The warrior moved briskly to one of the bridge's few operational panels and tapped in a series of commands. "Channel open, Chancellor," he reported.

"On-screen," Martok said.

The gunmetal hash of electronic snow on the viewscreen gave way to a murky, unsteady signal from the High Council chamber in the Great Hall of the First City. Looking back at Martok was his political nemesis, Councillor Kopek. "What news, Chancellor?"

"Our fleet has fallen," Martok said. "The enemy is en route to worlds across the Empire. I trust you know where duty lies, Councillor."

Kopek nodded. "Of course. We will defend Qo'noS, my lord."

"Summon every ship that can reach you in time," Martok said. "The fate of our homeworld is now in your hands."

"The Borg will not come to Qo'noS and live, Chancellor. When your fleet returns home, your throne will await you."

Martok smirked. "With you sitting on it, I presume?"

With no trace of mockery, Kopek replied, "Today is not a day for politics, Chancellor. Today is a good day to die."

Perhaps he longs for his place in Sto-Vo-Kor like the rest of us, after all, Martok thought. He didn't know whether Fek'lhr would permit such a vile spirit as Kopek to redeem himself with a single hour of heroism, but part of him wanted to believe that it was possible-and that every warrior deserved such a chance.

He saluted him. "Qapla', Kopek, son of Nargor."

"Die with honor, Martok, son of Urthog. Qo'noS out."

The signal ended, and the screen went dark.

I have fought the good fight, Martok told himself, but he found no solace in the thought. With his leg broken and his ship adrift, there was nothing more for him to do but stand and wait to see if the Empire's final hour had come around at last.

"Someone bring me a drink," he said.

12.

Erika Hernandez sat alone at a dressing table in her quarters on t.i.tan. She stared at her reflection in the large oval mirror. With her hands resting in her lap, she concentrated on her hair and felt the energy demands of her catoms as she altered her coiffure to match her fickle whims.

Her wild mane of thick, curly black hair retreated toward her head and turned an intense shade of indigo. Eyeing the more conservative spill of deep blue hair over her shoulders, Hernandez frowned. "I don't think so," she muttered to herself.

It took great effort to rein it back to a compact bob and shift its color to an auburn hue that matched her memories of cinnamon, fresh from the jar in her mother's kitchen. A fleeting whimsy drove her to go blond for all of eleven seconds.

She halted her hairstyling experiments as the door signal softly disturbed her privacy. "Come in," she said.

The door opened. Captain Riker entered, followed by two other officers-a bald human man and a young Trill woman-who wore the same rank insignia that he did. The trio was barely inside the room before Hernandez had used her catoms to restore her hair to its previous state, a ma.s.s of black waves that covered her back.

"Captain," Riker said. "I hope we're not interrupting."

"Not at all," she said. She added with a teasing grin, "And thanks for knocking this time."

The Trill woman gleamed with fascination. "How do you do that with your hair?"

"Catoms," Hernandez said. "Sophisticated nanomachines made and infused into my body by the Caeliar. The catoms can direct energy and reshape matter in remarkable ways, if they have enough power. Unfortunately, this little parlor trick's about all I have left in me-and to be honest, it's tiring me out."

Folding his arms, Riker said to the other two captains, "She's being modest. When she showed up on my bridge a few hours ago, she turned Ensign Rriarr's phaser to dust with a glance."

Hernandez shook her head and gave a tired grin. "Captain Riker's giving me a bit too much credit," she explained. "When I did that, we were still in orbit of New Erigol, where I had access to the Caeliar gestalt. Without that power to draw from, I can barely curl my hair."

The Trill cracked a smile, but the older man had the stern carriage of one who had seen too many days of war. Hernandez wondered if he saw her as clearly as she saw him.

He cleared his throat and threw a look at Riker, who dipped his chin at the reproach and gestured at his colleagues.

"Captain Hernandez," Riker said, "permit me to introduce Captain Ezri Dax of the Federation Starship Aventine and Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise."

Unable to mask her confusion, Hernandez c.o.c.ked her head and eyed Picard with suspicion. "But...you're the one the voice calls Locutus," she said.

Dax's and Riker's eyes widened in horror and surprise, and Picard froze as they looked at him. His face became pale, and he looked lifeless, Gorgonized. At last, he replied in a shocked whisper, "You heard a voice...call me...Locutus?"

"Yes," she said, listening to the inhuman chorus of distant voices that filled every empty s.p.a.ce in her thoughts. "Are you telling me the rest of you don't hear that?" She looked from one captain to another in an effort to gauge their reactions. Their obvious dismay and withdrawn body language told Hernandez that her revelation had left them ill at ease. "Great," she said. "You think I'm crazy, right? Think I'm hearing things?"

