by David Mack
* * *
Dax appreciated Captain Picard’s courtesy in coming aboard the Aventine to meet with her in her own ready room, but his gesture wasn’t making her any more receptive to his plan. The fact that she’d only been able to steal two hours of sleep since their last meeting wasn’t improving her mood, either.
“I think you’re making a mistake, Captain,” she said. “It’s like using a phaser to swat a fly.”
Her metaphor seemed to fray the edges of Picard’s already careworn patience. “I would hardly call the threat of a massive, genocidal Borg invasion ‘a fly,’ Captain Dax.” He paced like a tiger not yet resigned to life inside its cage. “Whether we’re talking about one hole in the Federation’s defenses or several, our mission remains the same—close the gap.”
“We will,” Dax said, pulling back hard on the reins of her own temper. “But that’s a short-term goal. We also have to consider long-term objectives.” It was important to keep this discussion civil. Though they were both captains, Starfleet protocols clearly recognized his many years of command seniority and afforded him considerable privileges under circumstances such as these.
He narrowed his eyes. “I’d consider the survival of the Federation both a short- and a long-term mission priority.”
“So is exploration,” Dax replied. “Think of where some of those subspace tunnels might lead. What if some of them are passages to other galaxies? Or shortcuts across our own? Their value to science is immeasurable.”
“As is the threat they represent to our survival,” Picard shot back. “If there was some way to tell if the Borg had access to only one, and if we knew which it was, I might consider a surgical strike. But both our science departments concur: there’s no way to be certain. For all we know, the Borg are exploiting several of these tunnels through subspace. And as far as I’m concerned, even one is too many. They must be destroyed.”
Shaking her head, Dax ruminated aloud, “We could open them up, go through, and scout ahead. If we could save even a few safe passages—”
“We don’t have that luxury, Captain,” Picard said. “Your science officer wrote in his report that it could take hours to calculate the frequency for opening the aperture of one tunnel, and that they all resonate to different harmonics. It could take days to scout all these passages—and I have reason to suspect the Borg won’t be giving us that much time. Collapsing the passageways is the swiftest means of ending this Borg invasion, and it lets us do so without further conflict or loss of life.”
Dax turned away for a moment and looked out the window behind her desk, at the swirling violet and blue fog of the Azure Nebula. Like most officers in Starfleet, she had heard the rumors of Picard’s bizarre mental link with the Borg Collective, and the advantages that it had given him in combat against them. He seemed convinced of the imminence of the Borg threat, and that was enough to persuade her. She swiveled her chair back to face him and folded her hands atop her desk.
“All right,” she said. “I see your point. All the research opportunities in the galaxy don’t mean much if we’re not here to enjoy them. Do you have a plan for how to proceed?”
Picard stopped pacing and leaned on one of the chairs in front of Dax’s desk. “I’d like our science, engineering, and operations teams to keep working together,” he said. “This is a new phenomenon, and we need to comprehend it before we can find a way to dismantle it.”
“Tall order,” Dax said. “Learning how to take it apart might take as much time as scouting each passage. Or more.”
“Perhaps,” Picard said. “Certainly, it will take time to complete our analysis. Reinforcements are en route, but we should take aggressive precautions.”
“Aggressive precautions,” she repeated. “Is that one of those phrases I’m supposed to learn as a captain, or did you just make that up?”
“I have been known to coin a phrase once in a while,” he said, with his own disarming charm. “As for securing these passageways, we can take advantage of the fact that all the apertures surround a central position. If we mine that zone heavily enough, we can prevent further incursions while we complete our research.”
Something about his suggestion didn’t sound right to Dax. “A minefield? Inside a nebula full of sirillium gas?”
“Exactly,” Picard said. “We’ll make the environment work for us, use it to amplify the potential impact of the mines.”
Dax tried to remain calm as she considered the consequences of Picard’s strategy, but anxiety set her index finger to tapping on her desktop. “At this range, the blast effects of a full-scale detonation would probably cripple both our ships.”
