Star Trek: Voyager - 041 - The Eternal Tide Read online

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Interlude

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Interlude

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Heather Jarman . . .

  This is long overdue.

  What am I now that I was then?

  May memory restore again and again

  The smallest color of the smallest day:

  Time is the school in which we learn,

  Time is the fire in which we burn.

  —Delmore Schwartz

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  Portions of The Eternal Tide take place outside normal time as we experience it. The rest takes place immediately following the events of Star Trek Voyager: Children of the Storm, August and September 2381.

  Just go with it.

  Prologue

  Q CONTINUUM

  “Her death is a fixed point in time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Q!”

  “Spare me the attitude. I’m just telling you what I know.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “I know.”

  “No individual human’s death can possibly be a fixed point in time.”

  “Not usually.”

  “Q was very specific about that in his Beyond Temporal Mechanics course.”

  “I still can’t believe you stuck it out in that sanctimonious windbag’s course for the entire term. Did you even get a passing grade?”

  “I passed with distinction, thank you very much. And those of us who weren’t the first and only child born of two Q and created specifically to save the Continuum didn’t have much of a choice in our course requirements.”

  “You were born of two Q.”

  “They had given up being Q before they had me.”

  “A minor point, I would have thought, considering how you turned out.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t ask my adviser when I found out you didn’t even have to audit Beyond Temporal Mechanics. Q insisted that my dubious parentage actually made it mandatory that I complete several prerequisites most Q don’t even have to endure.”

  “Poor Q.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your name.”

  “The rest of them can call me what they like but when it’s just you and me . . .”

  “Fine. Poor Amanda.”

  “Thank you, Junior.”

  “Don’t ever . . . oh, never mind. I thought you would understand, but obviously . . .”

  “No, I’m really curious. Her death is a fixed point in time. Meaning what?”

  “In every conceivable timeline where she exists, she dies at roughly the same moment.”

  “Under the same circumstances?”

  “For the most part.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “I know. There’s actually a timeline where the evolved cube never makes it to the Alpha Quadrant and in that one she slips getting out of her bathtub and accidentally drowns.”

  “Now you’re just teasing me.”

  “I’m not. It’s like the multiverse has it in for her in a way I was always taught wasn’t possible.”

  “Fixed points in time are big things, not small ones. They don’t correlate to any individual mortal being’s existence. All of the major worldwide wars on any planet, for example. Massive interstellar conflicts. The flashpoint in any given timeline may be slightly different, but with or without any individual’s actions or lack thereof, fixed points in time occur anyway. They are part of the larger fabric of space-time, the culmination of energies and events that transcend what we normally think of as cause and effect.”

  “Thank you for the refresher course, but the concept is pretty much right there in the name: fixed point in time.”

  “What I’m saying is, there has never been an individual mortal’s death, let alone a human’s death, that qualified as a fixed point in time.”

  “And yet, hers is.”

  “Wow.”

  “And it gets worse.”

  “How?”

  “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t always this way.”

  “But if it wasn’t always this way, then that would mean there was a timeline where she didn’t die, and if that was the case, you couldn’t call her death a fixed point in time.”

  “What I’m saying is that now her death is a fixed point in time, but for most of my existence, I don’t think that was the case.”

  “And how could you possibly know that?”

  “I don’t. It’s just . . . a feeling.”

  “Did you ask your father about this?”

  “Many times.”

  “And?”

  “And he told me to leave it alone. Sometimes things happen for reasons that are beyond our control and we are required to accept them.”

  “Your father said that.”

  “I know. Doesn’t exactly sound like him, does it?”

  “Your father? The Q who was kicked out of the Continuum for grossly abusing his powers how many times?”

  “Yeah, but they always ask him to come back, don’t they?”

  “Wait . . . we’re Q, aren’t we? The last time I checked we weren’t required to accept anything. That’s part of the whole omnipotent thing, isn’t it?”

  “He assured me that to intervene in any way in a fixed point in time such as this would inject so much chaos into the multiverse that even the entire Continuum might not be able to contain it.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. But I have to find out exactly how this happened, how this one human’s death became so incredibly important to the multiverse that it essentially broke its own rules to bring her death about.”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Anthropomorphizing the multiverse, something that cannot, by its very nature, be understood in such limited terms.”

