Atonement (4 page)

Axum
.
Even here, in the real world, their catomic connection remained unbroken. He could only see
through her
, but that did not make his observations less valuable. In the gestalt—created by their catoms while both of them were held in stasis—they'd had access to a shared reality. It would undoubtedly take some time for her catoms to adjust now that she was conscious. But in time, she might be able to return to that gestalt at will.

Useful information, but not as helpful to her as Axum's simple suggestion.

Seven did not trust her catoms as completely as Axum did. She would have preferred to explore their capabilities in a quiet, safe place. But this was no time for doubts.

Closing her eyes briefly, Seven ordered her catoms to show her what she could not see. The moment her eyes were open, it no longer mattered that the room was lit only by the faint illumination of the stasis chamber's controls. It may as well have been high noon. In addition, the almost silent footfalls of the Commander as he approached her echoed in her mind like thunder. The click of the hypospray he held in his hand was a sharp crack.

Immediately, she lifted her right arm to bat away the Commander's hand. Throwing her weight to the opposite side, with her left hand Seven pushed the surprised man to the floor. Straddling him to pin him down, she grasped him around the throat with both her hands, limiting, but not completely extinguishing, his air supply. The hypospray had been thrown clear.

Now that she could see him, Seven wondered that she could ever have feared such a small man. He was human. Sweat was pouring profusely down his clean-shaven scalp. His dark eyes were small, bulging in their sockets. His bulbous nose and thin lips were his face's most prominent features. His arms flailed uselessly at hers for a moment until he gave up and concentrated on prying her hands from his neck.

“Resistance is futile,” Seven said. The words, a standard greeting when she had been Borg, rarely sprang to mind anymore, but were deliciously appropriate under the circumstances.

She felt him relax beneath her and move his left arm down his chest. Sensing his target, she removed her right hand from his throat, plucked the combadge from his uniform, and tossed it well out of reach. The motion destabilized her long enough for him to roll forward. The side of her head impacted the nearest stasis chamber, causing her to release his neck.

He didn't have the strength to scurry too far. He made it only to his hands and knees, gasping for air, before Seven lunged at him again, throwing him facedown to the floor. She climbed over him and used the chamber to pull herself to her feet. She stood before him, winded but still flushed with adrenaline, as he pushed himself back on his knees and peered up at her.

“What . . .” he croaked, then cleared his throat and tried again. “What can you possibly hope to accomplish here?” he asked through ragged breaths. “Kill me and you'll spend the rest of your life in a Federation penitentiary for murder. Stand down, return to stasis, and once the catomic crisis has passed, you will be released.”

“After you have killed how many using the catoms I allowed you to extract and study?” Seven asked. “Perhaps I should take my chances with a Federation court.”

“I have killed no one,” he said so sincerely, she found it hard not to believe him. Ample evidence to the contrary existed in her memories of the past few weeks, but she was not yet able to discern to an absolute certainty which of those memories were real and which were products of catomic nightmares.

“I've seen your experiments, Commander,” Seven said. “I've felt the pain of your victims as their bodies rejected the catoms you injected into them, as the atomic bonds holding their molecules intact disintegrated. I've seen you irradiate their remains. I'm not even sure anymore that you're actually trying to cure the catomic plague.”

He blanched at this. “How?” he demanded.

“You have been studying Caeliar catoms for how long?” Seven asked. He did not reply, but she hazarded a guess, given his reluctance. “Since the moment of the transformation of the Borg?”

His breath had almost returned to normal now, and his eyes held both suspicion and desperation.

“You are attempting to unlock the programming portals contained within each catom, but their complexity is beyond your current capabilities,” Seven continued. “You are making minute alterations and testing them on live patients. None of them have succeeded. There are more than a trillion nodes on each catom, Commander, and you haven't even begun to map their locations and interactions. You're not going to be able to kill that many people without someone questioning your methods and you know it. You are correct that properly reprogrammed catoms could easily destroy any malfunctioning catom, even one that has bonded with another viral or bacterial life-form. But without my help, you will never achieve that goal.”

The Commander's face had turned to stone as she spoke. Without requesting her consent, he placed a hand on the nearest stasis chamber and used it to pull himself to his feet.

“Then help me,” he said.

Never
, Seven thought, but remained silent. He'd already reached for the bait.

“That was always my intention,” she said instead.

“I had no idea that you had even begun to dissect your catoms,” the Commander said. “Nothing in your files or the holographic doctor's research indicated that your understanding had so far surpassed my own.”

Seven could not truthfully take credit for this. Neither she nor the Doctor had dared delve this deeply into the mystery of the particles that had sustained her existence since the Caeliar transformation of the Borg. Their work had occurred in fits and starts as circumstances had required. But Axum had not felt any reluctance to explore his catomic nature. He had shared briefly with her the truths he had already made his own, the realities she was only beginning to grasp.

“Both the Doctor and I feared that any dissemination of our work would result in circumstances like those in which I currently find myself. To you, I am not an individual with rights, I
am an object of inquiry. I never wished to find myself at the mercy of men such as you.”

“Forgive me,” the Commander said. “So many have died. So many more will die unless I can complete my work. You and the others are essential to my ongoing research.”

“Is that why you placed us in stasis when we arrived?” Seven demanded.

“I required continuous access to your catoms,” the Commander replied. “I assumed that beyond that, you would be unwilling or unable to assist me.”

“I suggest that next time,
you ask
,” Seven retorted.

The Commander dropped his head and shook it back and forth slowly. When he raised it again, he was nodding and clearly already revising his priorities. “I'll have quarters and a lab prepared for you.”

