The only exception to the redundancy rule is the warp core; but I am not overly concerned about that. It is of a focused singularity design similar in concept to that used by the Romulans, if memory serves. Of course memory might not serve, in this case: I have no comparative engineering database to complement my database on comparative physiology. I am relying on technical information gleaned from casual conversations six hundred years ago. Be that as it may, the Vascan designers assured me that it was as self-sustaining as a star and should operate without need of maintenance for a thousand years.
While the assumption implicit in that assurance—that stars require periodic maintenance each millennium—might cause one to question their scientific acumen, experience has taught me to trust Vascan assessments of matters technical. With a small allowance for hyperbole, of course.
A millennium to the Vascans and Kyrians, I should point out, is equivalent to zero point eight two millennia in Federation Standard; but eight hundred and twenty years should be sufficient for my purposes. It is difficult to explain how heartening the discovery of that difference in measurement was to me. The knowledge that I was less than six hundred years behind Voyager rather than the seven hundred I’d first believed made me feel somehow closer to home.
Of course there is no correlation between Kyrian chronology and Federation Standard time periods; it would have been remarkable if there were. While living among them, I had made the conversions myself, which, while not difficult, was tiresome. As a result, I did request of the designers that my vessel employ Federation Standard Time. Though it was clear they regarded this melding of traditional Earth periods and the Vulcan need to divide everything by ten needlessly complex, they indulged my whim.
Having been a demon in their mythology for some seven centuries has its uses.
In another concession they made to my nature—no, that’s not fair. It was a tribute, and one which I appreciate deeply. The Vascan engineers have provided me with a sickbay that fills over onethird of my ship’s habitable volume.
That’s more impressive than it might seem at first; given my vessel’s diminutive size, one-third of its volume occupies significantly less space than my sickbay aboard Voyager does. Did. However, the Vascans are masters of miniaturization. The Mobile Medical Unit alone—which I think of as “sickbay ‡ la carte”—houses a complete diagnostic facility with its own medical computer and independent communications system in a self-propelled cabinet no larger than a standard biobed. Though a Galaxy-class starship can boast a larger facility, it is no more complete than mine.
This ship is much faster than Voyager, which is to be expected. At the time of Voyager’s visit to their twin system, the Vascans and Kyrians were about one hundred standard years behind the Federation in technology—though it is always inadvisable to compare such disparate cultures directly—and they’ve had five hundred and seventy-four standard years in which to develop since. Given the fundamental differences in warp technology (again my lack of engineering database limits my understanding to hearsay), the Vascan warp sixteen at which I habitually cruise seems to roughly coincide with the Federation’s warp nine.
Were I to simply set a course for the Alpha Quadrant and proceed at maximum warp, my journey would take a fraction—albeit a large one—of the time Voyager’s did. However, there would be no point in my rushing toward what I still think of as home if I were to pass some world where the people I knew had settled down. Or the point in space where they’d met an untimely end.
Though they did not file a flight plan when they left, I know generally—which is to say as well as anyone aboard Voyager—the route Captain Janeway and the others felt most likely to get us safely to Federation space. My own course is to follow that path, while complex Vascan sensors—far more discerning than anything the Federation had six centuries ago—probe subtly for evidence of Voyager’s passage. I do make occasional side trips to systems which seem likely—or would have seemed likely to Voyager’s sensors—to contain resources they would need to continue their trek homeward. I can think of several times in the early years when Vascan sensors would have saved us from unnecessary and dangerous forays.
At the moment these sensors, sensitive as they are, do me no good: I turned them off before I left to meet my fate. Until I have some idea why, I’m loath to do anything that might draw the attention of whomever it is I’m hiding from. In the meantime, if I want to know what’s going on I have to look out the window. Which is how I discovered my ship—or at least the part of it I can see—is disguised as a boulder floating in the midst of an asteroid cluster. Rather clever use of static electricity to attach dust, actually.
I could, if I’d wished, travel as a stable program secured within a crystal matrix, but I enjoy being a hologram. Though my projected fields give only the illusion of physical existence, they give me a definite sense of place; of self. There is a profound satisfaction in seeing through my own eyes, hearing with my own ears, and feeling with my own skin, no matter how insubstantial these may be, instead of streaming the sensory data directly into my mind.
The same principle underlies my library of Vascan and Kyrian literature. I could simply have added them directly to my database, but instead choose to read each volume individually from a padd, as a human would. Early on I did replicate a few as physical books, with covers of cured animal hide and pages of processed vegetable fibers, but I found that a bit excessive.
In the same way also, the ship’s cabin maintains a pressurized atmosphere—at the moment pure nitrogen at eight degrees Centigrade—to carry sound waves. I enjoy the sound of my own voice and I find listening to it as I dictate this log entry particularly comforting.
27/01/02
With an unknown threat that may or may not have destroyed my mobile emitter and which may or may not still be in the area, continuing to play opossum seems like a reasonable tactic for shortterm survival while I figure out what to do for the long term.
