String Theory, Book 3: Evolution

by Heather Jarman

  “Where is he?” Q shouted

  As the contentious seesaw of rhetoric continued, Harry decided to wander around. He wouldn’t touch anything that appeared to be beyond him; Q’s newt threat still rang in his ears. If q wouldn’t have anything to do with him, it couldn’t hurt to see what kind of delights existed in the pandimensional world. Besides, Tom always told him that the best way to ingratiate himself with a woman was to show an interest in her life. Having no frame of reference for what a female Q’s life consisted of, Harry thought it best to nose around to see what kind of conversational topics he could dig up. He half paid attention to the ongoing discussion between Q and q.

  Still sprawled out on the chaise, q shifted so she lay on her side, her elbow bent, head resting on the palm of her hand. “He accumulated some fines he couldn’t pay. So he took off.”

  Harry found this latest position to be very alluring.

  “Fines?” Q raised an eyebrow.

  She shrugged. “One too many thermonuclear whoopee cushions in the professors’ lounge…”

  “An oldie but a goodie,” Q said.

  “He didn’t have the credits to bribe the Oversight Board. A few games of Trinity gone bad…”

  “Wait a second,” Tom said. “The Q use credits? What for?”

  “This isn’t the time for a lesson in Continuum economics, Mr. Paris,” Q said in exasperation. “Just remember what I said about processing what you see and hear in ways your limited brain can handle, and you’ll find the need to ask fewer questions.”

  Harry paused his prowling in front of the desk that held the computer station q had been working on when they first arrived in the suite. A mangy, one-eyed tabby cat perched atop the terminal, the name FELIX engraved on his collar. Harry extended a hand to pet the cat between his ears. Hissing and spitting, Felix batted at Harry’s hand with his paw, his sharp claw drawing blood, and then jumped off the terminal, vanishing beneath the couch.

  “Good riddance,” Harry muttered.

  Beside the computer, a clear cube held a 3-D image of q standing arm-in-arm with several aliens, only one of whom Harry could properly identify as humanoid. The presence of Felix on the humanoid’s shoulder, the cat’s tail coiled around his neck, was a pretty good indicator of the humanoid’s identity. Hadn’t Q said that the Light had created a child with a Milky Way humanoid? The humanoid must be the Keeper of the Light. He certainly was a handsome fellow by human standards, bald, with a brown goatee. Upon closer scrutiny, Harry discovered that the Keeper had a hint of Nacene about him—like the glowing tentacles emerging from his back. He watched fascinated as the image shifted from moment to moment. Sometimes the tentacles appeared behind the Keeper, sometimes they didn’t; sometimes q laughed, other times she inflicted a good-natured punch on her suite-mate. Apparently, an entire moment in time had been captured and stored in the cube.

  The Q University logo rotating on the viewscreen’s background drew his attention away. A series of stacked bars with various labels ranging from METADIMENSIONAL COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM to PERSONAL covered the left-hand side of the screen. He had questions about q; the computer offered answers. Harry contemplated his options and then decided, What could it hurt? Not daring to use voice commands, he touched the bar that said PERSONAL. The logo dissolved and was replaced by two tiles, one said Q the other said KOL (Harry assumed that Kol was the acronym for Keeper of the Light). He glanced away from the viewscreen at the pair of Qs whose heated arguments over Kol’s whereabouts continued unabated. A thought occurred. While he would have a hard time explaining why he felt it was acceptable to invade q’s privacy, he knew he could rationalize invading Kol’s. He might score points with Q and impress q. He touched the screen to bring up Kol’s personal account.

  Admittedly, most of the content scrolling past appeared to be in a mathematical language that, given a lifetime, Harry probably couldn’t crack, but he noticed a few icons that might be useful, including “accounts” and “correspondence.” He touched the latter. For a long moment, he perused the contents, noting the thumbnail-sized pictures of who had recently contacted Kol. One guy—Fest—had sent the last message Kol had watched.

  “Who’s Fest?” Harry looked up from the viewscreen at Q, who was pacing the length of the room while arguing with q.

  Q paused, his eyes narrowed. “What are you doing, Mr. Kim?”

