Above all, however, if it had not been for his first chance encounter with her a decade ago on Alliance Prime, Tal and the entire crew of the Cormier would be dead, their bodies vaporized along with the ship and the s.p.a.cedock in which the botched repairs had been carried out.

He had never been able to explain her "talent" and she had never more than hinted at an explanation. Some odd form of telepathy or precognition, he had often told himself, not so much to explain it as to simply give it a needed label, a label that made it easier for his logical conscious mind to accept.

She had never been officially a part of his crew, was not even from an Alliance world, but she had been with him on three ships since the Cormier, part pa.s.senger, part confidant, and part unofficial adviser.

And, though he would never publicly admit giving credence to such superst.i.tion, something of a good luck charm.

At least until now, when he found himself racing to beat the Supreme Arbiter to the so-called Guardian's world, an uncharted planet whose coordinates Sarek himself had determined using information given him by the two self-professed Terrans. Despite his best efforts he had not yet been able to imagine how this action could bring him either good fortune or career advancement.

And yet, despite his misgivings and despite Guinan's own unwillingness-or inability?- to tell him why this trip was necessary, why it couldn't be left to Sarek to make the journey, he was doing it. He was, to put it mildly, uneasy, but he was following her lead, largely because he knew he would be even more uneasy if he refused.

Balitor had risen and dressed, the ecstasy of the Link finally beginning to fade, when she felt the pulsing warmth in her temple return. Startled, she turned toward her bed, but before she could even lie down, the immaterial lights that had so gently enveloped her before returned, no longer soft and comforting but blazing with eye-searing brightness. A moment later, the chill returned as well, but with bone-chilling intensity. Simultaneously she felt the Wise Ones return, but their ethereal bodies this time did not brush gently against her mind, responding to her efforts to initiate the Link. Instead, they smashed against it like battering rams-as if attempting to destroy her!

Her mind reeled as she realized what must be happening: She was being punished! Desperately, she tried to think what she could have done to offend.

Her terror escalated as she realized she could not even ask! Her body, her lips, her vocal cords were paralyzed. She could not move, could not even speak.

Stifling the scream that echoed silently in her mind, she mentally prostrated herself, begging to be told what she had done, pleading for a chance to redeem herself.

But this time there was no response, no softly welcoming voice, nothing.

Until...

She felt the same presence she had felt before, but this time it didn't envelop her like a life-sustaining womb. Instead it gripped her like a steel fist.

And her body began to move, not in response to her own frantic commands but of its own volition.

Or the volition of the Wise Ones!

Terrified but resigned to whatever punishment the Wise Ones saw fit to impose, Balitor could literally do nothing but watch and listen as her body turned and took a tentative step, then another, its movements stiff and uneven.

Suddenly, the attempts to walk stopped and her body swayed unsteadily. Her hand darted out, its palm slamming hard against the wall as if to keep from falling. For several seconds her body stood motionless, and the mindvoice that had previously welcomed her to the Link with soft and soothing tones returned, but this time it was sharp and demanding.

"Balitor," it grated, "if you wish to continue to serve the Wise Ones well, do not resist."

For a moment her terror only increased, but then, as the meaning of the words came clear to her, relief and joy flooded over her.

She was not being punished! She was being honored!

She was being given yet another opportunity to serve the Wise Ones. Her very own body had been chosen to serve as vessel for Them! She had not known such a thing was possible. The Proctors had never even hinted at anything beyond the Link, which they had maintained was the ultimate honor, the ultimate opportunity!

A helpless but suddenly ecstatic prisoner in her own body, Balitor watched with rising antic.i.p.ation as it began to move again, unsteadily pacing back and forth in her cramped quarters, the movements becoming smoother and less stiff with each step it took.

Twenty-One.

WITH MORE difficulty than she had imagined possible, the Borg Queen endured the creature's rampant emotions and yet continued to function, continued to silently walk the creature's body back and forth as she consolidated her control and adjusted to its limitations, to its maddeningly slow reaction times and fragile structure. It threatened to collapse at any moment, and undoubtedly would do precisely that if she relaxed her painfully tight control for even a moment.

The augmented Link required for complete control was far worse, far more intense than any normal Link she had ever undergone, immersing her so deeply in the creature's mind that its thoughts and memories became almost indistinguishable from her own. Even worse, her own distant memories of that bleak time before she herself had been a.s.similated were resurrected, floating back into her conscious mind like sediment being stirred up from the lightless depths of some forgotten seabottom. Having not reviewed those memories for centuries, she had logically a.s.sumed they had long ago been purged, but she had obviously been mistaken. Particularly disturbing was the realization that the mind and body to which she herself had long ago been limited had been no better and no worse than those of this pathetic creature.

