As usual, the Tellarite counselor had chosen to take the most confrontational possible tack in addressing his patient's issues, and Deanna Troi, being a trained counselor and his supervising officer, didn't appreciate it. "This isn't about blame," she said, surprised at how defensive her manner seemed.

"Of course not," he said, his cultured voice tuned to a perfect timbre of derision. "It's just a coincidence, yes?"

The rank insensitivity of his remarks sparked Troi's fury, which she found easier to face than the smothering sorrow of sympathy she'd expected from the ship's other counselor, Dr. Huilan. "We didn't choose this. It's not our fault."

"I see. So it's random chance and not some defect in your respective biologies that's put you on a course for your second miscarriage in half a year."

Troi sprang from the couch, turned her back on the slender Tellarite, and paced toward the far bulkhead of his office. At the wall she turned and began walking back toward him. He watched her with expressionless black eyes, which gave his face a cipherlike quality. "You're just trying to provoke me," she said with a note of resentment.

"Provoke you? Into doing what?"

She stopped and glowered at him. "Now you're trying to make me name my own dysfunction and outline my own needs. Are you this transparent with all your patients?"

"Yes, but most of my patients don't hold doctorates in psychology." He grinned. "Tell me what I'll do next."

"You'll try to shock me by saying something rude."

He shook his head. "I tried that. And I followed it with the echoed remark and the leading question, all of which got me nowhere. So guess what my next trick will be."

It amazed her that even as he was admitting to the failure of his manipulations, he still sounded smug. "I don't know," she confessed. "Reciting old Tellarite parables?"

"No." Haaj reclined and folded his hands behind his head. "Just an honest question: Why are you wasting my time?"

At first, Troi recoiled from the hostility in his voice. Then she replied, "Is this another example of your patented Tellarite argument therapy?"

"I'm serious, Counselor. You're my supervising officer, so I'm expected to show you a certain degree of deference, even in a therapeutic setting-but I don't have time for this. You're clearly not ready for therapy, and you're taking away valuable session time from my patients who are."

She called upon her empathic senses to try and sense whether he was dissembling in order to draw her out. He wore an intense aura of bitter dudgeon. If he was merely pretending to be annoyed with her, he was doing a very convincing job of it, inside and out. "Why do you say I'm not ready for therapy?"

"Are you kidding?" He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "All you've done since you got here is obstruct the process. You've dissected my method instead of answering my questions, and you'd rather criticize me than examine yourself." He leaned back and folded his hands in his lap. "Therapy only works when the patient is willing to partic.i.p.ate."

All his accusations were true, and Troi was ashamed of herself for indulging her appet.i.te for denial. "You're right," she said. "I have been sabotaging the session. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize to me," he said. "Apologize to Crewman Liryok. This was supposed to be his hour."

Troi stared out a window at the wash of starlight streaking past the ship and felt the subtle vibrations of warp flight in the deck under her feet. "I don't know why I'm having so much trouble surrendering to the process."

"Yes, you do," Haaj said, barely disguising his contempt.

She fixed him with a scathing glare. "No, I don't."

"Do."

He was the most exasperating therapist she'd ever met. "Is this your idea of therapy? Contradiction?"

"You're critiquing me again, Counselor. Why is that?"

She didn't mean to shout, but she did anyway. "I told you, I don't know!"

"And I'm calling you a liar," he said.

The more she felt herself losing control, the calmer he became. There were a thousand things she wanted to yell at him, and they were slamming together inside her mind, a logjam of epithets. Her face and ears felt hot, and her fists clenched while she struggled to put words to her fury.

Then he asked, "What are you feeling right now?" She stared at him, dumbstruck. He continued, "Would you call it rage?"

"Yes," she said, paralyzed by her emotions.

His voice took on a calming tenor. "Breathe, Deanna. Clear your mind, just for a few seconds. Remember your training: What's the difference between anger and rage?"

It was hard for her to pull air into her chest, even harder to hold it there. I'm hyperventilating, she realized. With effort, she did as Haaj asked, and then she closed her eyes.

