First Contact, page 2
Riker neared the desk separating them, but the captain had heard neither the gentle hiss of the door opening and closing nor the sound of his first officer’s footfall. Only when Riker’s transparent reflection became superimposed over the captain’s view of the stars did Picard turn to face his second-in-command.
Without a word or a change in his taut expression, the captain tapped a control on his console; blessedly, the opera dropped in volume. As it did, Riker felt his face relax and realized he had been wincing.
“Wagner?” he asked, with the faintest of smiles. The music played softly on, speaking to Riker of utter loss, destruction, despair—the ironically appropriate Götter-dâmmerung, the twilight of the gods.
Picard did not return the smile but replied curtly and without humor, “Berlioz. What do you have?”
Riker leaned forward and handed him the padd. “We finished our first sensor sweep of the Neutral Zone.”
As the captain scanned the readout, his lips thinned to a grim line, one end of which tugged downward. “Fascinating,” he said bitterly. “Twenty particles of space dust per cubic meter… fifty-two ultraviolet radiation spikes… and a class-two comet.” He tossed the padd onto his desk. “This is certainly worthy of our time.”
“I know how you feel,” Riker offered sincerely. He was about to add that the rest of the crew was experiencing the same sense of frustration when Picard interrupted, his voice taut with an undercurrent of bitter emotions.
“Actually… I doubt very much that you know how I feel.” The captain’s hazel eyes narrowed and stared deeply into Riker’s with a fury, an intensity that would have made any less loyal or determined friend and officer flinch and turn away in apology.
But Will’s stubbornness matched Picard’s. He met that gaze firmly with his own and saw that it held not just a challenge, but an invitation. There was something hidden there, something deeper than the insult the rest of the crew felt at being relegated to uselessness. Pain, he decided. Surely, though Picard eyed him squarely, the focus of the captain’s gaze seemed beyond him, as if it were fixed fast upon ghosts from another time: the flaming hull of the Starship Melbourne. The Saratoga. The Gage. Thirty-seven more starships and tens of thousands of lives aboard them were lost at Wolf 359 in the battle against the Borg—thanks to the strategic knowledge of Locutus’s human half, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Will Riker had endured the horror of confronting Locutus face to face, of staring at the Enterprise-D’s bridge viewscreen and witnessing the Borg’s handiwork: his commanding officer and friend rendered chillingly, obscenely inhuman. It would have been easier, Riker thought, to have looked instead upon the captain’s mangled corpse.
How much more agonizing must that encounter have been for the human Picard, trapped inside Locutus’s flesh-and-metal skull, looking upon his friends, his loyal crew, yet unable to warn them of the coming danger?
Riker saw vestiges of that pain in the captain’s eyes now, the same enraged helplessness that had possessed Jean-Luc in the early days after his release from the collective. Starfleet’s orders had unwittingly evoked from Picard the very same response as the Borg’s mental rape.
“You’re right,” Will said at last, still studying the captain intently. “I don’t. But then… I don’t know what’s really going on here.” He took another step forward, his tone pointed. “Captain—why are we out here chasing comets?”
Picard drew himself back into the present and visibly worked to release some of the tension in his face and voice. With a sigh, he glanced down at his desk. “Let’s just say that Starfleet has every confidence in the Enterprise and her crew”—he looked back up at Riker, his expression faintly rueful—“but they’re not so sure about her captain.”
He folded his arms tightly across his chest once more, as if to contain the bitterness in his heart, and began to pace. “They believe a man who was once captured by the Borg and assimilated… should not be put in a situation where he would face them again. To do so would be to introduce”—here he paused and changed the timbre of his voice to indicate a direct quote—“ ‘an unstable element into a critical situation.’ ”
“That’s crazy,” Riker said, his face taut with fury at Starfleet’s attitude toward his old friend. “Your experience with the Borg makes you the perfect man to lead this fight.”
Picard’s expression darkened. “Admiral Hayes disagrees.”
