Equinox - Diane Carey [75]
The mockery of life and music gutted Ransom as he watched the grim scene.
"How much longer?" he demanded.
Aberrantly happy with himself, The Doctor kept working. "Another hour. Maybe less."
He kept humming the ridiculous tune. On the table, Seven kept responding in a distorted mechanical harmony.
"Her auditory processor," The Doctor said proudly. "We used to practice duets together. In fact, I taught her this song."
He kept singing, and Seven kept responding every time the probe touched her circuitry.
Ransom didn't even register the words they were singing. The sound, the sight, were too horrible to di-
gest. She wasn't singing. She was reacting to a probe. Mechanical, cold, dead. She was making the words, the notes, but there was no life in them. They had taken it from her, what little she had managed to keep for herself. They had taken even more from her than the Borg had. At least they had left her alive. The lives of the aliens, the life of this girl... after that, who else's life? Captain Janeway? Her crew?
"Enough!" he roared.
The singing stopped.
The Doctor looked up. "Why the long face, Captain? You're about to get your crew home." He noticed then that Ransom was gazing sorrowfully down at Seven, and added, "She tried to stand in your way. You had no choice."
"No choice ..." Ransom stepped back. "Thank you, Doctor."
The two words hammered the inside of his skull.
"When all this is over," The Doctor said, "perhaps you'll allow me to teach you my repertoire. I'm going to need a new partner."
The twisting of hopes almost choked Ransom. Had he poisoned everyone on board? Even the hologram?
His quarters were cool, even a little chilly. He barely remembered walking here. He saw no corridors before him, but only the dissected skull of the beautiful girl, the latest head on his belt.
The synaptic stimulator to waited in mechanical patience on his bedstand. He picked it up.
Moments later, he stood again upon the shoreline
vista, watching the shore birds float and the reeds wave. Down and down the shoreline, ice-white sand glittered. The wet sand, the dry sand, the dune... There she was.
He moved toward her.
Closer... closer. She was coming to him now, her face obscured by blowing blond hair, like some advertisement for a travel agency.
This was no incorporated automaton, no decisionless android programmed or brainwashed.
Ransom moved to her. She pulled her hair from her face.
Beautiful... beautiful... alive.
"You," he said. "What are you doing here?"
His voice echoed strangely, again and again, over the water.
You you you you you doing here here here here
"Hiding," Seven of Nine told him, her voice no longer gravelly. "Like you."
"I'm not hiding," he protested.
A wave lashed the shoreline. Seven glanced at it, appreciating the lovely peace. "It's beautiful. I can see why this brings you comfort."
"I don't know what you're talking about," he told her.
"But it isn't real," she said, as if he hadn't spoken at all.
Ransom smirked, then got angry. "You're not real. Leave me alone."
"It's not too late to stop," she told him passively.
"I don't have a choice!"
"Find another way."
"There is no other way!"
"Stop trying to hide!"
"I told you!" Ransom backed off two paces. "I'm not hiding! Get away from me!"
But he couldn't move, couldn't leave, even though this was his mind, his dream.
She stood before him, her face losing its sculpted appeal. "End this!"
"No!" Ransom screamed.
Was he screaming in protest? Or because her face had changed now to the skull-split head of one of the spirit aliens-
He put both hands to his head, driven to madness by the corruption of the girl.
The image winked out.
Sweating, panting, rattled, he was sitting in his quarters holding the synaptic stimulator in one clammy hand. Yes, of course he was still here ... it was only a dream. It was fake. His innards were eating themselves out.
The line was outside of his grasp.