Star Trek by Christie Golden Read Free Book Online Page B

flinch from that scrutiny. Duffy wondered what the hell was on that recording that would make La Forge buck Gold so openly.
    Finally Gold nodded, cursorily. “You waste my time, LaForge, and I’ll let Picard know about it.”
    â€œUnderstood, sir, but I’m certain you won’t consider your time wasted.”
    â€œWell, then, start the thing going. I feel my hair turning gray.”
    Geordi pressed the control button and took a seat.
    With such a dramatic lead-in, everyone assembled leaned forward, expecting to see something staggering. The static and snow stabilized, formed itself into the face of a young woman. While Duffy knew intellectually that it was the face of the greatly decayed corpse now being held in stasis in sickbay—their possible Borg—this lively, animated visage bore little resemblance to the still death mask of the decaying body they had found in the chair.
    By human standards, he guessed her to be between sixteen and nineteen, if she was even that old. She was grinning. The recording device, which she held in her hands, was not steady, and she occasionally moved out of the center, but this inefficiency, which Duffy would have thought intolerable to a Borg, seemed not to trouble her one bit.
    â€œI’m recording these on a portable device because I don’t want Friend to know about them,” she said. Her eyes were a beautiful shade of leafy green, her teeth white and straight. But what broke Duffy’s heart more than anything was the smattering of greenish freckles on her small nose. Judging by Abromowitz’s expression, Carol, too, was mourning the loss of such a vibrant young woman.
    â€œDon’t get me wrong—I love sharing things withFriend,” the girl hastened to add. “I love it when we link up, and I’ve got the whole ship’s sensors at my hands.”
    She looked a little smug. “I don’t need a primitive viewing screen to see, or a console to program, not when I’m joined with the computer. To be able to experience so many things that, as an organic being, I’d never otherwise know is indescribable. And he—yeah, I know it’s not alive and it’s got no gender, but I think of the ship as a he—is so
close
to me when we’re joined. I’ve never known anything like it, not even in a relationship with another Omearan. But there are things I want to say, so I can look back at them later, and I can’t be entirely honest when Friend is so completely joined with me. So, I guess these are secret journals.”
    She giggled. To his surprise, Duffy felt tears sting his eyes. He had thought they’d be looking at boring but informative impersonal logs, stuff that would reveal the horrors and atrocities committed by this ship and this pilot, not the most intimate confessions of a young girl’s private thoughts. He felt like a peeping Tom. But there was nothing for it. This was, so far, the only information they had on the ship and its pilot, and they needed to keep watching, hard as it was.
    One thing was becoming rapidly apparent. Their assumption about the pilot had been all wrong. Whatever she was, this giggling, endearing child on the viewscreen was no Borg.
    The girl rambled on about how hard it had been for herto say good-bye to her family. “I didn’t want to tell Friend about it, because it’d upset him. He’s really sensitive to my happiness. It’s nice to have things like that matter to someone else so much.” She smiled, her green eyes soft with affection, and continued.
    â€œWe wouldn’t normally get tapped for so deep a mission, but after the war, we’re really short of pilots,” she explained. “So here Friend and I are, alone together in space, searching for an uninhabited but fertile planet so we can get off that toxic rock. Start new lives. I tried to explain to Friend about how great it feels to walk on soft grass in your bare feet,