At the same time, he studied the Borg's features-so colorless, so devoid of character or individuality-and felt pity.

Most of all, he felt sad for Sara. She would weep when she went to his quarters; he felt deep regret for the sorrow his death would cause her. He had wanted so badly to return to her, to love her, to make her life happy.

Enveloping it all was mortal fear-and its opposite, fearlessness, at the realization that others would follow him, that Captain Picard would never permit the Borg to win. His death would be avenged.

Calm acceptance washed over him as the Borg took him by the throat. But the fear was renewed when instead of a violent death, he felt only the cold metal of a Borg tubule piercing his neck. At the same moment, Lio punched his combadge and shouted...

"Enterprise! They attack on sight! Repeat: They now attack..."

6.

"ENTERPRISE ! THEY ATTACK ON SIGHT! REPEAT: They now attack..."

Picard was on his feet, but only briefly. The lieutenant's voice was replaced by a shrill sound that knifed through the captain's brain and brought him to his knees. At first, he thought the sound was only in his head-like the song of the Borg-until he saw that the entire bridge crew was similarly doubled over.

"Sever the connection," Picard called out to the communications officer, but the young man had already dropped to the floor in agony.

In two leaping steps, Worf reached the communications console and worked the controls. "The Borg have piggybacked a signal onto the lieutenant's comm," he shouted over the whine. "I cannot terminate the...Incoming!"

The bridge rocked as the Enterprise was. .h.i.t by a tremendous blow. The few officers still on their feet fell to the ground. Nave and T'Lana had both been thrown from their chairs.

"Shields are down," La Forge reported as he pulled himself back up to the console.

"Lieutenant Nave, take us out of weapons range!" Picard ordered as a second burst hit the ship.

The lieutenant struggled back to the conn, squinting in pain as the piercing sound grew impossibly louder. With a few commands, she brought the ship around and punched in a course that would take them as far away from the Borg ship as they could allow. As they sped away, the noise finally stopped.

"I've cut the connection to Lieutenant Battaglia's combadge," Worf reported.

"We've got shields," La Forge said.

Picard looked to his two officers. They had been through this before-and much worse-yet he knew the looks of shock on their faces as they continued to work at their stations mirrored his own. The Borg never lashed out so quickly, unless they were in attack mode. "I want a full-"

"The cube beamed something into sickbay while the shields were down," Worf said. "Readings are unclear."

Beverly!

Picard was immobilized for a fraction of a second. Though the rest of the bridge crew would have hardly noticed, to the captain, it felt like an eternity. The Borg were after Beverly. Somehow, they had sensed the connection and read his thoughts. They were hitting him personally, going for blood.

"Bridge to sickbay," Picard commanded.

Worf and Picard both went for the turbolift, when Beverly's voice filled the air. "Sickbay to the bridge." There was something hollow about her voice, calm yet emotionless. The tone stopped Picard.

"Yes, Doctor?"

"The Borg," she said, halting.

"We're on our way," Picard said with a glance to Worf. He knew they both shouldn't leave the bridge, but he'd be d.a.m.ned if he was going to stay behind.

"No," she said. "It's not drones. It's the away team. The Borg have returned their bodies...or, rather, what remained."

Picard felt a flush of relief. The Borg hadn't noticed the connection and sent a personal attack. They had merely sent the bodies to the most logical location on the ship.

The bodies.

He had failed them. He had done the one thing he had sworn he would never do: lose even one more of his crew to the Borg. With his eyes focused on the bridge personnel, his mind finished Battaglia's last utterance: They now attack on sight.

He had a.s.sumed that the Borg would react to the away team as they always had to humans who posed no direct threat-that they would ignore them. He had a.s.sumed...and been wrong. How had he not known? He had been correct on everything else; he had known about the existence of the unborn queen, the location of the Borg cube...

But he had not known about the Borg's new tactic of attacking all intruders. Or their murderous intentions. His imperfect connection to the hive mind was a defect, a flaw, that had to be corrected, and swiftly.

Sickbay was filled to capacity, and yet there was none of the chaos typical in triage. The brief attack on the ship had resulted in about a dozen minor injuries to the crew, the most serious being Ensign Wahl's broken leg from a fall from a ladder in engineering. As in any emergency situation, the entire medical staff had reported for duty and were tending to the patients. And yet the room was almost as quiet as it would be when it was empty. The reason was clear to Beverly as she conducted her autopsy on the remains of the away team.