  “Searching for Kol,” Harry said. “Fest was the last person who contacted Kol before he disappeared.”

  “Weren’t you paying attention during the whole ‘you break, you buy’ demonstration? I told you: Do. Not. Touch. Anything.” Q strode over to the viewscreen and smacked Harry’s hand before shoving him aside and examining Kol’s correspondence file. He ordered the computer to replay the last message Kol had viewed. A holographic projection of a creature with an eel head and a weasel-like body appeared and began describing, in physiologically explicit terms, what Kol’s fate would be if a certain debt wasn’t repaid.

  Imagining a fate similar to the one promised Kol by the eel, Harry linked his hands protectively over his midsection. Yikes.

  “Explain, q,” Q said.

  The contents of her empty lap suddenly became fascinating; q dropped her eyes, fiddling with her beaded bracelet with her hand from the opposite arm. “Fest is a kind of account specialist. Deals in credits, transactions of goods and services.”

  “He’s a two-bit hood,” Q said, hands on hips. “That stupid boy has a loan shark after him.”

  Tom and Harry exchanged looks. Harry, for one, couldn’t imagine what kind of horrors a Q-level loan shark might inflict.

  “I told you he didn’t have the credits to bribe the Oversight Board, I just didn’t tell you why,” q said.

  “So what’s his poison?” Q asked.

  “Kol has a fondness for games of chance.”

  Q shook his head. “If he needed credits, why didn’t he come to me? Uncle Q is nothing if not generous.”

  “Oh please, Q, your interest rate is worst than Fest’s.”

  Harry raised a hand, trying to get Q’s attention. “Pardon my interruption, but could we safely assume that if Kol needs to pay a debt, he’s probably somewhere trying to get what he needs to repay Fest?”

  “Or,” Tom said, “at the very least hiding from Fest.”

  Q beamed at them. “I told you humans could be useful,” he said to q.

  Standing up straighter, Harry grinned and squared his shoulders. “Anything else I can help with?” he asked, giving q a meaningful look. She had to be impressed.

  She returned Harry’s eager overture with a withering gaze before yawning indifferently. “Is he housebroken?” she asked Q.

  “Mostly harmless. You can keep him for a pet when this is over, if you’d like,” Q said.

  Rising from the chaise, she strolled over to where Harry stood and, crossing her arms, gave Harry a thorough once-over. She smoothed his hair, traced the outline of his cheek until her finger landed on his lips, then sent Q a look that indicated she’d consider his offer.

  Harry wasn’t sure how he felt about the possibility of being kept by a q. On one hand, she was hot. On the other hand…Harry decided there wasn’t another hand: q was hot. She sent his blood rushing to all the right extremities.

  “Where would Kol go to make some fast credits?” Tom said.

  q paused for a long moment, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. “I’d heard he was playing particle tag in the wormholes. Someone in my matter-creation lab hangs out there on the weekends. Said he was node racing on the side. A good racer can pick up two or three thousand credits a night if the action is good.”

  At the mention of racing, a decidedly intrigued expression appeared on Tom Paris’s face. It was Harry’s turn to frown and shake his head. “Don’t even think it, Tom.”

  Tom scowled. “Come on, Harry. I don’t even know what ‘node racing’ is. Don’t begrudge me a moment of professional curiosity.”

  “Kol was always a thrill junkie. Do you
still have your racing gear or do you need me to procure some?” Q said, throwing open the closet doors. He began rummaging through the shelves, tossing aside gadgets he didn’t find useful.

  “No way. I’m not going with you,” q protested. “I’m not. I have exams. That whole magnetic core stabilization exercise is a bastard.”

  “Then the boys can go,” Q said, smiling far too warmly for Tom’s comfort. “Won’t you, boys?”

  “But we want to go back to Voy—!” Tom began.

  “After you find the Keeper,” Q said. And before either Harry or Tom could protest further, he’d snapped his fingers.

  Chakotay sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge, watching the alpha shift bridge crew efficiently performing their jobs. Voyager had about another three hours, by Ayala’s estimation, until they reached the point where they’d launch the probe into the rift. Thus far, their passage had been uneventful. All that they had learned about navigating this strange region had been utilized.