Nodding and adopting a grave countenance, Picard said, “I’ve already made it clear to my officers and crew that the Enterprise is to be considered expendable if that’s what it takes to seal this breach in the Federation’s defenses. I need to know that you and your crew share this commitment.”
I must have missed the memo about this being a suicide mission. She wondered for a moment what pointed words her symbiont’s former host Curzon might have hurled at Picard in a moment such as this. Going along with Picard’s plan to wipe out an invaluable scientific discovery in the name of security had already rankled her; now he was asking her to pledge her ship’s destruction and her crew’s collective demise to accomplish it.
If he’s wrong, this’ll be a disaster, she told herself. But if he’s right …
“During the Dominion War,” she said, “Deep Space 9 used self-replicating cloaked mines to prevent Dominion reinforcements in the Gamma Quadrant from traveling through the Bajoran wormhole. I’m not sure the cloaking technology will work here inside the nebula, but if we make the minefield self-replicating, it’ll be able to sustain and rebuild itself even if our ships are destroyed or forced to retreat.”
“An excellent suggestion, Captain,” Picard said. “How soon can it be done?”
“We’re still fabricating parts for your repairs,” she said, thinking out loud, “but after that’s finished, we can build the first dozen mines in a few hours. Then we can release them and let them do the rest of the work, replicating themselves to build a defensive cluster between the subspace tunnels. The entire zone could be filled in about four hours.”
Picard stood tall and gave her a curt nod. “Make it so.”
* * *
“It’s a right awful shame, if you ask me,” said Miranda Kadohata, keeping her eyes and her hands on her console at ops. “One of the most amazing things we’ve ever discovered, and the captain wants us to destroy it.”
Worf had no wish to debate Kadohata regarding the wisdom of their assignment, and not just because she was right. The simple fact was that the Federation had once again found itself in a state of war with the Borg Collective. Discipline and morale were more important at times like this than at any other.
“I concur,” he said. “It is an interesting phenomenon, and it is regrettable that we will not be able to study it. But the captain’s orders stand.”
From a few meters behind him, Worf heard contact specialist Lieutenant T’Ryssa Chen mutter to another junior officer, “If we really wanted to know what makes these things tick, we’d have found a way to avoid blowing them up.”
Muscles in the Klingon’s jaw rippled with tension as he bit down on the rebuke he felt Chen so richly deserved. He stalked toward her, his unblinking gaze locked with Chen’s as her young confidant prudently slipped away to work at a different station on the other side of the bridge.
He loomed over the youthful woman of mixed Vulcan-human ancestry, and his voice became quiet even as it sharpened to a fine edge. “Do you have something to share, Lieutenant Chen?”
She swallowed once while staring up from beneath eyebrows lifted to steep peaks of anxiety. “No, sir,” she said. “I’m just, you know, compiling sensor logs and collating data. Sir.”
“I see,” Worf said. He put a malicious gleam in his stare. “Carry on, and keep Commander Kadohata informed of y
our progress,” he said. As he stepped away, he added, “The captains want regular updates.”
“They always do,” Chen mumbled under her breath, and Worf felt frustration force his hand to clench into a fist. With effort he had opened his hand by the time he reached the security console, where Lieutenant Jasminder Choudhury, the chief of security, was plotting the minefield’s distribution pattern. She had been laboring at the task for some time—longer, in fact, than Worf had expected it to require. He watched the serene-faced woman work at it, her agile hands rearranging patterns and data on her console. A subtle knitting of her brow was the only evidence of her mounting frustration.
He asked, “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”
Choudhury stopped working. “There are some challenges.” Her face was emotionless, her voice low and controlled—all hallmarks of a bad mood for her. “The fluid dynamics of the nebula are making it very difficult to keep the minefield’s position stable relative to the subspace tunnels. And I’m still waiting for an updated analysis from stellar cartography about the behavior of the apertures themselves, so I can correct for any distortions.”
