Chapter 2: The Alcove's Pulse
The phantom scent wouldn’t leave him. It followed Tom through the silent corridors of Voyager’s graveyard shift, a ghost in his nostrils that no shower could scrub away. It had been thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours of jumping at shadows, of flinching from B’Elanna’s touch, of his own skin feeling like a poorly fitted suit. The memory of his climax, warped and stolen, burned in him like a brand.
He found himself outside Cargo Bay Two, the door to her personal alcove sealed. The main bay was dark, the forgotten holosuite silent. His heart was a fist pounding against his ribs. This was insane. He should report to the Doctor. To Chakotay. To anyone.
His hand hovered over the chime.
Instead, he entered his override code. The door hissed open.
The alcove was a vault of whispered technology. The air was cooler here, carrying the ozone smell and that older, organic scent—not decay, but preservation. Like the inside of a living machine. Bio-luminescent panels on the walls pulsed a weak, greenish light, stuttering like arrhythmic hearts. In the center, surrounded by silent Borg consoles, stood her regeneration alcove, dark and dormant.
She was waiting for him.
She stood beside it, out of her biosuit, wearing a simple gray crew-neck undershirt and trousers. The shirt was unzipped to her sternum. In the sickly light, the geometric constellation of Borg interface ports embedded in her pale skin gleamed dully. Data nodes. Input jacks. She looked like a severed terminal.
“You came,” she said. Her voice wasn’t a question. It was a statement of confirmed data.
“What did you do to me?” Tom’s voice was a raw scrape. He didn’t step fully into the room, his body poised in the doorway, torn between fight and flight.
“I initiated a neural rapport. A subcutaneous link, derived from Borg synaptic transceiver technology. Its purpose is to facilitate the exchange of sensory and autonomic data.” She spoke as if reading a departmental memo. Her blue eyes held his, unblinking. “My initial hypothesis was incorrect. The link is not merely for observation. It is bidirectional.”
Tom’s blood went cold. “Bidirectional.”
“Your physiological and neurological responses are not merely observable. They are experiential.” She took one step toward him. The movement was unnervingly efficient. “The arousal you experienced with Lieutenant Torres. I assimilated the sensory data. The tactile impressions. The neurochemical cascade.”
“You what?” The words were a whisper of pure horror. She had been inside his head, inside his body, inside the most private moment of his life. He felt violently exposed. “You had no right.”
“Rights are a human construct pertaining to autonomy. My study pertains to biological imperative. The data was… illuminating.” For the first time, something flickered in her expression. Not emotion. A kind of fierce, ravenous curiosity. “However, the sample was indirect. Filtered through your bond with another. It is contaminated data.”
“Contaminated,” he echoed, numb.
“To understand the sexual response in its pure form, I require a direct source. A controlled interaction.” She closed the distance between them. That clean, warm scent enveloped him, and his traitorous body responded instantly, a hot jolt of desire firing straight to his groin, mingling with his revulsion. The link was still active. He could feel it now, a faint, humming presence at the base of his skull, a channel open between them.
“You’re out of your mind,” he breathed, but he didn’t move back.
“My mental state is optimal.” Her gaze dropped to the front of his trousers, where his erection was already tenting the fabric. “Your physiological response indicates a conflict. Your verbal protest is at odds with your autonomic nervous system. Which is the truth, Lieutenant?”
Her hand came up. Not to touch his face, but to hover beside his temple, near the phantom prick he’d felt in the cargo bay. “The link can be enhanced. The feedback loop strengthened. I can give you the clarity you are currently lacking.”
“This isn’t clarity, Seven. This is… this is violation.”
“It is experimentation. You are a compatible test subject. Your romantic nature, your documented sexual history, your proximity.” Her other hand finished the thought. It dropped, palm flat against the hardness in his pants, and squeezed.
Tom gasped. It wasn’t a seductive touch. It was an assessment. Clinical, firm. Measuring. Yet it sent a bolt of white-hot electricity straight up his spine. The link flared, and for a split second, he felt the pressure of her own hand from her perspective—the firm, unfamiliar shape of him, the heat bleeding through the fabric. The double sensation short-circuited his resistance.
“Fuck,” he choked out.
“Yes,” she said, her breath cool on his neck. “That is the premise. Show me.”
Something in him broke. The guilt, the fear, the anger—it all fused into a single, incendiary need to seize control of the nightmare, to own it. He wasn’t her puppet. He was the source.
With a snarl, he grabbed her shoulders, spun her, and slammed her back against the cold, transparent surface of the regeneration alcove. The glass shuddered. She made a short, sharp sound—not fear, but surprise. Her legs came up, locking around his waist with formidable Borg-enhanced strength, anchoring him to her.
