Destiny: The Complete Saga: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls

by David Mack

  Troi cast a reproachful stare at Haaj. “You’re repeating yourself. I already told you it’s not about blame.”

  “Oh, but it most certainly is,” he replied. “You’re blaming yourself.”

  She recoiled from his accusation. “I’m not!”

  “You’re cursing your poisoned womb,” Haaj declared, as if it were a piece of gossip everyone else already knew. “To paraphrase Shakespeare, you know the fault lies not in your stars but in yourself.”

  “There’s a difference between an argument and an insult, Doctor,” Troi said in her most threatening tone.

  Uncowed, he replied, “Do you really expect me to believe you don’t blame yourself for back-to-back miscarriages?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then where is all this shame coming from?” He continued as if he was scolding a child. “You said it yourself: You’re filled with rage, and rage finds its roots in powerlessness and shame.”

  Denial had Troi shaking her head as a reflex. “Rage comes from being ashamed of our anger,” she said.

  “So, you’re ashamed of your anger?”

  “No!”

  “You just said you were! Who are you angry at? Yourself? Your husband? Some higher power that’s betrayed your trust?”

  His relentless, vicious badgering forced her to turn away, because her fury had become swamped in the rising waters of her grief. Her chest felt crushed, and her throat was as tight as a tourniquet. All her bitter emotions were bleeding into one for which she had no name. She closed her eyes to avoid seeing her dark reflection in the compartment window. Then she heard footfalls behind her, followed by Haaj’s voice, somber and soft.

  “You’re angry at the baby,” he said.

  It was the sharpest truth that had ever cut her.

  Her hands covered her face as deep, funereal bellows of grief roared from some dark chasm inside her. Tears were hot against her face as she doubled over, robbed of her composure by her wailing cries. Haaj’s hands found her shoulders and steadied her. He guided her to a chair and eased her into it.

  She stared at her tear-moistened palms. “I don’t understand it,” she said between choking gasps.

  “You and William invested this child with your hopes and dreams,” Haaj said. “You wanted it to be your future. But now joy has turned to sorrow, and you resent your baby for failing you, when you’ve already given it so much.”

  Troi looked up through a blurry veil of tears at Haaj. “But it’s so unfair. It’s not the baby’s fault … it’s no one’s fault.”

  “You’re right,” Haaj said. “It’s not fair. But when we’re wronged, our instinct is to assign blame. Even if it means hurting someone we love—someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

  Dragging her feelings into the open was a hideous sensation and not at all as cathartic as she had hoped. Worse still, it was forcing her to confront other torments and terrors she would have preferred to ignore for a while longer. “Dr. Ree wants me to terminate my pregnancy,” she said. “I told him no.”

  “The good doctor doesn’t make such suggestions lightly,” Haaj said. “I presume his concern is for your safety?”

  Troi shrugged. “So he said.”

  “And you think he’s wrong?”

  “No,” Troi said. “I know he’s probably right. But I can’t do it. I won’t.”

  Waggling his index finger, Haaj said, “No, no, Counselor. I’m afraid you need to choose a verb there. Either you can’t terminate your pregnancy, or you won’t. ‘Can’t’ implies that you have no choice in the matter, no capacity to make an affirmative decision. ‘Won’t’ suggests a defiant exercise of your free will. So which is it? Can’t? Or won’t?”

  She wrestled with the semantics of his question for several seconds before she answered, “Won’t. I won’t do it.”

  “Even though it puts your life in danger?”

  A calmness filled her. “It’s not important.”

  Haaj looked deeply worried. “Counselor, are you saying you want to die?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “But you seem ready to risk your life for a pregnancy that’s already failed. Why is that?”

  Her calm feeling became an emotional numbness, and in a dull monotone she told him the simple truth: “I don’t know.”

  4

  The voice of the Borg Collective lurked at the edge of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s awareness, taunting him with inhuman whispers.

