Cohesion

  Moving very close to him, so close that Ziv could feel her warm breath on his cheek, Sem asked in a whisper, “I took something from you? And here I was thinking I gave you something.”

  “I did not want what you gave me,” Ziv hissed.

  “Then what is it you do want?”

  “I wish to be something I can never be again.”

  “And you think I could not arrange for you to be my shi-harat again?” Sem asked. “We could say your resignation was simply a mistake, a misunderstanding. Who would dare doubt me?”

  The desire to succumb, to agree to anything Sem asked, was overwhelming, but Ziv kept moving his eyes from Diro to Shet to Jara to Mol, then back again. “Leave,” he whispered, but even Ziv was not certain if he spoke to Sem or to his hara. No one moved for several seconds until, finally, Sem took a half-step away from him, sighing as her robes settled back into place.

  “Fine,” she said as she exited. “A wonderful time and place for you to develop some character, Ziv. What else will I find to do to amuse myself before the end?”

  Uncharacteristically, it was Mol who broke the silence after Sem left. “I’m sure,” he said softly, “that she will think of something.”

  * * *

  “You two were sent to help,” Kaytok said. “So what can you do? What were you doing to our scanners?”

  B’Elanna could hear the crackle of wood and felt the heat from a low fire on her knees, but did not smell smoke, so she assumed they had outfitted some kind of stove in one of the laboratories. The warmth was a comfort after the damp cold of the underground tank, and the rations from her kit had done a lot to bring her back to full consciousness. “We can’t do much now,” she said, picking at a bit of food wedged between her teeth. “Not until we can contact our ship and get these wounds healed. Just before the, uh, accident, we saw something in your scanners that might help us get back in touch with her.”

  “You mean the scanner that was severely damaged in the explosion you caused?” Kaytok asked. “Wonderful idea. Think of another one. Is there any way you could explain to us what you need?”

  “Possibly,” Seven said. “But we have a limited amount of time. Before the explosion, we learned that Voyager is trapped between two layers of subspace.”

  “We did?” B’Elanna asked.

  “I did,” Seven said. “It is the only explanation for the readings I saw.”

  B’Elanna resisted the urge to snarl. There was no point to arguing about data that she had not read. “All right. Then what’s their status?”

  “It is difficult to say,” Seven said. “Borg vessels trapped in similar circumstances were never imperiled for the short term. The danger comes if they attempt to escape. Fortunately, we should be able to contact them with subspace radio.”

  “Then speed is important, but there’s no way we can create the communication system we need from what’s here.”

  “What about your ship?” Kaytok asked. “Do you have what you need there?”

  “Yes,” Seven said. “Some of it would have to be adapted. Using materials from your shield experiments, we may be able to free them.”

  “Who said anything about shield experiments?” Pad asked, his voice sharply suspicious.

  “No one,” B’Elanna said. “But we saw the array on the roof and got a look at the equipment downstairs. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.” One question still nagged her, though. “But why are you out here in the middle of nowhere doing this work in a lab that looks like it was deserted months ago? Who are you hiding from?”

  Kaytok made a sound that the translator interpreted as a dry chuckle. “We’re not hiding,” he said. “We’re just not important enough that anyone would come look for us.”

  “That makes no sense,” Seven said. “You are attempting to save your people. Why would the authorities not care what you do?”

  “Because they’ve given up on saving everyone,” Pad said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “We knew that someone is building evacuation ships,” Seven said. “We encountered one on the way into the system.” She decided it was best not to reveal the fate of the transport. Someone in the room might have had a relative or friend on the doomed vessel.

  “And how many of those do you think the Emergency Council will be able to build?” Pad sneered. “Ten, maybe twenty if they’re incredibly lucky? How many people can they get off? One hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?”

  “So the council has no intention of removing your entire citizenry?” Seven asked.

  “Just the ones whom they consider necessary to survive on a new world: engineers, pharmacists, teachers, farmers, and, of course, capable administrators.”

