"Standing by, Captain. Transporters are operating on internal backup power."

Having Kirk already in the pattern buffer would essentially cut transport time-sitting-duck time-in half. Transferring to internal backup power in advance would avoid even momentary interruptions if they were hit and main power was lost. Even Picard's Locutus memories didn't tell him how much time would elapse between the moment he deactivated the deflectors and the moment the cubes, suddenly picking up the undisguised Enterprise, would begin firing. Every millisecond, however, could be critical.

On the viewscreen, the Vortex was already visible, even without sensor input. The image, derived from visual subsystems only, was of course out of date by the several days it took light to travel the intervening distance through normal s.p.a.ce. But it couldn't be helped. The Borg cube being simulated by the deflectors was sensor-opaque in both directions. Borg sensors couldn't see in and Enterprise sensors couldn't see out.

The two Borg cubes that had until hours ago been the only Borg ships in the vicinity of the Vortex appeared as tiny specks at approximately three and a half minutes out. The Wisdom and the Alliance observation platforms were of course still too small to be picked up. The new Borg cubes that had in reality positioned themselves around the Vortex several hours ago wouldn't be seen "arriving" until moments before the Enterprise dropped out of warp-within transporter range.

"Two minutes, Captain," Data said. "Chronometric radiation is increasing exponentially."

Picard's tension eased just slightly. Increased chronometric radiation was, according to unproven theory, indicative of increased instability. At some level, the timeline was already coming unraveled. The effects of whatever was about to happen were spreading in both directions through time, triggering the radiation just as their own "arrival" from the future had triggered a burst of radiation.

Whatever was about to happen...

Without warning, a half dozen Borg cubes appeared, not around the still-distant Vortex but around the Enterprise itself. Smoothly, effortlessly they matched its course.

Obviously the Enterprise, despite its "disguise," had been detected.

"Sixty seconds, Captain."

Before he could acknowledge Data's words, something closed around Picard's mind like an icy net, sending a new jolt of adrenaline through his body.

For a moment, he couldn't imagine what was happening to him, but as he tried instinctively to pull free, his Locutus memories recognized it: A Borg Link.

Pausing only long enough to direct all the cubes surrounding the Vortex to "see" the approaching cube and to lock onto it as soon as it came within weapons range, the Borg Queen focused her mind on the approaching cube to the exclusion of all else.

And found herself Linked directly to the Picard creature!

Even though some part of her had been expecting precisely that, the reality was still a shock, momentarily freezing her thought processes as the "memories" of her own death at the creature's hands once more threatened to overwhelm her.

Recovering, she considered for another moment the possibility of using that Link to extract the information she wanted directly from Picard's mind, to find out where he had come from and how he had come to be here, but caution won out over curiosity. A Link might be precisely what the creature wanted. The Link would allow information to flow both ways, and she was at the point now where she feared that nothing was impossible in her dealings with this creature, whoever or whatever it really was, whenever and wherever it had come from.

Breaking the Link with Picard, she returned her full attention to the Link with the rest of the cubes. Their weapons systems, she noted with satisfaction, were already locking onto whatever it was that was carrying the Picard creature.

First one and then another fired, but the phaser blasts seemed to pa.s.s through the object with no effect.

After those two shots, before the other cubes could fire, all weapons locks were lost.

Impossibly, the object was gone!

In its place was not another ship, not even Picard's, but an irregular, pock-marked ovoid, apparently a small planetesimal traveling at warp speed.

A trick!

She had no idea how Picard had done it, but it had to be a trick of some kind, an illusion.

But it was an illusion that registered on Borg sensors and would prevent their weapons from even trying to regain their lock. The target they had been instructed to fire upon had vanished after two bursts of phaser fire. There was therefore no reason to fire again, no reason to lock onto this new and totally different object.

She couldn't take direct control of all weapons systems on all cubes quickly enough, but she was already in control of those in her own cube. Unlike the drones and the automated weapons systems, she was not limited to what was programmed into her. She could act independently.

And she did.

But even as she trained the weapons on the object and fired, it dropped out of warp.

And disappeared.

An instant later, the Enterprise appeared in its place, a tiny speck within the volume of s.p.a.ce that had been occupied by the illusion. Her initial phaser blast shot through the area previously occupied by the vanished illusion but went harmlessly past the comparatively tiny ship offset several hundred meters from its center.

It took only seconds to redirect the phasers and fire a second salvo, followed by a series of photon torpedoes.

