However, Torres and Seven interrupt the important bridge work by asking for permission to shut down the sensor grid immediately.
As the women explain, Seven's new relationship with Voyager's computer systems has allowed her to find "a mating pair of photonic fleas" disrupting the power flow of the sensor grid. The fleas are found exactly as predicted, leaving the hapless Neelix to take the blame for allowing them onto the ship in the first place.
All this and company too
While all this excitement unfolds, the rest of the crew occupies itself with finding a ship floating near a giant iris-shaped structure at the coordinates of Janeway's quantum fluctuations.
Tuvok picks up a hailing signal and puts it on screen. An alien is calling to recommend maximum shielding -- Tuvok barely has time to raise Voyager's shields before a graviton wave buffets the ship.
After things calm down, the alien, known as "Mr. Tash," explains that his power core is malfunctioning, but the large construct is a machine designed to catapult vessels across vast distances almost instantaneously. Intrigued by the possibility that this machine will get them home, Janeway offer's her assistance.
As it turns out, Tash is an explorer, caught in an unstable wormhole and trapped far from home. His power core problems are the result of a recent test of the catapult machine, which he built to return home.
Chakotay offers to send an engineering team to examine the core, but the alien protests that this would be too dangerous. As a result, Kim and Torres come up with a plan to stabilize the power core remotely.
Meanwhile, Janeway cuts a deal with Tash that will allow Voyager to use the catapult as well. To study whether this is actually a feasible plan, Seven loads a new datapack and begins her regeneration cycle anew.
Seven for hire
Later, the ex-Borg, now seeming more perturbed than usual, drops by Janeway's quarters to pay the captain a visit.
According to Seven, not only is Tash deceiving the Voyager crew, but "his catapult is the same type of technology that was used to trap Voyager in the Delta Quadrant five years ago." In other words, Tash may be in league with the Caretakers, or be one himself.
To allay Seven's suspicions, Tash submits to a medical scan to determine whether he actually has Caretaker DNA. However, the search comes up negative, so Janeway directly confronts him about the similarities between his "catapult" and the "tetreon" energy that originally knocked her ship into the Delta Quadrant.
Tash explains only that he didn't know enough about Janeway and her crew to be sure they wouldn't attempt to steal his tetreon reactor, which Seven suggests might have been retrieved from the original array that the Caretaker used against the ship.
Now teetering on the edge of paranoia, Janeway orders Seven to continue scanning in case there is another Caretaker in the vicinity.
Of course, the plucky ex-Borg is versed in the art of multitasking and also has time to follow up her own growing suspicions about Tash. In Astrometrics, she replays the sensor logs of Voyager's encounter with the Caretaker, discovering what appears to be a tractor beam locking onto the array.
She goes to the bridge to question Tuvok about the event, asking who ordered the attack (Janeway), who programmed the tricobalt weapon used to destroy the array (Tuvok) and who decided to set the device's yield to 20,000 teracochranes (Tuvok again).
Tuvok seems willing to put up with this interrogation, but when she tells him that she believes the explosion opened a tear in subspace, allowing a cloaked ship to push the reactor through the tear, he rightly notes her theory suffers from a lack of evidence.
Searching for clues
As her first order of business in the hunt for said evidence, Seven visits Neelix to ask him about his recollection of the events.
He has apparently nursed his own suspicions about the Caretaker's search for a mate, and so informs the ex-Borg that Kes always suspected that there was more to the story.
However, according to Neelix, the only other vessel in the vicinity of the array prior to its destruction was a Kazon ship. Seven theorizes that the Caretaker may have pulled in a third, cloaked ship to protect the reactor.
Neelix has kept his old ship's sensor data, which has remained intact while Voyager's sensor banks were damaged during the Caretaker encounter. He gives the files to Seven, who promptly downloads them in her alcove.
Oblivious to all this, Ensign Harry Kim announces that the reactor has stabilized and the catapult is ready for use.
Tash's ship enters the catapult and disappears, while Janeway waits to hear from the alien upon the completion of his journey.
Conspiracy!
Seven summons Chakotay to Astrometrics, where she orders the computer to seal the doors and deactivate all the sensors in the lab.
She then informs the crafty first officer that she believes Janeway intentionally stranded Voyager and crew in the Delta Quadrant.
As Seven explains, the ship's presence is part of a Federation military campaign. The Caretaker pulled a Cardassian ship to the Delta Quadrant just days before Voyager's abduction -- a ship that she believes returned to the Alpha Quadrant shortly thereafter to deliver strategic information on the Delta Quadrant.
Chakotay calls this conjecture, but Seven insists that it is extrapolation from hard evidence.
Moving on, she tells him that Tuvok was aboard Chakotay's Maquis ship as a spy and sent the ship to the Delta Quadrant on purpose. Voyager "coincidentally" and deliberately followed days after, at which time Janeway's destruction of the array left the ship stranded.
