Without a miracle.

And isn't it a remarkable coincidence that I happen to know just where to find the number one card-carrying miracle worker in all of Starfleet?

"Captain Scott, I owe you an apology."

Scotty looked up from the drink that had been sitting before him for several minutes, his hands clasped around the gla.s.s as if it needed to be held down in order to keep it from leaping, unbidden, to his lips. Guinan stood across the Ten-Forward bar from him. Somehow it didn't surprise him that she had gotten there without his noticing.

"Aye, perhaps you do, la.s.sie. If you had not been at that Glasgow bar..." He shrugged, lowering his eyes and renewing his grip on the drink.

"If I hadn't delayed you those few minutes," she continued for him, speaking softly, "you wouldn't have met that young ensign and you wouldn't have- "

"His name was Matt Franklin," he said, his eyes still on the drink, a touch of anger in his voice. "And if I hadn't met him, I would not have been on the Jenolen and I would have lived out my life in my own time. I would not have been on this Enterprise, I would not have found that Klingon ship, and I could not have come back here and caused all this with my b.l.o.o.d.y meddling!"

He broke off, his stomach knotting even more tightly as the urge to down the drink in a single swallow, then grab the bottle and drain it in stinging gulps grew more powerful.

"Tell me something I do not know!" he grated, the anger boiling up.

"Very well," she said, her already soft voice becoming even quieter, almost a whisper, as she leaned closer over the bar. "In this timeline that you created by saving your friend Kirk, my world survived. The Borg bypa.s.sed it. You could say that, by delaying you those few minutes, I traded my world for yours-and for the entire Federation."

"But you couldn't have known- " he began, then stopped as he remembered what he had told Kirk about this seemingly ageless woman. Strange things happen when she's around.

"You did know?"

Guinan hesitated, steeling herself. The "feelings" had, over the centuries, demanded many things of her. They had driven her to warn friends and enemies alike of known and unknown dangers. They had forced her to keep secrets from friends while blurting them out to strangers. At their behest, she had ordered and cajoled and pleaded and tricked. She had even withheld information and used words to obscure the truth rather than reveal it.

But she had never been required to lie.

Until now.

"I did know," she said. "I don't know how I knew, but I did. I knew my world would be saved. What I didn't know was the price for its survival."

And she waited, knowing that what Captain Scott would do in the next few hours was crucial, not just for a few dozen worlds in and around the Alliance but for billions. In those hours, he had to decide whether he would continue his slide into the depths of guilt and self flagellation that had started on the bridge of the Enterprise-B or pull himself together and become again what he had once been.

For it was only then that he could fulfill the destiny she had glimpsed on the Guardian's world, the destiny that was the reason they were both here, the reason she had, all unknowingly, shepherded him to this time and this place, all to insure that he would, somewhere and someday, do or say or inspire something that would tip the balance of the universe for all time. The effect of that action, whatever it turned out to be-or perhaps the effect just of his presence-might not be seen for a dozen years or a dozen generations, but it would come, directly or indirectly.

He would make his indelible mark.

If he somehow pulled himself together in the next few hours.

And she, by uttering that meager handful of words, by shouldering part of the burden of guilt he had until then borne alone, had done her small part in nudging him toward recovery, even rebirth.

Or so her "feelings" told her.

What they did not tell her was how he-or any of them, no matter what decision he made-could survive the next few hours, let alone elude the Borg and deliver Kirk to the Nexus.

A mixture of relief and anger swept over Scotty as the meaning of the woman's words sank in: relief that he had not been solely responsible for this Borg h.e.l.l, anger that she had tricked him.

"And now that you do know the price?"

"The original timeline must be restored."

"Aye," he said, his voice filled with sarcasm, "is that all? I don't suppose you'd have any idea how that wee task might be accomplished?"

"It's simple, Scotty," a familiar voice said from just behind him. "You have to put me back where you should have left me-in the Vortex."

Scotty spun around on the bar stool. "Don't be daft, Captain, I couldn't- "

"You have to," Kirk said flatly. "Or somebody has to. The decision is in. Your friend here just talked to the Guardian, don't ask me how, and it says getting me back into the Vortex is the only way." He looked questioningly at Guinan. "Right?"

She nodded but remained silent.

"And you trust her word?"

Kirk's eyebrows shot up quizzically. "Is there some reason I shouldn't?"

