Her observation drew a few moments of thoughtful silence from the three men.

Then Steinhauer replied, "I'd rather have the beer."

"And some barbecue," Pembleton said.

Graylock added, "With a side of beer."

"Well," Thayer said, rolling her eyes, "I'm happy to see we at least have our priorities straight."

Lerxst had sacrificed the corporeal bonds of his body to preserve the integrity of his memory and awareness-and now those, too, were starting to slip forever from his grasp.

I'm losing myself, he shared with the gestalt.

Their communion had been winnowed to four voices. Of these, Lerxst was the strongest, with only Sedin as his close equal. Ghyllac and Denblas clung to vestiges of coherence, but their thoughts had become increasingly disjointed as they faded.

All four knew that they were dim shadows of their former selves, but the quality of their past lives now eluded them. They wandered together through lightless catacombs of twisted metal and shattered stone, always near one another, like bodies united in deep s.p.a.ce by a weak but undeniable gravity.

This place had a name, Denblas thought, disguising his plea for information in the form of a declaration.

His query lingered in the gestalt, but none of the four minds submerged into the bond could produce the answer. Denblas repeated himself. This place had a name.

So did we, once, replied Ghyllac. It's lost now, like us.

All of them felt the depths of history yawning below them, but not one of them could recall the events that had delivered them to this gray purgatory. They were simultaneously one in the gestalt and four in the world but only to the extent that they still sensed themselves as separate beings. Lerxst tried to mask his shame as he realized that although he remembered his name, the specifics of what he had considered his ident.i.ty had become fragmented and opaque in his memory.

He wondered with naked confusion, Who are we?

Sedin answered his question with a question: What are we?

We are those who are and that which is, Denblas added.

It was an evasion. The four knew that they were the same, but none could name their species. They defined themselves now in the hollow context of knowing what they weren't.

A swift current of images and sounds surged through the gestalt. Lerxst couldn't tell if they were real memories or delusions, snippets of history or the products of a deranged imagination. They all were rooted in the physical and tangible, the empire of crude matter and the illusion of solidity, and they ran like a river flowing into a canyon, like vast jets of energy sinking into the insatiable maw of a singularity.

Light and sounds, artifacts of the tangible, pa.s.sed from the grasp of the gestalt and vanished into the darkness.

Then came a terrible moment of clarity, as one cl.u.s.ter of catoms and then another released their energy reserves to bolster the gestalt. Our core catom groups are breaking down, Lerxst realized. Our memories are collapsing into entropy.

We're really dying, Sedin replied.

Deep, flat notes of dismay droned in the gestalt, and Lerxst extended himself to call for harmony's return. Then he sensed the diminished scale of the gestalt, and he understood the cost at which his clarity had been purchased.

Denblas was gone.

Lerxst and Sedin both seemed to have been fortified by their consolidation with their lost colleague, but Ghyllac appeared to have reaped no benefit from Denblas's demise.

Worse still, Ghyllac was no longer Ghyllac.

Where the essence of Ghyllac once had blazed, there was now a dark spiral of confusion, a mind trapped in the endless discovery of the present moment, with no sense of its past and no antic.i.p.ation of its future. The echo of Ghyllac would spend the rest of its existence imprisoned in a limbo of the now.

Without thought, without memory, his catoms serve no true purpose, Sedin lamented. They are expending energy without gain.

The implications of her statement troubled Lerxst. Is it our right to decide when his existence no longer has meaning?

He doesn't even have existence, Sedin argued. Without the mind, his catoms are an empty machine. A waste of resources. If you won't take your share of their reserves, I'll take them all.

Lerxst understood the deeper threat implicit in her words. If she absorbed all of the residual energy from Ghyllac's catoms, it would reinforce hers to a level of stability much greater than his own. Inevitably, he would find his catoms depleted far ahead of hers, and the only logical choice would be for her to consolidate his remaining energy into herself. He could either hasten Ghyllac's premature demise or else guarantee his own.

Very well. We'll consolidate his energy reserves into our catoms. There was no masking the deep regret he felt at his decision. They weren't killing Ghyllac, whose essence had already been lost, but taking the last of his catoms' power made Lerxst feel as if he had crossed a moral line.

Were we ever friends, Sedin?

I don't remember. Why do you ask?

Lerxst hesitated to continue his inquiry. When you and I begin to fade...will you consolidate me as you did Ghyllac?

As we did Ghyllac.

I will concede your semantic point if you'll answer my question. Are we mere fodder to each other? Will we meet our end united or as mutual predators?

We'll improvise, Sedin said. It's how we survive.

But what of the moral considerations?

