Worf felt the Vulcan's disapproving gaze on him. "I don't know," he said quietly. "I will have the opportunity to consult the captain shortly and will ask him."

"Thank you, sir," Nave said, clearly crushed. She turned away slowly and took her seat at the conn.

"Lieutenant," Worf said softly. He understood and liked Nave; she had a warrior's heart. He wished very much that he could allow her to seek justice for her friends.

Nave glanced over her shoulder at him.

"If anyone else needs to beam over to the Borg vessel," he said, "I shall make sure you accompany him."

Nave did not smile. "Thank you, sir," she said.

Picard/Locutus walked through the corridors of the Enterprise with Beverly Crusher by his side. The world was gray, leaden, distorted-and cold, so very cold.

"So this is how it looked," he murmured, in the low, hoa.r.s.e voice of Locutus; the sound of it still unsettled him.

Beverly turned her face toward him. "How what looked?"

"The ship. The way it appeared to the Borg when they invaded her. The deck, the bulkheads..."

"How does it look?" Beverly asked. She was distracting him, Picard knew, distracting them both from the fear of what was about to happen.

"Very odd. Without color; everything is varying shades of black, white, gray. And it's rather like being in a fishbowl looking out. When I close in on something, it grows alarmingly large-it's all I can see. And when it recedes, it's gone immediately." Speaking was an effort, yet he forced himself and was relieved when he could hear Jean-Luc's intonation and choice of words a.s.sert themselves. Gray and immediate, he decided, that was the Borg world. There was no right or wrong here, only directives, only stimulus and response. He understood now how they could kill so easily, without compunction: action was simply mindless action. They saw no difference among nourishing themselves, building a cube, or killing.

We are building a queen. Remain in your regeneration chambers and await the directive. He would have said more, but the single thunderous thought overrode all others, and he fell silent. The voices were tinged with emotion and an urgency that nearly overwhelmed him. It was different from the voices the last time he had been Locutus. Indeed, when Beverly spoke, he had to strain to make out the words.

"It sounds hideous," Beverly said softly.

It is, he thought, but the words proved too difficult to form beneath the chorus of Borg voices. He turned away and focused on walking; his gait seemed stiff, clumsy, as if he wore another man's body. Silently, he chided himself: he would have to adjust to the mental noise. If he could not speak quickly, coherently with his crew once he beamed over to the Borg vessel, all might be lost.

Beverly glanced at him. He could see in her eyes that she noticed his struggle, but she said nothing.

He forced out some words. "You were right-they will protect the queen at any cost. They will kill. It is not a directive. It springs from something...deeper."

They arrived at last at the transporter room. Commander Worf and Counselor T'Lana stood side by side at the transporter console. It was growing increasingly harder for Picard to judge expressions. He could not read T'Lana's reaction to the appearance of Locutus at all, but he caught a flicker in the Klingon's eyes.

Picard turned his attention first to the Vulcan. He could only imagine that she had come in order to make a final argument against his course of action. "Counselor T'Lana?" He forced himself not to react to the sound of his own voice rendered hauntingly alien, and he forced himself, too, to ignore the mental chatter and speak fluidly, without halting. "I presume you're here because you wished to have a word with me."

"Yes, sir," T'Lana said. She stepped from behind the console in order to face the captain directly. While such body language was generally ignored by Vulcans, T'Lana had come to realize that humans valued it. Her action hinted at respect and directness.

She wanted to show him such things. While she did not approve of his choices, he was still her captain. And she could not look on him thus, as Locutus, and not consider his loyalty to his crew-a value equally prized by Vulcans and humans. It was difficult even for her to see him so changed: she had never stood in the presence of a Borg drone, though she had seen many images, and the experience was unsettling. One of his eyes was completely obscured by an optical device; the other was dulled, devoid of emotion, of the spark that had made it human. His skin was as alarmingly pale as that of a bloodless corpse, and the black prosthesis fitted to his arm was equipped with an ominous and deadly looking metal blade.

T'Lana of course did not react outwardly to the change in his appearance, but Doctor Crusher and Commander Worf could not entirely hide the keen distress they felt. It must have been extremely difficult for them, given their experiences with Locutus. T'Lana was impressed that Picard was willing to endure what to him must be a horrific experience-again to become part of the Borg. Most important, he was willing to sacrifice himself in order to spare his crew and-he believed-the rest of humanoid civilization.

