Architects of Infinity

by Kirsten Beyer

  “Which would make these what, exactly?” Seven asked.

  “Some sort of incredibly advanced matter-energy storage and conversion device. Plants absorb energy in order to grow. They store excess energy until it is needed, at which point it is released. A structure like this could have been designed to store vast amounts of energy for release by growth or all at once.”

  “As in, explosive? You believe these things might be living bombs?”

  “Well, not anymore. Even if these fossils were actually part of the structure and were once nucleic acids, they’re dead now to all intents and purposes. But a long time ago . . . ?”

  Seven considered the readings again for a few more silent moments.

  “Still think there’s nothing really interesting left to discover on the surface of that planet?” he finally asked.

  “No. But I am willing to leave the collection of further data from the surface in your capable hands,” Seven replied. “I will continue my own analyses. Perhaps between the two of us we will be able to construct a plausible hypothesis to answer some of these questions.”

  O’Donnell stared at Seven for a long moment, a faint smile playing over his lips. Finally he said, “Among your many attributes, I think the one I most admire is your consistency, Seven.”

  VOYAGER

  Commander Tom Paris found his oldest and best friend, Lieutenant Harry Kim, on the holodeck, beating the living hell out of a punching bag. The sweat dripping from Kim’s face suggested he’d been at this awhile.

  “Hi, honey, how was your day?” Paris asked.

  Kim paused briefly, acknowledged Paris with a slight nod, and continued punching. “Fine.”

  Paris knew a dismissal when he saw one. He’d first learned how those worked at the hands of his father, the late Admiral Owen Paris. He also knew that Kim had been in eighteen different kinds of pain since Nancy Conlon had been diagnosed and transferred to Galen. Paris didn’t know the particulars of the illness. He didn’t need to. He figured B’Elanna knew more and was probably respecting Conlon’s privacy. There was nothing Conlon could have asked of him that Paris wouldn’t readily have given to help her, but his focus during this crisis had been and would always be Kim’s well-being.

  “Got a second?”

  Kim released a loud huff and grabbed the bag to still it.

  “What do you need, Tom?”

  “I have good news and I have bad news, so I thought I should deliver it personally. Why don’t we get the bad news out of the way first?”

  Kim’s eyes didn’t register trepidation at this pronouncement. That wasn’t, in Paris’s opinion, a great sign. Clearly, for Harry, whatever Tom was about to tell him couldn’t make his life any worse. He had hit some relative bottom and made himself comfortable.

  Paris didn’t have a problem with this in theory. The depths to which he had sunk from time to time in his life were horrifying to contemplate, even now, and all of his own making. The hell Harry was moving through had been thrust upon him by circumstance, and while he was going to eventually have to take responsibility not for the hell, but for his response to it, now wasn’t the time to have that conversation and Paris wasn’t going to push it. Depending upon how long this lasted, he might order Kim to see Cambridge, who would do a better job of bringing Harry around. Paris knew how to be a good friend, but he would never have confused his ability to deal with issues of this magnitude with those of a trained counselor.

  “What is it?” Kim finally asked.

  “You must have figured out by now that your and Seven’s little discovery was going to have consequences, but I’m guessing even you didn’t foresee Chakotay’s response.”

  “The whole fleet is going back to spend at least two weeks investigating the planet and taking turns at a lengthy shore leave,” Kim said, deadpan.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Everybody in the fleet knows that, Tom.”

  “Well, everybody in the fleet better prepare to be disappointed if when we get there the security teams you lead down to the surface find DK-1116’s version of poison oak everywhere and the shore leave gets cancelled.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “It might.”

  “It won’t. So that’s the bad news? I need to prep an away team?”

  “No,” Paris admitted. “The bad news is that once you determine that the planet is perfectly safe, you’re not going on rotation for shore leave.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s the good news. Chakotay is going to leave you in command of Voyager while the rest of us enjoy shore leave.”

  A few months ago, this revelation would have been good news. Sometime in the last year, Kim had decided to set his sights on the command track in earnest. To have Chakotay place this kind of faith in him would have been cause for celebration.

  Today, it was met with a slight nod.

  “Okay.”

  “Come on, Harry, it’s not okay. It’s awesome.”

  “I run this ship several shifts each week, Tom. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “Two weeks, all to yourself? It’s huge.”

  “Fine. It’s huge.”

  Paris sighed. “Should I tell the captain you don’t want the job?”

  “No. I’ll do it. I’ve already seen the planet. It’s not that great.”

  “Okay.”

  Paris couldn’t deny that he’d hoped this development would at least bring a little light back into Kim’s eyes. Obviously it wasn’t going to change any of the underlying problems, but as a sign of Chakotay’s restored respect after a rough patch during their mission to Sormana, Tom had hoped for better. Maybe it really was time to bring Cambridge in on this.

  “And yes, you need to prep your away teams. We’ll make orbit start of tomorrow’s gamma shift.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Paris turned to go. He expected to hear the sound of punching begin again but it didn’t before Kim called to him. “Tom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What was the name of that JAG officer who helped you out with that thing with your mom?”

