by Mosaic
"Can we implement the metaphasic shielding program?" she asked. "I'm not sure. We've routed so much power to the shields we don't have much to support the metaphasic program."
"Get it from somewhere. We have to get closer to that star."
"Aye, Captain," he replied, and began working a console. "Borrowing some from the impulse reactors... environmental... transporters... let's give it a try. Establishing metaphasic program-now."
Almost immediately, there was relief from the heat. The metaphasic shielding program, an innovation implemented just before Voyager was commissioned, had been developed on the former flagship of Starfleet, the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. It had been added to the defensive systems of certain classes of starship, and was supposed to provide enough protection from heat and radiation that a ship could actually enter a star's inner corona. Because it was a new technology, there hadn't been the opportunity to accumulate much data on its reliability. But it was the only hope Janeway had now of providing enough protection to take her ship closer to the fiery star.
"Mr. Paris, move us closer. Thrusters only."
"Aye," said Paris, and they watched as the solar disc grew larger still. "I can't guarantee how long we'll be able to keep the metaphasic program stable," Chakotay warned. "It's draining our power reserves pretty rapidly."
"The Tokath can't survive this much longer," replied Janeway. "They'll have to let go and get away from the star, or be incinerated."
"Hull temperature at fourteen thousand degrees. Radiation levels at seventy rads per minute."
"Distance from the star, twelve hundred kilometers."
And still the creatures clung to the shields. Janeway stared at the viewscreen, amazed at their tenacity, and willing them to admit defeat and let go. Minutes passed, silence broken only by Rollins's sonorous announcements:
"Hull temperature fifteen thousand degrees. Radiation at seventy-five rads per minute."
Now, even with the metaphasic program in place, the temperature again began to rise inside the ship. Janeway felt herself growing light-headed. She knew that the stress of the last eight hours was taking its toll, and she took several deep breaths to get oxygen to her brain. In her mind's eye, the image of the closed door suddenly appeared, and she shook her head to clear it. Why was that bothersome illusion cropping up now? A wave of anxiety flooded her, and she felt a moment's panic that she was losing control. But gradually the apprehension faded, and she refocused her attention to the viewscreen.
"Captain, the metaphasic shielding is losing integrity," Chakotay reported. Janeway turned to him. Without that added buffer, they couldn't survive this close to the star. "Can you stabilize it?"
"I'm trying-but without power reserves it's not going to be easy."
"Hull temperature seventeen thousand degrees. Radiation levels at ninety rads. Cabin temperature sixty-two degrees."
Janeway wiped perspiration from her forehead. A decision was being forced on her: they had to move away from the star. A wave of frustration swept over her as she looked back at the viewscreen. The Tokath were beginning to drop off.
They all noticed it simultaneously. "It's working!" crowed Paris. Rollins chimed in with his sensor readings: "Life signs are disappearing from the shields, Captain."
One by one, the brown and green bodies fell away from their field of vision, revealing the flaming disk of the star more fully. The temperature on the bridge was now almost unbearable.
"Metaphasic shielding is failing, Captain," said Chakotay tersely. "We have to move away from that star."
"Just a minute more-Rollins, tell me when the shields are clear of the Tokath."
"We're there, Captain. No life signs showing on the shields."
"The metaphasic program is collapsing-was
"Lieutenant, get us out of here."
Paris worked, and Voyager veered away from the star. Janeway moved to her chair and sank gratefully into it, listening to damage reports as they filtered in.
"Shield integrity barely holding at thirteen percent-was "Damage to the aft port ventral-was
"Hull buckling on deck fourteen-was
"Initiating repairs to propulsion systems-was
"Sickbay reports twelve crewmen suffering from radiation sickness-was The well-trained crew was already springing into action, doing whatever was necessary to restore Voyager to operating condition. Soon repairs would be completed and they could-what? Be on their way? Abandon their comrades on the planet and hope they'd find a way to survive? Continue the journey home without the great and good friend Tuvok? Tuvok, whom she'd initially disliked so fiercely but had grown to love as a brother...
... and sweet Kes... and dear Neelix... Greta Kale... Nate LeFevre... over twenty people in all that they'd never see again... She realized Chakotay was seated next to her, addressing her. She turned to him.
"dis.. though the Kazon don't appear to be a danger anymore, we can't risk another attack by the Tokath. We wouldn't survive another trip into the star."
"What are you suggesting, Commander?"
Chakotay hesitated, knowing the seriousness of his recommendation. "I don't see any way we can return to the planet, Captain."
She looked away from him, instinctively wanting to deny his statement. Quickly she reviewed the options as she understood them, and quickly she realized there weren't any more. She might have found a way to defeat the Kazon, but that other, unexpected nemesis-an ancient, brilliantly evolved life-form-was apparently invincible.
She looked back at Chakotay, whose wise, patient eyes held hers, reflecting concern and empathy, and nodded once. It was over. She'd fought with every bit of her skill and ingenuity, and she'd lost. The defeat was palpable. A chill passed through her and she became light-headed again. Images of her crew, trapped on the planet-perhaps under attack from the Tokath?-swirled in her mind. She began to feel disconnected from the present, from what was happening directly in front of her. The bridge began to spin.
