"In the battle for Voyager, 8472's message wasn't all I saw." The ringlight that filtered through the viewports into the shuttle was dim but diffuse, so the wild, half-dry locks of Kes' hair cast no shadow on her face. Her fingers were wrapped around a tea of leaves from her energy garden, made with a lightless burst of her own power's heat. There on the worktable folded down between them, the tea rippled gently with the sea that carried them.
"The rest of it began with the way they see the multiverse. I know Starfleet diagrams it as a tree, branching every time an event goes two ways at once." On that academic, neutral topic, most likely drilled into her by Tuvok, Kes raised her eyes for a moment, then looked back down into the cup. "But 8472…their science, or imagination, sees it as layers. Stacked, infinitely thin, infinitely many, interwoven in some places, parallel in others. And then, everywhere, imagine stakes driven through them, fixing the layers together. Those are people, sapient beings, who exist across universes. And when they spoke to me, it wasn't just this layer."
Countless attempts to reach countless Voyagers. He wondered how many EMHs had been working to destroy 8472 while they tried to reach out, and how many had succeeded.
"They tried different messages in different 'verses; they didn't know what would work. In each one I saw, the Borg broke the alliance. In this one, 8472 saw them winning. So they tried longer here. When they sighted along that line of me, across the verses, they let me watch. Just a few days, or a week or two, down those other timelines. They may even be right, that the relationship isn't as simple as branching; some things in the others were different from the start." She looked up again, almost through him, holding to the discipline that had held her together so far.
"There were versions of me that never fully heard them. Others used their message to form a link, to battle them telepathically. Some formed a counteralliance with them against the Borg. Some were assimilated. But all were touched by them in some way, and all were changed by it." Then her breath hitched, and that discipline cracked by a hair. "And one way or another, so many, many Voyagers escaped."
Her eyes were wet now, but her sob was really a laugh. In the near-dark, he heard an answering sound like it from himself; the pain and the relief, together, of remembering the infinite Voyagers that were still in flight.
"None of this matters here, for us. I haven't been keeping anything useful from you. But of the Voyagers that escaped, there was one…I don't know why it feels like this. It wasn't the best of the worlds, and certainly not the worst. But the 'me' on that one…her powers began to grow from the contact like mine have. And then, a short while later – when all was quiet, by Voyager's standards - she just…left."
He didn't understand.
"She'd become a threat to the ship. Those power surges from the contact with 8472; she couldn't control them yet. That part, I understand. Even here, I nearly fried your processor once; I had to sleep outside for weeks after that. Imagine it on a ship in vacuum. Those surges happened in most worlds, and most versions of me did what she did at first – rush to a shuttle. Some learned control there. Some died trying."
She was presenting her story in the same careful, factual way she'd presented patients. So as he'd done all those times, not to break her focus, he only nodded.
"But that one…That other change you saw tonight, when the powers take control of themselves, when my body starts breaking up, or reforming; that happened to her, too. And when it did, it wasn't cowardice, or…or anything, except curiosity, and a chance to move on, that decided her. She took the chance and let it happen. To go explore the universe, or space-time, or whatever directions her powers developed that weren't close combat on an empty planet."
And there it was, that slight downtick of tempo, marking the moment Kes always did a last check on her logic before proposing a diagnosis. "If any disaster happened to her friends afterwards, she'd never have even known."
"And you've been hating her for that," he finished, finally grasping it, "and yourself for being her, since you saw it."
Kes nodded once; she had her face in her hands now. Another human habit, but then, they both had to carry the torch for humans here, now.
"I know circumstances were different," she went on after a minute, with the focus of a pilot picking her way through a minefield. "But I'm not sure that matters. You see, that change, that total dissolution, didn't happen everywhere, to the others. Just her, and me; and one other, who had gone through some other loss I couldn't see, who I'd swear became the ship itself somehow, or blended with it. So we three were nearer to each other that way. And what we had in common was a starving desperation to change our lives entirely."
She uncovered her face; whatever type of pain was written there, it was outside his experience and too harrowing for tears. "You know what it feels like, when it starts? Relief. Escape. To become something, whatever it is, that gravity can't keep here. It's all I can do not to let it happen, to cut and run. Like she did."
But humanoids don't choose their desires, he wanted to say to all of that. Mostly, at least in Federation worlds, they judge each other by their actions.