  From what Chakotay could observe, everyone across the ship, by unspoken agreement, kept their heads down and focused on doing what was necessary to facilitate finding the Doctor, thus hastening their ability to hightail it out of this “hellhole,” as B’Elanna had described it. Chakotay wasn’t one to believe in jinxes or curses, but he wouldn’t believe this waking nightmare was over until Voyager was humming along at warp five at least a parsec away with Tom at the helm and Harry absorbed in, but thrilled beyond reason by, an utterly boring, predictable interstellar phenomenon. The Doctor would be back in sickbay working on restoring Kathryn to health. The crew could go back to complaining about Neelix’s food and trading replicator rations for holodeck time.

  He knew the odds of finding the Doctor were slim to none. But he also knew that he would never have a sound night’s sleep if he didn’t at least attempt to find the one entity he knew that might have the capacity to save the captain. The captain aside, he owed it to the crew. Imagining the aftermath of their first firefight without the Doctor in sickbay was sobering. He was prepared to take risks now if it meant he could move forward with no regrets.

  What happened after they searched for the Doctor seemed straightforward enough: Kathryn’s last order to him was to get out of Monorhan space, resume their journey to the Alpha Quadrant and not look back. Following that order meant they would accept Seven’s findings that Tom and Harry’s shuttle was nowhere to be found. Though he had continuously kept abreast of Seven and B’Elanna’s data analysis for the last day, Chakotay wasn’t comfortable with accepting their bleak conclusions yet. Facts were facts, though. He wouldn’t have a lot of maneuvering room when he gave the crew their orders several hours from now. Thankfully, he didn’t have to make any immediate decisions. Voyager could continue swimming upstream through Monorhan space, and her crew could continue pretending that everything would be fine on the other side of this day. A little self-deception could go a long way in helping them remain sane in the short term.

  Their situation reminded him of a story from his childhood about a clever fox who played dead so that a warrior would place him inside a bag full of fish he had caught to impress a prospective bride. The warrior believed that bringing a fox to his bride-to-be would prove his great hunting skills and impress her into marrying him. While the warrior was busy congratulating himself on his successes, the fox gnawed a hole in the sack, pushed out the fish and escaped after them. The fox had dinner; the warrior was let with an empty sack, humiliated in front of his bride. Chakotay wanted to believe he was the fox, but he couldn’t help but think he’d soon discover he was the warrior.

  A shrill beeping noise from Ayala’s companel disrupted his thoughts. He spun to the side. “Report,” he said.

  “Sensors have picked up three vessels off to the starboard side. All Monorhan.”

  Chakotay’s stomach convulsed. We didn’t need this. “Life signs?”

  “Five thousand, sir. But no indication that any technology beyond the barest life-support is functioning,” he said. “They appear to be stranded.”

  A simple beeping indicator had thrown them back seven days to the moment when Harry’s innocent observation of an anomalous star system had started a cascade of events none of them could have foreseen. Chakotay keenly felt the expectations of the bridge crew weighing on him. Five thousand Monorhans. Nothing but life-support. They’re waiting out here until they die. He couldn’t imagine a more horrible fate.

  “Set a course for the Monorhan ships,” he said, rising from the chair and heading for the turbolift. “I’ll be in main engineering organizing an away team.” He didn’t allow himself time to determine whether or not the bridge officers agreed with his decision. As long as Kathryn Janeway drew breath, he believed he had an obligation to follow the standard she had set. More importantly, he would not dishonor the trust she had placed in him by ignoring the needs of five thousand innocent people simply because Voyager was too tired or too hassled to care.

