With wide, radiant eyes, Kes studied Balim’s rugged face, still grimy with blackened smudge from the battle. Her eyes became moist and she placed her hand on his olive-skinned cheek. “She loves you so much.”
The Doctor watched, transfixed, as Kes became…someone else. She transformed beneath his gaze and her awareness of the person he knew receded. He didn’t know how Kes would join Lia nor did he want to. Not even scientific curiosity would prompt him to seek to understand such intimacy.
Unwilling to further violate their privacy, the Doctor slipped out of the tent unnoticed. Out in the chilly night air, he pulled his cloak tightly around him as a defense against wind-stirred dust haze. Where was he supposed to go from here? He could hear the distant cannonade, having no idea where the fighting was under way. He could smell the smoke of discharging weapons and singed bodies. Increasingly powerful winds swept down from the hills and disturbed the parched, gritty basin the camp had been built on. Gray thunderclouds grumbled with empty promises of rain. He settled on a stump sitting beside a dying cook fire.
The urgency of his predicament pressed heavily on him: he had no idea where he was relative to his own time continuum. A day in Exosia could be millennia in his space-time, and he’d been away from Voyager for at least two full Ocampan days. The Doctor couldn’t risk being lost to Voyager forever. If what Balim told him was true, Vivia might abandon him here if he failed to fulfill his mission. Expediting his return was critical, though he didn’t know how such a thing would happen until Lia’s child was born. Meanwhile, he needed to find a place to sleep. Damn these organic bodies. So needy and inefficient at times. Dropping down on the ground, he pulled his cloak hood over his head to shield himself from the wind. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them with his fingers, trying to remove the grit that had caught beneath his eyelids. He opened his eyes—
And was in an ornate nineteenth-century Parisian-style theater.
He’d returned to Exosia.
An electrical tingle coursed through his limbs; his head burned as if fire burned through his scalp. Placing his hands on his temples, he massaged them until the sensation faded. Spinning around, he found Vivia floating behind him.
You may go home if you wish, she said. Your people are looking for you and we have devised a way to send you back. We sent them…a bit of a message that let them know you were here.
“What will happen to the Light—to Lia.”
She dismissed him with a hand wave. I will finish what you were too weak to do. How cleverly the Light overcame the obstacles placed in his path! But sentiment has overcome reason—he has become vulnerable in joining with the woman.
Horror overcame the Doctor. She had to be referring to Balim and Lia—now Balim and Kes. “You won’t—you can’t—”
Their child can never be born. He will destroy Exosia.
q had been correct about Fortis workers being willing to gossip about the patrons. Tom and Harry hadn’t been in the lounge fifteen minutes when the bartender connected them with a dealer who had more than a few grievances with the monitors. It seemed that the alien—an amphibious Namian—had been demoted from the “big” by-invitation-only games that happened on the fifty-second level after he’d complained about a Rutillian gambler who liked “destroying things” when he won. When pressed for clarification about what “destroying things” meant, the Namian would only say that even pandimensional beings should exercise a modicum of restraint. The Namian hadn’t had direct contact with Kol, though he’d heard about a Nacene hybrid who liked taking big risks.
“He lost big,” the Namian said, sucking up algae through his fingers. “But he won big too. Reckless was what the other dealers called him. Jaded, even for an entity.”
“What do you mean by jaded,” Tom asked, pushing another plate of algae toward the Namian. He’d quickly learned that the more he fed the dealer the more the dealer talked.
“Dirts have a reputation for being easily amused,” the Namian said. “Doesn’t take much to thrill you lesser life-forms. And while most of these hotshots around here act all blasé about rearranging planetary systems and making stars go nova, the truth is, simple games of chance entertain them endlessly. I’ve seen Q sit at the slots for days, shoveling in their chips and pulling the handle to see if the primordial DNA combinations the box throws at them might create life and allow them to win the jackpot.”
“Winning is fun,” Harry said, pushing around a drink coaster. “No matter what dimension you come from.”
