The Borg sphere was dark and filled with smoke that danced and swirled in the beam lights the away team shone over the ship's surfaces. The dead bodies of drones littered the floor under the away teams' feet or hung grotesquely from their alcoves. There were also several dead bodies that weren't Borg but were about to be. The away team moved carefully though the sphere with phasers held at the ready while Seven and Janeway scanned the area. Janeway wasn't sure which was more eerie, an active Borg ship or this dead one. Both were figments from a sick and twisted nightmare. When a faint signal sounded on her tricorder it nearly made Janeway jump as it sliced through the creepy silence. The text that crossed her and Seven's screens caused the two women to look at each other with quizzical looks. Janeway nodded her head to Seven to proceed and then quickly followed the taller woman as Seven lead them wordlessly deeper in the haunting ship.
"B'Elanna see what you can find out about what happen to this ship." Janeway ordered as they moved past a section of computer access terminals. The Human-Klingon engineer nodded and quickly went to work on the sphere's computer core. Tuvok ordered his security officers to remain with B'Elanna while he continued to follow Janeway and Seven.
The look on Seven's face intrigued Janeway. It was focused and confused and curious all at the same time, not that anyone else would know that. Over the years Janeway had become rather good at reading the younger woman's seemingly non-present expressions. This particular look was a look that Janeway enjoyed seeing on the younger woman's face. Seven liked solving things as long as they were solvable. She liked to explore as long as she had the comfort of something solid like scientific and mathematical fact. She was Janeway's voice of reason when Janeway was in her gunslinger mode, just as much as Janeway was Seven's voice of reason when ex-drone perfectionist struggled with the imprecations of human reality.
As she watched the tall blonde work her way through an environment that seemed both foreign and natural to her, Janeway couldn't help but think about how much Seven had grown in such a few short years. The woman-child Seven had once been had become a wonderful young woman. It warmed Janeway's heart to think about the way Seven embraced her humanity with such an innocence and passion, anger and fear, joy and pain. The younger woman had worked so hard to get where she was now and Janeway couldn't be more proud of her, nor could she not help but love her.
"This way." Seven said with the slightest pitch to her voice, one that only Janeway noticed. Seven was feeling very uneasy about being aboard this ship and she wasn't really sure why. Some of her apprehension eased when she felt Janeway step closer to her. The older woman's nearness, her warmth, burned away the sudden cold Seven had felt wash over her. Feeling more at ease allowed Seven to focus on her intense curiosity. The ship's structure was unlike anything Seven was aware of.
Janeway and Tuvok followed Seven deeper into the sphere with out hesitation, although Tuvok made it known that the further in they went the more likely it was that Voyager would lose their signals. Janeway acknowledged her chief tactical officer's words of caution but she had to admit, at least to herself, that she was as enthralled with all of this as Seven was.
Seven walked into the center of the sphere and stopped dead in her tracks. The ex-drone nearly shivered as she took the room in. It reminded her of the space she'd shared for a brief time with the Borg Queen. The difference was that the center of the room wasn't taken up by the Queen's central alcove, but a single column like structure that gave off a soft green glow. She approached the structure slowly, scanning it as she did. The chamber seemed to have it's own power supply and as Seven came to the other side of it, she knew why. A small round window allowed her to see inside and what she found brought a soft inaudible 'oh' to her lips. Inside, floating in bright green goo, was a small human looking infant. The structure was a maturation chamber, but one that Seven was unfamiliar with. Seven watched wordlessly as the chamber's tiny occupant moved it's tiny arm in the bio-fluid completely unaware of what was going on around it. Sliding her tricorder back into it's holster Seven began accessing the chamber's controls.
Coming up behind Seven, Janeway's eyes grew slightly in surprise and her 'oh' was far from inaudible. She was aware of maturation chambers but none like this; a single chamber in the middle of an isolated part of the ship? She pressed her hand to the glass window as she continued to look at the infant inside. Then she looked over to Seven who continued working the Borg controls. As Janeway looked around the room she noticed that there wasn't another maturation chamber insight. There had been dozens on the ship they'd found Icheb and the other Borg children on. "Seven?"
