T'Lana watched the tsunami of pyroclastic ash, displaced sand, and toxic fallout surge across the flatlands, toward the rocky peaks and canyons of the Forge. At its current rate of speed, the blast wave will reach me in six-point-two seconds, she deduced. I will not reach sufficient cover in time.

She had come home to complete the Kolinahr and purge herself of emotions and prejudice. It therefore struck her as ironic that her final musings were so deeply emotional. She was filled with regrets for her life's unrealized possibilities.

I can never make amends for betraying Captain Picard.

I can never apologize for insulting Amba.s.sador Spock.

A blast of heat kicked up the sand and seared her skin, a stinging harbinger of the lethal onslaught to come.

I will never be able to tell Worf how I desired him.

The roar of the explosion struck with stunning force. T'Lana shut her eyes...and accepted what she could not change.

Erika Hernandez gave orders without speaking, in a voice that wasn't hers, to an army that had no choice but to obey.

Cease-fire.

It was like opening the clamsh.e.l.l skylight in Inyx's lab. She pictured an event, an outcome that she desired, and the Collective turned itself to fashioning her wishes into reality.

The barrages against the planets stopped. She was anguished to see how much damage had already been wrought. Great glowing scars on the surfaces of five worlds spread horrid, ash-packed clouds through their atmospheres.

The symptom addressed, Hernandez looked to the cause.

The cubes. The hostile drones. The Queen.

Destroy them, she commanded, and throughout the Collective, her legions of followers complied without question, oblivious of the fact that they were the targets in their own crosshairs.

Firefights erupted inside Borg ships throughout known s.p.a.ce. Drones cut one another down, pummeled one another with ruthless efficiency, slashed and shattered and impaled one another with mindless abandon. The cubes turned their awesome batteries against one another and blasted themselves to pieces.

Borg attack fleets in deep s.p.a.ce dropped from warp as they hammered one another with weapons fire. The Collective stood divided, every cube a battlefield in an instant civil war.

Aftershocks rocked the Collective. So many drones being extinguished at once was an excruciating jolt, and Hernandez felt her mind recoil and shrink from the horror of it. Without the feedback buffer, she was forced to experience every Borg drone's death, every violent end, every lonely submersion into darkness. With each pa.s.sing second, a thousand more voices cried out in the night, and her guilt felt like knives in her heart.

Then one voice rose above the carnage, that of a presence unlike any other Hernandez had encountered.

It was indomitable. Amoral.

Seductive and insidious.

The Queen answered Hernandez's challenge.

In a blinding flash of agony, Hernandez understood the true nature of the Borg...and for the first time in more than eight centuries, she was afraid.

A second queen. In all its millennia of expansion, a.s.similation, and steady progress toward perfection, the Collective had never before found itself torn between two monarchs.

Even when the Borg Queen had been forced in times past to manifest in multiple bodies at once, all of her avatars had represented the same will, the same mind, the same purpose. The guiding voice had always been unique and inimitable.

Now, on the cusp of the Collective's latest triumph, an impostor had risen. Harmony became discord; unity turned to conflict. Perfection had been tainted.

The Borg Queen quelled the millions of confused plaints and imposed order.

Sleep, she decreed. Regenerate.

These were the most basic directives the drones knew. They were among the first to be written, the building blocks for all that had come afterward. Willed by the Queen, they were irresistible fiats that overrode all other directives.

Throughout the enemy's territory, her drones halted their self-destructive struggles and sought out alcoves in which to replenish themselves and aid the restoration of their vessels. As the drones dropped out of the Collective, the Queen searched the still-waking minds for her rival.

Cube after cube went dark, slowed, and stopped in s.p.a.ce, as the drones hibernated. The Queen pushed the blank spots in the Collective from her mind and raced among the swiftly dwindling points of consciousness. Then there was but one besides herself.

Not human, not Borg. Something familiar but still alien.

Designation is irrelevant, the Queen decided. The intruder must be removed. She searched the isolated scout vessel for any remaining drones to serve her, but she found none. There were many humanoid interlopers on the ship, however. She decided they would suffice as replacements.

The ship awakened slowly to the Queen's will. It had not been engineered to play such a singular role, but it had been designed to support and create new drones-and to destroy all that opposed it, within and without.

