“I could understand the presence of charged particles around some of the constructs. They’re primarily metal. But all of the water sources in the biodomes are pure,” Bryce replied.
This was news to Torres. “They are?”
Bryce nodded. “I don’t know that any of the teams have been focusing on the water sources, but in looking at the energy fields and searching for the conductive pathways, we had to rule out the water. Every sample that has been taken has shown the same property. It is absolutely pure and therefore, not conductive.”
“No standing water is that pure,” Torres said. “Particles from the surrounding lake bed or ground would provide for at least minimal impurities.”
“Not here,” Bryce said. “I haven’t analyzed the ground at this site, but in our biodome, the area around the water was silica based. It’s like it was designed to keep the water sources pure.”
“What would be the purpose of that?” Torres wondered aloud.
Bryce shrugged. “Who knows? It might not have been intentional.”
“But what if it was?”
“Yeah,” Bryce said, looking back to the sky. “Either way, it doesn’t matter now. There’s no way that lake is a pure water source after a couple hundred of us swam in it today. And beautiful as that sky is, I don’t like it.”
Torres didn’t either.
12
* * *
VOYAGER
The first sensation of which Ensign Aytar Gwyn was aware upon waking was hunger. This was unusual. But everything was unusual.
This wasn’t her bed. The lights around her were dim, so it was difficult to determine where she was. She tried to turn on her side, and immediately her right arm protested, sending shocks of icy pain shooting up her arm, side, and neck.
That sparked a memory: her right arm and excruciating pain. An instinct to flee took hold of her at once and despite the pain, she forced herself to a sitting position. Tightness across her chest and a sense of something ripping were her reward for the abrupt motion.
A man approached her. An alien. His face was dark brown and spotted. His hairless scalp had a ridge in its center, leading down to a wide nose. His eyes were incredibly kind. She focused her attention on them.
So lonely, she thought at once. He is lost here, but seeks understanding. He misses the stars of his home. He does not believe he will ever see them again.
She wanted to comfort him. No, she needed to comfort him. She would not be whole until his suffering had ended. What’s more, she knew she could make it end. For him she could become the thing that filled his emptiness and made him whole at the same time.
But she was so hungry. Her stomach rumbled greedily. The absence at the center of her being was agony. Food would help temporarily. But not forever.
She had become a creature defined by need.
“Ensign?” The alien with the kind eyes spoke to her.
Her mouth was a desert. She swallowed, trying to force moisture into barrenness.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“You are in sickbay, Ensign. You were attacked on your last away mission. We have treated most of your injuries and radiation exposure, but you still need to heal. You require rest.”
“Hungry,” she said.
“It is too soon for food. I can get some water for you, but you must lie down.”
She obeyed without question.
She knew him. He was familiar to her. But she had never seen him as clearly as she did now. All of the new information flooding her senses replaced her previous knowledge, pushing it beyond her grasp.
When he returned he gently lifted her head and helped her sip from a glass of water.
“Better?” he asked so kindly.
She reached for his hand. “Who are you?”
He smiled, confused. He was studying her as much as caring for her. He had a new concern. He was worried about her.
“I am Doctor Sharak. Do you know who you are?”
“I am Aytar Gwyn,” she replied.
“That’s right. Do you know where you are?”
She looked around before pulling the answer from his mind. As soon as she found it there, she realized she had known, but been unable to find the answer in the wilds of her new mind.
“Sickbay. Voyager.”
His relief became hers.
“That’s right. Very good.”
He started to turn away. She reached for his hand.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I am for you, Doctor Sharak.”
He patted her hand as he would that of a child. This was not what she wanted, but what she wanted did not matter. All that mattered was what he wanted.
“I am here for you as well, Ensign. Just rest. You are going to feel better soon.”
Until the hunger was filled, there would be no better. She knew that. She also knew he did not understand.
He would. In time, she would help him understand.
A soft hiss at her neck and some of the pain in her arm and chest diminished. A wave of weariness washed over her. She did not wish to leave him, but she had no choice.
All she could see in her mind’s eye was his face drifting farther and farther away from her. She reached for him. Did he sense it? He turned back, touching her forehead with his warm hand.
He did.
He would be hers.
She would be his.
The hunger would end.
DK-1116
Captain Farkas had long since returned to Vesta. O’Donnell and Glenn had each pitched tents around their makeshift campsite and bid the admiral good-night. Chakotay had busied himself setting up the tent in which he and Kathryn would sleep beside O’Donnell’s. Admiral Janeway could hear Commander O’Donnell speaking softly to his XO, reporting some of the day’s finds and discussing personnel issues that had come up on Demeter in his absence.
Despite her weariness, Janeway felt certain that sleep was not going to come easy to her tonight. When she had first imagined this time, she had been warmed by the thought of sharing several uninterrupted days and nights with Chakotay. Now she wondered if she might not prefer a little solitude.
