VOY - String Theory 2 - Fusion (c)

by Star Trek

  Massive pieces of shrapnel flew before the main viewscreen as B’Elanna nudged the impulse engines from one-quarter to one-half, silently becoming one with the ship as she gently did her best to find the ever-narrowing course to safety.

  She managed to avoid the event horizon by less than a hundred kilometers and for a heart-stopping second dropped the nose forty-five degrees, heading straight toward one of the only sections of the array that was still relatively intact.

  “Shields at forty percent,” Tuvok said.

  Chakotay saw it rushing toward them and silently cursed himself for waiting too long. Their rapidly disintegrating shields would never protect them from head-on impact.

  “B’Elanna?” he called shrilly.

  “Don’t worry,” B’Elanna said softly. At the same time she had been entering one slight course correction after another, the rest of her brain had been calculating trajectories for the array’s debris. Though she couldn’t have given Chakotay the odds to the decimal point, as Seven of Nine would no doubt have done in her place, she was fairly certain that in six out of ten possible permutations, the mass of metal they were soaring toward, which began spitting plasma as they approached, would not be in the same position in less than two seconds.

  “Come on,” she hissed under her breath.

  One of the struts that had extended from the array shot past them like a spear.

  One second.

  B’Elanna closed her eyes…and thought of Tom.

  They had spent four years as chief engineer and conn officer debating and testing the limits of Voyager’s flying capabilities. She wondered for a fraction of a second if he would have chosen the same course.

  It doesn’t matter now.

  As Voyager reached the last obstacle separating them from relatively open space, the cumulative gravitational pull of the singularity upon the remaining solid fragment of the array forced the section out of their path and B’Elanna punched the engines to full impulse.

  The main viewscreen was filled with calm star-filled space.

  As the ship hurled itself toward safety, bucking under the protests of the singularity’s residual gravitational field, Tuvok called up optical controls at his station and the entire bridge crew watched in awe as the swirling mass of particles that had been the stable sight of the singularity was lit by the final death throes of the exploding array. For a few seconds, it erupted into a vortex of orange and green fire.

  A final shock wave shot out, nudging the ship forward in its wake, but compared to the last few minutes, the impact was relatively mild.

  Chakotay found voice to say, “Good work, B’Elanna.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she replied.

  “Set a course for…” He paused as if honestly unsure where they were supposed to go next. “Set a course for the nearest border of the Monorhan system. We’ll stop there for repairs and begin a thorough search for the Homeward Bound,” he finally said.

  “Aye, sir,” B’Elanna replied, her heart sinking.

  They were headed for the exact coordinates where Tom and Harry should have reentered Monorhan space. B’Elanna didn’t know what they would find there. But she was certain it wouldn’t be the lost shuttle. There was only so much she was willing or able to confront right now. As much as she knew they needed to complete the search, some small part of her knew it was going to be fruitless.

  And once that happened…

  For the moment, she allowed herself to disconnect from these painful and unspeakable thoughts and with lead-tipped fingers entered the course as ordered.

  Captain Janeway had materialized on the transporter pad lying unconscious on her side. As protocol demanded, Clayton had immediately initiated an emergency site-to-site transport to get the captain to sickbay without wasting a second. Of course, in the brief moments between her successful retrieval of the captain and her input to activate the site-to-site transport, the entire transporter system had automatically locked down to prevent catastrophic cascade failure as emergency systems were rerouted to accommodate for the requirements of the primary shield, structural integrity, and inertial dampening systems.

  Clayton hadn’t wasted a moment in rushing to the captain’s side to check her for injuries that would make moving her unwise, and when she found no obvious cause for concern, she lifted the captain unceremoniously over her shoulder and carried her to sickbay.

  In the chaotic minutes that ensued, Clayton had struggled to keep her balance, moving as quickly as possible through the dimly lit corridors that separated the transporter room from the medical bay. By the time she reached the doors, her uniform was sticky with sweat and the muscles of her neck and right shoulder were screaming in protest, but she entered sickbay both proud and relieved that she had accomplished her task.

  “Computer,” she called, gently lowering the captain on the nearest biobed, “activate Emergency Medical Hologram.”

  At the same time, Crewman Dalby entered, supporting Ensign Davidson, who was holding his right arm, streaked with a nasty-looking plasma burn.

  “Unable to comply,” the computer informed them.

  “Where’s the Doctor?” Dalby asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clayton replied, hurrying to the holographic control panel and taking note of the Doctor’s mobile emitter sitting in its case on his desk.

  “Computer, was the Doctor’s program damaged?” she asked.

  “Negative,” the computer replied.

  Clayton wasn’t the holographic wizard that Lieutenant Torres was, but her first casual glance at the Doctor’s initiation file shed at least a little light on the computer’s cryptic response to her inquiry.

  “What is it, Grace?” Dalby asked, crossing to join her.

  “The Doctor’s program…” she stammered in disbelief. “It’s gone.”

  Acting Captain’s log

  Stardate 52019.1.

