“Target the lead two ships inbound, and the aft of the outer two ships on the pass.” The captain looked at Chakotay. “If you’re right about their shield arrangement—”
[317] “Captain, I’m reading another ship,” interrupted Paris, his eyes widening. “Very strong reading. Captain ...”
On-screen the view changed to forward, and an orange dot appeared and grew quickly into a spherical cluster of lights. It grew larger, the lights forming crisscrossing lines across its surface. A bright spot detached from the sphere and broke into seven spinning, multicolored cubes that Janeway caught a glimpse of as they shot past Voyager toward the Mondasian fleet.
Janeway glanced at Bailey, who was looking at the screen with a pleased expression. “Aft view, Mr. Paris. Show me the Mondasians.”
The assault ships had slowed considerably, and their formation had drifted far out of true. In front of each ship now rotated a flashing, particolored cube, hanging like a Christmas ornament a few hundred meters from its bow, slowly spuming in the cosmic breeze.
“Composition of each cube ... unknown, but possibly metallic,” said Tuvok. “I am reading a solid cube, one hundred seven meters on each edge. I am not reading any type of internal components.”
Chakotay stared at the screen, then turned to Bailey. “What are those things? Are they dangerous?”
His question was answered as one of the assault ships opened fire on the cube in front of it. There was a huge white flash, and Voyager bucked sideways as the shock wave hit.
Janeway bunked the spots out of her eyes. On the screen six assault ships remained, each with its own cube. All that remained of the seventh and its attendant was a shattered engine section, rapidly receding end over end.
“Reading a radiation surge,” said Ensign Kim at the ops [318] station. “Shields filtering most of it. Radiation count dropping.”
The remaining assault ships had begun backing away from their cubes. Or at least attempting to—the multicolored gems stuck to the fronts of the ships as if glued there, maintaining their positions with perfect synchronization through the complex withdrawal pattern. In moments the assault ships were retreating at warp speed, along with their strange new, and potentially lethal, figureheads.
Janeway bunked. “Forward view,” she ordered.
The massive alien sphere was larger than a dozen Voyagers now, and still growing. Its size surpassed that of a Federation starbase, and still it grew until it was a small moon, its surface covered with glowing orange orbs as big as starships. It ceased to increase when it finally took up all of the screen and most of the vast dark sky, and Janeway could clearly see the pulsing pattern of the giant globes on its skin like the arteries of a man-made star. Bailey stepped to one side of the screen, inserting himself into the stunned silence.
“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself properly in the beginning,” he said, “but you can’t be too careful. That’s one thing I’ve learned over the years. This is a dangerous section of space, and I had no idea what had happened to the human race after all this time. I’d especially like to apologize to you, Captain Janeway, for not giving you the courtesy due another officer in answering some of your questions.”
“I think we may be getting some of those straight answers you were looking for,” said Chakotay.
“I think, under the circumstances, we might be able to [319] forgive some rudeness,” said Janeway, “especially if it explains what’s going on here. Who exactly are you?”
The man snapped to attention. “Lieutenant David Bailey of the U.S.S. Enterprise, formerly under the command of Captain James Kirk,” he rapped, and then grinned again, his best expression. “Now on temporary assignment. A kind of ambassador at large, you might say. And I’m sure my current commander would love to have you as guests on his ship. Would you do us the honor?”
Janeway gaped at him like a fish. Next to her Chakotay flicked his eyes between the man and the screen, unable to decide which of them to disbelieve first. Janeway stood slowly, buying time for her mind to try and get around what she was seeing and hearing. She blinked deliberately and pointed at the glowing, pulsing mass that filled the screen. “Your ship?”
Bailey nodded.
“I don’t see how we can refuse,” she said.
“You could just say ‘no thanks,’ ” said Bailey.
“No I can’t,” said Janeway. “And you know it. If I let this go, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I accept.”
“Great!” said Bailey, and he, Janeway, and Chakotay disappeared from Voyager’s bridge.
