Star Trek Voyager: Unworthy Page 20

  Nothing worked.

  Adrenaline poured through his body but without the release that came from focusing that energy on a specific task, he was left in an unbearably anxious state.

  He paced his cabin in darkness. The computer wasn’t responding to vocal commands. Turning to the personal display station in his cabin, he attempted to pull up a status report. The display seemed to be malfunctioning. It fluctuated between a black screen and a static-filled Starfleet insignia.

  He tried to contact Seven. He was debating simply heading for her cabin when his display screen went completely black for ten full seconds and a message finally appeared.

  “Meet in astrometrics .”

  The littlest bit relieved, Chakotay hurried to do so.

  Nancy Conlon had enjoyed more than her fair share of bad days in engineering. Compared with her days on the da Vinci, Voyager’s engine room had started to seem absolutely subdued since they’d managed to conquer the slipstream issues that had plagued them in the early days of the mission. She’d been free to focus her attention on longer-term issues like the benamite problem and deflector controls.

  Then all hell broke loose. She’d seen power disruptions, computer viruses, computer failures, and just about every conceivable system running amok, but she’d never experienced so many happening at the same time. Conlon was pleased that her staff were keeping their heads, working out one problem at a time, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t simply a random cascade failure.

  Teams of engineers were already in the bowels of every major system, running diagnostics and visually inspecting every centimeter. Nothing. Apart from life support and inertial dampers, the only other unaffected systems, at least for now, appeared to be deflector controls and their drives. Her first suspect was the deflector control interfaces, but like the engines, they were running five-five-five.

  “Neol, what’s the status of the comm system?” she shouted through the controlled chaos all around her.

  “I’m working on it,” the harried ensign replied.

  “Work faster,” she instructed.

  Turning to cross to the main display panel near the core, she ran into someone else.

  “Watch where you’re going,” she said as calmly as she could.

  “I’m sorry,” B’Elanna replied. “Can you use a pair of extra hands?”

  Part of her wanted to say no. The rest of her grudgingly told her self-esteem to button it and nodded. “Everything points to a problem with the main computer. Nothing else could disrupt so many systems at the same time.”

  “Did you try to shut it down and reinitialize?”

  “We can’t with these power spikes. I’m afraid to even try and access the central processor. If we suddenly lose what systems we still have …”

  “Okay, what’s working?” B’Elanna asked.

  “Propulsion,” Nancy replied.

  “What about navigation?”

  “Offline.”

  “That’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “I think so, too,” Nancy agreed.

  Together they turned to the main console and brought up the current status of the main engine systems.

  “Oh, hell,” Nancy said softly.

  “Am I reading this right?” B’Elanna asked, her voice growing tense.

  “Neol!” Nancy shouted. “I need to speak to the bridge right now!”

  Ensign Gwyn stifled a yawn. With the ship hanging in orbit and helm controls inaccessible, there was little for a pilot to do at the moment. She almost regretted pulling an extra shift tonight. Despite the zeal with which her crewmates were working to diagnose the current array of problems, she was finding it hard to get too excited. She knew that everything had been normal the last time she’d been able to look, and partial sensors now indicated that there was no sign of an attack coming from the Indign. Every time she glanced at the pitch black viewscreen, she was overwhelmed with a desire to grab a nap.

  I’m sure somebody will wake me when it’s over, she decided, allowing her eyelids to lower.

  She was startled back to alertness by a sudden illumination of the conn. “I didn’t touch anything,” she said softly as a series of bleeps and control sequences began to coalesce into a serious problem.

  “Captain,” she called immediately.

  “What is it, Ensign?”

  “The slipstream drive is powering up,” Gwyn reported.

  “Shut it down,” Eden ordered immediately.

  Gwyn was already making the attempt and finding it impossible to do so.

  “I don’t have control, Captain,” she replied.

  “B’Kar, take the helm offline,” Eden said.

  After a moment of silence, B’Kar reported, “The helm is not responding, Captain. I’m locked out too.”

  “Captain, we can’t go to slipstream velocity from orbit,” Gwyn advised. “In fact, we shouldn’t go to slipstream velocity from within this system, or any system come to think of it.”

  Eden crossed to her station.

  “Do we have terminal coordinates?”

  Gwyn was relieved to be able to answer that question.

  “Yes, approximately four light-years from our current position.”

  “Is there anything interesting about that location?” Eden asked.

  “It was charted by the Hawking during their analysis of the area’s subspace tunnels, but otherwise, no,” Gwyn replied.

  Eden turned to Paris. “Commander, override the doors to that turbolift and get to engineering. I need to know what’s happening down there.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Paris replied and Kim immediately moved to assist him in accessing the manual override.

  “Captain, I have partial helm controls restored,” B’Kar announced.

  “Shut down the slipstream drive,” Eden ordered again. “I can’t do that,” B’Kar replied, “but I can confirm that we are moving out of orbit at one quarter impulse and are on a trajectory to exit the system.”