“We can request help from the Aventine’s crew,” Worf said. He noted the dubious stare of his security chief—with whom he had also recently become more closely acquainted—and concluded that she wasn’t embracing his suggestion. “Or I could let you take more time with it.”
Her lips pursed into a frown, and she shook her head in small, slow motions. “I’m sorry, sir, I can do this—really. I just don’t know that I agree with it.”
“Why not?” It wasn’t like Choudhury to question orders, and Worf began to suspect that Kadohata might not be the only member of the Enterprise’s senior staff who was balking at Captain Picard’s tactical directive. Noticing Choudhury’s reluctance to answer, he added, “Speak freely, Lieutenant.”
“Commander Kadohata’s right,” she said. “Aside from their scientific value, the subspace tunnels would be a major tactical resource for the Federation if we could secure them.”
“And if we cannot, they are a vulnerability,” Worf said. “One of these passages is being exploited by the Borg. We have no way of knowing what threats lie beyond the others.”
Choudhury’s face flushed slightly. “For all we know, most of the passages might not need any defending at all. Why don’t we explore them, figure out which ones the Borg have compromised, and conduct surgical strikes to collapse just those passageways? Then we’d still have the others for exploration.”
“I agree … in principle,” Worf said. “But that approach would take a great deal of time—which we do not have.”
“But if we did,” Choudhury said, “and we could target only the Borg’s subspace tunnels—”
“It would make no difference,” Worf cut in. “If the Borg found one passage, they can find others. And now that they know what to look for, they will not stop until they find it.” He hardened his countenance to drive home his point. “The safest choice is to collapse all the tunnels.”
The security chief sighed. “You’re right.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then set herself back to work. “I’ll let you know when I’ve stabilized the deployment pattern,” she said, and then she let herself become consumed in her task.
As Worf returned to his chair, an ensign handed him a padd. The XO sat down, skimmed the padd’s contents, and was pleased to see that the Aventine’s damage-control teams working on the Enterprise were beginning to get ahead of schedule. If all continued to go well, the Aventine’s engineering division would be able to repurpose its industrial replicators for mine production shortly before midday.
On a less encouraging note, he reviewed the casualty statistics from sickbay and imagined it must have seemed like an abbatoir in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Before he could dwell too long on that morbid thought, Kadohata called back from ops, “Commander? Can I show you something?”
Worf put down the padd on his chair as he got up, and he walked at a quick step back to Kadohata’s side. “Report.”
“The Aventine just sent over its telemetry from its trip through the subspace tunnel,” Kadohata said. “Watch what the aperture does when it opens.” She played a computer-simulated animation that graphed the phenomenon’s behavior, and pointed out details of the tunnel’s interaction with normal space-time. “Something tells me Choudhury won’t like that.”
“No, she will not,” Worf agreed. Eyeing the display with a more critical eye, he asked, “Will this interfere with our plan to destroy the tunnels?”
“If by interfere you mean scuttle, then yes.” Kadohata pointed at a string of data. “Maybe I’m off the mark, but I think these readings mean that collapsing those passages is far more dangerous than we thought.” She swiveled her chair toward Worf. “Sir, I’d like to get a second opinion on this data from Commander La Forge and my counterpart on the Aventine.”
Her request prompted a subtle double take from Worf. “I have never heard you ask Geordi for a second opinion before.”
With quiet humility, Kadohata replied, “That’s because I’ve never been on the verge of making a galactically catastrophic mistake before.”
* * *
Jean-Luc Picard was always grateful for those rare days when everything went according to plan. Alas, this would not be one of those days.
He entered the Deck 1 observation lounge of the Enterprise to find Worf standing beside his chair near one end of the table. Next to Worf were La Forge and Elfiki.
