VOY - String Theory 2 - Fusion (c)

by Star Trek

  There was only one door left along this hall. At first he thought it had no design, but upon closer examination he saw that the same swirls and whirls covered the door in very faint hues of black.

  Raising his left hand this time, Chakotay opened the door and instinctively drew away. He stood at the brink of nothingness. The blackness before him had no depth or texture. It was simply absence.

  As he stepped away, his combadge chirped to life. It was one of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard.

  “Paris to Chakotay, do you read me?”

  “I’m here, Paris,” Chakotay said.

  “I’m a little less than two thousand meters from your position, Commander.”

  “You have the tricorder?” Chakotay asked.

  “Yes, sir. We found Tuvok. He and Harry have transported back to the ship. I have the pattern enhancers with me. Can you meet me halfway?”

  “Just tell me where to go, Lieutenant. There’s no way for me to get a sense of direction.”

  “You’re at a dead end, Commander,” Tom said.

  “You’re telling me,” Chakotay replied under his breath.

  “Head back down the corridor. Three hundred meters or so down you will see a three-way intersection. Turn to your left. And leave your comm channel open.”

  “Understood,” Chakotay replied, and began walking as quickly as he could away from the black room. “I tried to reach you earlier, Tom, but I couldn’t get a signal.”

  There was no response.

  “Tom? Tom?”

  Chakotay quickened his pace and continued to call for Paris. Once he had cleared the corridor of swirling doors he found the first intersection and turned toward the left, just as Tom had instructed. He was rewarded a few moments later by a burst of static over his combadge.

  “Chakotay?” Tom was calling.

  “I can hear you. There’s some kind of interference. It keeps cutting our signal,” Chakotay replied. “I’ve found the first intersection and taken the left turn.”

  “I can see your signal, Commander,” Tom replied. “And I think I’ve found a shortcut. There’s a door at the end of your corridor. It leads to a large room, probably a cargo hold of some kind. Go straight through, and I’ll meet you on the other side. I have a little farther to go than you, so wait for me.”

  “Understood, Tom. I can see the doorway now.”

  Unlike the other doors Chakotay had encountered, this one had an elaborate locking mechanism embedded in the wall to the right of the door. Chakotay tried a few random variations of picking the lock before he stepped back, resigned, and leveled his compression rifle at the door. It disintegrated in a wave of fire and sparks and Chakotay stepped gingerly over the bottom lip of the frame, entered the inky blackness of the room, and activated his wrist light.

  Playing the light along the right side of the room, he immediately saw a long, low bank of consoles. They were dead. No faint hum or dim light betrayed an operational status. There was a clear path before him and as he began to jog forward, he focused the light to his left and almost tripped over his own feet.

  He was staring at a Hirogen hunter. It took him a second to realize that, though the hunter glared back at him with dark penetrating eyes, he was standing behind a transparent barrier. Moving closer, Chakotay confirmed that the Hirogen was in some kind of stasis chamber. To the hunter’s right was another alien that Chakotay did not recognize, also in stasis. This creature was bipedal, but with two long necks that extended from its torso, one slightly taller than the other. Its skin was a dull shade of copper. Perched atop one neck was a bulging head covered with small spikes. The other was topped with a larger head consisting of small circular indentations layered with fine cilia.

  Chakotay retraced his steps but slowed his progress through the room. The stasis chambers, each containing a distinct alien species, ran the length of the room and at least twelve high. Chakotay was uneasily certain that there were probably more rows, but their placement exceeded the power of his wrist beacon. Continuing on, he recognized a Borg drone, a Talaxian female, an Illiderian, a Sikarian, a member of Species 8472, and a male Ocampa among countless others. It seemed that every alien race Voyager had encountered on their journey thus far through the Delta Quadrant, and many more that they had not, was represented in this strange and somewhat gruesome collection.

  After walking for over five minutes in this way, he stubbed the toe of his boot against a panel that was embedded in the floor. Stepping back to examine it, he found himself on the border of a circular construct that was at least twenty meters in diameter and raised a little less than one meter off the floor.

  Casting his beacon into the circle he saw suspended by invisible means a massive brownish sphere. It had been ripped open in several places, and from the direction of the tears that edged the gaping wounds it appeared that the rips had been directed from inside the sphere outward.

  The sphere was made up of a fine, thin substance, almost like paper, though he suspected that it was sturdier than it looked. As he cautiously made his way around the sphere, he found himself imagining the possible composition of whatever it was that had emerged from it. Each vision was more chilling than the next, and once he had passed it, he broke into a run, refusing to pause until he reached the far side of the massive chamber.

  He blew his way out of the room the same way he had entered and paused to catch his breath.

  “Chakotay to Paris,” he panted.

  “I’m right here, Commander,” Tom shouted, turning the corner at the far end of the hallway where Chakotay rested. For his part, Chakotay had never been so glad to see Tom Paris in his entire life.

  Janeway stood beside Naomi, trying to absorb her words.

  A monster in the mess hall?

  Bending close to the child, she said softly and reassuringly, “You’re safe now. You don’t have to worry.”

