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Stardate 52734

We thought it was a planetoid laced with dilithium. It was a trap crafted by a notorious group of bounty hunters, the Hazari. After we evaded them, the captain thought we'd done so a little too easily. She was correct. Several Hazari ships were working together, blocking every path Voyager could use to escape. Father and I were working with the captain, trying to construct tactical scenarios which would allow us to slip away, but we weren't having much luck.

Before leaving the Mess Hall for the night, Dad served Captain Janeway another mug of black coffee (he told me later he offered to provide her with intravenous caffeine, if she thought it would help her concentrate), and left her sitting there alone, working on her calculations. In the morning, she announced that an isomorphic projection (shades of Dejaren, the murderous isomorph!) had visited her after Dad's departure. This Kurros uploaded tactical data into her computer terminal, providing analyses of several likely Hazari ambushes. He'd also left her the coordinates for his vessel, if she wished to contact them about a possible deal. Before his image faded away, Kurros said, "You have a problem, Captain . . . and I am the solution."

The captain was intrigued. We traveled to where the vessel was located, hidden in a subspace pocket. I was disturbed by the very idea of a "subspace pocket," since Father, Tom, and the Doctor had been lost inside one several months ago, but admittedly, this group's technology was impressive. Some of it, Seven declared, was even more advanced than the Borg's. The captain and Seven visited them and met a motley assortment of beings who require a special telepathic enhancement device to communicate. When Kurros' isomorphic projection visited Captain Janeway in our Mess Hall, she'd called them a "Think Tank," a term which arose hundreds of years ago on Earth for organizations which did what Kurros' group purports to do. Those Think Tanks didn't perform their services gratis, and neither does this 24th century version. Kurros' Think Tank's fee for helping us escape from the Hazari included the schematics for the quantum slipstream drive (even though we haven't perfected it yet), Dad's chadre'kab recipe, Chakotay's ancient Olmec figurine - and Seven of Nine.

The captain was reluctant to trade a member of the crew, quite naturally, but she told Seven it was her choice to make. Kurros told Seven they were offering her a tremendous opportunity to do good in the galaxy, to fully use her intellectual gifts, which he said are "wasted" on Voyager. After Seven told the captain she would not comply with the Think Tank's request, Captain Janeway quoted an ancient Earth saying to Kurros: "Don't call us; we'll call you."

One of the plans we'd come up with on our own wouldn't allow us to escape from the Hazari, but if slightly modified, we realized it could buy us time. We used a very ancient trick, known on many worlds, but which apparently wasn't as familiar to the Hazari. We scattered debris in a small area to make it look like Voyager had exploded and hid subspatial charges inside the fragments. When a small Hazari vessel entered the field to investigate, we triggered the charges, disabling the Hazari ship long enough for us to transport the two men inside the vessel onto Voyager and into custody, while the craft itself was tractored into our shuttlebay. I was a member of the team assigned to examine their ship. I discovered several encoded transmissions, including scrambled bio-readings from the sender, and downloaded them for the captain to review.

She took the communication records to Sickbay. With the Doctor's help, an image was built holographically, revealing the Hazari had been hired by the Malon. The captain noticed some isomorphic signatures embedded within the bio-readings. When the image was reconstituted to account for those signatures, we discovered the Hazari's actual client: Kurros.

When the captain showed the doctored transmission to the Hazari captain/pilot, he was shocked. The bounty hunters had had no idea of the actual identity of their actual client until we shared the images with them. When he realized he was being duped himself, he agreed to work with us. The plan we came up with was a "sting" operation (another very old term). The Hazari wouldn't lose out on their bounty. The Think Tank were infamous. They'd duped many in the surrounding system who would be willing to pay them for the favor of "neutralizing" them. (It helped that the Hazari, as part of our "sting," would demand Kurros pay triple their bounty fee.)

When the Hazari were "attacking" Voyager, Seven slipped away to the Think Tank's subspace hideout and agreed to join them, since it was the only way to save Voyager. While this was the original reason Kurros had set the Hazri onto Voyager, he couldn't discount Seven's "defection" was a trick. He was willing to accept Seven's word as truth only after his cybernetic partner probed Seven's mind, as he had done at their first meeting. As soon as the partner connected with Seven's neural transceiver, Father transmitted a carrier wave through it, exploding their telepathic enhancement device, which destroyed the group's ability to communicate with each other. We immediately transported Seven back to Voyager. As we flew away, the Hazari had surrounded the Think Tank's vessel. Father said parts of it were showing signs of imminent hull breaches.

My parents and my closest friends all wonder if the Think Tank really did provide the Vidiians with a cure for the Phage, as Kurros had told Captain Janeway they did. If we judge them by the fact they negotiated with space pirates to attack Voyager, they seem more like confidence men (another ancient Earth term) than the humanitarians they declared themselves to be.

Were they truly geniuses, or were they reasonably intelligent misfits who found a way to exploit the vulnerable? At the very least, they practiced extortion, charging their "clients" so much for their "remedies" that the leaders of some systems were unable to provide basic services to their people after they'd paid the group for the work they'd completed on their behalf. As far as I'm concerned, the Think Tank deserves the fate the Hazari may have inflicted upon them.

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