For every trap the Borg Queen triggered, Hernandez improvised a defense. Rebuilding the lost deck behind her, she pulled Leishman and Helkara with her as she fought for each step. Prehensile twists of tubing as thick as her arms wrapped around her throat, Leishman's waist, Helkara's legs. Hernandez answered each attack with a focused mental image of its opposite. The physical reality of the Borg ship, for aeons the solitary domain of the Borg Queen, now bowed to her imagination. Tentacles withdrew or broke apart. Vanished decks rebuilt themselves. The lethal pressure of closing bulkheads became the freedom of open s.p.a.ce. Then her back struck the final barrier, and at her command, it turned to coal-black dust.

The trio collapsed onto the secured platform, which had been part.i.tioned from the rest of the Borg ship by directional dampening field projectors. Arranged in a large square formation were four transport-pattern enhancers, all blinking in their ready standby mode.

Hernandez dropped Leishman and Helkara into the middle of the enhancers, tapped the combadge on Helkara's chest, and said, "Boarding party to Aventine. Two for emergency beam-out!"

"Acknowledged," said a voice made small by being filtered through the combadge. "Stand by for transport."

Leishman and Helkara were still staggering weakly to their feet as Hernandez bounded away, clear of the pattern enhancers, and landed with preternatural grace atop a centimeters-thin railing. Perched on it, she felt the same rush of power that she'd had in Axion. Having attuned the catoms in her body to the Borg's unique wavelength, she had usurped their strength.

The images in Hernandez's mind were absolutely clear.

She saw Kedair being smothered inside the vinculum tower, her life fading, her mission to trigger the transphasic mine on the verge of failure. There was no direct route to the transport-shielded tower, no way for anyone to come to Kedair's aid...no one except Hernandez.

She coiled and tensed to leap off the railing into the moving parts of the Borg ship, already visualizing herself negotiating its grinding gears with impunity.

The whine of a transporter beam began to fill the air.

"Where are you going?" Leishman asked over the eerie wails and mechanical clankings of the ship's infernal works.

Hernandez looked over her shoulder. "To save Kedair."

Helkara and Leishman became pillars of swirling particles as the transporter beam took hold, and Hernandez leaped off the railing and fell willingly into the belly of the beast.

Lonnoc Kedair knew that she was close to the detonator controls for the transphasic mine, but she couldn't see it. Entombed in the squirming black tangle that surrounded the Borg vinculum, all she saw was darkness, as if she'd drowned in tar.

There was no air to breathe, nowhere to move, no way to get any leverage for a counterattack. Her feet had been pulled from under her, and stinger-tipped tentacles began impaling her from the front and from behind.

Horrendous grinding sensations filled her torso as the Borg ship's mechanical limbs pierced her body in several places at once. Almost as quickly as the wounds were inflicted, her body fought to heal them, but it was a losing battle. Several centimeters thick, the tentacles battered her with blunt force, snapping her bones, rending her skin, and pummeling her last h.o.a.rded breaths from her lungs.

She cried out in agony and felt her scream buried in the smothering, oily lubricant of the Borg machine. The foul liquid seeped into her nostrils and poured into her mouth. Reflex and instinct told her to spit it out, but she had no more breath left to push with.

Needling jabs p.r.i.c.ked her skin with sharp, icy twinges. a.s.similation nanoprobes, she realized. For a moment, she regretted the aggressive combination of antia.s.similation implants and injections she and the other boarders had received. Although the Borg's nanoprobes had faced and overcome some of these prophylactic measures in the past, they had never encountered this precise amalgam of genetic and neurological blockades. Lucky me, Kedair realized. Since I can't be a.s.similated, I get to spend more time being chewed up. Great.

Tentacles at either end of her torso pulled in opposite directions, and she realized only then that it meant to rip her in half. Then the shearing tension began, and excruciating pain expelled everything from her mind except agony.

No amount of rapid-healing possessed by any Takaran could keep pace with what was being done to her; the Borg ship was breaking down her resilient body by degrees. Kedair's mouth contorted as the pressure intensified, and the dark, metallic-smelling fluid found its way inside her ears. Then, fully submerged inside the horror, she heard it.

