Star Trek: Voyager - 042 - Protectors

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  For my Maggie

  and her amazingly bright future

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  As the Federation struggles to recover from the Borg Invasion (Star Trek: Destiny), a Starfleet that has already taken heavy losses is challenged by the emerging power of the Typhon Pact (Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire).

  The Full Circle fleet has been devastated by the force of the Omega Continuum. The narrative begins just after the return of Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager: The Eternal Tide) and unfolds from September 2381 through January 2382.

  “The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

  —ROBERT E. LEE

  Prologue

  STARBASE 185, BETA QUADRANT

  “Welcome to the graveyard, Verdell.”

  Ensign Lawrence Verdell, who had graduated from Starfleet Academy “without distinction,” as his father liked to say, or “in the bottom third of his class,” as his mother preferred, had not come to the nether regions of the Beta Quadrant with high expectations. He knew full well that gamma shift on a remote Starbase was the place Starfleet careers went to die, so his commanding officer, Lieutenant Hars Kaydn’s ominous greeting did not trouble him in the least.

  Many other cadets like Verdell whose formal notices of separation from the Academy indicated that they’d merely “met all standard requirements” had managed to secure posts on one of Starfleet’s many exploratory vessels. Hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of officers had been lost in the Borg attack seven months ago leaving a vast number of positions to be filled as ships were constructed. Most of those in Verdell’s class who were “exceeding all standard requirements” had graduated early and spent half of what should have been their final year of study on active duty. But Verdell had never dreamed of such things, and though he knew it was probably wrong to feel relief when he was passed over for similar honors, he couldn’t help himself. He would do his job as well as he could and sleep the untroubled sleep of the angels knowing that he was about as far from the white-hot center of the galaxy and its seemingly ever-present conflict and imminent destruction as it was possible to be and still call oneself a Starfleet officer.

  “Thank you, sir. Honored to be here,” Verdell replied cheerily to Lieutenant Kaydn as he took his post and made the controls of the ops station his own for the first of what he assumed would be many quiet and mind-numbingly boring shifts. He suspected Kaydn’s ominous “welcome” when he had entered the command center was meant to unnerve him a bit. A fair amount of hazing for the newbie was to be expected. He thought it best to play along patiently until it subsided. It was likely that nobody else in the room was a future admiral either or they wouldn’t be here.

  “See anything interesting out there?” a gruff voice asked over his shoulder.

  Verdell turned to nod at Lieutenant Terral, who was manning the security station for the evening’s festivities. Lawrence’s bunkmate, a garrulous Bolian named Lud, had already warned him that Terral was a hard-nosed stickler, and Verdell wanted badly to find his way into what few good graces the man possessed.

  “No, sir,” Verdell replied as he double-checked his console’s readings for good measure.

  “Just the way we like it, eh, Terral?” Kadyn observed.

  An impatient “Harrumph” was Terral’s terse response.

  “You any relation to Admiral Verdell?” Kaydn asked, though Lawrence was certain the Lieutenant knew the answer.

  “His third-born son,” Verdell said without looking up.

  He wasn’t a telepath, but he could still hear the unspoken thoughts of Kaydn, Terral, and Stacker, gamma shift’s science officer. Son of an admiral and the best he could do is this lousy post?

  Acutely conscious of three sets of eyes boring their way into his back, Verdell was grateful for the sudden appearance of a crimson-hued blip on his console. Though it was likely nothing, it pushed the unwanted attention of his comrades to the back of his mind as he automatically realigned the station’s sensors for a better look.

  “What the . . . ?” he murmured a few seconds later as a series of improbable readings appeared before him and simultaneously the station’s alert klaxons, which he had not activated, began to wail all around him.

  “We have incoming,” Terral confirmed as Kaydn rose from his chair and stepped closer to the main viewscreen.

  Verdell did his best to quiet the panic welling inside as he tried to make sense of the data before him.

  “From where?” Kaydn asked.

  Ensign Stacker obliged him by responding. “It emerged from some sort of subspace aperture, sir, less than four hundred thousand kilometers to port.”

  “Can you identify it, Ensign Verdell?” Kaydn barked.

  Finally, Lawrence could, at which point his shaking ceased, and he manually deactivated the deafening alarm.

  “Okay, you got me,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “Good one, guys.”

  He lifted his face to Kaydn’s, expecting to see a wide smile as communal chuckling erupted around him. Their lame attempt at a practical joke might have been more effective if they’d given him a little time to settle into his shift or had chosen a more realistic “emergency.” But there was no way he was falling for this one. “The automated red alert was a nice touch,” Verdell began, but he stopped short when he saw Kaydn’s wide-eyed glare.

  “Report, Ensign,” Kaydn ordered.

  “It’s . . . it’s,” Verdell stammered, suddenly wondering if he might have been wrong.

  “It’s what?” Kaydn demanded.

  “It’s impossible, sir,” Verdell replied.

