The next day, they began to prepare for war.

It was, considered academically, an interesting exercise. He would need to defend the small, fixed space of the shuttle, where his setup could draw continuous power. Using only small, targeted assaults, against an enemy that could disrupt his targeting.

At least, so far, the enemy wanted them alive.

His efforts ended in painting the interior with a close-packed set of contour lines, made with the metallic flare paint from the disaster kit. With those in place, he could triangulate coordinates for assaults where millimeter precision was enough. At least till the Borg could knock out his vision entirely.

Kes then informed him, with a long-suffering look, that for humanoids those lines also caused enough vertigo to disable any Borg in sight.

Meanwhile she, with her greater range, was their first line of defense; his role would be to preserve her a safe zone to retreat and rest. So she should perhaps have been focusing on honing her own deadly edge further.

What she really did, of course, was split her time, trying to boost the energy garden's output as well. But at this point there would be no arguing with her about lost causes, and that argument would have been a grim one anyway. The last time they had used holographic projection to float the shuttle, they'd had the emitter battery to supplement the energy garden's output. Unless the garden could produce enough power on its own now to float at least his setup, once the Borg found it, this would be his last stand.

"I did try moving your setup myself, you know," she said that night, squinting at his contour lines across the shuttle with one eye after another, threading her fingers between his, still slightly out of breath.

They were packed together, her back to his front, on the bunk, which did turn out to accommodate two people - briefly - if one had no circulation in his arms to lose.

It took him a moment to follow her words; they had just finished field-testing those anatomic edits to his files, and he was still busy congratulating himself on the results. The rest of his concentration was going to restraining himself from doing it aloud. Or pointing out his capacity for repeating the whole test without delay, if she felt like returning to the pile of uniforms on the floor to start over. Though perhaps she shouldn't demand so much from her one lung this time, however generous and revelatory those exertions had been.

Still, moving his setup was worth a thought too.

"What happened?" Still a bit distracted, he lifted his hand, one curious finger hovering over the mitral ridge down her back, with an interest at least partly anatomical. Perhaps he first needed another set of parameters from her, on how afterglow intimacies were supposed to work. Or, as he foresaw more such conversations ahead - situation permitting - a brief survey might be more efficient.

Kes, mercifully unaware and mostly recovered, rubbed her eyes. "I nearly flung it into the bulkhead. And did I tell you? That other me managed, on her way out, to fling Voyager ten thousand light-years toward home. And here I am, afraid to move one bioneural setup five kilometers. But it doesn't have Voyager's shielding, and I can't repair it if it breaks. Anyway, she was half-demolecularized at the time. It might have affected her judgement."

"I don't imagine," he said after a moment, now fully caught up, "that those versions of us would have managed so well here, either." The other versions of him, he was confident, would in fact have been seven kinds of horrified. Defiantly, he changed his mind, and ran one finger down her mitral margin. "Still thinking of that Kes often?"

Kes stretched under his hand, and then twisted her neck to nearly look at him for a second or two, a heroic feat in the space available, before settling back. "Still jealous, you mean?" Her upper hand felt behind her for his arm, his chest. "Not of everything."

He pressed his head to the back of hers. Then, sobering: "So we'll make a stand here. If we're careful, we may have quite a while before that happens."

At that, she became still for a moment. When she spoke again, it was with the careful neutrality of someone picking up a snake with too short a pair of tongs.

"We never settled this. If they get me, you'll only have a few seconds to end it. I'll do whatever I can to make sure I go down before you do. But will you do it?" She took a breath. "If it helps your decision routines, I do have critical intelligence, like your Starfleet captains. I know how other Ocampa can become like me. And I know where they are."

He knew. In the past three days, he had processed the decision several hundred times. Not so much in the hope of changing the outcome, by the end, as to make sure he wouldn't find a way to hesitate if the time came.

But he knew, also, why Starfleet had stopped issuing self-termination drugs on wartime missions.

"Because you'd prefer death to assimilation, for yourself? Or because you believe, ethically, you have no choice?"

She thought for a moment. "Does it matter?"

When the time came, given the millions of lives at risk, probably not. As a Starfleet officer, or even a sapient being, he had no choice himself. But -

"It does in the meantime. I can't fault your logic. But facing that choice has damaged far more people than ever had to go through with it. And you may have a long time to live with it." He stopped himself, later than he should have. "Perhaps I'm only looking for reassurance, thinking it would be easier to go through with if the consent were sincere." He sighed, and ran one hand down her arm. "I won't let you be assimilated, if I have any way to stop it. No exceptions. But I'm sorry if, to you, it's not a choice at all."

She found his hand with hers. "I read the declassified Picard memoirs on his time in the Collective once. If I'm not careful, sometimes I read them again. Then, the choice doesn't seem difficult."

With her eidetic memory, he could well imagine. He wondered if it had been acting up lately like his own at all.

"The truth is, I had the same choice all the crew had, except you. To board the ship in the first place." She finally managed to turn somehow and press her forehead to his; it helped a bit, even when it seemed like it didn't. "I don't want to die. I don't. But I want you to do it."

He put his arms in the usual places. "Aye, Captain."

Later, he would have to show her what he'd done with that fruiting plant that had turned out to make a heat-stable neurotoxin. A deal-breaker for nutritional use, but it had turned out to dessicate and cohere in pill form fairly well. That way, she'd have something lethal she could carry, in case she was out of range, or he had gone down first.

Not historic Starfleet issue, but it would do the job.

What he said now was, loftily, "I still don't expect the issue to arise. You didn't see the fear I left in the last drone's eyes. No doubt they'll lay low for at least a decade."

It was, in fact, a week.