Beneath the frantic pounding of her pulse, a malevolent whisper lurked in the suffocating fluid of this dark womb. Its message penetrated her thoughts, and she knew that it couldn't be debated or bargained with. Strength is irrelevant, it told her. You are small, and we are endless. You are one, and we are legion. You will become as we are. You will become part of us.

Kedair was ready to surrender to the darkness.

Then there was light.

The vile tentacles pulled out of her flesh and retreated into the walls. The crushing press of machines and needles and saws fell away, and some of the contraptions that turned humanoids into drones fell to pieces and scattered across the deck. Kedair's body fell free, and she landed in a twisted, mutilated heap on the floor. Through the cloudy stains in her vision, she saw that her left arm was partially severed and dangled by a tendon just below the elbow. Everything had a flat, distorted quality, and when she tried to blink away the slime, she realized she had only one working eye. The other had been gouged out to make way for some monstrous implant.

She heard footsteps approaching.

Turning her head, she saw Erika Hernandez striding back into the vinculum tower, heading directly toward her. The woman's uniform had become stained and tattered, but Hernandez herself looked none the worse for whatever she'd endured. She asked Kedair, "Can you walk?"

Kedair sputtered through a mouthful of filth, "Both my legs are broken." She jerked her head toward the transphasic mine, which had been securely affixed to the Borg ship's central plexus-essentially, its nerve center. "Set the detonator. We-" She paused to hack up a mouthful of viscous black oil and spat several times to clear her mouth. "We have to frag this ship."

Hernandez walked toward the mine. "Tell me what to do."

"It's already armed," Kedair said, wincing as her back and chest muscles began pulling shattered bones back into place before mending them. "Enter a delay in seconds using the touchpad, then press 'Enable' to start the countdown."

Standing at the detonator, Hernandez keyed in the data. She hurried back to Kedair. "It's running," she said, kneeling beside Kedair's mangled body.

Kedair asked, "How long?"

"Seventy-five seconds," Hernandez said.

"Are you crazy?" Kedair snapped. "That's not-"

A three-clawed biomechanoid tentacle lunged at Hernandez from behind. Kedair meant to shout or point or give a warning-then, without seeming to notice or care, Hernandez lifted a hand in a dismissive gesture, and the tentacle shredded into sc.r.a.p metal. Hernandez straightened Kedair's mauled limbs and prompted her, "You were saying?"

It took Kedair a second to recover her wits. "It's not enough time to reach a transport site," she said.

"Yes, it is," Hernandez replied. She slid her hands under Kedair, who at first felt no contact-and then she realized that she was floating a few centimeters above the deck. She was in Hernandez's arms and being lifted gently over the woman's shoulder. "Hang on," added Hernandez. "This part won't be fun."

Kedair's full weight rested on Hernandez's shoulder, and the youthful woman carried Kedair out of the vinculum tower at a brisk pace. The bobbing cadence of Hernandez's stride and the pressure on Kedair's abdomen made the Takaran cough up more of the bitter, toxic black fluid she'd inhaled while snared in the Borg ship's grasp.

Between hacking coughs, she saw more serpentine appendages lash out at Hernandez, who deflected each attack with the slightest motions of her fingers, like a sorcerer cowing demons. Pa.s.sages and exits closed themselves with piping and components that spread like black metallic ivy, but the hastily risen barriers retreated ahead of Hernandez, who parted them with broad waves of her hand.

They pa.s.sed through the last portal and reached the platform outside the tower. The bridge back to the ship's outer superstructure had been retracted. The s.p.a.ce above them, which only minutes earlier had been empty, now was alive with moving metal and blue-black clouds of some primordial matter that flashed with static electricity.

"Are you afraid of heights?" Hernandez asked.

"No," Kedair said.

Hernandez grinned. "Good."

She stretched one hand toward the distant top of the ship's interior, and then they were aloft, rising away from the platform and accelerating toward the shadowy maelstrom overhead.

Kedair, still draped over Hernandez's shoulder, watched the vinculum tower shrink beneath them. "How in the name of Yaltakh are you doing this?"

"Easy," Hernandez said. "I imagine I've already done it."