Riker opened his mouth to reply, but closed it when Counselor Troi’s voice filtered through the captain’s comm badge.
“Bridge to Captain Picard.”
There was a tense formality in her tone that immediately caught both Riker’s and Picard’s attention. “Go ahead,” the captain replied.
“We’ve just received word from Starfleet Command,” she said. “They’ve engaged the Borg.”
* * *
The bridge was, Picard reflected as he strode from the lift, like everything else aboard the Enterprise-E—including the situation that now confronted him and his crew—strange yet familiar. Strange, in that the captain’s chair was now elevated above the rest, to provide a better overview of the entire bridge (and, he thought ruefully, to more thoroughly expose him at this most difficult of moments, as he struggled to contain a firestorm of emotions). Familiar, in that once again, the Enterprise crew anticipated a nightmarish battle with the Borg—yet so unutterably strange that they should not be permitted to be part of it.
Picard could not help but note the lines of tension etched on each officer’s expression, beneath the careful composure. Troi failed to entirely hide a glimmer of edgy frustration as she glanced up at Riker and Picard’s entry, while at ops, Data’s demeanor was more candidly anxious, courtesy of the emotion chip.
The expression closest to conveying real calm belonged to Lieutenant Hawk at the conn, whose unflappable, direct personality reminded the captain of Will Riker’s, although Hawk was younger, clean-shaven, lean to the point of wiriness. Of course, Hawk had not been aboard the Enterprise-D when her captain had been captured by the Borg; he had never heard Locutus speak nor witnessed the fiery destruction of forty of Starfleet’s finest warships. Impossible to understand the horror of the Borg unless one had met them in battle—or worse, in their own hive. Hawk’s confidence sprang from ignorance—and the captain did not look forward to seeing him lose either.
As he reached his chair, Picard spoke. “Commander Data, put Starfleet subspace frequency one-four-eight-six on audio.”
As much as he could not bear to watch, he was just as urgently compelled to listen.
“Aye, sir,” the android replied, his long, golden fingers moving with an artist’s skill over his panel.
Picard gripped the armrests and leaned back against comfortable support without feeling it. He felt only an agonizing degree of helplessness as faint, disembodied voices—occasionally obliterated bursts of subspace static—filled the Enterprise bridge.
“Flagship to Endeavor… stand by to engage at grid A-fifteen.”
“Defiant and Bozeman, fall back to mobile position one.…”
Will Riker, who sat in one of the two chairs slightly below and flanking the captain’s, glanced up at Picard; they shared a pointed look at the mention of the Defiant. Troi’s gaze grew frankly concerned. All of them, Picard knew, shared a single unspoken thought: Worf.
A cascade of overlapping voices, some laced with adrenaline, followed.
“Acknowledged, flagship.”
“We have it in visual range!”
“We see it—a Borg cube on course zero mark two-one-five—”
“Speed: warp nine point eight.”
In the midst of the purely humanoid cacophony, a new sound came—not an individual voice adding a fresh skein to the chorus, but one consisting of a hundred, a thousand, a million whispers hammered into a solitary thought that obliterated all others:
“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
“We are the Borg.”
Picard felt the flesh on his arms, on the nape of his neck, prickle; the emotion those words evoked within him was too raw, too visceral to neatly label fear or fury or hatred. He stared out at the speechless stars on the main viewscreen and thought, How many planets…?
At the same time, an ominous realization came to him. He had known they were going to speak just then, hadn’t he? Even before they had uttered a sound, he had known the precise second they were going to speak.…
Static over the subspace channel, followed abruptly by the stern, confident command of a Starfleet admiral: “All units open fire.”
A deafening squeal of static made all on the Enterprise bridge wince—but not so much as the muted explosions that came after. A jumble of humanoid voices—punctuated by more static and ever closer explosions—followed: some female, some male; some the low, stern orders of experienced captains, others the high-pitched reports of green young officers.
“Remodulate shield nutation.”
“We’re losing power.…”
“Warp core breach!”
“All hands abandon ship!”
