Cohesion

  “Bring that lamp over here,” Torres called. “I can’t see what I’m doing.”

  “As I explained earlier,” Seven said, “you must will your eyes to use the available light.”

  “I don’t like how everything looks then. There’s a kind of shimmer around objects.”

  “Because you let the spectral analysis bleed in. Learn to control yourself.”

  “Hey, how about you just hold the light over here and then I won’t have to.” Unbelievably, Seven found she was being drawn away from where she had been working toward Torres.

  “Stop!” Seven called and dragged herself back. “I will not be violated in this manner.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Torres bellowed. “Just get over here. The sooner we finish this, the sooner we can get moving.”

  Seven continued to resist the compulsion to approach Torres. “Why not allow the Monorhans to do their own repairs?”

  “Because they might screw it up.”

  “It is their machinery!” Seven insisted, taking a step back to where she had been working.

  “And it’s going to have to merge with our machinery.” Seven’s foot slid back toward Torres.

  “Please stop that!”

  “Ow! Hey! I pinched my hand! And, hey, what are you doing?! I can’t move my hand!”

  Ah! Seven thought. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander! She stopped and looked at the tool in her hand and wondered at the alien thought. Where did that come from?

  Backing out of the panel, Torres appeared to be ready to throw the microspanner at Seven’s head and was only confounded by the fact that she did not appear to be able to unclench her fist from around it. “What’s going on? How are you controlling me like this?”

  Seven stood her ground when Torres approached, but only barely. “It is not me,” Seven said. “We are both responsible. The link makes it difficult to be in disagreement.”

  “Then how the hell do Borg even…” She held up her hands in surrender. “Never mind. I already know the answer. Borg never disagree about anything, right?”

  “A collective mind cannot argue with itself.”

  “But we can,” Torres said, studying her hand as she flexed the fingers. “I knew I was going to hate this.”

  A surge of rage climbed Seven’s spine. “You hate this!? You!? What about me? What about…?” And then she stopped, aware that she had clenched and raised her fist above her head. With her augmented physiology, a blow to the engineer’s head would certainly render her unconscious, if not outright kill her. A small voice in the back of Seven’s head said, Good!

  “Go ahead,” Torres said. “Try it.” Seven looked up at the engineer’s flinty gaze and was surprised—actually surprised—by what she saw there. Torres knew what Seven was thinking—if not in detail, then certainly in broad strokes. “You might be fast enough. I know you’re strong enough. But keep this in mind if you miss.” She held up her tool in a manner that Seven found genuinely intimidating. “I know how to take machines apart.”

  Feeling the unaccustomed rage subside, Seven said simply, “I am not a machine.” Then, focusing her gaze on the ridges of the appliance around Torres’s left eye, she said, “At least, no more than you are.”

  With her free hand, Torres reached up and touched the flesh around her eye socket, her mouth in a surprised Oh!

  A voice spoke from the shadows: “Are you two just about through?” Kaytok stepped from the gloom, a large chunk of circuit board carried effortlessly under his right arm. “Because if there’s something you want to settle, please try to do it far away from my shield generator. You have a bad habit of damaging it.”

  Seven asked, “Your shield generator? What do you mean? I have observed that Monorhans frequently use collective possessive pronouns.”

  Kaytok gently lowered the circuit board to the ground, lead wires jingling against the concrete floor. “I might not say it if any of the others was around, but, yes, I consider it my own. I designed it, built most of it.”

  Torres and Seven exchanged glances, then Torres said, “We assumed that this was part of a larger government project, that the shield generator was based on the models being used to protect the cities. That’s not true?”

  “The Emergency Council giving us a shield generator to play with?” Kaytok laughed, his large head snaking back and forth. “No, not really something they would do.”

  “Then you built this yourself?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Torres and Seven looked up at each other again, their movements perfectly synchronized. Seven heard herself say, “Wow.”

  Torres murmured, “Indeed.”

  Kaytok knelt down next to the circuit board and began clipping leads to the damaged panel. “Amazing what an individual can accomplish, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Walking down the corridor back to her room, Sem lightly touched the walls as she passed and permitted herself to feel a modicum of delicious satisfaction. I can hear you singing, little minds, she thought. And you can hear me, too, can’t you? These Voyagers—so smug in their superiority. Could any of them do what she could? She knew the answer, but enjoyed asking the question anyway, especially because she was the only one who knew the correct response. But now there was a new question: knowing what she knew, what should she do next?

  Feeling the urge to exercise her will once more, Sem concentrated, listened for the song of an unimportant little mind, then chirped a countertone in response. A moment later, nearby, she heard a small pop. Nothing else terribly overt occurred except for the overhead lights dimming. She clicked her tongues together in pleasure. Excellent, she thought. Now her goal would be to find important little minds, and she was certain where she could find some.

