Star Trek: Voyager®: Full Circle

by Kirsten Beyer

  “Yes, sir,” Chakotay murmured.

  Montgomery wanted to inquire about his leave. He had to believe that after two months spent glorying in the beauty of the San Juan Islands, Chakotay would have found some of his old enthusiasm, or at the very least, a little perspective. It seemed clear enough that any such expectation had been foolish.

  “Are you aware that Starfleet has issued new orders for Voyager?”

  Chakotay’s gaze remained distantly fixed as he replied, “Commander Paris mentioned it.”

  “I wanted to extend your leave as long as possible, Captain, but duty often requires us to make compromises.”

  When Chakotay did not respond, Montgomery went on, “However, before we allow you to resume your former command, Starfleet is requesting that you undergo a psychological evaluation.”

  Montgomery had been dreading this disclosure. He had yet to meet anyone who didn’t find the prospect of such an evaluation offensive. Chakotay, however, betrayed nothing beyond a hint of resignation as he replied, “I’m sure I can handle whatever milk run Command has in mind for my crew.”

  “Damn it, Chakotay, I’m not talking about a routine assignment,” Montgomery fired back, surprising himself with the vehemence of his tone.

  Chakotay had the good sense to at least appear curious. Meeting Montgomery’s eyes, he said, “Then what are you talking about, Admiral?”

  Montgomery was actually surprised Chakotay didn’t know. He assumed at the very least that Commander Paris would have let something slip to his old friend and captain, despite the fact that he had been ordered to keep the mission’s specs classified. It was strange to think that of the two of them, Tom Paris was living up to his Starfleet oath while Chakotay seemed ready to toss his out the nearest airlock.

  I would never have seen that one coming, Montgomery thought ruefully.

  “Once you have completed what I am hoping will be the formality of your evaluation, I will brief you in detail on your new mission,” Montgomery finally responded.

  “Can you at least tell me why I’ve been singled out for the distinguished honor of this evaluation?” Chakotay asked without a trace of mirth.

  “In reviewing your record, a number of incidents in the past year have called your judgment into question,” Montgomery replied as dispassionately as possible. “I’m certain that after walking our evaluator through your thought process, it will be clear that your actions were warranted or, at the very least, defensible.”

  Dark fire began to burn behind Chakotay’s eyes. It was almost a relief to see that something could still touch the man, even if it was only anger.

  “Once you’re done, I’m sure you’ll be cleared for duty,” Montgomery added, attempting to convey his strenuous hope that this would, in fact, be the case.

  “And if I refuse?” Chakotay asked.

  “You will be reassigned.”

  Montgomery didn’t know what he would have been thinking or feeling in Chakotay’s place, but he didn’t think it would include the serious consideration of refusing a Starfleet directive…which was exactly what Chakotay appeared to be doing.

  Does he even care if he loses his ship?

  Finally the embers lost the fierceness of their glow, and Chakotay lifted his eyes from Montgomery’s and fixed them once again on the distance beyond him.

  “Then let’s get this over with, sir,” he said coldly.

  Annika.

  Seven of Nine refused to answer. Usually, if she ignored the voice, it would eventually subside.

  You are Annika.

  Of course Seven knew this. Prior to her assimilation by the Borg at the age of eight, she had been the human girl Annika Hansen. Beyond acknowledging this simple fact, she did not yet understand what the voice required of her. She found its unfamiliar presence disturbing, but refused to yield to her fear that if she did not find a way to satisfy the voice, it might never go away.

  The voice had been the first thing she’d been aware of once the painful and terrifying process of what she could only think of as “transformation” had occurred. One moment she had been a human woman, sustained by the existence of several Borg implants, who still thought of herself more often than not as Borg. The next, she had felt fire consuming her body. Her mind, which had been a comforting, solitary place for years, had once again been momentarily linked with billions of others, many of whom, like her, were crying out in anguish, confusion, and horror, followed swiftly by an overwhelming, cleansing joy that bordered on ecstasy.

