She pulled him to her and forced him to turn away from the grim vision of his sundered home. He embraced her as he buried his face between her neck and shoulder, but Beverly still felt as if she were standing outside the wall of his despair, making futile efforts to peek inside.

There wasn't a millimeter of s.p.a.ce between them, but it felt to her as if the man she loved were light-years away-and growing more distant by the day. And the Borg were to blame.

"I won't let them take you from us," she said.

"Neither will I," he said.

It wasn't what he'd said but how he'd said it that made Beverly tremble and fear that the worst was yet to come.

Worf pressed the door signal outside Jasminder Choudhury's quarters and waited patiently. Seconds later, he heard her invitation, shaken by grief's vibrato: "Come in."

He stepped forward, and the door opened. Jasminder stood in front of the sloped windows of her quarters, one arm across her chest, the other hand half hiding her face. Worf took slow, cautious steps toward her. Behind him, the door sighed closed.

Exorcising all edge and aggression from his voice, he asked, "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she said. "Why do you ask?"

"It is unlike you to leave your post, even with permission," he said. "I was concerned."

She brushed a tear from her cheek and looked at him. "What about you? I thought you had the bridge?"

"I gave the seat to Kadohata," he said.

Turning back toward the windows and the nebula beyond, she said, "I just needed a few moments. No telling when we'll get another lull, right?"

"True," he said. He stepped closer to her as she folded her arms together in front of her and lowered her head. On the coffee table in front of her, a small hologram projector displayed a miniature, ghostly image of a majestic, multilimbed oak tree in front of a quaint rural home. Settling in beside Jasminder, Worf noticed that she was staring at the hologram.

He didn't need to ask where the image had been recorded. It was easy enough to guess. "It is possible your family escaped Deneva before the attack," he said.

"Possible," she said, choking back a hacking sob. "Not likely." Her eyes were red from crying. "But that's not what's killing me." She nodded at the hologram. "It's the tree."

"I do not understand," he said.

Her jaw trembled, and she covered her mouth with her hand for a moment until she was steady enough to talk. "Thirty-two years ago, my father and I planted that tree in front of our house. My mother used to have a picture from that day in our family alb.u.m-my dad with his shirt off and a shovel in his hand, me holding up the new tree while he filled in the dirt. Dad used to joke that he couldn't remember which was skinnier that day, me or the sapling." Her face brightened behind a bittersweet burst of laughter. "I don't remember, either. It was barely a tree, not even as thick as my arm." Sorrow overtook her face again. "See those two figures under the tree in the hologram? That's me and my dad, last year, when I was home on leave. Look how big that tree is: almost sixteen meters tall, nearly two and a half meters around at the base. It's just amazing...or it was. Now it's gone, and I'll never see it again."

Fresh tears rolled from her eyes, but the emotion flowing behind them was anger. "I just feel so d.a.m.ned stupid," she said. "I should be crying for my mother or my father or my sisters, all my cousins, my nieces and nephews...and what am I crying over? A tree. I'm going to pieces over a tree."

She was shaking, and Worf saw then that Jasminder's aura of serene detachment and dispa.s.sionate resolve had been shattered. The sudden loss of her home and family and the violent rending of every tangible connection to her past were pains he knew well. The murders of Jadzia and K'Ehleyr were old wounds for him, but the pain they brought him had never diminished.

"You do not mourn the tree," he said.

She shot a defensive glare at him. "Then why am I crying?"

"You weep for what it represents."

Jasminder regarded him with a stunned look for a few seconds, then turned her searching gaze at the hologram. "Myself?" she wondered aloud, and shook her head. "My home?"

"I see many trees on your family's property," Worf said.

"But this is the one I..." Her voice trailed off as she followed his leading question to her own understanding. "It's my father," she whispered, her eyes fixed on the spectral image. "A symbol of our bond, our relationship."

Worf nodded. "For a Klingon warrior, there are few things more important than one's father and how one honors him."

She turned toward him, and he saw the dawning of a terrible understanding in her eyes. "My father's gone, Worf."

The outpouring of her grief was incremental for a few seconds, and then it cascaded out of her, like an avalanche exploding without warning from a fractured mountainside.

He pulled her toward him as she howled with rage and sorrow. Her guttural wails made him think of the Klingon warriors who were storming the fields of Sto-Vo-Kor that day.

Her cries subsided, but still she lingered in his embrace, as deathly still as someone in deep shock. In a voice hoa.r.s.e and raw, she said, "I just can't believe it, Worf. Everything I ever called home is gone." She looked up at him with tearstained eyes. "Do you have any idea what that's like? To have your whole world blown away? Your whole family taken from you?"

His early childhood came back to him in bitter flashes. Memories of fire and fear on Khitomer. Bodies and blood.

"Yes," he said in a sympathetic whisper. "I do."

19.

Dr. Simon Ta.r.s.es felt his feet slip-slide for the third time in a minute while he struggled to close Lieutenant sh'Aqabaa's shredded torso. He shouted over his shoulder, "Somebody mop up this blood before I break my neck over here!"

Turning back toward Nurse Maria Takagi, who was a.s.sisting him, he snapped, "Clamp the aorta, dammit!"