They arrowed through the center of the ship's brewing thunderhead, and an eye of calm swirled around them as they pa.s.sed. Then they were near the top deck of the ship, and a dampener-secured platform equipped with transporter-pattern enhancers hove into view.

"Ten seconds," Kedair said. "No pressure."

Hernandez alighted on the platform, leaned forward, and shrugged Kedair off her shoulder. Catching the wounded woman with one arm, she tapped her combadge with her free hand. "Hernandez to Aventine! Two to beam up!"

"Energizing," replied a transporter chief over the comm.

Kedair clasped Hernandez's arm and grinned. "In case we don't make it," she said, "nice try."

The paralyzing embrace of the transporter's annular confinement beam found them, and the Stygian steelscape of the Borg ship began to fade behind a glittering veil-then a flash turned everything white.

The Borg scout ship vanished from the Aventine's main viewer in a fiery blue detonation.

Dax paced in quick steps behind Lieutenant Kandel, manic with anxiety. "Tell me we got them," she said, pestering the tactical officer for the third time in fifteen seconds.

From the other side of the console, Bowers tossed a sidelong frown in Dax's direction. "And you wonder why I don't let you go on away missions."

Pressing herself against the tactical panel beside Kandel, Dax said to Kandel, "Report, Lieutenant."

The Deltan woman finished reviewing the data on her screen in a calm, unhurried manner, looked up at Dax, and said, "Transporter room two confirms Captain Hernandez and Lieutenant Kedair are aboard. The lieutenant is being rushed to sickbay."

"Where's Captain Hernandez now?"

Kandel nodded at her companel. "In the transporter room."

"Patch me through to her," Dax said. She waited for Kandel to confirm that she had opened a channel, and then she said, "Captain Hernandez, this is Captain Dax. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, but I need to meet with you, alone, right now."

Bowers glanced at Dax, as if she needed reminding of the damage her ship had just taken and the dire need for repairs and a new plan. "Can this wait an hour, Captain? We have a lot-"

"Right. Now. In my quarters."

The vehemence of Hernandez's demand left Dax taken aback. She twitched her eyebrows at Bowers, who shrugged in return.

"All right, then," Dax said. "I'm on my way."

The door to the VIP guest quarters opened at Dax's approach, and she entered unannounced. A few paces into the compartment, she saw Hernandez leaning against the bulkhead.

Hernandez regarded Dax with a dour frown. "You're the second captain to barge into my quarters without knocking today," she said. "Doesn't Starfleet teach courtesy anymore?"

"My ship, my rules," Dax said. "Besides, you made it pretty clear-on an open channel-that you were in a hurry to see me." Spreading her arms in a sarcastic pantomime of openness, she added, "Well, here I am. Talk." She folded her arms across her chest while she waited for the other woman's reply.

As she meandered toward Dax, Hernandez wore a troubled look. "Bear with me, Captain," she said, her voice quieter than it had been. Her shredded uniform hung loosely on her slender frame. "What I need to tell you is vital, but it's hard for me to come at a problem straight. After eight hundred years with the Caeliar, keeping secrets becomes a virtue."

"I understand," Dax said. Hernandez stopped a mere arm's length in front of her. Looking more closely at her, Dax saw that despite the youthful appearance of her face and physique, Hernandez's eyes possessed an ancient light. It was a curious trait Dax had seen in joined Trills with very old symbionts.

Rubbing her palms slowly against each other, Hernandez said, "I read everything in your files about the Borg before I went to that ship. I thought I was ready for whatever I'd find. I was wrong."

"If you're blaming yourself over what happened during the counterattack, don't," Dax said. "As far as I'm concerned, you deserve a medal for saving three of my officers-especially going back for Kedair like you did."

Hernandez averted her eyes and stepped away from Dax, toward the windows that looked out on the deceptively placid starfield. "I'm not talking about what the Borg do," she said. "I'm talking about what they are. I wasn't ready to believe it." Her voice fell to a hush, and Dax inched closer behind her to listen as she continued. "I was expecting a group mind, but that's not really what the Borg is. It's one mind, one tyrant consciousness enslaving all the others. What it does to individuals is beyond cruel-it's s.a.d.i.s.tic, barbaric. And it's so...empty. It's a hunger void of form, a frozen pit that can never be filled, no matter how much it eats-and the larger it gets, the more it wants."