Picard stepped toward her. His voice was cautious and gentle. "Do you know what you've been hearing? Its name?"

Antic.i.p.ating the direction of his questions, she replied, "Yes. Do you?"

As if he were reading her thoughts, he said under his breath, "The Collective." He looked at Riker and seemed to draw strength from the younger man's quiet fort.i.tude. Turning back toward Hernandez, he continued, "When I hear the Borg, it sounds like a roar of voices, more like a noise than a chorus. Then the strongest voice overpowers the others. Is that what you hear?"

She shook her head. "No." She closed her eyes and let the ever-changing chaos of the Collective cascade inside her mind. "I hear all of them," she explained. "Every voice adding to the others, like a conversation. But I also hear the unifying voice, both on its own and when it speaks through the Queen."

"I hear only the many," Picard said.

"I hear what I choose to hear," Hernandez said. "I can isolate lone voices, if I try hard enough."

Riker swapped excited glances with Dax and asked Hernandez, "Can you communicate with them? Talk to them?"

"No," Hernandez said. "I can eavesdrop on their party, but I'm definitely not invited, if you know what I mean."

Picard paced slowly. "Captain, have you ever encountered the Borg before now?"

"Never even heard of them before today," she said.

"But you can hear the Collective in your thoughts," Picard said, lost in his own musings as he reversed direction and kept pacing. "Even though you've never been a.s.similated."

Hernandez hadn't encountered the term a.s.similated in the brief and heavily redacted file that Riker had let her read, and she wasn't certain she wanted to find out what it meant.

Captain Dax interrupted Picard's pensive perambulations. "It's probably related to the catoms the Caeliar put into her body. Somehow those nanomachines let her tap in to the Borg Collective's frequency, and-no offense, sir-with greater precision than you can." The sharp-eyed young woman focused on Hernandez. "You mentioned that you can tell one voice from another in the Collective. You also mentioned the Queen. Does that mean you can tell if the Queen's leading the attack on the Federation right now?"

"Yes," Hernandez said. "The armada's under her direct control." Closing her eyes again, she attuned herself to the thoughtwaves of the Borg monarch. "She's young, newly installed," Hernandez continued, even as she struggled to glean more details. "Full of fury. She...she even thinks of herself as being expendable-as long as Earth is destroyed."

Desperate, Picard asked, "Why? What's driving them?"

"I can't tell," Hernandez said. "It's all too muddled."

Riker and Dax pressed in closer, and Dax asked, "Can you tell us where the Borg Queen's ship is?"

Clearing her mind of all other questions, Hernandez sought that detail and found it. "I know where she is," she said. Then she opened her eyes and let her tears fall. "She's leading a phalanx of several dozen Borg vessels."

Riker's voice was taut with urgency. "But where are they?"

Hernandez palmed tears from her face. "Destroying Deneva."

13.

The Queen had emerged from her chrysalis with two mandates coded into her being: Destroy Earth, and crush the Federation.

For too long, we have obsessed over Earth, she had directed her trillions of drones, attuning the Collective's will to her own. It has lured us, tempted us, thwarted us. No longer.

She had projected her murderous fury to the drones and adapted them to the lightning pace that she and the Collective now demanded of them. We offered them union. Perfection. They responded with feeble attempts at genocide. Earth and its Federation are not worthy of a.s.similation. They would add only imperfection. Since they offer nothing and obstruct our quest for perfection, they will be exterminated.

It was all coldly logical and mechanically precise, but none of that mattered to the drones. They would follow the will of the Collective and execute the Queen's dictates without question or hesitation. No justification had to be given to drones. The Queen, however...she made different demands.

She was a conduit, a voice for something that no longer had one. Its will existed outside her, and it was her, all at once. It was the Collective-not a chorus of voices but one voice speaking through those bound into its service.

The drones, the cubes, the Unimatrix, and even the Queen all were nothing more than the trappings of the Collective's true nature. It was the authentic essence of the Borg, and It told the Queen that the time had come for worlds to burn.

From her attack force, she dispatched six cubes toward the next inhabited planet that lay along their course to Earth.

Leave nothing alive, she commanded her drones.

And she knew that they would obey, without question.

Captain Alex Terapane bolted from his command chair to point at his preferred target on the main screen. "All ships, fire on the flanking cube! Clear a path for the escaping transports!"

The bridge crew of the U.S.S. Musashi scrambled to carry out his order as the ship bucked and shuddered under a fierce barrage by the Borg. His first and second officers had both been killed in the opening minutes of the battle, and there was no turning back now. With five other Starfleet vessels-the starships Forrestal, Ajax, Tirpitz, Potemkin, and Baliste-the Musashi was struggling to fend off an equal number of Borg cubes. The enemy vessels had approached at such high speeds that there had been almost no time to brace for the attack.

