Refocusing his mind on work, he asked, "Have we heard from t.i.tan or the Aventine?"

"t.i.tan has locked in the coordinates of the Caeliar's home system," Worf said. "The Aventine has given us the software to generate and maintain a subs.p.a.ce microtunnel stable enough for a high-complexity signal."

Turning away from the hollowed memory of his ready room to face Worf, Picard asked, "Is Captain Hernandez ready?"

"Almost," Worf said. "Lieutenant Chen will help Lieutenant Commander Pazlar monitor the link to the Caeliar from t.i.tan. When they signal ready, we can initiate the soliton pulse."

Picard nodded and walked to his chair. Worf followed, always close at his shoulder. They settled into their chairs, and Picard regarded the battle-scarred hull of the Aventine; every scorch and breach was rendered with perfect clarity on the main viewscreen. "Any news from Starfleet Command?"

"No change," Worf said. "The Borg attack fleet is thirty minutes from Earth and Mars." He took a cautious look around the bridge, where everyone was working with quiet determination. Lowering his voice, he continued, "I have a question, sir."

In the same confidential tone, Picard replied, "About?"

"Admiral Jellico's orders."

"How did you...?" It took Picard a moment to reason it out. "Captain Dax told you."

"Yes, sir," Worf said. "A few minutes ago."

Picard frowned and nodded. "I take it you don't approve."

The semirhetorical statement provoked a scowl from Worf. "Running away would not be my first choice."

"We're long past first choices, Worf," Picard said. "The idea of surrender doesn't sit well with me, either, but the admiral may be right this time. When Earth falls, the war's over." Sensing Worf's protest, he held up a hand and continued, "Naturally, there's a plan for the continuity of government, but once the core worlds are gone, there'll be little holding the Federation together. Betazed and Trill will try, as will Bajor, but only until the Borg reach them, a few days from now."

Worf looked away from Picard and directed his intense stare at the forward viewscreen. "And what will become of us?"

"You mean the Enterprise?"

"And the Aventine and t.i.tan," Worf replied.

"That's a very good question," Picard said. "To be truthful, I haven't really thought that far ahead."

Grim antic.i.p.ation mingled with dark amus.e.m.e.nt in Worf's expression. "Then it might interest you to know that we are surrounded." He pointed at the tactical display on the armrest of Picard's command chair. "The Borg armada dispersed in a radial deployment from the Azure Nebula. At present, all sectors adjacent to this one are under Borg control."

Seeing the situation rendered as a simple graphic made Worf's point clear to Picard. "We have nowhere to run."

"Precisely," Worf replied. "Neither can we remain here. The Borg will seek us out. So...if we cannot flee, and we cannot hide, logic dictates that we should attack."

Picard smirked at his XO. "Channeling Spock again, are we?"

"I am merely stating the facts," Worf said.

Tugging his tunic smooth, Picard replied, "Be that as it may, we won't be doing any of those things just yet-not until we see the results of our current undertaking."

A muted tone beeped from the ops console. Commander Kadohata silenced it and swiveled her chair around to report to Worf and Picard, "Commander La Forge confirms the subs.p.a.ce transmitter and the deflector are online and ready to go, sir."

"Very good," Picard said. He looked left, toward Choudhury at tactical. "Lieutenant, hail Captain Hernandez on the t.i.tan. See if she's ready to proceed."

"Aye, sir," Choudhury replied. She keyed the message into her station's companel, and a few moments later she was answered by a bright synthetic tone. "Captain Hernandez and Lieutenant Commander Pazlar both confirm they're ready to go."

Standing up, Picard said, "Then it's time. Commander Kadohata, power up the transmitter and the main deflector. Lieutenant Elfiki, prepare to generate the soliton pulse. Lieutenant Choudhury, signal the Aventine and t.i.tan, and give them the countdown."

As his officers snapped into hushed, efficient action around the bridge, Picard noticed that Worf, as usual, had followed his lead and risen from his chair to stand at Picard's right shoulder. "Captain," said Worf, "I have another question."

"Speak freely, Commander."

"It is my understanding that we are not, in fact, sending a message through the subs.p.a.ce microtunnel."

Picard nodded. "Correct."

