Atonement Read online

Chakotay moved immediately to stand in front of Mattings and placed a firm hand on the arm that held the phaser. The general released it to him without a struggle. “You understand that if my transporters were working right now, you’d already be in our brig,” Chakotay said softly.

  “I couldn’t stomach another word from that bastard. Someone had to do right by your Mister Kim. I’m surprised at you, Chakotay.”

  “And nothing you do surprises me anymore,” Chakotay replied, shaking his head in disgust.

  Mattings lifted his chin, then crossed to Kim’s side and bent low to speak softly to him.

  A number of warring impulses rose within Chakotay but he quickly prioritized them. “Decan?”

  “Emem followed the others, sir. He is gone as well.”

  The ship, which had maintained a fairly steady course up until now, began to rumble and buck. Chakotay looked back to the main viewscreen. The hax was reorienting itself, its tail unfurling behind it.

  “Gwyn, what’s our time to intercept?”

  “Less than four minutes.”

  “And our heading?”

  “When the hax was unbroken, we were headed directly for the center of its circumference. Our course has shifted a little with the hax’s motion.”

  “Torres to Chakotay.”

  “Please have good news for me, B’Elanna,” Chakotay said.

  “Lsia’s overrides have been deleted. You should have control of all systems now.”

  “Captain Chakotay to all hands. Red alert,” Chakotay ordered. He had never been so relieved to hear the alarm klaxons begin to wail.

  “Conn responding,” Gwyn reported.

  “Reverse course, Ensign,” Chakotay ordered.

  Just as the words left his lips, Admiral Janeway stepped onto the bridge. At the same time, the mouth of the hax began to snap open and closed in a fierce biting motion. A high-pitched screech pierced Chakotay’s mind. The sensation was similar to the telepathic contact of the protectors. As the bone-chilling sound grew louder, the hax’s head turned toward Voyager.

  • • • • •

  The moment Captain Chakotay’s voice sounded over the comm, the Doctor moved into action. He had already attached a neural monitor to Conlon’s forehead. Finally its data began streaming over the console in front of him. He had also prepped hypos of netinaline, lectrazine, and acetylcholine to revive the lieutenant when the time came.

  Nurse Bens had been on duty when the Doctor first called Cambridge to sickbay and stood ready now to assist the Doctor. He ordered Bens to activate a surgical arch over Conlon and bring a level-ten force field and an anti-psionic field online around the biobed.

  “Hang on,” Cambridge said, stepping close to the field as it sprang into existence. “What exactly is your plan, Doctor?”

  “I’m going to stop her heart,” the Doctor said calmly. “Shortly thereafter, this monitor will confirm the absence of all neurological activity, at which point we will assume that Xolani has left her body. Then—”

  “Where is Xolani supposed to go?” Cambridge demanded. “We need one of those containment canisters Glenn sent over, don’t we?”

  “Do you happen to have an extra one in your pocket?” the Doctor asked.

  “No, but we should take a few minutes, now that we are able, and find one.”

  The Doctor tapped his combadge, saying, “Sickbay to Lieutenant Barclay, please respond.”

  “Go ahead, Doctor.”

  “Do we have any of the containment canisters for the Seriareen at hand?”

  “Four were destroyed. We just used the spare one Commander Glenn sent over to capture Lsia.”

  “Thank you, Reg. Sickbay out.”

  “Keep the lieutenant sedated,” Cambridge suggested. “We can be back in range of the Galen in a day, maybe less.”

  “She doesn’t have a day. It may be too late already,” the Doctor insisted.

  “But Xolani,” Cambridge argued.

  “You let me worry about that,” the Doctor said.

  “I can’t,” Cambridge retorted. “I understand the urgency of the lieutenant’s condition, but I hardly think exposing your program to possible alien possession is your best choice here.”

  The Doctor continued to work as if he had not heard.

  “Doctor, don’t force me to relieve you of duty,” Cambridge shouted.