To her utter surprise, the ship's shields offered no resistance. It was as if they didn't exist.

Another trick? she wondered as one of the phaser blasts caught the ship solidly, sheering off one of the two linear extensions at the rear, sending the remains of the ship tumbling out of control.

Another illusion? she wondered as a substantial piece of the forward part of the saucer section was vaporized and a half dozen explosions erupted from other areas of the saucer.

And even as she continued to wonder, even as the remnants of the ship began to break up, the entire universe seemed to waver around her, as if it and not the ship being destroyed before her eyes was the illusion.

"Thirty seconds to transporter range," Data announced as a searing lance of phaser fire shot by only a few hundred meters away.

And another.

"Second image," Picard snapped.

An instant later, the holodeck computers switched from the image of a Borg cube to that of an asteroid slightly larger than the cube had been. The visual subsystem images on the viewscreen shimmered for a split second but were otherwise unaffected by the reshaping of the deflector fields.

The Borg sensors, however, would see the asteroid, just as they had, until that moment, seen the cube. If Picard's Locutus memories were correct, the Borg ships would lose interest the moment the image changed-as long as they had not been programmed to deal with the new image. The Locutus memories had already been proven correct when the cubes had paid no attention to the sudden appearance of a new cube in their midst, so there was every reason to believe that this seemingly transparent subterfuge would also work. The Borg, at least at the drone level, did not deal well with the unexpected. Nor did they very often look out the window, so to speak, in order to see what was really happening.

All they needed was a few more seconds.

"Transporter range," Data announced.

Four things happened virtually simultaneously.

The Enterprise dropped out of warp drive.

Grimly, Worf disabled the deflectors, leaving the Enterprise both visible and defenseless.

Another bolt of phaser energy skimmed by, missing the Enterprise by less than a hundred meters.

And La Forge initiated the delayed second stage of Kirk's transport into the Vortex.

From the transporter room, Picard could hear-or at least imagined he could hear-the warble of the transporters as the matter stream that was Captain James Kirk was ejected from the pattern buffer and sent on its way to the heart of the Vortex more than ten thousand kilometers distant. Red warning lights were undoubtedly blinking wildly on the transporter console, indicating the destination was hazardous and unacceptable, but La Forge had already taken away the computer's ability to shut down the transmission and return the matter stream to the pattern buffer.

The ship shuddered as it was struck by the nearest cube's phaser fire. Lights flickered as emergency backup power came on line and what was left of the ship began to tumble helplessly.

A moment later, it shuddered again, even more violently from a second hit. Sparks erupted from every power bus as the viewscreen and all displays went dark for a moment, then briefly recovered.

"Hull breaches on all decks," the computer voice announced calmly in the moments before the last of the emergency power sources failed and the only light was the harsh glare of incoming fire.

In the transporter room, the last thing Geordi La Forge saw before everything went black was the barest flicker of the display indicating that transport was complete.

Twenty-Nine.

THE BORG QUEEN watched as the dispersing fragments of the Picard creature's ship seemed to melt and vanish into the now violently shifting background of stars while in the same instant the Borg ships that had destroyed it twisted into impossible shapes before they, too, vanished and the Borg Queen was enveloped in a terrible darkness that even her augmented senses could not penetrate.

For a few seconds or perhaps an eon, she drifted, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, until...

Suddenly, she was living the nightmarish memories of her own death. Picard's face loomed over her as his hands snapped in two the metallic spine that was all that remained of her body and let it fall to the floor...

And even as the rest of those memories blossomed and became real, even as they showed her dying mind how Picard had, in yet another timeline, pursued her back through time and defeated and then destroyed her...

... her consciousness faded and the final darkness enveloped her.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard's eyes snapped open, and for one terrifying moment he had no idea where he was. Fading memories of a dream-a nightmare-of the Enterprise disintegrating around him set his heart pounding even as his surroundings came into focus and he saw that he was in his quarters, in bed, his fingers in a claw-like grip on the crumpled sheet beneath his achingly rigid body.

Pulling in a breath, he released his grip, forced his body to relax, then sat up abruptly, taken with an intense desire to see the bridge and the crew-to see that the Enterprise was indeed still intact, still undamaged.

"Not that I don't appreciate what you were trying to do, Scotty, but there are no two ways about it. You screwed up royally."

Scotty came awake with a gasp, almost tipping over his chair as he jerked erect. Blinking away the startlingly vivid image of Jim Kirk, he tried to focus on the screen of the unfamiliar terminal before him.