They need to be secondary, Sedin replied. All that matters is that we survive until the humans return. Then we shall bond with them, for their own good. Their synaptic pathways can be easily mapped and made compatible with our needs. As soon as it becomes practical, we will facilitate their journey toward this planet's populated middle lat.i.tudes.

You underestimate the humans' natural antipathy for enslavement, Lerxst warned.

And you overestimate the strength of their free will.

He suspected that only bitter experience would disabuse Sedin of her illusion of omnipotence. Heed me, he told her. If you try to yoke them, they will fight back.

Let them, Sedin replied. They will lose.

It had been hours since Karl Graylock had been able to feel his toes. For a long time, they had been painfully cold, and then for a while, he had been aware of their being numb. Now they felt like nothing at all. The harder he tried not to think about frostbite, the more he dwelled on it.

Pembleton fell back from the trail-breaker position and slipped into the line behind Graylock, who now had Steinhauer's back to focus on. One shuffling, ankle-rolling step followed another. Graylock's stride was well practiced after only five short days of snowshoeing along the island's coast. He no longer needed to look at his feet while he was slogging forward against the ice pick wind and through hypnotic veils of falling snowflakes.

He had started the journey with an appreciation for the austere beauty of the empty arctic landscape, but he had since come to think of it as the proscenium to his traveling misery show. To one side lay low hills blanketed in snow, stretching away in gentle white knolls toward the distant mountains. On the other side was a sheer drop down fearsome cliffs of black rock, to a relentless a.s.sault of surf against the sawtoothed, obsidian boulders that jabbed up from a sea as black as the night sky.

Steinhauer led the foursome up a gradual rise. He kicked with the sides of his snowshoes and made a diagonal stair in the snow. After a few minutes, he began to fall backward. Graylock caught him and heard the labored gasps of the younger man's breathing. "It's all right, Thom," he told the private. "It's my turn to break. Fall back a while." Graylock handed the man into Pembleton's grasp and then stepped forward.

Each sideways chop at the hillside buried Graylock's feet in snow, which he carefully stamped down to make solid steps for the others. It was harder than regular snowshoeing, and for much of their journey they had avoided it when possible, opting for the most level paths they could find. As they'd neared the far southern end of the island, however, they had been forced to climb several shallow inclines to avoid plunging over sheer cliffs and to detour around impa.s.sable formations of rock that cut across the beaches and extended out into the turbulent sea.

Each step brought Graylock closer to the top of the hill and revealed more of the vast seascape that lay beyond. The ocean at night was pitch dark. The jagged cliffs on his right became more gradual, and ahead of him they descended in a steep but no longer vertical drop to the water.

Then he stepped over the crest and beheld the easy slope down to the rocky beach. The snow thinned and then ended roughly sixty meters before reaching the water, revealing miles of black sand. Majestic rock formations knifed up from the sea less than a hundred meters from sh.o.r.e. Great swells of black water curled around the rocks like ripples in a gown.

The vista possessed a stark beauty-but it was a wasteland.

And, as Graylock had feared, there wasn't a tree in sight.

He felt light-headed. Was it from not having eaten for three days? Or was it the result of six days of forced march over snow and ice, through an unforgiving wilderness? He reasoned it was probably both, colliding inside his frostbitten body and overwhelming his already sapped will.

The rest of the team huddled close beside him. They all stared at the wind-blasted sh.o.r.eline. Coal-black sand and stones were lapped by inky waves, which broke into gray rolls of foam. Then a fierce wind blasted stinging particles of sand and ice into their faces, and the survivors shuffled clumsily about-face to protect themselves from the scouring gales.

Graylock said, "We have to go back."

"We're not going back," Pembleton said. "We have to go forward, across the water, or we'll die."

With a sweep of his arm toward the beach, Graylock snapped, "What am I supposed to build a raft from, Gage? Rocks? At least when we were on the mountainside, there were trees."

Thayer snapped, "Then why didn't we build the raft there?"

"Because the G.o.dd.a.m.ned fjords are frozen!" Graylock stopped himself. He took a breath and said to Pembleton, "Even if we make it back to Junk Mountain, we're stuck until spring."

Pembleton's voice started out soft and grew louder as he repeated, "No...no...No...NO!" Overcome by frustration, he spun away from the group, then pivoted back. "Don't you get it?" He made wild gestures with his outstretched hands. "We have to go forward! It's our only chance. We won't make it to spring-not here and not on the mountain."

"Not without help," Graylock said.

"Tell me you're not saying what I think you're saying," Pembleton said. "Are you suggesting we bond with the Caeliar?"