"It is unusual." Seven stated. "I am unaware of there ever being a ship with only one maturation chamber, and never one of this style." The readings she was getting told her the tiny infant inside was alive and stable, but the chamber's power supply wouldn't last much longer. "She is alive but will not remain that way if we leave her in there much longer. The chamber has less then twenty minutes of power left."
Janeway nodded her understanding. She turned her attention back to the floating baby whose eyes were closed but seemed to be stretching in the fluid as one might a mother's womb. "Can she be removed from the chamber safely?"
Seven tapped at the screen for several seconds before finally nodding. "I believe so. All of her systems appear to be fully formed. Her development would appear to be the point of birth."
It didn't take Janeway long to start issuing her commands. "Tuvok, hail the ship. Let the Doctor know we're beaming him a Borg infant. Seven, do what you have to do to get her out of there."
Tuvok nodded while Seven began tapping in commands. After cutting power to the incubation unit that would have been used in the second stage of maturation, Seven beamed the infant out of the chamber and into it. Because the unit was now offline the infant was safe from the connection tubes that would have attached to it the moment the infant appeared in the unit. She and Janeway both walked over and watched as the tiny being took her first real breaths, her tiny chest just barely rising and falling. The infant stretched her limbs, testing their movement outside the bio-fluid. Then she began to whimper in preparation form testing out her now clear lungs. Seven returned to the control panel and lowered the already failing shielding around the chamber, then beamed the infant right to Voyager's sickbay.
"Doctor to Janeway. Patient received."
"Acknowledged Doctor." Janeway replied before turning to Seven. "Lets get as much information as we can get and return to the ship. I don't want to be here if someone else out there received that single as well."
"Yes Captain." Seven replied and went back to the station she'd been working at. She could access the ship's computer core from there as well as divert power to the station B'Elanna was at.
While Seven and B'Elanna worked on the computer information Janeway used her
tricorder to scan the unassimilated bodies that littered the ships corridors. They were humanoid, but not a species they were familiar with. She ordered Tuvok and one of the other security officers to scan some of the other bodies and some of the drones as well. While her officers worked Janeway took a closer look around. She'd been on enough Borg ships to know this wasn't the everyday run of the mill ship.
Once the away team got all the information they were going to get, they headed back to Voyager. Thanks to Seven they had what they needed to download the ship's core without having to remove it.
"It will be easier if we tried to decipher the information we have in the cargo bay." Seven commented as they stepped off the transporter pad.
"I'll take what we got and start setting up." B'Elanna offered as she gathered up the data nodes.
"Good." Janeway acknowledged as the team started splitting up. "Tuvok, have Tom move us to a safer distance, but still in the area. Go to yellow alert and be on the watch for any activity heading our way. You and Harry see what you can find out about that other ship. Seven and I will be in sickbay."
The normally quiet Voyager sickbay was filled with the angry protesting cries of a small red faced infant. The sound seemed to bounce off the walls and nothing the Doctor, Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram turned Chief Medical Officer, did seemed to sooth the frightened, annoyed, child. It had started the moment she'd been beamed aboard and despite his best efforts wasn't stopping. He finally ended up calling for back up.
"You called, Doctor." Neelix called out as he walked into sickbay.
The Doctor turned around with the screaming baby in his arms. He'd never been so glad to see the Talaxian moral officer. "I can't seem to get her to stop and since you have experience with…"
Neelix smiled a warm, surprised, smile that seemed to light up the whole room. He walked over to the Doctor and the baby rubbing his hands together in a pleased sort of fashion. The squat, hairy, specked man who served as Voyager's moral officer, chef and sometimes diplomat absolutely loved children. He reached out and took the infant, now wrapped in a soft medical blanket, from the doctor and cuddled her close, the way he had done with his goddaughter Naomi when she was a baby. "Where did she come from?"
"The Captain had her beamed over from the Borg sphere." The Doctor explained as he retrieved his medical tricorder.
"Again?" Neelix chuckled as he tried to sooth the infant. "You're not the first Borg baby to be sent to us." He told her. The baby stopped crying for a moment and looked at Neelix, but then started to cry again.
Minutes seemed like days while the two men tried to calm the infant. While Neelix held her, the Doctor was able to scan her enough to tell there was nothing physically wrong with her, yet neither of them could figure out why she wouldn't stop crying. Both men turned with pleading looks at the sound of the doors opening.
