Star Trek Voyager: Unworthy

  “The cube has sustained damage, Captain,”

  Kim reported.

  “Their shields are failing and I’m detecting overloads in several systems. The unregistered vessel’s shields are at eighty percent of maximum.”

  Paris was torn between admiring B’Elanna’s success and getting her the hell out of danger as soon as possible. The shuttle mxkaneuvered easily around the larger ship, avoiding direct fire. Still, the situation could change in seconds.

  “Open a channel,” Paris ordered.

  “Channel open,” Lasren confirmed.

  Before Eden could object, Tom said, “This is the Federation Starship Voyager to the pilot of the unregistered vessel. Do you require assistance?”

  A garbled response came over the comm.

  “Lasren, can you clean that up?” Paris demanded.

  “Commander,” Eden said angrily.

  Paris turned directly to Eden and said softly, “Captain, my wife and my daughter are aboard that ship.”

  Eden’s eyes widened in surprise but she replied just as softly, “Your recently deceased wife and daughter?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Tom confirmed.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  KIRSTEN BEYER

  Based on Star Trek®

  created by Gene Roddenberry

  and

  Star Trek: Voyager

  created by Rick Berman & Michael Piller & Jeri Taylor

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

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  Cover art by Michael Stetson; cover design by Alan Dingman

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-0398-2

  ISBN 978-1-4391-2348-5 (ebook)

  For Marco Palmieri

  “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

  —Sylvia Plath,

  “The Munich Mannequins”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Warning. Quantum phase stability at ninety-six point seven five one percent and falling.”

  “P’tak!” Miral said gleefully from the seat designated for a navigator that B’Elanna Torres had modified with a special booster attachment to secure her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter during flight.

  “Computer,” B’Elanna said as her patience wore dangerously thin, “recalculate phase variance and adjust deflector control.” Turning to Miral she added, “We don’t use that word, honey.”

  “Calculation complete. Modifying deflector telemetry,” the computer advised.

  “Computer, calculate revised phase stability.”

  “P’tak!” Miral said again, a little more ferociously.

  “Phase stability at ninety-nine point nine two five percent.”

  “Thank you,” B’Elanna replied. Once upon a time she never would have addressed any ship’s computer so politely, but since the computer was one of only a few adult voices B’Elanna heard regularly throughout the past fourteen months, she had come to think of her shuttle’s computer as a friend and an ally.

  B’Elanna swiveled her chair to face Miral and said with less congeniality, “Miral Paris, when I tell you that we don’t use certain words, what does that mean?”

  Miral drooped her head a little and focused her attention on what remained of her cranberry snack bar. It was possible that some of her afternoon treat had made it into her stomach, though judging from the large chunks of pressed grains, nuts, and berries that clung precariously to her sticky cheeks and fingers and dotted her overalls, she had spent most of the last hour playing with her food rather than eating it.

  “Dunno,” Miral said, pouting.

  “Look at me,” B’Elanna commanded. All the years she had spent in charge of Voyager’s engine room had prepared her to face critical systems failures, devastating encounters with hostile alien species, and spatial anomalies, but throughout it all she never had to use the tone she found herself using most often with Miral. Then again, her subordinates in engineering had rarely, if ever, lied to her face.

  “Miral Paris, look at me,” she said again.

  Miral gave her a cursory glance before filling her mouth with all that she could of the remaining snack bar.

  “Miral,” B’Elanna snapped.

  She finally got the child’s attention. Tom’s blue eyes, wide as saucers and pleading for mercy, met B’Elanna’s. Just below them, Miral’s full cheeks ballooned to almost their maximum as her baby teeth furiously chewed and strained against her tightly closed lips.

  B’Elanna struggled not to smile. She had spent weeks teaching Miral table manners and apparently the only part that had really stuck was the importance of chewing with one’s mouth closed.

  It’s a start, B’Elanna acknowledged to herself even as she fortified her determination to curb Miral’s penchant to repeat words B’Elanna often uttered in frustration despite the fact that they were completely inappropriate for a child. She suspected that Miral only did it to elicit a response from her. However, it would never do for her to greet her father in a little more than two weeks, after not having seen him in more than a year, by saying, “Hello, p’tak!”

  B’Elanna insisted a little more gently, “You do know.”

  “Are we there yet?” Miral asked, spilling a few crumbs down her front.

  “Don’t change the subject,” B’Elanna said, seeing right through her daughter’s pitiful attempt at a diversion. “There are certain words that children should not use, even if adults may use them sometimes. You still have many words to learn, and when you have learned them all, you will get to choose which ones you want to use. Until then, I choose for you. Is that clear?”

  “Sorry,” Miral said, sighing, clearly terribly put-upon by this regulation.