  “Ensign Verdell!” Kaydn bellowed.

  “The approaching vessel does not match anything in our databases, sir,” Verdell said, “but several unique attributes register as . . .” Verdell swallowed hard before he added, “. . . Caeliar.”

  “Caeliar?” Kaydn said. “Look again.”

  “Aye, sir.” Verdell nodded and did so. After a moment he was forced to accept the best information at his disposal. “Confirmed, sir. Caeliar vessel approaching.”

  “Life signs?” Kaydn asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Verdell went on, locking his knees to keep his legs from shaking. “One . . . very faint.”

  “We don’t actually have a good baseline for Caeliar life signs, sir,” Ensign Stacker advised from her science station.

  “Hail them,” Kaydn ordered.

  It took a fraction of a second longer than it should have for Verdell to remember that this was his job. He was too busy trying to wrap his brain around the fact that an individual from one of the most advanced and mysterious races Starfleet had ever encountered, the race that had single-handedly transformed the Borg and then, according to all reports, departed the galaxy for parts unknown, had apparently decided to pay a visit on the most remote starbases in Federation space.

  Finally, Lawrence’s shaking fingers found the appropriate controls as he sent a standard greeting to the incoming vessel and requested that it identify itself.

  “No response, sir
,” he said a few moments later.

  “The vessel is on a collision course,” Terral noted, as if Verdell needed any more pressure.

  “Open a channel,” Kaydn ordered.

  “Channel open, sir,” Verdell reported.

  “Incoming vessel, this is Lieutenant Hars Kaydn of Federation Starbase 185. Alter course immediately to avoid collision, and please advise if you require assistance.”

  Kaydn’s words were answered by several moments of miserable silence.

  Releasing a quick breath of frustration, Kaydn turned to Terral. “Can we nudge it off course without destroying it?”

  “I wouldn’t advise attempting that, Lieutenant,” Stacker jumped in. “What little intelligence we have on the Caeliar indicates that their vessels, their entire civilization, is powered by Omega particle generators.”

  “Would you advise allowing even a small vessel powered by Omega to run into the station, Ensign?” Kaydn asked pointedly.

  Verdell was grateful to be able to relieve a little of the suffocating tension now enveloping the command center. “Energy readings are not Omega, sir,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “I can’t tell you what is powering that vessel, but it’s not . . . you know . . . that.”

  “Either way, I don’t know if we want to open fire on a species that could probably destroy us in one shot if it wanted to,” Terral added.

  Kaydn nodded, clearly considering his options.

  “Time to impact?”

  “He’s coming in pretty fast,” Terral noted.

  “Three minutes, fifty-one seconds,” Verdell clarified.

  “Kaydn to transporter control.”

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Can you get a lock on the pilot of the incoming vessel?”

  During the thirty seconds that it took the transporter room to reply, Verdell busied himself wondering why he hadn’t told his parents to go to hell when they demanded he follow his brothers into Starfleet and instead opened the small Mediterranean restaurant he’d always dreamed about.

  “No, sir,” the transport officer finally replied.

  “Damn it,” Kaydn hissed.

  “Warning, intruder alert,” the maddeningly calm voice of the station’s computer advised, bringing Verdell fully back to the present moment.

  “Where?” Kaydn asked, but before the computer could reply, the air between the command chair and the viewscreen began to ripple. Kadyn stepped back automatically and almost tripped into his chair as the distortion resolved itself into a shimmering reflective surface. It appeared to Verdell as if someone had just hung an oval, full-length mirror in front of the viewscreen. Moments later, a figure broke through the surface and tumbled headfirst onto the deck as the mirror vanished behind him.

  Everyone else reached for his own phaser. Verdell brought both of his hands to his mouth to keep the contents of his stomach from adding to the grisly sight now before him.

  A man, or what had perhaps once been a man, his body a mangled mass of flesh and dried blood mingled with fresher putrid ooze, was curled in a fetal position on the deck. His bald scalp revealed numerous deep gashes, and a hole where his ear should have been was the only visible orifice. The rest of him looked like it had been haphazardly reconstructed by a surgeon who had no idea what the original shape of the man’s body might be. There was no clothing, no scraps or tattered rags to cover even an inch of the horrifying spectacle.

  “Kaydn to sickbay,” the Lieutenant shouted.

  “Sickbay here,” a light, feminine voice said.

  “Janis, we’re initiating a site-to-site transport of an injured man who has just appeared in the command center. When he arrives, put him behind a level-ten force field before you do whatever you can for him. He’s in pretty bad shape. And you’d better wake up Doctor Mai.”

  Turning to Verdell, Kaydn barked, “Why is he still here, Ensign?”

  Right. Site-to-site transport; that’s my job, too, Verdell realized and searched his panel for the controls. Even once he’d found them and the figure mercifully vanished in the transporter’s standard luminescent display, the stench the man had brought with him lingered.

  “Time to impact?” Kaydn demanded of Terral.