  It was a susurrus of thoughts—omnipresent, elusive, and inaccessible. Picard had been able to hear them for weeks now, lurking on the periphery of his consciousness, ever since the first wave of unexplained Borg attacks deep inside the protected core systems of the Federation. When he was caught up in the business of command, he could shut them out, but when he tried to relax or sleep, when his mind was idle … those were the times when the voice of the Collective smothered him from within. With his eyes closed, he could almost hear the name that continued to stab icy fear into his heart: Locutus.

  Beverly Crusher’s voice pulled him sharply back into the moment. “Look at him, Jean-Luc—isn’t he amazing?”

  Here-and-now returned in a flood of sensation. He blinked his eyes back into focus on the details. A delicate cup of hot Earl Grey tea in his hand, its subtle aroma soothing his frayed nerves. His wife, Beverly, warm beside him as they sat together on the sofa in their quarters. The murky bluish image on the display of her medical tricorder, which she had thrust in front of him, as if for inspection. He stared at it, awestruck.

  Our son, he had to remind himself. That’s our son.

  “Words cannot do him justice,” Picard said, aglow with a moment of quiet, paternal pride.

  Then the soulless voice of the Collective returned and intruded on his moment of reflection to remind him: Pride was irrelevant. Hope was irrelevant. Resistance was futile.

  Months earlier, to stop a new Borg queen from rising in the Alpha Quadrant, he’d dared to let himself be transformed once more into Locutus. Hubris had led him to think he could fool the Collective, walk into the largest cube it had ever spawned, and kill its nascent queen with impunity. He had even believed that his mind was strong enough to open itself to the Collective and behold all its secrets at once. Only when it had been too late to turn back had he realized how foolish he’d been.

  One mind could not grasp the Collective. It was too great, too complex. It had reminded him of his true stature in the universe: small, weak, fallible, and insignificant.

  And now the voice of the Collective thundered in his mind, louder and more intimate than ever before.

  His brow grew heavy and furrowed with concern while he gazed down at the sensor image of the child growing inside of Beverly. His jaw tightened, not in anger but in remorse. You’ve always known something like this would happen, he upbraided himself. You knew it. How could you have been so foolish?

  He had confided in Beverly after the first new wave of Borg attacks. Drowning in the merciless depths of the Collective’s devouring group mind, he had needed her strength and passion to anchor him. She’d kept him grounded in all that he loved: her, his life, and their family-to-be.

  She turned off the tricorder and set it aside. “You’re hearing them again, aren’t you?”

  Picard nodded. “It’s hard not to,” he said. “They’re always there, just waiting for me to let my guard down.”

  “Sounds like what I had to do,” she said with a teasing edge, trying to cheer him up.

  He was smart enough to grab a lifeline when it was offered. He smiled back. “There were definite similarities in strategy.”

  “Jean-Luc,” she said with mock umbrage, “are you saying I wore you down?” She pressed closer against him and stroked his smooth pate. He extended his arm across her shoulders and rested his head against her silky, fiery red hair.

  “I’m just saying that I could tell resistance was futile.”

  “If you call a few pathetic excuses ‘resistance,’” she said, obv
iously enjoying the opportunity to needle him.

  It had been nearly three months since the Enterprise crew had succeeded in its mission to hunt down and destroy the Borg-assimilated Federation science vessel U.S.S. Einstein. At the end of that mission, Beverly had sensed and taken advantage of an opportunity to cajole Picard into the most hopeful undertaking of his life: starting a family with her.

  There had been no denying that, on some level, he had wanted this for a long time. The need had been awakened in him nearly ten years earlier, when his older brother, Robert, and young nephew, René, had been killed in a tragic fire at the family’s vineyard home in Labarre, France.

  Beverly’s reason for wanting a family was just as poignant to Picard. Her only child, Wesley—whom she had treasured not only as a son but as the last surviving remnant of her late husband, Jack Crusher—had evolved many years earlier into a Traveler, a wondrous being capable of moving freely through time and space … but he also was no longer fully human. The more Wesley had grown into his powers as a Traveler, the less frequently he had returned to visit with Beverly. He had appeared at their hastily arranged, low-key wedding a few months earlier, but there was no telling when he might return—or if he ever would.