  When the transformation was complete, Seven had once again found herself alone in her mind. The Borg implants that had kept her body’s systems functioning properly since her severing from the Collective had quite literally dissolved and been replaced by something else, something utterly indistinguishable from flesh and bone, yet she was miraculously still alive.

  And the maddening, patient, gentle, totally unnerving voice had begun its constant mantra: You are Annika Hansen.

  The Enterprise, Titan, and Aventine had witnessed the liberation of the Borg by the Caeliar. But Seven knew long before their reports had begun to trickle into the Palais de la Concorde, the office of the Federation President, that the Borg and the multiple threats they had posed to the Federation were absolutely and irrevocably gone. The Caeliar, an incredibly advanced and xenophobic species, had unwittingly spawned the Borg and in an extraordinary act of compassion had welcomed their aberrant children home, folding them into the Caeliar gestalt where each individual retained their unique identity while still being part of the Caeliar collective.

  In many ways, it was the perfection that the Borg had relentlessly sought. The Caeliar had long ago mastered the omega molecule and harnessed its power. Their technological prowess far outstripped any other sentient species the Borg or the Federation had encountered, short of the Q. For the briefest moment, Seven had sensed—no, she had actually been one with—the new gestalt, and had glimpsed perfection, along with the combined relief of billions of minds freed from the oppression and insatiable hunger of the Borg.

  Had Seven possessed a spiritual context in which to frame the experience, she might have considered it sacred, perhaps even holy.

  As it was, she could only describe the moment as intensely powerful, transcendent, and mysterious. The moment had been fleeting for her, and once the transformation was complete, Seven had been left outside the bounds of this glorious new existence. Having tasted perfection and known briefly the answers to the questions that had driven her as a drone, and having it all ripped away, was now a source of constant and unutterable pain.

  Most days, the only thing separating her from complete despair was the pressing needs of those around her. Despite their salvation at the hands of the Caeliar, the Borg had practically destroyed the Federation. All able hands had been immediately called to constant duty, and once Starfleet Medical had determined that Seven had survived the transformation relatively unscathed, she was no exception. Her days were divided now between lengthy meetings and debriefings, her course work as an instructor at the Academy, and her responsibility to her aunt, Irene Hansen.

  “Annika.”

  Seven tore her gaze from the view of the San Francisco Bay afforded from the hillside of Federation Park to see her aunt gesturing her forward imperiously.

  Irene had called her Annika from the moment they had been reunited on Earth three years earlier. This had become cause for confusion only in the last several weeks.

  Her aunt stood at the base of the white pillar that had been erected to honor Kathryn Janeway. Seven walked dutifully forward, forbearing to let her eyes linger for long on the gleaming monument. Apart from her many duties, the only other sustaining force in her life was a sense of self-righteous anger, and this feeling was only intensified when she looked at Kathryn’s memorial.

  When Seven reached her side, Irene grasped her hand, which still felt naked without the implants that had once surrounded it. Irene’s grip was unnecessarily tight, but Seven had become accu
stomed to it.

  “Who the hell is Kathryn Janeway?” Irene demanded.

  Seven bowed her head for a few seconds to compose herself before replying as patiently as possible, “Kathryn Janeway was a Federation officer, the Starship Voyager’s captain, and the individual responsible for freeing me from the Borg collective.”

  “The what collective?” Irene asked.

  “The Borg,” Seven answered.

  It had been like this for eighteen months.

  Seven had never heard of Irumodic Syndrome, an incurable neurological disorder that caused irreversible deterioration of multiple synaptic pathways in the human brain, until her aunt had been diagnosed with it. The disorder’s most prevalent symptoms were temporary loss of memory, confusion, disorientation, and as it progressed, delusions. Ultimately it would prove fatal, but the Federation’s best medical minds were unable to give her any real sense of when her aunt would succumb to its ravages. In the interim, regular injections of peridaxon, which Seven administered, usually calmed the worst of the symptoms, leaving Irene in relative comfort and usually remembering who her niece was and how it was that she had come to share a townhouse with her in San Francisco. Shortly after her diagnosis, Seven had been forced to relocate her aunt to her residence near the Academy in order to provide better care for her only living blood relative.

