"And childish fears I have outgrown into my eyes are thrust, `til my dull tears go dropping down like lead into the dust."*
Seven spoke this ancient poetry in a thin monotone, the way she had spoken the heading of their flight course a few moments before. Kathryn turned to her in amazement.
"You're afraid," said Seven, "not of this mission, not of what might happen to you. You're afraid of me."
Iolanthe was an impressive vessel, although not quite the marvel of modern technology that Iberia had been. How Apocrypha managed to have these ships manufactured, tested and ready for launch, compensating for the others that seemed to be destroyed on a daily basis, Kathryn had yet to fathom. They were all racers, capable of travelling at high warp if necessary but built for those violent chases at impulse speeds. If it were any indication of the recent change in her, Seven was a daring pilot, flying too fast and too close to the obstructions in her path.
"If I'm afraid," said Kathryn, "it's because I'm can't be sure of who you are anymore."
"Oh?" Seven arched an eyebrow in much the same way that she always had. "And what about you? Not long ago you would have been giving me orders on how to fly this ship, but now you're a passenger. I'd say we've both changed a fair bit."
Seven's language, along with her physical appearance, had undergone a significant change. The perfunctory computer-speak of the ex-drone's younger life had been replaced with most, if not all, of the shades of human sentiment capable of being expressed through language. But Kathryn took this challenge calmly, drawing in a slow breath and deliberating her response. "You're correct," she said. "I can't give orders anymore." She paused. "How does that make you feel, Seven?"
Seven of Nine laughed, the low, hollow laugh of a Cassandra. "How does it make me feel?" she repeated, and when she looked at Kathryn her eyes were wet. "Well I'll admit to you that it feels tremendous. Tremendous to know that no one, not the Borg and not you and not anyone, will ever be giving me orders again."
The starship hurtled past an asteroid, nearly grazing the hull. Kathryn ignored this, the blood already rising in her temples in a familiar and dreaded exhilaration.
Seven reached into a pocket on her black racing uniform, and extracted a small vial of a blue liquid. She drank from it, a placid expression on her face, and she closed her large eyes momentarily.
"You believe that I've never truly forgiven you for taking me away from the collective, but you don't understand what it meant to me."
Kathryn frowned, vaguely realizing that this was, in fact, what she had been thinking – that Seven, after all these years, still held a grudge and was finally in a position to do something about it. "What did it mean to you?" she asked, as innocently as she could.
Seven paused again before replying. She stared dead ahead as she spoke, and knit her brows in concentration. "You saved me from something that I couldn't even recognize, you woke me from a sleep more profound than death. But once awake, I found that I was only half myself, human and not human, woman and machine and not the better part of either. I tried to be what you wanted me to be, and to feel what you wanted me to feel, but there was always something missing. I think you knew that, but you were so stubborn, and you have that greatness in you, to see possibilities where others see only failure. They say there is a fine line between genius and illness, and there are others besides yourself who saw potential in me, men who have been attempting to create a race of powerful soldiers. I did make a good soldier, I think, so those men were not wrong about me. The Cassandras believed they would have to wage war to force me away from Starfleet. But to shed that identity, to finally part ways with Seven of Nine, was the greatest gift I have ever received. Do you know, Kathryn," she said, turning her head, her voice suddenly rich with emotion, "that I am now able to cry, for hours, to weep as bitterly as a human child, and to laugh, to feel the breeze on my back and know the ecstasy of freedom. I can feel the cold sting of betrayal and I can burn for revenge, and yet my heart can break with compassion and allow me to be merciful. Such things I have never known, and never would have known if I had remained as I was. But you do understand Kathryn, because the same thing has happened to you. I can see it so clearly now, and I know that you've escaped, too."
Kathryn's hands gripped the metal edges of her chair. She had begun to feel the dizzying pull of Seven's mind on her own. She could feel Seven in the interior of her thoughts, studying them with the eye of a scientist and learning those parts of her that she would have not willingly shared. Her heartbeat rose in her chest. "Seven, wait –"
"I keep telling you not to be afraid. Don't fight this; it shouldn't have to be so hard. Isn't it only natural for two people who have shared so much to be together in this way?"
Kathryn willed herself to look only at the expanse of space ahead of her, to focus only on this race against time in which she was a hapless passenger. But Seven probed further into her mind with some unseen instrument.
"It's so simple, really. It's just like opening a window. This is the kind of freedom that you crave, what you've been searching for ever since you left Voyager."
Kathryn wanted with all her heart to hate this woman, and everything that she was saying. But she was beginning to feel that if she looked up, it might be enough to drown her in that intense desire to merge, to surrender her mind and her distinctiveness, to be as one with Seven and Cassandra and with all the others. She should have known this was coming; that the devil within was perhaps even stronger than the devil outside – but she held on for dear life.
"I can see you now, in the way that I've always wanted to see you. I know what you want, and what you are ashamed of, and every wave of pleasure and pain you've ever experienced. I know it because I've transformed, I've become everything I am meant to be. Don't pretend to me that you don't have that same hunger in you. Look at me, Kathryn. Look at me and tell me that you don't want to know me the same way that I am knowing you in this moment."
Kathryn did raise her eyes, and she did look at Seven. She looked, and felt exactly that – hunger. But was a hunger that transcended the physical, and could be satiated only in reaching that forbidden level of shared experience. There was half the liquid remaining in the vial. Kathryn ran her tongue over her lips in frustration, white knuckles tightening on her chair.
Aloud she said, her voice breaking, "I do want it. You know very well that I do." She could almost feel her own transformation taking place as she spoke the words, feel the liquid dissolving into her blood and bringing her to a new height of consciousness. "But I'm not going to drink from that vial, and you're not going to force me."
In another moment, she felt the claws retract, the grip loosen. Her heartbeat slowed and she began to regain control, enough to wonder why Seven had not tried harder to effect the assimilation.
But Seven was also recovering, and she almost resembled her old self as she turned away with only a look of mild surprise. As a matter of course, she unfastened the top of the vial and swallowed the remainder of the drug.
The ship sped onward into a starless abyss. "I'm sorry," Seven said after a long silence.
"For what?" asked Kathryn diplomatically. "This is just your nature now, isn't it?"
"No," said Seven, looking at her console. "I mean, I'm sorry about the past, about Chakotay. You have to believe that I wouldn't have done a thing in the world to harm you."
Kathryn accepted, as she had no choice but to do, that Seven now knew her with the intimacy of a best friend or of a lover, and possibly with the same tenderness. She still found it terribly disconcerting to hear these out-of-character turns of phrase, yet she recognized their meaning. "Well, if I didn't believe it a few minutes ago, I do now." She tilted her head back and cast a nostalgic smile in Seven's direction. "That was another lifetime ago. Ancient history."
And as she turned back toward the view screen, Kathryn saw this history fading even farther, and the future loomed ahead in the form of a single Borg vessel, badly damaged but still upright, its green lights low in the space surrounding it. Kathryn felt all her senses on fire with that curious mixture of terror and intuitive sureness that had so defined her existence of late. She looked back at Seven, her eyes bright with expectation.
"You're one of them now," she said, her voice low and hoarse and almost accusing. "A Cassandra. I know the Cassandras, better than you think. Tell me, Seven, do you mean to die today?"
A small hint of the sarcastic snarl had returned to Seven's face, and she said, "Not today."
*From Nuit Blanche by Edna St. Vincent Millay