The attack had been particularly vicious, far more so than anything she had seen the Borg inflict previously. Their bodies had been destroyed...desecrated. It was almost like their attackers had taken joy in the killing. There seemed no clear reason why the Borg would send back the dead instead of a.s.similating them. It ran counter to everything she had experienced when dealing with the Borg in the past. Her scans revealed nothing beyond the horrific way the away team died. There were no clues to what the Borg were planning.

As she continued the examination, Beverly did her best to compartmentalize her emotions. That was always the most difficult part of her job. She needed to remain focused on her task and treat it just like that: a task, a ch.o.r.e. She had to forget the lives these people had been living barely an hour earlier.

To help herself deal, she allowed her focus to split and busied her mind with the information collected on the Borg that she had been reviewing when the ship had come under attack. She regretted that they had collected few details on the queen herself. Even with all that Data had stored in his positronic circuits after his encounter with her, or what Voyager had collected in the Delta Quadrant, there was little of use. Certainly there was nothing to indicate how the queen had come into existence. But the more Beverly's mind worked to compare the Borg to Terran hive insects, the more possibilities occurred to her.

She suspected that the loss of the queen had triggered a survival mechanism in the race, that perhaps one of the drones had adapted into a temporary "leader" and issued a directive to the surviving Collective: create a new queen. So the queen had not existed from the beginning of the Borg. That would be the easiest explanation for the fact that the Federation had already encountered two versions of the queen. In fact, perhaps this was a natural part of the cycle-of a queen dying and the colony creating a new one. This survival mechanism might also explain why the Borg behaved so violently toward the away team.

To continue the a.n.a.logy, Beverly theorized that a queen might possibly be created from an adapted drone. But how would such a transformation be accomplished in the cybernetic world of the Borg? Was it a simple matter of attaching the right prosthesis, or of altering the DNA of a drone in much the same way Jean-Luc's had been altered when he'd been a.s.similated?

Beverly was so engrossed in her train of thought that she barely heard the doors to sickbay open. Figuring it was another minor injury, she glanced up briefly to see Jean-Luc approaching. His arrival had been antic.i.p.ated, though she had expected him sooner.

Picard walked directly toward her, but even with his single focus, she could see the slight falter as he saw the remains of the away team lying out on the examination tables. She knew that he would blame himself. Any captain would. But they both knew that this was not the time for that discussion.

"What have you learned, Doctor?" he asked, almost coldly, as he reached the examination table with the remains of Noel DeVrie.

"There's nothing out of the ordinary," she reported, "beyond the brutality of the attack itself. The cuts and...dismembering were accomplished by the usual Borg weaponry." Her voice softened. "Lieutenant Battaglia's body was not among the dead."

Jean-Luc looked down at the three bodies laid out beside each other on the tables. "Who would have thought these would be the lucky ones?"

Beverly could see Ensign Wahl's body tense as her leg was being worked on. The doctor knew that the reaction wasn't due to the pain. Wahl had heard what the captain had said.

Beverly nodded toward her office and walked with Jean-Luc to continue their conversation in private. She also wanted to get them both away from the gruesome reminder of their losses. Not that there was anywhere on the ship they could go that would be far enough. The death pall clung to both of them with every step.

"What I don't understand," she said as she took a seat at her desk, "is the Borg aren't like this. They aren't vicious. They're systematic. Violence is a means to an end. It's never done for show. The Borg certainly don't taunt."

Picard's lips twisted bitterly. "They are scattered across the galaxy, cut off from one another. And time and time again the Federation has shown them something they've rarely seen: defeat. In this case, the Borg have done what they do best. They've adapted."

Beverly tried to ignore the full depth of what that statement could imply.

"You should also know," he continued, "that the Borg killed the away team without any provocation. A skeleton crew, which should have been too busy completing the ship, attending the queen...yet they murdered our people without hesitation."

Murder. It wasn't a term she a.s.sociated with the Borg. Certainly they were killers, but murder implied an emotional state, one that wasn't usually present in the drones. And to kill without provocation...

She recoiled at the notion. She had walked among the Borg herself without being harmed, although it had been an inexpressibly eerie experience. "But I thought-"

"So did I," Jean-Luc replied heavily. "I was wrong. Obviously, my connection to the Borg is incomplete, imperfect. They are different now. Bolder. Vicious. I can't afford to be wrong again."

"Do you think it was a trap?" she asked.

"I don't believe so," he said unsurely. "I don't think they know that I can hear them. I hope that they cannot hear what is in my mind."

"Perhaps they're more aggressive because they're protecting the developing queen." She paused, knowing her words did nothing to ease Jean-Luc's sense of responsibility for the lives lost. "I have a theory that they're transforming one of the drones into the queen," she said as she brought up the files she had been studying. "What I don't understand is how they're doing it."