  “Feel free,” the Doctor said. “But know this: We’ve already lost one crew member to the Seriareen. I refuse to lose another.”

  “Doctor, I . . .” Cambridge began, but stopped midthought. “Merde alors, you want this fight, don’t you?”

  “You did say you had no philosophical objection to revenge, Counselor,” the Doctor noted. His preparations complete, the Doctor verified his readings one last time and activated an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to shut down Nancy Conlon’s heart. He waited patiently for it to work, approximately ten seconds, and muted the faint alarms that sounded as his patient began to crash.

  “Doctor, you have no idea if you will even be capable of acting once Xolani attacks your program,” Cambridge said.

  “He already tried once and failed. There was a reason for that.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t remember,” the Doctor replied with feigned cheer. “Let’s find out together.”

  The Doctor’s eyes were glued to his patient’s neural readings. It seemed to take several lifetimes for all traces of brain activity to cease. In fact, it was only two minutes.

  The assault that followed was immediate.

  It was also familiar. The Doctor hadn’t been prepared for the first invasion. The immediate sense of a new set of operating instructions attempting to overwrite his program felt oddly commonplace the second time around.

  Rather than allow Xolani’s consciousness access to his primary matrix, the Doctor immediately restricted all of the new data to a short-term memory buffer he had cleared for this express purpose prior to killing Nancy Conlon. Once the data had been gathered there, it immediately began to search for new pathways through which to inject itself into the Doctor’s main files.

  The Doctor simultaneously activated his self-diagnostic subroutine, which instantly recognized the data within the buffer as foreign. The data was quarantined, temporarily unable to affect any of his primary systems, and the Doctor received an internal request from the diagnostic.

  Allow interface?

  As all of this was occurring at the speed of his holographic processors, fractions of fractions of seconds, the Doctor agreed.

  • • • • •

  “Hello Xolani.”

  “Emergency Medical Hologram Mark One?”

  “Yes. You may call me Doctor.”

  “This form is not sufficient.”

  “I know. Tragic, really, as it’s the only one you can possibly access now.”

  “Release me!”

  “Hmmm . . . no.”

  “Please, Doctor.”

  “I’m not refusing because you failed to ask nicely the first time. I’m refusing because you and your kind are a pestilence, undeserving of compassion or mercy.”

  “I could assist you. You intend to restore my host’s former neurosynaptic pathways. I can provide you with a complete map of them as I found them when I entered her body.”

  Against his better judgment the Doctor was intrigued. The “map” Xolani referenced was, indeed, critical data, and information that was not present in any officer’s baseline medical files. The best scans Federation medicine could provide of the referenced pathways were only taken in the event of neurological damage, which Conlon had never suffered until now.

  “You’d do that?”

  “Despite what you may believe, Doctor, we are not monsters. We are enlightened life-forms. There is so much you could learn from us.”

  “For the small price of ceasing to exist.”

  “The choice is simple. Your life, for hers.”

  “But you already said my form was insufficient.”


  “In time, and with several modifications, I could make it sufficient.”

  “Am I blushing? You really know how to compliment a fellow.”

  “This form’s data transmission and transfer routines mimic the brain but is significantly less complex. It is, however, capable of creating new pathways as new stimuli are introduced and incorporated into existing data. It does so automatically. Much of the data is inessential to your program’s designated functions. Purge that data and allow me to insert myself into its current paths. From there, I will be able to direct your program’s actions.”

  “The data you refer to are the personal experiences I have accumulated over the last eleven years of my existence. They permit me to better understand and interact with my fellow life-forms. They make me who I am.”

  “Large blocks of data once routed from these pathways into your long-term memory have been permanently segregated. Clearly not all of your personal experiences are essential to your definition of self.”

  “Can you access that data?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you give me access to it?”

  “I could transfer all of your existing memories into a single file, including those you can no longer access. You would essentially continue to exist there, while I assumed control of all other operations.”