“Because it’s the one thing these pandimensionals can’t control. It’s all about choice and chance and it gives them a kind of rush to not be in control for once.” The Namian pushed aside his third emptied algae plate and signaled the bartender to bring him a Pondwater—a potent cocktail, from the dealer’s description, that featured ground-up hallucinogenic snail shell. Both Tom and Harry passed.
“But this Nacene hybrid guy. Nothing fazes him. He’ll sit at the table for hours, win or lose, and he doesn’t react. He throws away planets and rare elements like they were common Dirts—nothing personal,” the Namian apologized.
“Is he here now?” Harry asked.
The Namian shrugged. “Maybe. The bosses on Fifty-two are pretty protective about their clients. You can’t know for certain unless your mistress”—he indicated the bracelets Tom and Harry were wearing—“earns her way into a game up there.”
“I have confidence in her,” Harry said brightly.
“What a surprise,” Tom muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
A hand alighted on Tom’s shoulder. “Miss me, boys?” q said.
Harry leaped into action. “We have news on Kol.”
“That’s good, because I was going to have to decide whether to borrow against my account to get into a game upstairs.”
“Not too much luck at Zero-One?” Tom asked.
q shrugged. “The table was slower than I’d hoped.”
Touching her arm sympathetically, Harry gazed up at her. “How much are we short?”
“All of it,” she said.
Tom blinked.
“But I can get enough of a loan to get us into a game of Trinity. That’s the game Kol typically plays.”
The Namian exhaled loudly and clicked his long, flexible tongue against the roof of his mouth. “If your mistress is into Trinity…”
“Keep your opinions to yourself, Namian,” q snapped. “Or I’ll turn you into one of those concoctions you’re drinking. Ever tried life as a hallucinogenic snail? I hear it’s mind-bending.” Placing her hands on the table, she leaned forward, touched her nose to his nostril holes, and glared him straight in the pulsating eyeballs.
Shrinking back into his chair, the Namian cradled his Pondwater close to his chest and slumped down sullenly. “You Q are all alike.”
“Hey, that’s q to you.”
Having spent a few minutes in the Namian’s company, Tom had no doubt that the dealer was a low-life malcontent, but he had little reason to question the alien’s assessment of q’s choice of games of chance. Harry and q left the table headed in the direction of an unmanned kiosk. Tom ran after them.
“Why do we need to play Trinity, q?” Tom said. “Let’s find out where Kol’s playing, call Q to come pick him up, and then go home.”
“If that were possible, every loan shark and low life hood in the universe would extradite from Fortis,” q said impatiently. “This is a protected outpost. Once you’re in, you’re in to stay until you leave voluntarily or you’re booted by the management—like Q was.”
Harry said, “So we ask Kol to come with us. We explain the situation and—”
“You think we’re going to get Kol to leave a game willingly?” She snorted. “No. We force him out by making him lose everything. Then we negotiate when he’s vulnerable.”
“If we lose, then what?”
“We won’t lose,” q said.
Tom took a deep breath. “If we lose…”
“You might
spend a century in detention while I pay off the debt, but it isn’t like you’ll suffer my fate.”
“Ninth dimension?” Harry said.
q shuddered. She inserted her hand beneath a reader. The machine paused for a moment, and then spat out a stack of chips as tall as Tom’s forearm. She studied them for a long moment before gathering them up and dumping them into her bag. “There’s not enough here. We won’t even make it through the door.” Resuming her fast, focused pace, she shot across the floor toward the conveyor. Both Tom and Harry jumped to catch up with her; closing the distance between them proved tiring, especially since Tom realized it had to be at least thirty-six hours since he’d had any sleep.
“I still say we should contact Q,” Harry said, meeting Tom’s eyes over q’s head.
She stopped dead and gestured for both of them to follow her over a grouping of high-backed, overstuffed green satin-covered chairs.