  “I know,” Naomi said, “but you have to believe me.”

  Janeway paused. “Can you tell me what it looked like?” she finally asked.

  An involuntary shudder coursed through Naomi as she closed her eyes and attempted the most accurate description she could muster.

  “It was like water when it moves. It had arms, like an octopus. It was all arms. And it was clear. I mean, I could see it, but I could also see through it.”

  Janeway’s head pounded. She had seen something similar, only once before.

  “Thank you for reporting this to me, Naomi,” Janeway said seriously. “Now I want you to try and get some rest.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Naomi nodded dutifully.

  Gesturing for Neelix and Ensign Wildman to resume their posts at Naomi’s bedside, Janeway entered the relative solitude of the Doctor’s office and turned his computer interface panel toward her. Her heart was in her throat as she pulled up the sensor logs from the mess hall at the time of the attack on Naomi. She was neither surprised nor relieved when the log showed that the only crewman present in the mess hall at that time was Phoebe Janeway.

  Though everything Janeway believed to be true strained against it, she was forced to accept the possibility that her sister might not be what she appeared. There was only one way to be sure.

  “Computer, activate the EMH,” she called.

  “Please state the nature…” the Doctor began. Upon seeing her, however, he said, “Oh, it’s you again.”

  “Yes,” Janeway retorted with as much patience as she could muster.

  “I realize that I am only a program designed to serve your needs, but don’t you think it’s a little rude to deactivate someone midsentence?”

  “I apologize,” Janeway managed through gritted teeth.

  The Doctor paused, a faint flicker of alarm crossing his face. Though he hadn’t known the captain long, he seemed to sense that he would be taking his subroutines in his hands if he chose to antagonize her further.

  “Well…thank you,” he said as genially as possible. “Do you require my assistance?”

&
nbsp; “I do. I want you to run a full neurological scan.”

  “Of whom?” he asked, reaching toward a standard medical tricorder situated on a shelf behind his desk.

  “Me,” she replied evenly.

  “You appear to be in good health,” the Doctor said as he began the scan. “Are there any troubling symptoms you would like to share with me?”

  “I believe that my memory may have been tampered with,” she replied.

  “Very well,” he said. “I assume there are records of previous engrammatic scans in your medical file.”

  He set the tricorder down and moved to his diagnostic panel to pull up images of the scan he had just completed and the last similar scan on record.

  Janeway peered at the results over his shoulder. Though she was not as well versed as the Doctor in engrammatic analysis, it was obvious that there were significant discrepancies between the two scans.

  “It appears your concerns are well grounded, Captain,” the Doctor said. “There are significant portions of your memory centers that have been displaced.”

  “What does that mean?” Janeway asked.

  “It means that your true memories, whatever they may be, are buried beneath a layer of artificially implanted memories. The good news is that if we can safely purge the implanted memories, you should recover your true memories almost instantly. If, for example…”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Janeway cut him off. “I want you to perform the same procedure on Mr. Neelix, Ensign Wildman, and Naomi.”

  A few tense minutes later, the scans were complete and the results were telling.

  “Mr. Neelix and Ensign Wildman have also had their memories tampered with; however, the young girl is unaffected,” the Doctor announced.

  “Can you hypothesize as to why?” Janeway asked.

  “Without more data as to the source of the altered engrams, it would be difficult,” the Doctor said simply. “There are many differences between your species which could account for…What is this?” the Doctor interrupted himself.

  “What?”

  “There is a subtle phase variation in the molecular structure of Naomi Wildman which she does not share with you, her mother, or Mr. Neelix. Can you account for this?”

  A theory was formulating in Janeway’s mind and the Doctor’s discovery crystallized it. “Almost two years ago, the day Naomi was born, in fact, our ship encountered a subspace scission and every particle of matter on board was duplicated, including the crew. The Naomi who was born on this ship did not survive, but the duplicate child did, and before the other ship was destroyed, she was brought on board.”

  The Doctor was nonplussed. “May I inquire again as to the nature of Voyager’s mission?” he asked. “You have no chief medical officer, you harbor duplicate crewmen and non-Starfleet personnel…”

  “As I said, Doctor, our circumstances are unique. We were pulled into the Delta Quadrant against our will almost four years ago. We lost a number of our senior officers and in the course of our journey…”

  “The Delta Quadrant!” the Doctor shouted.

  “We are doing everything we can to return home as soon as possible!” Janeway snapped.

  “And yet you had time to stop and investigate a subspace…what did you call it…scission?”

  “We didn’t so much stop as run right into…” the captain tried to interject as the Doctor continued.

  “Where are we now? Are we traveling at maximum warp on the shortest conceivable course back to the Alpha Quadrant?”

  Janeway was about to end the discussion by once again deactivating the EMH when B’Elanna and Ensign Maplethorpe entered sickbay, carrying a faint Seven of Nine between them.

  “Who is this woman?” the Doctor asked, as Seven was placed on the nearest biobed. “Is she another duplicate…or another alien we’ve picked up along the way?” After initiating a cursory scan he turned exasperated on the captain to say, “Are you aware that this woman has Borg implants?”