  “Are we going to do that before the slipstream drive reaches full power?” Eden demanded of Gwyn.

  She studied the display closely before answering, “It’s going to be close.”

  “Captain, Hawking and Galen are breaking orbit with us, matching course and speed,” B’Kar advised.

  “Can we talk to them yet?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not,” Eden said, shaking her head.

  “This isn’t happening,” Conlon said.

  “No, this shouldn’t be happening,” B’Elanna added. They both watched helplessly while the slipstream drive continued to power up as if it had a mind of its own.

  “When did you bring the slipstream drive back online?” B’Elanna asked.

  “Yesterday,” Conlon replied. “I was able to quarantine the errant protocols that were disrupting the interface between the drive and deflector. They’re not responsible for this.”

  Together they studied the engineering code as it ran across the display screen, looking for something to indicate how and why it had suddenly come online.

  “Look at the central processor,” Conlon instructed B’Elanna. “It’s running through every nonessential program in its files and finding so many failures it won’t accept our overrides on the primaries.”

  “A virus?” B’Elanna asked.

  “But why isn’t it affecting propulsion?”

  “Maybe it hasn’t gotten there yet.”

  “This is intentional, B’Elanna.”

  “Possibly,” B’Elanna said, “but first things first. We don’t want to risk going to slipstream velocity right now.”

  “How do we stop it?”

  “If it were me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Break it,” B’Elanna suggested grimly.

  It was an extreme option, but Conlon had to agree that it might also be their only option. “Break it how badly?”

  “Just enough to make it impossible to open a slipstream corridor.”

  Conlon turned
to look at the brightly churning amber glow of the slipstream core. “So we evacuate engineering and throw a wrench at it?” What the hell, it’s worked before, she thought ruefully.

  “No,” B’Elanna said, her eyes suddenly filled with light. “Not the drive, just the deflector dish.”

  Nancy felt her eyes catch B’Elanna’s fire. “Vorik could do it.”

  “The comm is still down,” B’Elanna reminded her.

  “Just Voyager ’s.”

  “We have another comm system handy?”

  “Yeah,” Nancy replied with a smile.

  Captain Itak watched as Voyager moved gracefully toward open space. His ship’s sensors had detected multiple power fluctuations in the flagship. He was unperturbed by the lack of response to their repeated hails. He trusted that Captain Eden had the situation under control. For the time being Itak had agreed with Commander Glenn that they move into position to flank Voyager should the situation devolve into anything more troublesome. The Indign seemed to be taking no notice of the fleet’s activities.

  “Captain,” Vorik’s voice called softly from the bridge’s engineering station.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “I am receiving a transmission from Voyager. ”

  “On-screen.”

  “It has no audio or visual component. It is text only.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It is requesting that we fire upon Voyager’s deflector array with minimal phasers.”

  “To what end?”

  “It does not say,” Vorik replied evenly, “though the target and phase intensity are precisely spelled out.”

  “Is the message from Captain Eden?”

  “No. And it is not being routed through the central communications array.”

  “That array is still malfunctioning,” Bloom advised them from ops.

  “What is the source of the transmission?”

  “It is coming from B’Elanna Torres’s ship.”

  “But there is no command code authorization present?”

  “No, Captain.”

  Itak considered the situation and quickly reached a decision. Given what little he could assess of Voyager’s present circumstances, it was an unconventional request; however, there was a certain logic to it.

  “Move into position and fire when ready,” he replied.

  “Captain, I’ve restored power to the viewscreen,” B’Kar said triumphantly.

  Eden automatically lifted her head from the unresponsive ops controls where she caught sight of the Hawking moving into attack position from Voyager’s port side.

  What the hell? she wondered, just as a bright blue beam erupted from its forward phaser array.

  “Brace for impact!” she shouted as the beam struck, rattling the deck and everyone’s nerves, but doing no significant damage.

  As she waited breathlessly for another volley, having all but concluded that Captain Itak’s systems must be malfunctioning as badly as hers, her combadge crackled to life.

  “Conlon to the bridge.”

  “Go ahead,” the captain replied.

  “Was that the Hawking ?”

  “They just opened fire on us,” Eden confirmed. In the background someone on Conlon’s end had just let out a cheer.

  “Captain,” Gwyn interrupted, “the slipstream drive is powering down.”

  Eden struggled for a moment to put the pieces together. “ Hawking fired on our deflector dish, and it shut down the slipstream drive,” she said, smiling in faint relief.

  “Just as we requested,” Conlon confirmed.

  “We, Lieutenant?”

  There was a slight pause before Conlon admitted, “B’Elanna and I. I contacted Hawking using her ship’s comm system. Since it’s not linked to Voyager , it’s not experiencing the same issues we are at the moment. I’ve routed this comm signal into our combadges. I’m returning to engineering now. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

  “Thank you,” Eden replied. “Bridge out.”