  It’s been twelve hours since we left the array. We’ve set a course for the border of Monorhan space where we will begin our search for Ensign Kim and Lieutenant Paris and are en route at full impulse. Repairs are already under way. Primary systems are functioning at eighty percent and shields have been fully restored.

  The subspace dissonance wave that impacted the ship just before we escaped the array caused a catastrophic failure in the ship’s holoemitters. All holographic programs running at the time, including the Doctor’s, were damaged. I’ve ordered Lieutenant Torres to reconstruct what she can of the Doctor’s program. Apparently even the backup modules we created were lost, and she believes it will be several days before we are able to initialize a replacement program…if ever.

  Captain Janeway was recovered from the array, but for the time being is…

  Chakotay paused. He couldn’t even bring himself to say it. He was relieved when a chiming at the door of the captain’s ready room made continuing his log unnecessary for the moment.

  “Come in,” he called.

  B’Elanna entered, pausing at attention before the captain’s desk. He rose to greet her, moving from the chair he could not yet find any comfortable position in and saying, “Report.” He crossed to the rail that separated the main area of the room from the low benches that lined one wall and ran his hand along its cool surface.

  “I think I know at least part of what happened to the Doctor,” she said.

  His head snapped up. She didn’t sound pleased by whatever she had discovered.

  “Just before we left the array, there was a shipwide blackout,” she began.

  “I remember,” he said.

  “For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, when the dissonance field hit the ship, all photonic energy in its path was pulled into the field. I assumed we simply suffered a brief power drain, but the only systems affected were those that utilize photonic energy.”

  “Which explains the loss of the lighting systems and the holographic emitters,” Chakotay said.

  “Right,” she nodded. “But in the case of the Doctor, the fie
ld’s impact was unique. All of the other holographic systems simply went offline. But the Doctor’s program was extracted. There isn’t a single subroutine remaining…and given the nature of the event, that shouldn’t have happened. None of the other holograms were deleted. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What do our most recent scans show about the singularity that Gremadia was orbiting?” Chakotay asked. “Is there anything that suggests…”

  But B’Elanna cut him off, saying simply, “It’s gone.”

  “What?” Chakotay asked in disbelief.

  “I can’t explain it. Within minutes of the array’s destruction, the singularity disappeared.”

  “That shouldn’t have happened, should it?”

  “I stopped asking that question soon after we entered this system,” B’Elanna replied wearily. “Of course it shouldn’t have happened. All I know is that it did. And now there’s nothing to scan in order to help me confirm my hypothesis about the Doctor’s disappearance.”

  Chakotay took this in, gazing out at the starfield that rested in an illusionary static position beyond the window.

  “Neelix,” he muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?” B’Elanna asked.

  “Neelix said something a few days ago…he mentioned in passing…one of those sort of impossible suggestions you just tend to write off because it’s Neelix.”

  B’Elanna smiled faintly. Obviously she too had been guilty of this on more than one occasion.

  “Naomi did a drawing of the Monorhan stars, and gave it to the captain,” he continued, crossing to the credenza. He found the drawing resting in a cleared space and made a mental note to replicate a frame for it. “Then she did another, for her mother, and Neelix got a little concerned because the drawings were different. She was using a view from the mess hall for her model, and at the time the area of space where we collapsed the Blue Eye was still visible. Neelix thought some of the stars were missing.”

  B’Elanna considered this.

  “What are you suggesting, Commander?” she asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” he replied. “There’s so much about this system that we don’t understand. We’ve theorized and hypothesized and all but decided that there is something artificial about Monorhan space, that it was probably constructed by the Nacene, and that somehow it is a boundary between what we consider ‘normal’ space and Exosia. I’m beginning to think that we need to know more about the exact nature of this artificial system. The microsingularity created when we destroyed the Blue Eye might be evidence of some kind of serious destabilization of the boundary.”

  “Because in normal space the Blue Eye would have simply collapsed,” B’Elanna interjected.

  “And not only did a singularity form instead, but we know it’s getting bigger,” Chakotay continued. “If Neelix was right, and for some reason photonic energy is being sucked through the instability in the boundary at the microsingularity…”

  “And if the captain did succeed in opening some kind of direct conduit between our space and Exosia…” B’Elanna picked up.

  “A similar effect was observed. For a brief moment all photonic energy present in the vicinity of the conduit might also have been pulled into Exosia,” he concluded.

  “I’ll do an astrometric scan,” B’Elanna said. “If the microsingularity is producing the same effect as the dissonance wave…it might…I don’t know…” She trailed off.

  “Give us a place to begin to get a better understanding of this system,” Chakotay suggested. “If the Doctor’s program was taken intact into Exosia, we might still be able to find him and get him back.”

  B’Elanna paused before asking, “Should we alter course and just begin our examination of the microsingularity now?”

  It was a painfully difficult choice. The captain had been unconscious since her return from the array. She was still in sickbay, where Seven of Nine was doing all she could to stabilize the captain’s condition, but every moment that went by without the Doctor was one more moment lost in the battle to save her. On the other hand, Voyager was also missing her best pilot and senior ops officer. No one—least of all B’Elanna, Chakotay realized—was anxious to see that priority dropped down a peg either.