But that was insufficient for a telepath, and anyway, she had already gotten there. "So you see, I know, if I'd gotten the message they gave her, it would have been me instead. Off using the cosmos as a playground while her friends, people who'd protected with their own bodies, were in danger and alone. Different dangers, but always something; she should have known. I don't want to be her. But I want this world to be like hers. I want them all alive even if it means me not knowing, or caring. And I…I hate it, but I still…"
"You want what she has," he finished. "So you've agreed to become a weapon instead, to prove your loyalty to the dead." A textbook case of reaction formation; the counselling databanks were good for something after all.
Staring down at the table again, she brought it to a finish. "So you understand. And if this costs me…us…your respect, I understand. But it's distorting my judgement. I see that now. So you need to know."
His matrix was still shaky from the day's events, and not filtering things properly. With all the emotional subroutines and visuals her words had triggered, the faces of those they'd loved were flashing one after another in his optical processor. So, in a way, the eyes of the dead were on them.
But he was sure they would not have been looking in anger.
"Do you believe me?" he asked her after a moment. "That I only meddled with my ethical restraints? That the subroutines are still intact? I wouldn't blame you, if you didn't quite."
Kes looked up at that. "That time you went wrong," she answered after a moment, riding out the non sequitur, "everything was different. And the remorselessness it would have taken to make yourself seem the same instead, this time…Yes. I believe you."
Choosing for the sake of his matrix not to process that last idea fully, he nodded. "But you see, in their eyes, in mine, that other-you did nothing wrong. Nor did you." He steepled his fingers, leaning in, searching for words. "She was just…luckier. Her friends chose their path. She chose hers."
And then there was no putting it off any longer. "Even if a very stupid friend reprimanded you in both worlds, just before all this began, over one late medical report after one night spent on shore. Even if he was wrong, and arrogant, to think he knew what was best for you. When he should have been the first to understand there was a world outside the ship that you needed to see."
He'd expected that to be dreadful. He was right.
What he hadn't expected was the look that began forming on her face afterward. He'd only seen it on visitors and refugees passing through Voyager, people with conditions that were lifelong or fatal on their worlds, when they first understood those could be cleared up aboard with one hypospray. That knocked-sideways look, unbalanced by an unexpected hope.
She didn't speak right away, but after a moment, without yet looking up, she reached across the table and laid her hand silently on his arm. "Don't let me off so freely. I was young, and stupid. And late."
He waved his other hand, with intentional airiness. "All humanoid rites of passage. Not generally optional, and not character flaws." Looking out the viewport behind her, for the first time in quite a while, he found himself up to of a touch of snark. "Although I still wouldn't have recommended seeing this world, specifically."
Kes let go, and twisted round to look out with him at the cloudy ringlight on the water. After a minute, she made a sound halfway to being a laugh.
In the partly-hopeful silence that followed, he thought more about her near-dissolution earlier that evening. "Could you do what she did, now? Change your form and leave? Attack the cube, or go seek help?"
She shook her head, still looking out. "It's not voluntary. You saw it come with exertion, but that's not usually enough. Not for her there, and not for me. And anyway, imagine…right after completing that change, the first thing that other-me does is something I didn't think I'd ever do. Her brain, her organs, everywhere we look for personhood – all have changed. Who is she, then? Does she remember the people she loved? If so, does she care?"
At least, he liked to think, she sounded a bit more now like she was thinking through a problem, not being ridden by it. But it wasn't the time to make the obvious point that dissolution beat euthanasia. So this time, he had no comforting response.
She hugged her arms around herself, and they watched the waters in silence.
He kept watch that night, while Kes slept like someone who hadn't fully slept for months. And he ran La Traviatta on background. But most of his new power stream was going toward neither.
If every trick used on the Borg worked exactly once, he had no intention of coming up with the next one in the middle of the next attack, watching the last member of his crew an inch from assimilation, begging him for death.
His matrix was creaking again under the weight of his intentions; he muted it and continued. Planning ways to kill, it turned out, was just the inverse of creating treatment plans. Though there were some additional data needed, some investigations to be planned, to do it well.
By the time the shore came in sight, when he woke Kes to pole them up a marshy delta and moor the craft beneath the tangled shelter of the coastal swamp before dawn, he had made a list of what he needed to know.
And so it turned out, with the noise from his fluttering ethical functions silenced, this was exactly what he was made for.
. . . . .
"Kes," he said the next morning from the hatchway, "it's time."
Back turned, just outside, she dropped her hands from the seedling she'd been communing with – the mainland had a fresh trove of species to work with, to increase the power to the gelpacks – and said nothing for a moment. Then she gave up the effort; she'd hated his plan since hearing of it upon waking. "Was it this hard for you, when I went out?"