She looked at Dax. "It was like a melody I'd heard before, but now it was changed-darker, more dissonant. Instead of uniting the minds, the way a conductor guides the musicians in a symphony, it buries them, makes them into mute spectators, while it uses their bodies as tools. It's like a prison of lost souls, with trillions of beings chained to the will of something that doesn't even know what the h.e.l.l it wants."

"Sounds like a bad Joining," Dax said. Noting Hernandez's uncomprehending head shake, she added, "Sometimes, when a Trill symbiont is incompatible with its new host, it creates a persona so terrible that the only proper response is forced separation."

"That about sums it up," Hernandez said. Sorrow darkened her expression. "The worst part is how familiar it felt."

Suspicion percolated in Dax's gut. "Familiar?"

Stepping away, perhaps hoping to insulate herself from Dax with a bit of distance, Hernandez said, "I first noticed it a few hours ago, after the boarding teams contacted us. When we lowered the dampening field, I was able to sense one of the dying drones on the Borg ship in the same way that I used to be able to sense the Caeliar. And when I was inside the Borg ship and it regained full power, it was like I was back in Axion."

Dax kept a wary eye on Hernandez. "Is that all?"

"It's just the beginning," Hernandez said, stopping at her quarters' wall-mounted companel. She activated the screen with a gentle tap. It was crowded with multiple side-by-side windows of information-starmaps, ships' logs, and more.

"Records from Voyager and the EnterpriseD both suggest the origin of the Borg is somewhere deep in the Delta Quadrant," Hernandez said. Swapping one starmap for another, she continued, "When the Caeliar homeworld was destroyed, the event created a number of pa.s.sages through subs.p.a.ce-the tunnels you and your people were trying to shut down. Those were the stable ones."

A diagram of a subs.p.a.ce pa.s.sage took on a distorted twist. Hernandez explained, "Some of the tunnels cut through time as well as s.p.a.ce; that made them unstable, and they collapsed shortly after the Erigol cataclysm, from which only three Caeliar city-ships escaped." She drew bright, straight-line paths across the starmap with her fingertip. "One of those pa.s.sages tossed the city of Axion deep into the Beta Quadrant, about eight hundred and sixty-odd years ago. A second one threw the city of Kintana into another galaxy at the dawn of time."

"And the third city...?"

"Mantilis," Hernandez said, inscribing another line across the map, from the Azure Nebula to the Delta Quadrant. "Several members of my landing party were trapped in that city when it vanished. Until now, the Caeliar believed that Mantilis was lost or destroyed in some distant past. Now, based on my a.n.a.lysis of Borg nanoprobes and my own experiences with the Collective, I have a new theory. Through some kind of botched version of the process that made me what I am...they became the Borg."

Dax approached the companel to study the data up close. She imagined the horrified reaction it would provoke in Captains Riker and Picard-and likely in any human who was made aware of it. The origin of the Borg was a tragic confluence of long-past human actions and errors. "Are you sure about this?"

"Positive," Hernandez said with a satisfied smirk.

Shaking her head as a frown creased her brow, Dax said, "According to Captain Riker, we wouldn't stand a chance against the Caeliar, so why are you acting like this is good news?"

"Because now I know which of the Borg's weaknesses we can exploit," Hernandez said. "And if Caeliar technology made the Borg, maybe it can un-make them, too."

22.

Riker was waiting for the punch line. Still grappling with disbelief, he said, "The Caeliar created the Borg?"

"I don't think it was intentional," Hernandez said. She stood, attired in a new Starfleet duty uniform, in front of the companel in the Enterprise's observation lounge and faced Riker, Dax, and Picard. Nodding at the side-by-side images displayed on the screen behind her, she said, "The similarities between Borg nanoprobes and Caeliar catoms are too profound to be coincidence. But they're not obvious, because their exterior configurations are completely different, and inside, in their cores, the nanoprobes have been badly corrupted."

Picard sat at the head of the curved table on Riker's left, his countenance stern as he listened to Hernandez. "Your evidence is compelling, Captain," he said. "But how does this knowledge help us or the Federation in the time we have left?"