His temper was flaring, but he couldn't afford to waste precious seconds reining it in. There were five different colors of blood pooling on the deck between the biobeds, and the air was filled with pained cries, delirious groans, and panicked screams. Then the main doors gasped open, and a troop of medics carried in four more security personnel who were broken and saturated with their own blood.

A triage team led by the Aventine's a.s.sistant chief medical officer, Dr. Lena Glau, descended on the new arrivals. They worked in rapid whispers and grim, meaningful glances. At the end of several seconds' review, Glau pushed a lock of her sweat-stringy dark hair from her face and called out directions to her gathering flock of nurses and medical technicians. "Move the chest wound to the O.R., stage the bleeders in pre-op, and call the time on the head wound."

Sealing off a major tear in sh'Aqabaa's vena cava while dark blue ichor oozed over his gloved fingers, Ta.r.s.es called over to Glau, "Lena, what've you got?"

"More friendly-fire victims," she said, following her patient with the chest wound as he was moved on his antigrav stretcher toward the O.R. "I have two minutes to save this guy."

"Let me know if you need a hand," Ta.r.s.es said, and then he gritted his teeth while he struggled to work around the tattered remains of his Andorian patient's traumatized pericardium.

Glau replied, "Looks like you've already got your hands full, but thanks, anyway." She, her patient, and her surgical-support team vanished inside the O.R.

He grimaced at the critically wounded Andorian shen on the biobed between himself and Takagi. Ideally, he'd have performed her operation in the Aventine's main surgical suite, but sh'Aqabaa's vitals had crashed too quickly. There hadn't been time to move her to O.R. before the need to operate had become imperative. He didn't know who was to blame for the shortage of surgical arches, but as Ta.r.s.es rebuilt sh'Aqabaa's chest cavity by hand, he promised himself that someone at Starfleet Medical would get an earful about this.

a.s.suming Starfleet Medical still exists tomorrow, he reminded himself. Or, for that matter, a.s.suming we still exist tomorrow.

The other three members of sh'Aqabaa's squad were in the hands of the Aventine's chief resident physician, Dr. Ilar Prem, and its surgical fellow, Dr. Nexa Ko Tor. Dr. Ilar was a Bajoran man with a slight build, finely molded features, and dark eyes capable of snaring one with a sudden, shockingly direct stare. Dr. Nexa was a female Triexian with ruddy skin and deep-set eyes that seemed custom-made for keeping secrets. Her most impressive quality as a surgeon was the ability to use her three arms to operate on two patients with equal efficacy at once.

Prem's patient was a human woman, and Nexa was working on two men, a Zaldan and a Bolian. Even from across the room, Ta.r.s.es could tell that none of the three surgeries was going well. The vital-signs displays above the biobeds fluctuated wildly, and then they began to go flat.

"Cortical failure!" called Ilar's nurse.

A medical technician who was a.s.sisting Nexa with the Bolian patient scrambled for resuscitation gear as he declared, "Cardiac arrest!" Meanwhile, Dr. Nexa and Nurse L'Kem were turning all their attention to the Zaldan, whose body was twisted by a series of gruesome convulsions while he gagged on an overflowing mouthful of maroon blood.

Ta.r.s.es wanted to sprint across the room to intervene, to take charge, to try to save three lives at once, but he knew there wasn't anything he could do for those patients that his fellow physicians weren't already doing. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on the bits of shattered bone, the ragged flaps of rent skin, and the semiliquefied jumble of damaged organs that he and Takagi were racing to rea.s.semble inside sh'Aqabaa.

Minutes pa.s.sed while he blocked out the tense, barked orders and the rising tide of desperation that surrounded him. Then the sharp clanging of a medical instrument ricocheting off the bulkhead and the clatter of it bouncing across the deck made him look up. Dr. Ilar tore the b.l.o.o.d.y gloves from his hands and hurled them to the floor, cursing under his breath. He stormed out of the main sickbay and into the triage center.

Dr. Nexa accepted her forced surrender to the inevitable with a greater modic.u.m of grace. She looked at Nurse L'Kem and said, pointing to the human, the Bolian, and then the Zaldan, "Time of death for Lieutenant Hutchinson, 1307 hours; for Lieutenant Tane, 1309 hours; and for Crewman Doron, 1311 hours." L'Kem noted the times in the charts and gave the padd to Nexa, who reviewed it, signed it, and handed it back to the Vulcan nurse.

Ta.r.s.es had just finished stabilizing sh'Aqabaa and was making some temporary closures to the incisions as a precaution before moving the Andorian lieutenant to the O.R. He looked up as Dr. Nexa sidled up to the biobed beside Nurse Takagi and asked, "Is there anything I can do to help, Doctor?"

"No," Ta.r.s.es said, surprised at how cold and unfeeling his own voice sounded. "She's stable. Go help Ilar with those two bleeders who came in."

The slender Triexian nodded and ambled silently away. It still amazed Ta.r.s.es that for a person with three legs, Nexa made so little sound when she walked.

"Okay," he said to Takagi. "She's ready. Have the medtechs come move her to the O.R., and tell them to find me another surgical arch, stat."