  “Those are all reasonable choices,” Seven replied soberly. “Someone must make the decisions.”

  “Maybe,” Kaytok said. “But shouldn’t everyone get the chance to make their case? What about artists and writers? What about children who haven’t shown what they can do yet? And even if you don’t let everyone have a say, shouldn’t the council at least tell everyone what’s happening? Almost no one in the thirteen cities knows they’re likely going to die before another year has passed.”

  “A year?” B’Elanna asked. “How can you be so sure? And for that matter, how do you know all this when no one else does?”

  “We have sources inside the council,” Kaytok said. “Someone who was once part of our group went to work for the council. We trade information. That’s how we know that though most of the council disapproves of what we’re attempting to do, a couple members believe we should get a chance.” His voice suddenly dropped low in disappointment. “Unfortunately, our resources dried up a little while ago and we’ve been struggling to complete the prototype. The experiment we performed yesterday—that was an act of desperation. Nobody thought it would really work.”

  “What were you trying to do?” B’Elanna asked. “I still haven’t pieced it together. Obviously, you were trying to enhance your shield generator, but I still don’t understand what happened that Voyager disappeared into…wherever she is.”

  Kaytok replied, “You’re right, we were trying to enhance the shield generator. The new wrinkle we figured out was a method to power the shields with the radiation that’s been poisoning our planet. We’ve engineered a collector that absorbs the emissions from the Blue Eye and transforms them into power. Or so we thought….”

  Pad chimed in. “The transformer didn’t alter the radiation enough. We ended up pumping out altered energy rather than a shield. Blew out the collector and the transformer.”

  “We may be able to help with that,” Seven said. “If we can bring Voyager out of the subspace fold, we can use all her resources to help you repair your prototype. The idea has merit.”

  “She’s right,” B’Elanna said. “Now that I know what you were trying, I think I can suggest a couple changes that might help.”

  “The only problem being that that one is blind,” Kaytok said, “and you can’t walk. So how exactly do you plan to proceed?”

  “I have a proposal,” Seven said. “Though I strongly believe it will find little favor with Lieutenant Torres.”

  * * *

  Seven understood the concept of understatement and knew that many of her shipmates thought it a form of communication she practiced intentionally. This was not the case. Suggesting Seven employed understatement (or any of the other forms of wordplay including sarcasm, irony, and cheap ridicule) meant they believed there was a better way to communicate other than clearly stating facts in a simple, unadorned fashion. Seven found this idea baffling.

  Though she appreciated the fact that Torres’s initial response to her suggestion had been succinct, she was troubled by the flat refusal. “There is absolutely no way in hell I’m going to let you stick any of that Borg crap in me! Your little bugs—swimming through my bloodstream? Make me a part of the collective? Forget it!”

  “You would retain your individuality, Lieutenant, not become a member
of the collective. You couldn’t, because there is no collective here.” She stopped then and considered, realizing she was not being completely accurate. “Actually, that is not true: we would be the collective: a collective of two.”

  Torres stared into the middle distance, her jaw slack. Gathering her wits, then shaking her head, the engineer said incredulously, “You say that like somehow I’d find it reassuring. Amazing. No, Seven. Absolutely not. I won’t even consider it.”

  Kaytok and the others watched them argue, their heads swinging back and forth on their long necks.

  “Then quite likely all these people will die.”

  “Agreeing to this is no guarantee they’ll live.”

  “You’ll never see your friends again.”

  “I will if the ship finds us.”

  “But they won’t find us unless we can contact them and help them escape the subspace fold,” Seven said reasonably. “And we cannot do that unless you can see and I can walk. And neither of those things will happen unless you agree to this procedure.”

