Star Trek Voyager: The Gift

Star Trek Voyager: The Gift 43. Delta Seven

It is scientific fact that touch is the first sense developed by humans. Seven had to acknowledge the truth of that as her consciousness seeped back into her body, since the first thing she became aware of was something dangling near her leg, just tickling her right shin. She felt her fists clench as her whole body tensed and her skin rebelled in revulsion at the thin, filmy layer of some substance which covered every inch of her… It was that disgust which pulled her eyes open. Wherever she was, it was submerged in almost complete darkness, although soon her optical implant helpfully picked out a strip of light from somewhere behind her and the blinding blackness softened to a dull grey. Her gaze wandered upwards as her befuddled brain became bored with the torn, and wholly unenlightening, carpet of the floor she lay on. She saw what had been brushing against her leg, a bundle of wires dangling from the semi-collapsed section of ceiling hanging precariously above her. Somehow the flecks of dust drifting down from the hole captivated her as the light briefly caught each one, it was almost as if they were dancing, taunting her…

A brittle bark of a cough which rattled through her stiff upper body shook such irrelevant thoughts from her as sucking in the stale air restored her good sense as sharply as a dunk in freezing water. She gasped, forcing her arms to take her weight as panic filled her. Her surroundings had changed a great deal since she’d last seen them, but she recognised the place none the less. She was lying next to her station on the Valjean’s Bridge. Sitting up fully as that realisation calmed her slightly; she took the time to assess herself. She was covered in dust. That benign everyday substance had been what had bothered her first of all things! Her muscles were painfully cramped after so long, apparently, in the same position, but she appeared to be uninjured. As she stared down at her, slightly shaking, hands, blurry memories made her stomach contract with nausea and her head spin. She should be injured, and badly. No matter how vague her idea of what had happened was, she could remember the pain of it vividly, electric shocks, needles… Her hands flew to her abdomen as the horror of feeling the plunge of the needle returned to her. She now recognised the grit in her eyes as old tears, related the burn in her throat not to thirst but to the screams that had been torn from her as Chakotay suffered the same treatment.

Suddenly oppressed by the silence of the room, for a second she sat numbly, straining her ears to find the sounds of one of her crewmates, of Chakotay. She’d known beforehand though that the effort was useless. No one knew better than a former drone how to recognise the absolute silence of being utterly alone. Still, not willing to entirely trust her instincts, she gingerly stood up, leaning heavily against the console as her skilled fingers resuscitated the Computer enough to gather at least a few, chillingly simple, facts. According to every piece of data she had, it was now Stardate 48315.6, more than a week after the last day she clearly remembered. Her mind was shocked into disbelief by that for an instant, but then she reasoned that she had no way of telling exactly how long she’d been held captive, nor how long she’d been lying unconsciousness here…

Swallowing the lump of dread which was constricting her throat, she forced her voice to function. “Computer, activate viewscreen.” It took several seconds for the hoarse demand to bring a flicker of life to the viewscreen in front of her, but the distorted image it eventually offered her made her knees buckle anyway. The massive complex in front of her not only dwarfed the Valjean but also dominated the sandy orb of a planet it loomed over. That struck Seven as strange for an instant, like guarding a sandcastle, like Kolopak had shown her how to build once, with a starship. She now recalled that the Collective had also been confused by the set up, why was such a spectacular, near perfect, piece of technology guarding such a useless world? When they had tried to find out, via assimilation of course, the Cubes had been eliminated with ruthless efficiency…