by David Mack
In the end, it proved not so difficult a choice, after all.
As the gestalt embraced the freed and bewildered drones in its protection, Inyx appreciated at last how right Hernandez had been. The Caeliar had granted to the Borg all it had sought for millennia: nearly unlimited power, a step closer to perfection, and the secrets of Particle 010. In return, the legions of drones who flocked into the warm sanctuary of the gestalt had given the Caeliar what they had most desperately needed: strength, adaptability, and diversity. In one grand gesture, the Caeliar had become a polyglot society with an immense capacity for incorporating new ideas, new technologies, and new species.
For the Borg, it was the end of aeons of futile searching.
For the Caeliar, it was the end of an age of stagnation.
The lost children had come home. The gestalt felt whole.
Now the Great Work can continue, Inyx announced, initiating the newest members of Caeliar society to its ongoing mission. More important, he added, now the Great Work can evolve.
* * *
Jean-Luc Picard was on his feet again. He felt taller than he had in ages. So many emotions were whirling in his mind that he couldn’t name them all. Relief and joy were at the forefront of his thoughts, with wonder and gratitude close behind.
The aft turbolift door opened, and Beverly stepped out. She hurried straight to his side. “Worf called me,” she said.
She reached up, as if to touch his arm in a gesture of polite and dignified comfort.
Too full of life to settle for that, he embraced her, pulled her close, and pressed his face into the tender space between her neck and shoulder. He reveled in the sweet scent of her hair, the pliant warmth of her body, the gift of her every breath, the miracle of their child—their son—growing within her.
At first, she seemed caught by surprise, and he understood why. Picard had never been one for public displays of affection, especially not in front of his crew. He no longer cared about that. She was his love, the one he had waited for, the one he had almost let slip away because he had been too timid to follow his heart, too cautious to indulge in hope.
He was done being careful. More than fifty years earlier, it had taken a Nausicaan’s blade through his heart to teach him that lesson the first time. It had taken a trip to the edge of annihilation to remind him that life was not only far too short, but also far too beautiful and far too precious to enjoy alone.
“I’m all right, Beverly,” he whispered. “We all are.” He pulled back just far enough to kiss her forehead and then her vibrant red lips. Parting from her, he looked around the bridge and saw a dozen faces bright with mildly embarrassed smiles. He brightened his countenance to match and said, “Carry on.”
Riker and Dax stepped forward to pat his shoulders. Just as Riker was about to say something, he was interrupted by Lieutenant Choudhury. “Captain,” she said to Picard. “Incoming hail, sir. It’s Captain Hernandez.”
“On-screen,” Picard said, stepping forward behind the conn and operations consoles.
Erika Hernandez’s girlish features and enormous, unruly mane of sable hair appeared on the main viewer. “Will, Ezri, Jean-Luc, I just wanted to speak to you one last time before we go, to tell you that I’m okay—and to say good-bye.”
“Before ‘we’ go?” Picard said, echoing her. “You mean you and the Caeliar?”
A new understanding gave Hernandez an aura of calm. “You don’t need to speak of us as separate entities anymore,” she said. “I am one of the Caeliar now. In fact, I have been for a long time; I just hadn’t been able to really accept it until now.”
Riker stepped forward on Picard’s left and asked, “Erika, what’s happened to the Borg?”
“There are no more Borg,” Hernandez said. “Not here, or in the Delta Quadrant, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are only Caeliar.” Her beatific mien gave way to a broad smile. “And if you’ll excuse us, we have a new mission to begin.”
Dax edged forward and said, “What mission?”
“To find and protect cultures of peace and nonviolence—so that perhaps someday in the distant future, the meek really can inherit the universe.”
“Good luck,” Riker said.
“You, too,” Hernandez said, and then the signal ended.
The screen switched back to the view of magnificently glowing, urchin-like Caeliar vessels huddled around the miniature star of Axion. Then, though Picard wouldn’t have thought it possible, all of the ships and the Caeliar metropolis flared even more brightly, scrambling the main viewer image into a distorted crackle of white noise. Less than a second later, the light had vanished—and so had Axion and its brilliant new armada.
