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  For John Van Citters. He knows what he did.

  “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you love, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”

  —Thomas Wolfe

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  Admiral Kathryn Janeway leads the Full Circle Fleet—Voyager, Vesta, Galen, and Demeter—on a mission of exploration in the Delta Quadrant. Many things have changed since a lone, lost Starship Voyager was trying to find her way home. The fleet is charged with discovering what has changed in the Delta Quadrant since Voyager was last here and the ultimate power in the quadrant, the Borg, departed.

  This story takes place in September 2382, immediately following the events of the novel Star Trek: Voyager—Architects of Infinity.

  Prologue

  PERSONAL LOG: LIEUTENANT HARRY KIM

  You almost died today.

  So did your mom and I. A few hours ago, if you told me we would all still be here and I’d have time to sit for a few minutes and tell you about it, I don’t think I would have believed it. This day started as the worst I’ve ever had in my life, and given the fact that I live and work in space, where a lot of things can and often do go very wrong, that’s saying a lot.

  Um… I’m your dad. Harry. Harry Kim. But you should probably call me Dad. When I was seven I spent two weeks calling my dad Pops because one of my friends at school asked me why my dad was so much older than his. I didn’t understand anything then about my parents other than how much they loved me, but I was embarrassed by anything that made me different from the other kids. Kids can be really cruel to each other. You probably already know that but in case you don’t, fair warning. We all face different challenges and everybody’s situation is unique, but when you’re seven, and for a lot of years after that, all you want to do is be just like everyone else, so the “Why is your dad so old?” thing really bothered me. I decided to pretend like it didn’t bother me—another thing kids do—and somehow in my little kid brain just acknowledging the problem seemed to make it better. Like, I knew my dad was older than a lot of the other dads but I was cool with it. He was my Pops.

  It didn’t last long. My dad finally asked me why I didn’t call him “Dad” anymore and my face started to feel really warm in that not good way that tells you you’ve done or said something dumb and I blurted out something about how it was not okay that he had waited so long to have me.

  The look on his face, the sudden sadness—nothing rocks a kid’s world like seeing one of your parents cry—and I swear, he was about to do just that. Then he told me that people don’t always get to decide when to have a child. Children come when they are ready. He and my mom had waited… for me.

  I’m not as old now as my dad was when I was born, but in case you ever wonder why I’m so old, it’s because before I met your mom, I didn’t know anyone I wanted to share my life with and make a family. And when you came along, I didn’t want anything more than you and your mom and our little family.

  But I didn’t sit down to record this log to tell you all of that. All I wanted to tell you, really, is that you’re the reason I’m still alive right now. And that’s something that has never happened to me before. I face death a lot. It’s part of the job. Most of the time the spark inside me, the white-hot thing at the center of my soul that stays lit even when everything else is going dark, is fueled by the simple terror of ceasing to exist. Once in a while, it is kindled by the fear in the eyes of the people I’ve come to think of as my family, the crew I work with day in and day out. But the thing I know now that I didn’t know when this day started is that because you exist, because you are now part of my universe, what used to be a spark is now roughly the size of a newborn star.

  Also, don’t call me Pops. Anything else you like… Dad, Daddy, Father—no, that’s weird—but you know, whatever, we can talk about it. Or, yeah, call me Pops. I don’t know. You’re only a few weeks old. Maybe I shouldn’t start making decisions for you like that. We’ve got a long way to go before you call me anything. I’m not going to micromanage stuff like that for you. And if I ever start to, just tell me to knock it off. I don’t want to be that dad. Mostly, I just want you to know that you have already changed my life. You are roughly the size of a pea and what I felt today when I thought you might die was something I never imagined was possible.

  You might be wondering how you did that. You don’t have hands yet, or feet, or a face. You don’t even have a name yet. I’m going to wait and talk more to your mom before we decide that. There are so many things I need to talk to your mom about right now, but that’s not possible. I managed to make sure we would all survive for the first thirty-six hours of this disaster and right now she’s doing everything she can to make sure we live a lot longer than that. My whole job right now consists of staying awake, which is hard to do after thirty-six straight hours of terror and watching our main power relays in case they start to overload when your mom gets our fusion reactor running again. So I’m just going to talk to you a little longer if that’s okay.

  So yeah. Today. Here’s what happened…

  1

  U.S.S. GALEN

  Lieutenant Harry Kim had never been so cold.