  “I love you, honey.”

  “Love you, Mommy,” Miral tossed back more out of habit than genuine emotion. “Mommy, sing the good night stars song?”

  “Don’t you want to wait until bedtime?” B’Elanna asked.

  “No, you sing. Kula sings bad.”

  Kula was a hologr
aphic nanny B’Elanna created to tend to Miral during their long journey when the shuttle’s systems required B’Elanna’s complete attention. Miral’s criticism suggested that Kula’s vocal subroutines might need a little work.

  “Okay, honey, you start.” B’Elanna nodded.

  Star, star, bright in the sky,

  The time has come to close your eyes.

  B’Elanna felt as if her heart were melting; the little girl’s charm kicked into high gear and her voice was thick with happiness.

  Star, star, never you fear,

  I’ll wake tomorrow and you’ll be here.

  “Warning,” the computer’s voice interrupted.

  Star, star …

  “Hush, honey,” B’Elanna said quickly.

  “Quantum phase stability at ninety-five point nine six nine percent and falling.”

  An unpleasant jolt of adrenaline shot through B’Elanna. This was the last leg of a journey that had begun two and a half years ago. A renegade Klingon sect that believed Miral to be the Kuvah’magh, or Klingon savior, had decided the best way to avert the apocalypse Miral’s birth signaled was to kill her. Ever since, B’Elanna and her husband, Tom, had sacrificed their own happiness protecting their only daughter; they were to reunite once and for all in just a little more than two weeks.

  More surprising was the fact that this long-awaited event would be taking place in the Delta quadrant. B’Elanna assumed she’d seen the last of it long ago when after seven long years of being stranded there Voyager’s crew had managed to return home. But just a few days earlier, B’Elanna had received the rendezvous coordinates from Tom confirming that Starfleet was once again sending Voyager into the Delta quadrant. Tom was serving as the ship’s first officer.

  In truth, B’Elanna didn’t relish spending the rest of their lives in one of the worst areas of space she’d ever known. However, her well-founded fears were quelled when she realized the Delta quadrant was as far from the Warriors of Gre’thor—the renegade Klingon sect—as it was possible to get.

  B’Elanna was worried that the quantum slipstream drive might need some coaxing to take them the forty-five thousand light-years they needed to go. The Home Free, as she had privately christened the shuttle officially known as Un-registered Vessel 47658 that had been her and Miral’s home for more than a year, was a technological marvel. In addition to the slipstream drive, it boasted a prototype benamite recrystallization matrix, a communications array that put larger ships to shame, navigation and scanning systems that were boosted beyond normal capacities by Borg-inspired designs, and the smallest possible holodeck for Miral.

  Her previous uses of the slipstream drive had been limited to a few short hops where slipstream velocity had never been maintained for more than thirty seconds. The trip to the Delta quadrant was going to take a little over two hours. In the nod to her belief that the worst-case scenario was often the most likely, B’Elanna had set her course and engaged the new drive in plenty of time for her to make numerous stops along the way.

  During the last two hours, she had been forced to contend with updates indicating that the phase integrity of the slip-stream corridor was falling. These announcements had come so regularly—every fifteen minutes or so—that B’Elanna had grown accustomed to them. But it had only been minutes since the last warning, which likely meant something was seriously wrong.

  “Kula,” B’Elanna called, instantaneously activating the holographic nanny, a grizzled old Klingon warrior based on a dear and now departed friend. When the hologram appeared, B’Elanna nodded to Miral, then headed down a short flight of stairs in the main cabin to the shuttle’s engine compartment.

  What she found was that the deflector controls—a key component of the slipstream drive—were beyond maximum tolerance levels.

  “Son of a—” she began before biting back the end of that statement. Miral didn’t need to learn any other new words today.

  B’Elanna manually reconfigured the settings as patiently as possible, even as the phase integrity had slipped inexorably below ninety percent. At around eighty-five percent, give or take point two percent, the slipstream corridor would destabilize completely and more than likely the shuttle would be torn to shreds when it emerged.

  “Computer, what’s our time until we reach the terminal coordinates?”

  “Twenty-five seconds,” the computer replied dispassionately.

  These were going to be the longest twenty-five seconds of her life.

  “Warning,” the computer advised again.

  “Mute all audible warnings,” B’Elanna ordered. From her main engineering control panel she could see everything she needed without the computer adding to her elevating anxiety.

  She recalculated the phase variance of the corridor using a program she had designed that featured a number of Borg algorithms inspired by Seven of Nine. Compensating for these variances had been the unattainable goal which had forced Voyager to abandon slipstream technology. As her shuttle was smaller and infinitely easier to stabilize, thus far her program had worked. But now it seemed to be at its limits.