  “Yeah, I had to take Beyond Existential Constructs too, but I didn’t find the argume
nt terribly compelling then and I’m even less convinced now. If anything, her death is concrete evidence that sometimes the multiverse can be incredibly petty and small-minded.”

  “Why are you taking this so personally?”

  “She’s my godmother.”

  “You’ve met her all of twice.”

  “She deserved better.”

  “I agree. But there’s nothing you can do. Where would you even look for evidence of a reality that by your own argument can’t exist?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, my gosh.”

  “What?”

  “It couldn’t possibly . . .”

  “What?”

  “Hang on.”

  “Amanda? Amanda! Q!” Where did she go?

  Chapter One

  VOYAGER

  Captain Afsarah Eden couldn’t tear her eyes away from the viewscreen. Voyager moved at maximum warp, the deck below Eden’s boots thrumming with the engines’ strain as stars stretched themselves out in the illusory image that defined this particular version of warp flight.

  Eden and her crew were fleeing certain death. And with each second that passed, oblivion was gaining on them. The ship could not maintain its current velocity indefinitely, nor could it safely form a slipstream tunnel to increase its odds of outrunning destruction.

  Part of Eden knew that by running, they were only prolonging the inevitable. In some cold, lonely corner of her heart, she had already accepted her own death. But the duty that had bound her to Starfleet and sustained her through the most difficult times of her life demanded that she make this attempt on behalf of those she led.

  The temptation, no, the desperate longing she felt to order the ship to come about was becoming more difficult to ignore. Did she need to see the beast, to name it before it devoured them? Was it some absurd definition of honor that called on her to stand her ground, even in the face of annihilation?

  Or was it simply the fact that she was tired of running? This monster had already taken too much from her. There was no longer any true victory to be claimed here. She was not fleeing a predator that might grow weary of its chase. She was attempting to outrun something that had all but stripped away every last shred of her own identity. She was incapable of resisting or defying it. It would have her. And given enough time, it might actually bring her to accept that its version of Afsarah Eden was truer than the one she had constructed in fifty-plus years of life.

  She belonged to this darkness, and as that certainty struck her with the force of a roaring wave, she began to lose her bearings. Her head grew inexplicably light and her knees buckled. Eden reached her right arm back to steady herself against the command chair in which she knew she would never again sit.

  Her eyes briefly registered another person standing beside her, and the motion meant to reorient her became a graceless stagger as she unconsciously rebelled against the sight her mind refused to accept.

  I’m dead already.

  She had to be.

  Eden willed the vision to clear, but the longer she stared open-mouthed at the figure next to her, the more that figure seemed to coalesce and solidify.

  “Impossible,” Eden whispered.

  Beside her, Admiral Kathryn Janeway’s stone-cold eyes held Eden’s with a painful mixture of determined despair.

  “This is a dream,” Eden said, willing her voice to hold steady even as her senses scrambled for an escape route.

  “Feels more like a nightmare to me,” Kathryn replied.

  • • •

  The mess hall was all but deserted this close to the middle of gamma shift. Most of the crew members who had signed off a few hours earlier had already eaten, and those looking to get a jump on their day prior to the start of alpha shift wouldn’t start straggling in for another hour at least.

  Still, Captain Chakotay didn’t look up from his padd until the individual who had entered moments earlier made her way toward him and stood silently for a few seconds behind the chair across from his.

  “I thought you were planning to turn in early for a really good night’s sleep,” the weary voice of the fleet commander greeted him.

  “And I thought the wee hours were the only ones that ever found you sleeping,” he replied convivially as Captain Eden pulled out the chair and sat restlessly.

  “Do you mind?” she asked once the deed was already done.

  “Of course not,” he replied sincerely. “I’m not going to finish this letter tonight anyway,” he added, stifling a yawn as he pushed the padd aside and sipped from a cup of tea that had grown cold an hour ago.

  “It’s unusual to find you at a loss for words,” Eden said lightly as she rubbed her eyes.

  A faint smile traipsed across Chakotay’s lips as he replied, “Is that a good thing?”

  “So far I’d say, absolutely,” Eden said more seriously.

  A few months earlier, before the fleet had crossed paths with the Children of the Storm, Chakotay would have been hard-pressed to imagine himself engaged in such easy banter with Eden. Though she was a distinguished officer and an able leader, he’d found it difficult to warm to her, probably in no small part due to the fact that Starfleet Command had seen fit to assign her to Voyager’s center seat when the fleet had first launched and he was still deemed unfit for duty. Once Eden had assumed command of the fleet and officially requested that Chakotay resume his former place as Voyager’s captain, she had continued to maintain an aloof distance from those she led.