"That will be your next priority," Picard ordered.

"What are you going to do?" Beverly asked. Something about the way the captain's eyes had fallen on her told her that he already had a plan. The Enterprise could never survive a battle with the cube; retreat seemed the only answer. Yet she knew from looking at Picard's set expression that he had not even considered the option.

"The rules have changed," Jean-Luc said. "We have fought against the Borg-and they have adapted, grown impervious to our weapons, and forced us to fall back each time. Now it's our turn to adapt." There was an odd defensiveness in his tone, his eyes, an unflinching sense of determination; he knew that she would disapprove strongly of what he was about to say. "The drones react aggressively to humanoids. But they would not react at all to another Borg."

She stared blankly at him. Only her desk was between them, but she suddenly felt very far away from him. A muscle in Picard's jaw twitched subtly; she caught the glimmer of inward-directed loathing in his expression and felt a flash of understanding, of pure horror.

"No." She stood up, shaking her head as if to dislodge the very thought. Jean-Luc reached toward her, but she pushed his hand away. "No! I won't permit it."

"Doctor." His tone was formal, gentle, utterly reasonable. "You have the knowledge and the technology-and we haven't any option. If we are to destroy the queen, I must become Locutus again."

Picard saw the shock and revulsion in her green eyes, her expression, even her posture as she stood behind her desk. She folded her arms tightly about herself and shook her head, red hair swinging gently.

The idea-that he would have to become Locutus again-had come to him swiftly, harshly as he had stood on the bridge listening to Lieutenant Battaglia's anguished screams. After their retreat, Picard took a moment alone in his ready room to contemplate the situation. It was one that he could not entertain lightly, but there was no other option. During the ride on the lift, the walk down the corridor to sickbay, Picard had felt the same horror he now saw in Beverly. But he'd had the time to overcome it, to yield to the necessity of the situation. And now, standing in her office, he was resigned to the fact that it was the only possible course of action. Beverly would have to come to that conclusion, too.

"What else shall we do, Doctor?" he pressed. "Retreat, so that the queen can direct an attack against Earth? You've seen the vessel; it's even more formidable than the last. Shall we allow another battle like Wolf 359, permit thousands more to die in vain?"

"But Seven of Nine-" Beverly began.

He cut her off. "Seven will arrive too late to be of help. Even if she were here now, she's become too human. The Borg would never accept her as one of their own."

She had calmed; her arms were still folded, indicating her unwillingness to concede, but she was listening carefully. "I've been doing a great deal of research. Obviously, the queen is a drone who is being transformed into a female. My hunch is that it's far more than a simple surgical procedure, that biochemistry is involved. The Borg are half organic. There has to be a biomedical way to halt the transformation process-"

Picard interrupted. "This is still conjecture? You haven't yet discovered a method?"

She shook her head. "I need more time."

"Then your line of research will have to wait." He paused. "Even if you did find a way of halting the metamorphosis in time, someone would still have to get past the Borg in order to do it."

"Jean-Luc," she began softly. He heard the unspoken plea to find any other way.

"Someone must be transformed," he said, his tone hard. "Someone with special knowledge of the Borg, their ship, their queen. Can you offer a more logical solution?"

"No," she admitted. "But what happens if we do this and something goes wrong?"

"That is a question we can't yet answer. But we already know with certainty what will happen if we don't do this." He sighed and lowered his voice. "Look, I'm no more pleased about this than you. I would prefer any other option-if there was one. But all personal feelings must be put aside. I am the best candidate. And I must have a perfect connection to the hive mind." He fought to keep the pain and anger from his tone. "I won't lose anyone else because of my ignorance."

Her shoulders relaxed slightly; the emotion left her face and tone, replaced by the intent look of the scientific mind at work. "I have all the records, and Borg nanoprobes. I can adapt them for our purposes." She paused. "And we'll implant a neutralizer chip, of course, to protect you from total a.s.similation. You'll hear every directive the hive does, be privy to all the Borg's information. But you'll still be yourself-capable of free thought and action."

Picard gave her a grim smile of grat.i.tude; he knew it wasn't easy for her. "How long before I can be ready?"

She directed her eyes up and to the right as she calculated. "The actual work on you won't take more than fifteen minutes. But give me an hour to prepare."

"Make it less," the captain said. "We haven't that much time."

Picard sat in his quarters, listening to the haunting strains of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and trying to quell the evil specters evoked by the knowledge of what was to come. There were flashes of the Borg operating room...of the terror of being a small mind closed off, imprisoned by the thundering voice of the Collective...the agonizing frustration of being encased inside a body no longer his own to control, of hearing his own voice speaking on behalf of the Borg while he, the individual trapped inside, could do no more than scream silently with outrage.

