by Star Trek
Janeway considered this carefully. The array was alluring. But she shared Chakotay’s concerns. Finally she said, “Once we’re on board we’ll transport Tuvok directly to sickbay, and we’ll send an away team to the Monorhan ship. Otherwise, we’ll hold off on any purely exploratory missions for the time being.”
Chakotay relaxed a little. “Yes, Captain,” he said, and set about sending revised orders out to the teams he had already assembled.
The ship suddenly rocked forty-five degrees on its axis, throwing Janeway from her seat. Through the explosion of several plasma relays, she saw Lieutenant Paris clawing his way from the floor back to the conn. The bridge was bathed only in the red-black darkness of the emergency lighting system.
Pulling herself up on her hands and knees, Janeway shouted, “Report!”
Ensign Kim’s was the first voice she heard through the confusion of alarms.
“We’ve encountered the singularity’s event horizon, Captain,” he shouted.
She felt the firm grasp of Chakotay’s hand on her arm, helping her to her feet. In the space of a few seconds, Paris had regained his seat at the conn and the bridge had been returned to an angle that made standing, or at the very least staying in your seat, possible.
Tossing a glance toward the main viewscreen, she saw that her relatively placid view of the array’s docking bays had been replaced by the swirling vortex of the singularity.
“We’re still outside the array. How is this possible?” Janeway demanded.
Harry’s hands were flying over the controls.
“I don’t know Captain. According to our calculations, the existence of the horizon at any point outside the area of the array’s rings was theoretically possible, but highly unlikely.”
Voyager rocked again, but Janeway noted with some satisfaction that most of the bridge crew was prepared to hang on this time.
“Mr. Paris, adjust our heading to take us away from the array and go to full impulse.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tom managed through clenched teeth as he willed the ship to hold together long enough for him to lay in the new course.
Harry’s voice was strained, but controlled as he informed the bridge, “Shields at sixty percent.”
“Mr. Paris?” Janeway asked.
“Going to full impulse…now.”
The ship shuddered violently beneath them.
“Shields at forty percent.”
“The new course is laid in, Captain, but our impulse engines can’t pull us free of the gravity well.”
Janeway cursed silently as Voyager slipped inexorably toward the center of the singularity.
“B’Elanna,” Janeway shouted over the comm, “reroute all available power systems to the impulse drive.”
“It’s already done, Captain! Impulse engines are running at forty percent over maximum capacity now!” B’Elanna screamed over the chaos.
Janeway was running out of options.
The loneliness was gone. The pain was gone. Tuvok stood on the ridge of a vast, barren plain. Below him, hundreds of thousands of beings were dancing. They moved in couples, and small groups. They came together, and flew apart, as if compelled by the rhythm and harmony that sounded all around him.
The sadness of the spectacle he was witnessing was as overwhelming as it was inexplicable. The chaos of their movement shuddered through him, as the song began to lose its coherence. He could make out the shapes of those who had fallen. The others danced on, oblivious of the carnage.
Finally the truth hit him. This was not a dance. This was a battle. There were no directed-energy weapons. The forms he had earlier thought to be people did not actually possess arms or legs for punching or kicking. Nonetheless, the violent frenetic masses swarming the plain were obviously capable of inflicting mortal wounds upon one another. Their rage and hatred of one another was palpable.
“This was the beginning of the end,” a soft voice whispered beside him.
Turning, he saw a Monorhan male standing beside him on the ridge. Although he had never met him, Tuvok knew him in an instant. His name was Naviim.
“Are you the one who brought me here?” he asked.
Naviim’s dark gray eyes clouded over momentarily.
“In a way. You heard our call…sensed the urgency…but you would not have been capable of helping us.”
For the first time since the music had taken hold of his mind in sickbay, Tuvok found it relatively easy to focus. It seemed that his mind was, once again, his own.
“The music…is that the call you refer to?”
Naviim’s long jaw dropped slightly as the edges of his mouth crept upward and his ears flattened against his skull. Tuvok recognized the Monorhan smile.
“What you experienced as music contained much of our truth. Your mind interpreted the call in a way that brought order to the dissonance. There are mathematical properties to music that underpin some of our truth. You are fortunate that your exposure to complicated musical patterns gave you this context. Our telepathic gifts were different. When we came and the first of us were exposed to the gift, our sense of the emergence came not in sound, but overwhelming feelings of fear and danger.”
“Where am I?”
“Your body is on Gremadia. But you are no longer merely the sum total of your biological processes and simple matter. Your body is no longer relevant. What you are becoming…is all.”
“I do not understand,” Tuvok replied simply.
“Nor will you, for a time. But surely you sense that you are no longer what you once were?” Naviim asked.
Tuvok took a deep breath, bathing in the cool clear peace that the ability to separate thought from emotion gave him. Searching deeper, he was suddenly aware of the truth of Naviim’s words. He was no longer lonely…because although the music was gone, he was not alone. Blossoming within him was something new. He did not fear it, though its alien presence was faintly disconcerting. Instead, he considered it dispassionately, not as something that should not be there. But as a thing that in some impossible way…by taking the place of the music…completed him.