Meanwhile, Seven says, Janeway and Tuvok pre-arranged the rescue of the reactor and had it delivered to Tash, who constructed the catapult to have it waiting for them upon the culmination of their mission.
And what is this mission? Seven believes that Janeway doesn't plan to use the catapult to return home, but instead to pull ships from a joint Federation-Cardassian invasion force into the Delta Quadrant.
Chakotay can't deny the facts -- such as they are -- but doubts Seven's interpretation. In a virtuoso display of paranoia, she begins rattling off details of the crew's past adventures, offering alternate explanations and constructing an increasingly elaborate house of theoretical cards until Chakotay is forced to admit he can't be absolutely certain Seven is wrong.
Mutiny!
Back on the bridge, Tuvok picks up a transmission from Tash, who has apparently traveled 5,000 light-years in a matter of hours. The alien explains that he experienced some system overloads during the transit, so he transmits a series of shield adjustments for Voyager to use.
Chakotay volunteers to bring the data to Torres, but when he arrives in engineering, he orders B'Elanna to add a .03 variance to the data. This will disrupt the shield emitters, delaying Voyager's use of the catapult.
Despite having been a first-hand participant in the miracle of the photonic fleas, Torres is still skeptical about Seven's theories. With typical half-Klingon tact, she asks if he's run this brilliant plan by the captain, but Chakotay only replies, "No, and I'm not going to. Not yet."
As it turns out, Chakotay puts enough stock in the ex-Borg's radical reinterpretation of the last five years of Voyager that he would rather err on the side of caution. To this end, he would like to buy time to check the evidence for himself.
Kim is not allowed into the nascent conspiracy against Janeway.
Or maybe it happened like this...
Seven wakes up from her high-bandwidth nap and summons Janeway to Astrometrics.
When the captain arrives, Seven again locks down the lab, then presents Janeway with essentially the same collection of facts, but spinning them to implicate Chakotay as arch-manipulator as part of a Maquis plot.
Like the first officer before her, Janeway eventually finds herself seemingly swayed by the weight of the evidence.
Great destroyer
Later, Seven marches down a corridor, casting strange glances at the crewmen she encounters.
Naomi Wildman catches up with her, and Seven greets her with a coldness bordering on hostility. She demands of the child, "Who are you working for? Chakotay or the Captain? Tell them it's too late."
Janeway arrives in the cargo bay, only to find Chakotay tinkering with Seven's alcove. Janeway notes that both she and the first officer are armed with phasers. As they examine the alcove, they throw veiled accusations back and forth until each of them is forced to admit that Seven implicated the other in a conspiracy.
All is well again. In the midst of this revelation, Kim reports that Seven has left the ship in the Delta Flyer. Janeway orders him to lay in a pursuit course while Chakotay orders the Doctor to run a diagnostic on Seven's alcove.
Tuvok reports that Seven is headed for the catapult. Attempts to contact the ex-Borg or beam her off the shuttle are unsuccessful, so Janeway tries to destroy the Flyer's propulsion and weapons systems, again to no avail.
The Doctor determines that the root of Seven's paranoia is that she "downloaded too much data into her cortical implant." Unable to process all the information, she became unbalanced.
Celebrate the moments of your life
Janeway beams aboard the Delta Flyer. She orders Seven to turn the ship around, but Seven declares her orders irrelevant.
Recasting the facts yet again, Seven now claims that Janeway's true objective is the sexy ex-Borg herself. Everything -- her family's trip to the Delta Quadrant and subsequent assimilation, Voyager's arrival in the Delta Quadrant, Janeway's temporary alliance with the Borg -- has been part of an attempt to retrieve a Borg drone and take her back to the Federation for dissection.
It's an intriguing story, but the captain has her own set of facts ready to explain the chaos that has grown in Seven's mind.
Janeway focuses on the bond that has grown between them, the friendships Seven forged aboard Voyager, and her slow progress toward an understanding of her own humanity.
The two women beam back aboard Voyager, where Seven is not in fact dissected to gain tactical information against the Borg. Instead, Janeway uses the catapult to send Voyager 3,000 light-years closer to Earth, cutting 3 years off their journey in less than an hour.
Meanwhile, the Doctor manages to repair Seven's cortical processor.
By hour's end, Naomi Wildman arrives in the cargo bay to inform Seven how much data she "assimilated" -- or "learned," in the child's awkward parlance -- that day.
However, Seven is in the process of dismantling her enhanced alcove. She tells Naomi that she must focus on understanding the data she assimilates, not merely absorbing as much as possible. The voluptuous Pinocchio then offers to play a game with Naomi when she finishes dismantling the alcove.
In a bittersweet structural echo of the episode's opening scenes, Janeway and Chakotay meet over another meal. They reflect on how easily they lost trust in each other, but vow that it shouldn't happen again.
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