Somehow controlling the panic that threatened to overwhelm him, he tried to think back to the last thing he remembered.

And realized he had no conscious memory at all.

No past.

Not even a name!

For what seemed like an eternity, he stood frozen, unable to move or even to generate a rational thought beyond the obvious: Where am I?

Who am I?

But then, almost as quickly as his mind had emptied, a torrent of memories came flooding back, threatening to drown his still-struggling consciousness.

Limp with a relief that did not question the source of the memories, he thought: I am Sarek of Vulcan, amba.s.sador toNo! Not amba.s.sador! Arbiter! Supreme Arbiter of the Federation and- Alliance, not Federation!

He shook his head violently as he tried to make sense of the returning memories: The Borg. The Vortex. The Alliance Council.

But what was this "Federation" that had suddenly appeared in his mind, like a parasite that had attached itself to his returning memories? What- But it was not something that had just appeared, he realized, and with the realization came the beginnings of calmness and control. The "Federation" was just one small part of a long string of illusory memories that had plagued him for decades.

Memories of dreams.

Dreams that were not even dreams, merely shadows of dreams that he must have had even though he could not remember ever actually having them.

How could he have forgotten, even for an instant? He had been victim to them throughout most of his adult life, he now remembered. At odd times, day or night, on the rare occasions when he allowed his mind to wander, he would find himself "remembering" events that had never happened, events that couldn't have happened, events totally at odds with his true memories and with the world around him but otherwise virtually indistinguishable from his real memories.

He had, he remembered now, tried at various times to dismiss them as visions, which Vulcans, having limited telepathic abilities, were sometimes subject to, but that illogical effort had always failed. The most he could logically say was that they might conceivably be memories of visions, but of visions he could not consciously remember having had in the first place.

In the end, his only salvation had been to tell himself, as he did now, that the false memories were simply products of his subconscious and that therefore they were nothing more than a rare and peculiar form of dreaming, a series of wish fulfillment fantasies produced by his subconscious. What else could they be but fantasies, he had asked himself a thousand times? They had simply seeped up from his subconscious through the imperfectly formed barriers all Vulcans erect early in life to keep their emotions from breaking free of the prison of their inner, secret selves and into the real world of their logical, conscious minds.

He could not allow them to be anything else, just as he could not allow the momentary lapse of memory he had just suffered to be anything more than that: a lapse, a brief misfire of a cl.u.s.ter of otherwise healthy neurons.

It was his only choice if he wished to retain his sanity, if he wished to retain his ability to make logical decisions and act upon them.

And now-now, with the possibility of a Carda.s.sian attempt to unseat him growing daily-he needed that ability more than ever.

Without it, without all the logic and decisiveness he could muster, the Alliance could well be doomed. Without it- "Arbiter Sarek?" Commander Varkan's uneasy voice penetrated his whirling thoughts. "What is it you wish?"

Sarek came to himself with a start as he realized how long he had been standing silently before the viewscreen.

And remembered why he had contacted Varkan. He had decided to cut this ludicrous "mission" short.

"Prepare to return to Alliance Prime," he said. "I will join you on the bridge in a moment."

Signing off, Sarek broke the connection and thumbed open the door to the corridor. He had wasted more than enough time on this fool's errand, he thought grimly as he strode toward the bridge, the memory of his recent lapse slipping more deeply into his subconscious with every step.

Eleven.

PICARD, HAVING decided a private conversation with Guinan was essential, had just exited the turbolift a few dozen meters from her quarters when Riker's voice came through his combadge.

"Captain, to the bridge."

Wondering briefly if he should summon Guinan to the bridge for whatever was happening, he spun about and stepped back through the still-open doors of the turbolift.

"On my way, Number One. What is it?"

"Andor has just come within sensor range, Captain."

"And- ?" Picard prompted impatiently as the turbolift shot upward.

"And you'd better have a look, sir," Riker said, his grim tone changing Picard's annoyed impatience to stomach-twisting apprehension.

The door opened on the bridge, and he strode through.

And stopped abruptly as his eyes went from Riker, rising from the captain's chair, to the viewscreen.

The image filling the screen was fuzzy, indicating the object-the planet Andor, the first Federation planet that lay along their path from Arhennius to Earth-was barely within sensor range.

But the image was clear enough-and growing clearer by the second as the Enterprise drew closer at nearly warp eight.

Borg cubes, dozens of them, hovered around the planet like a malignant cloud.

His heart pounding, Picard could not keep from shuddering visibly. To him the Borg were not only the impersonal evil they were to most who encountered them, even to Guinan, who had been pa.r.s.ecs distant from her homeworld when the Borg, having apparently found it una.s.similable, destroyed it overnight. To Picard, they were a very personal evil as well, a horror that had lived on in his nightmares since those terrible days when he had been a Borg. Again and again he had relived those times, cringing inwardly as his will was relentlessly beaten down by the networks of implants and by the neverending pressure of the legions of slave minds in the collective, which itself had been anathema to the tiny fragment of humanity that he had somehow managed to hold onto throughout the entire ordeal. There were still nights when he awoke to find himself screaming silently as he struggled to pull free, like a man submerged in carrion-infested quicksand that was not drowning him but was leaching its way into his body, literally absorbing him bit by bit while he remained fully conscious, aware of each and every sickening moment.