"I couldn't say," he replied primly, securing the emitter to himself. "Do you consider me to have a half-healed immobilizing injury and the full attention of the galaxy's most dangerous species? And a physical body any number of things can kill?"
Stepping up from the muck to the shuttle with a squelch, Kes gave him a withering look as she passed, which was justified. The risk might not be death, but if he miscalculated or was delayed, letting the emitter's battery run out in the middle of nowhere was close enough.
But even Kes agreed there was no obvious alternative for completing their search for the others. Tucked away here in the marshes, the only way they could get a wider field of view was on the volcanic peak she'd seen from the island, high above the coastal plains. With the emitter, he could make the round trip in an hour; for her it would take days, if the cold and thin air at the top didn't stop her. From there, he could survey an area many times the widest scatter range predicted for the pods, and return with minutes to spare.
And if they both knew the statistics on survival and reunion after this long, it was still a trip they could not live out their days without having made.
But the journey up turned out in fact to be a pair of pleasures he'd nearly forgotten. Being the advance guard, walking where his humanoid companions couldn't; and tasting novelty again, obeying his directive to improve through experience. It was a revelation, after what felt like a lifetime spent in the shuttle - the shifts in slope and warmth across the mountain's folds and ridges, the gradual tapering of tree height and density, and then the sudden change as he stepped above the treeline into unbroken sunlight.
There, the ground beneath him was slabs of flat shale, veined with grasses in the shallow soil along the channels between them, silent and still except for pale glints off a few fluttering insects. When the slopes and woods ringed out below were visible in every direction, he stopped and searched.
His visual acuity had been designed for microsurgery, not long-distance reconnaissance. But in this cold clear air, on a planet without smog, the visibility and resolution were good enough.
Still, he almost missed it.
The living forest stretched undisturbed all around, with nothing larger than the lonely death of one tree here and there to break the primeval canopy. But a jagged scar of blackened snags, a kilometer across, zagged down to the east where a fire had once burned through. And cutting down within it, where someone must have thought the greater visibility would let them land more safely, was the razor-straight line of a landing trail.
It took him under ten minutes to intersect it. On the way, back below the treeline, he passed one of the apex predators Kes had described months before. It paralleled him for a while, half-hidden behind the trees, matching his inhuman speed through the underbrush with casual efficiency. Then it veered away. Put off, perhaps, by the lack of scent, or the disproportionate strength-for-mass evident in his spidery leaps across the rough terrain.
Too rich for your blood, he thought. Or, more likely, not rich enough.
There, on the slope of a wandering defile too steep for anything but patchy grasses to root, he found the escape pod. It was half-buried, scorched by energy weapons fire, and deformed from its collision with the ground.
And roughly two-thirds assimilated.
Circling it, peering between the tendrils of Borg technology that erupted through the thinning hull where they had drained its alloy mass to build themselves, he confirmed that it was empty. His creative imaging routines needed no encouragement; as if it were happening now, he could see those tendrils proliferating blindly over the interior as the pod entered the atmosphere, the crew inside scrambling to boost power to structural integrity - if they weren't already being assimilated - knowing the depleted hull would still never survive impact.
He wondered whether that was a worse or better way to die than in a clean pod under weapons fire. And whether any newly-assimilated drones would even be usable for the Borg after such a crash. Or perhaps here, too, they had come anyway to collect their dead.
Regardless, they certainly knew about the wreck, and had most likely left it here as bait.
That, or parading about in the open under a cloudless sky had done the trick. As drones flashed into the dusk to flank him, he thought, finally.
It would, after all, have been foolish to let his final trip away from the shuttle end without trying to collect that Borg physiology data he needed.
There were only two of them. He wondered for the first time if they were running low on drones.
"Have you been waiting for someone to come by all this time?" he asked them brightly as they closed. The curiosity was real, but he wanted them closer; and anyway, anxiety had always made him chatter.
This time around, the one that closed first wasted no time on the rest of him; it reached directly for the emitter.
And, for its trouble, got a puff of the mineralized dust, from a booby-trapped holographic decoy, mounted on the shoulder he'd always used for the real one. Kes' idea; hating his plan hadn't stopped her from improving it.
He used the drone's momentary disorientation to make physical contact, hand splayed on its chest to use his own sensory inputs to triangulate coordinates again. This time he planned to try a cerebral embolism of holographic air.
And got nothing back. No coordinate data, no physical signal of touch. He could see the contact, as if it were someone else's arm.
