This alone would have been enough to unsettle her. But there was further reason: she had noted the powerfulness of his build and the fact that his fierce profile could, even by Vulcan terms, be considered handsome.
She did not approve of her own reaction. She lifted her chin, realizing that the gesture might be read as defiant but unable to prevent it in time. “I did what I deemed logical.” She kept her tone cool.
“I saw no logic in it,” Worf countered. “I saw loyalty and kindness.”
T’Lana did not answer because she knew of nothing appropriate to say. She stared steadily at the seam in the lift doors and told herself that she felt no emotion: no longing and no outrage.
They rode in silence to the bridge.
• • •
In sickbay, Beverly Crusher glanced up from her work at the glowing legends on an overhead console. One steadily moving line in a graph, accompanied by numerical data below, represented Jean-Luc’s brain activity; a green blip nearby indicated that the neutralizer chip was working properly. The blip was accompanied by a softly pulsing chirp, so that she need not monitor it visually, but she found it increasingly difficult to tear her gaze away.
She knew it should take the captain less than an hour to accomplish what he needed to do; ideally, it should take him a matter of minutes. Even so, she did not care to spend a single moment waiting anxiously, which she would certainly do if she did not find a way to occupy herself. It was hard enough just to blot out the image of Jean-Luc as Locutus, to intentionally disremember the nightmare of the first moment she had stood on the Enterprise bridge and seen Locutus on the viewscreen — of the first moment she had looked into Locutus’s eyes and seen that Jean-Luc wasn’t there anymore.
It had been hard enough to walk beside him to the transporter room in his guise as Borg; she had kept reassuring herself by looking into his eyes and verifying that the man she knew and loved was still there. But he had moved with a stiff, inhumanly mechanical gait, and each time he had spoken, the sound chilled her: the inflection belonged to Locutus, not the captain.
It was difficult to remember, too, the rage that had consumed him when the Borg had invaded the Enterprise–E. When he had first confessed that he heard the voice of the Collective, she had wondered whether that rage — so mindless, so fierce that he had been willing to sacrifice everything, including his crew, his sanity — had been rekindled. But to her relief, he had remained relentlessly rational. He could not bear the loss of even four officers, and when he asked that she re-create Locutus, she had hardly questioned the decision. But now, sitting alone in her sickbay, watching the effects of that decision play out over a graph of colored lights and numbers, she allowed herself to acknowledge what she had done.
T’Lana had certainly hit a nerve earlier. Beverly wondered herself if she had made her decision based on the emotions of a lover over the objections of a doctor, just not in the way T’Lana had thought. Logically, Beverly knew that her reaction to the captain’s plan would have been the same prior to their admitting their feelings for each other. It would have been the same for anyone in her charge. That wasn’t at issue. Neither was the question of whether she was blindly agreeing with a lover, as T’Lana had seemed to imply. Beverly knew she was a strong enough person that she would not lose herself just because she was seeing someone. But that was tied into her confusion now.
Beverly did wonder why she had not put up more of an argument. The only explanation she had was that she was trying not to look like the worried lover. If she debated Jean-Luc more on the issue, would she have come across as the chief medical officer or as his partner? Now she’d never know, because she hadn’t allowed herself the question at the time. She hadn’t given anyone — but most of all herself — the chance to wonder if she had stopped the captain, would it have been out of concern for his importance to the ship or his importance to her? Had she given in because she didn’t want to come across as unprofessional? Her gut instinct told her that wasn’t the case. She and Jean-Luc had been close long before they ever got together. But at the same time, the perception that her decisions might be based in emotion rather than logic was now there. T’Lana had proved that. Beverly knew that she was, above all else, chief medical officer, but it was the perception she was battling — largely with herself.
She was not feeling particularly logical at the moment. She had, for the most fleeting of instants, allowed herself to consider the possibility that the worst might happen. That the Borg . . .