Pulling in a deep breath, he forced himself to at least appear calm.

"How many, Number One?"

"Sixty-seven so far. There may be more hidden in the shadow of the planet."

"And the status of the planet, Mr. Data?" he asked, his voice as flat as his body was tense.

"The conversion of the planetary ecosystem is not yet complete, Captain. There is still five percent free oxygen, but increasing levels of methane, fluorine, and carbon monoxide have already rendered the atmosphere unbreathable for anything but a Borg."

"How long..." Picard began but, uncharacteristically, let his voice trail off.

"We have never before observed the Borg's planetary transformation process in action," Data said, "so there is no reliable method of estimating the time remaining before the transformation is complete."

"Nor how long it's been going on already," Riker said, his face a stony mask as he watched the image. He swallowed. "How many Andorians are there?"

"None," Data said, studying the sensor displays. "There are, however, approximately two billion Borg. Sensors indicate most were, before their a.s.similation, Andorians."

Alone in her dimly lit quarters, Guinan listened to Picard's brief announcement concerning the fate of the Andorians. She knew it was time-past time for her to tell him the whole truth. Every moment she waited, the chances grew greater that he would learn it elsewhere. If that happened, the trust they had shared for even longer than he remembered would be, if not broken, severely damaged. It had already been damaged, but not, she hoped, beyond repair.

And yet even now, knowing she had no choice, she could not entirely free herself from the paralysis induced by the oil-and-water combination of emotions that had been eating at her like acid from the moment the Enterprise had emerged from its jolting pa.s.sage through time.

For it was in that moment she had felt history rearranging itself around her, felt its countless elastic threads shift and intertwine and stretch almost to the breaking point as they were woven into new and radically different patterns.

Patterns that filled her simultaneously with elation and despair.

In the hours since that moment, her thoughts had been like a pendulum being swatted violently back and forth. One moment she hoped with all her heart that what she had seen in the patterns was right, and then, a moment later, she hoped with equal fervor that it was not only wrong but a delusion, that the "feelings" that had plagued her for centuries had finally reached an intensity that had simply driven her mad.

But now...

Now, with the fate of Andor confirmed, she could no longer summon up any tenable hopes that the patterns she had seen were either false or induced by her own madness. There was no longer any doubt that they truly reflected the reality in which the Enterprise now existed.

And if she did not act now, if she did not regain Picard's total trust, everything could be lost...

Closing her eyes, she gathered together all her strength, strength that had seen her through countless crises before but only one that had tested her as severely as this. With the feeling that she was stepping off a precipice, she opened her eyes, waved the door open and stepped from her quarters into the corridor.

Not daring to hesitate, she glided rapidly toward the nearest turbolift and, seconds later, emerged onto the bridge. As the doors hissed shut behind her, every eye darted toward her, even Data's. On the viewscreen, the malignant cloud of Borg ships still hovered around the dying Andorian world.

The newest addition to the Borg Collective.

"Captain," she said, approaching him and bringing her eyes up to meet his directly for the first time since the Enterprise had emerged into this universe, "there is something I must tell you."

Picard frowned and glanced questioningly toward the door to his ready room, but Guinan shook her head. "This is something you all need to know."

She paused, looking around at the entire bridge crew, then drew in a deep breath. "Earth as you knew it," she said softly, "does not exist in this timeline. Where it once was, there are only Borg."

The blood drained from Picard's face, as it did from Riker's, until both were nearly as pale as Data. Even La Forge's mahogany features took on a greyish, corpse-like pallor, while Troi winced under the painful pressure of the emotion radiating from the Terrans. Only Worf, already scowling, seemed unaffected.

"How do you know, Guinan?" Picard's voice was so brittle it threatened to snap. "I don't doubt that it's true, but how do you know?"

"I've known since the moment we emerged into this continuum, but- "

"How do you know, Guinan? How?"

"I can't explain it, Captain," she said despairingly, her voice laden with apology. "You of all people should know that. All I can tell you is that there have been other times when I have been shifted into another timeline, but this is different. Those other times, I sensed that something was different, that something was wrong, but that was all. This time there is more. This time I can sense both timelines and some of the differences between them. It's as if they were closer together, or as if I were somehow linked more intimately to both than in any of those other incidents."

"Captain," Data broke in before Picard could continue his uncharacteristically harsh questioning, "I do not have a rational, scientific explanation for Guinan's special knowledge, but I believe there is something you might want to consider."

"Yes, Mr. Data?" Picard, still frowning, turned toward the android.

Data paused, as if reluctant to continue, but after a moment he said, "It is not really an explanation at all, Captain, but it is part of a category of utterances that nevertheless seem to have meaning to humans. Guinan may be aware of more than the rest of us because... Guinan is just Guinan."

