Part 24 (2/2)

”Acknowledged, Number One.”

After a moment's silence, Picard put his hand out. Kirk's eyebrows raised just slightly as he put his own hand out and the two captains shook firmly.

Despite his seemingly unruffled exterior, there was a lump in Picard's throat to match the b.u.t.terflies in his stomach as he released Kirk's hand and watched him turn and, seemingly without a qualm, leave the ready room and head for the turbolift.

So, Kirk thought as the turbolift door opened on the corridor that led to the transporter room, it's time. No more guessing what the Vortex was or what the Guardian really wanted or even whose side the Guinan twins were really on.

It was time to find out. Time to start the process.

Time to be stored in the transporter's pattern buffer, where he would ”wait” to be spat out when-if- the Vortex came within transporter range.

Not that he had any doubts...

Pulling in a breath, he stepped out into the corridor.

The Borg Queen was, once again, faced with the impossible.

The Picard creature's s.h.i.+p had disappeared.

It had not been destroyed. It had disappeared.

Nowhere in the teraquads of sensor data received from the hundreds of s.h.i.+ps that had been closing in on the Picard creature was there anything to indicate what had happened to it.

Halfway to the Vortex, it had suddenly changed course in an obvious-and seemingly futile-attempt to elude the cl.u.s.ter of Borg s.h.i.+ps that would have intercepted it within minutes.

But then it had entered one of the tiny but highly ionized nebulae that dotted this quadrant. And, unlike when it had ducked into that other, even smaller nebula, it had not come out.

A phalanx of Borg s.h.i.+ps had swept through the entire nebula not once but twice and then a third time. There was no way the Picard creature's s.h.i.+p could have been missed, even with their ionization-limited sensors. Even if it had possessed its own version of the Alliance's ”secret” weapon and used it to s.h.i.+ft to a different level of reality, the inevitable and spectacular energy leakage would only have made it that much easier to detect.

Nor could it have exited from the nebula. Every cubic centimeter of surrounding s.p.a.ce had been constantly monitored by at least two of the s.h.i.+ps deployed around the nebula, all sensors of which were fully functional.

Could Picard have simply returned to wherever or whenever it had come from, she found herself wondering? According to data from the s.h.i.+ps that had been monitoring the Vortex, the other, smaller interloper had literally appeared out of nowhere, just as the Narisian Balitor's information had claimed. And the smaller interloper had for some time now been stowed inside the larger. Who was to say that both could not then have returned to wherever or whenever they had come from?

But even if they had, were they no longer a threat? Or were they an even greater threat?

Unless she learned what had happened, she would never know the answer.

Until it was too late.

So completely connected to the cube that carried her that she had literally become a part of the s.h.i.+p, she began to reexamine the data, millisecond by millisecond, from each and every one of the more than a hundred cubes in and around the nebula.

Kirk stepped into the transporter circle.

Despite the suddenly churning stomach that had taken him by surprise as he stepped up onto the platform, he found himself grinning as he turned and looked down at Scotty and La Forge and the rest who had gathered to see him off. The only one that answered with even a subdued smile was Picard's odd friend, Guinan.

Earlier, before his final conversation with Picard, he had been filled with nervous uncertainty despite his calm but impatient exterior. Could he really trust the logic that told him that the Vortex was not synonymous with death? Should he trust Guinan's word that her twin had actually seen and spoken with the Guardian? And that this was indeed what the Guardian demanded?

But now, particularly after Picard's comment about ”making a difference,” Kirk's uneasiness had given way to a growing curiosity and excitement. It was, in a way, not unlike how he had felt the very first time he had been aboard a stars.h.i.+p waiting for the warp drive to be engaged, waiting for energies he could barely comprehend to hurl him through dimensions and distances only mathematicians could describe.

Except that here no one-except possibly the Guinans?- had any idea where or when he was about to be hurled.

Which, now that the moment was almost here, just made him all the more curious, all the more excited.

This must be, he thought abruptly, how Zefram Cochrane felt in the last few seconds before he took his life in his hands and engaged that very first, totally unproven, jury-rigged warp drive.

Winking at Guinan, he pulled in a deep breath and stood up a little straighter as he turned to look at Scotty. ”Let's get this show on the road, old friend, before whatever's controlling those cubes sees through your little miracle. If I don't see you again...” He shrugged lightly. Some thoughts didn't require voicing.

A moment later, the tingle of antic.i.p.ation was replaced by the grip of the transporter energies.

The s.h.i.+mmering curtain enveloped him, obscuring the faces looking up at him.

With a sudden surge of almost boyish eagerness he hadn't felt since his retirement, he wondered what was going to happen next.

Twenty-Eight.

WITH PAINSTAKING deliberateness, the Borg Queen continued to reexamine the data, evaluating every aspect of every cube's sensor readings, not just those that the drones had been instructed to watch and act upon.

Finally, she found what she was looking for. Not Picard's s.h.i.+p, but a Borg cube-a cube that seemed, impossibly, to not be part of the armada she had just sent forth.

According to the data, it had first been sensed at the periphery of the stunted, overlapping sensor fields of two of the cubes sweeping the nebula and had then quickly taken up a position midway between the two. The interloper was not part of the phalanx performing the sweep and in fact was not itself producing a sensor scanning field of any detectable kind.

Sensor records of the cubes posted around the periphery of the nebula did not show the cube entering the nebula. They did, however, show it leaving. It had emerged from the nebula in company with the cubes performing the sweep. As the next sweep began, however, it had broken out of formation and headed away from the nebula on impulse power, moving in the general direction of the Vortex.

It took only seconds to confirm with a matrix-wide Link that all cubes were accounted for, not only those in the Terran armada but every single one she had constructed since the moment the time sphere had deposited her in the Terran system over two hundred years ago.

With growing uneasiness, she directed the sensors to focus on the projected path of the errant cube.

As she had expected, it had gone into warp drive minutes after leaving the nebula and was now only minutes from the Vortex and the cubes guarding it.

And it was still on a course that would take it within a few thousand kilometers of the Vortex.

Just as she had expected.

And feared.

”Time to transporter range, Mr. Data?” Picard asked, his eyes fixed on the image of the transporter room confined to the corner of the bridge viewscreen. Even as he spoke, Kirk, on one of the transporter pads, s.h.i.+mmered into nonexistence.

”Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds, Captain.”

Even without the tweaking of the pattern buffer control circuits by La Forge and Scott, the matter stream that now contained all that currently existed of Captain James T. Kirk would be safe in the buffer for nearly seven minutes before the pattern began to degrade.

”Ready to complete transport, Mr. La Forge?” he asked redundantly.

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