Janeway took a moment to check herself. She’d been through too many transports to find them disorienting, but this one had been more abrupt and unexpected than most. Chakotay was next to her, and Bailey just in front. She glanced around. The room was more cramped than she had expected; from the size of the ship she’d have thought it would have rooms the size of playing fields. The walls were [320] partly hung with varying colors of the same metallic fabric Bailey was wearing, and a smell rather like fresh fruit blew softly through the air.
“Welcome,” came a strange voice from behind them, and Bailey held out a hand indicating the direction. Janeway turned and was confronted by a small man—Janeway would have called him a child, except for his voice—dressed in a metallic jumpsuit much like Bailey’s, but made of pure silver weave. He had a silver band wrapped around his bald head and was lying on a couch of the same fabric. He did not rise to greet them, but extended his hands.
“I bid you welcome,” he said in his strange, tinny voice. “I am Balok. This is my ship,” he swept his arms wide and looked around, “the Fesarius. Welcome aboard, Captain.”
Years of top-notch Starfleet diplomatic training kicked in and somehow, against all odds, Janeway managed to keep from staring like a statue at the little man. She smiled sincerely and automatically, stepped forward and extended her hand. “I’m Captain Janeway of the—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said in his slow, oddly deliberate cadence. “Captain Janeway, and Commander Chakotay. Come! Sit. Be comfortable. We will drink.” They sat, and Janeway noticed Bailey glancing back and forth between them and the alien. It was the first time he had shown anything resembling nervousness.
Bailey saw her look, and smiled a little crookedly. “We don’t get many visitors,” he said.
“More the pity,” said Balok, leaning over to a small drink service that had appeared at his elbow. “This is tranya,” he explained, picking up two glasses full of orange liquid and [321] offering them to the Voyager officers. “I hope you relish it as much as I.”
Janeway took the little glass, which she could just hold between two fingers and a thumb. “Balok, this ship—”
“I know, I know,” he interrupted again. “A thousand questions. But first, the tranya.”
“He won’t do anything until you drink it,” said Bailey, eyeing his own glass distastefully. He closed his eyes and downed half of his share, then put it down.
Janeway sniffed the liquid, which smelled rather like strong fruit punch. Chakotay took a sip and nodded appreciatively, and Janeway did the same. It had more taste than she’d imagined, and a strong aftertaste that faded through flavors like colors through a rainbow. Balok smiled and sipped his with gradual pleasure. Bailey shook his head in amazement.
“After all these years, he never gets tired of the stuff,” Bailey said. “Somewhere down belowdecks there must be a lake of it.”
“Balok—Mr. Bailey—” Janeway hardly knew where to start. The alien and the old man smiled blankly at her and said nothing.
“The ship,” prompted Chakotay.
“Ah, yes,” said Balok. “Provided by me, for Mr. Bailey’s use. With it, he tests the races we encounter on my behalf.”
“This was some kind of a test? “ asked Janeway, her voice wary with anger. In her mind seven fully armed attack cruisers bore down on Voyager once again, and Mr. Bailey stood to the side taking notes.
“Not exactly,” said
Bailey hastily. “I really had no idea that you were going to show up. A Starfleet ship, after all [322] these years.” A dreamy look crossed his weathered face, and he glanced at Balok to see if the little man would interrupt. Balok settled back into his cushions and eyed the old man with quiet interest over the rim of his glass.
When Bailey spoke again, his voice traveled back through the years to a distant corner of the Alpha Quadrant, where a young lieutenant had just been promoted to helmsman aboard an intrepid flagship named Enterprise. Its captain, James Kirk, had encountered the Fesarius at the edge of known space and been tested by its commander to reveal the true nature of the human species. Balok had been amazed at the brashness and innovation of the legendary captain, who took the game of testing farther than anyone before him with a complicated bluff and a mythical substance known as corbomite. That anyone would produce such a fantastic lie, let alone deliver it with such conviction, was a wonder to behold, and when Kirk demonstrated the truth of the Federation’s high-sounding words with a mission of mercy to Balok’s “damaged” ship, he had been greeted by its sole occupant with open arms and the traditional drink.