  After the Einstein was destroyed, Picard had thought they’d earned a chance to seize their dream. After all, Voyager had destroyed the Borg’s transwarp hub to Federation space a few years earlier. The Enterprise and her crew had stopped the most fearsome Borg cube ever encountered. And the last rogue Borg element in Federation space seemed to have been eliminated.

  For a moment, Picard had dared to hope. He and Beverly had started their family. And less than a month later, as they were still marveling at their newly conceived son, the Borg had begun their blitzkrieg into Federation space.

  You should’ve known. You’ve always known.

  There was no going back now. He and Beverly had committed themselves, and they were going to see this through, to whatever end awaited them. Even as they huddled in the dim light of their quarters and shut themselves away from the gathering storm, he knew that this interlude of happy domesticity had never been fated to last. It was doomed to end in tragedy, like every other moment of joy he’d known in his life.

  “It’s time,” he said with a glance at a chrono set on the end table beside him. He extricated himself from her embrace and stood. Then he picked up the tricorder from the sofa and turned it back on, to admire the image of his son again, even if just for a moment. “You’re right. He’s amazing. In every way.”

  He switched off the tricorder and set it on a table as Beverly stood beside him. She laid her warm hands on either side of his neck and kissed him tenderly. Resting her forehead against his, she said, “I’ll be in sickbay if you need me.”

  “Meet you back here when it’s over.”

  She nodded somberly, her demeanor calm. They let their hands fall away from each other, and she stayed behind as he left, to avoid the awkward ritual of another farewell in the corridor. Sharpening his mind for battle, he left their quarters at a brisk step and headed for the turbolift, which would bring him to the bridge.

  In less than an hour, the Enterprise would arrive at the Federation world of Ramatis, near the Klingon border. If Picard and his crew had responded quickly enough to the planet’s distress signal, the Enterprise might arrive only a few minutes later than the Borg cube that was on its way to the planet.

  Picard knew that the time for diplomacy was past.

  It was time to go to war.

  * * *

  From his first glimpse of the scorched and glowing northern hemisphere of Ramatis on the Enterprise’s main viewer, Worf knew that every living being on the planet’s surface was dead—and that the Borg cube in orbit was responsible.

  “No life signs on the planet,” said Commander Miranda Kadohata, the ship’s second officer. “It’s been cooked down to the mantle.” She swiveled her seat away from the ops console to add, “The Borg cube is sweeping up all the satellites and defense-platform debris in orbit, probably for raw materials.”

  Disgust churned up bile in Worf’s throat. An enemy that would conquer a world to possess it could be hated and still be respected as an adversary. The Borg, however, had undertaken a campaign of slaughter without even the pretense of assimilating the people of the Federation. Their mission had been defined in stark terms by their actions at Acamar, Barolia, and now this ill-fated world. The Borg agenda was nothing less than genocide.

  Captain Picard’s voice snapped orders through the grim hush of the bridge. “Helm, intercept course, full impulse.” The captain looked at Worf. “Destroy the Borg ship.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Worf moved to stand beside the ship’s chief of security and senior tactical officer, Lieutenant Jasminder Choudhury. The lithe, fortyish human woman’s unruly mane of raven hair was tied in a tightly bound ponytail much like Worf’s own.

  “Prepare to execute attack pattern Tango-Red,” Worf said. He discreetly pointed out a reading on her console to her. Dropping his voice to a coaching whisper, he added, “Increase the frequency of the transphasic shielding’s nutation.”

  “Aye, sir,” Choudhury said with a polite nod as she made the adjustment. She was highly skilled and a quick learner, Worf had observed. When they had first met, he had been concerned that her philosophy regarding security matters—which she shared with her deputy chief, a Betazoid man named Rennan Konya—might be too pacifistic. After seeing them both in action during the mission to stop the Borg-assimilated science vessel U.S.S. Einstein, however, Worf no longer had any doubts about their competence, or their ability to wield force when necessary.

