Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [109]
So she threw herself into the heart of the conversation. She spoke to everyone, seeking to catch up on news from the Alpha Quadrant. It still amazed her that Bajor had been freed from Cardassian rule only a couple of years after her assimilation. A child of the offworld refugee camps, she’d never set foot on her ancestral world, and it saddened her that she’d never get to visit a free Bajor. But she grilled the other Bajorans in the crew, eager to experience it vicariously through their memories. Of course they only had a couple of years’ worth of firsthand information, now five years out of date, and told of a world still struggling to heal from its scars. But at least Bajor had its freedom now, and that, Marika knew, was worth any price.
Naturally the Voyager crew grilled her in turn about how her triad had escaped the Borg. “Our neural link let us think independently from the collective,” she explained, “if not from each other. Over time we grew more and more independent. But we knew what happened to a nonresponsive drone, so we played along and bided our time. We tried to avoid hurting innocents when we could, but often there was nothing we could do.” She shuddered at the memories. That wasn’t the whole truth; in retrospect, she saw so much that they could have done but didn’t dare try. If there was a drawback to her mental solitude, it was having to cope with the guilt alone.
“A few months ago our scout sphere encountered a ship belonging to Species 7690-the Ankari. The sphere tried to assimilate them, but we were ready to make our move. We triggered the self-destruct, beamed ourselves to the Ankari ship and asked for asylum. We’d rigged a device to mask our signals from the collective.” She paused. “Well, I guess I rigged the device; I was the engineer in the group.” It felt good to take individual credit, individual pride in something after so long. “And Ankari ships travel fast and are hard to track. They were grateful for our help, so they took us far away and did their best to remove our Borg implants.” Her hand unconsciously went to her thigh, feeling its new smoothness. Voyager’s doctor-a sentient hologram, of all things-had improved on the Ankari’s work, removing most of her remaining implants and healing the surface scars. She now wore a tight dermal sheath like Seven’s to protect and nourish her new-grown skin; but unlike Seven, she didn’t consider modesty irrelevant, so she wore her Starfleet uniform over it. “They’re a good people-gentle, spiritual. They were a comfort.”
Some of the Equinox crew members winced, and Marika remembered that the aliens they’d been killing had been sacred to the Ankari. “Uhh, so how did you finally track Voyager down?” Harry Kim asked her, evidently sensing the mood and wishing to change the subject. She gave him an appreciative smile and continued-though she noticed the way his eyes lit up in response to her smile.
“We had the Borg’s knowledge of your last encounter, the transwarp core you stole. They computed how far you’d be likely to get with it, so we knew you were somewhere in the Three-Kiloparsec Arm. And the Markonian outpost is a major hub hereabouts,” she went on, gesturing toward the massive space station to which Voyager was docked. “Once you arrived here, the news spread quickly.”
“It’s a pretty impressive place, all right,” Harry said, and launched into a discussion of the diverse species and sensations he’d encountered on the outpost-still trying to guide the discussion away from the Ankari. Marika watched him with interest. Neelix may have been the nominal morale officer, and Tom Paris was clearly the life of the party hereabouts… but as she watched the crew interact, Marika sensed that Harry Kim was the true heart of Voyager, a stalwart, gentle, optimistic anchor keeping the crew from losing faith or growing embittered, as their counterparts on Equinox had.
So it surprised her when he confessed to participating in a recent brawl on the outpost. He and Paris had apparently been confined to quarters ever since, though Captain Janeway had let them out