  * * *

  When this is all over, Chakotay decided, I’m going to bunk down for a solid twenty-four hours. If he couldn’t arrange that, what was the point of being the commander? Patrolling the bridge, he examined the crew and assessed their preparedness. Fortunately, not everyone on the ship had needed to remain awake for the duration of the crisis. Tom Paris must have found time to sleep for a few minutes, because when they caught each other’s eye, Paris gave him a goofy half-smile, half-smirk. Once upon a time, Paris’s hijinks had irritated Chakotay, but now he knew that the pilot’s cavalier attitude was his way of coping with stress.

  Kathryn sat straight-backed in the center seat, alert but quiet. Having told her crew what she expected of them, the captain had subsided into a state of watchful readiness, marshaling her resources. Chakotay tried to figure out when she might have slept in the past thirty-six hours, realized that he couldn’t think of a time when she might, and decided that instead of going to his quarters when this was all over, he would make sure she went to hers. And that, he concluded, is really the point of being the commander.

  Completing his round, Chakotay stopped at the tactical station and cocked an eyebrow at Tuvok, who nodded once. “Status, Harry?” Chakotay said.

  From his station, Kim said, “Engineering asked for five more minutes to ‘batten down the hatches.’”

  Chakotay smiled. It was good to know Bill Jango was down there. “That should give you just enough time to get down to sickbay then.”

  Kim cocked his head, the question implicit in his expression.

  “The captain said she’d like you down there in case something goes wrong, Harry,” Chakotay said. “You know as much about our situation as anyone.”

  “Except for Tom,” Kim said, grinning slyly. “But he has to push a button.”

  “Never underestimate the importance of button pushing,” Paris retorted.

  Chakotay glanced at the captain, who was not smiling, but not frowning either. Her expression said, Let them blow off some steam if it helps. “The important thing is having the right man for the job,” Chakotay said. “Get your finger ready, Mr. Paris.” Turning to Kim, he said, “Go to sickbay. If everything works, you’ll be back here in
ten minutes.”

  Kim nodded once and headed for the lift. “Aye, Commander.”

  A minute later, the comm piped and Joe Carey called, “Captain?”

  “Joe.”

  “Ready to go?”

  Kathryn settled back into her chair, gazed around the bridge at her crew, then glanced briefly at the all-too-conveniently lost Sem. She inhaled deeply, then sighed. Looking over to Chakotay, she asked, “Do I have time to get a cup of coffee?”

  “Not really, Captain.”

  “Then go ahead, Joe. Deflectors to full.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Tuvok, shields around the bridge to maximum. Launch torpedoes on my mark. Mr. Paris…”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Get your button finger ready.”

  Chapter 14

  “Are you sure we’re headed in the right direction?”

  “Sure,” B’Elanna said. “I remember that dead tree.”

  “If you say there’s a dead tree over there,” Kaytok said, “then I believe you. The first question I have is, how can you see that dead tree? And, second, how can you tell that the dead tree you’re looking at is any different than the twenty other dead trees we saw before the sun set?”

  Kaytok, B’Elanna noted, liked to complain. Sure, he might very well be a brilliant individual, even a being of exceptional personal strength, but, goodness, a complainer. And he didn’t like walking. He didn’t like carrying a backpack—an empty backpack. He didn’t, in fact, seem to like being outside his lab. The farther they got from it, the more Kaytok grumbled. And now he was moaning about the damned dark when it wasn’t really that dark in the first place. Maybe Monorhans’ eyes were poorly adapted to night vision, which certainly didn’t seem sensible considering how large…

  Then B’Elanna remembered: She was looking at the world through nanoprobe-enhanced eyes. Well, eye singular. With an ease that mildly worried her, she mentally commanded the implant to return to human-normal mode and watched as the world turned dim and faded to black. Then, experimenting, she slowly increased the lens aperture until the scene before her was as bright as a summer’s afternoon, though the absence of shadows was weird and disconcerting.

  “Are you all right?” Kaytok asked.

  “Sorry,” B’Elanna said. “I was playing. So are you saying it’s too dark for you to travel?”

  “Not if we’re careful, but I like feeling I know where I’m going. Are you sure this is the right way?”

  Pulling out her tricorder, B’Elanna checked their position. She had set the device to automatically record the route she and Seven had taken, then programmed it to ping if she wandered too far off course during the return journey. “Yes,” she said. “We’re about three-quarters of the way there.”

  Kaytok peered at the backlit screen, then glanced up at B’Elanna. “That’s a wonderful little device. May I see it?”

  B’Elanna had an engineer’s disinclination to share tools, especially items that could not be easily replaced, but she trusted Kaytok. The closer she had examined his shield generator, the more convinced she had become that she was in the presence of a certifiable genius-level intellect. She handed him the tricorder without comment.

  Kaytok adjusted the display, touched several controls, then walked around in a small circle while carefully observing the changes in the scans. After flipping through a variety of screens, he clapped the device shut and handed it back. “Lovely,” he said.

  “You seemed to pick up the controls pretty quickly.”

  Kaytok shrugged. “Good design.”

  B’Elanna nodded and clipped the tricorder to her belt. “You mind if I ask you a question?”

  “You can if I can,” Kaytok said. Without either of them saying anything, they fell into a slow careful stride, walking side by side where previously they had been in single file.

