Q & A - Keith R. A. DeCandido [36]
Perhaps, the captain admitted, those eighteen were still so raw because they were at the hands of the Borg. At the time, he offered what comfort he could to the families. The families on the Enterprise he’d gone to individually. The husband and daughter of Lieutenant Rebekah Grabowski both broke down and cried. The wife of Ensign Franco Garcia took the news with remarkable stoicism. The daughters of Lieutenants Jean-Claude Mbuto and T’Sora shattered a piece of pottery in an emotional display that would have embarrassed their Vulcan mother. The life mate of Ensign Gldrnksrb was so devastated he lapsed into a coma. Over subspace, he spoke with the rest. In particular he remembered the grandparents of Ensign Soon-Tek Han, who had asked if their grandson died doing his duty. Picard said he had. The sad truth was that Han was in the section that the Borg carved out of the Enterprise saucer section only because he was late for his shift and was running through the corridor at the time. Seeing the relief on the Hans’ faces had been an awkward and bittersweet experience for the captain. Picard had done his duty, knowing full well that to him the words sounded hollow, meaningless.
Their next encounter with the Borg revealed how meaningless his words in fact were. The eighteen weren’t dead; they were worse than dead. Their bodies were defiled, their biological distinctness was taken, they were turned into Borg.
In his darkest hours—after Wolf 359—as Counselor Troi slowly worked to heal his broken self, Picard dared to wonder if those eighteen were somehow responsible for Locutus. If their own shining devotion to their captain had not given the Borg the idea to come for him, to use him. Maybe that was the reason Picard remembered each of them so clearly—he knew that he could not fight the Borg and neither could they. And he could not forgive himself for harboring that dark thought.
Picard still firmly believed that Q’s point could have been made without sacrificing those lives. But what did the lives of eighteen people matter to an omnipotent being like Q?
That’s always the question, isn’t it? He keeps coming back here. True, plenty of Starfleet officers—on Deep Space 9, on Voyager, on the Excalibur, on Luna—had reported sightings of Q over the years, but ultimately he kept coming back to the Enterprise. He had a fascination with Picard in particular, having done him the “favor” of showing him what a burden love was and later giving him a far more useful lesson about the value of the choices he made in his misspent youth. Then there was that whole anti-time nonsense, throwing Picard back and forth and back again among three different time frames, none of which actually existed, during which Q admitted to helping Picard beyond the boundaries of the test.
Why us? More to the point, why me?
The captain sighed as he finished sending the communique to Starbase 815. Answers would have to wait until Q was good and ready to provide them, a day that, Picard hated to admit, might never come.
He left his quarters and proceeded to the turbolift. The one thing that encouraged Picard was that he had several new crew members to deal with Q. After a while, Q’s appearances had become almost routine, in part because everyone