She felt as though she were encased in her own warp bubble; time seemed to freeze, the voices of the crew faded, and the bridge washed out into a pastiche of pale color-an abstract impression of sound and motion. She was moving toward the closed door, hand outstretched, determined to open it this time. No impediments, no obstacles-nothing would keep her from finding out what was behind that barrier. It must be cleaned out. Her heart pounded as she reached out, and an overwhelming sense of urgency cascaded through her. The door opened at her touch. surprisingly easily, after all. She took a breath and stepped through, ready to greet the clutter and mess she was sure lay there.
She was freezing. All around her was a white wilderness, bleak and unremitting, a milky landscape of snow and ice. She'd been here before, of course. She had crashed here with her father and Justin, who'd lost their lives beneath a cold, dark sea. She'd almost died, as well, her body temperature dangerously low before a rescue ship had picked up the automatic distress signal and beamed her aboard.
Why was she back here? Why did the closed door lead here? It was not a place she wanted to revisit. She tried to bring her focus back to the bridge, back to the here and now, but something refused to let her go. Images of the death planet lasered her mind with cruel clarity. She'd been buried in a snowbank... and then she looked up... stood, painfully... and saw an iceberg.
The iceberg. She'd stared at it for the longest time, confused, trying to decide if it were an iceberg. Why had that seemed so crucial? Why had there been doubt?
Now, in her memory, she was facing away from the iceberg, and she began to doubt that it was actually there. She had to turn and make sure it was-but she was frightened. Terrified, in fact. She was equally compelled to turn, and not to turn.
A dreadful minute passed as she was pulled on this rack, agonizing, paralyzed. On the one hand, what did it matter if she turned and looked at the iceberg? It would be there-and if it weren't, what did it matter? This was a memory, nothing more.
But it was a memory she'd kept behind a closed door for a lo
ng, long time. What did that mean? Why was the iceberg so potent an image? What gave it that power?
The only way to incapacitate it was to turn and look at it. Demystify it. Turn, Kathryn, turn...
Slowly, slowly, a millimeter at a time, she forced herself, in her mind's eye, to turn and look at the iceberg. The turn seemed to take forever, during which time she began to realize something would be vastly different when she completed the turn.
And so it was no great surprise when she looked into the middle of the dark sea-the frozen sea which had been cruelly penetrated by a flaming object from the heavensand saw no iceberg.
She saw the shape of an iceberg. An object jutting from the sea which might have resembled an iceberg if it were made of ice, if it had in fact broken from a glacier and floated, shards sticking out, through the alien sea. But of course no icebergs floated in the alien sea because it was frozen over, except for the dark gash which had been rent in it by the plummeting spaceship.
It was that ship whose fuselage now projected from the watery bed, nose up, violated and broken, looming out of the water like a huge and formidable iceberg. It was that ship in whose cabin she could clearly see her father and Justin, dazed and bloody, but alive.
She had immediately gone into action. Of course, she would-she was accustomed to pressure, to emergencies, to disasters. They were simply challenges, and Kathryn Janeway had always risen to the challenge. She had figured out how to multiply elevens and derive the distance formula, she had become a good tennis player and she'd saved Hobbes Johnson from drowning, she'd convinced Admiral Paris to mentor her and she'd saved Justin from death once before, at the hands of the Cardassians. She would not fail to save the two people she loved most in life. A console was flickering in the section of the cabin in which she'd ridden to the surface. There was still power, something was working. She flew to the controls and began entering commands; to her relief, they responded. She might be able to transport her father and Justin from the shell of the ship's cabin.
She focused intently on the console, quickly realizing she'd have to cobble together several circuits in order to have enough power for a site-to-site transport. To transport two people she'd need eight hundred megawatts. Their patterns would already be encoded within the ship's systems, of course, standard practice for the crew of any vessel.
She glanced over her shoulder to take a visual sighting of their positions, and made a mind-numbing discovery: the ship's fuselage was sinking. It was almost a meter lower in the sea than when she'd begun working, though the two men in the cockpit were still safely above the yawning pit of black water.
She turned back, working quickly. Two emergency microfusion generators were still on-line. They could be routed to the primary energizing coils. She brought the targeting scanners on-line and initiated a coordinates lock. This process would verify that the transporter system was functioning within operational standards, something she couldn't be sure of because of all the damage.
The scanners refused to lock on to the two figures in the ship's cockpit. Quickly checking the system, Kathryn understood why: the annular confinement beam was too unstable to hold two bodies in the spatial matrix within which the dematerialization process occurred. She had enough power to transport only one person. Not two. One.