She pulled herself up short. She had the proof in front of her in the blinking green light: Jean-Luc’s neutralizer was functioning perfectly. And Worf and Geordi were monitoring the captain’s physical movements aboard the Borg vessel; if anything went wrong, they would notify her immediately. The worst would not happen. Even if it did, there were solutions. There were always solutions.
And, she had decided, the best way for her to remedy her anxiety was to work on finding one of them. With luck, it would never be needed, but would be added to the scanty volume of research on the Borg.
Beverly forced her attention to the monitor in front of her. It displayed a rotating model of a double helix: the DNA molecule from a Borg drone. How was an androgynous drone linked to the group consciousness transformed into an individuated female capable of independent thought?
She fingered a toggle and brought up the information they had on the Borg queen. For a long moment, she stared at it. The composition of the queen’s flesh and blood did not differ from that of a drone’s in any significant way, and the structure of her DNA differed not at all — the fully assimilated Borg lacked the X and Y chromosomes that produced males and females in most humanoid species. In terms of the queen’s body chemistry, there was a slight amount of a hormonal compound that paralleled a human female’s estrogen, but the question was, what initiated the process that brought about the transformation? What caused the hormone to appear in the first place? Was it something buried in the DNA?
“No difference,” Beverly whispered to herself. No difference in the DNA. A slight difference in the blood, unaccounted for by a transformation in bodily organs, which might supply the estrogenlike hormone. So what caused the difference between the queen and the drones?
There was the difference in appearance, for one. Feminine features. The lips flushed with color, the skin not quite so pale, and . . .
Beverly hesitated and frowned. She pressed a control and enlarged an image of the queen that had long ago been imprinted by Data’s positronic brain.
The queen’s skin glistened. Jean-Luc had told her, long ago, of the revulsion he had felt at the Queen’s touch. It had been damp, sticky . . . coated with some sort of viscous semiliquid compound.
Beverly drew in a breath, then pushed another control and enlarged the image still further.
“Royal jelly,” she said in a tone of wonder. It was the compound secreted by the pharyngeal glands of worker bees, fed to all bee larvae. But one special larva received only royal jelly — and this exclusive diet produced a queen for the colony.
Could this nutrient trigger the development of the hormone? Or might the nutrient itself be broken down into the hormone in the bloodstream?
Beverly could not help glancing up at the blinking green light — showing that Jean-Luc’s neutralizer chip was still working — before putting the computer to work on the answer.
• • •
As he sat in the captain’s chair with T’Lana beside him, Worf studied the image of the Borg cube on the main viewscreen. Like all the others on the bridge, he was unable to tear his gaze from it for very long — as if by staring at it hard enough he might be able to see where Captain Picard was and what he was doing.
Geordi La Forge, of course, knew better than all of them. He stood at the engineering console behind Worf, monitoring the readout that tracked the captain’s position aboard the Borg vessel. The Klingon had instructed him to alert them if the captain veered off course or stalled in his progress to the que
en’s chamber. In the Enterprise transporter chamber, an operator was ready to beam the captain aboard at the first sign of trouble.
At that moment, Worf was also thinking of the past: of the moment he and Captain Picard had stood, in magnetized boots, on the gleaming white outer hull of the Enterprise. It had been like standing on the curving surface of a small, dead moon against the dark backdrop of space. He and Picard had gone in order to stop the Borg from finishing work on a transmitter. More specifically, Worf was remembering the instant he had wrested himself free from an attacking Borg, only to glance up and find one about to kill the captain.
Worf had reacted smoothly, without hesitation or thought. He had blasted the drone into eternity with the epithet, Assimilate this. And he had watched with pleasure as the impact of the blast had caused the drone to lose its footing and go sailing backward into space, receding swiftly in the frictionless vacuum until it could no longer be seen.
He did not regret killing the Borg that day. If he had not, it would certainly have killed the captain, an act that might eventually have brought the Borg victory. But Worf regretted the attitude that had seized him, the sense of satisfaction and smug triumph at destroying an enemy.