For a moment Scotty was ready to blurt out what Guinan had just told him, but he held his tongue. Even if her delaying him in that bar had been a deliberate act, he was the one who had made the final and indefensible decision to slingshot back and disrupt time. She had merely given him the opportunity.

Scotty shook his head, his stomach churning at the thought of actually doing what Kirk had just told him was necessary to remedy his "mistake."

Kirk looked from one to the other. "All right, then. It's agreed?"

"Aye, Captain, but- "

"But me no buts, Scotty. If we don't do something in the next few hours, we're all going to be either dead or, if we're really unlucky, a bunch of Borg zombies. And tossing me into the Vortex is the only idea on the table. Unless you have something else in mind."

Scotty shook his head desolately.

"Besides," Kirk went on, giving Guinan a momentary glance, not quite a wink, "now that I've had a little time to think about it, I'm not all that sure that a dive into the Vortex is necessarily fatal. If all the timeline needed to snap back was for me to be dead, there are a lot easier ways of accomplishing that than by running a Borg gauntlet. As an old friend of ours likes to say, Scotty, 'It's only logical.' And Guinan tells me the Guardian specifically vetoed the idea of simply having me killed. Just like her own 'feelings' did."

A twinge of hope tugged at the knot in Scotty's stomach. It was logical.

But it was also hopeless. "Even if you're right, it can't be done. The Borg- "

"The Borg are an obstacle, I admit. But you've overcome obstacles before and saved my hide more times than I like to remember. One time too many, in fact, so now you have to un save me."

"But how- "

"I don't know," Kirk said with a laugh. "You're the miracle worker. And this superdeluxe version of the Enterprise you have to work with is practically a miracle in itself."

"Aye, and that's the b.l.o.o.d.y problem! I don't even know how this Enterprise works. I told you what a mess I made of things when they first brought me on board. If you don't believe me, just ask Commander La Forge."

"So when did not knowing how something works stop you before? You think I've forgotten how you jury-rigged the Bounty? You hadn't had so much as a basic Klingon Technology 101 course, and still you practically rebuilt that bucket of bolts and made it do things the Klingons never even dreamed of-like hauling a pair of whales back from the twentieth century!"

"But- "

"I told you, Scotty, but me no buts. Look, maybe you'll fail, but so what? You've failed before, not often, but you have. The one thing you've never done, old friend, is give up without even trying! And you're not going to start now! There's a lot more than just Earth at stake, so get yourself down to engineering and plant yourself in front of a terminal or rip some control panels apart or do whatever it is you engineers do when you want to find out how things work or you're looking for inspiration. You've got all of six hours to find a way for Picard to get us past the Borg, or through them, or whatever!"

Impossible, Scotty thought, but he knew-had known all along, somewhere deep inside-that the captain was right about one thing. He never had given up without at least trying, and now of all times was not the time to start, especially since he was the one who had, albeit with a little help, created the problem in the first place. He might-probably would-die in the next few hours, but he would at least die trying.

Standing up abruptly, before he lost his nerve yet again, he pushed the still-filled gla.s.s and the bottle across the bar toward Guinan.

"If you have any influence on this Enterprise, la.s.sie," he said, "you may have to use it with Commander La Forge to get him to let me back in engineering at all."

Scotty stared in frustration at the words and formulas and diagrams as they flashed by on the screen. After Guinan's promised intercession, a harried La Forge had reluctantly directed him to an out-of-the-way terminal in engineering, where he had been rooted ever since, almost three hours now, but it was looking more hopeless by the minute. It was true he now had a better idea how the EnterpriseD's version of the warp drive worked, but compared to La Forge, he was still in kindergarten. If La Forge hadn't been able to nurse a few more decimals of warp speed out of it by now, there was certainly nothing Scotty could do to help.

In theory, Kirk had been right, but not in reality. In theory, no one should give up without even trying, but in reality there was d.a.m.ned little chance that it was going to do any good. Even if there was a miracle waiting to happen somewhere in the new Enterprise, Montgomery Scott wasn't the one to find it. Every "miracle" he'd pulled off on his Enterprise had been grounded in solid scientific and technological knowledge and reasoning, even if his so-called intuition had allowed him to now and then skip a few steps. He had had a deep, hard-won understanding of the equipment, an understanding of what the rules were and why they were, and that had given him the freedom to bend or break those rules in order to get results the designers never intended. Even on the original Bounty, the rules had been the same and even most of the Klingon technology had not been all that different from that of Federation starships.

