Part 18 (2/2)
”Sir,” Kedam said. ”The Billings is leading the reserve wing on a collision course with the Borg s.h.i.+ps.”
Bateson looked to his XO. ”Fawkes, hail them! Tell them to break off!” She tried to do as he asked, but Bateson knew it was too late. He watched in horror as the U.S.S. Billings and more than a dozen Federation stars.h.i.+ps were blasted into sc.r.a.p and vapor by the Borg cubes, which rammed their way through the spreading cloud of smoldering debris.
Reese cried out, ”The Borg are locking weapons!”
”Helm, evasive!” Fawkes shouted.
The young Andorian chan at the conn struggled to guide the Sovereign-cla.s.s vessel through a series of rapid and seemingly random changes in speed and direction, but the hull rang under a succession of crus.h.i.+ng blows from the pa.s.sing Borg cubes. A brutal impact sent the Atlas spinning and rolling and plunged its bridge into darkness for several seconds.
When the overhead lights and bridge systems came back on, Bateson was crestfallen as he confronted the grim scene on the main viewer. Only a handful of s.h.i.+ps from his attack fleet were intact, and even fewer appeared to be operational.
”Kedam, open a channel,” Bateson said, fuming mad at his failure to halt the Borg's genocidal march. ”Warn the Vulcans: The Borg will reach orbit in one minute.”
President Bacco, her cabinet, and her advisers stood and traded nervous whispers around the conference table in the Monet Room, sequestered below the Palais de la Concorde. Esperanza Piniero positioned herself to monopolize access to the president.
”We still have time to get you to safety, ma'am,” she said, her tone more insistent than it had been the last three times she had made this suggestion. ”There's a high-warp transport standing by. We can have you halfway to Rhaandar by the time the Borg reach Earth.”
”Enough,” Bacco said. ”One more word about this, and I'll have Agent Wexler put you on that transport by yourself.”
Piniero scowled. ”You say that like you think it'd be a punishment, ma'am.”
”Hush,” Bacco said. ”There's nowhere to retreat to, anyway. We're making our stand here, Esperanza. Besides, if the Federation falls, I don't want to live to see it. Now, step aside. You're blocking my view.”
She didn't really want to see any more of the developing calamity, but it was as good an excuse as any to end their conversation. The room's multiple display screens all showed similar images, telling the same story. Starfleet vessels were broken and burning or scattering in confused retreat. A Klingon fleet was making one valiant sacrifice after another to defend Qo'noS. Borg cubes advanced all but unopposed on the strongholds of the Federation and its allies. And volley after volley of transphasic torpedoes made not one blessed bit of difference.
The Borg were winning the war.
Off to one side, Admirals Akaar and Batanides conferred with Seven of Nine, who had joined them to review the latest dispatches from Starfleet Command. The admirals' faces were easy to read: naked fear. Seven, as usual, maintained an inscrutable mien as she whispered to the two flag officers. The statuesque former Borg drone turned, took a few steps toward the table, and faced Bacco. ”Madam President,” she said, snaring everyone's attention. ”The Borg have adapted to the transphasic torpedo.”
The admirals joined Seven, and Akaar said, ”We've confirmed it, Madam President. As of this moment, the Federation no longer has a defense against the Borg.”
Energy and signals from the Borg Collective coursed through the catoms that infused Erika Hernandez's body and mind. A surge of raw power flooded her senses, giving flavor to colors and sounds to the cold touch of wires against her flesh. It was narcotic and addictive, and the ocean of tiny voices that was swept up in the psychic wave of the Collective's imperial will was both suffocating and awe-inspiring.
She had expected it to be more like the gestalt, but its similarity was only superficial. Many voices had been fused into a single consciousness, but not willingly. Unlike the Caeliar, who had united their minds for the elevation of their society as a whole, the Borg Collective subjugated sentient minds and then yoked their hijacked bodies to serve its own aims.
The deeper she delved into the Collective, the more she realized that it was nothing like the gestalt. It was darker, almost primordial in its aggression, brutally authoritarian, and utterly domineering. She hadn't realized how much she had taken for granted the benign nature of the Caeliar gestalt; where it had linked individuals with a warm bond of common purpose that respected its individuals' right to free will, the Collective hammered disparate ent.i.ties together with cold force, like a blacksmith crafting a sword in a forge of ice.