One more explosion, this so thunderous and shattering that some of the fresh-from-the-academy officers jumped at their stations; Picard briefly closed his eyes. Tainted by the Borg or not, unsure of himself or not, he was sure of the Enterprise and her crew—and knew he could endure the agony of helplessness no longer.
The admiral’s voice came again, no longer stern, but laced with panic.
“This is the flagship! They’ve broken through the defense perimeter. They’re heading toward Earth! Pursuit course. Break off the attack and—”
Picard caught Data’s gaze and sliced a hand through the air; blessedly, the transmission ceased at once. There followed an instant of pregnant silence on the Enterprise-E bridge, during which the captain became keenly aware that all eyes were focused on him, waiting.
In any other situation, he would have asked the senior bridge crew to accompany him to the ready room, where he would have sought opinions and advice. After all, at the moment, he was on the verge of making a critical decision based entirely on emotion, one possibly colored by a personal desire for revenge. The wisest course was to consult cooler heads than his own.
But at the moment, he didn’t give a damn. The emotion that fueled him was too pure, too primal to deny. This was the right decision, the only one possible to him in this instance. No, more than that: this was his destiny and that of the Enterprise-E and her crew. He leaned toward the conn.
“Lieutenant Hawk. Set course for Earth. Maximum warp.”
Hawk’s blue eyes widened with surprise—and something very like admiration. He said not a word—not even, in his surprise, remembering to acknowledge his captain’s orders—but immediately set to the task.
Picard shot a brief glance at an approving Will Riker before turning to address his crew. Even if Riker had protested vehemently at that instant, it would not have changed a single word Picard was about to say.
“I am about to commit a direct violation of our orders. Any of you who wish to object, do so now and I’ll note it in my log.”
A ripple seemed to pass over the bridge crew in the form of shared, determined looks. After a heartbeat of silence, Data swiveled to face the captain and said, “I think I speak for everyone here, sir, when I say… to hell with our orders.”
Picard permitted himself a small, bitter smile, one that faded at once as he spoke. “Red alert. All hands to battle stations.”
As the klaxon sounded and crew members scrambled to their stations, he told himself: You are probably taking all of these people to their deaths, and you to your own—if all of you are lucky. And if you are not…
It was a reasonable fear, a responsible fear. But he would rather live with it for the time being than surrender without a fight to the evil of mindless apathy. And so it was with an uncanny degree of satisfaction that he settled back into his chair and ordered Hawk: “Engage.”
THREE
Aboard the Defiant’s bridge, Lieutenant Commander Worf sat staring at the viewscreen’s display of the monstrous and ungainly Borg cube surrounded by a dozen tiny starships—a leaden, lumbering beast attacked by a pale, shining swarm of insects, insects that packed an impressive sting. Dazzling bursts of phaser-fire lit up the surrounding blackness, leaving scorch marks on the Borg cube’s dully gleaming pewter hull.
The Defiant was among the ranks of those ships that had left their mark; Worf watched the effects of recently ordered photon blasts with a grim warrior’s smile of satisfaction, while Weapons Officer Tutu raised his dark, clenched fist to pierce the air in a gesture of victory. The hull of the massive Borg vessel was as pockmarked as an unsheltered moon.
But Worf’s satisfaction was, as the Klingon had known it would be, short-lived. The cube—an unappealing conglomeration of external metal tubing, wiring, and conduits that looked as if its builders had decided to simply turn the vessel inside out, exposing its bowels to space—shuddered briefly at the blast, then immediately struck back.
A burst of fire-bright torpedoes—one, then two, three, four, five—slipped from it and sailed with unerring aim toward the flagship, which had had the honor of first opening fire on the cube. But after several volleys with the Borg, her defenses were weakening, as were the Defiant’s. After the last exchange of fire, Worf was informed that the Defiant’s shields could not withstand further pummeling.
“Evasive maneuver,” he shouted, glancing over his shoulder at the conn as Lieutenant Kizilbash, a lean human female with a sculpted, angular face and Klingon-intense eyes, complied. As a moving target, the Starship Defiant was less likely to be hit and thus had more chance of disabling the enemy.
