Part 20 (2/2)

But Picard, Sarek realized instantly, would have no way of knowing the Borg s.h.i.+p had slowed prematurely. The Enterprise sensors would be as blinded by the nebula as the Borg's. If, as Sarek expected it to do, the Enterprise emerged from the nebula at maximum warp, heading almost directly at the Borg s.h.i.+p, it wouldn't shoot through the danger zone nearly fast enough to avoid Borg fire. Not only that, even if the Borg s.h.i.+p, now almost at a standstill, somehow failed to destroy the Enterprise and let it slip past, it would now be able to overtake it long before it reached the Vortex.

It was time to act. He had no choice.

Deliberately but rapidly, Sarek entered another code into the control panel. The neurobiosensor quickly verified his ident.i.ty once again.

And cleared the signal to be sent.

On the screen, the five specks of light swarmed toward the Borg s.h.i.+p like angry insects, burrowing into it in the seconds before the Enterprise emerged from the nebula.

Now continuously monitored by the neurobiosensor, Sarek sent the decloak and detonate signals.

Focusing her entire attention on the Enterprise's projected exit point from the nebula, the Borg Queen impatiently suppressed the countless unrelated signals that were clamoring for her attention. There would be time enough for them when her objective was accomplished. For the next few seconds, she wanted no distractions, nothing that would take even a tiny fraction of her attention from that objective: the complete and final destruction of the Picard creature and his s.h.i.+p.

But then, an infinitesimal instant after the Enterprise finally emerged from the nebula and went immediately to maximum warp, just as the intensity of a particularly insistent signal spiked violently, the s.h.i.+p's sensors went dead.

A fraction of a second later, she was enveloped in something the remaining organic portions of her brain interpreted as searing pain.

The Borg s.h.i.+p reappeared on the Enterprise viewscreen, indistinctly at first as the sensors struggled to pierce the last fringes of the nebula. The cube wasn't, Picard noticed with alarm, at the predicted coordinates or moving at the predicted speed. But there was no time to do anything but what they had hastily planned and programmed into the computer.

With virtually all power temporarily diverted to the warp drive and the s.h.i.+elds, the Enterprise surged ahead, the Borg s.h.i.+p now crystal clear on the viewscreen, its course and position pinpointed by the sensors. While they had been inside the nebula, it had altered its course so that the Enterprise would pa.s.s within hundreds of kilometers, not the tens of thousands they had calculated. Worse, the Borg s.h.i.+p had dropped out of warp, which meant the relative velocity at which it and the Enterprise would pa.s.s each other would be far too low to-Picard gasped as he suddenly felt invisible flames searing his flesh. For an agonizing instant he thought it might be some weapon the Borg of this universe used, but then, through eyes that barely functioned because of the pain, he saw what was happening to the Borg cube on the screen: It was expanding, beginning to disintegrate, shards of blinding light pouring out through dozens of widening fissures. Somehow, the cube was being destroyed!

And he knew the source of his pain: the Link to the Borg. Through that Link he was experiencing a feeble specter of what the tens of thousands of drones-and the s.h.i.+p itself?- were experiencing as they were vaporized.

As suddenly as it had descended on him, the agony was gone, shattered into a thousand bearable fragments that faded rapidly from his consciousness.

And the Borg cube was no longer a cube, not even a disintegrating one. It was little more than an expanding sh.e.l.l of fragments being vaporized by the ma.s.sive fireball that was propelling them outward even as it destroyed them, like the shockwave of a miniature supernova.

”All stop!” Picard ordered sharply.

The Enterprise dropped out of warp, the image on the viewscreen wavering momentarily as the sensors adjusted to the sublight environment.

Then the viewscreen dimmed as automatic filters kicked in to protect the screen and its watchers from the eye-searing glare as the fireball consumed the last remnants of the sh.e.l.l before beginning finally to fade.

A moment later, Sarek's voice erupted onto the bridge. ”Picard, is it your intention to return Kirk to the Vortex?”