When the Enterprise had departed, Bailey had stayed behind as both observer and ambassador. Balok, as it happened, was also an explorer of sorts, traveling through the cosmos on an interminable journey and testing those races he encountered for their intelligence and capacity. With his vast ship and almost incomprehensible technology—“We can scan through a starship’s entire database in seconds,” explained Bailey—he was all but invulnerable to attack, and spent his time inventing various threats to force his subjects into revealing situations. But his perspective was severely lacking, as Bailey soon discovered: Balok, as ancient and [323] powerful as he was, had passed almost beyond the comprehension of lesser species.
That was where Bailey came in. Provided with a small ship, he went where Balok would never have gone. He boarded strange vessels built by unheard-of races, stepped into the exotic atmosphere of alien space stations, and tasted the air of a thousand planets unseen before by human eyes. Balok never left the Fesarius; he lived every experience vicariously through the eyes of his human proxy, spending long hours sipping tranya in rapt silence while Bailey talked himself hoarse. Sometimes the excursions lasted a few hours; other times Bailey was gone for weeks, or months, or more. Time slipped away, and the little collection of worlds known as the Federation fell behind them until they were a pleasant, distant memory, the mere first of many. Bailey had become a wanderer too.
Janeway looked into the old man’s pale blue eyes and tried to comprehend the Me he had chosen. “You left human space behind forever. Surely you must feel homesick sometimes, Mr. Bailey—how do you deal with it? With the loneliness, the separation?”
Bailey’s eyes smoldered with an old flame, the spark of a fresh young lieutenant kept fueled for eighty years. “This is the best life I could ever have possibly chosen, Captain. This is what I joined Starfleet for—to see the galaxy, to go where no one’s gone before. I’ve tasted the fruits of planets I couldn’t have even dreamed of, seen places and people no human may ever see again. Sure, I’ve thought about returning sometimes.” He leaned forward. “But why backtrack through worlds I’ve already seen, races I already know? Every day is a new experience out here, every week a new [324] adventure. Every planet shows a new horizon, ripe with the promise of a million new sensations. Tell me, Captain: If someone gave you a ship like this and said, ‘Go out and see the universe, and come back whenever you feel like it,’ would you pass it up? How far would you wander, before you’d never come back?”
Janeway stared at Bailey, momentarily taken aback. Gone was the gregarious old man she had seen aboard Voyager, replaced now with a swashbuckling frontier officer from the golden age of Starfleet’s space exploration. His eyes burned with daring and intelligence like two blue diamonds set in leather; and Janeway thought, If this is the kind of man who served under him, what must Kirk have been like?
“I can certainly see the appeal of it,” said Chakotay, exhaling for the first time in what seemed like minutes.
“I thought you might,” said Bailey, shrugging back into his former jovial composure like an old shirt that fit perfectly. “And after all, I’m out here because I wanted to be.”
“Yes,” said Janeway. The captain turned carefully toward Balok. “I hope I’m not being too forward, but I would like to ask—”
“You wish to know if I can assist you in returning home,” he said, and a look of sincerest apology crossed the face of the little alien. “I am sorry, but this ship cannot perform that kind of magic. And we must continue with our journey—that is, if I can still speak for Mr. Bailey as my traveling companion.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the universe,” responded Bailey.
“Are you sure?” asked Chakotay. “That sounds like a better offer.”
[325] “You’re right,” said Bailey after a second. “Right now I only get the galaxy.”
Balok laughed an infectious laugh, amused beyond his years. “What wonderful guests you are! I must give you a tour of my ship.” He started to rise from the silvery couch.
“One more thing, Balok,” said Bailey, jumping to his feet. “I have something I want to give the captain.” He scuttled off through a nearby door to an adjoining room of the ship.
“Ah, yes,” said Balok. “A most appropriate gift. You should be quite grateful to receive it, Captain.”