Now he looked at Lieutenant Nave, stone faced and grief stricken, at the conn. She sat, rigid and stiff, in her chair, one hand clutching the console as if it were the only thing supporting her. Her eyes were wide and vacant, reminding Worf uncomfortably of how he had functioned after losing Jadzia. Clearly Nave had cared more for Lieutenant Battaglia than the Klingon had realized.
He stared at the Borg cube and thought of the four crew members who had recently been lost to the Borg. He thought, too, of the captain and the enormous sacrifice he was making — embracing the specter of Locutus again, going alone onto the Borg vessel. He had seen the bitterness in the captain’s eyes. It was one thing for one’s body to be vanquished by a foe, but to allow one’s mind and spirit to be degraded was unthinkable. Yet such extreme situations called for personal sacrifice.
Worf knew that if he had to face the enemy again, he would kill without question, so long as it was necessary. But this time, he would take no pleasure in killing, find no sense of victory or pleasure. This time, he would remember that behind each Borg was an assimilated — and tormented — individual who yearned to be freed, one like Captain Picard or Lieutenant Battaglia. And he indulged in a most un–Klingon-like thought: Would it not be better to be cautious, to avoid killing, to save as many Borg as possible with the thought of rehabilitating them?
Worf released a sigh. His life with humans, especially his marriage to Jadzia, had softened him greatly. And perhaps — just perhaps — the presence of the Vulcan counselor was influencing him, too.
He shot her a sidewise look. Poised and impassive, she sat beside him, her blue-black hair and brows contrasting starkly with her pale skin, her dark blue eyes fixed steadily on the image of the Borg cube. Unlike the others on the bridge, however, she showed no hint of turmoil or revulsion. Admirable, Worf thought, to be so cool and efficient under such pressure. Were they not averse to fighting, Vulcans would make greatly effective warriors.
Jadzia, he decided, would have liked her.
T’Lana’s lashes flickered. She had detected his gaze; her expression hardened very faintly as she looked back at the viewscreen. He could not know the truth at that moment: that she was looking at the Borg ship and remembering what she had told Captain Wozniak about the Jem’Hadar.
In their case, diplomacy fails. They are mindless creatures whose sole focus is killing. They cannot be reasoned with.
Worf forced his gaze and his thoughts away from her, and stared back at the Borg cube. He hoped that he would not have to test his newfound resolution not to kill the Borg unnecessarily; he hoped for the captain’s swift success.
But he had learned, when Jadzia had died, that hope was sometimes thwarted and that the very worst was indeed capable of happening.
• • •
At the helm, Sara Nave was holding on.
She was staring out at the Borg ship trying to focus on her duty, on her ability to react swiftly the instant she was needed, just as she had forced herself, after her parents died, to focus on her finals at the academy. The problem was that this time there was nothing to study, nothing to learn, nothing to distract her. She had nothing to do other than sit and wait . . . which made it extremely difficult not to imagine what was occurring there, on the ship in front of her eyes.
Holding on, her father had called it. When things were so impossible that all you could do was keep breathing, keep taking that next step, keep going until finally you were somewhere else, where things weren’t so terrible.
Her dad’s mother had died long ago, in a skimmer accident, when Sara was still a girl. He had just gotten the news and was still dazed when she had hugged him, crying, and asked him how he was.
Holding on, he had said dully, no doubt feeling the same emptiness, the same disbelief, the same helpless anger Nave felt now.
Duty was her only link to sanity at the moment. Without it, she would have to think about Lio and what was happening to him aboard the Borg vessel this very instant.
Assimilate. Such an innocuous-sounding word for such an unspeakably monstrous act. If he had simply been killed, it would have been awful enough. She had assumed that his broken body was transported to sickbay. When she found out that Lio was still out there, she was temporarily awash with joy and hope, until she realized that he was being forced to suffer a far worse violation.