  Curiosity furrowed the space beneath B’Elanna’s cranial ridges and the bridge of her nose, but she had no time to ask any of her obvious questions before Janeway said, “Report.”

  “We found the Betasis, the Monorhan ship,” she said, “and Seven made contact with someone, or something inside of it.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to,” she replied.

  “Did you discover anything about the Key?” Janeway asked.

  “We’re still analyzing what we found. But we also discovered the rest of the transmission.” B’Elanna swallowed hard before she continued. “The Monorhans who came here fifty years ago were wiped out by some kind of parasite. Ten thousand died in a matter of days.”

  Janeway inhaled sharply.

  “Captain,” B’Elanna urged. “We have to get off this array.”

  “I agree,” Janeway nodded. “But we’re not leaving without Tuvok and the away team.”

  “They’re not back yet?”

  “No. And for the moment, I can’t spare you on analysis of the information you just gathered. We have another problem.”

  B’Elanna turned to the Doctor, who had begun treating Seven while muttering several uncharacteristic epithets.

  “What’s wrong with the Doctor?”

  “That’s not our Doctor. His program was intentionally sabotaged. I need you to get him back as soon as possible. That,” said Janeway, indicating the EMH who was treating Seven, “is one of the backup modules we created.”

  B’Elanna nodded, crossing to the EMH diagnostic control panel. As she began to pull up the necessary files, she asked, “Captain…was there a reason you removed the Key from its containment field?”

  Janeway shook her head.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then you should add another problem to our list,” B’Elanna said. “The Key is missing.”

  As Janeway struggled to maintain a sense of calm and dignified command in what was quickly disintegrating into total chaos, Rollins called out over the comm.

  “Sickbay, this is the bridge. Prepare to receive emergency transport from the array. Two officers incoming.”

  Everyone automatically moved to the edges of the room to clear as much space in the open center as the high-pitched wail of the transporter alerted Janeway to the imminent return of her away team. A split second later, Tuvok and Harry appeared before her, and Neelix immediately helped Ensign Kim heft Tuvok onto another available bed.

  “Doctor,” she called, “is Seven of Nine stable?”

  “For the moment,” he replied. “Several of her implants were overloaded with a series…”

  “Explain later,” Janeway barked. “You have a medical emergency here!”

  As the Doctor turned his exasperated attention toward his latest patient—saying just loud enough for Janeway to hear, “What kind of ship is this woman running?”—the captain caught her first glimpse of Tuvok and realized that their rescue had come not a moment too soon. She barely contained a gasp at the sight of Tuvok’s blood-crusted face and mangled body.

  Intense hope mingled with fear as she watched the Doctor raise the biobed’s arch over Tuvok’s body and begin his scans. It was frustrating but true that there was far less she could do for him than the Doctor at this moment. Realigning her priorities, she turned to Ensign Kim.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “We were separated. Tom went after Chakotay. Given his position, it could take as much as an hour for them to return, even with the pattern enhancers.”

  “Dammit,” Janeway spat.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Harry began.

  “Don’t apologize, Ensign,” Janeway said, more sharply than she had intended. “I need to know something else.”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Mr. Kim, do I have a sister?”

  This was obviously the last question Harry was expecting at such a moment, and it showed on his face.

  “Yes, Captain, I believe you do
.”

  But Janeway’s next question was even stranger.

  “And have you ever met her?”

  “No, Captain,” he replied. “Isn’t she on Earth?”

  Janeway cast a quick glance around sickbay. The Doctor was tending to Tuvok; Seven was already sitting up and looked better than she had when she entered. B’Elanna was working over the diagnostic panel that regulated the EMH, all observed by Neelix and Ensign Wildman, who were occupied trying to shield Naomi from the worst of the unsettling set of circumstances.

  “Mr. Neelix,” Janeway ordered, “I think we should move Naomi back to her quarters at once. I want a security team posted at her door, and you and Ensign Wildman should stay with her at all times. Above all, you are not to allow my sister to come anywhere near her.”

  “But, Captain,” Neelix began.

  “That’s an order, Neelix.”

  Neelix nodded. “Consider it done.”

  Crossing to Seven, she asked, “Are you able to return to duty?”

  Seven hopped off of the biobed. She was pale and slightly shaken, but said, “I am.”

  “Get down to engineering. I need you to find the Key.”

  “Yes, Captain, but…”

  “Yes, Seven?”

  “I believe we are in serious danger. We must evacuate the array as soon as possible.”

  Janeway nodded. “B’Elanna already gave me the broad strokes. One crisis at a time.”

  “Understood, Captain.”

  Seven obviously had a great deal of information to impart and Janeway hated to delay her report. But there was simply no time at the moment.

  Crossing to the Doctor’s office, Janeway spent a few moments at his control panel, opened one of the storage cabinets, and removed two vials of a dark gaseous substance.

  On her way out the door she turned to Harry saying, “Ensign, you’re with me.”

  Harry fell into step beside her as they strode quickly out of sickbay.