  From time to time, the Doctor would come from his current project at Jupiter Station to check in on Seven and her aunt. These visits were usually brief. The Doctor always assured her that their old friends at the Institute continued to work diligently on her behalf to develop a cure for the syndrome. Despite their brilliance, Seven doubted they would find a cure in time to save Irene. She tried not to resent the fact that her staunchest companion, the Doctor, was also engaged in his own pursuits and therefore unavailable to focus his efforts entirely on relieving her of at least this much of her current agony. He offered his sympathy, but often as not such sentiments seemed irrelevant and did little to ease her suffering or Irene’s.

  Irene had good days and bad days. She had been enjoying a string of good ones when it had occurred to her that she had never formally paid her respects to Seven’s beloved friend Kathryn Janeway. Irene had been hospitalized briefly at the time of Kathryn’s memorial and hadn’t remembered for days after returning home that Seven had just lost one of those dearest to her. She had insisted this morning on venturing out to Federation Park, and Seven had chosen to oblige her. It seemed clear that now her recent lucidity had been cut mercilessly short.

  “We should return home for lunch,” Seven suggested to Irene.

  “I am hungry,” Irene conceded.

  Seven tugged gently at her aunt’s hand to pull her away from the monument toward the park’s exit. Irene turned her head back briefly to the base of the pillar, then, opening her eyes in alarm, said, “Kathryn Janeway died?”

  “Yes,” Seven replied.

  “Annika, I’m so sorry,” Irene said, her voice filling with concern. “What happened?”

  Seven had told this story so many times in the last year that she simply couldn’t bear to do it again.

  “She was killed in the line of duty, Aunt Irene. It is common for those who serve in Starfleet.”

  “Yes, but she was such a good woman, and she loved you so,” Irene went on. “You must miss her terribly.”

  Until the days following the Borg transformation, this had been the simple truth. Seven had missed Kathryn—her company, her insight, even her tendency to mother Seven when she least desired it. Their relationship had always been complicated, but once Kathryn had died, Seven found it harder and harder to think about those traits that sometimes smothered and irritated her. Instead, she had found herself focusing on Kathryn’s simpler, kinder gestures—the way she had allowed young Naomi Wildman to become her “captain’s assistant” on Voyager, the way she had encouraged Seven to bond with and nurture the drone One, the faith she had placed in Seven time and again when her abilities were doubted by others or her motives called into question; and most often, the handful of times the Borg had been determined to recapture Seven and Kathryn had risked her life and the lives of everyone aboard Voyager to deny them.

  However, since the transformation even these comforting and affirming memories had become a minefield. The first time she had gazed upon the tall white pillar, Seven had felt a mixture of shock and pain. Paralyzing bouts of sadness would come later, followed by a hollow numbness. Now as she looked again at the symbol of Kathryn’s life, she felt only anger.

  Janeway could not be faulted for her inability to know the future. In severing Seven from the Collective, she had done what she always did, what she thought best under the circumstances, and she had never abandoned Seven during the tumultuous years that followed as Seven struggled to adapt to her new existence.

  But Seven could not dismiss the feeling that had Janeway not interfered, the pain and confusion that were now a part of Seven’s life would never have troubled her. She would either have died or would now be a part of the Caeliar. She would now know perfection, a state she was confident that, as a human, she would never approach.

  But most of all, she would not be plagued constantly by the voice, and the knowledge of what might have been. Nor would she have to wonder why she had been left behind.

