Each of the commanding officers nodded their understanding of her orders.
Turning to Farkas, Janeway went on: “Before you go, the Vesta is going to host a small tour of delegates, including the First Consul. I will lead the tour, and as soon as it’s done, my team will head over to the Galen and you’ll be on your way.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Farkas said.
“If there aren’t any further issues, we’re done here,” Janeway said, bringing the meeting to a close.
As Chakotay moved toward the door, Admiral Janeway pulled him aside. Pitching her voice low, she said, “The first time I asked you if you trusted our potential new allies, you said, ‘for the most part.’ Has something changed your mind?”
Chakotay considered these words carefully before responding. “It’s complicated. I don’t want to blame them for the actions of their ancestors: the way they raped those star systems, tearing entire planets apart. But experiencing it from the protectors’ point of view was painful. I have yet to hear anyone acknowledge the magnitude of that transgression. To a person, they accept it as what had to be done. They don’t regret it.”
“Which means they’d do it again,” Janeway said.
“In a heartbeat.” Chakotay nodded. “What I’ve seen of Mattings, thus far, I want to like. He’s a fascinating man, and I sense nothing from him but a genuine desire to do his best by his people. He’s one of the few who aren’t coming at us with a definite air of superiority. He’s seen our slipstream drive in use. He knows there’s a lot we aren’t sharing, and the longer we withhold, the less he’s going to trust us.”
“I feel the same about the presider. She cares about her people. I just don’t know how much power she has here,” Janeway said.
“The one thing I won’t do is allow my personal regard for any individual to blind me to the threat they pose as a civilization. We have speed and the element of surprise. They have numbers. I know what you want to achieve here, for the Federation. But we’re still a small group a long way from home. We take care of ourselves first.”
“Agreed,” Janeway said. “Thank you, Chakotay.”
Lieutenant Kim was waiting for his captain when he stepped outside the briefing room. As they made their way to the shuttlebay to return to Voyager, Kim asked, “Is there anything in particular you want me to focus on while I’m on the Lamont, Captain?”
“I’d love to know the specs on their defenses,” Chakotay said, “but don’t put yourself at risk trying to get them.”
“I’ve been talking to Lieutenant Conlon about that. She’s going to work with B’Elanna on enhancing our scans. We have logs of the battle between the Confederacy ships and the alien armada at the Gateway. Conlon has already started analyzing those.”
“Good,” Chakotay said.
“If you don’t object, I’d like to learn more about the ways the Confederacy uses the protectors.”
“That request doesn’t surprise me,” Chakotay said, nodding grimly. “We know that the Confederacy uses the protectors to reinforce the streams. Mattings hinted that, in addition to transport, they can use them as some sort of rudimentary cloaking device. He also told me that the protectors they use now are usually destroyed after a short time in use. I don’t think they’re like the ones we encountered. They aren’t active long enough to develop the memories or make the intuitive connections the proctors and sentries did.”
“Using them to cloak a ship involves a minor harmonic adjustment,” Kim said, “similar to the design for the cloaking matrix. That’s not my question. I asked Commander Fife to send me Demeter’s logs from the first few minutes they were in Confederacy space.”
“Why?”
“Commander O’Donnell said that the protectors that accompanied Demeter—the ones that saved us during that battle, and then somehow secured safe passage for Demeter—disintegrated just after they arrived in Confederacy space.”
“We knew they were damaged during the battle.”
“Yes, but once they stopped taking fire they should have been able to sustain whatever was left of them. Unless journeying through the Gateway damaged them further,” Kim mused.
“You have a theory?”
“Yes,” Kim said. “But I’m not even going to suggest it until I have more information.”
“Fair enough,” Chakotay said.
As they entered the shuttle, Counselor Cambridge had to squeeze past Kim and the captain to reach his seat in the rear. The shuttle was well on its way back to Voyager before the counselor tapped his combadge and said, “Cambridge to Lieutenant Kim.”