Fear clutched at her. Though the air was bone-chilling, she didn't notice the cold. Adrenaline coursed through her body, her heart hammered, and her head pounded with every heartbeat. She looked back at the sinking ship, its two occupants slumped over their seats, but moving slightly, still alive. Justin, her fiancd, whom she loved and adored, and with whom she would spend the rest of her life. And her father, beloved Daddy, who had challenged and inspired her and made her what she was. How could she choose that one would live and the other die? Flash visions of life with Justin-knowing she had sacrificed her father to allow him to live-flooded her mind. How could she be happy with Justin after paying that price? Life without Justin, knowing she had sacrificed him to save her father, was equally intolerable. How could fate have presented her with this bitter dilemma?
She took a deep breath of the frigid air, trying to clear her mind and rise to this challenge. She would thumb her nose at fate. She wouldn't yield to this situation, but create the situation she wanted. She would transport both of them, somehow. There had to be a way. She turned to the console, mind racing with every fact and figure she could remember about this experimental ship. The phaser banks were recharged through a neodyne capacitor circuit. If the capacitors retained enough residual charge, she might be able to bring the annular confinement beam up to eight hundred megawatts-the minimum she'd need to transport both men. But the only way to find out was to tap into the capacitors. She'd have to try to engage the beam and see if it gained enough power. Rerouting through the phaser couplings, she drew a deep breath and activated the transporter circuit. She needed that eight hundred megawatts only long enough to make one transport. Just five seconds, to dematerialize her father and Justin, transfer their molecular patterns to the storage buffer, and rematerialize them. It had to be possible. Little by little, the beam gained power. It was working! Just seconds more, and she'd have them both safely on land, next to her. The emergency medical kit was in her section of the cabin; she could stabilize their injuries and keep them warm until a rescue ship found them. They were being tracked on Starfleet scanners and it shouldn't be too long before help arrived. The annular confinement beam power inched upward in maddening slow increments... five hundred eighty megawatts... six hundred ninety... seven hundred forty... Valuable seconds ticked by as Kathryn concentrated with all her intensity on the readings, willing them to reach the needed number. Seven hundred seventy-five... seven hundred ninety... and then finally, the beam power registered eight hundred megawatts. She could transport them both. Quickly, she initiated automatic pattern lock, bypassing the diagnostic process in order to save precious milliseconds, manually activated the annular confinement beam, and whirled to meet them. The ship's fuselage had disappeared, sunk beneath the inky waters of the alien sea. And her father and Justin were not materializing next to her. She turned and reentered the commands; surely she could pull them from beneath the water's surface. But though she went through the process time after time, endlessly, with every combination and permutation of commands, there was no response.
She had lost them both.
She stood, numbed, staring at the black pool of water, churning from the upheaval it had endured. It was a long time before she became aware of the pain in her broken leg, and when she did, she began to stamp that tortured leg repeatedly on the ground, trying to create an agony that would surmount the one she wasn't sure she could live with.
When that proved impossible, she'd simply found a way to bury that pain so deeply that she could go on. For over a decade, as she rose through the ranks of Starfleet, as her love for Mark deepened, as she became a captain and her friendship with the remarkable Tuvok flourished, as she took command of Voyager and was swept into their phenomenal adventure in the Delta Quadrant-for all that time, the bitter truth of her failure had lain enclosed in her memory, sealed like a plague bacillus which, if it were unleashed, might destroy her.
How then, to save herself now? The vile truth, bubbling up like acid, could never be banished again; it would eat at her every minute of every day, fouling her mind and corroding her spirit. No. No, that simply couldn't happen. Too many people depended on her, too many needed her strength, her indomitability. She mustn't fail them. The memory must be neutralized. This wasn't a conscious thought so much as a fully formed intuition that sprang from her mind like Athena from Zeus. There was only one way to strip it of its awful dominion: use it. After all, the locked door was open now, and the room could be swept clean. Bright light and fresh air could blow through it, chasing darkness and cobwebs. The dream, she was sure, would never come again. And so there must be a way to turn its pain to power.
She was on her feet without realizing it, moving toward the
conn, where Paris was still working to move them away from the star-how long had it been? It seemed a lifetime had passed since she'd moved into the mists of memory, but she became aware that only seconds had gone by; the crew was still engaged in assessing damage and assigning repair crews. "All stop, Mr. Paris," she said, and Tom's tousled head swung around to her in surprise.
"Captain?"
"We're not leaving the away team. We're going to go back and get them." Now Chakotay was approaching, brow furrowed in puzzlement and concern. "Do you have a plan, Captain?" he queried.
Janeway stared at him. No, no plan, just flinty determination. But sheer grit wouldn't solve their problem, wouldn't get them past the fiercely protective Tokath. How was that possible?
She felt every eye on her as the crew waited, trustingly, sure their captain had come up with an idea. Her mind seemed to flutter, agitated, starting to panic. She'd made an announcement that was foolhardy, made it with sheer bravado. Now she must back it up-but how? Suddenly she was four years old again, sitting in her father's study, trying to figure out the elevens. She had closed her eyes then and focused, visualizing the situation, and the answer had presented itself to her. The answer was always there, it just had to be accessed. She closed her eyes now and visualized the Tokath, reviewing what she knew about them. She imagined them as they must have been long ago, fierce protectors of a gentle people, sealing the planet from intruders and allowing them all to live in peace.