Chakotay placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Ready for bed?”
She turned her head to look up at him. His face was as it had ever been: a perfect balance of care-worn determination and mischievous idealism. “I don’t think so.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he said with a soft smile. “Would you care to take a walk?”
Janeway nodded as he helped her rise from her chair. He carried a soft bag over his shoulder as they made their way down the hill and back toward the zombie trees.
“It seems you have a destination in mind,” Janeway observed.
“I do.”
They continued on for a bit in companionable silence. Roughly a hundred meters into the “forest” they came upon a pool of water, too small for a lake, but much larger than a pond.
Chakotay knelt beside the water, testing it with his hand. A wide smile crossed his lips. “I remember well your fondness for baths. Will this do?”
Despite the misgivings that had complicated her feelings since she arrived, she had to admit that the thought of a midnight swim in calm, warm water sounded like heaven.
Chakotay had thought ahead. He removed large towels from his bag and laid them out in preparation for their return to the shore. In pleasant silence they helped each other out of their uniforms and entered the pool together.
For a time, they simply swam about. The pool was probably a dozen meters deep at its center, but near the shore, they could easily stand submerged up to their necks.
Eventually he reached his hands out to her and she allowed him to envelop her in an embrace. He kissed her tenderly and, for a time, all thoughts beyond the comfort and pleasure they gave each other were forgotten.
Finally, they emerged from the pool, wrapping themselves in the towels and relaxing in the breeze.
When they had settled themselves on t
he ground, their feet intertwined, Chakotay said, “I hoped coming here would grant you a little peace. Was I wrong?”
“No,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”
“Then why aren’t you happy?”
“I am.”
His head cocked to the side. He knew her better than that.
Janeway considered her next words carefully. After a moment she said, “Do you think we’re wasting our time?”
Chakotay’s brow furrowed, puzzled. “You mean taking so many days for shore leave?”
She shook her head. “Not here. I mean us. Are we just wasting our time together?”
“I’m not,” he replied. “But I can’t speak for you.”
She reached her hands out and took his. “We have two more years out here. Two more years of exploring and discovering . . .”
“And occasionally fighting for our lives,” he finished for her.
“If history is any guide,” she agreed. “You said once that this was all you needed. This is home. Do you still feel that way?”
“I do.”
“But in all the time we’ve had since we found each other again, we haven’t really talked about the future beyond those two years.”
“Do we need to?”
Janeway shuddered. “I think maybe I do.”
“Okay. Where do you want to go when this mission is done? Are you ready to retire? The work we do will never be complete, but are you starting to feel that it’s time to allow others to carry these burdens?”
She released his hands and placed hers under her chin, elbows on her knees for support. “I’ve never imagined this coming to an end. I’ve never wanted to.”
Chakotay nodded. “So when we’re done here, we take whatever Command offers next.”
“What if they want to separate us?”
“That’s not going to work for me.”
Janeway smiled. It was a simple statement of fact.
“I turned my back on Starfleet a long time ago,” he continued. “You brought me back, and since then I’ve gone where they asked, when they asked, and done my best to keep those I’ve led alive. But the days of either of us going where we’re told if it can’t accommodate our relationship are past, at least for me.”
“Starfleet might be more willing to acknowledge that if we did, officially, I mean,” Janeway said.
Chakotay’s eyes grew wide. “Why, Admiral Janeway, is that a proposal?”
Twice in her life, Janeway had been engaged. Neither one had ended in marriage. Both times she had believed they were forever. Both times, fate had intervened and taken that away from her. Was it possible that her fear now had nothing to do with Chakotay? Was she simply afraid to believe again?
“It’s an observation,” she finally replied.
To her surprise, he didn’t seem wounded.
“If marriage is what you want, Kathryn, then we will marry. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing we haven’t done is legalize our union. But the absence of that doesn’t change anything for me. To be honest, I haven’t been sure that you even wanted to marry.”
“You haven’t?” she said in genuine surprise.
“If I had any doubts, one look at your face when you thought I was offering you a ring took care of that.”
She felt her cheeks warming. Of course he had noticed. “I was just taken off guard by the timing,” she offered.
“No, you weren’t.”
“All right, I wasn’t. I was momentarily terrified. But not because I don’t want to be with you.”
“You’re content with where we are now,” he said. “So am I. Maybe we don’t have to know anything else right now.”
“I am content. But I’m also afraid. I’m not sure I trust this. At times like this everything seems so clear. But then something always seems to come between us.”
“That’s not going to change because we get married,” he said. “You and I have been together too long and seen too much to ever lie to each other about that. Set aside the reality that every long-term relationship that has ever been is subject to disagreements, tragedies, and unforeseeable events that can do great damage to its foundation. Forget the fact that all relationships live and die not by any single choice but by the countless daily choices they contain, the myriad moments where kindness, patience, and understanding prevail over our most base drives of selfishness and self-preservation. The deepest personal betrayals bear within them the seeds of grace and forgiveness. I don’t care if we ever marry. For me, nothing can change the fact that your happiness is indistinguishable from mine.”
