Part 22 (2/2)
Hernandez alighted on the platform, leaned forward, and shrugged Kedair off her shoulder. Catching the wounded woman with one arm, she tapped her combadge with her free hand. ”Hernandez to Aventine! Two to beam up!”
”Energizing,” replied a transporter chief over the comm.
Kedair clasped Hernandez's arm and grinned. ”In case we don't make it,” she said, ”nice try.”
The paralyzing embrace of the transporter's annular confinement beam found them, and the Stygian steelscape of the Borg s.h.i.+p began to fade behind a glittering veil-then a flash turned everything white.
The Borg scout s.h.i.+p vanished from the Aventine's main viewer in a fiery blue detonation.
Dax paced in quick steps behind Lieutenant Kandel, manic with anxiety. ”Tell me we got them,” she said, pestering the tactical officer for the third time in fifteen seconds.
From the other side of the console, Bowers tossed a sidelong frown in Dax's direction. ”And you wonder why I don't let you go on away missions.”
Pressing herself against the tactical panel beside Kandel, Dax said to Kandel, ”Report, Lieutenant.”
The Deltan woman finished reviewing the data on her screen in a calm, unhurried manner, looked up at Dax, and said, ”Transporter room two confirms Captain Hernandez and Lieutenant Kedair are aboard. The lieutenant is being rushed to sickbay.”
”Where's Captain Hernandez now?”
Kandel nodded at her companel. ”In the transporter room.”
”Patch me through to her,” Dax said. She waited for Kandel to confirm that she had opened a channel, and then she said, ”Captain Hernandez, this is Captain Dax. Are you all right?”
”I'm fine, but I need to meet with you, alone, right now.”
Bowers glanced at Dax, as if she needed reminding of the damage her s.h.i.+p had just taken and the dire need for repairs and a new plan. ”Can this wait an hour, Captain? We have a lot-”
”Right. Now. In my quarters.”
The vehemence of Hernandez's demand left Dax taken aback. She twitched her eyebrows at Bowers, who shrugged in return.
”All right, then,” Dax said. ”I'm on my way.”
The door to the VIP guest quarters opened at Dax's approach, and she entered unannounced. A few paces into the compartment, she saw Hernandez leaning against the bulkhead.
Hernandez regarded Dax with a dour frown. ”You're the second captain to barge into my quarters without knocking today,” she said. ”Doesn't Starfleet teach courtesy anymore?”
”My s.h.i.+p, my rules,” Dax said. ”Besides, you made it pretty clear-on an open channel-that you were in a hurry to see me.” Spreading her arms in a sarcastic pantomime of openness, she added, ”Well, here I am. Talk.” She folded her arms across her chest while she waited for the other woman's reply.
As she meandered toward Dax, Hernandez wore a troubled look. ”Bear with me, Captain,” she said, her voice quieter than it had been. Her shredded uniform hung loosely on her slender frame. ”What I need to tell you is vital, but it's hard for me to come at a problem straight. After eight hundred years with the Caeliar, keeping secrets becomes a virtue.”
”I understand,” Dax said. Hernandez stopped a mere arm's length in front of her. Looking more closely at her, Dax saw that despite the youthful appearance of her face and physique, Hernandez's eyes possessed an ancient light. It was a curious trait Dax had seen in joined Trills with very old symbionts.
Rubbing her palms slowly against each other, Hernandez said, ”I read everything in your files about the Borg before I went to that s.h.i.+p. I thought I was ready for whatever I'd find. I was wrong.”
”If you're blaming yourself over what happened during the counterattack, don't,” Dax said. ”As far as I'm concerned, you deserve a medal for saving three of my officers-especially going back for Kedair like you did.”
Hernandez averted her eyes and stepped away from Dax, toward the windows that looked out on the deceptively placid starfield. ”I'm not talking about what the Borg do,” she said. ”I'm talking about what they are. I wasn't ready to believe it.” Her voice fell to a hush, and Dax inched closer behind her to listen as she continued. ”I was expecting a group mind, but that's not really what the Borg is. It's one mind, one tyrant consciousness enslaving all the others. What it does to individuals is beyond cruel-it's s.a.d.i.s.tic, barbaric. And it's so...empty. It's a hunger void of form, a frozen pit that can never be filled, no matter how much it eats-and the larger it gets, the more it wants.”