Bailey returned with a small input tablet, gripping it with both hands. He gazed at it for a moment, then handed it to Janeway with an eager look in his eyes.
“It’s a copy of my journal,” he said. “The planets, races, and species I encountered, and what little I was able to learn about them. I don’t know that it’ll be very useful to you on your journey—we took the scenic route getting here—but I would like it to get back to Starfleet.” He smiled sheepishly. “Technically, I’m still on duty. I hope this’ll convince them I haven’t spent the entire time stargazing and drinking tranya.”
Janeway scrolled through the entry titles, each neatly dated and indexed. “This is almost beyond value,” she said. “Mr. Bailey, I don’t know how to thank you for this. I wish we had something to give you in return.”
“I have some of my own thoughts on that,” said Bailey coyly. He smiled, and Janeway noticed a particular listing near the bottom of the entries.
“You’ve encountered the Borg?” she asked with trepidation.
Bailey curled his lip in disgust. “If you can say that. We [326] didn’t have much contact with them—no reason to hang around in their space. All of their planets are essentially the same.”
“Not to mention dangerous,” said Janeway.
“Not really, to us,” said Bailey. “Actually, they’re afraid of this ship.”
“I can believe that,” said Chakotay.
“And they are very poor guests,” said Balok, shaking his hand in disapproval. “They talk only of ‘assimilation’ and ‘resistance.’ And they did not like tranya.” He shook his small head in shocked disbelief.
“I told you not to invite them over,” said Bailey.
The Fesarius dropped away in Voyager’s rear viewer as the rogue planet and the Federation starship parted company, never to meet again. Janeway sat in the command chair and paged through her copy of Bailey’s journal, scanning slowly through a lifetime of experience dropped suddenly into her hands. Much of his journey was off their planned path and would probably be useless to them in the short term, but the small points of intersection offered tantalizing clues as to what they would encounter. It was an astonishing thing, Janeway realized—a chance encounter on the edge of nowhere had taken a single man on what was probably one of the great epic journeys of human history, and another had brought her and her crew to this place to bear witness to it. If God doesn’t exist, she thought, synchronicity is doing a darn good imitation.
Tuvok tapped her on the shoulder and motioned toward the ready room.
She went, and he followed.
“I hope my records look this good when I report back to [327] Starfleet,” said Janeway when the door had closed. “This is better than a holonovel.”
“You had expressed some interest in preparing excerpts for the crew,” prompted Tuvok.
“I think it might be good for morale,” said the captain. “Besides, you’ve got to admit this is pretty exciting stuff.”
“I consider that it may have some appeal on that basis to certain members of the crew,” he said carefully. “Nevertheless, as the ranking member of Starfleet security forces, I would like the opportunity to review any sections prior to their general release.”
“I think I can trust your judgment.” She glanced at him curiously. “I take it you’ve already begun to review the material, then?”
Tuvok shifted uncomfortably. “Purely for security purposes. It is indeed a wealth of information, almost beyond compare in my estimation. I can hardly believe,” he said, and his eyebrow raised conspicuously, “that Mr. Bailey would trade it for a complete set of our replicator ration patterns. Perhaps he finds food in the Delta Quadrant too flavorful and interesting.”
“He said he’d spent two years trying to program in chicken-fried steak on his own,” said Janeway, “with no luck. Besides, it wasn’t just the journal.” She smiled, plucked a glass from the little tray on her desk, and handed Tuvok a small goblet full of thick orange liquid. “We also got twelve barrels of tranya.”
Fiction
jaQ Andrews
The stars were out again.
That was three nights in a row now; Renaii hadn’t seen such a long streak of clear skies for years. The light film of volcanic ash, almost constantly spewing from countless mountains across the surface of Draanis IV, usually obscured any hope of viewing the tiny points of light that evidenced any existence outside the thick, soupy atmosphere of the planet. The same ash also usually prevented anyone from staying outside for extended periods of time, clogging up the nasal passages, the throat, the lungs. But tonight was an exception.
STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I Page 27