String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [0]
“Your little bugs—swimming through my bloodstream?! Forget it!”
“You would retain your individuality, Lieutenant, not become a member of the collective. You couldn’t because there is no collective here.” Seven of Nine stopped then and considered, realizing she was not being completely accurate. “Actually, that is not true: we would be the collective—a collective of two.”
“You say that like somehow I’d find it reassuring. Amazing. No, Seven. Absolutely not. I won’t even consider it.”
“Then quite likely all these people will die.”
Lowering her head, Torres hissed softly, “How long will it take?”
“Not long,” Seven replied. “But it would be best if you were unconscious for the procedure. You are a very difficult person, Lieutenant. Lie down now.”
“I know,” Torres said, lying back on the floor. “It’s just that I really don’t like you at all. No offense.”
Seven leaned down over Torres and unconsciously flexed a muscle in her forearm. A minuscule gap opened between Seven’s wrist bones just above the cuff, and an assimilation tubule snaked out from it like a tiny black tongue. Seven touched the tube to Torres’s neck, and the engineer grew quiet. “None taken,” Seven said.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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To AnnaRita,
for all your help with the boldly going
Historian’s Note
This story unfolds between the fourth and fifth seasons of Star Trek: Voyager.
“The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.”
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Prologue
Disaster minus 14 minutes
Mateo did not like the captain leaving the ship. True, the aliens had not committed any overtly threatening acts, but he thought that Captain Ziv was displaying unwarranted trust. As impressive as these wayfarers were, Mateo believed they were making unbelievable claims, not the least being that their tiny ship was able to attain faster-than-light velocities, but, oh, not right at the moment because of some as-yet-undefined, unfathomable peculiarity about local space. So fiercely skeptical was the first officer that the hair was literally standing up on the sides of his neck.
On the other hand, Mateo had not had any particular desire to leave the vessel either, which would have been his fate if the captain weren’t so curious about (and so trusting of) the aliens. Traditionally, the second-in-command was the one to undertake any such diplomatic or exploratory mission, but neither Ziv nor any of his hara were traditional officers. Despite the fact that the captain had been put in command of their mission at the last minute and under some very peculiar circumstances (rumors of some dirtside impropriety had been circulating), Mateo both liked and trusted Ziv, and those feelings extended to the captain’s closest advisors.
Mateo scanned the bridge and surveyed his own hara. All seemed as well as they could be, even Cho, who had been terribly rattled by their unexpected, almost