Homecoming - Christie Golden [28]
“Attention!” Seven cried. “I am not here to converse with any of you. Not the press. Not curious onlookers with nothing better to do. Not any of you who claim to be long-lost friends of my parents. Not those of you who have subjected your children to this barbaric gathering in order to let them supposedly have a glimpse of history. I am not your plaything. I don’t belong to you, and neither does my aunt. You are on private property. You will leave this place at once and not return. If you do not comply, I will order this ensign to fire into the crowd with a phaser set on stun. Am I understood?”
Without waiting for a reaction, she strode through [80] the crowd. It didn’t part for her, and she heard the happy cheers mutate into outraged, wordless cries of insult and anger. She pushed. They pushed back. Before she knew what was happening, she was trapped in a tight circle of strangers. Their faces were furious, and they were yelling things at her, grabbing at her. She steeled herself to fight back. She was stronger than anyone here, and she could—
There was the sharp whine of a phaser. One of the biggest men pawing at Seven collapsed.
“Everyone, please!” Randolph’s voice was high, but his young face was resolute. “Seven of Nine has undergone a great deal. I’m certain she didn’t mean to sound so harsh, but she is exhausted and unused to this kind of attention. Please let her return to her home. I have no wish to set this phaser on wide-range. Let Seven alone.”
They backed away from her, but not far. She heard the taunts and jeers as she strode as swiftly as she could toward the beckoning of her aunt’s front porch.
“Didn’t get your heart back when they made you human, huh?”
“Think you’re better than us?”
“You were my hero!”
“We thought you were human again, but you’re still a Borg!”
Her heart was pounding rapidly in her chest and her neck hurt from holding her head so high. She wanted to break into a run but would not give them the satisfaction. Seven tuned out the scathing words shouted by the crowd and then, at last, her feet touched the wooden [81] steps of her aunt’s porch. She ran up them, unable to control herself, opened the door, and escaped inside.
“Oh, this is just great,” said Randolph, who had barely made it in behind Seven before she slammed the door shut and leaned against it. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone alienate a crowd quicker in my life.”
The hero worship that had shone in his eyes was gone. He now looked merely annoyed and a little frightened of the people outside.
“They had no right to be here,” Seven said, a touch defensively. “This is private property. Is it so much to ask that I be allowed to greet my aunt without a swarm of people demanding my attention?”
Randolph sighed. “You just don’t get it, Seven.” No more “ma’am,” Seven noticed. “You’re a celebrity, a hero. You’re a Borg who was liberated from the collective—a symbol of humanity’s triumph over the worst enemy we’ve ever encountered. All you needed to do was say a few polite words, smile and wave, and they’d have gone home happy.”
“You are just like your parents,” came an elderly woman’s voice. Irene Hansen was slowly coming down the stairs. She clutched the railing, but was moving under her own power. “Iconoclasts, both of them. More interested in ruffling feathers than smoothing them, I’m afraid. That’s not the Borg in her irritating those people outside, young man. That’s her mother and father.”
A wave of pleasure rushed over Seven, along with a sense of awkwardness. “Aunt Irene,” she said, her voice sounding stiff and formal in her own ears. “Are you well enough to be walking?”
[82] “I’m over the worst of it,” Irene said. “You come here and give me a hug.”
Even as she heard Randolph speaking to Paris, with words like “situation here” and “could use some security” and “need to