How, she wondered, could any sentient being prefer that state of self-destructive chaos and painful loneliness to the organized efficiency, the completeness of the Borg Collective? It was literally incomprehensible to her despite the fact that those same resurrected memories told her that she herself had resisted a.s.similation, had even been terrified of it.

Until the process had been completed and she understood.

But such concerns were irrelevant, she told herself. The creature's emotions were irrelevant as well, except insofar as they hindered her attempts to control its body.

Only one thing was immediately relevant: the origins of the being who called himself Picard.

The memories of the Balitor creature told her little beyond what she had already gleaned through the original Link. Worse, she wasn't even certain how she could gain access to the information she needed. Using her host to question Picard from a distance would almost certainly be futile and could, in addition, raise suspicions in his mind. Her best hope at this point was to gain access to his ship's data stores, but in order to accomplish that, she would have to be transported to his ship. Once there, she could utilize Picard's memories, extracted en ma.s.se and safely stored while Locutus had been part of her matrix. Those memories would give her quick and easy access to virtually anything on board.

The problem would be getting her host transported from this ship to the Enterprise without arousing suspicion. She was not accustomed to using deception. Like all Queens, she was accustomed to simply taking what she needed and destroying or a.s.similating anything or anyone that presented an obstacle.

But this situation was different.

She could easily call up a Borg ship and destroy the Picard creature and his ship, but that would not be enough. Such action could even, conceivably, precipitate the very disaster she feared, though she had no idea how or why. Picard, by all the laws of logic, could not be here, could not exist, yet he did. Therefore, the laws of logic-at least as she understood them-did not apply, and until she knew considerably more than she knew now, she could not take what would, according to normal logic, be the obvious course.

But then, as she continued to perfect her control of the creature's body, a voice emerged from the Wisdom's comm system and changed everything.

"This is Sarek, Supreme Arbiter of the Alliance," it said. "I have just returned from the alien vessel, the Enterprise, where I was given disturbing information. They have had more experience with Vortex-like phenomena than we, and their medical personnel are of the opinion that the length of time the Wisdom spent in proximity to the Vortex has very likely caused undetected but potentially serious damage to the health of everyone on board. They a.s.sured me, however, that their medical science is such that they can not only detect any such damage but treat and reverse it. I myself, in fact, have already undergone the tests and treatment."

Sarek fell silent. After a moment Commander Varkan's voice replaced the Vulcan's. "All off-duty personnel will report to the transporter room for transport to the Enterprise . As soon as the tests and any indicated treatments are completed, you will be returned to the Wisdom to relieve the crew currently on duty."

It was, she realized in amazement, an order to do precisely what she wanted-needed- to do.

Hastily searching Picard's stored memories, she found nothing to indicate that the subtle alterations to the Narisian's brain could be detected by any technology that the Enterpise possessed. The crude implants that she had used in her earlier efforts would have been obvious to the most cursory of scans, of course, but those had been supplanted generations ago. Certainly a routine physical examination of the Balitor creature would reveal nothing. It was of course possible that this vessel had upgraded its technology. She had no way of knowing.

But to gain immediate access to the Enterprise was obviously worth whatever risk was entailed.

The decision made, she palmed open the door and stepped out into the corridor, her control of her host's body now so nearly complete that it required virtually no conscious effort.

As she made her way down the corridor toward the transporter room, other compartment doors opened and other off-duty personnel emerged and headed in the same direction, some looking puzzled, others worried, others as stone-faced as the body she herself inhabited.

She noted that both Sarek and the Wisdom's commander were waiting in the transporter room, watching as three of the crew stepped apprehensively onto the pads, their eyes carefully averted from the commander, as were those of every other crew member except herself. From the Balitor creature's memories, she saw that this was not surprising. Commander Varkan was feared as much as he was respected, and the thought of meeting his stern gaze directly, thereby calling attention to themselves, was more unsettling than the prospect of being transported to an alien ship. The presence of the enigmatic Supreme Arbiter only reinforced the tendency to simply follow orders as efficiently and inconspicuously as possible.

The Balitor creature's turn came quickly as the commander motioned for her and a pair of Romulans to step onto the pads. Acknowledging her presence with a nod-she was the only member of the trio that was part of the bridge crew-he gestured to the transporter operator the moment her feet settled on the pad. Almost instantly she felt the tingling paralysis that preceded transport by these comparatively primitive devices.