  He didn’t think he was dead. Pressing against the deck beneath him, he lifted his body and came to his knees. The darkness around him was near absolute. The faintest of orange lights emanated from somewhere behind him, as did a low murmur of pain from he knew not whom. The right side of his head burned with the pricks of countless tiny needles. Lifting a hand to it, he was rewarded with the shock of intense agony consistent with raw flesh meeting anything solid. A slick of blood now coated his fingers.

  Where the hell am I?

  Behind him, the murmurs became louder, approaching frantic cries.

  “Harry? No! Please, no! Harry, help me!”

  The thud of something solid hitting the deck was followed by the weight of a body meeting his back. Ice-cold hands groped over his shoulders. Someone was using him to stand up.

  “Harry?”

  The voice was Nancy Conlon’s.

  “Harry, get up!”

  He wanted to oblige her. Some distant instinct insisted that he follow her command. But somehow whatever was troubling her seemed very far away.

  “God damn it, Harry. Get up! The baby is dying! ”

  A jolt of pure adrenaline brought a moment’s clarity. His baby, his daughter, she was there with him. And something was terribly wrong.

  A memory that could have happened a thousand years ago slammed into the forefront of his consciousness—he and Nancy standing in open space
beneath countless stars, holding each other in an embrace that was as close to holy as he had ever known. Beside them, in a gestational incubator, their daughter, only a few weeks old, floated in fluid that would sustain her while she developed over the next several months.

  The sheer joy of the moment returned to him, warmth rising from the center of his chest to the top of his head. Something important had just happened between them. Something unexpected and impossible existed between him and Nancy. For the first time since he had learned of her illness, he believed that they were finally in this fight together. Three had become one.

  Now Nancy’s breath was random and panicked. She had moved away from him and was pounding on the solid metal door that separated the small space they occupied from the rest of the ship.

  What ship?

  The Galen.

  “Nancy?”

  “We have to get out of here,” Conlon screamed as she continued pounding her hands raw. “Help us, please somebody anybody please help!”

  Rising on unsteady feet, he ignored a wave of nausea washing through him. Tripping past Nancy, he checked his fall by placing both hands on the bulkhead beside the door. Where the flat of his hands met the solid tritanium plating, searing heat shocked his flesh.

  But it wasn’t heat.

  It was cold.

  A few new thoughts suddenly occurred to him. No room on a starship should ever be this cold. Environmental systems were offline and had clearly been offline for some time. That was bad. The door sensors were also offline, suggesting that main power might have been cut from this area of the ship. Also very bad.

  On the plus side, he and Nancy were still alive. So there was enough residual oxygen present to sustain life. He had no idea how long that would last. Given the other catastrophic indicators, it was a good bet that the answer to that question was not very long, but in assessing any survival situation, it was important to focus on the positives as well as the negatives.

  Spent and nearly hyperventilating, Nancy turned her back to the door and sunk to the deck. Her eyes were glued to the incubator where the baby floated. Power indicators on the side were already in the red.

  “Main power is offline. We need power cells, backup batteries, anything,” she said, shifting past panic and trying desperately to simply work the problem.

  The problem?

  The baby was dying.

  Nancy had moved across the small room and was searching the few cabinets for anything that might help. “Hypos, dermal regenerators, no, no, come on! Where are the emergency supplies?” she shouted.

  Suddenly, literally nothing else mattered to Harry Kim. For weeks this child, his daughter, had lived in a wasteland in his mind, alive, but not meant to live, present, but not yet real. Nancy had all but decided to terminate the pregnancy for reasons that essentially boiled down to her unwillingness to bring into the world a child she would likely not live long enough to raise.

  But before she could act on that choice, she had suffered a brain hemorrhage. The life of the embryo had been in danger, so it had been transported into a gestational incubator. To all intents and purposes, his daughter had been born less than a week ago.

  And everything had changed. Despite the fact that her continued development was far from assured within the incubator, odds were good that she would survive. And Kim was going to do everything in his power to see that she had that chance. It didn’t matter that she was currently little more than a tiny mass of cells. In his mind, she was already snuggled in his lap as he read to her stories of Timmy and the Targ.

  Of course, that wasn’t going to happen if he didn’t find a way to restore power to the incubator.

  First things first.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Kim said.

  Nancy started to weep softly.

  “Please, no,” she murmured. “I can’t…”

  Bracing himself for the pain this time, Kim again placed his hands on the side of the bulkhead next to the door. He fumbled in the darkness until he found the panel he sought. Digging into its edges with numb fingers, he pried the panel from its housing and found the manual release lever. It took every ounce of determination at his disposal to wrap his hands around the lever and pull. His rational brain told him that he could not endure the pain of holding a bar-shaped block of ice any longer.