In the meantime, I have run a complete diagnostic on every system within my vessel, as well as making a visual inventory of all supplies and resources. Everything is in perfect working order and/or exactly where it should be. I even took the precaution of replicating a mobile emitter to replace the one lost or destroyed.
In my initial entry I alluded to the difficulty of using my vessel’s name and promised to explain later. Now would seem to be as good a “later” as any, and the explanation will help pass the time.
The Vascans had intended to christen the vessel they were building to my specifications Voyager or, after I first expressed discomfort at that, Voyager II. When I made clear that no variation of “Voyager”—whether “II,” “B,” “beth,” “beta,” or “Jr.”—would be acceptable, the Kyrians had suggested the name “Voyager” in their common language. (By “common” I of course mean the language their two cultures share, not an opinion of its worth.) Unfortunately—and I did not explain this in declining their offer—phonetically the word “voyager” in their language bears an uncanny resemblance to a mildly rude scatological phrase in Federation Standard.
From that point naming my ship became something of a popular cause on both their worlds, despite my repeated assurances that they need not bother. Wagering on which suggested name I would select for my ship was widespread and, I was told, quite intense.
Suggestions came from all quarters—some noble, some quixotic, some poetic, and a few ribald. There was the veritable thesaurus of “voyager” synonyms, of course, such as “wanderer,” “sojourner,” and “trekker.” The names of my crewmates enjoyed a brief vogue as well, but somehow I could not imagine myself traveling through space aboard the Janeway or the Tuvok; and any ship named Tom Paris would be likely to get into more trouble than I was willing to handle.
The fact was, having grown comfortable to life and personal identity with no name of my own beyond “Doctor,” I felt no real need to name my vessel. Yet the cultural pride of these people I’d come to care about—not to mention scor
es of gambling establishments—required me to chose a name.
Unremarkably—perhaps inevitably—“Name the Doctor’s ship” became a popular assignment for posters and essays with teachers of small children. It was these schoolchildren, with the logic of the very young, who solved my dilemma. The great majority of them on both worlds concluded that if I am called simply “the Doctor” my vessel should be called “the Doctor’s ship.” I concurred, not surprisingly, and—since their own children had suggested it—so did a great many adults. Thus it was that amid much somber fanfare—and rumors of teachers made wealthy by betting on their students—I set off in The Doctor’s Ship to follow the path of Voyager on its journey to the Alpha Quadrant.
Secreted unindexed within my library of Vascan and Kyrian literature I’ve discovered a copy of the Voyager memoir I wrote during my first year among them. I hardly think it qualifies as true literature and suspect it was included as a compliment to me.
In rereading it I must confess it is somewhat romanticized; at times drifting a little too far toward the sentimental. In fact, some passages can only be described as mawkish. However, taken in the context of debunking over five Standard centuries of vilifying myth, I think imbuing our achievements aboard Voyager with a bit of heroic gloss is certainly salutary. Or at least permissible.
Yet whatever the literary merit, my speculations from those early days still have the power to hold my imagination. What sort of person did Naomi Wildman grow to be? Where has her metamorphosis carried Kes? What did Seven of Nine and the Federation make of each other?
Speaking of Seven of Nine: the Borg were as much a myth of Vascan and Kyrian culture as Voyager had been. They had heard tales, but no one of either culture had had any contact with the Borg or with any other race which had.
Imagine my surprise, then, in discovering a Borg cube floating in deep space less than a dozen light-years from their home system.
The cube was completely without power: no light, no gravimetrics, not even the minimum of life-support. If the high concentration of refined metals had not triggered my sensor alerts I would have passed within thirty thousand kilometers of it without being aware of its existence. There was no atmosphere within the cube, but it was not open to space. With the interior temperatures near absolute zero, the frozen atmospheric elements coated every surface with a patina of crystal. I imagined I could hear them crunching beneath my feet as I walked, holograms being unaffected by the lack of gravity, but of course there was no real sound.
Many of the surfaces the crystals clung to belonged to Borg drones frozen in their regeneration chambers. Every niche was occupied.
The warp core, in fact all of the cube’s mechanical functions, seemed undamaged to my untrained eye and to have simply been shut down. Though curious, I had no intention of accessing the cube’s computer core to find out what had happened. The thought of becoming a collective of one holds no attraction for me.
That was the first of seventy-two dead cubes—six of them in tight formation—that I’ve encountered over the last twenty-six years. Given the extremely tiny percentage of the galaxy I’ve observed to date, it may be a bit premature to extrapolate from seventy-two cubes that the entire Borg collective has ceased to exist; but I do find myself hoping.
I never pass a cube without taking the time to walk through it and examine every drone. So far I have found no humans. So far I have found no one I know.
27/01/03
While sitting alone blind and deaf is conducive to thoughtful introspection, it does not provide me with the information I need to choose a course of action. Despite my earlier resolve to wait, I have elected to activate the passive sensors now.