Captain Wozniak would have done such a thing. She drew a breath and pushed the image of the dying Wozniak from her mind.

"I have come for two reasons, Captain," T'Lana said. "First, I wish to tell you that I regret I was unable to be of use to you in my role as counselor-"

Picard interrupted immediately, in the grating, unsettlingly inhuman voice of the Borg, though the mere act of forming the words seemed to require enormous effort. "But you were of service. You gave your opinion. I value that."

"Thank you, sir."

"And the second reason you have come?" Picard asked.

T'Lana drew a breath. Whether the captain was right or wrong was, at this moment, immaterial. "To wish you success in your mission, sir."

The Borg face could not quite smile, but she saw the very humanlike glint in the single exposed eye. "I appreciate that, Counselor. It is definitely something to be wished for."

As T'Lana exited, Picard turned to his second-in-command. "Commander Worf." His words came out harsh, stilted, uninflected, Borg. "You are now in command of this vessel."

He paused, meaning to say more, but the Klingon spoke first. "Aye, Captain. I will do my best, sir. As an emergency backup, I am a.s.sembling another away team-"

Picard cut him off, gesturing with the prosthetic arm, an action that made Worf and Beverly wince. "There will be no more away teams, even if I fail." It was nearly impossible to speak quietly while someone else was shouting in his brain, but he forced himself to maintain his focus, to make the words come. "Now that I am fully part of the Collective, I understand that the Borg's entire a.r.s.enal is almost online. And their engines will be ready in just under seven hours. Do you understand?" He paused. "If I am unable to neutralize the queen, your orders are to take the ship out of here and warn Starfleet Command immediately. We will risk no further lives."

Worf's expression grew stoic. He gave a single, curt nod. "Aye, sir."

"I'll stay in constant contact. If for any reason my communicator fails, or the Borg taps into my comlink, you'll be able to get my coordinates from the transponder. If we lose contact, notify Doctor Crusher immediately; she will be monitoring the neutralizer chip to be sure it is functioning properly. I want you to remain just within transporter range. No closer." He let go a small gasp, drained by the effort of so much speech.

If Worf saw, he did not show it. "Yes, Captain."

That's it then, Picard told himself silently-a small, barely discernible thought amid the collective's babble, phrase layered over phrase layered over phrase.

Nutrient uptake successful.

Prosthetic body now available for use by the queen...

The queen's gestation is nearing completion. Prepare for the coming directive.

Maintain ninety-five percent humidity in gestation chamber. Construction completed on Levels Three through Twenty-one Alpha. Raising internal temperature...

Picard lumbered to the transporter pad, then turned and faced Worf and Beverly, both of whom stood at the console.

How distant they looked, how gray; how cold and grim and lifeless the Enterprise herself seemed. Weighed down by the cacophony of the collective, Picard made himself a silent, solemn promise: he would return again to a world warm and vivid and bright.

"Mister Worf," he said, "beam me over to the Borg vessel."

The world shimmered, sparks of light illuminating the gray. The edges of reality softened, melted into each other, then abruptly, relentlessly dissolved.

8.

EVEN AS PICARD MATERIALIZED ON THE BORG vessel, he gratefully sucked in air. The atmosphere aboard the Enterprise had become so cold and dry to him that it pained his throat and lungs. Here it was obligingly hot and so moist a fine mist veiled his surroundings.

The voice of the Collective was clearer here, utterly pervasive yet somehow less intrusive, as quietly a part of him as his own breathing or the beating of his heart. The part of him that was Locutus found it welcoming. At the same time, he felt his level of anger increase. At first, he thought it was a natural reaction to being back aboard a cube. But slowly he came to realize that Jean-Luc Picard wasn't angry. It was the Borg.

Emotion was not typical of his connection to the Collective. The Borg were systematic. Even with all the added voices, Picard remembered that the last time he was Locutus there was an overall sense of calm. Of reason. The Borg did not see themselves as evil. They were merely performing a function of their superior biology. They had never attacked with malice; they were simply fulfilling their natural prerogative to expand their race. The sense of preservation was still there, but now it was mixed with a need for vengeance. And a feeling of satisfaction.

