Resistance - J.M. Dillard [54]
T’Lana had certainly hit a nerve earlier. Beverly wondered herself if she had made her decision based on the emotions of a lover over the objections of a doctor, just not in the way T’Lana had thought. Logically, Beverly knew that her reaction to the captain’s plan would have been the same prior to their admitting their feelings for each other. It would have been the same for anyone in her charge. That wasn’t at issue. Neither was the question of whether she was blindly agreeing with a lover, as T’Lana had seemed to imply. Beverly knew she was a strong enough person that she would not lose herself just because she was seeing someone. But that was tied into her confusion now.
Beverly did wonder why she had not put up more of an argument. The only explanation she had was that she was trying not to look like the worried lover. If she debated Jean-Luc more on the issue, would she have come across as the chief medical officer or as his partner? Now she’d never know, because she hadn’t allowed herself the question at the time. She hadn’t given anyone—but most of all herself—the chance to wonder if she had stopped the captain, would it have been out of concern for his importance to the ship or his importance to her? Had she given in because she didn’t want to come across as unprofessional? Her gut instinct told her that wasn’t the case. She and Jean-Luc had been close long before they ever got together. But at the same time, the perception that her decisions might be based in emotion rather than logic was now there. T’Lana had proved that. Beverly knew that she was, above all else, chief medical officer, but it was the perception she was battling—largely with herself.
She was not feeling particularly logical at the moment. She had, for the most fleeting of instants, allowed herself to consider the possibility that the worst might happen. That the Borg…
She pulled herself up short. She had the proof in front of her in the blinking green light: Jean-Luc’s neutralizer was functioning perfectly. And Worf and Geordi were monitoring the captain’s physical movements aboard the Borg vessel; if anything went wrong, they would notify her immediately. The worst would not happen. Even if it did, there were solutions. There were always solutions.
And, she had decided, the best way for her to remedy her anxiety was to work on finding one of them. With luck, it would never be needed, but would be added to the scanty volume of research on the Borg.
Beverly forced her attention to the monitor in front of her. It displayed a rotating model of a double helix: the DNA molecule from a Borg drone. How was an androgynous drone linked to the group consciousness transformed into an individuated female capable of independent thought?
She fingered a toggle and brought up the information they had on the Borg queen. For a long moment, she stared at it. The composition of the queen’s flesh and blood did not differ from that of a drone’s in any significant way, and the structure of her DNA differed not at all—the fully assimilated Borg lacked the X and Y chromosomes that produced males and females in most humanoid species. In terms of the queen’s body chemistry, there was a slight amount of a hormonal compound that paralleled a human female’s estrogen, but the question was, what initiated the process that brought about the transformation? What caused the hormone to appear in the first place? Was it something buried in the DNA?
“No difference,” Beverly whispered to herself. No difference in the DNA. A slight difference in the blood, unaccounted for by a transformation in bodily organs, which might supply the estrogenlike hormone. So what caused the difference between the queen and the drones?
There was the difference in appearance, for one. Feminine features. The lips flushed with color, the skin not quite