  Recent, near disastrous events, however, had begun to bridge the distance between them, as they were forced to stretch the boundaries of the formal command structure and work together to find solutions to a vast array of challenges, including the loss of one of the nine ships that had originally begun the journey, the almost total loss of a second, and the capture of a third by the Children. Eden had also recently seen fit to share some of her personal history with him, including her mysterious origins, and he’d finally begun to see her not just as his commanding officer, but as an individual: complex, devoted to duty, but painfully alone. Now, he found that he had no compunction in returning her confidence and was actually grateful for the opportunity to share a little of his own current burden.

  “It’s my sister, Sekaya,” he sighed.

  Eden’s eyes left his as she searched her memory. “She’s not Starfleet, is she?”

  “No. She has accepted civilian assignments from time to time, but where I’ve seen the possibility of working for positive change from within Starfleet, she’s always been skeptical.”

  Eden nodded. “Your people’s experiences with the Cardassians probably had something to do with that.”

  “For starters,” Chakotay agreed.

  Suddenly Eden’s eyes widened. “She thought your resignation was going to be permanent, didn’t she?”

  “She wasn’t the only one,” Chakotay chuckled. “Of course I wrote to her the moment I reassumed command of Voyager, but I didn’t get her response until we regrouped with the rest of the fleet last week.”

  “She’s not happy,” Eden rightly surmised.

  “No.”

  What began as a slight pause was threatening to stretch into a lull when Chakotay added, “I don’t blame her. She never saw what Kathryn’s death did to me, but we have enough mutual friends that word got back to her anyway. Her relief at my resignation was comforting at the time, but I’m finding it harder now to explain my certainty that as much as leaving the service, even briefly, was absolutely necessary, returning now is the best choice I could possibly make.”

  “Do you doubt your choice?”

  “Not at all,” Chakotay replied firmly. “I know I haven’t ‘taken a step back or retreated from a better future.’ ”

  Eden’s eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t mince words, does she?”

  “It runs in the family.” Chakotay grinned knowingly. “But beyond assuring her that she’s wrong, and without actually being able to see her and explain myself in person, I don�
��t know how to convince her. The more I think about it, the more I realize that my choice has more to do with instinct or . . . a feeling I trust but can’t really name. I’ve made peace with my past.”

  Eden shook her head and smiled mirthlessly. “That makes one of us.”

  Setting his own concerns aside, Chakotay took a moment to study Eden. Tension knotted her brow and lifted her shoulders. Her black, almond-shaped eyes were uncharacteristically uncertain.

  “So, why aren’t you sleeping tonight, Afsarah?” he asked kindly.

  She sat back in her chair and took a long sip of whatever warm beverage she’d replicated before joining him. “It’s nothing.”

  “I doubt that.”

  He was pleased to see her countenance soften just enough to let a little light back into her eyes.

  “For the last few weeks, I’ve been having this recurring dream.”

  “Really?” he asked, genuinely intrigued. Though he was no expert in dream analysis, it, like all manner of subconscious exploration, had been a subject of deep inquiry throughout his life. His curiosity was grounded in his people’s unquestioning acceptance of a spiritual realm that coexisted with reality and could be entered willingly with enough practice. But this belief was rare among Starfleet officers—so rigorously grounded in reason, logic, and science.

  Eden took another sip before going on. “I’m alone on the bridge. At least at first.”

  Chakotay kept his expression neutral as he nodded for her to continue.

  “We’re moving at high warp away from something terrible. We need to go faster, but we can’t. I’m absolutely certain the ship is about to be destroyed. And then . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Then?”

  “I shouldn’t be bothering you with this.”

  Chakotay was puzzled by her abrupt retreat. “Then?” he gently coaxed.

  Eden studied his face and in a brief instant, Chakotay saw that her concern was not that she would be embarrassed but that somehow she would insult him.

  “It’s a dream, Afsarah,” he said. “I’m the last one who would take anything you say personally.”

  Eden sighed and dropped her chin in deference to his perceptiveness. Shrugging slightly, she went on, “And then I look to my right and Kathryn Janeway is standing beside me. I know in some ways that should make me feel better. I mean, whom would you rather have beside you in a fight? But the sight of her absolutely terrifies me.”