But even if the Borg's speed could be matched or exceeded-as La Forge was still struggling unsuccessfully to do-there was no way the lone Enterprise could flash past dozens or hundreds of Borg ships without being vaporized. And even if it could get past them by sheer speed alone, it would have to drop out of warp, lower its shields and become a sitting duck long enough to transport the captain into the Vortex. Even if he could find a way to bypa.s.s the shields with the transporter, as he had in the Jenolen and again in the Wisdom, transporting from a ship moving at warp speed to someplace not moving at warp speed hadn't worked in the days of the original Enterprise and it still didn't work. There was simply no way a transport could be completed in the milliseconds they would be within transporter range. That was one rule that was neither bendable nor breakable.

It was not even possible-according to Guinan and the Guardian, at least-to send the entire Enterprise, with Kirk on board, into the Vortex at maximum warp. It had to be Kirk and only Kirk.

No, the only way to get at the Vortex was to get the Borg to go back to ignoring the Enterprise. Or to become invisible, which would have been easy enough if he hadn't mis-laid the Bounty 2. Since no one in this timeline except one small group of Carda.s.sians had stumbled across "standard" cloaking technology, the Borg had probably never developed a defense for it, only for interphase cloaking, which wasn't, technically speaking, cloaking at all but a form of dimensional shifting.

But the Bounty 2 was gone, probably wiped out along with everything else in that now-defunct timeline, and there was no way of building a cloaking device for the Enterprise, not even if he had six months instead of six hours.

Unless...

Suddenly, as if pulled by a mental rubber band, his mind shot back to the days immediately after the Jenolen, when the entire Enterprise had seemed like a giant technological candy store. Before his ham-handed ways had gotten him exiled from Engineering, one of his seemingly misguided enthusiasms had been holodeck technology. And one of the questions he'd asked, one of the questions that La Forge had politely laughed off as being too ridiculous to even consider-Excited for the first time since this misbegotten universe had sprung into being around him, Scotty wiped the warp drive data from the terminal screen and began racing through specs and schematics of the holo generators.

After five minutes, his heart was pounding as if he'd run a mile, not sat transfixed as he scanned dozens of schematics and engineering specifications.

Standing up abruptly, he started to search the walls for the nearest intercom but then remembered the tiny device-combadge, they had called it-that Picard had given him.

"Bridge," he said, giving it something closer to a slap than a tap, "I cannot be sure, but I may have found a wee something."

Twenty-Six.

"WELL, Mr. La Forge, will it work?" Picard asked as Scotty lurched to a verbal halt. They were gathered not on the bridge but in central engineering where a still-harried La Forge was constantly monitoring and occasionally adjusting several critical parameters in the warp drive.

"I honestly don't know, Captain, but one thing is obvious. If we adjust the deflector fields to block sensor scans rather than incoming particle and energy weapons, we'd be defenseless. A single phaser hit in the right place, un-hindered by the shields, could destroy the warp core or turn the Enterprise into the biggest photon torpedo on record."

Kirk, standing next to Scotty, shook his head, almost laughing. "And just how long would the deflectors, at full strength, hold up against what one cube, let alone dozens of them, can throw at us? I seem to recall that Sarek's entire fleet didn't last very long."

"We've never had to find out," La Forge began, "but- "

"Less than a minute," Picard interrupted, drawing automatically on Locutus's remaining memories, "if we were to be extremely lucky and only one Borg ship attacked. A matter of seconds if several fired on us simultaneously."

"So what do you have to lose?" Scotty looked from one to the other while Kirk nodded his agreement.

Picard pulled in a breath, his eyes meeting Guinan's for an instant, looking for an a.s.sent that may or may not have been there.

"As you say, Mr. Scott. Make it so. Quickly. At best, we have two hours before the nearest Borg ships are within weapons range."

Unlike on the ill-fated Enterprise-B, the majority of the modifications and reroutings on the EnterpriseD could be done via the computer once the necessary safeguards were disabled.

The first and easiest step was to take some images-including that of a Borg cube-from the main computer memory and transfer them to the holodeck computers. Somewhat trickier-but right down La Forge's alley-was overriding several additional, hardwired safeguards in order to be able, at the last possible moment, to modify the phase and frequency of the deflectors, making the field opaque to subs.p.a.ce sensor scans rather than to the usual array of particles and energies.

