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

by David Mack

  Behind him, a battle cry preceded the agonized scream of Lieutenant ch’Kerrosoth, who tumbled wildly away from the second Hirogen hunter, into the middle of the bridge. The tall Andorian clutched at the stump of his left arm, which had just been severed a few centimeters above the elbow.

  Pandemonium erupted on the bridge. Security officers broke cover and converged on the two exposed Hirogen, who cut them down with the smooth precision of butchers in a slaughterhouse.

  Then the Alpha-Hirogen spotted Kadohata and Šmrhová trying to smuggle Captain Picard off the bridge to the observation lounge. He pointed at the captain. “Kill that one!”

  Both Hirogen charged, knocking aside the security officers in their way. Worf sprinted to cut them off. Šmrhová and Kadohata closed ranks in front of the captain and fumbled as they tried to reload their TR-116s.

  Choudhury buried one of her Gurkha knives in the charging Beta-Hirogen’s unarmored knee joint. He spun and swung his own blade at her head. She ducked his slashing attack. He lunged forward, grasping at her throat. The limber security chief caught the beta’s wrist, employed a move that was half judo and half Mok’bara to flip him onto his back, and used his own momentum to drive his dagger through his eye and into his brain.

  Worf tackled the alpha, who jabbed an elbow backward, only to be blocked by Worf’s bat’leth. The Hirogen rolled free of Worf’s grip, and they came up facing each other. A feint by the hunter put Worf off balance. Next he felt the hot sting of a slash across his chin. He lunged and swung his bat’leth in a deadly downward stroke. It slammed impotently against the shoulder plate of the alpha’s blue-black armor.

  The alpha swatted the bat’leth from Worf’s hands. Then he lunged and thrust his dagger forward and up, to stab Worf under his chin—exactly as Worf had hoped he would.

  The rest happened in less than three seconds.

  Worf pivoted away from the striking blade. He let himself flow like water, his limbs as free as the wind, and the dagger missed him. He ducked under the Hirogen’s right arm, caught it by the wrist, and flipped the hunter over his shoulder.

  The alpha struck the deck at Worf’s feet, his wrist still caught in Worf’s grip. Worf yanked the hunter’s forearm taut and struck it with his knee. The elbow broke with a crack like a rifle shot. As the blade fell from the alpha’s fingers, Worf landed a stomping kick on the alpha’s neck. The fatal snap was muffled by the Hirogen’s armor.

  His dropped blade bounced across the deck and came to a stop as the Hirogen’s body went limp.

  “Turn off his energy dampener,” Picard ordered, moving back toward his command chair.

  Worf found the device on the alpha’s belt and switched it off. Instantly, the overhead lights, companels, and main viewscreen became operational again. He noticed several of his crewmates recoil as the return of normal lighting revealed the copious amounts of blood that stained the deck around them.

  Captain Picard, however, remained stoic and calm. “Hail the Aventine,” he said. “Signal all-clear and confirm their status.”

  “Aye, sir,” replied Kadohata, who stepped over the bodies of several dead security officers on the way to her post at ops.

  Apprehensive looks and discomfited expressions marked the faces of the other bridge officers, who were led back in from the observation lounge. Elfiki lifted a hand to block the carnage from her sight as she hurried to the science station. Weinrib maintained a rigidly focused stare on the main viewer as he returned to his seat at the conn. T’Ryssa Chen looked as if she might become physically ill.

  The main turbolift doors opened, and a team of medics emerged. As expected, they had come bearing a large number of blue body bags. The two who had actual medical equipment were led to the unconscious Lieutenant ch’Kerrosoth.

  Kadohata glanced back at Worf and the captain. “Aventine confirms all-clear, sir.”

  “Splendid,” Picard said, sounding enervated.

  From the auxiliary science station, Lieutenant Chen stammered, “Um … sirs?”

  Worf replied gruffly to the half-human, half-Vulcan contact specialist, “Report, Lieutenant.”

  “We have a new problem,” she said, patching her sensor data onto the main viewer. “New readings from the subspace tunnel,” she explained. “Long story short: It’s becoming unstable. If we don’t go back right now, we might never be able to.”