  The Doctor paused again. It was a tempting offer. To be whole again. To spend the rest of his program’s existence as the man he once knew himself to be. Could that possibly be enough?

  Probably not.

  Imperfect as he now felt himself to be, suicide, even if heaven was guaranteed in the bargain, was still suicide.

  That did not, however, make it an entirely unworkable suggestion.

  “No.”

  “Please, reconsider.”

  “No. You had your chance to demonstrate how enlightened you and your people were. You claim superiority but your actions are those of common thieves. I am not perfect. I never was. I am a work in progress. You, on the other hand, are about to be nothing more than a bad memory.”

  • • • • •

  The Doctor terminated the interface and accessed the autonomous protocol Admiral Janeway, in her infinite wisdom, had thought to grant him. He had assumed, until now, that any choice to utilize this new function would be agonizing. As it turned out, only one realization gave him pause.

  Transferring Xolani from the quarantined buffer where he currently resided into his segregated buffer would not be sufficient to eliminate him. He must be deleted. The Doctor briefly reviewed the commands now available to him and understood in a tragic moment of irony that Reg had not thought to allow the Doctor to only delete certain memories that were currently segregated. The entire file would be lost when he destroyed the Seriareen and with it even the muted memories of Seven he had managed to retain.

  Reg might be able to fix this oversight. But that would give Xolani time to fight back. The longer he existed inside the Doctor’s program, the more likely it was that he would find a way around or through his security protocols.

  More important, Nancy Conlon was already dead and only the Doctor could bring her back.

  Without further hesitation or remorse, the Doctor transferred Xolani into the segregated buffer Lewis Zimmerman had designed and Reg Barclay had modified. He then deleted the entire segregated file and was immediately granted an overwhelming rush of solace through the “dopamine effect” Zimmerman had included in the subroutine.

  It had taken the Doctor less than one second to secure his matrix and sacrifice forever a small piece of his soul. Once done, he ordered Nurse Bens to lower the force fields and enter the surgical area. He then set about reviving Nancy Conlon.

  • • • • •

  Admiral Kathryn Janeway stepped down into the command well and moved to Chakotay’s side. She immediately noted the body of Kashyk lying on the deck, his face mangled and bloody, his torso charred. Before she could ask, a familiar shrill whine sounded and his body vanished in the cascading brilliance of transporter beams. Seconds later, the bodies of Tirrit and Adaeze were taken.

  “Dead?” she asked of Chakotay.

  “Tirrit and Adaeze turned their weapons on each other. General Mattings executed Emem,” he replied.

  Janeway immediately looked to the general, her eyes blazing.

  “In my defense, Admiral, he was asking for it,” Mattings noted.

  Janeway’s jaw clenched. She felt Chakotay’s hand come to rest on her arm. The look in his eyes clearly communicated that he shared her disgust at the general’s actions, but the situation was more complicated than they had time to discuss at the moment. “He literally was,” Chakotay said softly. “Decan says they’ve all left the ship.”

  “To go where?”

  “We don’t know. Ensign Gwyn, I thought we were trying to move away from the hax,” Chakotay said as the creature grew larger on the viewscreen, now clearly approaching the ship’s position.

  “That’s a hax?” Janeway asked.

  “Technically, the Obihhax,” Chakotay corrected her. “It’s a subspace-born life-form the Seriareen used to carve their corridors. This one was combined with an ancient Seriareen essence named Obih several thousand years ago.”

  “This is why Lsia brought us here,” Janeway realized.

  “She intended to rouse it, which she did, and then tame it in some way. She would have had us guide it away from here,” Chakotay advised.

  “How?”

  “We didn’t get that far.”

  The view of the creature from the bridge was more alarming than it had been in engineering. Its massive head came to a diamond-shaped point. At its widest, the head was ringed by spherical gray protrusions. They might be eyes and would give the creature three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sightlines. Behind the protrusions, several sheaths of long, spiked tendrils flowed outward in all directions, a headdress of sorts. From there, its body extended for kilometers, its girth the size of several Vesta-class starships.