  “The family law specialist?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Paris turned back to face his friend. He tried desperately to imagine what possible need Kim would have for the officer who had prevented Julia Paris from gaining custody of her grandchildren a few months prior but drew a disquieting blank.

  “Lieutenant Garvin Shaw.”

  Kim nodded but offered nothing more.

  “Are you finally going to sue your parents for emancipation?” Paris teased.

  “Very funny,” Kim conceded, though he didn’t really seem to appreciate the joke. “You liked him though, right?”

  “He was great.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? What the hell, Harry? What do you need with a lawyer?”

  Kim dropped his head. He shook it back and forth a few times as if unable to find the words he sought. When he raised it again, the look in his eyes bordered briefly on feral.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Harry said.

  “If you think for one second I’m leaving this holodeck without a better answer than that, you’re out of your mind, Harry.”

  “You can’t tell B’Elanna.”

  Paris felt the words as a physical blow. Kim was deadly serious, and Paris knew that if he pushed, he was going to have to live with this promise. He also knew he was going to have to live with his wife’s wrath when she inevitably learned of it. This was a dance they’d done more than once in their marriage, and Tom had no interest in taking the floor again. But whatever was slowly killing his friend demanded that he rise to this occasion. Kim would have done no less for him. In fact, Tom’s failure to show that level of confidence in Harry a long time ago had been the only thing that had seriously threatened the continuation of their friendship.

  “Ever?”

  “For now.”

  “As long as now isn’t very long.
”

  Kim took a moment to summon something. Courage, maybe? Paris wondered. Finally Kim said, “I’m a father.”

  Paris had steeled himself for the answer. The doctors have given up. Nancy only has a few weeks/days/hours to live. Turns out it’s contagious and I have it too. But Paris had not been at all prepared for this.

  Once the shock began to abate, however, the next question was obvious. “Who is the mother?”

  Kim stared at him for a moment with the same disbelief he might have summoned at the sight of a monkey lecturing on particle physics.

  “Nancy, right?” Paris asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So you mean you’re going to be a father?”

  Kim shook his head. “Nancy was only about six weeks along. They had to perform emergency surgery on her brain and in order to save the embryo during the procedure they transported her to a gestational incubator. She’s aboard Galen right now.”

  “Is Nancy okay?”

  “She’s stable. She’s going to be in a coma until they’re sure it’s safe to wake her.”

  “Harry, I’m so sorry.”

  Kim’s face set in hard lines. “Me too. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got to figure this out.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got some time. Anything at all you need, B’Elanna and I will help. We can start setting Michael’s things aside as he outgrows them.”

  “She’s a girl, Tom.”

  “Whatever. With most of the baby stuff, gender doesn’t matter. But I still don’t understand why you need to talk to Shaw.”

  Kim moved back to the weight bench and sat. Grabbing a nearby bottle he took a long drink of water. Once he’d wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he continued. “Nancy didn’t want to keep the baby.”

  Paris considered his next words carefully as he took a seat beside Kim. This was one complicated issue he’d never had to face, and he was grateful for that. Much as he adored his children and had grown to love being a father, he also knew that if B’Elanna hadn’t been on board with his desire to have a family, that would have been the end of it for him. Suddenly Harry’s request to speak to Shaw took on a troubling significance.

  “You said they performed an emergency embryonic transport, right?”

  “Right. Technically, the baby was born last night. She’s here and assuming she survives the next eight months, she’s my responsibility.”

  “She’s your and Nancy’s responsibility,” Paris corrected him gently.

  Kim shrugged. “I don’t think Nancy’s going to change her mind when she wakes up. She was very clear from day one that she didn’t think either of us was ready to take this on. And she’s pretty sick, Tom. Even if she wants to do this, she might not be physically able to.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “I want to make sure the baby is taken care of,” Kim said, his voice tinged with desperation. “When I thought Nancy was going to terminate the pregnancy, I was a wreck. I promised her I would go along with whatever she wanted, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was making the worst mistake of my life. You know me, so you know that’s saying something,” he said bitterly. “The doctors originally said it might be years before Nancy’s illness caused serious problems. I figured that if I could change Nancy’s mind, there was more than enough time for us to create a life for the three of us here as a family. That was the impossible version I kept turning over and over in my head without really believing for a minute it could happen. But Nancy almost died yesterday. The illness is already attacking her brain. What if she wakes up and doesn’t remember me or us or the baby? Or what if she never wakes up? As much as I thought I wanted this, now that it’s happened, I have no idea if I can do it at all, let alone without Nancy.”

  “You’ve got plenty of people here who will help, Harry,” Tom insisted.

  “Plenty of people who all have their own demanding responsibilities to attend to,” Kim countered. “Starting with you and B’Elanna. You have two human beings to keep alive and nurture while serving as first officer and chief engineer of this fleet. That’s more than enough on your plates.” Kim paused, trying to collect thoughts that had apparently fallen to the ground in a million mixed-up tiny pieces. “I’m finally on a path that might lead to a ship of my own eventually. How am I supposed to pull all of the extra shifts required to make that happen as a single parent?”

