Part 10 (1/2)
”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 stars.h.i.+p to hail another via a tightbeam transmission, it would have to know the other s.h.i.+p'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 s.h.i.+p 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 stars.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 stars.h.i.+p captain, even one without a stars.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 s.h.i.+p. 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.