For another instant he was still completely disoriented, unable to recognize his surroundings, but then the equations on the terminal screen came into sharp focus.

And he remembered.

He was in his guest quarters on board the Enterprise. The new Enterprise.

The equations were those that he had seen Spock use to slingshot the Bounty back through three centuries of time.

They were the equations he was going to use to take the Bounty 2 back through time.

To save Jim Kirk.

His stomach knotted as he remembered Kirk's imagined words and realized that they were precisely what the captain would say if this mad scheme were to succeed.

And it was a mad scheme, the rational part of his mind told him harshly.

A mad scheme born not of common sense but of his own guilt, his own obsession.

A scheme that Kirk himself would certainly condemn-as he just had in that little scene that had apparently bubbled up from Scotty's own subconscious.

A subconscious which, he grudgingly admitted to himself, had a much better grip on reality than did his guilt-ridden conscious mind.

And the reality was that there were literally a million things that could go wrong on an ancient ship like the Bounty 2, no matter how well he took care of it. Even if everything worked perfectly, he would have to decloak a few seconds in order to use the transporters. Which meant that a Klingon bird-of-prey would appear, no matter how briefly, deep in Federation s.p.a.ce at a time when the Khitomer Accords were less than a year old, at a time when Admiral Cartwright's treachery was common knowledge throughout both the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

Scotty shook his head. The precarious trust that had allowed the Accords to exist could be wiped out by a single incident, no matter how innocent.

And that was only one scenario. When you meddled in the past, the possibilities for disaster were infinite.

It would have been sheer insanity to take the kind of risk he had been planning to take just to save a single life, even if that life was that of his best friend. Kirk himself had taken risks all his life, but never anything as daft as this. Both the stakes and the odds were unacceptably high while the potential reward loomed large only on a personal level. Friendship was important, even sacred, but he couldn't allow it to totally blind him to the consequences of his actions.

True friendship meant knowing when to let go.

With one last, wistful look at the equations, Scotty cleared them away-and found himself confronted with a series of engineering specs scrolling across the screen.

For a moment he didn't recognize them, but then he remembered. In the weeks after he had first been brought on board this Enterprise, after he had been deservedly exiled from engineering itself, he had begun skimming through the engineering specs that described all the marvels of this new Enterprise. Surely, he had thought, the technology couldn't be totally beyond his understanding. Surely the basic rules still applied. Surely he could eventually prove he wasn't the technological dinosaur La Forge a.s.sumed he was.

In the end, however, all he had learned was that he was a technological dinosaur. And these were the very specs that had proven it: the specs for the holodeck and the computers that drove it. He had had some wild ideas about tying them in with the deflector system to produce a cloaking effect of sorts. But La Forge had shot him down, quickly and easily. That sort of thing just wasn't possible.

Except...

It was possible!

Somehow, without knowing how he knew, he knew!

For an instant, it was as if he was remembering having actually done it, as if he was remembering the elation he'd felt as the pieces of the puzzle had suddenly fallen into place.

But that was obviously impossible.

And yet...

But it doesn't make any b.l.o.o.d.y difference, he told himself sharply. Whatever the reason, he knew that his supposedly wild ideas would work. All he had to do was prove it!

And to do that...

To do that-and a thousand other things-he would have to do what he should have done right from the start: quit living in the past and start catching up with the present.

Suddenly, instead of being depressed at the thought of how much he had to learn in order to catch up, he felt just the opposite: exhilarated at the thought of how much he could learn, how much there was to learn. It was, he realized with an antic.i.p.atory shiver, much the same way he had felt when he first learned he had been accepted into the Academy.

Dinosaur I may be, but this is one dinosaur that won't be going extinct any time soon!

Blanking the screen, he stood up and headed for the bridge, hoping Picard's offer to arrange transportation to Earth and Starfleet Academy was still good.

Kirk looked around at the forest and the rustic cabin nestling in a clearing and wondered idly where he was and how he had gotten there.

He'd been in the guts of the Enterprise-B, he remembered, tearing something apart and putting it back together when the bulkhead had disappeared and he'd found himself looking out at a blinding wall of flame and lightning and being sucked out like a feather in a tornado, and-Or had it been the EnterpriseD? No, that couldn't be. There wasn't any such ship, and besides- Besides, he realized as he heard a horse whinnying somewhere in the distance, it didn't really matter, any of it.

Wherever he was, it was where he belonged.

At least for now...