“First, you will comply with my demands,” Seven said.

“Demands?”

“I came here willingly. I volunteered my catoms willingly. Axum's status is in dispute and will likely remain so until you decide to release him. Riley Frazier also agreed, though under duress, to assist Starfleet Medical. But the rest of her people, and their children, are another matter. Riley was promised that they would be relocated to a safe place here on Earth until she was released from this facility. You have not honored that promise. That will be corrected immediately.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Is the fact that I do enough to convince you to stop wasting time?”

“I require as large a sampling of catomic material as is possible for my work,” the Commander countered.

“Not anymore,” Seven corrected him. “You will cease immediately any experiments involving the catoms you extracted from the inhabitants of Arehaz. You may continue to work with mine, Axum's, and Riley's until I return.”

“Where are you going?”

“You will release Riley's people from these pods and prepare
them for transport. I will depart this facility immediately and make arrangements for their care until our work is concluded. You will transfer them to my custody, and once they are secured beyond your reach, I will return and provide you with all of the information you require to cure the catomic plague.”

The Commander considered the request. “How long will this take?”

“Ten days,” Seven estimated.

“And if I refuse?”

“You can put me in stasis again,” she replied. “But you can't keep me there. You will not live long enough to discover on your own how to program a single catom. Agree to my demands, which are no more than you have already promised, and I will return without advising your superiors of my suspicions of the illegality of your actions. I will submit to any tests you require. I will share all of the information I currently possess. Axum and Riley will remain to secure my compliance. Once I return, we will solve this problem in a matter of days.”

“When you leave this facility, you will be tracked. All of your interactions will be monitored,” he insisted.

You can try,
Seven thought.

“There aren't many on Earth I can trust to assist me,” she said. “I will only contact—”

“Commander Paris and Doctor Sharak,” the Commander finished for her.

Seven nodded. “Yes.”

“Where will you take these people?”

“That is not your concern.”

“And if you don't return in ten days?”

“I have given you my word, Commander. To me, that actually means something.”

The Commander stepped forward. Seven retreated automatically as he extended his right hand. Only when she understood his intention did she take it, unsurprised by its cold, clammy feel.

“One more thing, Commander,” Seven said as she shook his hand quickly and pulled away.

“Yes?”

“To
whom am I speaking?”

“My family calls me Jefferson. My associates call me Doctor Briggs. Those who work here call me Commander.”

Seven nodded. “Very well, Commander. You may address me as Seven. The rest of my designation is no longer accurate.”

MONTECITO, NORTH AMERICA

“Mom?” Tom Paris called again.

He stood on the porch of her home, a large ranch-style house that had been in the Paris family for several generations and that his mother, Julia, had redesigned to her own specifications almost half a century earlier. She had envisioned a vast space where multiple generations of Parises would create happy memories during holidays and extended visits. Those dreams had been frustrated by the realities of her husband's death during the Borg Invasion and the failure of her daughters to provide her with grandchildren.

Paris might have finally won a few stingy points from his mother over her favorites, Kathleen and Moira, by giving Julia Paris a granddaughter, Miral. That his wife, B'Elanna, was currently carrying Julia's grandson would normally have been announced to the entire Federation, and his birth would have required a gathering of at least a thousand people to celebrate the momentous event. But those hopes had evaporated when Julia had learned that her son had lied to her about the deaths of his wife and daughter; deaths that had been fabricated to stop an ancient fanatic Klingon sect from murdering Miral out of fear that she was some sort of Klingon savior. Julia's disappointment had been so savage she had actually attempted to gain custody of Miral through the Federation Family Court.

The mediator had ruled in Tom's favor, ending his current troubles. But the look on his mother's face when the judgment was rendered had filled Paris with fear on his mother's behalf. As soon as he and his attorney had completed the required
paperwork, Paris had transported to Montecito to assure himself that Julia Paris was not going to make any other inexplicably stupid decisions.

“Mom, I know you're in there,” Paris said, pressing the doorbell with one hand while simultaneously putting the large brass knocker through its paces with the other.

Finally, the door opened a crack. His mother's face did not fill it. All he could see was a solid metal guard that secured the door while open. It would take several hundred pounds of pressure to break the door open.
Or a phaser,
Paris thought.

“Mom,” Paris said again.

“Go away, Tom.”

“I'm not going to do that.”

“I have nothing more to say to you.”

“I have plenty to say to you. Let me in.”

“No.”

Paris turned his back to the door and leaned against it. “We're not going to leave things like this, Mom. I'm worried about you. I know you thought you were doing the right thing by going to the Family Court. It's going to take some time but I'll make B'Elanna understand. I promise you'll see Miral and the new baby when the fleet returns from the Delta Quadrant. But I'm not going to be able to do what I have to do when I get back out there if I don't know you're okay, and right now, I don't. Right now, you're scaring the hell out of me.”

“I'll be fine.”

“Mom.”

“Just go, Tom.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you going to do when I leave?”

“Finish my tea.”

“And then what?”

“There's some reading I've been meaning to catch up on.”

“And tomorrow?”

A long pause followed. Finally, Julia said, “I don't know.”

“This
is what I'm saying, Mom. You've still got a lot of years ahead of you, and if they're not going to be filled with babysitting or looking after Dad, find something else.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“I'm not. You are one of the most driven human beings I have ever met. You're like me. You can't stay still. You need a constructive place to throw all of your time and energy. You can't just sit in this big old house drinking tea and watching the news feeds. You need—”