Worf went on, "However, the mission profile requires us to provide Captain Hernandez with a high-bandwidth channel, on a frequency very much like the one used by the Borg."

"Also correct," Picard said, his manner dry and matter-of-fact. "What's your question?"

"What, exactly, are we doing?"

A wry, crooked grin pulled at Picard's mouth. I've asked myself the same question a hundred times in the last hour. He threw a sidelong look at Worf. "We're making a leap of faith."

Melora Pazlar moved in slow, graceful turns through the zero-gravity sanctuary of t.i.tan's stellar cartography hololab. She reconfigured the lab's holographic interfaces on the fly, to take direct control of the subs.p.a.ce transmitter hardware on the Enterprise while regulating an influx of beamed power from the Aventine. At the same time, she had to coordinate with several officers on all three vessels to maintain a real-time FTL datalink, in order to multiply their shared computing power.

A few meters away, between her and the micro-gravity catwalk that led to the corridor portal, Captain Erika Hernandez and Lieutenant T'Ryssa Chen floated in the weightless s.p.a.ce. Chen, a cultural-contact specialist from the Enterprise, was supposed to be helping Hernandez set up her own interface with the hololab, but the half-human, half-Vulcan young woman seemed more focused on floating upside-down while talking Hernandez into a stupor.

"Eight hundred sixty years," Chen gushed, staring wide-eyed at Hernandez. "Wow! You must've learned so much about the Caeliar living among them for so long."

"Sometimes I think I've barely scratched the surface," Hernandez said. The youthful-looking octocentarian shot a pleading glance at Pazlar. "Commander, are we ready to send the soliton pulse yet?"

Pazlar gave an apologetic shrug. "A few more minutes, Captain. Sorry-we're working as fast as we can." In an effort to keep Chen distracted, Pazlar added, "Lieutenant, have you calibrated the alpha-wave receiver to the captain's brainwave frequency yet?"

"Yup, did it," Chen replied, before turning her intense focus back toward Hernandez. "I read a sanitized report of your time with the Caeliar, and I really need to ask, if their bodies are composed of programmable matter-"

"Catoms," Hernandez interrupted.

"Right, catoms-but they told you they made replicas of their old organic bodies and that they perceive the physical world the same way after their transition to synthetic bodies as they did before-but is that really possible? I mean, okay, they can defy gravity and become noncorporeal, and that's cool-but could they do that before?"

An exasperated reaction fleeted across Hernandez's face. "I don't know," she said.

"But what does it feel like, to be able to do that?"

Hernandez sighed. "Slipping free of gravity is like being one with the wind," she said. "I don't know a better way to explain it. As for their little trick of actually becoming one with the wind, I have no idea what that's like. I can't do that."

Before Chen could ask a follow-up question, Pazlar cut in, "Lieutenant, synchronize the delta-wave receiver frequency with the operating frequency of the captain's catoms."

"Already done," Chen said, doing an inverted zero-g pirouette, and then she continued to Hernandez, "If the Caeliar have a steady stream of-no, wait, that's not what I mean. If they have a...an unbroken-a continuity of memory dating back to their organic selves, but their bodies are completely synthetic now, how did they keep their memories? Was each memory engram individually copied and replaced? Did the old Caeliar brain even use engrams to record memories, like most humanoid brains, or did it use a...um...a cranial-fluid medium, like the Sogstal.a.b.i.ans? Or something else, like a crystalline matrix?"

"Honestly, Lieutenant, it never came up."

"Never?"

"Well, I was only with them for about eight centuries."

Chen frowned for just a moment at the derailment of that line of inquiry, but then she soldiered on with her enthusiasm undiminished. "What about making little Caeliar? After they became synthetic, did they stop having kids, or did they find a way to simulate that, too? If their population is zero-growth, is it by choice, or was it a trade-off for going synthetic? Do they still have s.e.x for pleasure?" At Hernandez's pointed stare, Chen added, "Not that you'd have any reason to know."

"I'll answer that," said Hernandez, "except for the last few parts-on one condition."

"Name it," Chen said, floating perpendicular to Hernandez.

"That you won't ask me any more questions about the Caeliar until after I'm finished in here."

The perky young human-Vulcan hybrid nodded. "Deal."