"Ready?" he said. She nodded. He asked, "What's anger?"

"An emotional cue that something is wrong, that we have been injured or mistreated, or that values we consider important are being challenged or disregarded."

He harrumphed. "I imagine you did very well on the essay portions of your exams.... Now, tell me what rage is."

"A shame-based expression of anger," she said. "And a reaction to powerlessness."

"Powerlessness," Haaj repeated, tapping his index finger against his upper lip. "Impotence. Helplessness." He wagged his finger at her. "You don't like feeling out of control, do you?"

She crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't know many people who do."

"I do," Haaj said. "There are plenty of folks who like not having to make decisions or take responsibility. They're happy to go along and believe what they're told, because it's easier than thinking for themselves."

Troi drummed her fingers on her bicep. "And what does that have to do with me?"

"Nothing," the wiry Tellarite said. "It was just a tangent. Those happen sometimes in conversation." Feigning embarra.s.sment, he added, "I'm sorry, I forget. What are we talking about?"

"Control," Troi said, feeling a new tide of rage swell inside her chest.

He clapped his hands. "Ah, yes! Control." He let the words linger between them for a moment before he added, "You've been feeling out of control lately."

She shook her head. "I don't recall saying that."

"But you've certainly been at the mercy of events," Haaj said. "Not much recourse when a tragedy like yours happens."

"No, there isn't."

The Tellarite nodded. "It's too bad Dr. Ree isn't skilled enough to correct the problem."

"It's not his fault," Troi said. "Medicine isn't magic. There's only so much he can do."

"True," Haaj said. "I mean, he can't be expected to compensate for your husband's genetic shortcomings. After all, the captain is, as they say, 'only human.'"

Troi cast a reproachful stare at Haaj. "You're repeating yourself. I already told you it's not about blame."

"Oh, but it most certainly is," he replied. "You're blaming yourself."

She recoiled from his accusation. "I'm not!"

"You're cursing your poisoned womb," Haaj declared, as if it were a piece of gossip everyone else already knew. "To paraphrase Shakespeare, you know the fault lies not in your stars but in yourself."

"There's a difference between an argument and an insult, Doctor," Troi said in her most threatening tone.

Uncowed, he replied, "Do you really expect me to believe you don't blame yourself for back-to-back miscarriages?"

"I don't."

"Then where is all this shame coming from?" He continued as if he was scolding a child. "You said it yourself: You're filled with rage, and rage finds its roots in powerlessness and shame."

Denial had Troi shaking her head as a reflex. "Rage comes from being ashamed of our anger," she said.

"So, you're ashamed of your anger?"

"No!"

"You just said you were! Who are you angry at? Yourself? Your husband? Some higher power that's betrayed your trust?"

His relentless, vicious badgering forced her to turn away, because her fury had become swamped in the rising waters of her grief. Her chest felt crushed, and her throat was as tight as a tourniquet. All her bitter emotions were bleeding into one for which she had no name. She closed her eyes to avoid seeing her dark reflection in the compartment window. Then she heard footfalls behind her, followed by Haaj's voice, somber and soft.

"You're angry at the baby," he said.

It was the sharpest truth that had ever cut her.

Her hands covered her face as deep, funereal bellows of grief roared from some dark chasm inside her. Tears were hot against her face as she doubled over, robbed of her composure by her wailing cries. Haaj's hands found her shoulders and steadied her. He guided her to a chair and eased her into it.

She stared at her tear-moistened palms. "I don't understand it," she said between choking gasps.

"You and William invested this child with your hopes and dreams," Haaj said. "You wanted it to be your future. But now joy has turned to sorrow, and you resent your baby for failing you, when you've already given it so much."

Troi looked up through a blurry veil of tears at Haaj. "But it's so unfair. It's not the baby's fault...it's no one's fault."

"You're right," Haaj said. "It's not fair. But when we're wronged, our instinct is to a.s.sign blame. Even if it means hurting someone we love-someone who doesn't deserve it."

