He woke into an oddly humid hell.

The shuttlecraft was apparently hosting a jungle now, with green shoots curling from the ceiling and broad flat leaves clutching the walls. There were burns beneath them, blackened starbursts, new since his last moments active but now vined over.

And it was under attack.

Those black-armored pale horrors were flanking the viewports, drilling in from the right, their blank slack faces gazing through at nothing.

And there was Kes, crouched and panting, making a stand between the viewports and the neural gelpacks, the spent phaser rifle at her feet. As he finished initializing behind her, she was clawing out one hand, palm facing the drone with the drill, pushing against something unseen.

There on the other side of the pane, the drill squealed briefly in a shower of sparks and stopped. The drone paused, head cocked, to examine it.

And well it might. This was new.

Standing sheltered by two others well back behind it, a trio of other drones made a synchronized gesture similar to Kes'. The drill flared with a cloudy, corruscating light, and the driller got back to work.

The Doctor hadn't considered, before that moment, that the Borg might have assimilated other psychokinetic species.

"Do you have a plan?" he shouted at Kes over the grinding. The buffer text deletion, at least, had worked.

"What does your code say about euthanasia?" she shouted back, raising the bar for topics unsuited to the moment in a memorable way.

Except it wasn't.

Not if the alternative was the Collective adding her to its arsenal of psychokinetics. A new specimen, capable of holding her own against seven – since, with vision fully online now, he could see another three sprawled along the shore in a trail leading to the shuttle.

Nevertheless. "It's complex, and there's no time to run it," he bellowed over the noise.

But his database on Borg physiology had finished loading now; this looked like a scout-style party, lightly armed by their standards. Just what one might send to take a valuable target alive. "Let's try some alternative treatments."

It was time to give the emitter some novel directions. He studied the drill mechanism for a moment, ran it through his Borg database, and generated two focal points of pressure like lever arms, stressing its weakest joint. Then he shoved.

It burned an hour's worth of energy. But the damned thing snapped.

The drone took an impassive look at its broken mechanism, then discarded it and apparently gave up on finesse. It began a rhythmic, unhurried pounding with its more mechanized arm on the clear polymer. The reverberation rang the hull like a bell.

The two closest behind it left off shielding the ones he'd designated psychokinetics, and came up to beat in synchrony. After the sixth hit, the polymer began to buckle.

Light and counter-light flared up around them; Kes was going head-to-head with the psychokinetics over the front-line drones, presumably trying to repeat whatever she'd done to bring down the others. Her legs were shaking, and with the next blow the polymer visibly deformed.

"Doctor," she hissed, "I've seen it. Death is better."

The old rage, from when he'd deactivated, had still barely faded; the addition of the new rage made it easy.

Doctors knew so many ways to kill.

His ethics subroutines were silent, as he had the emitter generate a thin impermeable membrane along the internal surface of each drone's lungs, the delicate fractal interfolding of each alveolus. There within, he felt their chest cavities twitch, and then begin heaving uselessly, as their respiratory muscles yanked again and again, with first puzzlement and then desperation, moving the air but cut off from the oxygen.

His hypothetical imagery routines, meant for creative treatment design, were sputtering up uncalled, flashing images of past events he hadn't even witnessed. The Captain on the bridge, pinned to the floor by new drones created from her own crew. Her eyes were fixed past them, watching the destruction countdown finish, even as their nanites slipped into her blood.

Amid his answering rage, as the drones actually before him dropped their arms and began to stagger, one cold note of reason slipped through too. There was no landing craft in sight. So the cube had managed to get transporters working here, even if it took its entire power output, and even if the trail of drones along the beach suggested the targeting was still poor. But if the drones here were able to return and report their precise location, then in a moment, others would be beaming straight into the shuttle.

So as they gasped, he cut their internal connections to their distress signals.

