Part 16 (2/2)
”And here I thought the Enterprise -A was too s.p.a.cious for its own good,” the man said, a faint smile briefly softening his features as he returned his eyes to Picard. ”I'm James T. Kirk, captain-one of the captains-of the original Enterprise.”
Suddenly, Picard's mind was spinning.
He had been right: Scott had slingshotted into the past with the intention of saving his commander and friend.
But he had also been wrong: Scott had not failed, had not overshot hundreds of years and brought the Borg to Earth. He had apparently done precisely what he had intended to do.
And yet the Borg were here.
And the Federation was not.
”This was your purpose, then, Captain Scott,” Picard said, ”to save your one-time captain from the energy ribbon.”
”Aye, it was,” Scotty acknowledged, momentarily lowering his eyes. ”I know now how daft it was, but once I had the Bounty 2 in my hands, once I knew there was even a wee chance of saving him, it would have been defying fate not to try. Or so I told myself.”
And tempting fate to try, Picard thought but did not say. Recriminations would be pointless at best, even though he could not keep himself from wondering once again if Kirk himself, one of Starfleet's legendary mavericks-or loose cannons, depending on whom you talked to-was appalled or gratified at what he had inspired Scott to do.
”I know the feeling, Scotty, believe me,” Kirk put in, apparently sensing Picard's disapproval. ”As the old saying goes, 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'”
He turned his eyes to Picard again, all remnants of the smile gone. ”Don't worry, Picard. You won't have to throw me back into the Vortex, or whatever they call it in your era. I'll dive back in myself-if it can be determined for certain that Scotty's saving me is what caused all this.”
”And who is to be the judge of that certainty?” Picard asked, trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice. He couldn't imagine Kirk willingly surrendering his life as long as even the most minuscule chance of a non-fatal solution existed. The man had virtually made a career out of beating the odds.
”I'll accept whatever you and Scotty decide,” Kirk said, his tone now subdued. ”And Sarek, of course,” he added with a glance offscreen toward the Vulcan. ”But before anyone decides anything, it would be nice to have a few facts, not just hunches and speculations, no matter how logical.”
”Agreed,” Picard said, ”but whatever brought this timeline into existence could have happened anytime since the Borg came into existence and anywhere in the galaxy. How do we determine where or when to even start looking for facts?”
”We visit the Guardian,” Kirk said. ”If we can find it.”
”Guardian?”
”The Guardian of Forever,” Kirk said. ”Scotty and I were hoping you might be one of the people entrusted with its world's coordinates.”
Picard frowned. ”What is it?”
Resignedly, Kirk gave him the same sketchy explanation he had given Sarek minutes before, but Picard could only shake his head.
”When I was at the Academy there were rumors of dozens of miraculous lost worlds and races, but I remember nothing of the sort you describe. If it does exist, though, I can certainly see why it would be kept a secret.”
”It existed in my day, believe me,” Kirk said grimly. ”I only hope it exists in this timeline as well.” He turned to Sarek. ”Are you ready to start looking?”
Within minutes, using Kirk's and Scotty's memories of that long-ago mission, Sarek zeroed in on a remarkably anonymous star in the Wisdom's data banks. It was less than a pa.r.s.ec from the route the original Enterprise had been following when it had been diverted to investigate the ”ripples in time,” distortions that would most likely register on the new Enterprise's more advanced sensors as chronometric radiation. In this timeline, it was the only star in that sector that had never been surveyed at close range. It wasn't even known if any planets...o...b..ted the star.
They arranged to rendezvous, the Enterprise and the Wisdom. Picard and Guinan would beam over to the Wisdom, in the hope that they could convince a reluctant Sarek to transfer both himself and his two ”guests” to the faster Enterprise for the journey to the coordinates he had found.
As the Enterprise to D'Zidran to Wisdom connection was finally broken, the images of Tal and that other Guinan flickered across the screen, vanis.h.i.+ng almost before they were fully formed, but not before the eyes of the two Guinans met for one brief, intense moment.
A chill swept over Guinan in the split second that her eyes met those of her counterpart on the distant Enterprise. Suddenly, she realized what she must do.
As she had admitted to Picard, similar wordless ”intuitions” had gripped her countless times before, but never had one come over her as suddenly or gripped her as powerfully as this one, not even in those long-ago centuries when the two had been one.
And never-never had the reason for the action she must take been so immediately obvious. Sometimes it took years or decades before the reasons came clear. Sometimes they remained obscure forever.