The Musashi slipped through a gap in the Borg's firing solution as the security chief, Lieutenant Commander Ideene, called out, "Torpedoes away!"

Terapane tensed to sound a victory cry. Then he watched the three transphasic torpedoes slam into the Borg cube's shields, which flared and then retracted but didn't fall. He snapped, "Hit them again!"

A thundering impact snuffed the lights and pitched the deck violently. Terapane fell and landed hard on his left hip. White jolts of pain shot through his torso. He forced his eyes to relax from their agonized squint just in time to see the U.S.S. Tirpitz vaporized on the main viewer. Seconds later, the Ajax suffered the same fate and vanished in a flash of golden fire. Then came the Baliste's blaze of glory, as it followed the others into oblivion.

"Strigl," Terapane shouted to his ops officer. "Tell Forrestal and Potemkin to regroup-protect the transports!"

"Comms are jammed," Strigl replied. "All frequencies."

Pulling his brawny form back into his chair, Terapane snarled at his security chief, "Ideene! Report!"

"Targeting scanners are gone, I have to aim manually," said the square-jawed Orion woman. "Firing!"

Another volley of transphasic torpedoes soared from the Musashi, slammed through the nearest Borg cube, and pulverized it in a bluish-white fireball. As the burning cloud dissipated, Terapane saw another cube struck by a double volley from the Potemkin and the Forrestal. The black hexahedron erupted and disintegrated. Spontaneous whoops of celebration filled the Musashi's dim, smoky bridge.

Then a scissoring crisscross of green energy blasts from the four remaining Borg cubes slashed through the Potemkin and the Forrestal and transformed both ships into chaotic tumbles of fiery wreckage. Dozens more beams lanced through the hundreds of fleeing civilian transports, reducing them to glowing debris.

With Starfleet's defense forces shattered, the four remaining Borg cubes accelerated away from the Musashi, into orbit of Deneva, millions of kilometers away.

We're all that's left, Terapane realized. His ship was Deneva's last defender, and it was outnumbered and outgunned. "Arm all transphasic warheads," he said to Ideene.

"But I don't have a target," Ideene protested.

Terapane shot back, "Arm every warhead we have, right now, wherever they are-in the tubes, in the munitions bay, I don't care. Do it now." He took a deep breath. "Helm, put us smack in the middle of those cubes, best possible speed, on my mark." Throwing a look back at Ideene, he snapped, "Well?"

"Warheads armed," she replied.

On the main viewer, the four cubes were demolishing Deneva's...o...b..tal defense platforms, which had been heavily upgraded after the Dominion War. Not upgraded enough, Terapane brooded, as he watched the Borg turn them to sc.r.a.p. Then the cubes spread apart in high orbit and turned their formidable weaponry against the planet's surface.

"Captain," Ideene said, "because of the Borg's deployment pattern, at best we might be able to take out two of them." She started to say something, but she stopped and averted her eyes toward her console. She swallowed. "Even in a best-case scenario, we can't save Deneva, sir."

"No, we can't," Terapane acknowledged. "But I won't just hand the Borg their victory. I plan on making them pay for it." He used the controls on his chair's armrest to open a shipwide comm channel. "All decks, this is the captain. All noncombat personnel, abandon ship. Medical teams, evacuate sickbay, and split up to provide support for as many manned escape pods as possible. All pods will be ejected in two minutes." He closed the comm channel. "Mister Strigl, prep the log buoy."

Terapane sat and pa.s.sed the final two minutes of his life in quiet reflection while his crew readied the Musashi to make its futile sacrifice. He thought of his wife and sons on Rigel IV, of the countless lives being extinguished on Deneva, of the grim fate that seemed to lie in store for all of the Federation. Watching the Borg cubes bombard the world that he had been tasked to defend, he seethed. Every second you wait, more die, his conscience scolded. His reason countered, They're all going to die today, anyway. Two minutes won't make any difference.

The hull resounded with the metallic thumps of magnetic clamps opening. Lieutenant Strigl swiveled his chair around from the ops console to report, "All escape pods away, Captain."

"Release the log buoy, Mark," Terapane said.

Strigl keyed in the command. "Buoy's away," he said.

Terapane stared at the carnage on the viewscreen and saw no point in lying to himself. He wasn't about to work a miracle or save the day; nothing would be gained by what he did next. But his ship had been named for the famous samurai Miyamoto Musashi, and it seemed only right and proper, in the aftermath of such a colossal failure, to fall on his sword.

If his figurative seppuku also happened to claim the lives of a few more of his foes, so much the better.

"Helm, is the course plotted?" he asked.

"Aye, Captain," replied the young Vulcan pilot.