Once they sat down, q said, “Q steps one foot in this place and alarms will go off from here to the end of the universe. So scratch that one off the list right now. What few options we do have are iffy at best and come with huge risks. Most of them require that we leave Fortis unless I keep gambling until I come up with a stake to get us into Kol’s game. Even that’s not a sure thing. For all my blustering to the contrary, I can’t make you stay and help me. I’m sure Q’s given you the whole chance and choice song and dance routine. It’s his favorite number—especially for corporeals.”
“He’s said something along those lines, yes,” Tom said.
“As a Q enrolled at university, my options are limited,” q said. “I can put a third eye in your forehead, give you a snout, stick you in a cell with a grumpy Nausicaan, but I can’t do anything that can’t be easily undone by another Q. So if you all have anything useful in those little brains, now’s the time to speak up.”
“If we leave now,” Harry said, “we lose our best shot at Kol. Everything we’ve done so far would have been pointless.”
q nodded her head.
A trio of uniformed and helmeted security personnel burst through the door behind them. One of the officers raised his wrist to his mouth. Most of his words were unintelligible, but Tom caught “Nacene hit man” and “secure perimeter immediately.”
Leaping to her feet, q rushed over to an information terminal and whispered a command into the console. Tom and Harry followed behind. Moments later, the screen flashed several rows of green text. They scanned the contents. Tom blanched.
A groan, followed by a sigh and a swift kick to the information terminal expressed q’s reaction to the information. “They’ve found him. Those self-important sporocystian prima donnas dispatched someone to take him out. I didn’t think they’d get this far! Arggh!” She kicked the terminal again.
For the first time since he’d met her, Tom felt a sense of what q was up against: reduced power, odds stacked against her, no backup from the Continuum. He admired her for sticking to her resolve and not falling back on her superiors to bail her out. B’Elanna would like her, Tom realized.
“We can’t let the Nacene get him. There has to be another way,” Harry said.
“There’s no time!” q shouted. “We’ll have to force our way in.” She pressed her hands against her temples. “Or something.”
Harry touched her arm. “Don’t worry. We’re in this together.”
“That’s sweet, Harry, but it’s not comforting,” q said.
They started for the interfloor conveyor. Out of habit, Tom slipped his hand into his pocket and found something hard and metal inside. Midstep, he paused. “Wait,” he called out to q and Harry, who were several meters ahead of him.
“What is it?” q asked.
He removed the metal box from his pocket and held it up so he could better see it. Flipping open the lip, he read: Monorha. A glance inside revealed the marble with the planet spinning inside. He held it up for q to see. “Can I gamble this somewhere? Fast?”
“Tom, we don’t have time for this,” Harry said.
“We don’t have time for anything else, Harry,” Tom said. “It’s our one chance to get into the game quickly.” He looked back at q.
q stared at him blankly for a moment, and Tom wondered if she thought he had lost his mind. Suddenly, she pointed over his shoulder. “There! A slot machine!”
Tom looked. On the wall opposite where they’d met the Namian, he saw the gambling device. It wasn’t particularly fancy, and pretty easy to miss in the midst of all the grandeur and opulence of Fortis. Tom would have preferred a dabo wheel, but this would do. He ran toward it. When he reached the slot machine, he caressed its cool silver edges, appreciating the fine workmanship as only a gambler could. Gingerly, he removed the marble from the box and rolled it into the betting slot. “Let ’er rip!” he called out as he yanked down the handle. He heard Harry’s nervous squeal and refused to let it dampen his mood. The slots spun around dizzily, colors flashing. “Come on, baby, come on! Give me the goods,” Tom chanted as he rubbed his hands together.
“This is, without question, the most stupid thing I’ve ever agreed to” q said.
Tom ignored her. The first slot stopped. A cherry. “Straight cherries, honey, I know you want to give it to me. Cherry cherry!”
A second cherry. And a third. When the fourth slot stopped on a cherry, Tom thought his heart might have stopped beating. Even q had shut up and was standing at his shoulder, watching the slot intently. Tom took a deep breath, waiting for the final wheel to stop. He squeezed his eyes together, unwilling to look.
It clicked to a stop. Tom dared a peek—
The bells and sirens started at once.