Staring into his dark eyes, she felt the doubts she had nurtured slipping away on a single breath. She reached out to him again, pulling him toward her. Their bodies met, two galaxies subject to the inexorable outward pull of the universe, both determined to remain connected, if only by a bridge of stars.
• • •
Lieutenant Devi Patel took a deep breath. She stepped back slowly from the door, wishing she knew how to close it. Every other door they had managed to open remained that way. Perhaps leaving the sphere chamber the way they had come would seal all of them. But she couldn’t attempt this without the rest of her team. Much as she wanted to explore more of the spheres, she also couldn’t do that as long as this eerie chamber was open and whatever waited in the darkness might be on its way out right now ready to rip her arms from their sockets and beat her to death with them.
Get a hold of yourself. You’re a Starfleet officer. You’ve spent your entire adult life preparing for this moment. Whatever is back there has been there for thousands of years. Just because it sounds scary doesn’t mean it’s dangerous.
Reasoning things out helped a little. Tempted as she was to flee down the same hallway Lasren and the others had taken, she knew that she would lose whatever remaining shreds of credibility she had with them if she showed her fear. Also, the thing in the dark might follow and she would have led it to three other potential victims.
Just take it slow, she decided. Every instinct she possessed practically screamed otherwise, but she refused to allow fear to start running this show.
She prepared carefully. First, she lit the beacon around her wrist. In the same hand, she held her tricorder. It hadn’t done a great job thus far interpreting the data of this strange architecture, but she had to try to collect whatever she could. In her other hand, she held her phaser, set to kill. Nothing could possibly be alive back there, but the feel of her hand around the grip was reassuring.
Ready as she would ever be, she stepped into the new space. Her beacon illuminated the walls, which appeared to be simple brown stone. Here, alone, the metallic ore that had led them to the cavern was absent.
The shriek of metal against metal met her ears again. It wasn’t as piercing as the alarm that had sounded when they first tried the door, but it remained unsettling. Friction suggested movement. Lasren’s empathic abilities had sensed disorganized life and rage. She tried not to imagine what those two things might look like conjoined.
Roughly twenty meters in, she discovered the source of the strange blue light. All along the walls, more blue spheres were embedded within alcoves above circular openings. They were dimmer than their counterparts in the main room. Many glowed with a barely perceptible grayish hue. She was struck by the random notion that compared to the data spheres, these seemed to be dying.
The first opening wasn’t covered by a door. Instead, a faint trembling of the light indicated a force field. Focusing her beacon into the space beyond, she saw a small form resting on the floor of the otherwise empty cell. It was vaguely spherical, less than a meter in diameter, and mostly metal, a strange hybrid of the silver and black they had found everywhere. Draped all around the object were long, rusty brown tentacles. They seemed to extend from within the metal but they appeared to be organic. Whatever this thing is, it’s not alive. She comforted herself with this thought until the moment the light from her beacon found a tentacle that extended out from the metal all
the way to the far wall of the cell. It appeared to be taut. As she played her light over it, the tentacle snapped toward her, hitting the force field with a slap of electric energy.
She stumbled back, her heart racing.
“It can’t hurt you from in there,” she said aloud. She didn’t honestly believe that, but she sure as hell hoped it was true.
Lifting her hand, she used the beacon to illuminate as much of the rest of the corridor of cells as she could. Shadows remained in the far distance, but between her and them were several more cells—and the metal screeching didn’t sound that far off as it occasionally bounced off the walls toward her.
Emboldened, she continued forward. Each cell contained a variation on the same theme as the first; chunks of metal in varying shapes, all with visible organic components. By far the most disturbing was one that appeared at first to be a large, relatively flat metal plane, smooth except for every few meters where soft tissue resembling lips protruded. They opened and closed as if trying to breathe or gasp, or suck or wail. A few of the mouth-like openings even contained small metallic teeth.
As she passed and noted the contents of each cell, her terror was transmuted into horrified fascination. What was this place? If the spheres and workstations were a library of data, this felt more like a zoo.
One potential answer to her question lay near the end of the cavern in a cell whose sphere glowed more intensely than the others.
Patel steeled herself as she stepped toward the force field. Here, the screeching sound reached a pitch almost as deafening as the “screams” that had sounded the first time Lasren had approached the door to this chamber of horrors. There was no doubt in her mind that this was the source of the sound.
The cell was darker than the others. The object within had no reflective surfaces. It was not solid metal. At first it looked like a blob of black viscous liquid a little more than two meters long end to end, lying in the center of the cell. Where the other figures had small features that moved, this one was in constant motion. It writhed in apparent agony as distinct shapes undulated into being briefly, only to lose cohesion and dissolve back into an unformed mass.
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