They had already realized his activity was force field-based, and were trying frantically to counter with their own. But that was only a war of vectors, which was his turf; he could make their own fields cut their own wires and asphyxiate themselves just as easily, with the perfect modulation of his own.

He was, after all, designed with unparalleled tactile acuity.

The psychokinetics went down first, buckling to the ground, limbs twitching like insects, faces twisted in humanoid agony at the end. He barely saw it; his imagery routines had moved on to showing him something that had never happened at all. Kes, wired and augmented, deep in the gray chambers of a cube, taking down the last defenders of the Klingon emperor's palace from afar. The brave colors of the imperial gardens shrivelled in flames under her pale and distant hand.

He switched imagery off. He stepped up coolly to the viewport for a better look, cataloguing how long it took till each drone's gasping stopped. The one with the drill went last.

It had taken nearly no energy at all.

In the palpable silence, he noticed his matrix had been alarming for several minutes. Looking away from them, back at his remaining crewman, calmed it down a bit.

"Huh," said Kes.

. . . . . .

They spoke only to plan. There wasn't time for more. They'd been found, and every trick ever used against the Borg worked precisely once. If Kes had an opinion on his new penchant for dronicide, it would have to wait.

The obvious, if terrible, solution in his view was for her to leave on foot. With another few dirty tricks, he might be able to take out another two or three parties coming at the shuttlecraft before they got to his processor. Possibly he could first render a hologram of her, and fake a convincingly explosive death.

But this wasn't sickbay, and Kes was clearly done with taking orders.

"And when in this plan, after you go down heroically and I flee on foot on an island they've identified, do I sleep?" She shook her head; she was older, her ears beginning to go rough, features more precise somehow. Four months had passed. At some angles, he saw the mineral sheen beneath her skin now, over the whipcord movements of her tendons as she paced the shuttle floor.

He had nothing to say to that, except that at least his way wasn't euthanasia. An obstruction to cerebral blood flow would be far quicker than the lungs, and painless. Oh, no.

"Besides, you're still assuming you're on borrowed time. You may not be. Can you check your energy flow?"

He did, and nearly flickered with surprise. The power supply was still down to ten hours, but it wasn't draining; there was a thin but steady current spliced in from somewhere else.

There wasn't time, and this wasn't the place, for the relief that flooded through him, unclenching something he had forgotten could unclench. The sheer freedom of not thinking about energy every second – ridiculous, fantastical. Not since Voyager.

"How did you…" and then he trailed off, looking round, really, for the first time, at what she'd done with the place. The thick stems of the spreading vines, the graceful tangles of their roots in makeshift aeroponic brackets. Five semi-separate filigree networks, each embracing an embedded neural gelpack beneath a glossy sealant.

They looked like nothing so much as a mother's vessels meeting her child's at the placenta. With what, he strongly suspected, was the same design: two circulations that must never mingle, but with walls so thin that nutrients could cross them freely.

She had stabilized the energy carrier molecule by getting its makers to help, instead of killing them.

Excellent job, Kes. Impressive. Those were the peaks of graciousness he'd risen to in Sickbay, and about as adequate now as congratulating the ocean.

"Well," he said finally. "Trust you to build a garden that can feed a hologram."

She flashed a grin for a moment. "The plants were easy. The hard part was convincing the gelpacks to eat." Just as quickly, that was gone, as that little hatch she cracked open for one emotion was obviously stormed by all the others. She looked down. "So."

So, that changed the risk-benefit balance, without offering alternatives.

Except one.

"What are your feelings," he said after a moment, "on holographic boats?"

. . . . . .

The shuttlecraft was lighter than it looked; less than a meter's radius of holographic raft around it was enough to keep it afloat. He set the emitter to maintain it independently, leaving a tiny trickle of energy for himself. With the last dregs of Kes' power, and some holographic lubricant, they eased it down into the water, and studied it critically from the edge of the shore for a few moments as it bobbed.

And then they embarked, poling past the rocky pillars toward the open water where the waves could take them. The universe had been generous in one way; it was another cloudy afternoon.