“You are Monorhan,” Tuvok observed. “Are you also on Gremadia?”
“I was, and am, though not as you see me now. I was the last taken. As such, it falls to me to welcome you to your new life. You see me now in the only form that your limited mind can still accept. It will not always be so.”
Tuvok was intensely curious. Yet somehow he grasped intuitively that the answers he would have of Naviim were already within him…that in time…he would know all. For the moment, he was content to allow the mystery to unfold.
“What is this place?” he finally asked.
“You are experiencing a memory of us. I have not visited this place in a very long time,” Naviim replied.
A split second later Tuvok felt a white-hot searing pain slice into his head.
Do not resist.
He heard the words clearly, though the largest portion of his mind denied their truth. That which caused pain must be resisted. Logic dictated that if there was something he could do to prevent this, he should. The instruction of the voice flew in the face of that logic. And yet, somehow, that voice was also his. It was part of him. And part of something infinitely larger than him.
With no ready alternative, he chose to heed what he hoped was the voice of some sort of higher reasoning. He accepted the pain, and in that same moment, its power vanished.
“I am sorry,” Naviim said as the pain subsided. “The transition before you will be difficult at times. As you see, acceptance is the easiest course. We would not have you suffer unnecessarily.”
“What have you done to me?” Tuvok demanded.
“We have done nothing. Though we are all capable of sharing the gift with you, we would never force it upon you without your consent, as it was forced upon us. But there is one among us who does not share our ability to make such distinctions. We allowed it to pass the gift along, as the only means to guarantee the continuation of y
our existence. We were grateful that you came. It would have been wrong for such a noble impulse to end in oblivion.”
“Will you stay with me?” Tuvok asked.
“You will pass into darkness soon,” Naviim replied. “As your body dies it will be difficult for us to continue this communication. But do not be afraid. We will not leave you, and when you awaken to your new existence, I and the others will be here to greet you. We await that moment with joy.”
With those words, Naviim vanished.
Tuvok turned again to the plain below. The battle was over. Vague, shapeless masses were strewn about the field. Many appeared to be in the final throes of death. The light around him began to fall. The field was bathed in deep purple gauze. In the distance, Tuvok saw a figure, rising from among the dead. A fierce wail, equal parts agony and defiance, rocked the earth beneath Tuvok’s feet. The sound was everywhere, within and around him, searing heat that threatened to pull him apart.
Phoebe left sickbay as quickly and unobtrusively as she could, leaving the Talaxian and the hybrid girl’s mother sitting their uneasy vigil. As she made her way back to engineering, she realized that she had fallen into an old habit, underestimating humanoids. Having spent so much time among the life-forms of this dimension, she had grown used to thinking of them as lesser beings.
It hadn’t started out that way. When she had made a choice to turn her back on the Others, she had done it with a firm sense of the possibilities that this dimension would hold. For thousands of years she had marveled at the complexity of life, and its seemingly limitless potential. But their tendency toward sameness, the mistakes she had seen countless different races make time and again, as if they had no interest or intention of learning from the wisdom of others, or even their own histories, had gradually soured her on the experience.
She had yet to encounter a humanoid species that even approached the limits of their own abilities. They evolved at a torturously slow rate, and were hindered, of course, by their mortality. Though it was true that Phoebe and her kind were “mortal” in a sense, their life span could be extended almost to infinity if the proper measures were taken.
She had made the same early mistakes as many of those who had once shared her passion for exploration. She had intervened in the normal development of countless life-forms, helping them enhance their natural abilities, artificially extending their life spans, restructuring their environments to make them more hospitable to their evolution.
But time and again, she had been disappointed.
Perhaps the Others had been right about that much. The consequences of interference could be harsh, but to simply witness senseless death and wasted potential seemed equally inappropriate. Why exist, if one’s existence did not make a difference?
But she was still a long way from accepting the choice of the Others. Every moment still held the possibility that another solution to their mutual problem might exist. She had no intention of giving up, but she had long ago concluded that no humanoid life-forms would play any role in the ultimate solution. If her current circumstance was any indication, quite the opposite might be true. These humanoids in particular, could be the undoing of them all.
Captain Janeway unknowingly held the literal and metaphorical key to the most devastating possibility Phoebe had ever faced. The worst part was there was almost no way that Phoebe could even begin to make her understand what was at stake. Humans like Janeway didn’t even have words to describe the reality that hung in the balance. Though they were more evolved than many, they were millions of years from even a rudimentary understanding of the true nature of the space-time construct that they inhabited.