Kim reached automatically for his chest and was surprised to find it lacking the small metal insignia. Looking back he saw the counselor holding his combadge in his hand. With a wry smile he tossed it back to Kim. “What time did you get up this morning, Lieutenant?” Cambridge teased.
“I’m never going to live that down, am I?” Kim asked.
“No,” Chakotay said, shaking his head vigorously.
VOYAGER
As soon as Commander Glenn had returned to the Galen the previous evening, Lieutenant Reg Barclay had boarded a shuttle bound for Voyager. Upon his arrival, he had set to work freeing space and installing the programs required by the Doctor. He had also examined the results of the self-diagnostic he’d asked the Doctor to perform. It had shown no malfunctions. But as far as Barclay was concerned, the matter was far from settled.
The Doctor’s odd memory lapses might indicate any number of problems. Most likely he was looking at some minor degradation in the Doctor’s short-term memory buffers. That was easy enough to repair.
At the back of his mind, however, was the strange file he’d found during the Doctor’s last level-ten diagnostic, a message sent by the Doctor’s creator and aging doppelganger, Lewis Zimmerman, for Admiral Janeway’s eyes only.
Barclay didn’t want to know what that message said. If Zimmerman really wanted him to know, he would have told him in spite of Reg’s pleading not to be asked again to keep secrets from the Doctor. He had done that once and the results had been devastating. The Doctor had taken what was meant to be help as a betrayal, and in the process a powerful menace had been unleashed in the form of Meegan. Barclay wasn’t going down that road again.
But if there was really something wrong with the Doctor . . .
Barclay had completed the installation and returned to Galen. A few hours of light sleep populated by dreams of the Doctor vanishing before his eyes, piece by piece, brought him back to Voyager less than an hour before it was scheduled to depart on its new assignment.
He found the Doctor multitasking: a good sign. Every data screen the sickbay possessed was displaying different programs the Doctor had initiated. He moved among them like a conductor, analyzing, tweaking, and integrating the data faster than any human could. He did not even realize Barclay had entered until he placed himself between the Doctor and one of those screens.
“Hello,” the Doctor greeted him. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. The new systems are performing perfectly, Reg. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Have you been running continuously since I departed?”
“Of course,” the Doctor said.
“Great,” Barclay replied. “Keep doing what you’re doing. I just want to check a few things. We’ll be out of touch for several days and I don’t want your progress to be slowed by any bugs in the system.”
A faint smile lit the Doctor’s face. “That’s very considerate of you, Reg. Thank you.”
“My pleasure, Doctor.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie. The Doctor assumed the systems he was referring to were those Barclay had just installed. Instead, Barclay pulled up the master files of the Doctor’s matrix and initiated a level-six diagnostic, one that was specifically designed to analyze his memory centers.
Once the program had started to run, Barclay said, “What progress have you made thus far?” Part of the test included analysis of the integrity of the memory bu
ffers with their corresponding vocal subroutines. Barclay could test this no matter what subject the Doctor spoke about, and there was nothing the EMH enjoyed so much as sharing his experiences, however minute.
“You really want to know?” the Doctor asked.
Barclay had to be careful not to overplay his hand. For months he had been a lousy conversationalist, and both of them knew it. His focus had been singular and obsessive. The Doctor had taken him to task several times for it.
“I do,” Barclay said, searching his own memory for the words Counselor Troi might have suggested for such a moment. “Part of being a good friend is showing interest in another’s work. I have not been a good friend to you lately, Doctor. It’s time I started to correct that.”
The Doctor beamed at him. “You are a good friend, Reg. You always will be. And, thankfully, you are one of only a few individuals I can speak with openly about my current work.”
