The yellow grids glimmered around her as she stood in the middle of the holodeck. She took a deep breath, clearing her thoughts, and then she put her fingers to her head.
“Delcara,” she said softly, and again, “Delcara.” And when she spoke, her voice went far beyond the confines of the holodeck, beyond the confines of normal space.
All was silence for quite some time, and then an image shimmered and appeared before her.
Guinan gasped when she saw her in spite of herself. Delcara’s face was more lined than before, and now her hair was brittle and looked like it might even be falling out. When she stood it was with hunched back, as if she were carrying the weight of the world on her. And her very aura had changed. Once it had glimmered, white and pure, and now it was darksome and disturbing. Her eyebrows were heavier, her eyes seeming to be receding into her head. When she regarded Guinan, her entire face seemed constructed for exuding suspicion.
“What’s happened to you?” whispered Guinan.
“Nothing,” said Delcara. “Nothing, bond sister. You called me. I have come. What more can you wish from me than that?”
“Computer,” Guinan said abruptly. “Access ship’s log, stardate 44793.6. Re-create from visual records the woman named Delcara who appeared in holographic form. Physical form only. Do not animate.”
Within an instant the computer had complied, and a perfect construct of Delcara stood before the two of them. She stood there quietly, unmoving, a mere shell. Yet there was a grace and quiet beauty still in evidence that had already faded from the being who had come to Guinan at her behest mere moments ago.
“Geordi tried this with his Borg friend,” said Guinan. “A woman whose soul he is trying to recapture. I figured, if it’s good enough for him…”
“A Borg friend?” Delcara looked at her skeptically. “Recapture a soul? That cannot happen, my bond sister. They have no souls. Nor does this,” and she gazed in fascination at the body that stood before her, motionless. “This, however, does present interesting…opportunities.”
She stepped forward, like a specter, and merged with the body.
The body staggered for a moment, as if getting its bearings, and then Delcara’s heart shone through the eyes. She held up the hands and experimentally touched them to the face. “Intriguing,” she said. She looked over to Guinan, who was standing there with quiet satisfaction, and held out her hands to her.
“Bond sister, I feel as if I see you with new eyes. You are looking well.”
“And you—” Guinan took her hands. “You look terrible.”
“Blunt as ever,” said Delcara. “Wrong as ever. You counseled forgiveness, Guinan. You counseled that I should live my life and not dwell on the past. But look at what I have achieved, sister. Look.”
“Yes, let’s look, shall we?” said Guinan sharply. “Don’t you understand what’s happening to you? Your obsession is destroying you. It’s eating away at your soul. God only knows what it’s done to your body. You won’t let us see that.”
“My body is in perfectly fine health,” Delcara told her.
“Come aboard the Enterprise, Delcara,” Guinan said urgently. “Leave the planet-killer behind. Come be with me. Come be with him. We are your future. Not that machine in which you hide.”
“You do not understand, Guinan. They need me, and I need them.”
“You only need them if you need vengeance. If you put vengeance aside, you need only love. And you don’t need a machine that was built to destroy to provide you with that.”
Delcara turned her back to her. “You don’t understand.”
“No, no, I’ve never understood,” said Guinan. “Letting an obsession consume you in the way that it has is totally alien to me. I remember you as you were, Delcara. There was a darkness in you, true, but you were willing to let in light. You were willing to love. You were willing to dream and hope of things other than destruction.”
“We change, Guinan. Well, not you, of course,” said Delcara with a touch of sarcasm. “You are the same, sweet-tempered, attentive individual you always were.”
“I remember a time when that was important to you,” Guinan replied. “Delcara, come back to us. To me.”
“They need me,” she began again.
Guinan squeezed Delcara’s “hands” as tightly as she could. “They need. They need. But they don’t give, bond sister. They take and take from you. But they don’t give you the flesh and blood relationship that only other living beings can provide. The spirits of the dead possess you and destroy you. Leave them and return to us.”
“I can’t!” cried Delcara in exasperation. “What would you have of me, Guinan! What would you have!”
“Give up the vendetta…”
“I can’t! Don’t you see? That’s all I am. That’s all that’s left of the woman you once knew. I don’t know anything else, nor does anything else matter!”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Whether you believe it or not doesn’t change it.” “Let us come to you,” said Guinan desperately, urgently.
“Impossible.”
“Not impossible. Let us into your vessel. See us like this,” and she squeezed Delcara’s “hand” firmly. “Let us address the many beings that you represent. Picard can be very persuasive.”
“Picard,” said Delcara with a faint whisper, and then, her voice more firm, she said, “It’s impossible, I said.”
“That’s not you speaking,” said Guinan with surprising fierceness. “That’s them.”
“They are many. I am one.”
“But you’re the one that matters to me.”
“All right,” said Delcara, sounding extremely tired again. “All right, Guinan. I swear, you and your relentless nature. You would vex the gods of patience.”
Guinan smiled. “At the very least, I’d give them something to think about.”
“Time draws short, though,” said Delcara darkly. “I sense more of the soulless ones on the horizons of space. There are three of them this time.”
Guinan cast a glance in the direction that Delcara was pointing, as if she could see through a bulkhead. “Three.”