More important, as with all creations of the Borg, it had been made to do one thing above all else: adapt.

Everyone in the combat operations center was talking at once, and Admiral Jellico could barely hear what Admiral Nechayev was saying from across the room. "Speak up, dammit!" he shouted.

"It's confirmed, sir," Nechayev hollered back. "The Borg cubes fired on each other, and now they've all stopped, dead in s.p.a.ce." She turned away as a harried-looking Arcturian captain thrust his padd into her hands. Turning back toward Jellico, Nechayev lifted her voice to add, "All the Borg cubes are showing heavy damage-most of their cores are exposed."

We might never get another chance, Jellico realized. "All ships, reengage! Press the attack while we can!"

His legion of officers snapped into action, rallying the fleet and directing an immediate counterattack. Watching the ma.s.sive screens full of tactical diagrams shift to represent the recommitted battle forces, Jellico dared to hope.

If we're fast enough, we might just survive this.

"Fawkes, we need to strike now!" Captain Bateson bellowed, as the Atlas accelerated on an attack heading. "Who's left?"

His first officer studied her tactical monitor and frowned. "Exeter, Prometheus, and Kearsarge."

"Well, tell Prometheus to do its three-way-split trick. We need to hit as many of those cubes over Vulcan as fast as we can." Too energized to stay seated, he sprang to his feet and prowled forward. "Helm, attack pattern Theta-Red. Weapons, hit the Borg with everything we've got: transphasic torpedoes, phasers, bad grammar-whatever it takes!"

The reddish orb of Vulcan grew swiftly larger in the frame of the Atlas's main viewscreen, and within seconds, the mangled and immobilized Borg cubes lingering in orbit became visible.

At tactical, Lieutenant Reese's youthful and delicately feminine features hardened with resolve. "Targets locked, sir."

Lieutenant Kedam at ops added, "Kearsarge and Exeter have their targets, and Prometheus has initiated multivector a.s.sault mode." A signal beeped on Kedam's console. He eyed the display and glanced back at Bateson with a crooked grin. "New orders from Starfleet Command, sir: Reengage the Borg."

"Typical bra.s.s," Bateson said, rolling his eyes.

"Prometheus has its targets, sir," Kedam said.

Bateson decided that if ever a moment had called for the invocation of Shakespeare, this was it. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Fire at will!"

His blood was hot in his veins and his pulse heavy in his temples, almost to the point of vertigo, as he gazed in awe at the staggering volume of sheer firepower that the Atlas and its allies loosed upon the Borg cubes. Great cl.u.s.ters of blazing warheads and brilliant slashes of phaser energy lanced through the black monstrosities in orbit of Vulcan and pummeled them into wreckage and dust. Any piece large enough to be detected by a scanner was targeted and shot again, until every hunk of bulkhead and every vacuum-exiled drone had been disintegrated.

"All targets eliminated," reported Lieutenant Reese.

"Secure from Red Alert," Bateson said, cracking his first smile in weeks. He gleamed with satisfaction at his first officer. "Thank Starfleet Command for their permission to engage-and tell them the attack on Vulcan is over."

Erika Hernandez gasped for breath and couldn't fill her lungs. Her mind was empty of thoughts but filled with white agony. All at once, dozens of cubes and countless thousands of drones had been annihilated, and their savagely curtailed suffering was too much for her to shut out or shunt aside.

Then came the real pain.

Psionic attacks pierced her memories like spears of fire, searing her to the core of her soul. Every engram jolted into action was transformed, b.a.s.t.a.r.dized, tainted into a memory of torment and violation.

She was a child again, screaming for rescue as her family's home went up in flames, and blistering licks of orange heat consumed her beloved stuffed-animal companions...

No, our house never burned...

A dank bas.e.m.e.nt, a dust-revealed shaft of dull gray light through a narrow window, her uncle sitting beside her on a sofa with torn upholstery and old stains, his hand resting somewhere that it shouldn't have been...

He never did that! It's a lie!

She was sixteen and on her back in the snow, on a slope in the Rocky Mountains. Kevin, the boy she'd adored since eighth grade, was on top of her-with his hands at her throat and a narcotic haze clouding his crazed countenance. Her flailing and kicking and twisting bought her no freedom, not even one more tiny breath. She scratched at his wrists but couldn't reach his face. He was exerting himself, and clouds of exhaled breath lingered around his head, which was backlit by a full moon, giving him an undeserved halo as he throttled her.