As the Wisdom's transporter room vanished behind a glittering curtain, a feeling of vertigo startled her until she saw in her host's memory that, for her, it was both normal and familiar. Then the curtain faded and she gave a mental sigh of relief as she saw that this Enterprise's transporter room was identical to the one in Picard's memory. The crew was also the same. The ship's counselor, who was a mixed-breed of Species 5618 and the telepathic Species 1599, and Riker, Picard's second in command, both stood not far from the controls, watching the new arrivals. Three medical ensigns whose faces were familiar to Picard, even if their names were not, stood to one side, also watching.

If the rest of the ship was as familiar as this transporter room, she quickly concluded, she would have no trouble accessing its data banks from virtually anywhere, including the sickbay to which she a.s.sumed they would all be escorted. With Picard's knowledge instantly available, it would take only seconds to access a complete history of the ship and the logs of its captain. Her dull-witted host would serve as little more than a conduit, seeing little and comprehending less of the data that would simply be relayed at lightning speed through its sensory system into the matrix's data banks, where she could later study it at her leisure and decide on a course of action.

Looking around, wondering why the ensigns had not yet stepped forward to escort herself and the two Romulans to the sickbay, she noticed the counselor, a slight grimace on her face, tapping her combadge and murmuring something into it.

Was something wrong?

Could they have somehow detected her presence? The counselor's empathic talents might be capable of such a feat, the Locutus memories told her, but only if she knew precisely what she was looking for. But that would mean they already suspected a Borg presence on the Wisdom, which was of course impossible. For hundreds of years, no one had suspected the Borg of having anything to do with the Narisians or any of the other "observer" races. Even the creatures themselves did not know that their races' benefactors were the Borg.

No, it was just her host's rampant emotions, so powerful she could not entirely block them out.

Unless the Picard creature- As if cued by her thoughts, the door to the corridor hissed open and someone stepped through.

Picard himself!

Suddenly the Borg Queen found herself as close to panic as her physical body, the product of the technologies of a thousand a.s.similated worlds, would allow.

Memories flooded her mind, just as they had at the initial sight of Picard's face on the Wisdom's viewscreen. But those relatively bland memories had been triggered by a mere image, a two-dimensional representation that had been heavily diluted and distorted by Balitor's limited mind and imperfect memory.

This was Picard himself-Locutus!- and the memories this time were incomparably more intense.

But these memories, unlike those involving his transformation into Locutus, were of things that had not happened, things that could not possibly have happened.

In these, she remembered dying!

She vividly remembered screaming in pain and frustration, something she hadn't thought herself capable of, as the flesh-and-blood portions of her chosen body were literally eaten away. She remembered seeing her attendant drones disintegrating around her, remembered feeling her entire matrix going the way of her own body, dying with her.

She remembered lying helpless yet still alive, still fully conscious and acutely aware that, even though she was reduced to nothing but a brain and spinal column encased in protective metal sheaths, she was still capable of being resurrected in a new body.

She remembered this same Picard, drenched in sweat, looming over her. She remembered him picking up the thing she had become, remembered the mixture of revulsion and pity that filled his eyes and his mind as he held it briefly in his hands.

She remembered the grisly metallic snap as he broke her spine in two, taking from her her last chance for true resurrection.

She remembered her consciousness fading as he dropped the quivering segments to the deck. She even remembered accepting, in the final moments of that consciousness, the previously incomprehensible notion that she herself, not just her individual, replaceable bodies, could come to an end. The only form of resurrection now possible was to be duplicated from her stored memories, but it would not be her. It would be a being exactly like her, a being who remembered being her but in truth had never been.

She herself would be no more.

She remembered all that and more in disturbingly vivid detail.

And yet she knew-knew without the slightest doubt-that none of what she remembered had happened.

Yet!

Suddenly, the truth exploded in her mind. These memories were not of what had happened but of what was yet to come!

She neither knew nor cared which ability from which a.s.similated race had provided her with these premonitory "memories." She knew only what she herself had to do.

She had to cease her obsessive search for irrelevant details of Picard's past, for meaningless clues as to how he could still exist and why he was here.

All that mattered was that he be destroyed.

Now!

Before those "memories" became reality. If yet another Picard appeared out of nowhere, so be it. She would deal with it when and if the time came.