The queen's gestation is nearing completion. Prepare to receive a directive...

He found himself on the uppermost deck. Overhead hung exposed circuitry and conduits. Beneath his feet lay exposed metal scaffolding above a hundred other scaffoldings just the same, spiraling downward into infinity, and row after row of honeycomb alcoves filled with inanimate drones. To the human Picard, the sight was dizzying. To Locutus, it was unremarkable; the Borg's vision focused on what was closest to him, the better to detect intruders or beings to be immediately a.s.similated. Distant objects receded into near invisibility: height meant nothing. Only an individual could be afraid of falling.

Only individuals would desire to see colors, to appreciate aesthetics; Borg vision detected shades of gray because those were the functional colors of the Borg cube.

Levels Twenty-two A through Thirty-nine A now at acceptable life-support levels, ready for habitation.

Picard began to move slowly, deliberately, at the Collective's steady pace. He was keenly aware that he had beamed onto the precise spot where Battaglia and his search party had started out. Unlike them, he needed no coordinates to guide him.

He had grown sufficiently accustomed to the Collective's steady patter in his mind to focus on his own thoughts. He let Locutus guide his feet and let his mind recall each individual of the lost away team. He wanted to remember them separately; it fell to his responsibility to notify their families when he returned to the Enterprise.

If he returned, the thought whispered, and he corrected it quickly, firmly. When.

He could not let himself forget the cost of his own reluctance to face the Borg alone. The lost were not faceless officers, aware of the dangers of service aboard a starship. Each one had a history, loved ones, dreams. And Picard fought against the Collective to remember them as such.

There was Lionardo Battaglia, of course-a sharp, ambitious young man, but one with depth. When duty had brought him to the captain's quarters, Battaglia had immediately recognized the music Picard had been listening to: Puccini. He had spoken knowledgeably of the composer's life.

Though Battaglia was still alive, Picard had to think of him as lost. He could not cloud his mission with thoughts of rescue. Saving Battaglia could mean the loss of more than just Picard.

Instead, he focused on the dead-the truly lost. There was Amrita Satchitanand, whom he had met only briefly when she had first reported to duty aboard the Enterprise. He remembered her as a lithe, diminutive woman with skin the color of coffee with cream and an elegance to her movements that reminded him of Hindu temple dancers.

There was Jorge Costas, tall, dark eyed, and proud, who had come from a large family in Starfleet, all of whom would feel his loss. There was Noel DeVrie from Holland, painfully young, with an eager att.i.tude and hair the color of sunlight, as pale as Costas was dark.

He moved past a row of darkened chambers, each one housing the silhouette of an upright, sleeping Borg. The sleep that is not sleep, he thought. The Borg did not dream. Their presence made him wary, but as he pa.s.sed by, they remained silent and still, adrift in mindless existence.

Footsteps coming toward him. Locutus took no notice, but Picard tensed at the sight of a drone looming swiftly in his vision-coming, he knew with Collective instinct, from the birthplace of the queen. The drone had once been humanoid, though its original s.e.x and species had been so long submerged that they had been washed away, like the tide wearing down stone, leaving smooth, bland features in its wake.

No alarm was sounded in the group consciousness, no call to action given, but Picard froze nonetheless, remembering how swiftly Battaglia and the others had been taken. The drone neared and lifted an arm terminating in a single, viciously sharp blade. Picard rested a finger on his communicator badge, ready to touch it if need be, to warn those on the Enterprise, just as Battaglia had done with his last breath.

The Borg moved within an arm's length, the arm still raised. And then he walked on, brushing against Picard as he pa.s.sed.

Picard let go a long breath, then stilled his human mind. He allowed the Collective to become ascendant and resumed his steady pace.

He let the mind of the Borg draw him over the metal scaffold, beneath pulsing lights that might have dazzled human eyes. In the ship, all was silent. Locutus felt safe, nestled in the bosom of the Collective, a part of hundreds of others. Picard felt horribly alone.

It was not far to the single enclosed chamber on the ship. Picard paused in the open entryway and stood in the pulsing light-a longer wavelength than that in the rest of the ship, though his Borg's eyes could not identify the color.