The passive sensors are theoretically undetectable since they simply note the energy radiated by other sources and do nothing in themselves that would attract attention. The human senses—and my holographic analogues of the human senses—are passive sensors. At the moment, my ship’s passive sensors reveal no energy sources in the immediate area. I would be more reassured by this if I did not know that my own vessel’s core is so well shielded as to be invisible to passive scans.
It is with some trepidation that I consider enabling the active sensors. Though these would end my blindness, they would also vividly advertise my presence to anyone who might be looking for me. I could scan selectively; one sensor would be significantly less noticeable than the entire array. Less noticeable is still noticeable, however, and the wrong sort of scan would be disastrous. A scan for refined metals would completely miss a Tholian vessel of crystal and ceramic, for example, creating a false sense of security. And what good is knowing there are no biological life-forms in the area if it alerts hostile energy-based life-forms to my presence?
There’s nothing for it but to do a full sensor sweep. As a precaution I’ve brought the warp engines up to as near readiness as I can without glowing like a thermal beacon. It will take twelve seconds for my ship to be able to maneuver if and when I give the command. Assuming I recognize the threat in time.
Here goes.
27/01/06
My position is now some sixteen light-years beyond the sphere of the Nouar and its attendant asteroids on my way toward the Alpha Quadrant and home. I have stopped my ship in space as empty as any I’ve found so that I may safely shut down the main computers to make this entry. I can’t help feeling as though my precautions are perhaps overzealous; but I would rather feel foolish about jumping at shadows than cease to feel anything at all.
It is extremely difficult for me to make this entry; the last twenty-four hours have been very disturbing for me at a fundamental level. All of which sounds rather melodramatic, I know, but I am quite sincere.
My first full sensor sweep of the asteroid cluster three days ago had revealed a mottled cloud of pink-tinged orange in all directions at a range of zero point zero. It took the computer four interminable seconds to realize the layer of dust camouflaging the sensor array was eighty-nine percent hovinga iridium: a naturally occurring mineral that is impervious to sensor scans. A routine degaussing cleared the sensor arrays—incidentally making them clearly visible to the casual observer—and subsequent sweeps proved more informative.
Though the dust and gravel concealing my vessel had the highest concentration of the sensor-blinding mineral, all of the asteroids contained at least some hovinga iridium. They also contained a high percentage of heavy nickel and other metals.
Almost directly behind my vessel was what appeared to be a fragment of the planetary core from which this asteroid cluster had been struck: an irregular boulder with a mean diameter of just over thirty seven kilometers. An anomaly in its apparent mass triggered a finer scan by the Vascan sensors which revealed that is was in fact a hollow shell. From the arc section visible to deep scan, the interior void was approximately twenty-four kilometers in diameter; a volume of just over seventy-two hundred cubic kilometers too precisely spherical to be a natural formation.
Nor was the term “void” quite accurate. The sensors seemed to indicate—their readings distorted by the iridium—that a radiant power source hung within the center of the sphere; most likely a stable singularity. I could only imagine that such a singularity would have uniformly illuminated the entire interior surface like a bright, though very tiny, sun.
The computer concurred, tentatively identifying the hollowed asteroid as a miniature Dyson sphere.
Where there was sunlight, I reasoned, there was life. I began a series of tests, recalibrating the sensors slightly, then sweeping the interior curve of the sphere. I was seeking a combination of sensor waves that would penetrate the hovinga iridium well enough to determine if the hollow world was indeed inhabited.
I had completed my third inconclusive probe and was adjusting the sensor parameters in a direction which seemed promising when the entire computer core ceased external functions and began a full system diagnostic. Apparently some combination of my unusual modification commands had triggered the malfunction alert at a bas
ic level.
Downloaded as I was into my mobile emitter, I was unaffected by the computer core’s shutdown beyond being unable to access my library, which—beyond making the wait seem longer—was not immediately important.
Resigned to an uneventful hour’s wait, I was composing a personal log entry when a series of sharp beeps disturbed me. It was only when the pattern repeated that I realized the Mobile Medical Unit’s communicator was heralding an incoming message.
My first thought as I approached the MMU alcove at the rear of sickbay was that my question about the sphere being inhabited had been answered. My second thought was to wonder why the Mobile Medical Unit’s communications grid was active. Perhaps some safety protocol activated this isolated system when primary communications functions were in diagnostic mode.
The MMU’s comm panel told me whoever was contacting me used lasers to carry both visual and audio signals. This emboldened me somewhat for, while effective over short ranges, laser would not be the first choice of someone possessing subspace communications. At least technologically, whoever was trying to reach me could not match the capabilities of my vessel.
First contact carries with it the responsibility of making the right first impression, of course. For a moment I was torn between standing or sitting, but thought that sitting might appear too imperious while standing casually alert would convey the proper attitude. I decided against altering my uniform to full dress. Routing incoming visual signals to the larger medical display, I activated my own comm system in response.
As the image of my caller formed, a wave of vertigo passed through me, forcing me to grip the edge of the console in an effort to stabilize my holographic coordinates. I was abstractly aware of my program shutting down secondary tactile and motility functions as I sank numbly into the operator’s chair.
Strange New Worlds IV Page 24