Part 8 (2/2)

”Yes,” Hernandez said. ”The armada's under her direct control.” Closing her eyes again, she attuned herself to the thoughtwaves of the Borg monarch. ”She's young, newly installed,” Hernandez continued, even as she struggled to glean more details. ”Full of fury. She...she even thinks of herself as being expendable-as long as Earth is destroyed.”

Desperate, Picard asked, ”Why? What's driving them?”

”I can't tell,” Hernandez said. ”It's all too muddled.”

Riker and Dax pressed in closer, and Dax asked, ”Can you tell us where the Borg Queen's s.h.i.+p is?”

Clearing her mind of all other questions, Hernandez sought that detail and found it. ”I know where she is,” she said. Then she opened her eyes and let her tears fall. ”She's leading a phalanx of several dozen Borg vessels.”

Riker's voice was taut with urgency. ”But where are they?”

Hernandez palmed tears from her face. ”Destroying Deneva.”

13.

The Queen had emerged from her chrysalis with two mandates coded into her being: Destroy Earth, and crush the Federation.

For too long, we have obsessed over Earth, she had directed her trillions of drones, attuning the Collective's will to her own. It has lured us, tempted us, thwarted us. No longer.

She had projected her murderous fury to the drones and adapted them to the lightning pace that she and the Collective now demanded of them. We offered them union. Perfection. They responded with feeble attempts at genocide. Earth and its Federation are not worthy of a.s.similation. They would add only imperfection. Since they offer nothing and obstruct our quest for perfection, they will be exterminated.

It was all coldly logical and mechanically precise, but none of that mattered to the drones. They would follow the will of the Collective and execute the Queen's dictates without question or hesitation. No justification had to be given to drones. The Queen, however...she made different demands.

She was a conduit, a voice for something that no longer had one. Its will existed outside her, and it was her, all at once. It was the Collective-not a chorus of voices but one voice speaking through those bound into its service.

The drones, the cubes, the Unimatrix, and even the Queen all were nothing more than the trappings of the Collective's true nature. It was the authentic essence of the Borg, and It told the Queen that the time had come for worlds to burn.

From her attack force, she dispatched six cubes toward the next inhabited planet that lay along their course to Earth.

Leave nothing alive, she commanded her drones.

And she knew that they would obey, without question.

Captain Alex Terapane bolted from his command chair to point at his preferred target on the main screen. ”All s.h.i.+ps, fire on the flanking cube! Clear a path for the escaping transports!”

The bridge crew of the U.S.S. Musas.h.i.+ scrambled to carry out his order as the s.h.i.+p bucked and shuddered under a fierce barrage by the Borg. His first and second officers had both been killed in the opening minutes of the battle, and there was no turning back now. With five other Starfleet vessels-the stars.h.i.+ps Forrestal, Ajax, Tirpitz, Potemkin, and Baliste-the Musas.h.i.+ was struggling to fend off an equal number of Borg cubes. The enemy vessels had approached at such high speeds that there had been almost no time to brace for the attack.

The Musas.h.i.+ slipped through a gap in the Borg's firing solution as the security chief, Lieutenant Commander Ideene, called out, ”Torpedoes away!”

Terapane tensed to sound a victory cry. Then he watched the three transphasic torpedoes slam into the Borg cube's s.h.i.+elds, which flared and then retracted but didn't fall. He snapped, ”Hit them again!”

A thundering impact snuffed the lights and pitched the deck violently. Terapane fell and landed hard on his left hip. White jolts of pain shot through his torso. He forced his eyes to relax from their agonized squint just in time to see the U.S.S. Tirpitz vaporized on the main viewer. Seconds later, the Ajax suffered the same fate and vanished in a flash of golden fire. Then came the Baliste's blaze of glory, as it followed the others into oblivion.

”Strigl,” Terapane shouted to his ops officer. ”Tell Forrestal and Potemkin to regroup-protect the transports!”

”Comms are jammed,” Strigl replied. ”All frequencies.”

