“I seem to recall that you chose against us, too,” she said, relieved that her mouth cooperated. “You filed for divorce, not I.”

“Fair enough. But I chose to stop bleeding, Rachel. I chose to bring an end to one type of pain, and I exchanged it for another. Now youhave to choose: your ship or your family. You can’t have both.”

“What kind of choice is that? Your ship, or your family,” she said, the blood pounding a samba beat in her temples now. She scrubbed her forehead with her right hand, restrained the urge to start cursing, loudly.“Christ, Ven, you sound like a character from a cheap holonovel. What exactly am I supposed to do? I can’t just drop everything when things become inconvenient. There are some things, manythings that happen aboard ship that require my presence.”

“Such as?”

“Such as now, right now.My first officer’s away, and I’ve got no replacement, and I can’t tag my new ops, this woman named Bat-Levi, because she’s on psychiatric probation and that’s because she went a little crazy a while back, but she’s supposed to be really sharp even if she isa bit off, and…”

She paused for breath. Kaldarren didn’t need the litany, after all. “Those are all good reasons why I, as captain, can’t just leave. Ven, you act like I have a choice. I don’t. I can’t delegate these things away,” she said, sidestepping the fact that, probably, she could, if she were wired just a little bit differently. “What kind of choice is nochoice?”

“No, Rachel, you dohave a choice.” Kaldarren sighed.

“Don’t you understand? You havea choice. You have choices.Your problem is that you simply don’t like the ones you have.”

He was right, and she knew it. Damn him, but he’d cut right to the heart of things, like he always had, as if he really was reading her mind.

Don’t be stupid; it’s not the telepathy. The man wasmarried to you for seventeen years. Who better to know how you think?

She said, “I want to talk to Jason. Can I speak with him, please? Try to explain? Please?”

“And how do you propose to explain things, Rachel?” Kaldarren’s eyes were large and sad. “What can you possibly say that will make things any better?”

And, much as Garrett hated to admit it, the man had a point.

“Please, Ven,” she said again. “Please?”

Chapter 2

“Can we get on with this, please?” asked Lieutenant Commander Darya Bat-Levi. Her voice was strained, but her tone was still polite. “Please?I’ve just gotten off shift. I’m tired, it’s late, and while I appreciate you being willing to move my… appointmentaround to accommodate my duty schedule, I really would like to get this over with, if it’s all the same to you. So can we move things along, please?”

And then she didmove. A simple thing, crossing her right knee over her left leg. When she did so, there was a small click, the halting choke of a servo as the joint flexed, extended. The whirr and clack of machinery.

Borg.Dr. Yuriel Tyvan felt his stomach clench. Borg.The thought was immediate and visceral, like a roundhouse punch to the solar plexus that has you wondering if you’ll ever breathe again. Tyvan’s mouth went dry, and his heart ramped up, the hairs prickling along the back of his neck. Borg.

The Borg were the black maw of a tunnel, a long, dark corridor filled with inchoate sounds and images too chaotic to be called memories: the rippling of the deck beneath his feet and shuddering up his thighs, the high thin screams of the other refugees. Sweat tracking down his neck, soaking the back of his shirt. The acrid smell of his fear. The way his mother had clutched at his arm so tightly her nails ripped into his skin and left marks: a row of tiny crescent moons incised in red. They were the only remnants of his mother Tyvan had left—marks that had healed, and memories that would not.

Now, of course, Tyvan knew that the first powerful jolt, the one that sent him reeling against a bulkhead and a stout, heavy girder crashing down to crush his mother’s back, was not a disruptor beam fired from a Borg cube. At the time, his mind gabbled in panic: Somehow the Borg had made it from the Delta Quadrant, tracked them down, and now they were going to die, and if they didn’t die, they would be assimilated…

Now, after forty-three years, Tyvan knew that an energy ribbon, the Nexus, had destroyed the two ships, the Lakuland the Robert Fox,carrying the pitiful remnants of his civilization to safety. But he didn’t know about the Nexus until long afterward, when he and forty-six of his fellow El-Aurians were safe on the Enterprise-B, and his parents were dead.

He appreciated the irony. Here he was on another Enterprise.He should have felt safe, but he didn’t. Tyvan never felt safe, knowing the Borg were out there, somewhere. Waiting. Biding their time. Machines were patient. Machines didn’t know guilt, or fear. Machines could wait—forever, if necessary.

“Please?” asked Bat-Levi again, her tone testy now, and Tyvan blinked back to the present.

Darya Bat-Levi was no Borg. The woman sitting in the overstuffed beige armchair—the chair he reserved for patients—was in her early thirties, and Tyvan thought she’d once been beautiful. She wasn’t beautiful now. An explosion and long exposure to theta radiation had taken care of that. A taut, shiny pink scar ran from her right temple to the angle of her jaw and trailed down into the hollow of her throat. The scar was so tight the right corner of Bat-Levi’s mouth pulled down into a lopsided grimace. Tyvan knew from Bat-Levi’s medical files that her hair had once been black. Most of it still was, except for a wide, silvery-white swath that ran from just above her right eyebrow and streaked over her ear like the tail of a dying comet. Her spine, from thoracic vertebra four on down, was a titanium implant. And there were the artificial limbs made of titanium alloy and polydermal sheaths: Bat-Levi’s legs, and her left arm and hand, the one whose fingers had no nails.

Her body mass was now sixty-six percent metal, thirty-four percent everything else, give or take. That’s the way Tyvan figured it. Bat-Levi didn’t move like a Borg, or even look that much like a Borg. She squealed when she walked, though this meant that she needed to get her servos adjusted. (Tyvan thought she let her servos go on purpose, and he would get to that, all in good time, and probably tonight. There was method to his madness, too.) The medical engineers hadn’t been able to restore much in the way of sensation, but he knew that Bat-Levi felt pressure, and she felt pain. She needed pressure sense, or else she couldn’t walk, and she needed to feel pain, or she’d never know to pull her hand out of a fire. Her skin was pink, not a sickly grayish-white; she had a soul and emotions. Her mind—imprisoned in the body Tyvan was sure she cherished—was her own. Tyvan knew that Darya Bat-Levi didn’t have the foggiest idea who the Borg were, or even that they existed. Few in the Alpha Quadrant did. Yet.

“Sorry,” said Tyvan. His fear had made his underarms damp with sweat, and perspiration crawled beneath his collar. “My mind wandered a bit there. The hour, I guess. I apologize.”

“If you’d like me to come back another time,” said Bat-Levi, her tone hopeful. “I know I’mtired and…”

“No,” said Tyvan, cutting her off. He watched her face settle into an expression just shy of sullen resentment. “I’m with you right now. This is your time.”