  Elfiki turned from her station, eyes wide with alarm. “Captain, without our shields at full power, we can’t go back into the plasma stream.”

  “Bridge to engineering,” Picard said.

  “La Forge here.”

  “Geordi, we need full shields, immediately.”

  “After the beating we just took? Captain, we won’t have full shields for at least six hours.”

  Everyone looked at Chen, who shook her head. “We don’t even have six minutes.”

  “Then we need a new solution,” Kadohata said.

  The normally shy Elfiki spoke up. “Mister Weinrib, how are your reflexes?”

  The flight controller replied suspiciously, “Pretty good.”

  Elfiki threw a look at Kadohata. “And yours?”

  “I’ve had no complaints,” said the second officer.

  “Well, you’d both better be fantastic if we want to get out of this.” She shouldered aside Šmrhová from a tactical console and routed new information to the main viewer. “If we detonate two transphasic warheads—one here and the other here—we can create a six-second gap in the plasma stream. Which means we and the Aventine will have that long to emit the pulse that opens the aperture, navigate into it, and get both our ships inside the tunnel before the plasma stream catches up and slags us.”

  Chen added, “And we have about five minutes to do it.”

  Picard gave a fast nod. “Make it so.”

  The crew snapped into action. Worf settled into his chair and sleeved a smear of blood from his chin. He looked left and caught the captain’s eye. In a sub rosa voice, he said, “A pity she did not devise her plan before the Hirogen attack.”

  The captain lifted his eyebrows and sighed. “Starship command is like comedy, Number One. Timing is everything.”

  * * *

  Dax stood in the center of the Aventine’s broken, smoldering bridge and felt precious seconds slip away. Her crew was racing to prepare the ship for its return journey while she stared at the main viewer and watched a raging flow of stellar plasma be siphoned from a red giant into its black-hole companion.

  Bowers bounded from the science console to Dax’s side. “We’re ready,” he said, wiping his soot-stained hand down the side of his grimy uniform jacket.

  “Kandel, hail the Enterprise,” Dax said. “Start the countdown. Nak, charge up the main deflector.” Looking past Bowers to the ship’s senior science officer, she added, “Get ready to pick that lock, Gruhn.”

  The svelte Zakdorn kept his eyes on his just-repaired companel as he palmed a sheen of sweat from his broad, high forehead. “Give the word and we’re in, Captain.”

  Bowers confided to Dax, “Let’s just hope the deflector’s strong enough to shield the entire ship from the radiation inside the tunnel.”

  “If it’s not, we’ll know in about fifteen seconds,” Dax said, watching the synchronized countdown on the main viewer.

  A series of chirping tones sounded on the tactical console. Lieutenant Kandel reviewed the incoming data. “Enterprise is arming torpedoes and targeting the plasma stream,” she said.

  “Tharp,” Bowers said to the Bolian conn officer, “full impulse, on my mark. Gruhn, open the subspace aperture on the same mark.”

  Kandel called out, “Torpedoes away in three … two … one …”

  “Mark,” Bowers said, as a pair of blue flashes sped from the bow of the Enterprise toward the plasma stream.

  The vibration of full-impulse thrust resonated under Dax’s feet as the Aventine accelerated instantly to one-quarter light speed, following the transphasic warheads toward a river of fire hanging in
space. Six hundred meters to port, the Enterprise was pacing the Aventine in their race toward the subspace tunnel.

  Electric blue flashes whited-out the main viewer. Then the image returned, and the first step of the plan had worked: The transphasic warheads had blasted a lacuna into the black hole’s relativistic jet stream of superheated coronal mass.

  Ahead of the two starships, the subspace aperture spiraled open as if rent from the fabric of reality itself. As it loomed larger on the Aventine’s main viewer, however, so did the tide of burning stellar plasma advancing from behind it.

  “This is the fun part,” Dax said, then inhaled sharply.

  The blue-white rings of the subspace passage pulsed beyond its aperture’s edges into the golden blaze of the plasma stream.

  Then the Aventine was inside the passageway, shaking and pitching as strange energy currents hammered its hull. “Nak!” Dax hollered over the steady roar of turbulence. “Report!”