Pazlar caught Hernandez's eye and nodded at the interface controls while holding up an index finger to convey the idea We'll be ready in a minute. Hernandez noted the signal with an almost imperceptible glance and then said to Chen, "I asked my Caeliar friend Inyx about this, after the city of Axion went into exile. I wanted to know how long he thought it would take his people to repopulate. He said they wouldn't, that the fifty-two million Caeliar in Axion were all that was left. They'd stopped reproducing after making the shift to synthetic bodies. As you guessed, it was a side effect of the Change. Since they weren't really worried about dying, they'd figured a population of about a billion people could keep their civilization going indefinitely. But when the cataclysm destroyed Erigol, ninety-eight percent of their species was killed."

Chen blinked a few times, as if doing so would erase her stunned reaction. "Wow," she said. "Would you happen to know what their peak population was prior to-"

"We had a deal, Lieutenant," Hernandez said.

Hanging her head, Chen replied, "Right, sorry."

Pazlar finished the last of her modifications to the hololab's systems. Twisting and turning in a balletic inversion of her body relative to her guests, she locked in the power feed from the Aventine and confirmed that its computers were in synch with its counterparts on t.i.tan and the Enterprise. "We're ready," she declared. "Captain, would you care to test your connection to the interface?"

Hernandez nodded, closed her eyes, and became very still. Then, as if moving of their own accord, multiple elements of the lab's holographic interface reorganized their layout; some faded out and were replaced by others, and some became flurried with data. After a few seconds, all of the changes reversed themselves, and the interfaces returned to Pazlar's final configuration. Hernandez opened her eyes. "Feels good."

"All right," Pazlar said. "I'm signaling the Enterprise and letting them know we're ready to do this thing."

Chen grinned at Hernandez, held up a hand to show her entwined index and middle digits, and said, "Fingers crossed."

"Do you make a special effort to confound expectations about your Vulcan heritage?" Hernandez asked.

"Yes, actually," Chen said.

"Don't try so hard."

Suppressing a grin at Chen's expense, Pazlar said, "Stand by, Captain. Enterprise is generating the soliton pulse now."

The semitransparent gauges around Pazlar peaked with ma.s.sive surges of energy and torrents of data. The Elaysian science officer marveled at the complexity and sheer power of the signal the three vessels had united to create-chiefly because the most robust part of the outgoing stream was flowing directly through the mind of Captain Erika Hernandez.

Reaching across darkness and distance, Erika Hernandez felt the transmission systems of t.i.tan and the Enterprise harmonizing with her catoms, vibrating in sympathy, reacting to her will like old limbs finally set free to move.

Safe in the redoubt of her own psyche, she opened her psionic senses. The gestalt was barely audible to her. A tremolo infused its every nuance and lent it a quality of dread. Though she was tempted to renew her contact with the Caeliar's shared minds.p.a.ce, she regretted the need to surrender control again. Accepting the Change had meant letting go of her autonomy. At the time, she had felt broken, defeated, and diminished. Only with the benefit of centuries of hindsight did she appreciate the riches with which she'd been blessed in return, out of all proportion to her sacrifice. All the same, having once more tasted freedom, she savored it and was loath to give it up.

She guided her consciousness past the elaborate defenses of the gestalt and heard its voices. They were in disarray, a tumult of anger and anxiety. It felt to Hernandez like a surreal nightmare, as if she were one of the victims at the mythical sundering of the Tower of Babel, one of thousands milling about in confusion, each unable to understand any of the others.

Then the Caeliar sensed her mental presence among them, and the pandemonium was silenced. Their minds pulled away from hers as if by reflex, like a layer of grease on dishwater retreating from a drop of detergent.

Surges of shock and bitterness came in waves from the Caeliar. Bright anger emanated from Ordemo Nordal, their tanwa-seynorral, or "first among equals." Counterpointing his dudgeon was Inyx's conflicted mix of emotions-his resentment at her deception, his relief to be back in contact with her, and his amused pride at the true scope of her abilities.

Hernandez's thoughts took shape in the gestalt with the clarity of spoken words. "As long as I have your attention," she projected with obvious disdain, "let me apologize for my fly-by-night exit. I would have left a note, but there wasn't time."

Ordemo replied, "Your sarcasm remains as blunt as ever. No matter. Even if you had been sincere, mere words would hardly repair the damage you've inflicted."