But Worf harbored no false hopes about his chances of surviving the battle. Such a death would be supremely honorable, and he did not fear it; indeed, he would embrace such a fate, for he had long ago decided—upon his first look at Picard as the Borg drone Locutus—that he would indeed die rather than submit to the crime against freedom called assimilation.
Thus he fought today with special fervor, remembering. The Borg had taken Captain Picard, one of the strongest-willed humans Worf knew, and drained from him all life, all honor, all volition, until nothing but a mindlessly obedient shell remained.
Worf would fight to his last breath against such an evil; but his secret fear was that he would die and the Borg would be undefeated—and assimilate all beings in the galaxy, including those Klingon warriors too unfortunate to die.
Picard, he thought; it was unfair that Picard was not here, to redress the wrong done him. And unfair not only to him, but to all those asked to risk their lives to fight the Borg, for the Enterprise-E was Starfleet’s newest, finest vessel, equipped with the latest improvements in shields and weapons. When the Defiant had first arrived at the battlefront, Worf had asked Starfleet Command why the new Enterprise had not appeared and was informed curtly that she was patrolling the Romulan border. No further explanation was given. It seemed to him an outrage to keep Picard from an act of redemption and the Enterprise-E from providing aid to those who desperately needed her now.
All this Worf considered as the Defiant sailed in a swift arc, causing the sight on the viewscreen to shift. The Borg vessel lay dead ahead, while at two o’clock, the flagship shuddered, its forward hull and one nacelle illumined by a flood of eye-searing, deadly light.
One, then two, of the blasts had already struck home.
Abruptly, that brightness dimmed, leaving behind the section of hull nearest the bridge and half a nacelle scorched, pitted. Fire is immediately extinguished in the vacuum of space, Worf knew; but beneath that blackened hull were dull glimmers of swift-moving redness—the oxygen-laden decks, where people were being burned alive.
Three, four. The next two blasts followed in less than a Vulcan heartbeat. The third sliced into the already-weakened hull; the fourth hammered the crippled nacelle, whose surface crumbled and emitted the shocking orange flare that heralded a warp-core breach.
Five. The final blast limned the wounded starship with a writhing corona of light whose brightness was only increased by the sudden, nova-intense eruption from the warp-core nacelle. The flagship erupted in a glorious but fleeting blaze that sent quickly extinguished, darkening bits of shrapnel hurtling into the breathless void.
For those aboard her, it was the most honorable and noble of deaths—most importantly, a free one, untainted by their enemy’s peculiar brand of slavery. But Worf had little time to contemplate it, as the entire exchange between the Borg cube and the flagship had taken only a few seconds.
And even as the starship’s debris went hurtling past the Defiant, Worf kept his gaze fixed on the viewscreen for another curiously timeless instant. A fresh barrage of torpedoes birthed from the Borg ship’s underbelly was now streaking directly toward his vessel, his crew.
One—then two, three, four, five.
The sight made him bare his teeth and roar, “Fire phasers!” in the second before the blasts found their mark; astoundingly, Tutu had anticipated his commander’s order and at once unleashed a retaliatory burst from the Defiant’s phaser banks.
Worf did not have the pleasure of seeing the toll his response took on the pewter-colored cube. The instant Tutu’s ebony fingers touched his controls, the first blast hit.
One. The Defiant pitched hard astern, throwing Worf back against his chair and tossing the communications officer to the deck. He tried to shout orders for evasive maneuvers and more phaserfire, but the sound was swallowed by the thunder of impact.
Two. The second blast followed almost instantly, rendering all hope of communication with his bridge crew impossible. Impact came now from the ship’s right flank, hurling him from his chair; all about him, officers were flung from their stations onto the deck. He fought to right himself, then scrabbled toward the weapons console. Nearby, Tutu was now part of a jumble of bodies working to free themselves and return to their stations.