  “Shields holding,” the Tellarite shouted over the noise. “Hyperphasic radiation leaks on Decks Twenty-five and Twenty-six, Sections Thirty to Thirty-three.”

  Dax nodded. Nak had predicted leaks in those areas when he’d configured the deflector dish as a backup shield emitter, and they had been evacuated before the plan had been engaged.

  A brutal tremor rocked the ship. Consoles stuttered light and dark, and white-hot phosphors rained down around Dax and Bowers as another EPS capacitor overloaded above them.

  Bowers staggered across the heaving deck toward Helkara, and then a violent jolt of acceleration sprawled the first officer roughly against the science console. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Gruhn, what’s going on out there?”

  “The tunnel’s imploding!” said Helkara, raising his voice so that Dax could hear his report, as well.

  “What’s causing it?” she demanded, falling awkwardly into her chair.

  Helkara waved a drift of smoke away from his console. “Someone’s bombarding it with high-energy soliton pulses,” he said. “It’s disrupting the tunnel’s topology.”

  “Helm, all ahead full!” Dax yelled to Tharp.

  “Almost there,” the Bolian replied, even as he patched in every ounce of reserve power, including the ship’s spacedock thrusters. “Clearing the passage in five … four …”

  Ahead of them, the once-circular aperture of the tunnel had become deformed and irregular, like an amoeba. Its contours rippled, undulated, and began retracting and fusing together.

  “I think it’s trying to eat us,” Nak blurted out in horror.

  The melting edges of the aperture reached precariously close as the Aventine breached the subspace tunnel’s threshold—and then the chaotic blue-and-white kaleidoscope was behind them, and the ship’s main viewer was once more awash in the radiant, deep-blue serenity of the Azure Nebula.

  “Enterprise is clear,” Kandel reported over the relieved collective sigh of the other bridge officers. Then she gasped.

  Dax glanced back at the Deltan woman to see what was wrong, only to see the shocked tactical officer raise her terrified stare toward the main viewer.

  As she turned forward, Dax realized that all her officers were gazing at the viewscreen, looking transfixed and stunned.

  Then she saw why.

  The cerulean clouds and swirls of the nebula were aflame and littered with the wreckage of countless vessels.

  Where she had expected to find the allied expeditionary force, all Dax saw was a smoldering starship graveyard.

  * * *

  Jean-Luc Picard didn’t need sensor readings to know what had wrought the vast swath of carnage he saw on the Enterprise’s main viewer. The voice of the Collective was no longer distant; it was ubiquitous and deafening.

  We warned you, Locutus, the Borg Queen declared. We offered you perfection, and you refused us. Now you, Earth, and your Federation will suffer the consequences.

  “We’re reading Borg weapon signatures everywhere,” said Choudhury, whose console was only partly functional because of recent battle damage. “Massive subspace signal interference, too. I’ll try to compensate for it.”

  Kadohata coaxed intermittent bursts of data from the ops panel. “I don’t see any ships intact,” she said. “Hang on—I’m picking up a Mayday on the emergency channel.” Working quickly at her uncooperative controls, she added, “We have a visual.”

  Picard forced the Collective’s voice from his mind and struggled to remain stoic as he faced the maelstrom of destruction that surrounded his ship and the Aventine.

  Then the image was magnified, and he saw the shadow of an Intrepid-class starship. One of its warp nacelles had been sheared away. Ragged chunks had been torn from its elliptical saucer, and sparking trails of half-ignited plasma streamed from its fractured secondary hull. It was trapped in a slow, random tumble, at the mercy of the nebula’s currents.

  With grim reverence, Kadohata said, “It’s Voyager, sir.”

  He stood and tugged his uniform jacket taut. “Hail them.”

  The image on the main viewer sputtered in and out. Random signal noise hashed diagonally across the screen, and harsh static punctuated the high-frequency wail that tainted the audio. Even without the interference, however, Picard would barely have recognized the face of Voyager’s commanding officer.

  Captain Chakotay’s nose was broken, and the lower half of his face was caked with blood, some of it fresh and bright red, some dried and brown. All the hair had been scorched from the left side of his head, revealing burned, blackened skin. He was slumped at an awkward angle in his command chair, with his left arm pinned underneath him. A pink froth of bloodied saliva bubbled over his lip as he mumbled, “Picard …?”