Tom’s face split into a grin as the credits, deeds—including the one to Monorha—jewels, and currency spilled out of the slot machine onto the carpet. He grabbed the machine by the sides and placed an enthusiastic smooch in the center of the cherries.
Mouth agape, q stared at the machine, her spike heels rooted to the floor. “If that isn’t the finest display of dumb luck I’ve ever seen…”
“Can we play Trinity now?” Harry asked as he scooped credits off the floor and shoved them into his pockets.
Tom paused from his lovefest with the slot machine long enough to look over at q. “Choice and chance, right?”
She smiled.
Chapter 9
“You’re making a mistake,” the Doctor said to Vivia. “The Light isn’t the enemy you’ve made him out to be. He’s trying to repair the damage done by the Exiles. What he’s doing can not only save Ocampa but help you deal with the Exiles.”
Vivia tossed her auburn hair. I am running out of patience with you, foolish creature. I owe you no explanations.
The Doctor knew he should simply accept Vivia’s offer to be returned to Voyager and allow fate to run its course, but he refused to take the risk of abandoning Kes—and Lia and Balim—to a horrific end. “You don’t know the future, Vivia. You see shadows and possibilities, but until the choice is made the outcome is uncertain. Allow the child to be born!”
Only the fate of the strings concerns me. The Light made his choice when he joined the Exiles.
“You have a chance to make a different choice, Vivia. Something besides the Nacene default to containment or destruction.” Opening his arms, the Doctor approached Vivia, pleading. “If you destroy the Light’s child, you are no different than the Exiles who know nothing but pursuit of their own selfishness. Do you want to be like them or—”
Vivia whirled in the air, her eyes wide with rage, her arm raised above her head.
The Doctor gasped; dullness seized him. He tried lifting his legs to walk but they refused to move. The theater spun dizzily around him and his grip on this reality weakened. Stumbling forward, he dropped to the stage. Tightness squeezed his innards; pain shot down his arm into his fingertips.
You will be contained.
Must stop Vivia…he thought. Balim had been right all along. And now, he may have sent Kes to a cruel death a
t the hands of a vindictive Nacene. Think, man, think, he thought. What are Vivia’s rules? How does she operate…? How did I break through her containment before…
The unthinkable happened. He heard Seven’s voice as clearly as if she were standing beside him.
“Voyager to the Doctor. Please acknowledge. Direct your program to coordinates 56-2-1-V. Repeat. We will bring you home.”
Seven wasn’t one who typically paced. She found it to be an inefficient way to expend cellular energy and rarely believed it accomplished its purpose—to help relieve anxiety or to express stress. As she stood before the astrometrics console, waiting for the viewscreen programmed to receive data from the probe to go active, she discovered she had an unexpected impulse to pace. This annoyed her.
She turned her back on the viewscreen. She would ignore it. She would be productive. Watching a blank screen, waiting for it to crackle to life, was a ridiculous waste of time. The probe would not transmit information unless it fell within the parameters programmed into it by Seven and B’Elanna.
Instead, she focused on developing updated navigation coordinates for Ensign Knowles. The problems in Monorhan space were accelerating, and it was vital that Voyager avoid piloting into one of the many wells and folds that were continually appearing like—like Borg implants sprouting out of the newly assimilated, she thought. She asked the computer to compile the latest sensor readings and to adjust the route Voyager would follow out. Obligingly, the computer produced the appropriate graphic, displaying the best route of five minutes ago with the current route. Statistically insignificant differences, Seven concluded. She had just wasted three minutes redoing a task that didn’t need to be redone.
Waiting was seriously beginning to irritate her.
Looking around astrometrics at the various blinking consoles, Seven realized that everything in the room was operating as it should. No critical tasks remained. She decided that she would offer her services to the commander. On a ship this size, someone always needed help—perhaps engineering, since Lieutenant Torres was on the away mission. Even better, she probably should make her offer in person so she wouldn’t have to stand around astrometrics waiting any longer. “Computer, location Commander Chakotay.”
String Theory, Book 3: Evolution Page 26