded silently.

Suddenly, Picard couldn't help but smile at the utter absurdity of the situation. Her "feelings"- or more likely whoever or whatever was responsible for them-had caused a cosmic train wreck and now they were hoping things could be put back the way they were.

Or perhaps Q or one of his ilk was being more subtle and less self-aggrandizing than usual and was perpetrating his biggest prank yet. He wouldn't put it past Q, a creature with an infinitely large ego and the nearly infinite power to indulge it. Virtually everything Picard had seen Q do had been, at one level or another, a prank.

But without knowing for certain, knowing only that Guinan and her feelings had been right more times than he liked to remember...

"Well, then," he said, "I suppose we'll just have to try to do what they want."

As Sarek listened to Kirk describing the universe he and his companion claimed to have come from, two things became increasingly clear and increasingly disturbing.

First, everything they said about it matched his own supposedly false memories, sometimes in details he hadn't even been consciously aware of until they were mentioned. And the creatures themselves matched their counterparts in those same memories. Each time one of them spoke, particularly the one called Kirk, the uncanny similarity notched upward in Sarek's mind. Movements, gestures, tiny details of their features, even their patterns of speech as their words emerged from their version of a universal translator, everything matched his spurious memories.

Second, their universe had diverged from Sarek's more than a century before his birth. That was when, according to the one called Kirk, Terra-Earth, as they insisted on calling it-had developed a warp drive and established contact with Vulcans and other starfaring civilizations. The warp signature of Earth's very first test flight had been detected by a Vulcan ship that happened to be cruising the stellar neighborhood. Within hours, that Vulcan ship was on Earth, its pa.s.sengers earnestly welcoming the newcomers into the interstellar community. Within a century, the upstart Earth had progressed to playing a major role in their version of the Alliance, a group of allied worlds called the Federation.

In the real world-in Sarek's universe-none of that had happened. Either the test flight hadn't been conducted, perhaps because Earth had already been a.s.similated by the Borg by then, or there hadn't been a Vulcan ship near enough to detect the resultant warp signature. In any case, the first "official" notice Vulcans or anyone else took of Earth was decades later when a fleet of Borg ships swept out from Terra and surrounded the Alpha Centauri system, setting up a death-dealing blockade that destroyed any ship that tried to enter or leave.

A few years later, the sensor shield was erected around the Terran system, although Vulcan ships had in the meantime managed to survey Terra and record the images Sarek had shown them earlier. Alpha Centauri, however, was never isolated in that way, nor were the subsequently a.s.similated worlds. They were left-as examples?- open to long-range sensors, which were able to monitor the entire process as their atmospheres were gradually changed from a breathable oxygen-nitrogen mix to a corrosive blend of methane, carbon monoxide, and fluorine.

It was a.s.sumed that the conversion-and planet-wide strip-mining- of Earth had continued to completion after the shield was raised.

No one knew where the Borg had come from or precisely when they had arrived. Because the approach of their asteroid-sized ships had totally escaped detection, some had suggested that the Borg, like Kirk and Scott now claimed to have done, had emerged from an alternate universe. In those pre-Alliance days, however, there were no regular patrols, and sensors were more limited, which meant that if an alien ship-or even a fleet-didn't intrude directly on territory claimed by another world or accidentally encounter an exploratory or trade ship in deep s.p.a.ce, it was unlikely that it would be detected.

None of that, however, was of any help to Sarek in deciding what to do with these two interlopers. If they were telling the truth and were not Borg creations, they and the technology represented by their tiny craft might well be of help against the Borg.

On the other hand, if they were Borg creations, their every thought being instantly shared with the collective- An amber light at the bottom of the control panel flashed brightly, cutting off his speculations. It took him only a fraction of a second to realize that it was a signal from Commander Varkan, sent through the same hardwired connection that allowed the Wisdom's computer to bypa.s.s the shields and respond to the control panel and provide the images Sarek had ordered up to show his "guests."

"We will continue this discussion later," he said, opaquing the wall and, a moment later, initiating transport.

"Enable exit," he said as soon as transport was complete. The door of the auxiliary transporter cubicle slid open and he strode rapidly up the narrow secondary corridor toward the bridge.