Despite her efforts to suppress it, Lio’s voice spoke unbidden in her mind. But it wasn’t really Joel. They’d taken him, changed him, defiled his body with these, these weapons and cybernetic attachments to his head, his eyes, his arms. He was no longer human . . . And the worst part was . . . I couldn’t destroy the monster they’d made of him . . .
When her parents had been killed, Nave had not remembered the names of the two warring planets; she had not wanted to know which side was responsible for the destruction of the Lowe. In her mind, her parents’ deaths were a faultless tragedy. She had been too stunned to think about blame.
Now it took near-impossible effort not to think of the Borg, not to be filled with venom at the sight of their ship, at the utterance of their name.
When Commander Worf had told her that there would be no second away team — that Captain Picard would be going alone onto the Borg vessel — Nave had been frustrated beyond tears.
There were only two things she desperately wanted. The first was to go onto the Borg ship and rescue Lio. Even though he had not been there to hear, she had promised him, standing in his quarters, that she would go to the Borg vessel and find him and bring him home. And she did not intend to break that promise.
The second thing she wanted was to go onto the enemy ship and kill as many of the Borg as she could find. She did not want rehabilitation for them, or even justice. She wanted vengeance and blood.
• • •
The queen was beautiful and grotesque.
“You,” Picard breathed, so quietly he could scarcely hear the word himself. He knew the face all too well: distinctly feminine, high cheeked, ageless, elegant.
It was the face of the queen who had desired and pursued Locutus; it was the face of the queen Picard had fought, in Earth’s past, and killed with his own hands. Here she was reborn, her features in easy repose, her eyelids shut as though she were sleeping, trapped in a deep and vaguely pleasant dream.
We were very close, you and I. You can still hear our song.
But her voice was silent now. She was no more than a bust: a lifeless head and shoulders. They sat atop an exposed snakelike spine fashioned of bone and steel and blood. The whole of it, from the queen’s neck down, was enveloped by a translucent, glistening cocoon . . . nutrients, Locutus knew. The nectar allowed only the queen.
But her sculpted body, of dully gleaming black metal, awaited her nearby, tended by two dead-eyed, ghostly drones. The
body stood in a gruesomely alert fashion, legs and arms animate and slightly twitching, almost as if impatient for the absent head to come and rest upon its shoulders.
Picard moved over the threshold into the chamber and was relieved that neither drone glanced up from its task.
He had allowed himself an instant’s reaction to the queen’s familiar face, but now he was determined to waste no more time. He stepped cautiously toward the bed where she rested. So great was Picard’s loathing that Locutus’s impassive features began to contort from the emotion.
He kept his prosthetic arm — the arm the Borg had, ironically, given him so long ago — lowered by his side. He did not intend to strike until the last instant, when he stood directly beside her. He did not want to give the drones enough time to understand what was happening, to move in to protect her.
He stared down at her throat, its delicate veins throbbing with the first signs of life beneath a layer of glistening gel. One quick stroke, and that life would be snuffed out and the universe safe. He moved in, so close to her that his thigh brushed against the edge of the bed on which she lay. With a single thought, he activated the neural circuits that controlled the prosthetic arm and lifted it. The deadly blade at its tip, where a human hand had once been, began to whir.
He bent down.
As he did, her eyes opened, stark and wide, quicksilver, with no iris, no pupil. Yet she saw. In less than an instant, she saw — as if she had always known he was coming, as if she had been biding her time in order to startle him — and she shrieked, beauty transformed into a gorgon’s rictus.
The cry roared through the Collective, so powerful and shrill and outraged that it blotted out every other sound, every thought. Picard closed his eyes at a mental pain so intense he feared his skull would shatter. It was so much worse than the sound that had come over the Enterprise’s comlink earlier. He staggered, only an agonized burst of will keeping him on his feet. Miraculously, he opened his eyes again, steadied his arm, tried to bring the whirring blade down to meet the tender skin of that feminine throat.
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