  The day Seven had awakened in Voyager’s medical bay and learned that Janeway had severed her from the Borg, Seven would have killed the captain with her bare hands. Several days of painful debate had followed as Janeway had insisted that she knew better than Seven how much she would come to treasure and be defined by the individuality that had been her birthright and that was now restored to her. Seven wondered what Janeway, if she were still alive, would make of Seven’s current predicament. Seven would have liked to rage at her again, as she had in those early days. That alone might have dispelled some of the anger that now gripped her.

  Seven had lost too much in too short a time. Those that she might have turned to for help were all so mired in their own struggles that none of them even questioned how she was coping. Seven did not blame them, but she did miss them.

  But for better and worse, Janeway’s loss was cruelest of all.

  “Annika?” Irene asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Does Chakotay know what happened to Kathryn? Is he all right?”

  Seven swallowed yet another bitter truth.

  “He knows, but I cannot tell you how he is coping with the loss. He and I have not spoken for several months.”

  “I’m so sorry, Annika.”

  You are Annika.

  “Do not trouble yourself,” Seven replied. “I will adapt.”

  “Can we go home now?” Irene asked wearily.

  “This way.” Seven nodded, gesturing toward the treelined path that led to the park’s western gate.

  You are Annika.

  I was Annika. I am now Seven of Nine, she insisted.

  Seven would placate her aunt for as long as necessary. But she refused to accept the will of the voice, which seemed determined to take from her the only thing she could still call her own: the strength and the wisdom and the vast knowledge she had attained as a Borg drone. Even Janeway had known better than to insist that Seven’s abilities were irrelevant because they had been gifts of a force for great evil.

  The harm Janeway had done to Seven now seemed to far outweigh the good; at least Seven could grant her this much and draw a modicum of resilience from it.

  I will never be Annika again, not for you or anyone.

  Seven only wished desperately to know whom she was trying to convince.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The room in which Montgomery instructed Chakotay to wait was a monotony of white walls, a white paneled ceiling, and a white floor broken only by a small silver table and two identical metal chairs.

  It’s like a damned interrogation chamber.

  Which in one sense, Chakotay supposed, it was. In another, it was almost comforting. Starfleet c
ounselors were trained to put their patients at ease. Usually their offices were inviting spaces in terms of design, colored in soft earthtones. The furnishings tended to be softer than Chakotay preferred, designed to force one to relax. Had he found himself in such a room at this moment, he would have been hard pressed not to vomit. The captain could no longer abide pretty lies. At least Montgomery had done him the courtesy of not pretending that this evaluation was routine. Chakotay’s career with Starfleet and his command of Voyager were hanging in the balance.

  All that remained was for Chakotay to determine whether or not he cared, and he definitely preferred the prospect of confronting that decision in a cold, hard room.

  Right up to the moment when the room’s only door swished open and Counselor Hugh Cambridge entered.

  Chakotay was on his feet before it dawned on him that, for the moment, he still outranked the counselor.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Cambridge said neutrally.

  “Counselor.” Chakotay nodded.

  Despite the thready rhythm his heart had begun to disseminate throughout his body, Chakotay tensed his legs, forcing stillness upon them. There was simply no way that Starfleet had assigned his counselor to evaluate his command abilities. The only explanation for Cambridge’s presence had to be that he was sent in advance to prepare Chakotay, or perhaps provide a familiar face to put him at ease.

  Even in that regard, Cambridge was the poorest choice imaginable. Chakotay had disliked the man from the moment they had met, and though Cambridge’s abilities had earned him a certain amount of respect, Chakotay had never warmed to him. He had learned to tolerate and occasionally make use of him, nothing more. What had always amazed him was that Cambridge never seemed bothered by his captain’s feelings. He had never requested transfer from Voyager, and Chakotay had been hard pressed to make the case that beyond his personal feelings, Cambridge was in any way unfit for his duties.

  Clearly unruffled by Chakotay’s stern gaze, Cambridge moved to take a seat across the table. He had a way of sitting, his long legs crossed at the knees, his back resting comfortably and his hands clasped in his lap, which always gave the impression that he was relaxed and in complete control.