Chapter Four
From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay
And from Galway to Dublin town
No maid I've seen like the sweet colleen
That I met in the County Down.
A red-haired woman stood on the pier, surveying an ancient scene and recognizing, with some discomfort, her smallness within it. For the first time in many years, she felt herself to be completely alone, facing a terrifying freedom. No longer a representative of a larger group, she had forsaken that life for another one much less certain. The members of her immediate family, no doubt, were disappointed in her choice, because there was no way they could understand and no way she could explain. But all of them seemed so far away now, as if they only belonged in that other life to which she could never return.
In the days since her dismissal from Starfleet, Kathryn had turned much of her attention to her physical training, such that her body had become an instrument of war, lean and powerful enough that she could, in the event, outrun the enemy, pursue it, or defeat it. This, and her face had also changed, in that she bore a scar on her right temple from the attack on the Class G planet. Since that time, more than one medical professional had approached her about the scar. She did not doubt that someone more skilled than the physician who treated her could have effectively removed it, but nonetheless she elected to keep it. Somehow it would have been disingenuous to repair that wound, a gesture of disrespect to her experience. And in a sense the scar satisfied her vanity more than it interfered.
She had not wanted to grow out her hair, because this reminded her of Chakotay, of the few times he had touched her hair when it was long, by accident or by half-accident. But she did grow it, and now it hung below her shoulders in loose auburn waves. On the rare chances that she glimpsed herself in a mirror, she barely recognized herself.
She had become convinced, through the spontaneous investigations she undertook, that the missing piece in the devastating corruption of Starfleet was the Borg collective itself. Her principal liaison in her research was the tough-minded, square-shouldered Margaret Thorpe, who acted for the time being as the managing director of the Apocrypha racing club. For a reason that Kathryn was still unsure of, this woman had a terrible grudge against Starfleet and in one way or another was determined to be the instrument of its undoing. Kathryn understood that at the very least, Apocrypha as a whole had been humiliated – kept alive, so to speak, because of the wishes of corrupt officials to conduct business in an out-of-the-way place. But the Ultimate Starfleet Officer Project, a cold-blooded initiative to create and reproduce Borg-human hybrids, was surely too complex and far-reaching to have been carried out by Starfleet alone. Most, if not all, Apocrypha employees believed that the project was directly related to an alleged treaty between the Federation and the Borg, that it was in all probability a conciliatory gesture to avoid direct capture by the collective.
Because she was free to do as she wished and because she had, at least for the moment, the support of Apocrypha, Kathryn had it in her mind to seek out the Borg. She had set up an observatory on a small planet outside of Federation space, and for the past several days had been conducting long-range scans in an effort to locate the nearest cube. She considered herself without any prideful sentiment to be less afraid of the Borg collective than any other officer in Starfleet. She had, over the past several years, systematically fought this group, joined forces with it, by turns outwitted it and fallen prey to it, argued with it, and she had come, by the default of her own experience, to a deep understanding of its principles and structure. And she had learned, through a terrible confluence of events, that she too was susceptible to the allure of collective living, to the extent that she could barely believe that the organization to which she had devoted her life could have fallen so irretrievably from grace. She knew it was true, now, and she knew that she had to begin believing everything she had always said about the nature of individuality.
And she had to do it alone. The crew of Voyager was her heart and soul, linking her to the past, and fulfilling an otherwise unsatisfied desire for a family of her own. But there was no way she could see or talk to any of them again. She had agreed to relinquish her officer status and disappear from Starfleet entirely, in exchange for a judicial reprieve. The men who had, by unknown means, taken control of several high-ranking administrative positions had warned her to never set foot in San Francisco again, and, without mincing words, had indicated what would happen if she were to go back on this agreement. Kathryn had wished desperately that she could have told her former crew, any of them, but in the last analysis had made up her mind that it was too dangerous. And she had walked out of the Administration complex for the last time with her head held high, in civilian clothing, and she had taken a civilian shuttlecraft back to Alpha Walker. She had in effect disappeared, and anyone who had ever known her was free to speculate on, and to guess, and to judge her reasons.
What she was living for, she told herself, was the idea that justice could still be done. By the same token, she herself was quite prepared to die in pursuit of this justice, and had no real doubt that she most likely would die pursuing it. She did not consider this to be too great a sacrifice. Perhaps it had been the brief but intense time she had spent with her flight partner Cassandra, a young woman with a quite obvious suicide wish, that had instilled in her a kind of macabre indifference about the length of her own life. If she could be, for the remaining moments that she was alive, an instrument of that justice that seemed to be too precarious and elusive to be sustained, then she could die with a clear conscience, having honoured all the innocents who had suffered or who might in future suffer for her cause.
At long last, she had located the ship she had been hoping to discover, and received word from Margaret that her own vessel would be ready and delivered to her. She spent her final days on the planet preparing her flight plan. On the last day, she woke up with the rising of the planet's sun and completed her task, and she began to pack her things, and to eliminate any trace of her presence on the planet. She did not think she had been followed; that is, she believed they were most likely looking for her but she thought she had for the moment evaded them. For several hours she waited at the pier, the wind whipping at the loose fabric of her tunic, until shortly before nightfall she spotted her Apocrypha vessel approaching.
Iberia, which she considered her prized posession although it never technically belonged to her, had been destroyed on the Class G planet, and this streamlined metallic grey flyer was Apocrypha`s attempt at a suitable replacement. Kathryn recognized the woman who presently stepped out of the vessel as her flight partner. She was tall and thin, and she wore the Apocrypha black racing gloves on her hands. Kathryn was aware that this was not her Cassandra, not the woman who had died in a race toward Aurelius Prime, but another woman just like her, with the same body, the same face, and perhaps an almost identical mind.
She walked toward the woman to introduce herself, and expected a pair of strange hazel eyes to meet her gaze. She stiffened with surprise and recognition as she saw the clear, round blue eyes that stared back, at once accusing and tender. She was so terribly used to that stare, and she thought if she did not see it for years, she would still know it anywhere. The positions of the implants had changed, but there could be no doubt; this woman was Seven of Nine.