  Rage—B’Elanna’s old friend—was rising up within her, choking her, clouding her thinking. She knew she was being unreasonable, even irrational. Seven did not wish to make B’Elanna into a drone any more than B’Elanna would want to be one. The idea of their becoming linked was probably as repugnant to the former Borg as it was to her. She had been turning over possibilities in her mind for the past hour, trying to figure out some way to contact the ship, but she kept running into the same obstacles: She was blind, Seven was lame, and there was no way the Monorhans could do the delicate technical work they required. And here was Seven proposing a possible route out of their dilemma and all B’Elanna could do was imagine how violated she would feel having nanoprobes swimming through her blood, into her muscles, brain, and nerve endings.

  Grimmer memories began to filter into B’Elanna’s mind. She found herself remembering the names and faces of her former Maquis allies, all of them now slain if she was to believe the news from the Alpha Quadrant. Thinking of them, she felt her rage begin to condense and cool, to become something like a black hole in the center of her being. What about the sacrifices they had made? What about the ultimate sacrifice? If Seven thought she knew something that would save Voyager (and as much as B’Elanna hated to admit it, Seven was usually right about these things), then she owed it to her shipmates, to her friends, to do anything, to surrender anything to save them. Lowering her head, she hissed softly, “How long will it take?”

  “Not long,” Seven replied. “But it would be best if you were unconscious for the first part of the procedure. Some of the nanoprobes will need to construct an ocular implant to enable you to see.”

  “Only one?”

  “Two would not be wise,” Seven said. “There would be complications.”

  “Great. No depth perception.”

  “‘In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’”

  “But he still would have no depth perception.”

  Seven sighed, a response that only Torres could tear out of her so frequently. “You are a very difficult person, Lieutenant. Lie down now.”

  “I know,” Torres said, lying back on the floor. “It’s just that I really don’t like you at all. No offense.”

  Seven leaned down over Torres and unconsciously flexed a muscle in her forearm. A minuscule gap opened between Seven’s wrist bones just above the cuff and an assimilation tubule snaked out from it like a tiny black tongue. Seven touched the tube to Torres’s neck and the engineer grew quiet. “None taken,” Seven said.

  Chapter 13

  When Kim had asked to meet her in astrometrics, Captain Janeway had thought he had found an answer to her question about going into a controlled warp in the fold. This was not the case. Instead, Kim had seen something in the map of the fold Tuvok had been creating that he wished to discuss. At first, she had been impatient with the ensign, almost angry, but as he had talked, Janeway had begun to see the idea toward which he had been driving. Now, having fleshed out Kim’s idea, she wanted to get Chakotay’s opinion before proceeding. “Explain it to him, Harry,” she ordered.

  Kim brought Tuvok’s incomplete map up onto the lab’s big monitor. “This all started when Tom and I were looking at Tuvok’s map and we noticed this curved line,” Kim began.

  Janeway read the consternation on Chakotay’s face and even heard a note of annoyance in his voice when he said, “I don’t follow you, Harry. So it’s curved? So what?”

  “Which is precisely what I said,” Janeway admitted. “Why wouldn’t a fold have a curve?”

  “And I conceded that,” Kim said. “But there was something about the shape that nagged at me, so I asked Tuvok to send out more probes and complete the line. He did, and then we got this.” The line became appreciably longer, but the curl of the curve was more extreme. “Up at this end, the curve spiraled in on itself. I had to ask myself why it would do that.”

  Chakotay stared at the diagram for several seconds, then rubbed his eyes. “I’m not following you, Harry.”

  “Show him what we think the rest of the curve looks like,” Janeway said.

  “Right,” Kim said and worked the controls. “I think I saw the beginnings of it because of a topography class I took in high school.” He dropped his eyes. “Unfortunately, I didn’t do very well in the course. The captain saw the answer right away.”

  When Harry was finished, the rest of the shape emerged and Janeway saw the light of understanding dawn in Chakotay’s eyes. “We’re not in a fold,” he said.