  “Two minutes, nineteen seconds,” Terral replied.

  “Verdell, Stacker, lock every sensor we have on that ship for the next seventy-nine seconds. I want as much data as we can get. At one minute out, destroy it, Terral.”

  “Aye, sir,” all three responded in unison.

  Verdell immediately retuned his station’s sensors to the most detailed analysis of which they were capable. He didn’t know how much information Starfleet had about the Caeliar. If his father’s comments in the heady days after the cessation of hostilities with the Borg were to be believed, the answer was “not nearly enough.” Verdell briefly glimpsed life as someone who could actually add something meaningful to the organization he had reluctantly chosen to serve, and applied himself diligently to coaxing as much usable information as he could from this brief encounter.

  A bright flash of light followed by a shockwave that shook the station forcefully as it dissipated, ended the information-gathering process too soon, but Verdell had already seen enough to know that his end-of-duty report this night was going to take days to compile. Surprised, Lawrence found himself looking forward to it.

  It was disappointing when seconds after the ship had vanished in a blaze of particles, his console went suddenly haywire before sputtering into darkness.

  Kaydn was headed for the door to the turbolift as he said, “Kaydn to Captain Dreshing.”

  A groggy voice replied, “Dreshing here. Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  “Please join me in sickbay immediately, sir. We have an unexpected guest.”

  “On my way. Dreshing out.”

  As Kaydn headed for the turbolift he tossed back over his shoulder, “Good work, everybody. Well, almost everybody,” he added with a sharp glance in Verdell’s direction. “I know it’s your first day out of the Academy, Verdell, but gods almighty damn, you just about screwed up one of the most important contacts Starfleet has ever made because you decided it was a joke.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Verdell said.

  “I want your initial analysis in my hands in an hour, Ensign.”

  “I’d like to comply, sir,” Verdell said, shaking his head as his stomach heaved.

  “Is there a ‘but’ coming, Ensign?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but my station has been rendered inoperable.”

  “What?” Kaydn demanded, halting his steps.

  “It’s not just Verdell, sir,” Stacker added. “My station is out, too. I think that ship transmitted a virus over the open channel just before we destroyed it.”

  Kaydn shook his head, disgusted.

  “Do what you can to recover any data possible, Ensigns.”

  “Aye, sir,” Verdell and Stacker said.

  Lawrence immediately set to work, certain that if he was unable to retrieve or reconstruct the data requested, his service to Starfleet would end an hour after it had begun. And while “shortest career in history” was still an accomplishment, Verdell had no doubt where his father would put him when he learned of the dubious achievement.

  Welcome to the graveyard, Verdell.

  Chapter One

  VOYAGER

  “This is absurd,” Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway said, crossing her arms and fixing her gaze on the streaks of starlight visible from the long bay window in Counselor Hugh Cambridge’s office.

  The counselor did not reply immediately, a tactic Janeway had become all too familiar with in the last few days of regular morning sessions with Voyager’s resident therapist. She didn’t need to turn back to know that despite her outburst, she would find him as she’d last seen him, resting comfortably in the deep black chair he favored, his long legs crossed at the knee, and his hands resting in his lap. His features would be placid, though occasional hints of ironic mischief would flash from his eye
s.

  “Can they actually do this?” she demanded of the heavens.

  “Starfleet Command?” Cambridge replied drolly enough for Janeway to infer his meaning: How well do you know the lunatics currently running our high-tech asylum?

  Finally facing him with the full sum of her fury, Janeway said, “They already offered me the damned job.”

  A faint smile flickered too quickly across Cambridge’s lips for her to demote him for it on the spot.

  “They did,” Cambridge agreed.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “You didn’t accept,” Cambridge replied.

  “I didn’t accept immediately,” Janeway corrected him. “The issue was first raised twenty-four hours after I had witnessed the deaths of Captain Eden and my godson while doing all I could to prevent the end of the entire multiverse. Hell, I’d only been alive again at that point for three days. And those three days were a little fraught, even by the Delta Quadrant’s standards.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Cambridge murmured.

  “They ordered me to think it over,” Janeway said.

  “And you excel at following orders?” Cambridge asked.

  “I do,” Janeway said, genuinely surprised at the implied criticism.

  Cambridge said nothing, obviously wondering if she was going to dig this hole any deeper before tossing her a rope.

  Janeway’s shoulders fell as she released her arms to her sides, finally saying, “I excel at following the important ones.”

  A chuckle finally escaped the counselor’s lips. “Congratulations, Admiral. We’ve been at this for days, and that might be the closest you’ve come to dispassionate self-reflection.”

  “What do they want from me?” Janeway asked.

  “How should I know?” Cambridge countered, matching her bewildered tone.

  “You’ve served under Admiral Montgomery for almost four years now,” Janeway shot back.

  “And you served right next to him for almost three,” Cambridge said. “I’d hazard a guess that you know him better than I ever wish to.”