On the other side of the table stood Captain Dax, Commander Bowers, and the Aventine’s science officer, Lieutenant Helkara. The normally warm-colored, indirect lighting of the conference room was overwhelmed by the violet illumination from the nebula outside its broad, sloped windows.
Picard walked in brisk steps to his chair at the head of the table, and as he sat down he said, “Please, be seated.” Everyone settled in at the table and leaned forward. He looked at Dax and asked, “Why has production halted on the minefield?”
“Because it won’t work,” Dax said. She nodded to her science officer. “Mister Helkara, the details, please?”
The svelte Zakdorn used the touchscreen on the table surface in front of his seat to activate a brief presentation on the wall monitor opposite the windows. “Our sensor telemetry of the subspace tunnels reveals a curious feature of its apertures,” he said, narrating as the computer-generated animation on the screen continued. “When they open, they cause a localized disruption of the space-time curvature, to a range of approximately a hundred thousand kilometers. The effect is subtle enough that a starship’s navigational system can compensate with little difficulty. Position-stabilized mines, on the other hand …”
He triggered a new animation sequence of an aperture opening into a region occupied by the minefield cluster. In a brief blur, the area was swept clean. “The space-time distortion is powerful enough within one thousand kilometers to disperse any minefield we install. Most of the mines will collide with one another and detonate. Any that are left will be brushed aside and ejected from the nebula, into deep space.”
“It’s possible that a few might remain intact after the aperture closes,” Bowers added, “but not enough to stop a Borg ship, or to regenerate the minefield.”
“Plus,” Helkara said, “the mines that get tossed from the nebula will become hazards to interstellar shipping and travel.”
Captain Picard presented a calm and professional demeanor as he looked to his science officer. “Lieutenant Elfiki? Have you had a chance to review this data?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Our own sims confirmed it. The subspace tunnels’ apertures will violently disperse the minefield. Mister Helkara and I think it might be a deliberate safety feature of the passageways.”
Worf asked La Forge, “Could the mines be altered to compensate for the distortion?”
The chief engineer shook his head. “No, they just don’t have that kind of maneuverability.”
; “Could we build it in?” Picard asked.
“I doubt it,” La Forge said. “We can remove the replication systems, but there still won’t be enough room for the hardware and computing power these things’ll need to make those kinds of adjustments on the fly. Even if there were, without the self-replication feature, each mine would have to be produced and deployed by us or by the Aventine. And once triggered, the field would be unable to regenerate.”
Picard scowled, exposing his ire at seeing a perfect plan thwarted by incontrovertible facts. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll simply have to proceed without a safety net. Reinforcements will arrive within fifty-one hours. Until then, we’ll have to hold the line while we work on collapsing the subspace passages.”
Elfiki, who rarely spoke up in meetings, seemed cowed as she said to Picard, “Um, Captain?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
Her eyes darted nervously from Picard to Helkara and then back again. “There’s just one problem with that plan. We should stop trying to collapse the tunnels.”
The captain lowered his voice to mask his irritation, but in the hushed conference room, he still sounded upset. “Why?”
She took a deep breath and seemed calmer as she replied. “All the passages resonate at different subharmonics of one interphasic frequency, so any pulse that collapses one of them safely will cause a domino effect that’ll collapse the others. But the uncontrolled implosions will have amplified effects that could resonate throughout galactic space-time.”
Worf swiveled his chair toward her. “Such as …?”
“Stars could explode,” she said. “Whole systems could vanish. Spiral arms could be dispersed into the void.”
Helkara added, “Pluck the wrong string on this instrument, sir, and you could wipe out a quadrant in one note.”
Certain that he felt a headache forming inside his skull, Picard muttered, “Merde.” For a moment he let his mind go quiet, to see if he could hear the voice of the Borg Collective. He sensed no contact, but he felt as if the silence held its own menace. The Borg were out there, lying in ambush, waiting for him, awaiting some final call to action. He was certain of it.