  B’Elanna hunched over the workbench, examining the prototype multispatial probe’s rewired circuitry with satisfaction. You still have the magic touch, Torres, she thought. When Seven had first approached her with the project, B’Elanna had thought searching for the Doctor had more in common with trying to capture a specific gl’ebagh worm in an entire mountain forest full of nests than with a rescue mission. Seven’s theories were solid, though, so B’Elanna was quickly able to adapt their technology to the necessary specifications. Next up she was going to try an experiment with a wide-spectrum light, a character from a holodeck program, and the Doctor’s mobile emitter. If the probe could definitively identify a specific photonic signature amid a flood of photons, Voyager might be able to determine if the Doctor was somewhere inside the rift. She’d retrofitted the probe to carry a smaller, self-powered module containing the equivalent of sickbay’s holobuffers. If they could find the Doctor and if they could transfer him to the probe, the smaller secondary device could be launched out of the rift should the primary device be damaged or rendered otherwise unable to exit the rift.

  All of B’Elanna’s plans assumed that the Doctor’s consciousness was active and that his program was still intact. If he was trapped—or, heaven forbid, decompiled—she didn’t know how they would extract him.

  From B’Elanna’s perspective, Voyager’s crew was working as hard as they ever had to achieve objectives that they had little chance of accomplishing. They were basing their hopes on a lot of unknowns and “what if” scenarios that B’Elanna wasn’t thrilled with. Then again, she had seen enough go wrong in her lifetime that her expectations tended to default to the worst-case outcome; she was pleasantly surprised if the results were more positive. Tom was the gambler in their relationship; he’d take any odds if the potential payoff was worth the risk. Part of her wished she had Tom’s optimism about now.

  Seven had tried her best to show B’Elanna the reasons why no news was good news in the case of Tom and Harry. No evidence of their destruction, ergo, maybe they aren’t dead. B’Elanna’s immediate response to Seven’s postulates was to dismiss them as a means of self-preservation. After all, even a Borg equipped with nifty nanoprobes would prefer to keep her ocular implant and other limbs attached to her body: Angry B’Elanna equals Broken Borg. Further thought, though, convinced B’Elanna that Seven was attempting to offer reassurance, however meager. B’Elanna appreciated Seven’s efforts.

  Suddenly, the thrum of the conduits stopped. The engines halted. What the—She stopped. No alarms that accompanied systems failure sounded. Panic, for the moment, had been averted. Whatever had stopped the engines could wait. She reached for a vial of coolant and injected it into the coils surrounding the probe’s processors. Backflow spilled onto her palms and drizzled onto her uniform. Lovely. But at least it’s nearly ready to be transported to the launch tube.

  She glanced up from her workbench to reach for a rag to wipe off her coolant-smudged hands when she saw the doors of main engineering open. Chakotay stepped through and sc
anned the perimeter of the room, presumably looking for her. Apprehension for the well-being of her engines filled her. B’Elanna slid out of her chair, onto her knees, so she could observe unobtrusively without being observed. He better not ask her to subject them to any more abuse than he already had. She was almost out of mechanical miracles.

  Chakotay turned to Vorik, who subsequently pointed to the “corner” where B’Elanna was sequestered. Traitor, she thought, vowing to put Vorik on conduit-scrubbing duty as soon as possible. Chakotay immediately started walking in her direction.

  B’Elanna quickly dropped her eyes and focused on making her final adjustments to the probe. Not good, she thought, when the boss decides to deliver bad news in person. For an instant, she considered whether she should save time and hurl the hypospanner at Chakotay now. Locked up in the brig, she might get the time off she deserved.

  She noted, with dark humor, that the engineering staff had collectively put a few more meters between themselves and her location. Ensign Titus looked like he wanted to burrow through the deck plating with his bare hands. She almost laughed aloud: her close friends understood that stories of B’Elanna’s angry outbursts were exaggerated. She didn’t dispel the rumors because a certain amount of fear was an effective way of keeping her team in line. Still, it was tempting, this one time, to give her staff what they expected….

  And then, without warning, any will she had to fight back dissipated. She released an audible exhalation; her shoulders slumped and the need to curl up with a soft pillow and take a nap overwhelmed her. Detachment replaced the cynicism. She drifted far, far away from her body. Working by rote, her fingers found the last empty connector and slid the chip into place. She slid the face-plate onto the probe until it clicked.

  By the time Chakotay reached her, she’d become indifferent to the drama. What did her objections matter? What did her purported anger matter? Chakotay would do whatever Chakotay wanted to do—or needed to do.