Ignoring the physical limitations of her host's frail body, she launched it toward Picard and the security detail that had followed him into the transporter room.

Moments earlier, just outside the transporter room, Picard suppressed a grimace as Troi's muted words came through his combadge: "It is worse than Mr. Scott suspected, Captain. I sense that the Narisian is not alone in her mind. Something is controlling her."

"Borg?"

"Perhaps. It feels Borg, but there is far more emotion- "

"Thank you, Counselor," he said, cutting her off as his eyes met those of Worf, who led a security detail that included Ensigns Porfirio and Houarner. "You heard?"

The lieutenant nodded. "If one of them is already possessed by the Borg, then anything we do will be known to the entire collective."

"Indeed." Tapping his combadge again, Picard spoke to Data, still on the bridge. "Mr. Data, inform Sarek that the Narisian is apparently being actively monitored if not controlled, almost certainly by the Borg. Tell him we will do our best not to betray our suspicions and to learn as much as we can from our medical scans before returning her to the Wisdom along with the rest of the crew. With luck, the Borg won't realize we suspect anything."

With Data's acknowledgment, Picard returned his attention to Worf. "Put away your weapons but stay alert when you escort her to sickbay."

He waited a moment until the three officers holstered their phasers, then stepped forward as the doors to the transporter room opened. Two Romulans and the Narisian were still standing on the transporter platform, looking around uneasily, as Picard entered.

The Romulans paid him no attention, but the Narisian froze the moment she saw him. Her face betrayed no emotion, but her vertically slitted eyes locked unwaveringly on him. Picard couldn't be certain if it was an illusion, but the fur on her head seemed to bristle.

Pretending not to notice, he turned toward Riker and Troi. The counselor, her eyes still riveted on the Narisian, gasped.

At the same moment, perhaps a split second earlier, the Narisian, in expressionless silence, leapt with startling speed, not at Picard but at the security detail two or three meters behind him. Her movements were so sudden and so blindingly fast that she had her hands on Porfirio's loosely fastened phaser before he or any of the others could react.

As if thoroughly familiar with the weapon, she had it set to full power in an instant, without having to even look at it. Even before the weapon was completely raised, she pressed the firing stud. The beam lashed out, charring the deck bare meters from Picard and starting to sweep toward him.

At the same time, Worf fired his phaser at the Narisian.

For a moment, the Narisian wobbled, her own deadly phaser beam twitching backward onto the already scarred area of the deck, but almost instantly it steadied.

The split-second hesitation and retreat, however, had given Hovarner time to act, and a second phaser beam, set to heavy stun, staggered the Narisian.

But it did not fell her.

Worf and Houarner fired again until finally, with startling abruptness, the Narisian collapsed, thudding to the deck as if every muscle had gone flaccid simultaneously. For a moment that seemed to go on forever, the fingers that somehow still held Porfirio's phaser twitched as if they had a mindless life of their own but could not manage the strength or coordination to press the firing stud. Finally the fingers were as still as the rest of her body, and Porfirio retrieved his weapon as Picard himself knelt next to the body.

Troi grimaced as if in pain. "It is gone, Captain," she said, her voice trembling.

Picard scooped the Narisian up in his arms and said to the transporter chief, "Two to beam directly to sickbay." He glanced briefly at the haggard-looking Troi. "Join us there, Counselor, immediately," he said in the moment before the transporter beam enveloped him and Balitor.

Without warning, agony engulfed Balitor, as if her entire body, inside and out, had burst into flames. In the same moment, that body literally collapsed, every muscle going limp as she thudded to the deck. Not one would respond. She couldn't move, she couldn't scream.

She couldn't even lose consciousness.

She could only endure-and realize that the Wise One was gone.

What madness, she wondered through the pain, had overcome the Wise One to produce such a burst of violence, to virtually destroy her own body in a vain attempt to kill one single person?

Then the one called Picard was looming over her and she understood. A ghostly image of another Picard, an image that only the Wise One could possibly have sent, blotted out everything else, even softened the pain, as it came closer and reached down as if to strangle her and- Instead of strangling her, the real Picard picked her up even as he barked orders into the air. The transporter room vanished, replaced by another, unfamiliar room, and her pain-deadened nerves barely felt her body being laid on a soft, flat surface.

Someone else, a female with long red hair, was standing over her then, running a small, hand-held device over her body, then holding it almost touching her head and- Her heart faltered, and she realized in dull horror that these beings were trying to kill her, probably in retaliation for the attack they had seen her body carry out.