On the screen, tiny and alone in the cold majesty of the cosmos, were Titan and the Aventine. The rest was silence.
Worf relaxed his shoulders a bit and said to Choudhury, “Cancel Red Alert.”
Whoops of jubilation erupted from the other officers around the bridge. Picard and Riker clasped each other’s forearm and slapped each other’s shoulders. “We did it,” Riker said.
“No,” Picard said. “Erika did it. We just lived through it.” He smiled. “And that’s good enough for me.”
He and Riker let each other go, and Riker turned to help Dax coax Worf into joining the celebration. Picard fell back into Crusher’s arms and treasured the moment. There was a lightness in his spirit, an exuberance and an optimism he hadn’t felt since the earliest days of his command of the Enterprise-D.
It took him a moment to put a name to this sublime feeling.
I’m free, he realized. I’m free.
* * *
Admirals Akaar and Batanides were pressed against the situation monitors in the Monet Room and surrounded by a clutch of junior officers, all of whom were scrambling to confirm the latest reports from the Enterprise, Titan, and the Aventine.
If the subspace messages from the three starships were true, it would be nothing less than a miracle. It would be one of the most stunning reversals in the history of the Federation.
President Bacco knew she ought to be waiting on the admirals’ report with undivided attention, but she was focused on a different spectacle. She and the other civilians in the room had gathered in a tight huddle in front of the painting Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies.
Tucked in a fetal curl on the floor beneath the painting was Seven of Nine.
The statuesque blonde was normally so intimidating—Jas Abrik had described her with the less forgiving adjective “castrating”—that it shocked Bacco to see her like this.
Only minutes earlier, Seven had been conferring with the admirals and analyzing the reaction of the Borg armada to its sudden dislocation across vast reaches of space. Then, before anyone had realized anything was wrong, Seven had staggered away from the situation consoles, dazed and trembling. Seconds later, she had collapsed to the floor and folded in on herself.
Most of the people in the room had reacted by backing away from Seven, as if she might be transforming back into a drone bent on assimilating or assassinating them all.
Bacco had dashed from her chair toward the fallen woman, only to be forcibly intercepted by her senior protection agent.
“Ma’am, you should stay back,” Wexler had said.
“Stay close, Steve, but get your hands off me.”
Wexler let go of Bacco’s arms and backed off. “Sorry, Madam President.” She’d continued past him to Seven’s side, and he had fallen in right behind her. His presence had seemed to reassure the others, who had slowly regrouped in a clutch around Seven.
Now Seven lay on her left side, with her arms wrapped around her head, unable or unwilling to respond to the gentle queries from Bacco and the others.
Piñiero asked Seven, “Can you hear us?”
No answer.
“I think she’s hyperventilating,” Abrik said.
Secretary Iliop said, “Maybe she’s having a seizure.”
Agent Kistler joined the huddle. “A doc
tor’s coming.”
Press liaison Kant Jorel asked, “Should we take her pulse?”
Piñiero threw a glare at him. “Are you a doctor now?”
Abrik cut in, “I wouldn’t touch her if I were you. Last time we checked, those Borg implants of hers still work.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Bacco grumbled. “Move.” She reached a hand toward Seven but paused as Akaar called to her.
“Madam President,” the gray-haired admiral said, his voice loud and bright with the promise of good news. “The all-clear signals have been verified, and Captain Picard has confirmed that the Borg threat is over.”
Piñiero asked with naked cynicism, “For how long?”
“Forever,” Akaar said. “Captain Picard reports that the Borg … no longer exist.”
Wide-eyed, Abrik stammered, “H—how?”
“The captain assures me it is ‘a long story,’ which he will explain fully in his report.”
“He damned well better,” Bacco said. “Because that’s a story I want to hear.” The sound of the secured door opening prompted her to look over her shoulder. One of the Palais’s on-call doctors and a pair of medical technicians hurried inside, and Agent Kistler waved them over toward Seven.