"Still exaggerating for effect, I see," she shot back.

"For once, Ordemo has understated the matter," Inyx answered. "The feedback pulse you and t.i.tan's crew created caused significant harm to much of the apparatus we use for the Great Work. However, I suspect he and the majority of the Quorum are more aggrieved by your irreparable violation of our privacy." Though his words were chastising her, the aura of his emotions betrayed his lack of animosity.

The rest of the Quorum, however, blazed with indignation, and they were the ones she would have to persuade if humanity was to be saved from annihilation. "I won't pretend to seek your forgiveness," she said, addressing the whole of the gestalt. "That's not why I've come. I'm contacting you to ask for your help-and to tell you why you should give it."

"You're referring to the hostilities that currently threaten your homeworld, we presume," Ordemo responded.

"That's part of it."

The tanwa-seynorral channeled the Quorum's chilly reproof. "Then you're wasting your time and ours, Erika. We don't meddle in the affairs of others-you know that."

"Yes, I do," Hernandez said. "But I'm not asking you to help Earth-not directly. I'm asking you to help the Borg."

She started sharing images with the gestalt, aeons of memories she'd obtained from her union with the Borg Collective. Worlds plundered, technologies taken by force, all h.o.m.ogenized without mercy. Entire species and cultures violently adapted to service the Borg's single-minded pursuit of perfection, which its guiding intelligence defined as unfettered power.

Her plea was met with silent rejection. The gestalt recoiled en ma.s.se from her request. Even Inyx sounded perplexed by her entreaty. "Erika, the Borg are a brutal, rapacious culture. Why would you ask us to aid them?"

"Because you created them," she said. "And in a way, so did we. Look closer." She painted a mental image of the Borg's nanoprobe technology, and then she pushed past its cluttered outer sh.e.l.l to reveal its core components. "Their Collective operates on a frequency that is so close to the gestalt that I heard it from light-years away. It's not as sophisticated as your little psychic commune, but it's a lot more powerful."

She presented them with visions of sentient beings being a.s.similated. "Watch how that technology alters organic beings. Does that look familiar? It should. That was one of the outcomes Inyx warned me about before he Changed me-the suppression of higher brain functions, a mindless existence as an automaton. But the worst part of it is that they aren't really mindless. All those individual minds are still in there, each one a prisoner."

A pall of horror swept through the gestalt, and Hernandez realized with grim satisfaction that the Caeliar finally understood the truth.

"Mantilis," Inyx said, his telepathic voice muted by shock. "It must have survived its journey through the temporal disruption."

"With both human and Caeliar survivors aboard," Hernandez said, completing her mentor's thought. "Something happened that drove them to try to unite for survival, but instead of fusing their strengths, it amplified the ugliest parts of both species, made them into a diseased reflection of us. Your paranoia and fanatical desire for conformity got tangled up with human barbarism and aggression. It was a recipe for disaster."

Inyx replied with dark melancholy, "No, Erika, it's nothing less than a complete abomination."

"Call it what you want," she said. "The Borg Collective has abducted trillions of sentient beings over the past several thousand years and laid waste to vast swaths of the galaxy. But I can guarantee you, the drones aren't to blame. Every last one of them is a slave, living in perpetual suffering. The real culprit is whatever's controlling the Collective and speaking through its Queen. That's the root of the problem, and to deal with it, I'm going to need your help."

Ordemo's stubborn refusal to accede to her request held the Quorum's reaction in abeyance. "Though it seems likely that an unfortunate accident created this atrocity you call the Borg, that doesn't compel us to interfere. The timeline is as it was; if the Borg were meant to exist, then the natural order of events must be respected."

"Let me tell you two things you ought to consider," she said. "First, think about the threat the Borg will pose to you and your Great Work if they a.s.similate my catoms and my memories of your technology. Second, I'm not asking you to tamper with the timeline. As you might say, what's done is done. We can't change the past, but we still have a chance to shape the future."

Hernandez felt the mood of the gestalt shifting into alignment with her, but the tanwa-seynorral continued to resist her arguments. He said, "What, precisely, would you ask of us?"

"Bring Axion here, to my coordinates in Federation s.p.a.ce, and I'll explain everything in person."