Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [0]
Stardate 50907.2
Population approximately nine billion… all Borg.
Picard’s breath fogged the large window on his cabin wall, the moisture momentarily making the view of his homeworld indistinct and devoid of color. Even now, five days after they’d been uttered, Data’s words reverberated through his mind as he once again relived that terrible moment on the bridge. On the main viewscreen had been an Earth altered beyond belief, its continents transformed into a bleak technological sprawl, its oceans dark, its atmosphere thin and gray. Caught in the temporal wake of a Borg sphere, Picard and his crew had seen with their own horrified eyes what the Borg had wrought by fleeing into Earth’s past.
But the Enterprise had pursued them, and in so doing, stopped the Borg from assimilating Earth, and ensured the completion of humanity’s historic first warp flight.
Picard closed his eyes and straightened his posture, moving his forehead off the back of his hand. His breath evaporated, and Earth was restored to its tranquil blue and white.
And now we’re back in the present, Picard thought somberly. Earth is as it was, at least as far as we know… although who really knows what effect our presence in the past-however carefully controlled and covered up-has had on this timeline? He had told his crew that they were going back to repair whatever damage the Borg had done, but how much change had his own actions in the past had upon the present?
Picard didn’t like thinking about the issues inherent in the temporal tampering, though the analytical portions of his mind had wandered there all too often in the last few days. If the Enterprise crew aided Zefram Cochrane’s 21st-century voyage, hadn’t they always been there in the mists of history, however unrecorded? And if the Borg had conquered Earth and had then been beaten back, hadn’t that always occurred? Following Data’s own theoretical ruminations on the topic, Picard had been forced to tell him to keep the subject to himself; he was tired of thinking about it.
Better than thinking about the alternative, the voice in the back of his head would tell him. Picard and his crew were already dealing with the direct consequences of their journey, and even though they had saved the future of mankind, the reward of that knowledge seemed to pale when stacked against the costs. It had taken La Forge and his engineers a couple of days to create a makeshift replacement for their lost navigational array, one capable of reproducing the effect that had allowed them to journey to the past in the first place. During that time, Will Riker and Worf had been busy rounding up the ASRV lifeboats that were jettisoned when Picard had initiated the Enterprise’s autodestruct sequence.
Once that danger and Borg threat had been stopped, retrieving the nearly 200 escape pods had proven more challenging than his officers had expected; some had made it to Earth, some had lingered in orbit. Although about three-quarters of them had made it to the rendezvous point on Gravett Island in the South Pacific, crewmembers from some of the other autonomous survival and recovery vehicles had been grounded elsewhere-mostly due to Borg-related system glitches. Many of those had dispersed into the regions they landed in, some taking refuge in the wilderness in case of Borg pursuit, others trying their best to blend in with the ragged factions of postapocalypse humanity they encountered.
Most of the repairs to the Enterprise had to wait until the ship got to McKinley Station, where they were now docked. Most of the crew were still in the long queues for the starbase’s massive medical complex; they had to be quarantined, scanned, and decontaminated, not only for any possible Borg infection, but for any viral or bacterial pathogens they may have picked up while in the past. It wouldn’t do to release a 21st-century virus, whether natural or bioengineered, into the 24th century.
After being given clean bills of health, the crew would have some time off. How much time was unknown at this point. Engineering crews-all wearing