“No, Admiral. I am familiar with the collective, and this experience was unique. Where the Borg are driven by the need to assimilate individuals and have them work for the continued growth of the group, the Totality is not driven by anything except its own immediate existence. It has no goals, no purpose, only awareness.”
Janeway struggled to raise a hand to rub at her temples. “I thought their goal was to bring us into the fold.”
“That is correct,” Spock agreed. “But not for the sake of conquering us, not for obtaining our resources, but merely because… they feel sorry for us.”
Janeway stared at Spock, baffled.
“Admiral,” Kirk said, taking pity on her, “what it all comes down to, what it’s always been about since the first time I encountered Norinda, is that the Totality only wants to help us.”
Janeway looked to Picard and to Riker. “You both go along with this?”
Kirk wasn’t surprised to see that his fellow captains were uncomfortable accepting his summation.
“Whatever the Totality is,” Picard said, clearly choosing his words carefully, “it’s a life-form that we’ve never encountered. One that inhabits a realm our minds never evolved to comprehend. I don’t think it’s critical what their motives are, however accurately or imperfectly we understand them.” He glanced at Kirk as if offering an apology. “What is critical is putting an end to what they’ve done to us.
“Spock has given us a way to drive them off our ships and enable us to travel at warp again. And Jim has a database of information collected by the first Starfleet vessel to encounter the Totality as it traveled from Andromeda to our galaxy.”
Janeway looked back at Kirk, now thoroughly confused. “Which vessel?”
“The Monitor.” His hand and arm trembling from the effort, Kirk drew Marinta’s copper-colored message player from his jacket. “This is their last transmission. I believe it contains information that’ll enable us not only to resist the Totality, but to fight back.”
Janeway pursed her lips in satisfaction. “So you do admit that we’re in a war?”
“We are,” Kirk said. “But they’re not.” He knew how Janeway would react to what he was going to say next, but that didn’t stop him. “You see, the whole reason they’re reaching out to us, attempting to communicate instead of just overwhelming us, is that the Totality loves us.”
As Kirk expected, Janeway didn’t appear to believe a word of what he had said. If she’d been capable of rising from her chair to mock him, he suspected she’d have done so.
“How do you propose we fight ‘love,’ Captain?”
Kirk said nothing, but tightened his hold on the message player, hoping the answer was somewhere in its contents.
Because right now, he had no answer for the admiral.
And he knew that, until he did have that answer, he would never see his son again.
26
S.S. BELLE REVE, MERCURY
STARDATE 58569.2
When it had to, Starfleet moved quickly.
The provisional Starfleet Command agreed with Kirk’s reasoning and did not transmit any information concerning the Totality’s newly discovered weakness. The presumption was that every Starfleet vessel had at least one agent of the Totality on board as a spy, so Command would do nothing to warn them of what was to come.
Instead, just as in the days of Cochrane and the first great wave of human exploration, decades before the discovery of subspace radio, word went out by messenger.
One by one, starship commanders stationed in Earth’s home system were visited by three representatives from Command and given verbal orders. One by one, the commanders issued orders for their crews to brace for increased gravity. By the dozens, crew on each vessel broke into black cubes and sand as the gravity load reached four hundred percent Earth normal.
On the ships that had been cleared of Totality projections, warp cores were brought back online, and once again starships set off at factors far beyond the speed of light.
Their first objectives were those vessels stranded between the stars. Ships that had managed to shut down and retain their warp cores were told to increase their gravity, then resume their warp travel for Earth.
Those that had ejected their cores were also instructed to increase their gravity settings, then wait for a refit team from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. In the meantime, any urgent supply needs were noted, and any passengers with critical skills required for the fight against the Totality were allowed to transfer to warp vessels- Janeway’s holographic doctor among them, checking that key personnel were able to function adequately under the gravitational strain.
The Spock Defense, as it came to be called, spread out from Sector 001 at warp nine. Special diplomatic envoys carried the information to the Klingon and Romulan Empires.
But even as the Federation’s competitors were given help, one world of the Federation remained out-of- bounds.
Just as the Totality had first focused on the twin worlds of Romulus and Remus to establish a beachhead in this galaxy, another world appeared to have been chosen for their second attempt.
So it was decided to give the Totality one safe harbor to which they might withdraw. One planet on which they might feel protected. One planet that Starfleet could attack in force when the time came.
Thus, no Starfleet vessels traveled to Vulcan.
The strategy was cold, calculating, and endorsed by those senior Vulcan diplomats in Earth’s home system.
Spock had given Starfleet a strategy for exposing Totality spies and keeping Starfleet facilities free of infiltration.
Kirk had given Starfleet the Monitor transmission, and in its secrets Starfleet scientists and engineers were convinced they had found the secret to creating weapons to drive the Totality from Federation space, and then the galaxy.
Vulcan would be the first battleground and, if all worked as planned, the last.
All it would take was time.
And that was the one thing Kirk didn’t have.
Alone in his cabin, Kirk believed the only thing keeping him sane was the continual exposure to four gravities. Every movement required thought and planning. Exhaustion was a constant. The mere struggle to breathe and eat and make his plans with Spock, McCoy, and Scott left him little time for worry. Even less time for despair.
He was certain Norinda didn’t want to harm his son.
But her means and motives, her actions and goals, all seemed to shift over time, as if the Totality wasn’t constant.
That meant Joseph might be safe for now.
But he wouldn’t be safe forever.
Which was why, in less than twenty hours, the Belle Reve would set off for Vulcan with the newest weapon in Starfleet’s arsenal-a localized gravity projector.
A team of Starfleet engineers had created the device in less than a day, with Scott telling Kirk they’d done so simply by modifying two portable antigrav carriers to operate out of phase-the same technique Kirk had had Scott use to generate an artificial-gravity field outside the hull of the Belle Reve during its battle with the Enterprise. The significance of mismatching the phase of the antigravs was that doing so caused their gravitational distortions to manifest at a distance, instead of on the surface of their contact plates.
The science of the device had been known since Kirk first joined Starfleet. He still had fond memories of the