“All right, everyone,” said Agent Wexler. “Move back, please. Let the medical team through. Thank you.”
Even as the others retreated to make room for the medics, Bacco stayed by Seven’s side. The stricken woman was whimpering and sobbing into her shirtsleeves.
The doctor, a young Efrosian man who sported a haircut and a goatee that were trimmed much shorter than was customary in his culture, kneeled beside Bacco. “Madam President, we can take it from here,” he said, opening his satchel of surgical tools.
“Just give me a moment,” Bacco said. She reached out and placed her hand lightly on Seven’s shoulder. Leaning down, she whispered in as soft and soothing a voice as she could muster, “Seven, it’s Nan. Are you all right? Can you hear me, Seven?”
Bacco waited, her hand resting with a feather touch on Seven’s shoulder. Then she felt a stirring, a hint of motion.
Seven’s breathing slowed but remained erratic. In gradual motions, she lowered her arms, pushed herself from the floor, and rolled onto her back. As her face and left hand came into view, Bacco gasped.
The Borg implants were gone. A tiny mass of fine, silvery powder lay on the floor where Seven had rested her head, and a glittering residue clung to her left hand and temple.
“Seven,” Bacco said, stunned. “Are you all right?”
With her beauty no longer blemished by the biomechanical scars of the Borg, Seven looked up at Nanietta Bacco with the tear-streaked face of an innocent.
“My name is Annika.”
30
Rubble and dust crunched under Martok’s boots and cane as he struggled to the summit of a great mound of shattered stone and steel, which only that morning had been the Great Hall.
He ignored the bolts of pain shooting up his broken leg. It had been crudely set and splinted with long, inflexible strips of metal salvaged from a ruptured bulkhead on the Sword of Kahless. His flagship’s sickbay and all of its medical personnel had been killed during the calamitous battle against the Borg hours earlier. Without any of the advanced surgical tools that could repair his fractured femur, he had been forced to settle for a more old-fashioned treatment of his wound.
At the peak of the smoldering mound of debris, he steadied himself and kept his weight on his good leg. Pivoting in a slow circle, he drank in the devastation around him. The First City was a husk of its former self. Only the scorched, denuded skeletons of a few prominent architectural landmarks were still recognizable. Where once the city’s main boulevard, the wo’leng, had cut like a scar from the Great Hall to the smooth-flowing waters of the qIJbIQ, its second great river, significant portions of the broad thoroughfare had been erased by chaotic smears of smoking wreckage and crashed transport vessels.
Thick clouds of charcoal gray and deep crimson blanketed the sky. A sharp, acrid bite of toxic smoke was heavy in the air, and the profusion of airborne dust left the inside of Martok’s mouth dry and tasting of chalk. It reminded him of historical accounts of Qo’noS in the years immediately following the Praxis disaster, which had pushed the Klingon homeworld to the brink of environmental collapse. This was a catastrophe almost on par with that one. Seven major cities on Qo’noS had been destroyed before the Borg cubes had, inexplicably, withdrawn on reciprocal courses, back toward the Azure Nebula.
Councillors Kopek, Qolka, and Tovoj had died with the home guard fleet and a force of their allies defending Qo’noS. Councillors Grevaq, Krozek, and Korvog had died with Martok’s fleet. Most of the other members of the High Council were at that moment missing in action, and Martok had no idea which of them would turn up alive or dead.
For the moment, Martok alone was the High Council, and the temptation to wield unitary power was taxing his will; the call of ambition was powerful, and it was all he could do to remind himself that succumbing to it was what had fatally undermined his predecessor, Chancellor Gowron.
I will not make that mistake, he vowed. I will not be that man. That will not be my legacy.
He limped across the ruins to stand with General Goluk.
“Do we have casualty reports yet, General?”
“Only preliminary numbers, my lord,” Goluk said, poking at the portable computer in his hand.
Martok scowled to mask a sharp jolt of pain from his leg. “Tell me,” he rasped.