"Yes, Doctor," Takagi said, stepping away to summon help.

He stood beside the biobed as he peeled the gloves off his hands, and he thought of Ilar's outburst minutes earlier. A stickler for regulations would put Prem on report for that, Ta.r.s.es thought. He looked down at sh'Aqabaa and brooded on how hard he'd already fought to save her; then he pondered how he might react if she didn't make it out of surgery.

If she dies, I'll probably start throwing things, too.

Tuning her mind to the frequency of the Borg Collective was proving more difficult than Erika Hernandez had expected. She felt she was close to being able to link with it, as she had with the Caeliar gestalt centuries earlier, but the closer she got, the more elusive the Borg's voice became.

She stared at her access to the vinculum and asked engineer Mikaela Leishman, "Are you sure this thing is set up correctly?"

"Positive," Leishman said. "It's responding to your own biofeedback, just like you asked."

Beside the Aventine's chief engineer was its second officer and science department head, Gruhn Helkara. The Zakdorn clenched his jaw, pushing up his facial ridges. "If you don't feel up to this, we should scrub the mission now."

"I'm fine," Hernandez said. "Just let me concentrate."

She closed her eyes and focused on aligning her brainwaves with those of the Collective. She blocked out the muggy climate inside the Borg ship, the discomfort of her semi-invasive neural interface with the vinculum, and her own fear.

Two oscillating tones, slightly mismatched, served as her guide. Hers was the shorter, faster wave of sound; the more she relaxed, the closer her alpha-wave tone matched that of the Borg.

Perfectly measured, crisp footfalls approached. She knew before she heard the voice that it was Lonnoc Kedair, the security chief. "The transphasic mine is armed," she said to Leishman and Helkara. "How's our royal infiltrator doing?"

"She's working on it," Leishman said.

Hernandez was very close to bringing her psionic frequency into synch with the Collective's when Helkara's combadge beeped and broke her concentration. Dax's comm-filtered voice sliced through the low thrumming and anxiety-filled silence inside the vinculum. "Commander Helkara, report," she said.

Opening her eyes to glare at Dax's three officers, Hernandez noted the abashed look on Helkara's face.

"We're almost there, Captain," he said.

"Well, get there faster," Dax said. "The Borg are minutes away from hitting five major targets, including Andor, Vulcan, and Qo'noS. If this plan's gonna work, it has to happen now."

Leishman and Helkara traded glances of dismay. Kedair stared intently at the pair, awaiting their reaction. Helkara replied to Dax, "We need a few more minutes, Captain."

"We're out of time," Dax said. "What do you have now?"

Hernandez beckoned to Leishman. "I have an idea."

The engineer arched her eyebrows. "I'm listening."

"I'll be able to adjust my modulation faster if you remove the feedback buffer from my interface," Hernandez said.

Helkara dismissed the suggestion with the energetic waving of both hands. "Absolutely not," he said. "Without that, you'll run the risk of a counterattack by the Borg."

"I'm a big girl, I can handle it," Hernandez said. "Look, the buffer is most of what's slowing me down. If I don't get inside the Collective's head right now, billions of people are going to die. Risking my life to save all of theirs makes sense, at least to me." She raised her voice. "Captain Dax, I'm asking permission to remove the buffer and face the Borg head-on."

"Granted," Dax said. "Gruhn, Mikaela, get it done."

"Aye, Captain," Helkara said, acquiescing with reluctance.

"Aventine out," Dax said, closing the channel.

The wiry Zakdorn frowned and ran a hand through his thatch of black hair. He pointed at the interface jury-rigged to the vinculum and said to Leishman, "Remove the buffer, Lieutenant."

Leishman stepped forward, tapped a few b.u.t.tons on the control panel, and reached under the console to pull free a sheet of isolinear circuits, from which dangled a bundle of optronic cables. Holding the deactivated component in one hand and leaning on the other, Leishman shook her head at Hernandez. "I hope you know what you're doing, Captain," she said.

"So do I, Lieutenant," Hernandez said.

Then she turned her thoughts to fusing with the Borg.

A crowd of frazzled bodies and fearful faces had gathered in the combat operations center in the secure bunker below Starfleet Command.

Towering screens high on every wall showed images from orbital platforms above five different worlds, and a sixth hard-line feed showed President Bacco and her cabinet gathered in the Monet Room at the Palais de la Concorde in Paris.

Admiral Edward Jellico leaned against the room's enormous central strategy table, flanked by his colleagues, Admiral Alynna Nechayev and Admiral Tujiro Nakamura. Together, they watched the majestic displays that surrounded them and awaited a catastrophe. An undercurrent of comm chatter and muted voices droned beneath the pall of fear that filled the room. For the junior officers working in the command center, there was still work to be done, something to focus on, tasks to distract them from the terror of speculating about what would happen next.

For Jellico and the other admirals a.s.sembled in the command center, there was nothing left to do but wait. They had drafted their plans and moved thousands of starships and hundreds of thousands of people like pieces on a chessboard-all in what felt to Jellico like an increasingly pointless effort to escape what they all knew was really checkmate.

Quietly, he said to Nechayev, "We've done all we could."