As the emitter's technology, including sensory input, was several hundred years ahead of them all, that was a neat trick. And they didn't have to beat him; only to delay him till the emitter's battery ran out.
If he was down to vision alone for triangulating, he needed a move that didn't require nanometer precision, and now.
As it turned out, a standard autopsy Y-cut, with a holographic blade of near-infinite sharpness, was equally effective at opening the living as the dead.
But the drone's distress homing beacon was still working, and enough of the dust had settled now to let the signal through. Twitching and staggering, jetting umber blood through the slice down its frontal armor, the drone vanished halfway to the ground.
Satisfied, he turned. Just as the fingers of the other one closed round the real emitter on his ankle.
The instant, objective regret values in his matrix were dazzling. Even dead, the drone would have its grip on the emitter, and in a moment the Collective would recall the body. His hubris was about to end him, and leave Kes alone for good.
But he had muted that regret subroutine before departing, as being unhelpful here – it was only good for performance improvement in a clinical setting, where there was time to reflect. So, in the extra half-second the dusty air bought him before this drone's homing signal got through, his extra processing power suggested a desperate possibility.
He filled a fifty-centimeter-long volume, along the likely path of its spinal cord, with holographic tetanus neurotoxin.
Whether he'd overshot the dosing, or its implants were amplifying the signal from its hijacked nervous system, the drone spasmed so viciously he thought he heard it crack a vertebrae.
As always, the extensor muscles won the battle with the flexors. Its fingers around the emitter snapped open in a fan-like rictus, releasing him.
He took advantage of its collapse to peel off its homing beacon and toss it away. It flashed out of view before hitting the ground.
But his scattershot counterattack had burned most of the remaining emitter power. Fewer than seven minutes remained.
Still, he could make it back to the shuttle's hiding place in half of that. And the drone's armor was executing a rhythmic emergency action, expanding and contracting to make it breathe without functioning respiratory muscles; there was time to study it alive.
So he took a few moments, while it lay paralyzed, to carry out his original plan. He crouched over it and mapped the interface points between machine and organism by hand, beginning with the assimilation tubules, tracing the anatomic vulnerabilities with professional interest.
As he'd suspected, the structures of the implants had evolved, from those in Starfleet's records. More biochemical manipulation; less servomechanical redundancy.
That gave him several new ideas.
When he worked up to its face, he got a shock of his own. Based on his data files, it was the liaison the Borg had sent aboard their ship, the one that would have executed the assimilation. It was marked, now, by a jagged point-blank phaser scar from forehead to clavicle, closed over but still livid and knotty.
He wondered if the Borg lacked dermal repair technology, or just didn't care.
"Seven, how nice to see you again," he said pleasantly, prying up the ocular interface with a holographic microretractor to see which cable types entered the optic nerves. "I do mean that, since not all humanoid species react to tetanus neurotoxin. Did Mr. Tuvok give you that scar? Or Mr. Paris, perhaps? He did have some uses."
Its paralytic grimace didn't shift, of course, but its free eye was fixed on him, blinking. He shone an infrared light in the exposed pupil to see if it contracted. "I like to think it might have been the Captain herself."
He balanced the drone carefully on its rigid side to study the cranial augments, still dimly aware of several other things. The muting on his regret subroutines was about to expire, for one. And his emitter was nearly out of battery.
"Why," he asked in his best bedside manner, probing with the microretractor round the implant edges, "aren't you coming at us harder by now? Can't you? Or won't you?"
Finally, having gleaned what he could short of vivisection, he was left with the remaining fact he'd been ignoring: he had backed himself into a corner by taking a drone captive.
He finished his exam, laid it on its back on the cooling ground and stood over it. "I'm truly sorry," he said, and meant it – he had let regret unmute. "If there were a time for euthanasia, this would be it. But I don't have your consent, and you don't qualify as an active threat till your neurotransmitters replenish. I hope your people can retrieve you."
Or at least, he thought - walking away in the wrong direction, in case it was watching - that the predators here don't play with their food.
Out of sight, he changed direction and broke into a ground-eating run toward the shore, already feeling what a humanoid might have described as light-headed. His last act, stumbling through the shuttlecraft doorway as Kes rose to her feet, was to finally set a level-two self-diagnostic running. His matrix had been red-alerting for the past half hour, and he was getting a bit too good at ignoring it.
Time ran out, and the emitter hit the floor.
Offline, he went back to his list of lethal tricks to begin applying what he'd learned, with the diagnostic humming and the matrix wailing in the background.
It was, in its way, a bit like opera.
