Truth be told, Kathryn considered Margaret Thorpe to be an exceedingly strange woman. Most likely well into her sixties, she wore her curly greying hair in a complex assembly of pins placed every which way around her head. She was painfully thin, in fact she seemed only to eat when it was absolutely necessary to do so. Her face was by turns beautiful and severe, with its wide-set, intelligent dark eyes, lovely upturned nose, and lips that seemed to be almost permanently set in an expression of discontent. She walked like a soldier, or perhaps like a dancer, back terribly straight and arms swinging rhythmically at her sides.
She ran the Apocrypha racing club with an iron fist, as if she were the most rule-bound of Starfleet Admirals. And yet she hated Starfleet with a passion so intense that it seemed to come from within, like an inborn character trait. It was this inexplicable hatred that so fascinated Kathryn and made her think Margaret very unusual. There must have been a reason, beyond the ordinary run of reasons – and yet Margaret virtually never spoke about her own life, thus leaving everyone in her circle to ponder the origins of the vendetta she so proudly executed on a daily basis.
It was in this very silent way that the two of them had come together, neither willing to reveal anything about her past. For although at this late hour Kathryn felt sure of her self-imposed mission, she had never revealed anything to Margaret about her own original reasons for joining Apocrypha, and had never said that her personal battle against Starfleet had started much later. She was terribly curious to know what Margaret supposed of her; a decorated Starfleet officer who returned home from a seven-year mission, only to ally herself with a group of misfits from all walks of life, a group whose main occupation was the engineering of space-races so dangerous as to be illegal. And yet, despite these glaring incongruities, Margaret had never asked Kathryn anything, had never seemed suspicious of anything, but simply accepted Kathryn's presence, and tolerance for danger, as fact. It was as if she offered Kathryn anonymity, and expected to be paid in kind.
There was an irony to Kathryn's present journey to Seven of Nine's gravesite. She could only in rare moments admit this to herself, but the truth was that Seven and Chakotay's brief affair had played no small part in the chain of events culminating in Kathryn's defection to Apocrypha. She had been so angry then, at one individual, and now that anger was all but gone, and had been replaced by a mission of vengeance against an entire organization. Chakotay's love was hers, and Seven….
She docked her ship in what remained of the cube that she and Seven had visited together. It was indeed a burial ground, the skeleton of a vessel bearing hundreds of dead bodies, both Borg and human. Kathryn searched the wreckage for hours. She did not find Seven's body, but had seen enough to know that her friend could never have survived.
How was she to mourn the death of someone who had been to her both parent and child, teacher and student, friend and enemy? It had sometimes seemed that her lectures to Seven on individuality only served to make them more fused with one another, inextricably wound together in that cord of questionable philosophy. She did not know how else she could have loved Seven, how much more, or how deeply, nor did she know how much more she could have hated Seven – her stubbornness, her wilfulness, her arrogance – that tremendous resemblance to everything Kathryn disliked about herself. She could not bury Seven without leaving a great part of herself behind, lost, just like her dear friend, to the overtaking evil, a casualty of war.
Kathryn remained for many hours aboard the wrecked ship, feeling somehow that leaving would signify a defeat. But by and by Margaret's warning and her call to arms took their effect, and Kathryn rose, an expression of calm determination on her face. She would face her true enemy now, Seven's own creator and the only mystery remaining in the Ultimate Starfleet Officer project. She knew that she would never really recover from Seven's death, but she told herself that if she were to die in the pursuit of conquering the Borg, then she would be doing it not for Apocrypha, and not for Starfleet, but for Seven.