  Eden was pleased, of course, that the immediate problem had been solved. The next order of business would be to determine whether or not the multiple failures were accidental or intentional.

  A heavy thump sounded behind her. After a moment, a breathless and angry Admiral Batiste crawled out of a Jefferies tube.

  “What is going on?” he demanded.

  Eden moved to his side and gave him a brief explanation of the last few minutes. His eyes blazed with barely repressed fury as she completed her report.

  “You know what this means, don’t you, Captain?”

  Eden did, but hesitated to give voice to it while in earXshot of the rest of her bridge officers. “Yes, Admiral. Unfortunately, I do.”

  Chakotay was surprised when the doors to the astrometrics lab opened automatically. Most of the others between his quarters and this deck had required manual override. He’d felt the ship shudder beneath what he assumed was weapons fire.

  The lab was dark. A small circle of light coming from an auxiliary panel immediately caught his eye, as it was the room’s only illumination. Seven’s face was a crescent moon, glowing in the panel’s uneven light. She did not look up as he entered.

  “Is everything okay, Seven?”

  “No.”

  He stepped closer to peer over her shoulder. She was studying scans of the Indign system and seemed to be focusing her attention on the fourth planet.

  “Do you have any idea what the emergency is?”

  “The ship is experiencing widespread systems failures. When I arrived I found that the lab’s power supply had been cut. I only just retrieved the data I require.”

  “If the power is down, how did you do that?” he asked.

  She raised an eyebrow slightly as she glanced in his direction. The look said clearly “I am Borg,” though he suddenly realized how long it had been since she had used that particular phrase in his presence.

  “I experienced something several hours ago, which I am attempting to understand. Initially I believed it was another product of my catoms and their unruly nature. Upon reflection, however, I have formulated another theory.”

  “I’m listening,” he replied, wondering why her tone filled him with a sense of impending doom.

  “I believe someone is using my catoms to try to communicate with me.”

  “The Caeliar?” was his automatic assumption.

  “No,” she replied wearily.

  “Then who?”

  “Someone located on the fourth planet of the Indign system, the one populated exclusively by the Neyser,” Seven said, a hint of anger in her voice.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Just as alpha shift was ending, Captain Eden asked Commander Paris and Lieutenant Kim to report to her ready room. She had already reviewed Conlon’s most recent report. Most of the affected systems had been restored. Multiple viruses responsible for the failures had been found and eliminated. Conlon was now in the process of reviewing the logs of anyone with command clearance as only someone with that authorization could have accessed that many systems. Eden sensed that Nancy was taking it personally that someone was messing with her engines.

  Eden was troubled by the why as much as with the whom . In the captain’s opinion, the most relevant clue might be the coordinates to which the saboteur had intended to direct Voyager . The area contained a high concentration of subspace instabilities that suggested a motive to Eden that was most disturbing.

  There was a brief, uncomfortable skirmish when Paris and Kim entered, over who should precede whom through the door, that gave the captain pause.

  As Kim was mock bowing and gesturing for Paris to enter ahead of him, her patience snapped and she said, “Let’s go, gentlemen. None of us has time for this right now.”

  Appropriately chastened, they hurried inside.

  “Take a seat,” she ordered, nodding to the chairs opposite her desk. Once they’d settled, she said, “It’s going to be several days before we have a full report on what hap
pened today, but one interpretation of the information we do have at hand has disturbed me greatly and I’d like your input.”

  “Of course, Captain,” Harry said immediately.

  “We might have a saboteur onboard.”

  Both looked appropriately stunned.

  “Conlon thinks someone damaged the power systems intentionally?” Paris asked, aghast.

  “Shortly before we made the journey from the terminus of the Beta and Delta quadrants to the nebula, Lieutenant Conlon discovered a series of strange deflector protocols that had been recently restored to our active systems. Among them was one whose only purpose is to open a rift to fluidic space. Conlon has found it impossible to purge this protocol thus far, though she did successfully quarantine it. I don’t have to tell either one of you how troubling it is to imagine that someone on board might wish to make contact with Species 8472.”

  “No, you don’t,” Kim agreed.

  “Today, we suffered massive failures to dozens of systems, but strangely, propulsion was unaffected, though navigational control was disrupted. The slipstream drive came online of its own accord and was about to take us to a set of coordinates where opening a rift to fluidic space might have been possible.”

  “Can’t we open a rift anywhere?” Paris asked.

  “Theoretically, yes,” Eden answered. “Practically speaking, you need a naturally occurring quantum singularity, or you have to create an artificial one. That’s easier to do in areas where subspace has already been altered by the presence of, among other things, transwarp tunnels. Our researchers have found it all but impossible to open even a tiny rift in the Alpha quadrant. That didn’t make sense until the destabilizing factors of regular subspace travel, which are readily found here in the Delta quadrant thanks to the Borg’s preferential form of FTL flight, were taken into account.”