String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [76]
Pad chimed in. “The transformer didn’t alter the radiation enough. We ended up pumping out altered energy rather than a shield. Blew out the collector and the transformer.”
“We may be able to help with that,” Seven said. “If we can bring Voyager out of the subspace fold, we can use all her resources to help you repair your prototype. The idea has merit.”
“She’s right,” B’Elanna said. “Now that I know what you were trying, I think I can suggest a couple changes that might help.”
“The only problem being that that one is blind,” Kaytok said, “and you can’t walk. So how exactly do you plan to proceed?”
“I have a proposal,” Seven said. “Though I strongly believe it will find little favor with Lieutenant Torres.”
Seven understood the concept of understatement and knew that many of her shipmates thought it a form of communication she practiced intentionally. This was not the case. Suggesting Seven employed understatement (or any of the other forms of wordplay including sarcasm, irony, and cheap ridicule) meant they believed there was a better way to communicate other than clearly stating facts in a simple, unadorned fashion. Seven found this idea baffling.
Though she appreciated the fact that Torres’s initial response to her suggestion had been succinct, she was troubled by the flat refusal. “There is absolutely no way in hell I’m going to let you stick any of that Borg crap in me! Your little bugs—swimming through my bloodstream? Make me a part of the collective? Forget it!”
“You would retain your individuality, Lieutenant, not become a member of the collective. You couldn’t, because there is no collective here.” She 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.”
Torres stared into the middle distance, her jaw slack. Gathering her wits, then shaking her head, the engineer said incredulously, “You say that like somehow I’d find it reassuring. Amazing. No, Seven. Absolutely not. I won’t even consider it.”
Kaytok and the others watched them argue, their heads swinging back and forth on their long necks.
“Then quite likely all these people will die.”
“Agreeing to this is no guarantee they’ll live.”
“You’ll never see your friends again.”
“I will if the ship finds us.”
“But they won’t find us unless we can contact them and help them escape the subspace fold,” Seven said reasonably. “And we cannot do that unless you can see and I can walk. And neither of those things will happen unless you agree to this procedure.”
Rage—B’Elanna’s old friend—was rising up within her, choking her, clouding her thinking. She knew she was being unreasonable, even irrational. Seven did not wish to make B’Elanna into a drone any more than B’Elanna would want to be one. The idea of their becoming linked was probably as repugnant to the former Borg as it was to her. She had been turning over possibilities in her mind for the past hour, trying to figure out some way to contact the ship, but she kept running into the same obstacles: She was blind, Seven was lame, and there was no way the Monorhans could do the delicate technical work they required. And here was Seven proposing a possible route out of their dilemma and all B’Elanna could do was imagine how violated she would feel having nanoprobes swimming through her blood, into her muscles, brain, and nerve endings.
Grimmer memories began to filter into B’Elanna’s mind. She found herself remembering the names and faces of her former Maquis allies, all of them now slain if she was to believe the news from the Alpha Quadrant. Thinking of them, she felt her rage begin to condense and cool, to become something like a black hole in the center of her being. What about the sacrifices they had made? What about the ultimate sacrifice? If Seven thought