Scotty himself, of necessity, took on the task of modifying the outputs of the holographic imagery subsystem, which normally drove the billions of holo diodes that lined the walls of the holodeck. What he needed the subsystem to do now was what La Forge had, a seeming lifetime ago, politely derided as impossible: provide a modulating input to the conformal transmission grids that lined the exterior hull and produced the s.p.a.cial distortion that made the deflectors possible. Normally the distortion and hence the deflector field itself conformed to the shape of the hull, essentially producing an impenetrable "skin" covering every square centimeter of the ship's exterior. With the inputs of the transmission grids modulated by the imagery subsystem, however, the grid system would be fooled into producing a deflector field not in the shape of the underlying Enterprise but in the shape of whatever image was being provided by the imagery subsystem computers.

In this case, a Borg cube.

Or so Scotty believed, based on what he feared might be a comparatively superficial understanding of the technology involved. He just hoped that it wasn't, as some had suggested, a case of not knowing enough to understand why it wouldn't work.

But it felt right, just as the countless shortcuts and "tricks" he had pulled off on the old Enterprise had felt right and had, when the crunch came, been proven right.

Unfortunately, no matter how well it worked, this particular trick would not produce a visual image of a cube. That would require lining the outside of the ship with specially augmented holo diodes, something that might be accomplished in a well-equipped s.p.a.cedock but never in deep s.p.a.ce under warp nine conditions. The transmission grids would, at best, produce a deflector field that would look to Borg sensors like a Borg cube. To someone near enough to get a visual sighting, however, it would look like what it really was: the Enterprise.

According to Picard's Locutus memories, that might be enough.

If the nebula they had located in the Enterprise data banks existed in this universe.

If they could reach that nebula before the Borg reached them.

And if they were very, very lucky.

In any event, n.o.body had come up with a better idea.

For the first time since her arrival more than two hundred subjective years ago, the Borg Queen emerged, physically, from the solar system that had once been the home of Species 5618. She had faith in her armada for most things, but it was no better equipped to deal with the unexpected than was any other collection of Borg ships.

And the Picard creature's very presence was the epitome of the unexpected. By all tenets of logic, he could not exist, and yet he was here. By those same tenets, "memories" of events that had not yet happened, "memories" of her own destruction, could not exist, and yet they existed.

Waiting to happen-unless she could prevent it.

In the time since the idea had first occurred to her, she had only become more convinced that she was right despite the fact that under ordinary circ.u.mstances she would have dismissed it as impossible.

But the current situation was far from ordinary, even farther from predictable. Making use of the time sphere harvested from Species 1429 was by itself enough to introduce a measure of unpredictability, but that was only the beginning. When she had used it, in the aftermath of her matrix's takeover of Earth, she had intended to go back only a few days to warn her earlier self about the unexpectedly effective defense of Earth the Federation had mounted. The damage it had inflicted was such that, when the inevitable second wave of Federation ships would attack, her entire matrix would almost certainly be destroyed, and that was simply unacceptable. But instead of taking her back a few days, the time sphere had somehow malfunctioned, sending her back more than three centuries.

And now she was living through those three centuries again while-she a.s.sumed-her earlier self simultaneously lived through them for the first time. Knowing what her earlier self had done, she had for the most part been able to keep from interfering with that earlier self, particularly her work with the Narisians and others. Once the earlier self had obtained the time sphere and abandoned the Narisians and all the others, she had taken them over, continuing the control, knowing that her earlier self would never contact them again.

But the mere fact that she was living two lives simultaneously, the fact that she had crossed three centuries of time, meant that time was not inviolable. If she herself could physically travel back in time, then her mind, perhaps altered by that travel, could do the same-but without the a.s.sistance of the time sphere.

Therefore it was only logical that these "memories" of her own death at the hands of Picard were nothing less than a warning of that death sent back by her own future self, its final conscious act.

It was essential, therefore, that she tend to this matter herself, that she make absolutely certain that Picard was destroyed, once and for all.

The latest information indicated that Picard's ship, instead of continuing to flee, had turned about and was once again on a direct course for the Vortex. Which strengthened another of her theories, that Picard was attempting to reach the Vortex so that he and his ship could "disappear" the same way the other ship had "appeared" there. The ship, the Enterprise, would almost certainly be intercepted and destroyed, reduced to a spreading cloud of dissociated atoms by other Borg ships long before it could reach the Vortex.

She was, however, taking no chances. If the impossible came to pa.s.s and Picard's primitive ship eluded the dozens of Borg ships closing in on it, she and more dozens of ships would be waiting at his destination, the Vortex.

She would be waiting, and this time she would make no mistakes...