Star Trek - Voy - Mosaic

by Mosaic

  "War takes many tolls, Kathryn. I'm all too aware of the massive ones-slaughter, torture, misery, starvation..." He moved to sit next to her again. "Those things you can't ignore. I guess I didn't pay attention to some of the others. I was asked to help prevent war from befalling the entire Federation, and I never hesitated. I'm still trying." He looked solemnly at her, his gray eyes burrowing into her, those kind, loving eyes, urging her to listen, to believe him, to accept his absolute sincerity. "You and Phoebe, and your mother, paid the price. I simply wasn't there when you were growing up. I knew your mother had enough love to give you, and I thought-I hoped-that would be enough. But I swear to you, I thought of you every day, every hour, missing you so much it was like a physical pain.

  "And it seemed as if you were flourishing. You excelled at everything. We were more worried about Phoebe-she lacked direction, she wasn't motivated. I was relieved when she found she loved painting, because it gave some focus to her life. But you-you were never a concern."

  Kathryn couldn't ever remember her father talking to her like that, talking about personal things. She felt as though she had been unburdened of a huge tumor, one that had melted into the million tears that had flowed out of her body, leaving her weightless. She snuggled into her father's arms again, and they sat for another hour, talking about her childhood, about Phoebe, about Justin, and about whether she should take Admiral Paris' advice and switch her career track to command. Her father was strongly in favor of the idea because "the best of the best should be in command-and that's you, Goldenbird."

  Kathryn made popcorn and hot chocolate, and they ate bowl after bowl, washing it down with the velvety sweet liquid. And later that night, after they'd gone to bed, she woke, and with the house dark and quiet, her mother and father sound asleep, she crept downstairs to the study and curled up in the kneehole of his desk, where she sat contentedly until the sun rose.

  A month later, she, Justin, and her father were seated in the prototype ship Terra Nova as it entered the Tau Ceti system. It was an impressive vessel, small and lean, highly maneuverable-and heavily armed.

  It was Starfleet's necessary response to the mounting threat of war with Cardassia.

  Edward Janeway had been working on its design and construction at the Utopia Planitia shipyard for two and a half years, had test-flown it himself on numerous occasions, and was now overseeing its first long-range flight-a three-day journey to the Tau Ceti system, where it would undergo a series of experimental flights conducted in a variety of spatial environments. Lieutenant Justin Tighe was the pilot. They had spent the previous night at Mittern Station, enjoying a festive meal with Admiral Finnegan, whom Kathryn had first met years ago on Mars Colony. His red hair was now mostly gray, but his sense of humor was as keen as ever, and they had lingered over coffee, laughing and telling stories.

  Even Justin, not the most social of people, had relaxed and enjoyed himself, and told a funny story about growing up on a mining colony. She couldn't remember his ever having been able to laugh about his childhood, and to her it was proof that he was truly becoming comfortable with them. Her heart had warmed as she saw her father and Admiral Finnegan's response to him: they liked him and respected him-but most important of all, they enjoyed him.

  "On final approach to the Tau Ceti system, sir," she heard Justin say, jarring her out of her reverie.

  "Stand by to execute the warp thrusters maneuver," replied her father. The Terra Nova was designed to function in a variety of battle conditions. One of the innovations of the ship was warp thrusters, which provided quick bursts of speed without engaging full warp engines, allowing the ship to maneuver quickly out of dangerous circumstances, change position, and return to the fray from an unexpected direction. Computer simulations had originally indicated intractable stresses to the hull from the maneuver, but Admiral Janeway had eventually solved this and a host of other design problems.

  They spent an hour testing the new thrusters, which functioned perfectly. Kathryn enjoyed watching Justin at the controls, which he handled like an artist, seeming to become at one with the ship as he worked it through the complicated commands. Her love for him swelled in her like a living thing, enveloping her in a warmth of a sort she'd never known before. She had the giddy and irrational thought that she didn't deserve this much happiness. "Solar winds are kicking up, Lieutenant," her father said. "Let's give the port thrusters one more burst and then call it a day."

  "Aye, sir. It's been a good first run."

  What happened then occurred so quickly that, years later, she couldn't pinpoint exactly what the sequence of events was. All she could recall was that one moment she heard her father say "Wind shear-"and the next she was falling through space, slowly, drifting, vaguely aware of strange chilly breezes but not bothered by them. She felt as though she were in a hammock, swaying gently, floating toward the surface like a scrap of paper tossed on the winds but settling inevitably lower and lower. There was no sense of disaster, or even mishap. She felt mildly curious as to these puzzling circumstances, but not alarmed by them. The downward drift was so soothing that she almost wanted it to go on indefinitely. She sailed that way for a long time.

  Then she heard a rush of air and her body absorbed a massive impact; pain screamed through her bones and she thought they must all be broken. She lay stunned for a period of time she couldn't determine, waiting for the pain to subside, waiting for her vision to clear-she couldn't see. That fact finally registered in her mind. Only darkness surrounded her, a black, agony-filled universe that began and ended with her body, racking her, obliterating her efforts to quell the suffering. She tried, without success, to use her pain-reduction techniques, then finally resigned herself to the hurt.