“Sixteen million dead in the First City. Another seven million in Quin’lat, eleven million in Tolar’tu. Based on rough estimates from Krennla, An’quat, T’chariv, and Novat, we believe their combined death tolls will exceed forty-three million.”
A dour grunt concealed Martok’s dismay. “So, seventy-seven million worldwide?”
“Yes, my lord. Though, as I said, that’s just an estimate.”
Nodding, Martok looked away and let his eyes roam across the vista of death and destruction. Despite the solemnity and tragedy of the moment, he permitted himself a sardonic chortle.
Goluk asked, “Is something amusing, Chancellor?”
“This is the second time since I became chancellor that the Great Hall’s been leveled,” Martok said. “I could be wrong, but I think I might be the only chancellor who can make that claim.” He stabbed the rubble with his cane, and bitter laughter welled up from his throat. Shaking his head, he continued, “Do you know what irritates me most?” He glanced at Goluk and then looked at the shattered stone under their feet. “I’d finally learned my way around this maze, and now I have to start over again.”
Both men laughed, though Martok knew neither of them had any mirth in his heart. Though the Borg had been routed, to call this a victory would at best be an exaggeration.
The day was theirs, but no songs would be sung.
* * *
President Nanietta Bacco closed her eyes and drew a long breath to calm her frazzled nerves and steady her shaking hands. She waited until the pounding of her heart slowed by even the slightest degree, and she nodded to her press liaison, Kant Jorel, and her chief of staff, Esperanza Piñiero. “I’m ready.”
Piñiero said to Agents Wexler and Kistler, “Let’s go.”
The two presidential bodyguards stepped forward and were the first ones through the door at the end of the hallway. A deep susurrus of echoing conversations filled the air. Bacco walked with her shoulders back and her chin up, leading her entourage into the main chamber of the Federation Council, which occupied the entire first floor of the Palais de la Concorde.
Her eyes adjusted to the dimmer lighting in the chamber and to the glare of the spotlight pointed at the lectern on the podium along the south wall. Every seat in every row on both the east and west sides of the chamber was filled, including those in the supplemental rows. The visitors’ gallery was packed to capacity, and a row of security personnel held back a standing-room-only crowd
of Palais staff and VIP guests along the north side of the speakers’ floor.
Bacco wondered if the intensity of interest demonstrated by the staff, diplomats, councillors, and guests was any indicator of the public’s interest in the address she had come to deliver. I guess I’m about to find out, she decided.
She moved to the lectern at the front of the podium and waited while the Council’s leaders called for quiet. A constellation of small red lights snapped on in the shadows on the opposite side of the room, informing her that live subspace feeds of her address were being transmitted throughout known space.
From her right, Piñiero gave her the ready signal.
Speaking to the half-shadowed faces in the gallery and the focused stares of the councillors, Bacco intoned in her most stately voice, “Members of the Federation Council, foreign ambassadors, honored guests, and citizens of the Federation … this day has been a long time in coming.”
As the glowing text of her speech crawled up a holographic prompter situated just off-center in front of the lectern, Bacco continued almost from memory, delivering the first address in decades that she’d composed without the aid of her chief speech-writer, Fred MacDougan, and his staff, who were all still light-years away from Earth, caught up in postevacuation chaos.
“It is my pleasure and my honor to be able to bring you good news,” she said. “The Borg threat is over.
“The officers and enlisted crews of three starships have done what so much of our marshaled might could not. A joint effort by the Starships Enterprise, Titan, and Aventine has turned the tide this day, bringing an end not just to the Borg invasion of our space but to the tyranny and oppression of the Borg throughout the galaxy.”
Spontaneous, powerful applause and cheering erupted from the gallery and the councillors’ tiers. Bacco basked in the roar of approval for a few seconds, and then she motioned for silence. Gradually, the room settled, and she continued.
“In keeping with the finest traditions of Starfleet, these three crews accomplished this not through violence, not through some brute force of arms, but with compassion. This war has been brought to an end not by bloodshed but by an act of mercy.