That's not what happened! He was my first love!

None of her protests mattered. Each stab into her psyche twisted another cherished moment of her life into something sick and shameful. Every milestone of achievement, every fleeting moment of tenderness and connection, was trampled. It was the psionic warfare equivalent of a scorched-earth policy. Her foe intended to leave her no safe haven, no place to retreat, nowhere she could go to ground.

Hernandez didn't know how to fight something like this. It was too powerful, too ancient, too cruel. It had no mercy, and it possessed aeons of experience with shattering minds and devouring souls. A destroyer of worlds, an omen of the end of history, it was not merely the Borg Queen-it was the singular ent.i.ty beyond the Queen, the very essence of the Collective.

A cold darkness enveloped her, and she felt her fear being leached from her, along with joy and sorrow, pride and shame. This is a.s.similation, she realized. It's even worse than Jean-Luc said. All you can do is surrender.

Physical sensations returned with an excruciating spasm.

Hernandez's back arched off the deck, and fiery needles shot through her arms and along her spine. A scream caught in her constricted throat, behind her clenched jaw. Sickly green light was all she saw in the dark blur that surrounded her.

Helkara shouted, "Pull the rest of the leads! Now!"

"Not yet!" Leishman said. "Too much residual charge!"

Hands pulled at cables that snaked under Hernandez's skin, and she heard the hiss and felt the tingle of a hypospray at her throat. "We're losing her," Helkara fumed. "Somebody get a medic! Chief, get that first-aid kit over here!"

The convulsions ceased, and Hernandez let her body relax on the deck. Her vision started to clear and sharpen, but she felt utterly drained, and she began shivering intensely.

"Bring blankets," Leishman said to someone running past.

Hernandez reached out and took Leishman's forearm in a weak grasp. "Queen," she croaked, surprised at how difficult it was for her to form words. When she tried to speak again, all that issued from her lips were reedy gasps.

Helkara leaned in and asked Leishman, "What'd she say?"

"She said, 'Queen.' I guess the Borg Queen shook her up."

"No kidding," the Zakdorn science officer said.

Vexed by their obtuseness and quickly losing consciousness, Hernandez let go of Leishman's arm and grabbed Helkara's collar. She yanked his face down to her own and stammered in a brittle whisper, "The Qu...Queen..."

Helkara pried her hand from his uniform and straightened his posture. "Is on her way to Earth-we know, Captain," he said, placing her weakening hand on her chest and patting it in a patronizing manner. "We'll deal with her next. Right now, you need to rest. Just hang tight till the medics get here."

The sedatives they had given her were kicking in, and the edges of her world were growing soft and fading away.

Morons! she raged, imprisoned inside her tranquilized body. She wanted to warn them, but then she sank into the smothering arms of dark bliss, unable to convey a simple report: The Queen is here.

The news was almost too good for Nan Bacco to believe it. She kept waiting for the correction, the retraction, the nuanced clarification that would negate what she and her people had just witnessed on the subs.p.a.ce-feed monitors in the Monet Room.

A hushed conference between Seven of Nine and Admirals Batanides and Akaar ended, and Akaar strode to the head of the conference table. He lifted his large hands and silenced the nervous chatter that had filled the room.

"We've just received confirmation from Starfleet Command," he said, lifting his chin and letting his long gray hair frame his squarish features. "The Borg attack fleets at Vulcan, Andor, Coridan, Beta Rigel, and Qo'noS have been routed."

He had more to say but was cut off by the room's thunderous applause and whooping cheers of jubilant relief. Bacco permitted herself only a tight, grateful smile, for fear of tempting the Fates with premature celebration. She caught sight of a deep frown on Piniero's face, and then she noticed that similarly grave expressions were worn by Batanides, Akaar, and Seven.

Akaar lifted his palms again and hushed the a.s.sembled cabinet members and advisers. "There were reports of infighting among several other Borg battle groups, but those have now ceased-and all remaining Borg attack fleets are once again on the move." He met Bacco's questioning look and added, "Including the one on its way to Earth."

4527 B.C.E.