  “Captain Chakotay,” Picard replied. “Stand by to receive rescue teams from the Enterprise and the Aventine.”

  “The Borg,” Chakotay spluttered.

  Nodding, Picard tried to calm him. “Yes, Captain. We—”

  “Rammed us,” Chakotay continued, mumbling in a monotone born of severe shock. “Smashed the whole fleet …”

  Picard nodded to Kadohata and Choudhury, who understood his unspoken intention and began discreetly directing the deployment of medics and engineers to Voyager.

  “Weapons did nothing,” Chakotay went on, no longer looking at Picard but at some distant point in his imagination. “Couldn’t stop them. Too many.”

  “How many?” Picard asked, not sure he wanted to know.

  Chakotay didn’t answer. He started shaking his head, and then kept on shaking it, as if denying the truth with enough vigor would make it go away.

  Worf stepped forward beside Picard and said, “You need to see this, sir.” The XO nodded to tactical officer Šmrhová, who split the main viewer image to present a sensor readout on the right-hand side. It was a long-range tactical scan. And the widening circular formation of red icons around the Azure Nebula stabbed an icy blade of fear through Picard’s brave façade, down to his very core. “This is confirmed?”

  “Aye, sir,” Worf said. “At least seven thousand Borg ships have deployed into Federation, Klingon, and Romulan territory.”

  “Thousands,” Picard mumbled, his voice barely a whisper. “Enough to send one to every inhabited world in known space.”

  Choudhury added, “With enough left over to target every star-base, outpost, and shipyard within a thousand light-years.”

  Under his breath, Picard said, “It’s begun.”

  It was the day he had dreaded for sixteen years, since his first encounter with the Borg, in System J-25, during his command of the Enterprise-D. His inaugural experience with the Collective had spurred the Borg to step up their efforts to move against the Federation. But as horrific as the battles of Wolf 359 and Sector 001 had been, Picard had long suspected that they were little more than tests of the Federation’s strengths and weaknesses—preludes for the true invasion that would bring Earth and its allies to ruin.

  Now his greatest fear was made manifest, and there was nothing he co
uld do to stop its deadly advance.

  Kadohata tapped silent a comm signal on her panel. “The Aventine is hailing us,” she said.

  “On-screen,” Picard said.

  Dax appeared on the main viewer. She looked shell-shocked. “Good news,” she said. “Helkara says all the subspace tunnels have collapsed, so there’s no more back door to the Federation.”

  Worf grunted. “Unfortunately, they have closed too late to make a difference.”

  “Well, I guess making a difference is our job now,” Dax replied. “We’re setting course for Earth.”

  “To what end?” asked Picard, openly skeptical of Dax’s proposed plan of action.

  The headstrong young Trill woman shrugged. “I’m playing it by ear. Maybe we can find the Borg Queen and take her out.”

  Her naïveté inflamed Picard’s temper. “It won’t make any difference if you do,” he told her. “They’ll just raise another queen, and another.”

  “Then we’ll do something else,” Dax said, her own ire coming to the fore. “But I won’t just sit back and do nothing.”

  He stepped forward, hoping to make a stronger connection with Dax through virtual proximity. “Be rational, Captain,” he urged her. “The Borg fleet numbers in the thousands, and it’s moving away at speeds we can’t match.”

  “Maybe your ship can’t,” Dax said. “Mine has a prototype slipstream drive, and this seems like a damned good time to fire it up.” She nodded to someone off-screen. “There’s a war on, Picard, and I plan on being part of it. Keep up if you can. Aventine out.”

  The screen snapped back to the nebula full of broken starships and burning debris. The Aventine cruised past and then accelerated away, vanishing into the midnight-blue mists.

  “Aventine is leaving the nebula at full impulse,” Choudhury said, checking her console. “She’s on course for Earth and powering up her warp drive.”

  Worf threw a sharp look at Picard. “Orders, sir?”

  Picard knew that the logical response was to let the Aventine go on its quixotic tilt, keep the Enterprise hidden in the nebula, render aid to any survivors, and contact Starfleet Command for new orders.