“The Dominion, sir?” Bowers asked.

“Think about it, Sam,” Vaughn said. “Preparing the Dominion for the possible return of the Borg can only help us in the long run, and I can think of no better way to demonstrate our own peaceful intentions than by returning a marooned Founder to their keeping, along with the information you’ve obtained. This isn’t just a tactical opportunity, it’s a diplomatic one.”

“I hope Command agrees with you, sir.”

Vaughn smiled. “That makes two of us.”

A scream suddenly cut through the lab. Vaughn turned and almost refused to believe what he saw.

The Borg corpse had come to life. Assimilation tubules had launched themselves from its inanimate hands and into the nearby changeling, whose form was morphing wildly before his eyes.

Bowers drew his phaser, ready to fire.

“No,” Vaughn shouted. “Not yet.”

The child’s terrifying howls continued. Black streams of nanoprobes snaked through the Founder’s undulating mass of metaplasm. Pseudopods reached out blindly across the room as it convulsed in apparent agony, lashing out in every direction. The Defiantofficers narrowly missed being struck by a pseudopod that smashed into the bulkhead behind them.

Then all at once the morphing mass contracted, straining violently to compress itself into a tight opaque sphere. It vibrated madly on the deck as it continued to shrink, becoming Borg-black as it condensed.

“Prepare to fire,” Vaughn said.

Suddenly the sphere morphed again, expanding and elongating into the changeling’s humanoid form. She seemed to be struggling to maintain her shape before finally stablizing.

Shar took out his tricorder and began scanning.

“Are you all right?” Vaughn asked.

The changeling nodded, flexing her hands.

“You resisted the assimilation,” Bowers said. “How?”

A third arm grew out of the center of the Founder’s narrow chest and opened its slender, symmetrical, two-thumbed hand. The arm lengthened until the hand was only inches away from Bowers’s face. In the center of its palm, Vaughn saw, was what looked like a black pebble.

“The nanoprobes?” Bowers guessed.

“They were trying to overwhelm me,” she said. “They were quite painful. They kept twisting me inside out. I knew I had to make them stop. So I did the only thing I could think of. I squeezed them together until they stopped.”

“Mr. ch’Thane,” Vaughn said. “Explain, please.”

Shar shook his head. “She’s fine. She really was able to withstand the assimilation.”

“How?” Bowers asked.

Shar continued studying his tricorder. “Borg nanoprobes are designed to assimilate life-forms on a cellular level. But a changeling’s morphogenic matrix has no cellular structure in its natural state. In essence, it was as if the nanoprobes were trying to assimilate a body of water.”

“More good news for the Dominion, I guess,” Bowers said. “And for us.”

“Wait a minute,” Vaughn said, peering at the Borg corpse across the room. “That drone is dead. How is it possible that the assimilation tubules are still functional?”

“The Borg are proving to be increasingly difficult to understand,” Shar said, “but apparently, even without a living humanoid to act as host for the technology, the Borg imperative to assimilate other life-forms can survive the death of a drone under certain circumstances, lying dormant until the right opportunity presents itself.”

“My God,” Bowers said, looking at Vaughn. “That means—”

“Prynn,” Vaughn said, drawing his phaser as he ran from the science lab. The medical bay was just down the corridor….

Vaughn’s phaser was up and aimed as he stormed into the room. But all was peaceful. Prynn was exactly as he left her, still at Ruriko’s side, softly reading to her mother from The Silmarillion,Ruriko’s favorite book. Ruriko herself seemed peaceful, even serene, her eyes almost tender as they regarded Prynn, never leaving her.

Tears began to form in Vaughn’s eyes. My family,he thought, unsure who he was addressing. This is my family. Isn’t this why I’m here?

Vaughn lowered his phaser. “Prynn,” he said.

His daughter paused from her reading and looked up. She saw the phaser in his hand and frowned. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” Vaughn said. “But I need you to step away from your mother right now. We have to make sure everything’s all right. Please, Prynn. Move now.”

To her credit, Prynn didn’t argue. She put the book down and started to rise.

The tenderness abruptly fell from Ruriko’s eyes. She reached out to Prynn with her remaining hand.

Vaughn brought up his phaser and fired.

19

Lieutenant Commander Bhatnagar had returned to duty only two hours before. After a good night’s rest following her release from sickbay, she was anxious to figure out the cause of the overloaded EPS conduit. While by definition, starship engine rooms should have been predictable, uneventful places that operated according to the reliable mathematics of warp physics, she’d come to believe that, more often than not, they were in fact the nexi of entropy. Order battled chaos in these places with an almost dependable regularity. And engineers, she secretly suspected, functioned as avatars of both these forces, keeping them carefully balanced so that neither overwhelmed the other. Thus, warp drive worked, but the best engineers could still find a new wrinkle in the laws of physics when circumstances required it.

Bhatnagar stood over the master systems display table in the center of room and knew that something wasn’t right. Nothing in the diagnostics explained the buildup that led to the plasma overload. According to every instrument and situation monitor in engineering, everything had been fine. Yet something had caused the conduit to rupture, and in the absence of any evidence of a malfunction, or defects in the conduit itself, Bhatnagar knew only one other conclusion was reasonable: sabotage. Someone aboard the Gryphonhad caused the explosion deliberately.

She was considering how precisely to tell the captain when a chime from the computer suddenly rang out. “Warning: Antimatter containment failing. Ejection system off-line. Warp core will breach in two minutes.”

What—?

Bhatnagar checked her monitors as all around her techs scrambled to do the same at stations throughout engineering. But nothing was amiss: Forcefields and injection systems in the warp core were at optimum, the core temparature was well inside the safe zone, and there was no indication of any anomalous energy fluctuations. Yet the computer had just announced imminent failure of the antimatter-containment fields.

“Montenegro to crew,”the first officer’s voice said over the comm system. “Report to the escape pods. All hands abandon ship. I repeat, abandon ship.”

Bhatnagar was beginning to believe chaos had finally gotten the upper hand. Nothing was making sense. A breach in progress where all was well, and now an order to evacuate the ship.

“Commander! What the hell are you doing? Let’s go!”

Bhatnagar ignored her assistant, Lieutenant Benitez, as she sought the cause of the computer’s warning.