Pulling his brawny form back into his chair, Terapane snarled at his security chief, ”Ideene! Report!”

”Targeting scanners are gone, I have to aim manually,” said the square-jawed Orion woman. ”Firing!”

Another volley of transphasic torpedoes soared from the Musas.h.i.+, slammed through the nearest Borg cube, and pulverized it in a bluish-white fireball. As the burning cloud dissipated, Terapane saw another cube struck by a double volley from the Potemkin and the Forrestal. The black hexahedron erupted and disintegrated. Spontaneous whoops of celebration filled the Musas.h.i.+'s dim, smoky bridge.

Then a scissoring crisscross of green energy blasts from the four remaining Borg cubes slashed through the Potemkin and the Forrestal and transformed both s.h.i.+ps into chaotic tumbles of fiery wreckage. Dozens more beams lanced through the hundreds of fleeing civilian transports, reducing them to glowing debris.

With Starfleet's defense forces shattered, the four remaining Borg cubes accelerated away from the Musas.h.i.+, into orbit of Deneva, millions of kilometers away.

We're all that's left, Terapane realized. His s.h.i.+p was Deneva's last defender, and it was outnumbered and outgunned. ”Arm all transphasic warheads,” he said to Ideene.

”But I don't have a target,” Ideene protested.

Terapane shot back, ”Arm every warhead we have, right now, wherever they are-in the tubes, in the munitions bay, I don't care. Do it now.” He took a deep breath. ”Helm, put us smack in the middle of those cubes, best possible speed, on my mark.” Throwing a look back at Ideene, he snapped, ”Well?”

”Warheads armed,” she replied.

On the main viewer, the four cubes were demolis.h.i.+ng Deneva's...o...b..tal defense platforms, which had been heavily upgraded after the Dominion War. Not upgraded enough, Terapane brooded, as he watched the Borg turn them to sc.r.a.p. Then the cubes spread apart in high orbit and turned their formidable weaponry against the planet's surface.

”Captain,” Ideene said, ”because of the Borg's deployment pattern, at best we might be able to take out two of them.” She started to say something, but she stopped and averted her eyes toward her console. She swallowed. ”Even in a best-case scenario, we can't save Deneva, sir.”

”No, we can't,” Terapane acknowledged. ”But I won't just hand the Borg their victory. I plan on making them pay for it.” He used the controls on his chair's armrest to open a s.h.i.+pwide comm channel. ”All decks, this is the captain. All noncombat personnel, abandon s.h.i.+p. Medical teams, evacuate sickbay, and split up to provide support for as many manned escape pods as possible. All pods will be ejected in two minutes.” He closed the comm channel. ”Mister Strigl, prep the log buoy.”

Terapane sat and pa.s.sed the final two minutes of his life in quiet reflection while his crew readied the Musas.h.i.+ to make its futile sacrifice. He thought of his wife and sons on Rigel IV, of the countless lives being extinguished on Deneva, of the grim fate that seemed to lie in store for all of the Federation. Watching the Borg cubes bombard the world that he had been tasked to defend, he seethed. Every second you wait, more die, his conscience scolded. His reason countered, They're all going to die today, anyway. Two minutes won't make any difference.

The hull resounded with the metallic thumps of magnetic clamps opening. Lieutenant Strigl swiveled his chair around from the ops console to report, ”All escape pods away, Captain.”

”Release the log buoy, Mark,” Terapane said.

Strigl keyed in the command. ”Buoy's away,” he said.

Terapane stared at the carnage on the viewscreen and saw no point in lying to himself. He wasn't about to work a miracle or save the day; nothing would be gained by what he did next. But his s.h.i.+p had been named for the famous samurai Miyamoto Musas.h.i.+, and it seemed only right and proper, in the aftermath of such a colossal failure, to fall on his sword.

If his figurative seppuku also happened to claim the lives of a few more of his foes, so much the better.

”Helm, is the course plotted?” he asked.

”Aye, Captain,” replied the young Vulcan pilot.

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