Each Borg drone represented just such an individual mind-trapped, forced to watch its body behave mindlessly, against its will...The magnitude of the tragedy was incomprehensible.

Now one of the drones was being altered, changed into a new creature-one with her own will and her own individuality, one bent on crushing those of others. He shuddered at the thought of himself as Locutus, supine in the operating theater while the queen, her skin moist and glistening, leaned her face close to his and whispered to him of their joint future as she stroked his cheek with cold, inhuman hands...

He quashed the unpleasant memories, replaced them with the one memory of pure triumph, unrivaled relief: the instant he had divorced himself from Locutus and the hive mind, and reached out, as Jean-Luc Picard, to grasp Data's arm.

Sleep, he had said. The utterance brought unspeakable satisfaction, for it was his own voice, so long silenced, that was speaking. It was his rest.i.tution for the crimes wrought by Locutus; he was giving his crew the information they needed to stop the Borg, to save Earth. Data had heard and had understood.

Those positive memories, he knew, would give him the strength to become Locutus again, to walk among the Borg as one of their own. He would be with them but apart from them; never again would he permit them to steal his or anyone's individuality.

He was staring out the window, lost in the past and the swelling music, when the door chimed. "Music off," he said, and then, "Come."

He turned as T'Lana entered.

"Captain Picard," she said formally. "I would like to state that I recognize you were correct about the existence of the Borg vessel. I realize that such validation is important to humans."

He smiled faintly at that. "So. Are you withdrawing your objection to my order to bring the Enterprise here without Seven of Nine?"

"No, sir," she replied calmly as she came farther into the room. "While I acknowledge that you were right about the existence and location of the Borg ship, you were incorrect in your judgment that the Borg would pa.s.sively accept the presence of the away team. Therefore, I have no way of verifying which of your a.s.sertions is correct. I do not know for a fact that Seven of Nine would have arrived too late to have been of help."

Picard felt the defensiveness welling up in him, especially at the mention of the lost away team. He wanted some physical distance between himself and the Vulcan and made a sudden move for his chair, brushing T'Lana's arm as he pa.s.sed. "I'm all too aware of the fact that my connection to the Borg collective is imperfect. It was a regrettable mistake but one that had to be made to learn what we know now."

As he sat, he saw a look on T'Lana's face that could only be described as...curious. "Yes?"

"You intend to become Locutus again."

There was no anger in her tone, no question either. She knew this as fact. This was the benefit-and the challenge-of having a highly sensitive touch-telepath as a member of the crew. He hadn't intended to tell T'Lana his plan yet, but there was no reason to deny it.

"No humanoid can safely accomplish our mission," he explained. "So, yes, I will become Locutus again. I will wear a neutralizer chip so that my a.s.similation is not total. The Borg will accept me as one of their own, and I will be able to destroy the queen quickly."

T'Lana digested this, showing no sign of surprise save for a slight lift of one eyebrow. At last she replied, "There is a significant chance that your plan will go awry and you will be captured. Starfleet would lose an a.s.set and the Borg would gain an invaluable one."

"I need not be reminded," Picard answered heavily. "Counselor, I was unaware of a single detail which, tragically, led to the loss of four crew members. Now I am pursuing a course of action that will allow me unlimited access to the Borg hive mind and give us our greatest chance of disabling the Borg before they can launch a deadly attack against us. Why are you so unwilling, after the evidence you have seen, to trust me?"

"Your emotions," she said bluntly, with a slight lift of her chin-which, were she human, Picard would have taken as a sign of defiance. "When you first announced that you sensed the Borg collective, I read all the relevant logs and reports concerning your encounters with them. During your last, when the Borg invaded the Enterprise-E, your anger brought you very close to allowing the Borg to destroy every member of the crew. Your actions jeopardized your ship and the future of the Alpha Quadrant. You behaved irrationally, Captain. As counselor, it is my responsibility to remind you of such facts. I would be remiss if I did not mention that I have sensed a great deal of emotional turmoil in you regarding this decision. I urge you to reconsider your actions, to change your strategy, and report back to Admiral Janeway for instruction."

Picard, careful to contain any trace of heat in his tone, said, "I can hear them, but they are different now. I misunderstood how the Borg had been changed. But now I do have a better understanding. Without the voice of their queen, the hive mind has become a mob mentality. At this moment, there is no logic within the Borg. If I can walk among them as Locutus, we can end this before it starts."