“Yes. It will be a difficult battle. But I will prevail. That is the main reason that I agree to see Picard now, you see.”
“On the eve of your great triumph?”
“No,” she said simply, and sadly. “Because I anticipate that he will not face the Borg another time and live. And his departure will leave a great absence in me. How fortunate that I do not love him,”
The holodeck-generated body arched her back slightly, and then slumped forward, its eyes vacant and wide, stating at nothing. Guinan nodded slowly and said, “How fortunate indeed.”
Once again Picard had assembled his top officers in the briefing room, with Korsmo and Shelby in attendance as well.
It was a strategy conference, the type of which Picard had hoped he would never have to call again. “The Borg,” he said, “are on the way. The speed reported by Starbase 222 was somewhere above warp nine-point-nine.”
Geordi whistled. “Incredible. The fastest that subspace radio goes is warp nine-point-nine-nine-nine, and that’s with booster relays, which means that the Borg may be barely behind the radio transmission. You know, the laws of physics say it’s impossible to reach warp ten, but if anyone can do it, I bet the Borg could. Not that I get any particular pleasure from that thought, mind you.”
“What’s even more incredible is that they ignored the starbase,” observed Shelby.
“Obviously, they were in something of a hurry,” said Riker. “And I think I know what they were in a hurry for.”
He glanced out the viewing port. Ahead of them, space was warping around the speeding shape of the planet-killer, still on its head-on course to penetrate Borg space. Thus far the Enterprise and the Chekov were keeping pace, but it was not an easy task, and it required careful monitoring of the engines.
Riker shook his head in amazement. That it would take ye
ars to achieve her goal was clearly of no interest to her at all. As she had said, she had all the time in the universe.
It was time that the Enterprise did not share, which Data was just now pointing out. “If we can assume that the planet-killer is capable of surviving the next Borg attack, the next densely populated system will be that of the Gorn. Furthermore, beyond that she will inevitably—presuming she does not alter her course—enter a section of Romulan space.”
“Just perfect,” said Riker sarcastically.
“Why doesn’t she just open fire on the Federation headquarters and be done with it?” demanded Korsmo, sounding even more frustrated. “She’s going to have the entire galaxy in pieces before she’s through.”
“I am aware of what she might and might not do, Captain,” said Picard quietly.
“Well, she’s not going to have the chance,” said Korsmo. “I received a communiqué from Starfleet…”
“Yes, I know,” Picard told him. “We received the same one.”
Korsmo seemed surprised for a moment, but then shrugged. “Then you know.”
Crusher looked confused, as did Troi and La Forge. “Well I don’t know,” said the doctor. “Someone care to let me in on it?”
“Starfleet is assembling a fleet to intercept her,” said Korsmo with great satisfaction. “If the Borg don’t get her, we definitely will.”
There was silence in the briefing room for a moment. Picard cast a glance at Shelby, who was seated next to her captain but clearly wasn’t sharing his enthusiasm. Nor did Riker look ecstatic. “Problem, Commander? Commanders?” said Picard.
Shelby looked at Riker. “It’s Wolf 359 all over again.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Riker.
“I do not like what you’re implying at all,” declared Korsmo. “Starfleet can no more let that woman carve her way through the galaxy than they could let the Borg assault us unanswered. For a galaxy to be at peace, that peace must be protected. Starfleet and the Federation aren’t simply going to turn away when such a massive threat presents itself, whether it be the planet-killer or the Borg. And I will have you know, young officers,” he added stiffly, “that Wolf 359 was heroism at its finest!”
“Wolf 359 was a massacre,” said Riker. “I will never forget the look on Admiral Hanson’s face when he told us of the fight he was going to give the Borg. He was like a war-horse put back into harness. You weren’t there to see that, Captains. We saw it. A brave defender going off to be slaughtered. And we saw the graveyard of ships that were left behind in the Borg’s wake.”
“And that was against one Borg ship,” Shelby said. “Now you’re telling us that a fleet is being assembled—a fleet which can’t possibly be as powerful as the one at Wolf, because most of the best ships were lost there—and it’s going up against a foe that’s more powerful.”
Now Picard cleared his throat loudly and said, in a tone that was indicating that no further discussion on that topic was being tolerated, “It’s of far more importance, I think, that we deal with the here and now. And the here and now would indicate that, sooner rather than later, depending upon their speed, we will be encountering three Borg ships. Mr. La Forge, what are our options?”
“We’ve developed ways to temporarily stall the Borg during an attack,” said Geordi. “Fluctuating the phaser resonance frequencies tampers with their ability to adjust to our weapons. Also varying the nutonics slows down their ability to overcome our deflectors, although only for a matter of seconds.”
“There was something else you did. Memoranda were circulated throughout Starfleet,” said Korsmo, “and Shelby was telling me about it as well, with the deflector dish…”
Geordi’s head bobbed up and down. “We discovered that the power nodules of the Borg were susceptible to phaser frequencies along the higher end of the band. It caused system-wide drops throughout the Borg ship when fired on them. Figuring that more is better, we generated a concentrated burst of energy using power from the warp engines, channeled through the deflector dish, to give us more punch than phasers or photon torpedoes could have provided. The problem was that since it took so much power, we couldn’t maneuver at warp speed. Furthermore, it caused failure in the warp reactor core primary coolant system, and we came damned close to cracking the dilithium crystals.”