"So," he said, emerging from the hatch onto the port runner after securing the aeroponic garden for water travel, "will you go first? Or shall I?"

Kes wiped her brow; it was, apparently, summer. Three months, now, past Starfleet's record for survivor recovery after an escape pod launch. She was in a spare science uniform, hanging slack like the others, now frayed into long fringes where she'd hacked off lengths of its legs and arms. In the sunlight, his previous impressions came together: she'd arrived solidly at mid-adulthood. In a uniform that fit, she might have been a medical officer herself, or a ship's lieutenant.

She returned his gaze, as if vision could provide a similar update on him. "What do I need to know about you now?"

He settled himself on the runner, legs hanging dry in the lapping waves.

"Lethal force is enabled for present-danger defense. I didn't cut the ethical subroutines themselves; just the restraints. Personality is unchanged, as is duty structure." He hesitated; might as well get it in the open. "I made only the changes I thought were clearly needed. But unless you want to become one of perhaps three people off Jupiter station who reads EMH code, I can't prove it."

She set the pole inside and sat in the hatchway, legs dangling beside his shoulders. It took her a moment to speak; not so much worried, he thought, as out of practice. "But you wrote the code yourself this time. Anyway, at this distance, I can almost tell."

Now he needed the moment; the new power source apparently hadn't improved processing speed. "You can sense me, now?"

She shook her head. "Not thoughts. But your gelpacks have a…a degree of presence to them. It hasn't changed. Finding it was a kind of company, actually."

Four months. And he'd used to complain about being left active overnight. "You've still found nothing of the others?"

She looked down. "I've grown quickly, the past few months. Ever since the contact from 8472. I've been looking. I can find wildlife. I can get some kinds of answers from the plants."

He glanced back through the doorway at her energy garden.

"But I can't find them. I think…within their plausible landing radius, I'm fairly certain I would."

The effect of his crew complement estimate's value going to zero should have been minor; it had been a few parts per million already. But it wasn't; there must have been terms using that value in nearly every subroutine, the way all of them flickered and went hollow. This time it was Chakotay he saw for an unexplained moment, the man who'd been civil to him before he'd known what civility was. He had always meant to study how the fellow got such a reputation for competence without ever bragging. He'd wanted to apply it to his own subroutines.

A bit unsteady, he spoke to distract himself. "What else is in your arsenal?"

"Other than searching, I've focused on combat. Simple things I could do reflexively, if caught unprepared. Control's not a problem, any more –" – he thought of the scorch marks on the shuttle interior – "and I can stop anything close enough to see clearly. My biggest limit is distance. And, apparently, enemy psychokinetics." She looked over with a flash of grim humor. "I sometimes wonder if Tuvok would approve."

"There's a first time for everything," he replied, still trying to damp down the cascading effects of the value change. "Was this their first attack?"

Kes nodded. "They must have had telepaths listening. The same drones that were psychokinetics, I could tell once they were close. I'd just gotten the energy garden running; the biggest thing I'd ever done. Detectable from orbit, for them, I guess; their range must be better, though I'm stronger one on one. And then, when they came, I was already exhausted."

He was still half-listening, he realized. The fog about his crew kept pulling him back in. Perhaps that was why the thought came to him. "You…don't believe the others could be alive? Assimilated?"

She looked back at him; her face was hard to read, as if she'd gotten out of practice with expressions too, but her eyes were slightly wet in the sunset light. Clearly, she'd considered it. "I don't know if I'd feel them in orbit. But if the drones that came for us had been people we knew, I don't think either of us could have done…what we did. And, if they had assimilated anyone who knew us, they'd know that."

"Ah." He wanted to probe further, the same way humanoids always picked at scabs, but the trouble focusing was giving him his first stirrings of real concern for what his matrix could handle at the moment. "Perhaps we'd better pause that train of thought for a bit."