Barclay understood. In some ways, he was the Doctor’s doctor. As the fleet’s resident holographic specialist, he was authorized to access every file and subroutine in the Doctor’s program. The Doctor couldn’t hide anything from Reg, even if he’d wanted to. It was understood that for Barclay to perform this essential function, there could be no secrets between them. Data on the Doctor’s patients, though confidential, had to be retrievable by someone should the Doctor’s program fail. As a result, Barclay was already privy to many sensitive subjects, including the Doctor’s work on Seven’s catoms, his treatment of Axum, and the classified catomic plague.
“So . . . ?” Barclay prodded.
“I began my analysis with the records I was given of the first hundred plague victims on Coridan,” the Doctor began. “Of those hundred, forty-five were Starfleet officers who came in direct contact with Borg debris just prior to the Caeliar transformation.”
“How?” Barclay asked, as he checked the progress of the diagnostic and noted that several key memory centers were already showing slight variances from normal. They were within tolerances, but they had not appeared on any previous diagnostic Barclay had run since the fleet’s launch.
“There was a great deal of fighting above Coridan. Three Starfleet vessels engaged six Borg cubes. At least two of the cubes took heavy damage, and several large pieces of them, some with functioning drones, were found on the surface. Teams of our officers were dispatched to engage them.”
“I see,” Barclay said, not caring one bit.
“The interesting thing is that none of the victims died from a single or similar cause. Most suffered from treatable conditions, or genetic issues that were exacerbated by injuries they sustained. For reasons that are still unclear, these conditions led to massive systemic failures within hours. The range of their diagnoses made categorizing this ‘plague’ as such almost impossible, initially.”
“That sounds terrible,” Barclay said, hoping it did. A few scattered memory files showing variances had turned into hundreds in the time it had taken the Doctor to explain this much.
“It was,” the Doctor said, nodding. “Causes of death ranged from multiple massive aneurysms, heart failure, the sudden emergence of antibiotic- and antiviral-resistant infections, neurological collapse, complete autoimmune failure, toxic shock, and sepsis. It’s like something caused these people’s bodies to turn against them.”
When the Doctor paused for too long, Barclay looked up. The diagnostic was almost complete and the affected files had hit a thousand. The Doctor was staring at Barclay but in a way that suggested he wasn’t even seeing him.
“It’s a virus,” the Doctor said.
“Are you sure?”
“It has to be; a virus that somehow adapts to target each patient individually and attacks them wherever they are weakest. It must also be able to adjust its mode of transmission. Hundreds were affected following these first cases that had no direct interaction with Borg debris, including some of the first physicians to treat them. It became airborne, probably within hours, but could also spread through direct contact.”
“Can a virus do that?”
“Many viruses can mutate and alter the ways in which they spread. But most that kill this quickly don’t have time to do that,” the Doctor mused. “They’re too busy devouring their hosts.”
“Okay,” Barclay said, his mind running through all of the possible things that could account for the new variances in the Doctor’s memory centers. He quickly eliminated all of them but one.
“If a virus could somehow be imbued with catomic properties, the ability to customize its destructive potential to each host as soon as it entered their body the same way catoms take their input from surrounding cells and adapt to augment them, that would certainly explain what we’re seeing here,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve already reviewed the blood work from each of the first hundred patients and none of the particles show catomic tags.”
“So it’s not catomic?” Barclay asked.
“I don’t see how it could be. But nothing else suits the evidence so perfectly,” the Doctor replied.
“Doctor?” Barclay said.
“Hmmm . . . ?”
“Doctor?”
The Doctor fixed his gaze on Barclay. “Sorry, Reg. I was just thinking.”
“When was the last time you spoke to Doctor Z?”
“It was . . .” the Doctor began, but he paused in midthought. Barclay watched in horror as one of the slight variances in a memory file only recently shifted from short term to long term increased by a factor of twenty. Looking again at the Doctor’s face, Barclay noted a blankness relax his features, quickly replaced by his more normal alert presentation.
“It was just before the fleet launched,” the Doctor said, and he seemed unaware of the length of time it had taken him to find this response.