  As the captain rose from his chair, Worf said, “Arm torpedoes and target the Borg vessel.”

  He noted with approval how deftly Choudhury found the Borg vessel’s known vulnerable points. “Locked,” she replied.

  Confident that she had no further need of his oversight, he moved to an aft station and configured it to gather damage and casualty reports.

  Around the bridge, he saw hunched shoulders and clenched jaws, people tensed for action in a battle that would require little more than pressing buttons. Kadohata was the exception. Her countenance of mixed Asian and European ancestry was the very portrait of calm, and her British-sounding accent conveyed the same unflappability that Worf had come to expect from the captain. “Borg vessel in firing range in ten seconds,” she reported.

  The Borg cube loomed like a nightmare on the main viewer.

  Worf longed for the raw physicality of the great Klingon battles of old, fought on fields of honor where warriors faced one another with blades to test both prowess and courage. War was more glorious then. But death remains the same.

  “The Borg cube is arming weapons,” Choudhury declared.

  Three shots struck the Enterprise. Deafening concussions rocked the ship, and consoles along the starboard bulkhead crackled with sparks, belched acrid smoke, and went dark.

  Captain Picard glanced at Worf. “Now, Number One.”

  “Fire at will,” Worf said. “Helm, execute attack pattern!”

  Streaks like blue fire blazed away from the Enterprise and ripped into the towering black grids of dense machinery that served as the outer hull of the Borg cube. Large segments of the Borg ship disintegrated as the torpedoes exploded, and a cobalt-colored conflagration began to consume the cube from within.

  Then it returned fire.

  The bridge crew was thrown like rag dolls rolling in a drum as the Enterprise’s inertial dampers overloaded. Everyone was hurled to port, and they plummeted as the ship kept rolling. In the span of just a few seconds, they struck the consoles along the port bulkhead, tumbled across the overhead, and dropped hard back to the deck as the ship’s artificial gravity and inertial compensators reset themselves.

  Worf’s nose caught the scent of blood, which mingled with smoke and sharpened his focus. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees and looked first to the captain—w
ho was bruised and had suffered a scrape on his forehead, but was not seriously hurt—and then to the main viewer, on which he saw the Borg cube consumed from within by an indigo fury. The cube collapsed into itself. Its core of blue fire turned blinding white … and then the ship was just a cloud of carbon dust and superheated gas.

  If we could arm all of Starfleet with these weapons, Worf imagined, we could end this war with the Borg on our own terms.

  He finished a cursory review of the damage and casualty reports and moved to the captain’s side to help him up.

  “Thank you, Mister Worf,” the captain said once he was back on his feet. “Damage report.”

  “Hull breaches on decks twenty-six through twenty-nine, and the ventral shield generators are offline.”

  Picard nodded once. “Casualties?”

  “Several on the lower decks,” Worf said. “Mostly blunt-force trauma. No fatalities.”

  “Good,” Picard said. “Are the sensors still operational?”

  Worf stole a quick look at Kadohata, who wobbled her hand in a gesture that meant sort of. Worf looked at the captain. “Their function is limited.”

  “Focus our repairs on the sensors. We need them to trace the Borg ship’s arrival trajectory.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The captain palmed a sheen of sweat from his forehead and regarded the smoldering planet on the main viewer with a frown. “I’ll be in my ready room, Commander. You have the bridge.”

  The battered and shaken crew remained at their posts and focused on their jobs as Picard left the bridge. Worf could tell that despite their swift victory over the Borg cube, the jarring blow the ship had taken had rattled the nerves of a few of the younger officers. Figuring that the crew would benefit from a bit of encouragement, Worf made a slow tour of the bridge stations and offered quiet, low-key compliments. It did not have the effect he’d hoped for. By the time he reached the tactical station, he noticed sly, questioning looks passing from one junior officer to another.

  Choudhury confided to him, “I think you confused them.”