Resistance - J.M. Dillard [1]
Even before she spoke, he read her skepticism in the way she slightly drew back her head. “A wound as deep as yours won’t ever heal completely, Jean-Luc.”
“Then help me forget.” He took hold of the arm supporting her head and gently pulled; she didn’t resist but laughed and let herself roll toward him, almost on top of him. He gave her a swift kiss, and they smiled at each other in the darkness.
“I’m sorry it still troubles you,” she said gently.
He shrugged. “It’s not troubling me. It was just a…subconscious hiccup, that’s all.” He stroked her hair. “Sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
She yawned, then settled against him, her cheek nestled beneath his collarbone. In an instant, she was out again—a doctor’s talent, learned long ago in medical school. He teased her about it, but it was a talent he envied, especially now that he lay staring up at the night ceiling fully awake, feeling the regular rise and fall of her breath against his ribs.
The dream left him troubled. He had not thought of the Borg in a very long time. He could not remember the last time he had consciously relived the horror of his existence as the human/machine hybrid named Locutus. He did not understand why such memories should surface now. More important, he did not know why they should prove especially disturbing.
In his ear, the faintest of whispers.
“What?” He tilted his chin down to glance at Beverly. She was soundly sleeping; he decided she had murmured while dreaming. He gazed back up at the overhead, then closed his eyes, determined to dismiss all foolish anxiety and return to sleep himself. He drew in a breath, then released it as a sigh and let his body rely completely upon the bed for support.
Another whisper, too soft to be intelligible.
Picard opened his eyes. This time, he did not look down at Beverly; this time, he knew that she was not the source. For the solitary voice was soon joined by another, then another…until it became a faint, distant chorus of thousands.
You can still hear our song.
It was, Picard knew with a certainty he wanted urgently not to possess, the whisper of the Collective.
It was the voice of the Borg.
1
BY SHIP’S MORNING, PICARD WOKE TO FIND Beverly gone and his mind clear, free of its nocturnal terror. He dressed, and by the time he mentally reviewed the tasks of the day, he had convinced himself that the Borg chatter had been no more than a vestige of the dream.
The first stop was engineering. Picard entered to find the android B-4 sitting, legs sprawled with un-selfconscious gracelessness, clad in the mustard jumpsuit he routinely wore. His expression bland and benign, B-4 let his ingenuous gaze wander, without curiosity, over his surroundings. Picard could not determine whether the android had actually registered the captain’s entry, or the presence of Geordi La Forge or Beverly Crusher.
“Captain Jean-Luc Picard,” B-4 said at last, without inflection. From experience, Picard knew this was not a greeting; B-4 was merely parroting the name of an object he recognized. But for the sake of the others, the captain took it as such.
“Good morning, B-4,” he said briskly, with false cheerfulness. Silently, he nodded a greeting to La Forge and Beverly.
Geordi stood next to the android. Beverly stood across from the two of them, her arms folded, her expression carefully professional, that of chief medical officer and nothing more. Technically, since B-4 was not human, what was about to occur could not be called a medical procedure. Nonetheless, Beverly had insisted on coming.
Geordi’s features were composed as well, but there was a poignant undercurrent in his prosthetic crystalline eyes. Data had been his closest friend, and spending time with B-4—Data’s double in physical form only, certainly not in personality, intelligence, or attitude—had only served to underscore the loss of that friend. Geordi had worked the past few months with B-4 in hopes of summoning Data’s memories—to re-create, if possible, all that Data had been.
The effort had proved cruelly futile.