“The result?” asked Korsmo.
Geordi shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and no one else around the table looked particularly at ease. “Nothing. The Borg shields absorbed it.”
“That would be my doing,” admitted Picard. “When the Borg ‘recruited’ me, they took all of our possible planned strategies from my mind.”
“The other drawback is that it left us virtual sitting ducks,” said Riker. “That kind of failure against one Borg ship is bad enough. Trying it again with two other ships to attack you while you’re making yourself vulnerable attacking a third is even more risky.”
“They can only prepare for what they knew we could do, up to the point where they abducted the captain,” said Geordi. “But they don’t know about things that we’ve come up with since.”
“You have something in mind, Mr. La Forge?” asked Picard.
“Something that’s worth a shot,” said Geordi. “Wesley had been conducting experiments with creating warp bubbles.”
“Oh God, don’t remind me,” said Beverly Crusher.
“But it may be something we can use,” Geordi continued. “All the equations and records of the experiment are in the computer, and I’ve been looking them over from time to time when I had a spare few minutes. And I’ve been discussing possibilities with Data…”
“We have theorized,” Data said, “that it would be possible to program into the computer a remix of matter and antimatter to duplicate, on a large scale, the warp bubble that Wesley created.”
“In the main engines?” said Picard, looking somewhat taken aback.
“No, sir,” said Data. “The mixture would be contained in the emergency antimatter generator on the lower engineering hull. However, upon command, the computer would then channel it through the warp field generators on the outboard nacelles. The warp bubble would interact with the subspace field of the Borg ship and encapsulate it in a shrinking universal field similar to the one which trapped Doctor Crusher. It would, for all intents and purposes, remove the affected ship from our space-time continuum.”
“So we would have to maneuver close enough to the Borg vessel to, essentially, ‘drop off’ the warp bubble on their subspace field,” said Picard.
“Yes, sir,” confirmed Geordi. “And we would have to keep moving at impulse power to leave the discharge behind. We’d have maybe three seconds to get away—at impulse power—or risk being encompassed in the warp bubble along with the Borg ship.”
“Sounds dicey,” admitted Riker.
“How long would it take you to prepare the emergency antimatter generator?” asked Picard.
“Wesley did all the theoretical groundwork when he was first doing his experiments.” Geordi shrugged. “This is just a straightforward application. Maybe half an hour.”
“Make it so.” Picard paused. “Captain Korsmo, I—”
But he didn’t get to complete the sentence, as the briefing room communicator sounded. “Captain,” came Chafin’s voice, “the planet-killer is reducing speed.”
“Are there Borg ships ahead?”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe it’s running out of gas,” said Korsmo.
The briefing room doors opened and Guinan entered quickly. Korsmo looked up and sighed in exasperation, but kept his peace. Guinan, for her part, ignored him completely but instead went straight to Picard.
“She wants to see us.”
“Wants to?” said Picard, not having to ask who Guinan meant by “she.”
“Perhaps ‘wants to’ is too strong a term,” allowed Guinan. “She will see us. That alone is a breakthrough.”
“What she is that?” asked Korsmo. “The woman in the p
lanet-killer?”
“Captain,” Chafin’s voice came, “it’s dropping out of warp.”
“Bring us alongside,” said Picard, and stood. “Transporter room. Prepare for four to beam aboard the planet-killer. Doctor, Guinan, Mr. Data, with me.”
“No, sir!” Riker said immediately, “that would bet—”
“The only logical course of action,” said Picard with quiet confidence. “This may be our only chance to ally the planet-killer solidly with Federation interests. If that can be accomplished, we need never worry about the threat of the Borg again. Mr. La Forge, Counselor Troi, tell me of the Bonaventure woman. Could she be useful somehow in negotiating with Delcara?”
“You can’t negotiate with her, Picard,” Korsmo now said. “She’s a terrorist! She does what she wants, where she wants. There can be no compromise with someone like that.”
Picard simply stared at him icily, and then said very quietly, as if Korsmo had not even spoken, “I’m waiting for an answer to my question, Counselor.”
“Using Reannon would not be advisable,” said Troi. “She is at a very delicate stage in her recovery, and very unpredictable. She could do as much harm as good.”
“I agree,” said Geordi.
“Very well, then. She’ll stay here.” And seeing Riker’s mouth about to open, Picard quickly interrupted with a curt, “There is nothing to discuss, Number One.”
“Captain,” Shelby now said, leaning forward, “this is not the time.”
“Commander Shelby is right, sir. You can’t be away from the Enterprise now. The Borg are coming.”
Picard turned to Riker, and his first officer understood immediately from the look in Picard’s face. This was more than determination on Picard’s part to take the risk himself. This was a personal fulfillment of a lifelong quest on the part of his captain, and he came to the quiet realization that there was no way in hell he was going to be able to get in this man’s way.
“You will have to give them my regrets,” said Picard.