The only possibility for communicating the truth to Janeway lay in a course of action Phoebe instinctively found unacceptable. But if worse came to worst, she wouldn’t have a choice. She hadn’t passed along knowledge of the sort required to such a lesser being in a very long time. But she couldn’t predict what Janeway would make of the array, or the spores that had been placed there when it was created and ultimately taken by those that became the abominations. She assumed Janeway would perceive the abominations as a threat. Anything a humanoid could not understand was often classed as hostile. She would have preferred to keep Janeway and her ship far from the array until the last possible moment, but only a massive show of force would stop the captain at this point. She could contain the rest of the crew. She would kill them if necessary to protect the precious cargo contained within the abominations. Their value was incalculable. But she knew that Janeway would never agree to help her if she was responsible for the wholesale slaughter of the humanoids who were under the captain’s protection.
More troubling were her own mistakes. She had been away from the array for too long. Though it was not her primary responsibility, she and many others had made periodic visits to ensure the safety of the spores and to shed the inevitably wearying fabric of the one or many life-forms they mimicked while exploring this realm. Some had chosen to enter stasis rather than continue this cycle, content to leave the difficult work of solving the problem to those with more energy and enthusiasm for it. In the process they had added whatever new data they had collected to the array’s systems, evidence in the case they would ultimately make to the Others of the value of their choice.
When she had first encountered Voyager, her course of action had seemed obvious. The lesser beings were no match for her abilities. She would deceive them as long as necessary to protect the Key and its owner. Though she could not have anticipated the anomaly presented in the hybrid girl, she should have been more thorough in her analysis of the holographic doctor. He could have been her undoing. It was a careless mistake and she was unaccustomed to making such mistakes. Her solution would probably wreak havoc on all she had planned.
Perhaps when Voyager reached the array there would be time for her to renew herself. There were dozens of suites designed for this purpose, and she took a moment to anticipate the welcome release and reinvigoration that would accompany the reorganization of the subatomic fabric of her existence.
First, however, she must protect the Key. Janeway had already learned too much. The “sporocystian” label she had placed on it was predictably simplistic, and altogether too close to the truth. Phoebe knew full well that once the Key was in closer proximity to the abominations, the subspace dissonance field emanating from it would increase exponentially. Janeway would most certainly misunderstand this, and might go so far as to destroy it.
When she entered engineering she noted with relief that all the crewmen present were busy tending to their respective duties. Their heightened state of alarm and alert, given the strain on the ship resulting from its proximity to the singularity, made her all but invisible. Nonetheless, she encouraged them with a thought to pay no attention to her as she moved toward the Key still sitting tranquilly behind its forcefield.
Even in her true form she would not be able to deconstruct the Key in order to remove it. Its very nature made that impossible. Had this not been the case she would simply have enveloped it and taken it back to an uninhabited area of Monorha, similar to the field where it had rested undisturbed for so long. For now, she could only use the primitive technology at Voyager’s disposal. Standing before the diagnostic station, she pulled up the ship’s transporter controls and searched for an appropriate hiding place. It did not take her long to find the only location within the ship where the Key would go unnoticed for a time. Voyager’s warp core had been deactivated for several days, since they entered the Monorhan system. But the residual antimatter swirling within it would shield the Key temporarily from their sensors. As long as the warp drive was not active, it would pose no danger to the Key. Phoebe could think of no reason why the warp engines would be brought online in their present circumstances, and breathed a sigh of relief when a few moments later the Key dematerialized behind the forcefield and the transporter log, deleted as soon as it appeared, indicated that it now rested at the base of the warp core.
/> Her relief was short-lived. Within seconds of the transport, the ship careened at an impossible angle as klaxons began to wail.
Static burst across the main viewscreen, briefly distorting the image of the spinning vortex that threatened to crush Voyager and her crew.
Through the open channel between the bridge and engineering Janeway was conscious of a fierce debate raging as B’Elanna and her staff proposed and discarded one potential possibility after another. She heard Seven’s normally calm voice raised almost to the point of shrillness as she joined their efforts.
Strangely, the bulk of her mind, however, was calm. This was the difference between a Starfleet captain and the rest of the crew, no matter how experienced. In such a moment, as the rush of adrenaline caused most people’s bodies to kick into a hypersensitive yet often unproductive state, a good captain could find a safe harbor in the eye of the storm, where the idea that meant the difference between life and death was invariably to be found. Dipping into the well of experience, Janeway searched for the idea. A moment later, she had it.
“B’Elanna,” she shouted over the din as the rest of the bridge grew silent, “bring the warp core online.”
“But, Captain…” B’Elanna began.
“Just do it,” Janeway cut her off. “I’ll explain later.”
Janeway knew full well she might never get the chance to explain. But she also knew she was right. She had just spent an uncomfortable several hours trapped in a subspace fold of the Monorhan system. Several of the properties of that layer were similar to those contained within the singularity. Although it was impossible to create a stable warp field within the layer, it was possible to create an unstable one. The difficulty lay in determining their exit vector. They had considered but ultimately rejected this course of action a few days earlier, unwilling to run the risk of exiting the subspace layer at an indeterminate point. The singularity was probably the only other area of Monorhan space where a similar field could be created. She was counting on it.