Kes dipped her head. "Of course. I don't want to have to field-repair the processor with a hand trowel."

Quite a mild way of acknowledging that if his matrix broke again here, there was no replacement. He grabbed hold of a different thread of thought with both metaphorical hands, and pointed at the clouds hiding the gleam of the cube above. "So then why are they still here, wasting a ship's worth of effort, after more than half a year?"

She climbed past him into the shuttle and rummaged around inside; he heard the crinkle of a ration bar wrapper. From within, mouth half full: "If they know something like 8472 does? To assimilate me. Or destroy you."

"How flattering." His heart wasn't in it. But it was at least clear enough from the events of the past few hours that killing her was no longer the Borg plan A. Too bad they didn't have the luxury of giving the drones the same courtesy; his imagery routines threw up a wistful fantasy of a Sickbay and a sufficient power supply to paralyze and re-individuate them, instead of killing them like weeds.

Kes took a breath and set the bar down. "Your recoding. I know what a painful decision it had to be. I'd be dead, if you hadn't. At best."

He found the wherewithal to smile. "Well. I do have a euthanasia exception, when requested by captains with key tactical intelligence facing imminent assimilation. I suppose, at this point, you may qualify." He waved his hand with a determined approximation of airiness. "But I'm not sure I could have processed your commission and promotions in time."

He nearly went on that he had been wondering if Borg regeneration technology could impact the Ocampa lifespan. Rescued by a dim sense that that would cross the line from humor to just gallows, he didn't.

As it was, Kes did give him a grim laugh. He wrenched his attention back to the prior thread again, to keep it off his crew. "Then why aren't there ten cubes here, if they want you so badly? A thousand? They could blanket the planet with drones and search meter by meter."

"Borg reasons," she said with unaccustomed bitterness. Meaning, no reason we'd grasp, and but some very logical reason, and no doubt something monstrous.

She stepped down onto the runner beside him, still chewing, watching the sun drop under the waves. The planet's rings were coming into sight, a scatter of silver at a mad angle across the darkening sky. They both watched them brighten for a few moments, and then she gestured across them. "But I think also, possibly, those."

Rings formed from the dust of the planet itself, mirroring its own mineral content that scattered sensors and messages, refracting everything round in a circle the size of a world.

The Borg cube, while it stayed in orbit, would be as isolated as they were.

Sarcasm was the only form of humor he was fully comfortable with, or he suspected he would have laughed and laughed.

After full dark, Kes began to practice, a habit formed while he was down. She did warn him – "Don't panic." But the first time a cubic meter of water off their port bow sizzled into steam, and the ocean round it sucked in and up into the void with a roar, he still thought it was the Borg again. He had come up with four new lethal counterattacks by the time he understood that it was her, and that this sort of practice was how she had been ready the first time.

After heat, it was mass impact, cannonballs of water crashing into each other, timed to match the roar of the unseen surf. And then the stars went out, and the black water went opaque beneath them – no, that was her too, wrapping the craft in a sphere of darkness so she could raise balls of flame from the air in safety.

He was programmed by explorers, and they had included a bit of awe, to let him value the gains from the medically foolish risks that crew were always taking. And so, once he realized she had thought through the risks of discovery, he watched in silent appreciation, and thought perhaps he believed in her being a final weapon a little more.

Until he looked back over at her. She was doubled over now, hands on her knees, arms shaking, face hidden beneath her hair till he ducked down to see it. Sweat had soaked through the uniform and was dripping from her nose, while the flames chased each other in an accelerating spiral.

"Kes. That's enough."

She closed her eyes, locking both arms on her thighs to straighten slightly. "This. This is how tired I was when they came."

So now she was determined to be fighting fit in this state, too, apparently. It would have saddened him - in their former lives, and if his subroutines around sorrow weren't supermaxed already. Here, she might well be right.

Yet there was still something off about the look of her now. Not only driven, but half despairing.