  Time passed. She had no clear idea of how long, and knew she might have been passing in and out of consciousness. Eventually the pain ebbed and she began to feel tranquil again; a narcotizing effect seemed to have pervaded her brain-a natural secretion of endorphins, she thought instinctively-and she felt consciousness begin to slip away.

  Something was in her mouth. And her nose. She couldn't breathe, she was suffocating, that was why she was drifting off... strange, that she could acknowledge that she was dying, recognize the cause, and yet be unable-even unwilling-to do anything about it. She coughed. Felt a sudden intake of cold substance, and then choked, gasping, sucking air but ingesting instead whatever that cold substance was, wishing she could return to the cocoon of unconsciousness once more. Dying, she realized, wasn't frightening; living was infinitely more difficult.

  Without conscious will, she lifted her head. A realization invaded her mind: she had been lying facedown in a snowbank. White crystals clung to her face, and to her eyelashes, obscuring her vision. She dug at her eyes, brushing away snow and bits of ice, and suddenly she could see again. Parts of a small space ship were strewn around a vast, ice-ridden landscape; everything was white for as far as she could see, and the horizon blended almost indistinguishably into a pale gray sky, making her feel as if she were inside a vast white sphere. Snowy cliffs rose abruptly from the ground several kilometers beyond her, and grotesque white shapes on the ground, like abstract ice sculptures, testified to the irregularity of the terrain.

  She sat up and involuntarily cried out; bones were broken for certain. She moved gingerly, trying to get her bearings, and realized she was sitting on the rear empennage of the ship. A drogue system must have deployed, slowing her plunge to the surface, but even so if she hadn't landed in a soft snowbank she would never have survived.

  She had no idea what had brought her to this snowy wilderness. She could remember nothing that led up to her present existence, pain-racked and cold, on an unknown ice planet. How had she gotten here? What ship was now scattered in wreckage all around her? were there other people here, too? Other people. A vague alarm rose in her, but she couldn't identify it. Was she with others? If not, why would she have been flying alone? She wasn't a particularly accomplished pilot, it didn't seem likely that s
he'd be on a solo mission.

  But what was the mission, then? And if there were others, who were they? And where were they?

  Dizziness engulfed her and she lowered her head, trying to keep blood flowing to her brain. A vast confusion began to overtake her, and she couldn't think what she should do next. Lie down again, perhaps. It had felt so much better to be lying prone, in the pillow of snow and darkness, than to stare, bewildered, into this milky landscape. She started to put her head back onto the snow when another feature of the terrain caught her eye. An iceberg. A huge shard of jagged ice, jutting from... from... the ground? No, icebergs didn't form on land. There must be water there. Maybe it wasn't an iceberg. Maybe it was just another of the strange icy formations that dotted the surroundings... but no, no, it was definitely an iceberg. She was sure of that, but unclear why she was sure. She became intrigued, then obsessed, with this question. How did she know with such certitude that she was looking at an iceberg? She pondered what she knew about icebergs. They were floating masses of ice, broken from the end of a glacier or a polar ice sheet. They drifted according to the direction of sea current. They most assuredly required a huge body of water to support them. Ergo, there must be water here. Isolated bits of iceberg-information came climbing upward from memory like salmon. Only one-ninth of the mass of ice is seen above water. The Titanic was destroyed after impact with an iceberg. Many bergs are tilted, as the result of wave-cutting and melting that disturb their equilibrium. She glanced up at her berg, and saw it tilted at an angle. It was rapidly fulfilling the requirements of being what she was so sure it was. Nonetheless, it was increasingly important to her that she be absolutely, positively, unequivocally sure that she was looking at an iceberg. She forced herself to her feet, shuddering with the pain that knifed through her with each movement, standing shakily, light-headed. The horizon swam and undulated like silk billowing in the wind, and she knew she was about to faint; but this strange desperation to verify her observation superseded everything. Was this an iceberg?

  Gradually the world stopped fluctuating and she forced her eyes to focus on the area around the-the object she was trying to verify.

  And, indeed, there was water surrounding it. It protruded from a dark, glassy pool, which seemed to lap and roil around it in unusual agitation. Another strange thing: the pool was small. There was no sea here, no ocean, just the ring of agitated black water that bubbled around the tall shard of ice.

  Then, could the object in fact be an iceberg? Was it possible to designate it as such in the absence of an ocean? And if not, how should it be designated? She felt her mind move into a frenzied Socratic dialogue, feeding on itself and becoming ever more urgent. She must determine if there was, in fact, no ocean. Empirical evidence. Prove it for certain, one way or another.

  She took a step and very nearly collapsed. Something was broken-leg, ankle... something-but it couldn't be allowed to stop her. She would use the pain, turn it to her own ends, create from it a focusing lens that forced her to concentrate on her quest. With each agonizing step, her mind would fixate more intently on the task at hand, narrowing the beam of determination until it was an unstoppable laser point. And so, in that cruel way, she made her way forward. Several truths began to reveal themselves. The first validated her single-minded undertaking: there was a body of water present-probably a vast body of water-that was frozen over. The iceberg (yes, now definitely deserving that definition) jutted from its depths, but she could see surrounding it other holes in the ice sheet, holes and cracks, long, ragged gashes through which the dark liquid below was seeping, as though a giant had plunged a massive pick through the ice, over and over, cracking it open in an orgy of destruction, and the more she looked the more holes she saw, larger holes, huge holes, holes that were smoking as though the water were boiling from below, over some unseen flame.