After a moment of shocked silence, Picard recovered his voice. ”Wisdom on screen,” he snapped, and Sarek's face appeared instantly. ”What happened, Sarek?”

”If you wish to restore your timeline, Picard, answer my question.”

Darting a look at Kirk, who seemed as puzzled as himself, Picard scowled. ”That was the plan,” he said, ”but if you can- ”

”There is no time for discussion, Picard,” Sarek said, more tension in his voice than Picard had ever heard in any Vulcan's. ”Proceed to the Vortex if such is your wish.”

”I won't know if it is or not-unless you answer my question: Did you destroy that Borg s.h.i.+p? If you did, I would say we have more options than you led us to believe.”

Before Sarek could reply, his image vanished from the viewscreen.

For a seemingly interminable moment the Borg Queen was paralyzed with shock and pain as the distant s.h.i.+p that had for a few minutes served as her body was torn apart and vaporized. Like the equally impossible sensation of exhilaration, it had been resurrected from a past that, until these last few hours, she had thought dead and forgotten.

But then it was over, and she was once again whole, once again fully rational.

And she knew instantly what had happened.

The s.h.i.+p she had been controlling had been destroyed-because of her!

Anger-yet another unwelcome ghost from that distant past-swept over her. But not anger at the Picard creature or whoever had triggered the destruction of her s.h.i.+p but at herself, at her rashness, at the sheer irrationality of her actions.

The alarms she herself had put in place decades ago in every Borg vessel had been warning her. She had sensed those warnings, but she had brushed them aside. She had been so absorbed in her obsessive pursuit of Picard that she had failed to instantly comprehend their meaning or their importance. Worse, her control of the s.h.i.+p had been so complete, the s.h.i.+p so much an integral part of herself, that she had, unknowingly, kept the s.h.i.+p from reacting.

She had kept the s.h.i.+p and its thousands upon thousands of drones from saving themselves.

It would not happen again.

Her actions from this point on would be dictated by strict logic.

And that logic now overwhelmingly dictated that, in order to be absolutely certain that she would achieve her primary goal, she would have to scale back the magnitude of her intermediate goal by hundreds of worlds. Instead of waiting another hundred years for thousands more s.h.i.+ps to be built, she would have to be satisfied with the thousands already built. Without the a.s.sistance of the Narisians, she would no longer have any way of learning what new weapons some Alliance world might secretly devise in those hundred years, and that kind of uncertainty was unacceptable. To accept it would be to accept the very system that she had spent the last several subjective centuries proving wrong.

No, she had no choice. She had to initiate the final phase of her plan not a hundred years from now, but now!

The shrunken image of the Enterprise bridge vanished abruptly from the corner of Sarek's viewscreen, leaving only the full screen display that indicated the locations of the interphase-cloaked photon torpedoes. At the same moment an ear-piercing alarm erupted from his control panel, sending even his heart racing.

Because he knew instantly what it meant.

He had never before heard it except in simulations, but its meaning was unmistakable: Someone, somewhere had broken through the layers of security that surrounded the interphase-cloaked fleet.

With the neurobiosensor still continuously confirming his ident.i.ty, he sent the signal that would freeze the entire system, locking out all incoming signals until everything could be a.n.a.lyzed and the source and nature of the intrusion determined.

Automatically, the system began spewing out teraquads of data, detailing the status and history of every interphase-cloaked device, including source, destination and content of every signal they had ever sent or received.

But before Sarek could even begin to search through the avalanche of data, another alarm went off.

And one of the specks of light on the screen winked out.

Followed by another.

And yet another.

As close to panic as a Vulcan could come, Sarek zeroed in on the final readings transmitted from the now-missing s.h.i.+ps, scanning them rapidly. Everything appeared completely normal until- Impossible! With the system frozen, not even he could force a detonation command through.

But someone had.

Milliseconds before the datastreams ended abruptly, all three devices had received-and accepted-an unauthorized detonation signal.

And on his screen, still more lights were winking out.

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