Dragging her feelings into the open was a hideous sensation and not at all as cathartic as she had hoped. Worse still, it was forcing her to confront other torments and terrors she would have preferred to ignore for a while longer. "Dr. Ree wants me to terminate my pregnancy," she said. "I told him no."

"The good doctor doesn't make such suggestions lightly," Haaj said. "I presume his concern is for your safety?"

Troi shrugged. "So he said."

"And you think he's wrong?"

"No," Troi said. "I know he's probably right. But I can't do it. I won't."

Waggling his index finger, Haaj said, "No, no, Counselor. I'm afraid you need to choose a verb there. Either you can't terminate your pregnancy, or you won't. 'Can't' implies that you have no choice in the matter, no capacity to make an affirmative decision. 'Won't' suggests a defiant exercise of your free will. So which is it? Can't? Or won't?"

She wrestled with the semantics of his question for several seconds before she answered, "Won't. I won't do it."

"Even though it puts your life in danger?"

A calmness filled her. "It's not important."

Haaj looked deeply worried. "Counselor, are you saying you want to die?"

"No," she said. "I don't."

"But you seem ready to risk your life for a pregnancy that's already failed. Why is that?"

Her calm feeling became an emotional numbness, and in a dull monotone she told him the simple truth: "I don't know."

4.

The voice of the Borg Collective lurked at the edge of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's awareness, taunting him with inhuman whispers.

It was a susurrus of thoughts-omnipresent, elusive, and inaccessible. Picard had been able to hear them for weeks now, lurking on the periphery of his consciousness, ever since the first wave of unexplained Borg attacks deep inside the protected core systems of the Federation. When he was caught up in the business of command, he could shut them out, but when he tried to relax or sleep, when his mind was idle...those were the times when the voice of the Collective smothered him from within. With his eyes closed, he could almost hear the name that continued to stab icy fear into his heart: Locutus.

Beverly Crusher's voice pulled him sharply back into the moment. "Look at him, Jean-Luc-isn't he amazing?"

Here-and-now returned in a flood of sensation. He blinked his eyes back into focus on the details. A delicate cup of hot Earl Grey tea in his hand, its subtle aroma soothing his frayed nerves. His wife, Beverly, warm beside him as they sat together on the sofa in their quarters. The murky bluish image on the display of her medical tricorder, which she had thrust in front of him, as if for inspection. He stared at it, awestruck.

Our son, he had to remind himself. That's our son.

"Words cannot do him justice," Picard said, aglow with a moment of quiet, paternal pride.

Then the soulless voice of the Collective returned and intruded on his moment of reflection to remind him: Pride was irrelevant. Hope was irrelevant. Resistance was futile.

Months earlier, to stop a new Borg queen from rising in the Alpha Quadrant, he'd dared to let himself be transformed once more into Locutus. Hubris had led him to think he could fool the Collective, walk into the largest cube it had ever sp.a.w.ned, and kill its nascent queen with impunity. He had even believed that his mind was strong enough to open itself to the Collective and behold all its secrets at once. Only when it had been too late to turn back had he realized how foolish he'd been.

One mind could not grasp the Collective. It was too great, too complex. It had reminded him of his true stature in the universe: small, weak, fallible, and insignificant.

And now the voice of the Collective thundered in his mind, louder and more intimate than ever before.

His brow grew heavy and furrowed with concern while he gazed down at the sensor image of the child growing inside of Beverly. His jaw tightened, not in anger but in remorse. You've always known something like this would happen, he upbraided himself. You knew it. How could you have been so foolish?

He had confided in Beverly after the first new wave of Borg attacks. Drowning in the merciless depths of the Collective's devouring group mind, he had needed her strength and pa.s.sion to anchor him. She'd kept him grounded in all that he loved: her, his life, and their family-to-be.

She turned off the tricorder and set it aside. "You're hearing them again, aren't you?"

Picard nodded. "It's hard not to," he said. "They're always there, just waiting for me to let my guard down."

"Sounds like what I had to do," she said with a teasing smirk, trying to cheer him up.