David Mack is the multi-award-winning and the New York Times bestselling author of thirty-eight novels of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure, including the Star Trek Destiny and Cold Equations trilogies. His extensive writing credits include episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and he worked as a consultant on season one of the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy. Honored in 2022 as a Grand Master by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, Mack resides in New York City.

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Epic Trilogy uniting characters from the Star Trekuniverse and revealing the origin and final fate of the Federation's most dangerous enemy--the Borg

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Star Trek: Destiny

2373

PROLOGUE

It was a lifeless husk—its back broken, its skin rent, its mammoth form half buried in the shifting sands of a mountainous dune—and it was even more beautiful than Jadzia Dax remembered.

Her second host, Tobin Dax, had watched the Earth starship Columbia NX-02 leave its spacedock more than two hundred years earlier, on what no one then had realized would be its final mission; Tobin had directed the calibration of its starboard warp coils. A pang of sad nostalgia colored Jadzia’s thoughts as she stood on the grounded vessel’s bow and gazed at its shattered starboard nacelle, which had buckled at its midpoint and lay partially reclaimed by the dry waves of the desert.

Engineers from Defiant swarmed over the primary hull of the Columbia. They took tricorder readings in between shielding their faces from the scouring lash of a sand-laced sirocco. Behind them lay the delicate peaks of a desolate landscape, a vista of wheat-colored dunes shaped by an unceasing tide of anabatic winds, barren and lonely beneath a blanched sky.

Jadzia counted herself lucky that Captain Sisko had been willing to approve another planetary survey so soon after she had accidentally led them into peril on Gaia, where eight thousand lives had since been erased from history on a lover’s capricious whim. Though the crew was eager to return to Deep Space 9 as quickly as possible, Dax’s curiosity was always insatiable once aroused, and a flicker of a sensor reading had drawn her to this unnamed, uninhabited planet.

A sudden gust whipped her long, dark ponytail over her shoulder. She swatted it away from her face as she squinted into the blinding crimson flare of the rising suns. Adding to the brightness was a shimmer of light with a humanoid shape, a few meters away from her. The high-pitched drone of the transporter beam was drowned out by a wailing of wind in minor chords.

As the sound and shine faded away, the silhouette of Benjamin Sisko strode toward her across the buckled hull plates.

“Quite a find, Old Man,” he said, his mood subdued. Under normal circumstances he would have been elated by a discovery such as this, but the sting of recent events was too fresh and the threat of war too imminent for any of them to take much joy in it. He looked around and then asked, “How’re things going?”

“Slowly,” Dax said. “Our loadout was for recon, not salvage.” She started walking and nodded for him to follow her. “We’re seeing some unusual subatomic damage in the hull. Not sure what it means yet. All we know for sure is the Columbia’s been here for about two hundred years.” They reached the forward edge of the primary hull, where the force of impact had peeled back the metallic skin of the starship to reveal its duranium spaceframe. There Defiant’s engineers had installed a broad ramp on a shallow incline, because the ship’s original personnel hatches were all choked with centuries of windblown sand.

As they descended into the ship, Sisko asked, “Have you been able to identify any of the crew?” Echoes of their footfalls were muffled, trapped in the hollow beneath the ramp.

“We haven’t found any bodies,” Dax said, talking over the atonal cries of wind snaking through the Columbia’s corridors. “No remains of any kind.” Her footsteps scraped across grit-covered deck plates as she led him toward the ship’s core.

A dusty haze in the air was penetrated at irregular angles by narrow beams of sunlight that found their way through the dark wreckage. As they moved farther from the sparse light and deeper into the murky shadows of D Deck, Dax thought she saw brief flashes of bluish light, moving behind the bent bulkheads at the edges of her vision. When she turned her head to look for them, however, she found only darkness, and she dismissed the flickers as residual images fooling her retinas as her eyes adapted to the darkness near the ship’s core.

“Is it possible,” Sisko asked, stepping over the curved obstacle of a collapsed bulkhead brace, “they abandoned ship and settled somewhere on the planet?”

“Maybe,” Dax said. “But most of their gear is still on board.” She pushed past a tangle of fallen cables and held it aside for Sisko as he followed her. “This desert goes on for nine hundred kilometers in every direction,” she continued. “Between you and me, I don’t think they’d have gotten very far with just the clothes on their backs.”

“That’s a good point, but I think it’s moot,” Sisko said as they rounded a curve into a length of corridor draped with cobwebs, and disturbed a thick brood of small but lethal-looking indigenous arthropods. The ten-legged creatures rapidly scurried into the cracks between the bulkheads and the deck. He and Dax continued walking. “I don’t expect to find survivors from a two-hundred-year-old wreck, but I would like to know what an old Warp 5 Earth ship is doing in the Gamma Quadrant.”

“That makes two of us,” Dax said as they turned another corner toward a dead end, where Miles O’Brien hunched beneath a low-hanging tangle of wires and antiquated circuit boards—the remains of a control panel for the Columbia’s main computer. “Chief,” Dax called out, announcing their approach. “Any luck?”

“Not yet,” said the stout engineer. His tightly cut, curly fair hair was matted with sweat and dust. The two officers stepped up behind him as he continued in his gruff Irish brogue, “It’s a damned museum piece is what it is. Our tricorders can’t talk to it, and I can’t find an adapter in Defiant’s databases that’ll fit these inputs.”

Sisko leaned in beside O’Brien, supporting himself with his right hand on the chief’s left shoulder. Dax hovered behind O’Brien’s right side. The captain stroked his wiry goatee once and said, “Are the memory banks intact?”

O’Brien started to chortle, then caught himself. “Well, they’re here,” he said. “Whether they work, who knows? I can’t even power them up with the parts we have on hand.”

Dax asked, “How long will it take to make an adapter?”

“Just for power?” O’Brien said. “Three hours, maybe four. I’d have to do some research to make it work with our EPS grid.” He turned away from the Gordian knot of electronics to face Dax and Sisko. “Getting at its data’s gonna be the real challenge. Nobody’s worked with a core like this in over a century.”

“Give me a number, Chief,” Sisko said. “How long?”

O’Brien shrugged. “A couple days, at l…