The chamber was vast, high ceilinged, fogged with humidity; in the far misting shadows, an exoskeleton of conduits hung on the walls, pumping in specially warmed and dampened air, filtering the environment. Small, slickly shining nutrient tubes dangled down unused, a tangle of black snakes.

Captain Picard, Battaglia had whispered, we have found the queen...

T'Lana had just boarded the lift that would take her up to the bridge when she spotted Commander Worf in the corridor. He caught her eye and lifted a finger, a signal, she decided, for her to wait for him.

Out of courtesy, she did so, though she did not relish the opportunity to be alone in his presence.

He entered the lift and gave her a nod in thanks as the doors closed behind him.

"Bridge." For a few seconds, they rode in silence. And then Commander Worf said, "That was most gracious, Counselor. What you said to Captain Picard."

The remark caught her off guard, but she realized that the Klingon was attempting to be professional, courteous. To his credit, he was trying to establish a good working relationship. He had made the comment because he was loyal to Captain Picard, and he wished to show his support of T'Lana's sentiment.

Even flawed instruments, she told herself, could sometimes give correct readings.

She knew that she ought to respond positively; it was paramount, at such a critical time, that the crew function together effectively. But something in his demeanor made her hesitate to reply. He broke off eye contact a bit too quickly, and his tone bore a hint of shyness; he even took a step back, failing to maintain the normal physical distance between colleagues.

He was behaving so, T'Lana realized, because as a male he had noticed that she was a female. He was attracted to her and attempting to suppress it.

This alone would have been enough to unsettle her. But there was further reason: she had noted the powerfulness of his build and the fact that his fierce profile could, even by Vulcan terms, be considered handsome.

She did not approve of her own reaction. She lifted her chin, realizing that the gesture might be read as defiant but unable to prevent it in time. "I did what I deemed logical." She kept her tone cool.

"I saw no logic in it," Worf countered. "I saw loyalty and kindness."

T'Lana did not answer because she knew of nothing appropriate to say. She stared steadily at the seam in the lift doors and told herself that she felt no emotion: no longing and no outrage.

They rode in silence to the bridge.

In sickbay, Beverly Crusher glanced up from her work at the glowing legends on an overhead console. One steadily moving line in a graph, accompanied by numerical data below, represented Jean-Luc's brain activity; a green blip nearby indicated that the neutralizer chip was working properly. The blip was accompanied by a softly pulsing chirp, so that she need not monitor it visually, but she found it increasingly difficult to tear her gaze away.

She knew it should take the captain less than an hour to accomplish what he needed to do; ideally, it should take him a matter of minutes. Even so, she did not care to spend a single moment waiting anxiously, which she would certainly do if she did not find a way to occupy herself. It was hard enough just to blot out the image of Jean-Luc as Locutus, to intentionally disremember the nightmare of the first moment she had stood on the Enterprise bridge and seen Locutus on the viewscreen-of the first moment she had looked into Locutus's eyes and seen that Jean-Luc wasn't there anymore.

It had been hard enough to walk beside him to the transporter room in his guise as Borg; she had kept rea.s.suring herself by looking into his eyes and verifying that the man she knew and loved was still there. But he had moved with a stiff, inhumanly mechanical gait, and each time he had spoken, the sound chilled her: the inflection belonged to Locutus, not the captain.

It was difficult to remember, too, the rage that had consumed him when the Borg had invaded the Enterprise-E. When he had first confessed that he heard the voice of the Collective, she had wondered whether that rage-so mindless, so fierce that he had been willing to sacrifice everything, including his crew, his sanity-had been rekindled. But to her relief, he had remained relentlessly rational. He could not bear the loss of even four officers, and when he asked that she re-create Locutus, she had hardly questioned the decision. But now, sitting alone in her sickbay, watching the effects of that decision play out over a graph of colored lights and numbers, she allowed herself to acknowledge what she had done.

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 a.s.similated 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 so pale, and...

Beverly hesitated and frowned. She pressed a control and enlarged an image of the queen that had long ago been imprinted by Data's positronic brain.

The queen's skin glistened. Jean-Luc had told her, long ago, of the revulsion he had felt at the Queen's touch. It had been damp, sticky...coated with some sort of viscous semiliquid compound.