Resistance - J.M. Dillard [17]
Her words summoned the memory of his own, spoken years ago, to Will Riker, explaining why a different admiral had forbidden him to fight the Borg: In Starfleet Command’s opinion, a man once captured and assimilated by the Borg should not be allowed to face them again. It would introduce an unstable element to a critical situation.
If that were the reason, Picard wasn’t sure that Seven of Nine would be the best to place in charge of this situation either. Certainly the Borg had more of an effect on her life than they did his. He had never met the person who had spent more time as a drone than a free-thinking individual, but Picard was familiar with her file. All of Starfleet knew of Seven of Nine. Though everything Picard had read maintained that she could keep her professional cool, it was still disconcerting to think that he couldn’t be trusted to handle the Borg. Particularly since he had bested them in every encounter. And especially since time was most definitely of the essence.
The frustration was agonizing. How did he know, with such infinite certainty, what he was saying was true? He could not explain even to himself how he knew what he did about the Borg’s plans—so how could he prove they existed to Janeway or to anyone else at Command? Yet he was no less certain, no less urgently desperate. “Admiral, Earth is too far away; the Borg are moving swiftly. We don’t have a ‘matter of days.’ By the time Seven arrives—”
She cut him off. “You are to do nothing until Seven of Nine arrives, and she will be in charge of the investigation. You’ll be contacted shortly with her ETA. Those are my orders. Janeway out.”
He found himself staring at the Starfleet Command logo as he whispered the words she would not hear: “It will be too late.”
For several minutes, he sat looking at the darkened screen. Even now that his mind was still, and the voice of the Borg no more than a memory, he felt the invisible tendrils of the Collective pulling at his consciousness. He knew what they were doing, and although he did not know the coordinates Janeway had asked for, he knew what heading the Enterprise should take in order to find the mysterious moon.
He propped his elbows on the desk, leaned forward, and massaged his temples. Beverly had found nothing physically wrong with him. Was it possible that there was a third, less sinister cause for him to hear the echoes of the Collective’s voice, to experience this gut-level certainty?
In his memory surfaced a familiar face, one cinnamon-skinned, beautiful, framed by close-cropped dark russet hair, a face from another century—Lily, Zefram Cochrane’s assistant. He smiled faintly at the thought of her. She had lived in such a desperate, cruel time in Earth’s history, surviving a war that had killed millions. It had toughened her, made her strong, made her cling desperately to the hope that Cochrane was going to convert an instrument of death—a nuclear missile—into a warp ship, an instrument of hope. The harshness of her life had also made her frightened, liable to lash out violently at anyone, anything she did not know.
Yet even she had seen beyond her own hurt to the depth of the psychological scar he had borne. She had called him “Ahab”—the crazed captain from Moby-Dick—willing to sacrifice his vessel, his crew, and ultimately himself for the sake of revenge on that which had wounded him. Lily had brought him to a moment of epiphany: he realized he had to let go of his bitterness before it destroyed him and those he loved.
He had thought