But this time, the reason was so obvious that, even before the exchanged glance, as she had listened to Picard and Sarek talk, listened as they determined the coordinates of the so-called Guardian's world, she had been on the verge of breaking in and suggesting the very thing that the feeling now demanded.
Putting her hand lightly on Tal's shoulder, something she had done perhaps only twice in their years together, she said: ”If you have ever trusted me, my friend, trust me now.”
Balitor could not believe her good fortune as her s.h.i.+ft finally ended and she made her way toward her quarters, barely able to keep from breaking into a run. For hours that had seemed like years, she had waited, resenting every second she was forced to delay her attempt to Link with the Wise Ones.
But then had come the message from Alliance Prime and the contact with the second alien vessel, and she realized the delay had been a gift, not a hards.h.i.+p. This new information was even more important, more vital than what she already had. She knew it was. There was no longer even the tiniest sliver of doubt in her mind. Her Link would be accepted!
Her only regret was that her mother would never know. The knowledge could not have made up for the disappointment her mother's life had become, but it could at least have rea.s.sured her that, through her daughter, her life would be given meaning. It had not been lived entirely in vain.
Balitor was trembling, every square centimeter of her body tingling with antic.i.p.ation by the time she palmed open the personal security lock on her door and let it click shut behind her. Leaving the lights off so as to have nothing to distract her, nothing to dilute the coming experience, she removed her uniform and lay down on her sleeping pad, her fur-covered body free now of all restrictions, all distractions.
Instead of curling up, knees to chin, as she normally did to sleep, she lay on her back, bringing her left hand up to gently stroke her left temple as she concentrated on the series of thoughts and words that would, she had been taught so long ago, initiate the Link.
At first she could feel nothing happening, and she began to fear that her very eagerness was interfering with the process. The Wise Ones, the Proctors had told her again and again during her training, did not possess emotions nor did they value them in others. Even so, it had been the Narisians in whom the Wise Ones had chosen to place their trust, not the seemingly emotionless Vulcans. The Narisians, not the Vulcans, were the Chosen-despite their frailties, not because of them, the Proctors said.
Finally, faint lights began to come into being, swirling in the darkness around her, and she could feel a growing warmth in her temple.
Suddenly, the lights blossomed into a glow that enveloped her like a coc.o.o.n and then faded into darkness. An instant later, despite the warmth that still bathed her temple, an icy chill enveloped the rest of her, as if the very air around her had congealed, freezing her in place. As the darkness returned, she sensed the presence of the Wise Ones all around her, as if their minds hovered in the very air of the darkened room in which her now-chilled body lay. She could feel them brus.h.i.+ng against her mind, bringing the outer, physical chill inside, as if to freeze her very thoughts.
And a voice, not in her ears but in her mind, said: ”Welcome, Balitor. Share with us the knowledge that you bring for our enlightenment.”
s.h.i.+vering both with cold and with pleasure, Balitor opened her thoughts to the Wise Ones.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard tossed restlessly on his ready room couch, drifting in and out of that unsettling twilight between sleep and wakefulness where dream cannot be distinguished from reality. He had hoped to get a little much-needed rest while the Enterprise raced to rendezvous with the Wisdom, but his mind had refused to halt the constant stream of wildly varying images of what he imagined the Guardian's world to be like.
But those increasingly hallucinatory images were not now the primary source of his uneasiness.
It was the voices that had begun whispering in his mind, bringing with them wordless feelings of disorientation and dread. In fleeting moments of clarity, he wished he could fully awaken and find the whispers gone, a forgotten dream, but he could not.
The whispers, he knew in those moments of clarity, were not a dream, not an hallucination.
The Borg were once again whispering in his mind.
It had been thus ever since Locutus's brief existence.
Every physical trace of the Borg additions and modifications had been painstakingly removed from his body and brain, but whatever allowed him-forced him-to now and then Link with the Borg, to eavesdrop on some segment of the collective, was apparently not a physical object that could be located and excised. Like so many other modifications, it had most likely been created by a small cadre of the countless nanotech devices the Borg had introduced into his body, but once the work of this particular group had been completed, it was apparently self-sustaining and undetectable, at least by Federation medical science. He suspected it was nothing more than a series of neural patterns, no different from the other patterns that made up his subconscious mind.
No different, that is, except for its origin-and its purpose.
But this time, he realized as the whispers built to a crescendo, something was different. Very different.
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