Looking again at the diagnostic, Barclay noted that the file in question had now returned to a more or less “normal” variance range.
For better and worse, Barclay had the answer he had come here seeking. The Doctor had just lied to him. And he didn’t seem to realize he had done it.
“Why do you ask?” the Doctor inquired.
“I was just curious,” Barclay said as he quickly copied the diagnostic results to his padd and deleted them from the sickbay’s files.
“Are you finished?” the Doctor asked.
“Everything looks good for now,” Barclay said, hating himself for betraying the Doctor’s trust again so soon after swearing not to. “I don’t see any system integration errors.”
“Good.”
“I have to get back,” Barclay said, relieved to be in the land of truth again.
“Take care of yourself while I’m away,” the Doctor said.
“I promise,” Barclay said.
“I’m sure the next time I see you, I’ll have made considerable progress.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Barclay departed, knowing that Doctor Zimmerman was the only person in the universe other than himself who could have intentionally altered the Doctor’s memory centers. The file sent to Admiral Janeway suggested it had happened recently, as Admiral Janeway had been presumed dead until a few months before and there would have been no reason for Zimmerman to encode a message to a dead admiral.
But what exactly had Zimmerman done and why? Had he created some new subroutine that gave the Doctor more autonomy over his ethical subroutines? Or had he discovered some degradation in his memory files that had eluded Barclay’s standard tests?
Barclay had told the admiral the last time they spoke that he didn’t want to know what was in that file unless the Doctor’s program was seriously compromised. Thus far, that wasn’t the case. The variances were within tolerable limits and were not a serious threat to the Doctor’s program.
The engineer just wished he knew how soon that might change.
VESTA
“First Consul Dreeg,” Admiral Janeway greeted him, “a pleasure to see you again.”
“And you, Admiral Janeway,” Dr
eeg said cordially as the members of his party stared openmouthed at the shuttlebay around them. Their transport ship was smaller than the two runabouts stored in the Vesta’s auxiliary bay. It was hardly the largest bay the Vesta had, but it was clearly imposing to their Confederacy guests. A few security officers strolled along the catwalks above, monitoring the Confederacy representatives while giving the appearance of attending to other, nonrelated duties.
Dreeg turned and cleared his throat. All but one of his people promptly shut their mouths and focused on him. Only one, a tall male humanoid in a reserved gray suit with a skull nearly twice the size of the Djinari and Leodts, continued to study his surroundings, unabashed.
“Bridge to Admiral Janeway,” the voice of Commander Roach, Vesta’s first officer, said over the comm.
“Go ahead.”
“A second Confederacy shuttle is on approach. I have cleared them to land in bay three.”
“Acknowledged,” Janeway said, turning to her aide.
“We were advised that only one shuttle would be arriving this morning,” Decan said.
“You were not misinformed,” Dreeg said quickly. “If you will excuse me for a moment?” he asked.
“Of course,” Janeway said. Turning to Farkas, she added, “Would you please greet those arriving in bay three?”
“Right away, Admiral,” Farkas replied. Counselor Cambridge stepped closer to Janeway as she departed. Lieutenants Lasren and Psilakis continued to monitor the arrivals from a greater distance.
“What species is that?” Cambridge asked softly, looking toward the man in gray.
“I don’t know,” Janeway replied.
“He’s studying the bay like he’s trying to memorize its design.”
“For all we know, he is,” Janeway said with a shrug.
Dreeg strode quickly back down his shuttle’s ramp. He appeared agitated. He opened his mouth to address Janeway but promptly closed it as Captain Farkas reentered the shuttlebay. Presider Cin was by her side, inclining her head graciously to speak with the much shorter Farkas. Settling his face again into composed lines, Dreeg said, “As you can see, our presider has chosen to make an unexpected gift of her presence to us.”
Star Trek: Voyager - 043 - Acts of Contrition Page 12