Bo watched, paralyzed, as Kenzi took step after inexorable step toward the portal. She felt like she was trapped in a bad dream, able to see the disaster about to happen but powerless to do anything to stop it. The portal throbbed in time with her heart, which beat more and more painfully as Kenzi drew closer to the opening.

Until something snapped. She didn't make a conscious decision, but acted out of pure animal instinct. She sprinted toward Kenzi, rapidly catching up, and tackled her. The two women rolled and landed in a heap about ten yards shy of the portal.

Kenzi rolled into a fetal position, clutching her stomach with the wind knocked out of her. Bo turned a concerned eye to her friend, but her head quickly jerked up and over toward the portal. Her eyes flared blue and she rose like an automaton, walking toward the opening that seemed to beckon to her.

The entire room was oblivious to what was happening - the Revenants still fought, the Fae still chopped off their heads, and only Dyson and Trick seemed to take any note of Bo's actions. They exchanged a glance - Dyson's eyes full of anguish, Trick's full of resignation.

A small commotion ensued at the doorway. The knot of Revenants that turned toward the noise quickly shied away. Incredibly, the Revenants began to melt away from the door, and two figures made their way hastily to the front of the room.

Dragging a reluctant Evony in her wake, Lauren sprayed the last of her Revenant repellent and tossed the empty canister to the ground. The noxious substance - invisible to the human and Fae olfactory systems, but intolerable to the undead - lingered in the air around them, granting Lauren, Evony, Dyson and Trick temporary reprieve from the fray.

Lauren started to ask a question, but her expression turned to utter horror when she looked at the portal and saw…

"BO! NO!"

Dyson made a grab for her arm, but the doctor was too quick. She sprinted toward Bo and made to tackle her, an action that created a disorienting deja vu for Dyson and Trick.

Bo was not to be taken down as easily as Kenzi, though. She was not a reluctant human making her terrified but determined way toward sudden death. She was a succubus in full thrall to whatever siren song called to her ancient blood from the portal.

Lauren's arms closed around her torso, but Bo barely budged. In fact, she kept walking, with Lauren clinging desperately to her waist, her feet trying to find purchase on the rocky ground. It flashed through Lauren's mind that the scenario was similar to several cartoons she had watched on Saturday mornings as a child, with an animated tiny mouse trying with all its might to stop a much larger cat or dog and instead being dragged along in its wake, legs scrabbling to find purchase on the ground. It would have been funny if she hadn't known she was being towed toward her - and Bo's - certain death.

"Please Bo! Fight it! You have to stop!"

Bo paused. Now Lauren herself was struck by deja vu - it was so like the time that Bo had been in raging succubus mode when confronted with the Manta at the Bacchus' sex club. There had been that same pause, that same momentary recognition where Bo had seemed to see Lauren.

Bo turned her head, and Lauren's relief was replaced by renewed terror when she saw that Bo's eyes were still a brilliant, pulsing blue. Bo opened her mouth, and all the Revenants ceased their fighting as Bo drew their chi from their mouths and into her own. Hundreds of undead fell to their knees and then flat on their faces as Bo drained them dry, then took the last final steps to enter the portal.

Still clinging to Bo's waist, a part of Lauren's brain dispassionately registered that Bo had drained only the Revenants, and that neither she, Dyson, Trick nor Evony had been the target of Bo's mass chi-suck this time.

That's great progress toward directed chi extraction - that kind of regulated selection points to a new level of control, Bo! Lauren thought to herself, absurdly proud, right before the entire world dissolved in a flash of brilliant light.

Kathryn Janeway was tired. Fatigued, yes - she hadn't had enough sleep, working straight through the alpha, beta and gamma shifts. Coffee had ceased to give her any jolt of energy, and instead was just making her stomach hurt. Her eyes felt dry and strained from staring at the viewscreens for so long, and her shoulders ached from being hunched over a PADD working on scenarios. Even the hum of the warp engines, usually so comforting to the starship captain, was more of an irritant than a balm.

But she was also crabby. And not a little of the reason for her irritation had to do with the blonde Borg who had been her constant companion for the past 24 hours. Fatigue didn't seem to affect Seven - she appeared as calm, kempt and mentally acute now as she did when the two women had started their marathon project. Not a single strand of hair escaped from Seven's French twist, and the Borg's purple biosuit seemed as fresh now as it had at the beginning of the project.