  “Right,” Harry said. “It finally made sense when the captain reminded me about the radiation in the space around us. Where is it coming from? It couldn’t have all come in when we did.” The diagram on the screen showed Voyager in a space that looked remarkably like a paper bag whose mouth had been twisted into a corkscrew shape. “It’s leaking in through the top of the bag.”

  Chakotay slowly nodded, then looked at Janeway. “All right. I get it and I agree. It’s the only explanation that fits the facts. What do we do now?”

  “We have to uncurl the top of the bag.”

  “Any ideas how we’re going to do that?”

  “Yes,” Janeway said. “One.”

  She briefly outlined her plan, after which Chakotay sagged back against one of the stools along the wall. “Suddenly I’m glad B’Elanna’s not on board. She isn’t going to like what we’re about to do to the engines.”

  “So you agree?”

  “We’re running out of options, Captain.”

  Feeling every muscle in her lower back protest, Janeway straightened. “Then assemble the senior staff in the briefing room,” she said. “Everybody needs to know exactly what their job will be.”

  * * *

  “Lieutenant, wake up. You must open your eye.”

  Eye? B’Elanna thought. Right. Only one. Which did she pick? Her eyes shut, B’Elanna reached up and touched her left cheek, then gently probed the socket, finding unfamiliar ridges and bumps. She felt her skin suddenly grow clammy. An implant, she thought. I have a Borg implant in me. I’m going to hate this. Fighting down panic, she inhaled and exhaled slowly, then tried to assess her condition. All things considered, she decided. I feel fine. If Seven had performed some kind of surgery on her, the Borg had worked very skillfully. But, wait, no, of course not. Seven had not grafted the implant into her; she had injected preprogrammed nanoprobes and the implant had grown in her. B’Elanna fought back a second shudder. No time to be squeamish, she decided. The sooner we get this done, the quicker I can get home and have the damned thing removed.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “I’m here,” B’Elanna said, her throat raw and scratchy. Struggling to sit up, she opened her eyes. “How long have I been out…Oh!”

  “Be patient, Lieutenant,” Seven said. “Your brain is attempting to process a new level of data. Frankly, I’m not entirely confident that it will be able to do so, but there are adjustments we can make. Her
e,” she said when B’Elanna did not reply. “Let me…”

  B’Elanna brushed her hand away. “No,” she said. “Don’t touch…”

  Light. Everything was made of light. Her glowing hand moved back and forth in front of her face, tiny pinpoints of luminescence sprinkling down from her palm like pixie dust. Looking past her hand, B’Elanna saw a galaxy of pinpoint stars flicker and dance, shivering down from the sky, twirling in whorls and Brownian waves.

  “Lieutenant?”

  B’Elanna turned toward the voice and gasped in wonder. “Oh, my…” she said. Seven’s face and form were picked out in infinitesimally tiny beads of color, subtle hues shading one into the other, all glistening, all vibrating with life.

  “Lieutenant?”

  B’Elanna tried to speak, but her throat was constricted, so overcome was she by what she was seeing. Finally, she choked out, “Seven?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Is this how you see the world all the time?”

  The glimmering goddess that was Seven of Nine reached up to touch her own temple, making B’Elanna gasp and grow weak with a wondrous sensation that she imagined must be what religious people meant when they spoke of ecstasy. “Let me see…” Seven sighed and then said, “No, Lieutenant.” Abruptly, the galaxy shifted. All the lights and colors dimmed by half, then half again. Details receded and shapes grew hard edges. Nothing sparkled anymore. “The magnification and spectral analysis modules were set too high. You were looking at microscopic life-forms, dust mites, nematodes…nuisances, really.”

  “But, but…they were so beautiful.”

  Seven cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, Lieutenant. If you say so. How do you feel otherwise?”

  B’Elanna performed an internal audit and was surprised to find that she felt…fine. I feel good, she thought. Really quite good. “What the hell is wrong with me?” she asked, but couldn’t work up a genuine feeling of aggravation. “I don’t feel right. I mean, I feel…calm.” Almost happy, even. “What did you do to me?”