No more words. His mouth crashed down on hers. Her lips were softer than he’d imagined, but still, unyielding. She didn’t kiss him back so much as allow it, analyzing the motion. He didn’t care. He fumbled with his trousers, freeing his aching cock, and then yanked at the fastening of her pants. She assisted, with brutal efficiency, shifting her hips so the fabric tore away.
He positioned himself, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance. She was dry. “Seven,” he panted against her mouth.
“Proceed,” she ordered, her voice a tight wire. “Lubrication is a biological response that will follow initial stimulation.”
It was the least erotic thing he had ever heard. It made him impossibly harder. He drove into her with one desperate, raw thrust.
She gasped, a real, uncalculated sound. Her inner muscles were tight, clenching around him in a fierce, hot knot of resistance that gave way to a slick, gripping warmth. The link exploded into full, screaming life.
It wasn’t double sensation. It was a cyclone. He felt the brutal, stretching fullness of his own cock and the shocking, invasive pressure of being filled. He felt the scrape of the cool glass against her back and the bite of her nails digging into the muscles of his shoulders. Her analytical coolness was gone, flooded with a tsunami of raw, unfiltered input—pressure, friction, heat, a storm of signals her mind couldn’t categorize, could only feel.
“Oh, god… the data…” she moaned, her head thrashing side to side against the glass.
“Fuck your data,” he growled, pulling almost all the way out and slamming back in. The wet, slapping sound of their joining echoed in the metallic room.
He set a punishing rhythm, fucking her into the alcove, each drive of his hips measured by her sharp, catching breaths. The feedback loop amplified everything. The pleasure wasn’t just his; it was a shared current arcing between them, building in a closed circuit. He could feel her attempts to compartmentalize, to analyze the rhythmic compression of her vaginal walls, the exact viscosity of her arousal, the spike of her cortisol giving way to a flood of dopamine and oxytocin. But the data was too much. It was overwhelming her. Her logical mind was bluescreening, leaving only animal sensation.
“Tom… Paris… the variables are… excessive…” Her words were broken, gasped.
“Shut up,” he grunted, his hands gripping her thighs, spreading her wider as he plunged deeper. “Just feel it.”
He looked down. The sight was devastating. Her implants gleamed with sweat. Her normally perfect hair was tangled. Her blue eyes were wide, dilated, locked on his with a shocking vulnerability. She was coming apart under him, and he was the cause. The power of it, twisted and wrong, fed his own climax, coiling his guts into a tight, screaming knot.
The hum of the alcove’s systems seemed to rise, harmonizing with their ragged breathing, with the wet, rhythmic impact of their bodies. The bioluminescent panels flickered wildly.
“I am… I am experiencing a systems failure…” she cried out, her back arching.
“You’re coming,” he rasped. “Let go.”
Her climax hit her like a seizure. It wasn’t a smooth wave; it was a catastrophic, localized system crash. Her whole body locked, her channel milking his cock in a series of violent, rhythmic clenches. The sensation through the link was cataclysmic—a feedback burst of pure, white-noise pleasure that shattered his last shred of control.
With a hoarse shout, he buried himself to the hilt and came. His orgasm was a torrent, ripped from him, longer and more brutal than the phantom one with B’Elanna. This was real. This was shared. He pumped jet after hot jet into her, each pulse mirrored by a corresponding, devastating ripple through her own nervous system, prolonging her crash. The loop held them both suspended in a seemingly endless cascade of raw sensation.
Slowly, the world faded back in. The hum of the ship. The flickering light. The smell of sex and ozone.
He was slumped against her, his forehead on the cool glass beside her head, spent, dripping. Her legs slowly unlocked from around his waist, sliding down to the deck, trembling. She was panting, her eyes shut, her brow furrowed as if running a catastrophic damage report.
He pulled out, a sudden emptiness echoing in the link. The connection didn’t sever. It just muted, becoming a low, persistent thrum of awareness.
He straightened his clothes with clumsy hands, unable to look at her. The guilt was a black hole, opening up inside him, far deeper than before. Because this time, he had chosen it. He had participated.
She finally opened her eyes. The cool analysis was returning, but it was fractured. Haunted by the ghost of sensation. She looked at the fluid dripping down her inner thigh, then up at him.
“The experiment was a success,” she stated, her voice regaining its flatness, but it was thinner now. Frail. “The data set is… comprehensive.”
Tom couldn’t speak. He just nodded, a stiff, mechanical motion. He turned and walked out of the alcove, out of the cargo bay, the phantom scent now a permanent part of him, the link a silent scream in the back of his skull. He had gone for answers. He had gotten them.
And now he was part of the experiment.