Riker let out a brief snort of harsh laughter. "No one's ever argued with that."

Picard's features relaxed slightly. "I've always known it to be true," he said, his eyes meeting Guinan's again, his momentary anger turning into a sigh. "In any event, shooting the messenger is virtually always counterproductive. Tell us, Guinan, what else do you know about this place?"

"Just one other thing for certain, Captain. It's the reason I told you before that any advice I might give you in this timeline could not be trusted." She paused, lowering her eyes for a moment, then raising them to once again meet Picard's.

"In this universe," she went on, forcing the words out, "your world is gone, but mine is not. Here, the Borg did not destroy El-Auria."

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

The engineer flinched under the words, not because he resented them but because he knew they were absolutely true. His halting attempt to explain his actions to Kirk had only made his rashness more glaringly apparent. Worse, listening to his own words as he spoke them had made him begin to wonder if, in the final a.n.a.lysis, he hadn't done it all for a purely selfish motive. Had his primary concern really been to save the captain's life?

Or had it been to save himself from the guilt and the nightmares that that death had inflicted on him?

"I cannot say how sorry I am," he began bleakly, but Kirk held up a hand to block the words.

"Like I said, you screwed up," Kirk repeated, this time with a rueful grin. "That's the bad news. The good news is, you survived and so did I, so we've got a chance to do something about it. For a start, how about finding out what it was that brought these-Borg, was it? What kind of name is that, anyway?- that brought these Borg into the picture? Obviously they're not here simply because you saved me."

Scotty blinked in confusion. "But you just said- "

"I said you screwed up and you did. You never should have taken off on this wild goose chase. You never should've taken a chance on corrupting the timestream just to save one person-even if that person was me. I didn't say that saving me was what brought these Borg monstrosities down on us."

"Then what- "

"What did cause it?" Kirk shrugged. "I have no idea, Scotty, not yet. But whatever it was, it wasn't your rescuing me. You said it yourself. As far as the Enterprise-B and that timeline are concerned, you were right: You didn't change anything. With or without your 'interference,' I disappeared. The energy ribbon got me in one case, you got me in the other, so I was taken out of the picture either way. And if that isn't enough, just use a little of your engineering-style common sense. The effects of what you did here and now, in 2293, whether it was saving me or something else you did accidentally, would begin here and now. Worst-case scenario, the effects would grow larger and larger until the here and now you came from-2370, you said?- would be drastically altered. But not this here and now. Whatever caused this change happened a long time ago. As our mutual friend always says," Kirk added with a more genuine grin, "it's only logical."

A wave of irrational relief swept over Scotty. It was indeed only logical, and he would surely have realized it himself if he hadn't been so rattled. "But if it was not something I did, then what- "

"Tell me about this future captain of the Enterprise. Is he impulsive?"

"I did not spend that much time with the man, but I seriously doubt it. Although he did let the Enterprise get trapped inside the Dyson Sphere the Jenolen had crashed on."

Kirk nodded. "And you said he 'gave' you this shuttlecraft, just like that, no promise to return it on a given date, nothing. That sounds pretty impulsive to me, Scotty."

"Aye, I suppose you could look at it that way."

"And you said he was right behind you back there in 2370, trying to get you to stop. Did he have any idea what you were planning? Did he know about our own little adventure on the first Bounty?"

"We'd not discussed it, but I can't imagine that he did not."

"Me neither. So when he saw you were heading almost directly into a star, he must have realized you were going to try to slingshot some when." Kirk paused, grinning again. "Ten to one, he followed you. Care to bet?"

Scotty blinked. Was it possible? From what he had seen of the EnterpriseD captain, Picard was far more by-the-book than Jim Kirk had ever been. He didn't even lead his own landing parties the way Jim almost always had.

On the other hand, the woman calling herself Guinan had been on the bridge with Picard. Scotty had heard her voice once or twice before he'd closed the incoming channel.

And strange things happened when that seemingly ageless woman was around.

She had somehow popped up in Glasgow, and because of her delaying him a few minutes in that bar-which was still nearly a year in the future in this timeline, he realized with a shiver-he had met Matt Franklin and decided to join him on the Jenolen, which was the only reason he'd been on board when it had crashed on the Dyson Sphere and the only reason he'd ended up seventy-five years in his own future.

And now-now she had been on the bridge of the Enterprise when it had been pursuing him, and here he was, almost back where he'd started, but in a world not of the Federation but, apparently, of the Borg.

Scotty shook his head. "I don't know, but, aye, it's possible. He could've tried to follow me."

"I'm certain of it!" Kirk said triumphantly. "And he couldn't have had time to do any serious calculations, not nearly as many as Spock did on the first Bounty. All he could do was stick as close to your tail as possible, and that wouldn't be nearly close enough. Which means he showed up back here at a slightly different time, maybe before you arrived, maybe after. But no matter when he arrived, he must've made a second jump even further back, and- "

"But why would he do that?"