Hernandez wanted to flee from its casual cruelty, free herself from its oppressive embrace, but there was too much at stake. I have to keep going, she told herself. Pus.h.i.+ng her mind into deeper levels of connection with the Collective, she felt her thoughts taking on its primal hues. I have to surrender myself to the Collective and experience it the way the drones do. I need to hear the Queen and know what she sounds like.
Surrendering to the gestalt had been like returning to the womb and becoming a fluid in an endless stream of consciousness. Submitting to the Collective felt more like being swallowed in a tar pit, enclosed in oily darkness, smothered, and silenced.
Then, alone in the dark, Hernandez heard it.
The voice of the Borg Queen.
Harsh and autocratic, it was a psychic whip of fire on the backs of the drones. Even the cube-shaped s.h.i.+ps answered to its unswerving command. Hernandez let herself see what the Queen wanted her to see: fleets of Starfleet and Klingon stars.h.i.+ps being crushed without mercy or regret, orbital defense platforms above five worlds being obliterated with ease, and the cubes' preparations for surface bombardments that would turn those worlds into lifeless slag.
Vulcan. Andor. Coridan. Beta Rigel. Qo'noS.
In moments, they would all be gone.
Erika Hernandez directed her catoms to vibrate in harmony with the essential frequency of the Borg Queen and steeled herself to speak to the Collective.
Only then did she realize she had no idea what to say.
Charivretha zh'Thane watched green bolts fall from the sky above Therin Park on Andor. As the matron of her clan, she had refused to abandon her home. It would have served no purpose, she'd decided. There was nowhere safe to go, and her chei, Thirishar, and his bondmates and their offspring all were long gone from Andor. There was nothing left here for her to protect.
She'd still hoped it wouldn't end like this, that Starfleet would devise some brilliant tactic to repel or thwart the Borg's latest incursion. During her years as Andor's representative on the Federation Council, she had often been amazed by Starfleet's seemingly endless resourcefulness.
Not endless after all, she admitted, as a viridescent fireball descended toward the park. Strikes beyond the city's perimeter trembled the ground under her feet.
Too jaded to mourn the loss of her own life, zh'Thane felt a profound sorrow for the doomed beauty that surrounded her and the several thousand other Andorians who had chosen to await their end in Therin Park. Cloistered in the heart of the capital city, it was a place of great natural beauty. Its aquatecture filled the air with the gentle burbling of flowing water, and its sprawling gardens and terraced waterfalls were designed to create secluded enclosures. Exotic, colorful fish in its ponds nipped and leaped at floating transparent spheres that housed dancing flames. Though portions of the park had been damaged by terrorist bombings years earlier, it had been rebuilt into something even more beautiful than what had been lost.
Vretha doubted that would be the case this time.
She drew her last breath of cool, floral-scented night air.
Then she and the park, along with the fish and the flowers and the soft music of flowing water, were gone.
All that remained was fire.
The skies of Vulcan wore many colors. At daybreak, brilliant shades of pink and vermillion ruled the lower degrees of the heavens. At midday, faded hues of amber and cinnamon set the tone. Come sunset, gold and crimson owned the horizon.
At every longitude of Vulcan, the red and bronze dome of the sky was split by jade-colored thunderbolts from orbit.
T'Lana had ventured alone into the vast wasteland of the Forge in search of solitude and healing. Her judgment as a counselor and as a Starfleet officer had been compromised by her ego and by her own surety that she'd known better than everyone around her, about everything. It had taken a failed-and, in retrospect, disastrously misguided-mutiny against her commanding officer to make clear to her just how skewed her reasoning had become. Faced with the inexcusable nature of her actions, she had done the only logical thing: She had transferred off the Enterprise, requested an indefinite leave of absence, and returned to Vulcan to place herself in the care of experts who could guide her back to the path of selfless reason and logic.
She saw the death stroke falling and wondered, Did I play some part in this tragedy? Were my actions part of a series of errors that led the Federation to this moment?
Logic suggested that she was succ.u.mbing to egotism again. In any reasonable evaluation of the matter, her own role would likely prove to be so small as to be inconsequential. Only a rank egotist would seek to accept solitary blame for an event of such epic proportions, she a.s.sured herself.
Her inner eyelids blinked shut as the blast of burning emerald plasma slammed down into the heart of s.h.i.+Kahr and turned the city to slag, vapor, and rubble. The shockfront from the detonation raced from the vanished metropolis as a kilometers-tall mushroom cloud reached into the soot-blackened sky.
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