  “You first,” B’Elanna said.

  Kaytok nodded. “That was quite a fight you and Seven of Nine had back there before you left. She really didn’t want you to leave for the shuttle so soon. Why? It strikes me that right now every minute counts.”

  B’Elanna chuckled. Without knowing it, Kaytok had cut precisely to the core of the problems she and Seven had been having over the past year. “Seven has a very precise mind,” B’Elanna said. “She doesn’t like haste and has a very low opinion of what human beings can accomplish.”

  “If she thinks you can’t make this trip, then why didn’t she do it?”

  “Because she knows she can’t do it. Seven is very aware of everything that happens in her body. There’s a little meter somewhere in her that says, ‘Here’s how much energy you have. Don’t go beyond this line.’”

  “But not you?”

  B’Elanna smiled. “I have one. I just ignore it.”

  “How do two people with such different personalities get sent out together?” Kaytok asked.

  Chuckling, B’Elanna replied, “I wonder about that myself. Sometimes, I think my captain is blind to the problems some people have getting along. Other times, I just think she has a strange sense of humor.” She smiled to herself, surprised that she was saying such things to a relative stranger. “And then there are the other times where I think the captain is trying to make sure we all learn to get along because we might be together for a very, very long time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  B’Elanna sighed. “It’s difficult to explain,” she said. “My ship, Voyager, we’re not out here just for exploration or for, I don’t know, for fun. We’re trying to get home, but home is a very long way off, even moving at multiples of the speed of light. We’ve had a couple lucky breaks, made some jumps, but at the current rate of speed, we’re still many, many years from the edge of an area we call the Alpha Quadrant.”

  “Home,” Kaytok said.

  “Right. And the way things have been going, we might not ever make it. Or maybe our kids will if we’re allowed to have kids. It’s one of those things we don’t talk about very often because the captain…she doesn’t like to admit it might take that long.”

  “And yet she stops to see how she can help a group of aliens living on a planet that she’s never seen before.”

  “There’s something to that,” B’Elanna said. “I know there are some in my crew who feel that way, but not everyone. My concern is more that she sometimes doesn’t seem to think about how her decisions might affect our home, our way of life.”

  “And you’ve never told her how you feel about this?”

  “Not precisely. It’s not easy to talk to her about this kind of thing. She’s my captain. She outranks me.”

  “It sounds to me like she’s your hara-tan, but not a very sensitive one if she does not hear your thoughts.”

  “A rih-hara-tan can read minds?”

  “Not precisely,” Kaytok said. “But a hara can sense the well-being of his haran through their bond, or so I am told.”

  “You’ve never had a hara?”

  Kaytok shook his head. “I have never been able to form the bond.”

  “Oh,” B’Elanna said, uncertain what was appropriate to say next. She considered saying, “I’m sorry,” but instead settled on, “Is that unusual?”

  “Fairly,” Kaytok said, and his wistful tone told B’Elanna what she needed to know: Here was another outsider. “But not unknown. Once, a child who could not form the link would have been allowed to die. Today it is treated as a sad thing, but not an evil. Certain avenues are closed to one, certain opportunities. Many of my colleagues are like me, as you may have noticed.”

  “I did,” B’Elanna said. “I didn’t spend much time around the Monorhans on my ship before we came here, but I saw that they tended to stay close to each other and speak in the whistles and clicks…What do you call that?”

  “Second tongue.”

  “Right. You and your group don’t so much.”

  “There are some hara among us, but the groups are small,” Kaytok explained. “And they try to be di
screet. Those like me, the na-hara, as we are called, we tend to cluster together. It helps that we are all engineers, too.”

  B’Elanna felt a twinge of kinship. “Right. Engineers. We’re always kind of on the edge of things.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And you end up working out in the middle of nowhere on a project that no one wants despite the fact that it might save the world.”

  Kaytok clicked his tongue in a manner B’Elanna took to be a laugh. “Yes, precisely. This is what happens. Except the project doesn’t really work and so I need help in the form of funny-looking visitors from the sky.”

  B’Elanna rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that. It gets kind of old.”

  “Seriously?” Kayok asked. “You’ve been in this situation before?”

  Shrugging, B’Elanna said, “Saving the world? Yeah. I’ve been here before.”

  “And that does not give you a good feeling? You are not gratified?”

  “Of course. It’s great. Only…”

  “Only what?”

  B’Elanna hesitated. She rarely would consider discussing such feelings, especially with someone she barely knew, though there was something about Kaytok. “Only that sometimes I wish someone would save me.”

  They walked several paces in silence and B’Elanna began to wonder whether she had broken some kind of taboo. Just as she was thinking of trying to offer an apology, Kaytok suddenly halted in his tracks.

  “Kaytok?” B’Elanna asked, leaning down over him, one hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  Kaytok’s right arm shot out and closed around B’Elanna’s ribcage, instantly cutting off her air. She tugged uselessly at the Monorhan’s grip. Caught completely by surprise, B’Elanna had no breath in her lungs as he pulled her to the ground and the dark instantly began to creep in around the edge of her vision, until it closed completely.