  “There are options, starting with holographic ones like Kula.”

  “Neither of you rely on Kula as much as you think you do. And even if she’s more involved now, for the first few years of Miral’s life, the really formative ones, B’Elanna was with her twenty-four/seven, right?”

  “Yes,” Tom admitted.

  “That’s what a child needs. And that’s what she should have. I don’t know if I can do it, and if I can’t, I want to know what my options are.”

  “Okay, slow down,” Tom said. “The future you are trying to plan doesn’t exist yet. Well before you have to figure out how to care for your daughter—I can’t believe I just said those words, by the way—you’re going to know what Nancy wants to do and whether or not she’s going to be able to be a part of this. Honestly, the best-case scenario here is that she gets better and you two figure out how to make it work.”

  “I hope she will, Tom. But what if she doesn’t?”

  “First thing I learned about being a father? You do everything one moment at a time. Forget hours, forget days. It’s moment by moment. That’s what makes it so exhausting.”

  “But worth it, right?”

  Tom stared hard at his best friend. “Absolutely.”

  VESTA

  “Ensign Gwyn?”

  Doctor Sal looked up from her desk as the petite ensign sporting short, spiked indigo hair entered her office just off the main medical bay.

  “Doctor Sharak asked me to report to sickbay as soon as we made orbit. When I got there he said you had requested a sample of my blood.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When I asked him why he wanted it, he said he didn’t. You did. And there was nothing more he could tell me.”

  “I hope the request didn’t alarm you, Ensign,” Sal said, rising and gesturing for Gwyn to take the seat opposite her desk. Perching on the front edge of her desk, she continued, “Since Sharak is your CMO, it is customary for him to perform any standard medical procedures. Any other fleet doctor can step in during an emergency, but usually we keep our crew’s medical needs segregated.”

  “Why do you want my blood?”

  “I believe your blood cells might contain some unique factors that will help me develop a treatment for another patient. Think of it as donating blood to someone in need.”

  “Am I allowed to know who?”

  “No,” Sal replied. “Does it matter who?”

  Gwyn sat very still, almost like a small, trapped animal.

  “I’m half Kriosian.”

  Sal nodded. “I know that, Ensign. Your file also indicates that you have no Degnar affiliation.”

  “I’ve never been observant. My mom was, but I’m not. Still, we’re not supposed to give blood to anyone who isn’t Kriosian.”

  “I understand, and you are well within your rights to refuse my request. I just hope you won’t.”

  “But if the patient was Kriosian . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Ensign. I can’t tell you anything about the person I’m trying to help. They enjoy the same rights to privacy you do.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning no one, not the patient, nor your mother, will ever know if you choose to break with your cultural traditions in this instance. What I can and will tell you, is that the patient in question is seriously ill, and your blood might very well help me cure them.”

  “How is that possible? How is my blood even compatible with someone who isn’t Kriosian?”

  “You’re also half human.”

  “But there are hundreds of humans in our fleet.
None of them can help you?”

  Sal shook her head. “The kind of compatibility you’re thinking of isn’t the issue.”

  “Then what is the issue?”

  “I believe your blood cells can help me save a life, Ensign. It’s that simple.”

  Gwyn rose from the chair. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I’d like to help you, but I don’t think I can. It’s just something we don’t do.”

  “Sit down, Ensign.”

  Gwyn started at the fierceness of Sal’s tone and immediately did as she had been ordered.

  “Do you know why Kriosians have this cultural taboo in place? Do you know where it comes from?”

  Gwyn shook her head, refusing to meet Sal’s eyes. “No, Doctor.”

  “It only goes back a little more than five hundred years.”

  “Since the Dawn?”

  “That’s right, since your people learned they weren’t alone in the universe and other intelligent, spacefaring races were out there.”

  “There must have been a good reason for it. Are you sure my blood won’t hurt your patient?”

  “There is a good reason, and yes, I’m sure. I wouldn’t ask if I had any doubt.”

  “Do you know the reason?”

  Sal paused. From this point on, anything she said would be well-reasoned speculation. She was already treading on the thinnest of ethical ice. If Regina were here, she would have ended this conversation the moment Gwyn refused the donation.

  But Regina wasn’t here, and Nancy Conlon was dying. Much as Sal understood the need to respect the traditions and social mores of every individual she encountered, in this case, the petty, arrogant, self-serving individuals who had created this restriction to cover crimes committed against countless generations of Kriosians weren’t worthy of that respect. If she’d had her way, all of them would have been exposed and prosecuted for their actions. Those bridges had been burned long before Sal was born. There was no one left to blame. But allowing the fruit of an immoral tree to stand in the way of healing Nancy Conlon felt worse than unfair. Perpetrating this lie was wrong, and Sal hated that she was one of only a handful of people in the galaxy who knew it. She had no latitude when it came to sharing it. Regina had been perfectly clear on that point. Still . . .