Graylock hunched his shoulders and lifted his hands in a plaintive gesture. "What choice do we have, Gage? You said it yourself, we won't make it to spring. And I'm telling you, we can't sail until the ice thaws. Remember what Lerxst said. The catoms would help us survive famine and fight off disease."

"Only if we're lucky," Thayer cut in. "If we're not, we'll either end up dead or brain-fried. Is that what you want, Karl?"

"Dammit, be logical about this," Graylock said. "If we don't bond with the Caeliar, we'll die for certain. If we do, we might die anyway, just differently. But there's also a chance we could live. We'd be changed, but at least we'd be alive. Don't you think that it's at least worth taking the risk?"

Pembleton and Thayer exchanged dubious glances, and then each gave Graylock a grudging nod of agreement. The engineer looked around for Steinhauer, to confirm his a.s.sent to the plan.

The first things Graylock saw were Steinhauer's abandoned snowshoes. His eyes followed the deep, ragged bootprints that led away from them down the slope. One discarded layer of Caeliar fabric after another lay beside Steinhauer's trail. Then he saw Steinhauer, who was halfway to the water's edge, peeling off his protective layers of clothing as he went.

"Scheisse," Graylock muttered. "Steinhauer's losing it." He stumbled over his own feet in his haste to turn around, and Pembleton and Thayer did little better. By the time they began breaking their own haphazard trails down the slope, Steinhauer had almost reached the water. He had stripped to his jumpsuit and boots, and he carried his phase rifle in one hand.

"Thom, stop!" called Pembleton as he charged downhill. "Put your gear back on, Private! That's an order!"

Steinhauer ignored them and kept walking toward the sea.

The trio in pursuit kicked free of their snowshoes when the snow became too shallow to hold a trail. Graylock and Pembleton sprinted the rest of the way to catch up to Steinhauer, while Thayer limped awkwardly far behind them.

The two men were still several meters away from catching Steinhauer when the private turned and aimed his rifle at them. "Don't come any closer," he said.

Pembleton and Graylock slowed to a careful walk. "Calm down, Thom," the sergeant said. "We just-"

The phase rifle blast struck the ground at their feet with a deafening shriek. Both men recoiled and halted. Behind them, Kiona slowed her own approach and then stopped at a distance.

Standing ankle-deep in the frothing surf, Steinhauer looked like an emaciated wild animal dressed in human clothing. His face was gaunt, and his eyes, though sunken in their sockets, burned with feral desperation. Spittle had turned to ice in his ragged beard whiskers. Behind ma.s.sive clouds of exhaled breath, he shivered violently, and his jaw chattered loudly. The tips of most of his fingers were black and blistered with frostbite almost to the first knuckle. Graylock was amazed the man could still hold a rifle in his condition, never mind fire it.

"I won't go back," he said, his voice breaking into a near-hysterical pitch. "I can't. Too far. Too cold." He shook his head from side to side with mounting anxiety. "Can't do it. Won't."

With slow, cautious movements, Graylock extended his open hand to Steinhauer. "Thom, please. Put down the rifle, get dressed, and come with us. We have to go back to the Caeliar. It's the only way."

"Not for me," Steinhauer said.

In a fluid motion, he flipped the barrel of his phase rifle up and back, held its muzzle inside his mouth with his right hand, and pressed down on its trigger with his left thumb.

A flash of light and heat disintegrated most of his head.

The weapon fell from his hands. His decapitated body collapsed and fell backward into the pounding surf.

Graylock and Pembleton stood in silence for a minute and watched the waves wash over Steinhauer's corpse. Then Pembleton waded out to the body, retrieved the phase rifle and a few items from the dead man's jumpsuit, and returned. "We'll collect the fabric he left behind on the way down," he said. "A few more layers might make the trip back a bit less miserable."

As he followed the sergeant back up the beach to their snowshoes, Graylock felt a pang of regret at leaving Steinhauer unburied. He interred his guilty feelings instead. With no food left and temperatures dropping daily, he and the others could no longer afford to be sentimental; death was a simple reality in the hard land of the winter.

Thayer picked up Steinhauer's cast-off snowshoes. "These'll make good firewood," she said. "Where should we make camp?"

"We should get moving," Graylock said. "Right now."

Thayer looked askance at him. "In the dark?"

"Might as well," he said. "Because if my math is right...for the next five months, dark is all we're going to have."

2381.

15.

Riker and Picard stood behind the desk in t.i.tan's ready room and watched Admiral Alynna Nechayev on the desktop monitor. "We just broke through the Borg's jamming frequencies," she said, her lean and angular features now drawn and pale. "It's confirmed. Deneva's been wiped out. It's gone."