Seven walked into sickbay with Janeway, and looked at the two men and the small infant with her eyebrow raised. "Is there a problem with the child Doctor?"
The Doctor sighed in annoyance. "Other then her need to shatter the glass in here I can't find anything, but I can't fully examine her until she calms down."
Seven walked over to the two frazzled men and took the infant from Neelix. She wasn't really sure why, other then recalling something the Captain had said to her once in a similar situation about following her maternal instincts. She'd only held an infant once, when they'd found Icheb and the others, but that had only been for a few moments. It was awkward at first. She was use to older children such as Naomi Wildman, Icheb, the other former drone children. They could walk, talk, explain what was wrong with them, they could be independent, everything that this small infant couldn't and wasn't yet. It took a moment for Seven to get the feel for holding the infant, keeping her head stable in the bend of her arm, her other arm supporting the baby's weight, but once she got use to the way the baby felt she seemed to relax. Neelix and the Doctor watched in utter amazement as the baby stopped crying and snuggled into Seven's arms almost the instant she'd been placed there.
"Fascinating." The Doctor said softly as he walked over to them. He opened his tricorder and began to scan the baby without asking Seven if she'd mind holding her while he did so. "She's been crying since you sent her over."
"Well, it looks like our Seven has a magic touch." Janeway said with a smile on her face. She'd watched, wordlessly, as Seven had taken control over the infant. With a soft smile on her face she came over to stand next to the taller woman and looked down at the baby. The Captain's smile brightened as she reached out to caress the baby's soft cheek. "She's so tiny."
"Fascinating." The Doctor repeated as he ran his scans.
Janeway managed to keep from rolling her eyes, but only barely. "You've been reading Ambassador's Spock's memoirs again, Doctor. Care to give the imitation a rest and fill us in?"
The Doctor gave her an annoyed look before taking his tricorder over to the main station and placing it in it's downloading dock. "The infant is human." He stated bluntly. "She was, as Seven stated, at the end of the human gestation cycle, and is in perfect health. There are Borg enhancements, but not the normal Borg implants that should be worked into her system."
"Human." Janeway repeated, her shock evident in her voice. She reached out and touched the baby's cheek again, causing the baby to blink her eyes open. Crystal blue eyes locked onto blue-gray eyes for several moments before the infant began taking in the rest of her surroundings. "Do newborn Borg have implants?"
"Not to the degree a mature drone would." Seven answered as she continued to hold the baby but focus on the adults. Though she would glance down each time she saw the Captain touch the child, and she did look into the baby's eyes when they opened.
Janeway looked at the doctor. "What does she have?"
"Nanoprobes of course." The Doctor replied as he accessed the tricorder scans. "Basic stuff like an interlink node, neural transceiver, a cortical array and node, neuro-processing adjunct."
"That all sounds pretty average." Janeway cut in. "Seven?"
Seven had been looking down at the small bundle in her arms, watching her breath, watching the way she snuggled closer to her body. 'For the warmth' Seven told herself. "If an infant is placed in stage one maturation they are adapted only enough to survive with in. More implants would have been added during the following stages. It is not until stage four that they would appear more Borg in appearance."
"Are the implants active?" Janeway asked.
"She was removed from the maturation process prematurely, the assimilation process interrupted, the implants should not be functional other then to maintained her life functions." Seven answered.
"And yet" The Doctor interjected, "the distress signal Seven was receiving appears to have come from her neural transceiver. It seems to have stopped transmitting."
Seven looked up at the doctor as she listened to what he was saying. "I am not linked to the hive mind. I should not have been able too…"
"The signal doesn't appear to be the standard drone signal." The Doctor once again interjected. "It isn't broadcasting to the Collective, at least not on any band we're familiar with. I need to run further scans, but there are defiantly some unique aspects to the child's implants."
Janeway reached out and gently traced the only visible implants on the child, the node above her right eye, and the starburst behind her left ear, polar opposites of Seven's facial implants. "Do whatever needs done, Doctor. Keep her from sending any more SOS's or linking with the Collective. Seven, while you and B'Elanna are checking those files keep an eye out for anything that may help the Doctor."
"Yes Captain." Seven replied as she locked eyes with the older woman for a moment.
"Alright, keep me informed." Janeway replied before smiling at the baby. "You're in good hands kiddo. Welcome to Voyager."