Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

there.
    “Forty-seven Borg cubes, B'Elanna . . . what were they all doing there? Did we stumble on Borg central? The terrible part is that I don't really care. I don't want to go back there, no matter what we find out. The whole episode scared me down to my socks.”
    “It's not like you to be afraid,” she said.
    With a shrug he admitted, “I'm not usually so shaky. I don't know, I've never felt this kind of scared . . . not like I felt when I saw that cube ten feet off the bow. Poor Harry . . . you should've seen his face. He wants to do more than just communicate with his parents over the Pathfinder. He really wants to be back there. Me, I've got nothing to go back for, but usually I can make myself forget. When I looked into Harry's eyes when we turned away from the nebula . . . B'Elanna, all I saw was the reflection of my drive to get out of there and never go back in. What does that make me? A coward?”
    “You're not afraid for yourself,” she reasoned. “I know you better.”
    “But I am! I've got a responsibility to stay alive now like never before. I can't take the kind of risks I used to take because now an innocent life is depending on me. I've got no business sticking my neck out anymore. Those are
Borg
out there, not Klingons!”
    She gave him a quizzical glare and silently scolded him until he realized what he'd said.
    Paris pressed a hand to his face. “I—didn't—mean that the way it sounded.”
    B'Elanna slouched a little deeper into the chair. “Let me get Seven up here and you can critique us both.”
    “Don't even joke about it,” he moaned. “If we'd been collectivized . . .” He lowered his voice and forced out the rest. “. . . what would've happened to our daughter?”
    His wife's harsh expression mellowed at the idea and a brief silence fell between them. Neither of them could voice the true prospects. Would their child have simply been “removed”? Killed as a sort of useless parasite? Or assimilated with no chance for life other than as another Borg drone?
    His head spun with terrible waking dreams. “We pretend that all the risk and danger and the not knowing whether we're going to be alive next month isn't here because there's nothing we can do about it. Why worry about something we just have to handle? But we became so casual about it that we're having a baby! What kind of world am I bringing a child into? What business do we have doing this?”
    “Little late,” she muttered. “But if you don't live life all the way while you have the chance, you're already dead. What's the use of surviving?”
    He grumbled a halfhearted agreement and slipped back on an elbow. “This is
tough.
I feel like sending a long-range to my father and apologizing for what it was like to raise me! Do you have any idea what kind of kid I was?”
    “Would you rather have died seven years ago,” she asked, “so you didn't have to go through what we've all gone through together?”
    Surprised by the strange question, he paused to decipher what she meant. “Well . . . no . . .”
    “Don't you think our daughter will feel the same way someday? If you asked her if she'd rather be alive on a starship, in trouble now and then, or never be born, what do you think she'd say?”
    “Would she say, ‘I want to be infiltrated with mechanics and turned into a living robot’?” He shook his head and tried to free himself of the recurring image of that Borg monstrosity rushing toward him and his arms aching as he wrenched the ship away from the very near miss. “When I saw that cube, I suddenly realized that my life really is different now.”
    Exhausted and lacking a night's sleep in days, B'Elanna suspended her physical frustration and brought out a touch of the circumspection she would need to juggle the coming event with her shipboard responsibilities and the fact that she too had a new set of priorities to work out. She shifted her unbalanced body a little to the left and placed her hand over his until he found the courage to look her in the eyes.
    “Welcome to fatherhood,” she said.
    * * *
    The frustrating evening led into an even more frustrating next day. By now everyone knew the captain hadn't made an adventurer's decision.
    The crew's reaction ran about fifty-fifty, and tended to change by the hour. At first, the proximity to Borg cubes—so many, many Borg cubes—had pretty much chilled any daring spirits, with the exception of Harry Kim's. As the hours passed, some people grew