But it wasn't Seven's appearance that was irritating the captain. It was the constant stream of objections to every angle from which Janeway tried to approach the wormhole project. Fly directly into the anomaly? The hull couldn't withstand the gravitational forces if their angle of approach was even a bit off. Slingshot around a nearby star and rocket in at high speed? Steering with thrusters at those velocities was too crude, and they would almost certainly bypass their target, at best, or smash Voyager to smithereens, at worst. Use photon torpedos to blast a bigger opening in the wormhole?

Janeway suppressed a smirk at that one. She had only suggested it to see what Seven's reaction would be. The withering glance that Seven had leveled in her direction was worth it.

But it wasn't just Seven's objections that were bothering Janeway. It was that she was right. None of the scenarios they had come up with so far were remotely workable. Wormholes were few and far between in the Delta Quadrant, and the crew had been excited to find this one in what seemed to be unclaimed territory. The anomalies, which permitted instantaneous travel between two far-away points, to date had been jealously claimed and guarded by the local muscle - including the Borg.

Having time to study a wormhole at leisure was unexpected and Janeway jumped at the chance. Part of the problem with wormholes was that if no one had yet been through a particular one, you had no idea where it might end up. You could emerge in the same quadrant only a few parsecs away, or you could end up on the complete opposite end of the galaxy. The prospect of landing her crew potentially even further away from the Alpha Quadrant wasn't a risk that the captain was willing to take, regardless of how frustrated she was.

The second problem with this particular wormhole was probably why it wasn't claimed by any species. It seemed unusable. It oscillated, and not on any regular frequency that she and Seven had been able to deduce, either. It opened and closed at random, and from what they could tell, its orientation also shifted. Taking a starship into the wormhole as it stood now would be a dicey proposition.

That's why she and Seven had been spending so much time together - they were trying to find a way to stabilize the wormhole. If they could find a way to prop it open and keep it still, they might have a better shot at trying to trace its path with probes. As it was, the forty-two probes they had launched already had all failed to enter. It was almost if the wormhole could sense the approach of the probes and deliberately denied them entry.

When Janeway had voiced this observation to Seven, the Borg had informed her that humans often anthropomorphized inanimate objects and assigned them motivations that were entirely absent. Janeway had in return informed Seven in a mock eureka moment that perhaps part of the problem with fighting the Borg enemy was that humans anthropomorphized them overmuch.

Seven's disdainful glare had told Janeway that she was not unaware of the unflattering double meaning of the captain's statement, and the women had worked in silence for a period of time. Janeway was wondering if she should apologize when Seven broke the silence.

"Captain."

"Yes?"

"What about directed, prolonged phaser fire aimed at the trailing edge of the wormhole opening?"

Janeway sighed. "Seven, we already discussed that a few hours ago. We simply don't have enough power in the phaser banks for a long or powerful enough pulse to get the job done."

"True," Seven said. "We don't. But we do have a surplus of dilithium crystals."

Janeway paused. "You can't possibly be suggesting that we try to inject antimatter into the wormhole. We have no idea what consequences might result."

"Not antimatter, Captain."

"Then what?"

"Refraction."

Janeway frowned as she took that in.

"Split the nadion particles in the phaser beam with the dilithium?"

Seven nodded. "And then refocus the components of the beam back on the wormhole. The varying frequencies in each component beam will have a greater chance of achieving a harmonic with the oscillation of the wormhole."

"Then we aim a non-refracted phaser beam at the wormhole, to fix it in place?"

Seven nodded. "Precisely."

"That's so harebrained...that it just might work."

"It will work," Seven stated with ultimate certainty, ignoring the captain's comparison of her scheme to the thought processes of a large rabbit. "I've been mapping out the path of the refracted phaser beam and we need to place dilithium prisms here and here." She indicated a PADD she was holding.

Janeway leaned over Seven's calculations. "Actually...here." She moved the prisms several hundred kilometers to the left and right. "You made a mathematical error."

"Borg do not make mathematical errors," Seven informed Janeway, but frowned at the PADD.

"Don't sweat it, Seven," Janeway said, clapping Seven on the arm, her good mood restored.

"You're only human."