Day of Honor - Michael Jan Friedman [62]
"Or maybe disengage the magnetic constrictors?"
Seven of Nine was silent for a moment. "You believe I'm responsible for the accident. That I deliberately sabotaged the ship."
Janeway shook her head. "That isn't what I meant at-"
"But it is," the Borg insisted. "You are like all the others on this ship. You see me as a threat."
The captain's first impulse was to deny the accusation. Then she thought better of it.
"I won't lie to you," she told Seven of Nine. "Part of me is suspicious. We've dealt with tachyon fields before on Voyager and never had this problem. And it wasn't so long ago that you made a serious attempt to send a signal to a Borg ship."
"That is true," Seven of Nine conceded.
"But," Janeway went on, "I suspect that if you really wanted to disable this ship, you would have found a much more clever way to do it."
The Borg absorbed the comment. Then she spoke.
"Captain, I am unaccustomed to deception. Among
the Borg, it was impossible. There were no lies, no secrets in the collective. I do not think that I am capable of fabrication. And I assure you, I had nothing to do with the accident in engineering."
The ball was in Janeway's court. She could slam it back at Seven of Nine or keep the volley going. She chose the latter.
"Thank you," she told the Borg. "I believe you."
Seven of Nine took on a distant look. "I am finding it a difficult challenge to integrate into this group."
The captain nodded. "That's understandable."
"It is full of complex social structures that are unfamiliar to me. Earlier today, I witnessed something called a poker game."
Janeway smiled. "Ah, yes. I'd heard Ensign Kim was trying to start one up. On some ships, it's a tradition."
"A tradition," the Borg echoed.
"Yes. A ritual. Something that gives us comfort over time."
Seven of Nine shook her head. "The Borg have no rituals. No moment is different from any other."
The captain shrugged. "We look at life as more than a series of moments. We try to place them in context, so we can understand them. So we can celebrate them, each in his or her own way."
"That, too, is new to me," said the Borg. "The idea that, in a given situation, in a uniform set of circumstances, each person may act differently."
"It's what makes us individuals," Janeway explained.
the muscles worked in Seven of Nine's jaw. "Compared with the Borg collective, this crew is inefficient and contentious. It lacks discipline and uniformity of purpose."
Janeway sensed that Seven of Nine hadn't completed her thought. "But?" she said softly.
The Borg's brow creased as she considered the matter. "But it is also capable of surprising acts of compassion."
The captain was pleased that Seven of Nine could detect such behavior. "Unexpected acts of kindness are common among our group. That's one of the ways in which we define ourselves."
The Borg seemed to absorb the information. "It is all so different," she breathed. She looked at Janeway. "Is there anything more?"
"There is," the captain told her. "We still have to figure out what caused the tachyon leak." She reached for a padd lying nearby. "Tell me what you remember about the power fluctuations in the propulsion system."
Together, she and the Borg bent to their work.
Paris had forgotten how much he liked floating free in space.
It was invigorating to sit at the conn of a starship and skim through the void, breasting a sea of stars at warp 6. But there was no substitute for swimming that sea on one's own, unfettered and unencumbered, at one with all of creation.
Nor was the universe the immense thing he had once expected it to be. Somehow, when one was drifting through it, one's mind reduced it to a personal space-almost an intimate space.
So while someone else might have been frightened by the circumstances in which the flight controller found himself, Paris himself wasn't frightened at all. If he felt anything, it was curiosity.
He turned to B'Elanna, wondering if she felt the same way. Gazing at her faceplate, he could see her eyes darting this way and that, as if she were trying to figure