Part 19 (1/2)

T'Lana watched the tsunami of pyroclastic ash, displaced sand, and toxic fallout surge across the flatlands, toward the rocky peaks and canyons of the Forge. At its current rate of speed, the blast wave will reach me in six-point-two seconds, she deduced. I will not reach sufficient cover in time.

She had come home to complete the Kolinahr and purge herself of emotions and prejudice. It therefore struck her as ironic that her final musings were so deeply emotional. She was filled with regrets for her life's unrealized possibilities.

I can never make amends for betraying Captain Picard.

I can never apologize for insulting Amba.s.sador Spock.

A blast of heat kicked up the sand and seared her skin, a stinging harbinger of the lethal onslaught to come.

I will never be able to tell Worf how I desired him.

The roar of the explosion struck with stunning force. T'Lana shut her eyes...and accepted what she could not change.

Erika Hernandez gave orders without speaking, in a voice that wasn't hers, to an army that had no choice but to obey.

Cease-fire.

It was like opening the clamsh.e.l.l skylight in Inyx's lab. She pictured an event, an outcome that she desired, and the Collective turned itself to fas.h.i.+oning her wishes into reality.

The barrages against the planets stopped. She was anguished to see how much damage had already been wrought. Great glowing scars on the surfaces of five worlds spread horrid, ash-packed clouds through their atmospheres.

The symptom addressed, Hernandez looked to the cause.

The cubes. The hostile drones. The Queen.

Destroy them, she commanded, and throughout the Collective, her legions of followers complied without question, oblivious of the fact that they were the targets in their own crosshairs.

Firefights erupted inside Borg s.h.i.+ps throughout known s.p.a.ce. Drones cut one another down, pummeled one another with ruthless efficiency, slashed and shattered and impaled one another with mindless abandon. The cubes turned their awesome batteries against one another and blasted themselves to pieces.

Borg attack fleets in deep s.p.a.ce dropped from warp as they hammered one another with weapons fire. The Collective stood divided, every cube a battlefield in an instant civil war.

Aftershocks rocked the Collective. So many drones being extinguished at once was an excruciating jolt, and Hernandez felt her mind recoil and shrink from the horror of it. Without the feedback buffer, she was forced to experience every Borg drone's death, every violent end, every lonely submersion into darkness. With each pa.s.sing second, a thousand more voices cried out in the night, and her guilt felt like knives in her heart.

Then one voice rose above the carnage, that of a presence unlike any other Hernandez had encountered.

It was indomitable. Amoral.

Seductive and insidious.

The Queen answered Hernandez's challenge.

In a blinding flash of agony, Hernandez understood the true nature of the Borg...and for the first time in more than eight centuries, she was afraid.

A second queen. In all its millennia of expansion, a.s.similation, and steady progress toward perfection, the Collective had never before found itself torn between two monarchs.

Even when the Borg Queen had been forced in times past to manifest in multiple bodies at once, all of her avatars had represented the same will, the same mind, the same purpose. The guiding voice had always been unique and inimitable.

Now, on the cusp of the Collective's latest triumph, an impostor had risen. Harmony became discord; unity turned to conflict. Perfection had been tainted.

The Borg Queen quelled the millions of confused plaints and imposed order.

Sleep, she decreed. Regenerate.

These were the most basic directives the drones knew. They were among the first to be written, the building blocks for all that had come afterward. Willed by the Queen, they were irresistible fiats that overrode all other directives.

Throughout the enemy's territory, her drones halted their self-destructive struggles and sought out alcoves in which to replenish themselves and aid the restoration of their vessels. As the drones dropped out of the Collective, the Queen searched the still-waking minds for her rival.

Cube after cube went dark, slowed, and stopped in s.p.a.ce, as the drones hibernated. The Queen pushed the blank spots in the Collective from her mind and raced among the swiftly dwindling points of consciousness. Then there was but one besides herself.

Not human, not Borg. Something familiar but still alien.

Designation is irrelevant, the Queen decided. The intruder must be removed. She searched the isolated scout vessel for any remaining drones to serve her, but she found none. There were many humanoid interlopers on the s.h.i.+p, however. She decided they would suffice as replacements.

The s.h.i.+p awakened slowly to the Queen's will. It had not been engineered to play such a singular role, but it had been designed to support and create new drones-and to destroy all that opposed it, within and without.

More important, as with all creations of the Borg, it had been made to do one thing above all else: adapt.

Everyone in the combat operations center was talking at once, and Admiral Jellico could barely hear what Admiral Nechayev was saying from across the room. ”Speak up, dammit!” he shouted.

”It's confirmed, sir,” Nechayev hollered back. ”The Borg cubes fired on each other, and now they've all stopped, dead in s.p.a.ce.” She turned away as a harried-looking Arcturian captain thrust his padd into her hands. Turning back toward Jellico, Nechayev lifted her voice to add, ”All the Borg cubes are showing heavy damage-most of their cores are exposed.”

We might never get another chance, Jellico realized. ”All s.h.i.+ps, reengage! Press the attack while we can!”

His legion of officers snapped into action, rallying the fleet and directing an immediate counterattack. Watching the ma.s.sive screens full of tactical diagrams s.h.i.+ft to represent the recommitted battle forces, Jellico dared to hope.

If we're fast enough, we might just survive this.

”Fawkes, we need to strike now!” Captain Bateson bellowed, as the Atlas accelerated on an attack heading. ”Who's left?”

His first officer studied her tactical monitor and frowned. ”Exeter, Prometheus, and Kearsarge.”

”Well, tell Prometheus to do its three-way-split trick. We need to hit as many of those cubes over Vulcan as fast as we can.” Too energized to stay seated, he sprang to his feet and prowled forward. ”Helm, attack pattern Theta-Red. Weapons, hit the Borg with everything we've got: transphasic torpedoes, phasers, bad grammar-whatever it takes!”

The reddish orb of Vulcan grew swiftly larger in the frame of the Atlas's main viewscreen, and within seconds, the mangled and immobilized Borg cubes lingering in orbit became visible.