  The second truth was that her mind wasn't working properly. More than her body had been injured; she must have sustained a concussion. What was this mad determination to prove an iceberg was an iceberg? She was losing rationality. She had to begin functioning, to treat her wounds and get shelter; she'd be dead from hypothermia before long if she simply stood and stared at her iceberg.

  She tried to reason through this strange conundrum in which she found herself. Something had broken through the ice sheet. That's why the water was turbulent, why the ice was so mutilated. Parts of the ship she'd been on must have rained down on a vulnerable section of the frozen sea and ripped it apart, superheated from flaming entry into the atmosphere, steaming the water into a huge, heaving cauldron. Parts of the ship she'd been on. What ship was it? She looked around her at the scattered debris; only one section, the empennage she'd been sitting on, was intact. She noted a console that still flickered, partially functional, but the rest of the rubble that was strewn about was in pieces smaller than a meter square.

  Where was the main cabin?

  Who was the pilot?

  What was the last thing she remembered before standing alone in this vast, ice-shrouded wilderness in front of a steaming vat of black water? Suddenly she wondered if the lionfish was in that water, parboiled now, flesh flaking off the bone, sightless eyes running like jelly. And then the third truth, like a hideous specter that looms in a nightmare, stood dancing before her, monstrous and obscene.

  Her father. Her husband-to-be. They were in the cabin of the ship. They were now entombed beneath that ravaged sheet of ice. Her mind instantly became lucid and crystalline. She knew with awful clarity what she must do next. She lifted her broken leg and began to stamp it on the ground beneath her, gently at first, then harder and harder, be- cause only the excruciating pain that she was inflicting on herself stood any chance of offsetting the third truth. Brutal physical torture could demand her full mind and keep it from acknowledging the third truth; and in that way, she kept the specter dancing in front of her, at a distance, unable to overwhelm her, until the pain obliterated her consciousness. As she sank to the ice, just before blacking out, she realized that her iceberg was gone. It had melted from the heat of the smoking water, disappearing forever to join Justin and her father in their dark and lonely grave.

  CHAPTER 19

  TRAKIS THE PHYSICIAN STARED CALMLY INTO THE EYES OF MADE Dut. He felt strangely composed, considering what would seem to be the seriousness of his situation. Maje Dut was not known to be magnanimous toward those who had failed him. But Trakis knew that the Maje was also somewhat deficient in intellect (like most Kazon, in his opinion), and he felt confident he could weather this latest mishap. The Maje, it was true, was furious, his forehead ridges dark and his eyes red-rimmed. He gestured toward the prisoner, lying motionless on the examination table. "You've accomplished nothing. We know no more than we did before you began your inept examination. And now you've butchered him."

  "It's you who's butchered him. You insisted that he be continually narcotized. I warned your minion that the drug might kill him, and now you see I was right."

  At least, thought Trakis, the prisoner hadn't suffered. He simply proceeded from oblivion to death-and what, after all, was the difference?-without even being aware of it. Of course, he had no idea if the being had anything approaching awareness, anyway. The Kazon's foolish insistence on narcotizing him had precluded any of the sophisticated testing that might have allowed Trakis to ascertain if the species was sentient. All he had was a catalogue of anatomical and physiological data-not particularly helpful for the Maje's purposes, he suspected. "Careful, Trabe. That tongue could be pulled from your head if it's not kept in check." The Maje glowered at him for a moment, but Trakis merely held the look with an even stare.

  Maje Dut circled the examination table, gazing at the body of the prisoner. "It was a miracle that we found any of these beings. We have no access to another. This was our one opportunity to study the species." He glanced back at Trakis. "It would seem your usefulness is at an end, physician." The implication was clear, but Trakis wasn't cowed. "You're wrong about that, Maje. I
can perform a necropsy. I'm likely to discover a great deal more from this specimen dead than I was able to alive."

  Maje Dut's eyes flickered with renewed interest. "Such as?"

  "Brain structure. Neural architecture. Synaptic integration. I can probably determine just how the Krett were able to control them."

  The Maje's arm snaked out and grabbed Trakis by the throat, holding him firmly. "You'd better do just that, Trabe. And quickly. Once the Federations are dispatched we must act quickly."

  "If you want me to do this with any efficiency, then keep the Control out of here."

  "Nimmet? He hasn't been empowered to harm you."

  "His presence is harmful. He's a nattering fool who constantly interrupts my thought processes with inane comments or superfluous commands. I could complete this project much faster without him."

  Maje Dut stared at him for a moment, and Trakis knew he was weighing the request. Trakis smiled ingenuously and spread his palms. "After all, Maje-where could I go?"

  Dut finally nodded curtly. "Very well. But I want hourly reports from you. And I expect those reports to be substantive."

  Trakis inclined his head in acquiescence. "I think you will be most surprised, Maje."