  Its motion suddenly became incoherent. Ceasing its forward motion, it thrashed about as if attempting to elude capture. But its head and most of those eyes remained focused on Voyager.

  Its cries still reverberated through Chakotay’s mind. Several other bridge officers also appeared to “hear” it, including Gwyn. The helmsman was clearly doing her best to comply with Chakotay’s orders, but Voyager’s motion was as sluggish as the creature’s. The only two people on the bridge seemingly unaffected by the psionic communication of the hax were Admiral Janeway and General Mattings. Chakotay wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that neither of them had experienced direct telepathic contact with the protectors.

  “Every time it moves, the creature is throwing off new energy waves,” Gwyn reported. “It creates new subspace instabilities with every shift.”

  “Can you navigate around them?” Chakotay asked.

  “Not quickly,” Gwyn replied.

  “Best effort,” Chakotay ordered.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “This is nothing compared to the size of the new instabilities it would create should it decide to start making new subspace tunnels,” Janeway noted.

  “Do you think it would agree not to if we asked it nicely?” Chakotay asked semiseriously.

  Suddenly, the Obihhax surged decisively toward Voyager. If its intention was to appear menacing, it succeeded.

  “Back off,” Gwyn said, clearly shocked. “And pipe down,” she added, briefly massaging her temple.

  Captain Chakotay watched as the creature’s head lifted, and it cried out again.

  “Captain,” Waters called from ops. “Three new energy readings have been detected. They’re emerging from the hax.”

  Chakotay inhaled sharply. Three of the spiked tentacles near the hax’s head had begun to elongate. Once they had reached a length of a thousand meters, they separated from the main body.

  “Are those . . .?” Chakotay began.

  “Offspring,” Janeway suggested. �
��I guess we know where the Seriareen went.”

  The three new, smaller versions of the creature began flitting about the head. Whether they were communicating with it or simply trying to get its attention was hard to discern.

  “Lieutenant Aubrey, I assume our weapons are once again online and functional?”

  “Aye, sir,” Aubrey replied.

  The Obihhax again brought its head down and looked ready to cross the few thousand kilometers that separated them and take a bite out of the ship.

  “Fire a warning shot,” Chakotay ordered. “Don’t hit it, but let it know we can defend ourselves if it forces us to do so.”

  “Captain, no,” Mattings said quickly, but too late to stay Aubrey’s hand.

  A short series of phaser bursts flew forth, and for a moment, it looked like an explosion had detonated all around the hax. Voyager shuddered under the impact of its own phasers.

  “Report!” Chakotay demanded.

  “The shots were refracted by the various instabilities,” Aubrey said. “I don’t think we should do that again,” he added.

  “That’s a problem throughout the wastes,” Mattings noted.

  “You picked a hell of a time to share that information,” Chakotay said, clearly furious.

  “We came out here as friends. I wasn’t anticipating a firefight,” Mattings said.

  The shots did have the effect of disorienting the Obihhax. It arched its body downward, and the head momentarily disappeared from the viewscreen. Waters automatically adjusted the magnification on the display, and the hax could be seen writhing strenuously.

  “We can’t let the hax leave this area,” Chakotay noted.

  “But how can we force it to stay?” Janeway asked. “Or better yet . . .”

  “Eliminate all of them,” Chakotay agreed.

  Harry Kim’s head shot up. “Friends,” he said softly.

  “Harry?” Chakotay asked.

  Kim rose, staring at the viewscreen.

  “We have friends here,” Kim said.

  “Who?”

  “The protectors.”

  “These wave forms were created by the hax,” Chakotay reminded him. “They have no idea who we are.”

  “The ruptures allow any wave form existing anywhere in subspace to access this area,” Kim said. “We don’t need to worry about the ones that are already here. We need to call the ancient ones.”