While Starfleet is getting their backsides beaten in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, the USS Aventine, captain by Ezri Dax, is exploring a crashed starship in the Gamma Quadrant. Ezri was the ship's third officer when the Borg invasion began. Aventine lost its captain and commander in their first battle with the Borg. Ezri took command and received a battlefield commission immediately thereafter. The crashed starship, USS Columbia NX-02 which went missing during the Romulan War, was discovered by Jadzia Dax in the days after the events at Gaia in "Children of Time". There are no remains from the crew aboard but it was put on autopilot before it crashed. Dax's hope is that discovering how Columbia traveled from the Beta to the Gama Quadrant will tell Starfleet how the Borg are arriving from the Delta Quadrant.
The events of Columbia's past are interspersed throughout the larger story taking place in the 24th century. The ship was critically damaged in a Romulan ambush in 2156 and lost both warp drive and subspace communications. With no hope of repairs and a near zero chance of being discovered and rescued, Captain Erika Hernandez cranked Columbia's impulse engine way past its safeties, accelerating to near light speed in order to reach a (relatively) nearby planet that might be able to help them. The time dilation means that Columbia will reach the planet in roughly 60 days while 12 years pass for everyone else. So two months later Columbia, in the objective year 2168, encounters a high (very high) tech civilization called the Caeliar. Unfortunately the Caeliar value their privacy. The will not, however, take life or through inaction allow life to be taken. So instead of harming the crew, the Caeliar refuse to repair the ship or let it its crew leave.In the 24th century, USS Titan is warping through uncharted space, too far from the Federation to get back in time to help against the Borg. In the course of their flight they detect energy signatures from an approaching system that connect to other points in the galaxy including inside Federation space. Suspecting this could be connected to the Borg, Titan changes course.
Meanwhile, on the front line, Enterprise is putting out Borg brush fires where it can. With the planet Ramatis wiped out, the ship races to Korvat hoping to destroy an anticipated cube before it attacks. They arrive too late, destroying the Borg ship after it's laid waste to the planet. Simultaneous Borg attacks happen at Starbases 234, 343, 157, and the planet Khitomer. Starbases 157 and 234 are destroyed with Admiral Owen Paris among the casualties. Starbase 343 is saved by the USS Excalibur. The USS Ranger makes a suicide run on the Borg cube at Khitomer, saving the Klingon colony when their own fleet had not arrived.
After studying debris from the cube at Korvat, the Enterprise determines that it passed through the Azure Nebula, the remnant of a star that went supernova 200 years earlier and is located at the "tri border" where Federation, Romulan, and Kilingon space meet. Enterprise sets course.Returning to the 22nd century, Columbia's crew have been "guests" of the Caeliar for months with Captain Erika Hernandez, several officers, and several MACOs trapped on the surface of their planet. The Caeliar have been putting all their energy toward "the great work", a search throughout the known universe for a civilization more advanced than them. The same day they make contact most of the Columbia personnel go rogue in an effort to return to their ship, escape the Caeliar homeworld, and go back in time twelve years to when they were ambushed. This goes horribly wrong. At the same time the Columbia crewmembers sabotage the Caeliar technology, an apparently malicious feedback is sent from the civilization they contacted. The feedback causes an overload in the Caeliar's power generating technology that will destroy both their planet and its sun. Columbia tries to leave orbit through the temporal subspace passage but its instability vaporizes the crew. Caeliar cities attempt to flee into their own passages, but the tampering done by the Columbia crew has rendered them all unstable. With the exception of the two cities with humans in them, every Caeliar city is destroyed with their planet. The remaining two cities, forced into action to safeguard the humans' lives, brave the unstable passages, each one traveling to different points in space and time. The city with Erika on it arrives deeper in the Beta Quadrant and over 600 years in the past. The other city arrives very near a planet and promptly crashes before the remaining Columbia crew members are told how far in the past they traveled.
Still in orbit of the planet Columbia crashed on, Aventine has determined there was a passage between this system and the Azure Nebula. During their investigation an unknown alien presence boards the ship, kills some crewmembers, and steals a runabout. The runabout accesses the subspace passage, and the Aventine follows. Both ships arrive in the Azure Nebula. Ezri beams to the runabout and finds a dying alien who identifies himself as Caeliar. Seconds later Aventine receives a distress call from Enterprise en route to the nebula.
Meanwhile, farther into the Beta Quadrant, Titan discovers a planet hidden inside a small Dyson Sphere. Arriving on the planet via shuttle craft, Titan's first officer Christine Vale and her landing party meet a number of Caeliar and Columbia CO Erika Hernandez.
Resistance is Futile
The Borg really are a mess, aren't they? The first part of Destiny--the whole trilogy, really--is best if you don't think too critically about them. The Borg's ability to adapt almost instantly is reminiscent of their first appearances in "Q Who?" and "The Best of Both Worlds"--back when they were scary and long before Voyager made them vulnerable to just about everything. The question of why the Borg never bothered to send multiple ships to assimilate Earth and the Federation is a topic best left unconsidered. After all, if they had sent this many near-indestructible cubes (so, not the Voyager models) to assimilate the Federation, they wouldn't have had to send this many cubes to annihilate the Federation.
Using the Borg as a force-of-nature deck-clearing villain does have its advantages, though. The most obvious is that no time really needs to be spent providing some kind of viewpoint and rationale for the bad guy. Of even greater benefit, though, is how the Borg tie into Picard.
The Borg-Picard connection makes the war more personal than inventing some named characters to represent the enemies or retconning some kind of prior connection that was never spoken of before. By this point Picard has been dealing with the Borg for almost 20 years, and it's a wound that has never healed (in fact, thanks to the events of the recent Next Generation book Resistance, it has gotten worse), so exploring that trauma doesn't require loads of backstory. In a lot of ways that ongoing trauma turns a galaxy spanning war story into something resembling a character drama.
If the character story was limited to just Picard and the Borg, though, this kind of war story could turn into a series of plot points stacking upon plot points until the book resembles an extra wordy outline. Gods of Night is actually littered with character beats: Dax's new role as a captain, Columbia's crew longing for home (and fearing for its safety), Picard's guilt over giving into his desire to have a child, Kadohata's connection to her family, and Riker and Troi's painful struggle to start a family.
And somehow, on top of all that, Mack manages to squeeze in some good old fashioned Star Trek exploration with Aventine's investigation of Columbia's wreck and Columbia's encounter with the Caeliar.
Gods of Night is an attention grabbing start to the Destiny trilogy and an excellent first step into what's going to be a long, exciting ride.
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