  Fortunately for Kim, he was well beyond rational already.

  With a groan, the lever began to move, and finally, the door. When enough space existed for him to pass his hands through it, Kim released the lever and attacked the door itself.

  Strength born of desperation coursed through him. A gasp escaped Nancy’s lips and moments later she was beside him, tugging at the door with all her might.

  Don’t let go, Harry thought.

  Finally, enough space was created to allow Kim to step beyond it, inching sideways through the opening.

  “Power cells,” Conlon cried out. “As many as you can find.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Kim assured her. “Stay here.”

  Emergency lights along the corridor were out—another terrible sign—but at the end of the hall, which opened into the Galen’s main medical bay, flickering orange and red motes beckoned.

  As soon as Kim passed into the main bay, illuminated intermittently by a few panels that seemed to have a little life left in them and randomly distributed SIMs beacons, his estimation of his current predicament downgraded from bad to we’re all going to die, aren’t we?

  The biobeds were filled and the area around them was standing room only for many in desperate need of medical attention. Harry didn’t remember how many organic crew members the Galen had, but it seemed likely that at least half of them were all occupying this relatively small space. Several of them were wrapped in silver emergency blankets but no one seemed to be tending to their injuries.

  Where is the Doctor?

  He assumed he wasn’t the only person there who wanted an answer to that question, but like so many others, it would have to wait.

  Weaving through the dazed and terrified officers, Kim made his way to the bay’s supply cabinets and jerked them open. The first two contained medical stocks. It was in a small cabinet near the floor that he discovered a stack of emergency power cells.

  Grabbing a handful, along with a couple of SIMs beacons, he rushed back to the private room he had just escaped. Nancy was still there, her hands hovering over the incubator as if she were willing it to remain functional for just a few more minutes.

  “I got them,” Kim said. “The power cells, I mean.”

  “Hurry,” Conlon pleaded.

  Hands trembling, Kim managed to find the power input and attach the first emergency cell as Conlon activated the small handheld lights and positioned them to cast their illumination on his work area. The incubator’s panel responded almost instantly to the new power source, moving out of the red into a yellow status.

  “Power partially restored,” Kim said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not going to last more than a few hours,” Conlon reminded him.

  “Can you string these together to extend the time?” Kim asked as he passed her the other six cells he had acquired.

  “Yes, yes,” Conlon said, and went to work immediately opening their control interfaces and exposing their internal leads.

  “What happened?” Kim finally thought to ask.

  Conlon looked at him, her face racked with fear.

  “I have no idea,” she replied.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Reginald Barclay refused to panic, not that there weren’t ample reasons.

  His ears were ringing and he was pretty sure that the liquid substance he was wiping from his right eye every few minutes was blood, but none of that mattered. Twenty-seven minutes earlier, the Galen had suffered a catastrophic loss of power, and while he fervently hoped that he was only moments away from at least a partial emergency reset that would bring some percentage of the medical bay’s systems back online, every second that pas
sed fed his fear that even if he succeeded, this might be the least of the problems now before him.

  The current power problem would have been significantly more challenging had Barclay not been one of the engineers responsible for designing the Galen and her unique holographic systems.

  Normally, a starship’s fusion reactors provided emergency power, but even in the event of their destruction, discrete emergency backups existed to provide short-term energy supplies. The Galen had more of those than most starships, multiple redundant cells attached to the main grid to supplement the ship’s unusual holographic needs. Fully a third of the ship’s crew complement was holographic and had they been powered as most holodecks were, by their own separate grid, the loss of that grid would have been disastrous. It had been Barclay’s notion to desegregate Galen’s hologrid, linking it to Galen’s main power supplies, a design innovation many, including Lewis Zimmerman, had fought against. But Barclay had held his ground and if he succeeded now in figuring out why the ship’s systems were not accessing the emergency power cells, his foresight was going to be responsible for saving this terrible day. Or at least buying others the time they would need to do that.

  Around him, chaos reigned. People were dead and dying. He knew this. But the first rule of triage was prioritizing the most urgent issues. Two of the bay’s human medics were attending to the incoming patients. They needed the Doctor, the ship’s CMO who was a hologram.

  Often, the Doctor’s program was routed through his personal mobile emitter. It was the first thing Barclay had checked when he realized the Doctor wasn’t present. He had found it in the Doctor’s office, right next to his workstation, in a small container created specifically to protect it when it was not in use. Unfortunately, just before whatever the hell had caused the power loss, the Doctor’s program had been routed through the main emitters. The primary hologrid would have to be restored to bring the Doctor back online, and that required power—power that did not currently exist.