  Ten more seconds and the slipstream drive would automatically power down.

  Just hold it together, B’Elanna prayed as she watched the phase integrity reading creep down to eighty-seven percent.

  She held her breath as the drive’s high-pitched whine shifted downward—then every system on her board spiked into the red as the corridor dispersed, depositing the shuttle at the right coordinates. A series of concussive blasts echoed all around B’Elanna as several critical systems overloaded simultaneously. Out of the corner of her eye she noted a power-rerouting protocol initiated by Kula, undoubtedly to activate a protective forcefield around Miral.

  B’Elanna was left with several fried panels, exploded plasma conduits still sparking in protest, and a bitter, tinny odor filling her nostrils. She could have replicated some of what she needed but the replicator was fried. She was forced to confront what had always been her worst nightmare when she had been planning this trip. The repairs were going to take days, and they could only be accomplished at a well-stocked spaceport.

  The Home Free would hang dead in space until Tom arrived. But Voyager might be detained, and rations and water were low.

  What I need is a friend, B’Elanna thought morosely. The direness of her predicament threatened to overwhelm her, until she remembered that she actually had a friend not that far from her current location.

  I wonder if he’s missed me as much as I’ve missed him, B’Elanna mused as she quickly set to work on her communications array.

  “Seven? Seven, where are you?”

  Chakotay’s heart still pounded from having forced open the door to Seven’s San Francisco town house after she failed to answer his repeated knocks. As he completed a frantic search of the first floor, he tried to imagine what could have gone wrong in the six hours since he’d last seen her.

  Much of the previous evening had been devoted to a lengthy visit at the hospice where Seven’s beloved Aunt Irene had been placed. Though Seven had fought against this step, Chakotay had finally managed to help her accept that this was both necessary and in Irene’s best interests. Seven had been Irene’s primary caregiver throughout the past eighteen months as Irumodic syndrome had begun to ravage Irene’s mind. However, Seven was no longer in any condition to continue providing constant care for her aunt. Further, the doctors had assured them that Irene’s suffering would likely end in a matter of days.

  When Seven and Chakotay had parted after the visit, she had insisted she was weary enough to sleep, and he had taken her at her word. Still, he found it hard to believe that she had fallen into so deep a sleep that she would not have heard him pounding on her front door. Panic quickened his breath and his pace as he rushed up the stairs to the second level and continued his search, all the while calling out, “Seven? Seven, where are you?”

  Chakotay finally found her seated in a darkened corner of her bedroom. Her hands were clasped tightly
around her knees, and her deep blue eyes were wide but vacant.

  “Seven!” he said in alarm.

  She remained perfectly still, though she blinked lazily in what he hoped might be some kind of response.

  Chakotay quickly pulled back the nearest curtain to better evaluate her condition. Her pale skin was a shade lighter than usual, and her forehead, cheeks, and hands were clammy to the touch. Her long, strawberry-blonde hair had been piled loosely atop her head, and several unruly strands were plastered to the back of her neck. She wore a pair of dark black pants and a fitted red tank top. The jacket lying rumpled at the foot of her bed would have completed the casual ensemble. Chakotay didn’t begin to relax until he confirmed that her respiration and pulse were slow but strong and steady.

  He had feared something like this might happen. Seven had endured so much in the past few months. It would have broken most people long before now. Lifting her gently, he placed Seven in bed and began to survey the room, to see if he could figure out what might have forced her to retreat into her mind.

  Seven had begun her life as Annika Hansen, a human girl who had been assimilated by the Borg when she was eight. Years later, she had been assigned by the Borg to interface with their new “allies” aboard Voyager. Ultimately, the alliance had served its purpose but to secure their safety, Chakotay and Captain Kathryn Janeway decided to sever Seven from the rest of the Collective. At first, Seven resentfully resisted their decision, but over time she began to appreciate the individuality the Borg had stolen from her and she became a valued member of Voyager’s crew.

  The ship had managed to complete what should have been a much longer journey from the Delta quadrant to the Alpha quadrant. Upon her return to Earth, Seven was initially considered a curiosity by all but her aunt, who had welcomed her home with open arms, despite having given up her niece for dead. Ultimately Starfleet had begun to appreciate Seven’s brilliance and over the past few years had often called upon her to lend her expertise and to teach at the Academy. Her input had never been more valued than a few months earlier when the Borg had launched an invasion of the Alpha quadrant, intent on destroying the Federation. Seven had stood at the Federation president’s side, advising her throughout the conflict. The Caeliar, a powerful and xenophobic species—heretofore unknown to the Federation—had transformed the Borg from members of the Collective to members of the Caeliar gestalt, ending the hostilities.