And now she herself was blurring, borders not quite defined, her body sharing space with something not space. Light, and darkness which, on a second look, was light as well, outside the visible spectrum.

"Kes!"

And then the Borg came again.

Silhouetted in the eldritch flare of their own transport beam, there were three this time, two to prow and one to stern. All three moved to close on her, one stepping around him on its way along the narrow rim of raft.

She looked up through the strings of lank hair in her eyes and began dimming back down into her own physical borders. Without rising from her crouch, she lifted her arms, one finger arrow-straight toward each of the closest two. From those fingers, her two flames flared out toward their marks, each flattening on impact against the flare of their shields. The energies battled in lurid color there, hers shooting tendrils out and around, feinting about for an opening.

From behind the third drone, as it closed with her, the Doctor messaged the emitter. The raft dematerialized beneath it, and it dropped into the water.

It made, absurdly, a plop.

Without waiting to find out if it had come prepared for water combat, he re-formed the missing piece of raft above it, and turned his asphyxiation trick on the biggest one remaining.

This time, though, the emitter couldn't localize. Each time it tried to triangulate positioning, the coordinates wouldn't resolve; illegal values kept returning.

Borg and their adaptions.

The remaining two had their assimilation tubules out, arms reaching for Kes' flesh. She had switched to defense, braced between two walls of pure force, visible where they flattened the drones' outer armor. Their foot augments had spiked into the craft runners for traction to push through it.

The Doctor widened the allowable coordinate value range; it hardly mattered if he closed off an aorta instead of a lung. But the readings scattered, again. Any more imprecision, and he might just as easily kill Kes.

But there was more than one way to get coordinates. His tactile acuity was still excellent.

He came up behind the one that had braced nearest him, and closed his fingers round its throat.

The emitter was more than willing to use those coordinates.

The drone tried to peel him off; he let it snap a few of his fingers, while he formed new ones. Its assimilation tubules groped for him, little blind worms; he let it shoot a few hundred thousand nanites into him, and cordoned them off to keep for later. He spared a glance for the other drone, but Kes had gone back on offense there, and with only one target, was making a stream of little inroads through its shields, now sizzling on its skin.

So he focused back on maintaining triangulation on his own drone, as the seconds became minutes, as his tactile read reported that its vitals deteriorated and fell silent.

They threw the bodies in the sea.

Watching the red optical beam of the last one fade slowly beneath the waves, long after the rest had sunk from sight, she said, "You all right? Not crashing?"

He ran another self-diagnostic. His matrix was alarming again, but still recoverable, with the immediate strain past. "Just adapting. I think, when I got a tactile read on its vitals, the last drone got partially coded as a patient. Not completely, thankfully, since I certainly didn't 'do no harm'. I should be all right in a moment."

"I'm so sorry. That was so foolish."

There was such a desperate self-disgust in her voice that it took him a moment to realize she was talking about her practice. She was assuming that was what had drawn their attention again.

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

"Let's not make a diagnosis before we have a differential." He said it bracingly, on purpose; she was strung quiver-tight along some axis he didn't still understand, but it was purpose that had kept her upright so far, and she needed to keep going a bit longer. "Did the last group get close enough to touch the hull?"

Her head snapped up. She met his eyes, grimly.

They split the search, him to port and her to starboard. Knowing where the drones had stood before he'd been active, it was she who found it: a leggy little tracer burrowed like a tick into the hull. Then they searched twice more, risking some lights within her sphere of darkness, till they were certain the rest of the hull was clear. Unsure how the tracer might react to flesh, he pried it out himself, strapped it to a life vest from the emergency kit, and set it adrift in a cross-current.

And then he turned back to Kes, who was sitting in the doorway, drenched in sweat, looking more lost than the crew of a ship in the wrong quadrant of the galaxy.

This wasn't counselling, but it needed to be something. He'd been missing some piece of the situation for too long.

"You could take a swim," he said finally. "And then..."

"Yes," she said. "Then I'll tell you."