  “Maintain course for now,” he replied. “But let me know what the sensors show. If there’s reason to alter course then, I’ll consider it.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Have the sensors picked up any evidence of further Nacene activity?” he asked.

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?” he offered.

  He looked back at the computer station on the desk. He needed to finish that log, but for the moment simply couldn’t face it.

  “If you need me, I’ll be in sickbay,” he said.

  B’Elanna nodded mutely as he left.

  When he arrived, he was somewhat surprised to see Tuvok standing beside the captain’s motionless form. Seven of Nine stood opposite him, indicating a reading on the neural monitor that suggested minimal brain activity.

  “Commander,” Seven greeted him, “there has been no change in the captain’s condition since my last report.”

  “Thank you, Seven,” he said, joining them. “I know you’re doing all you can.”

  “She is stable, for the moment. But she has suffered severe neurological damage. I have thoroughly studied the ship’s medical database and do not believe it will be possible to reverse her injuries. We can continue to artificially support her body’s systems indefinitely, but she is, to all intents and purposes, brain-dead.”

  Chakotay nodded, his jaw clenching involuntarily as his stomach churned.

  “Do you have anything to add, Tuvok?” he asked.

  “Only that while I did not wish to see the captain come to harm, I am certain that her sacrifice was not in vain.”

  Chakotay locked eyes with Tuvok. At some point, many, many years from now, he might find this thought comforting. But for the moment, he was struck with an intense irrational desire to wring the Vulcan’s neck.

  Tuvok did not miss the hostility flaring in Chakotay’s eyes, but was, of course, unaffected by it.

  “If the captain was successful in opening the conduit between our space and Exosia, the Monorhans who had been transformed aboard the array were able to pass through into the existence for which they were meant. They are now at peace.”

  “And how do you suppose the Nacene feel about that?” Chakotay demanded harshly.

  “I cannot speculate,” Tuvok replied. “They are a complex species, and I do not believe our limited understanding of their actions or their nature suggests any conclusive answers to that question at this time.”

  “Of course, we don’t know if the captain succeeded,” Chakotay said bitterly. “We may never know.”

  “That is not entirely true, Commander,” Tuvok contradicted him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Monorhans were not bound by the physical constraints of the array. They remained there by choice. Though most of them would surely have died in the destruction of the array, had even one of them survived, I believe I would still sense their presence.”

  “And I take it you don’t?” Chakotay asked.

  “No, Commander. I do not.”

  The tension flaring between them was dispersed when the doors slid open and Neelix entered, leading Naomi Wildman by the hand.

  “Commander,” Neelix said, “Naomi was wondering if she could speak to the captain?”

  Chakotay’s brow furrowed. He worried that this would be a traumatizing experience for a child.

  “She understands that the captain is resting,” Neelix added quickly, “but I didn’t think it would do any harm.”

  Chakotay shifted his gaze to the young girl’s solemn little face, then saw that she was holding a sheet of drawing paper in her free hand.

  “I’ve drawn a picture of one of my favorite stories for her,” Naomi said seriously. “E
ven if she can’t see it yet, I thought I could tell her about it, the way Neelix tells me every night when I fall asleep.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Naomi,” Chakotay replied.

  Forcing the hot rush of despair rising within his chest to a standstill, Chakotay watched silently as Seven set up a stool on level with the captain’s bed where Naomi could sit and describe her drawing to the captain. Seven then retreated to the Doctor’s office while Neelix moved to Naomi’s side and Tuvok remained standing his serene vigil opposite them as Naomi began her story.

  “This is the Great Forest,” Naomi said softly, holding the picture between them so that had Janeway been capable of opening her eyes Naomi’s drawing would have been the first thing she would have seen.

  “And in the middle of the forest is the Great Tree. The sun is always shining there…see…that’s the sun. And it’s always warm, but not too hot. When you get to the Great Tree you will always know because everyone you love will be there waiting for you. This is me, and my mother, and that’s Neelix…”

  Chakotay saw Neelix raise his hand to brush a tear from his eyes.

  Turning away, Chakotay allowed those forming in his eyes to fall freely.

  He didn’t know if it would ever be possible for Kathryn to return to those who loved and needed her.

  All he could do was ask the spirits that lived between the unnamed stars of the Delta Quadrant to guide her on the dim and rocky path that separated life from death.

  That…and wait.

  Please Kathryn, he silently prayed, find your way back to us.

  Epilogue

  The last thing the Doctor remembered was standing over the translucent remnants of the creature that had gestated within Tuvok and been transferred to Assylia. He had begun pondering the safest means of disposing of them only after he had released Tuvok from sickbay and added a brief subroutine to remind himself to consult with Tuvok once this latest crisis was past. He did not believe the ship’s disposal systems would be capable of recycling them. For all he knew, B’Elanna and Seven would want to study them. But for him they were simply in the way.