She looked at Dax. ”It was like a melody I'd heard before, but now it was changed-darker, more dissonant. Instead of uniting the minds, the way a conductor guides the musicians in a symphony, it buries them, makes them into mute spectators, while it uses their bodies as tools. It's like a prison of lost souls, with trillions of beings chained to the will of something that doesn't even know what the h.e.l.l it wants.”
”Sounds like a bad Joining,” Dax said. Noting Hernandez's uncomprehending head shake, she added, ”Sometimes, when a Trill symbiont is incompatible with its new host, it creates a persona so terrible that the only proper response is forced separation.”
”That about sums it up,” Hernandez said. Sorrow darkened her expression. ”The worst part is how familiar it felt.”
Suspicion percolated in Dax's gut. ”Familiar?”
Stepping away, perhaps hoping to insulate herself from Dax with a bit of distance, Hernandez said, ”I first noticed it a few hours ago, after the boarding teams contacted us. When we lowered the dampening field, I was able to sense one of the dying drones on the Borg s.h.i.+p in the same way that I used to be able to sense the Caeliar. And when I was inside the Borg s.h.i.+p and it regained full power, it was like I was back in Axion.”
Dax kept a wary eye on Hernandez. ”Is that all?”
”It's just the beginning,” Hernandez said, stopping at her quarters' wall-mounted companel. She activated the screen with a gentle tap. It was crowded with multiple side-by-side windows of information-starmaps, s.h.i.+ps' logs, and more.
”Records from Voyager and the EnterpriseD both suggest the origin of the Borg is somewhere deep in the Delta Quadrant,” Hernandez said. Swapping one starmap for another, she continued, ”When the Caeliar homeworld was destroyed, the event created a number of pa.s.sages through subs.p.a.ce-the tunnels you and your people were trying to shut down. Those were the stable ones.”
A diagram of a subs.p.a.ce pa.s.sage took on a distorted twist. Hernandez explained, ”Some of the tunnels cut through time as well as s.p.a.ce; that made them unstable, and they collapsed shortly after the Erigol cataclysm, from which only three Caeliar city-s.h.i.+ps escaped.” She drew bright, straight-line paths across the starmap with her fingertip. ”One of those pa.s.sages tossed the city of Axion deep into the Beta Quadrant, about eight hundred and sixty-odd years ago. A second one threw the city of Kintana into another galaxy at the dawn of time.”
”And the third city...?”
”Mantilis,” Hernandez said, inscribing another line across the map, from the Azure Nebula to the Delta Quadrant. ”Several members of my landing party were trapped in that city when it vanished. Until now, the Caeliar believed that Mantilis was lost or destroyed in some distant past. Now, based on my a.n.a.lysis of Borg nanoprobes and my own experiences with the Collective, I have a new theory. Through some kind of botched version of the process that made me what I am...they became the Borg.”
Dax approached the companel to study the data up close. She imagined the horrified reaction it would provoke in Captains Riker and Picard-and likely in any human who was made aware of it. The origin of the Borg was a tragic confluence of long-past human actions and errors. ”Are you sure about this?”
”Positive,” Hernandez said with a satisfied smirk.
Shaking her head as a frown creased her brow, Dax said, ”According to Captain Riker, we wouldn't stand a chance against the Caeliar, so why are you acting like this is good news?”
”Because now I know which of the Borg's weaknesses we can exploit,” Hernandez said. ”And if Caeliar technology made the Borg, maybe it can un-make them, too.”
22.
Riker was waiting for the punch line. Still grappling with disbelief, he said, ”The Caeliar created the Borg?”
”I don't think it was intentional,” Hernandez said. She stood, attired in a new Starfleet duty uniform, in front of the companel in the Enterprise's observation lounge and faced Riker, Dax, and Picard. Nodding at the side-by-side images displayed on the screen behind her, she said, ”The similarities between Borg nanoprobes and Caeliar catoms are too profound to be coincidence. But they're not obvious, because their exterior configurations are completely different, and inside, in their cores, the nanoprobes have been badly corrupted.”
Picard sat at the head of the curved table on Riker's left, his countenance stern as he listened to Hernandez. ”Your evidence is compelling, Captain,” he said. ”But how does this knowledge help us or the Federation in the time we have left?”
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