Star Trek: Voyager - 042 - Protectors Page 6

  “I know it’s a small ship,” Chakotay replied, surveying the close, efficient space that would barely have accommodated his ready room on Voyager, “but is this really the best they could do?”

  The admiral shrugged. “Commander Glenn offered me her quarters for the duration, but I refused. It’s got a workstation, a replicator, and a bunk. I won’t need anything else.”

  “Low maintenance.” Chakotay grinned. “I like it.” His instinct was to move toward her, but her stance, hands on hips and chin tilted upward, demanded a little distance. He settled for, “I was a little surprised when I woke up alone in my bed this morning.”

  Kathryn turned away and busied herself organizing a few padds on her tiny desk. “I spent most of the evening, once the service had concluded, with Neelix and Dexa. He’s sending me home with about a hundred letters for Naomi Wildman. After that, Tom Paris found me and asked if I would pay a visit to his mother when I reach Earth, circumstances permitting. I would have done so anyway, but now it seems I’m obligated. At any rate, I wouldn’t have been able to join you until breakfast.”

  Chakotay nodded. “I assumed as much.” It was the first night they’d spent apart since Kathryn returned and the last night they could have shared for several weeks to come. “I lost track of you at the service.”

  At this, Kathryn turned again to face him and crossed her arms, resting against the workstation. “Did you know what Captain Farkas wanted to speak to me about?”

  “No,” he replied. “She only asked that I facilitate the introduction.”

  “I see.”

  “What did she want to speak to you about?” Chakotay asked.

  “She’s furious with me,” Kathryn replied simply. “In fact, now I’m wondering how much influence she might have with Ken Montgomery or the rest of Starfleet Command.”

  “There’s no way she could have influenced Montgomery’s decision,” Chakotay insisted.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Kathryn shrugged. “But damn, she speaks her mind. I’ve got to give her that. There’s something refreshing in it. Not that she’s got anything on Hugh Cambridge.”

  “What exactly did she say?”

  Kathryn waved the question off. “Nothing I haven’t already accused myself of, or that future Admiral Janeway.”

  Chakotay nodded. He knew too well the demons she was wrestling and was more than willing to give her the space she needed to battle them. But he was a little surprised to hear of this coming from Captain Farkas, who, as best he could tell, was one of the more seasoned and even-tempered officers in Starfleet.

  “I can’t help but feel how much has changed in the last fourteen months,” Kathryn finally admitted.

  “A lot of us who lived through them are still raw. It can be hard to hold your tongue,” Chakotay offered.

  “It’s more than that,” she continued. “Maybe I spent too much time among the brass. I certainly grew accustomed to a fair amount of deference from those I outranked, and the political maneuvering among my peers was done in subtext. It appears that’s not how we do things anymore.”

  Chakotay considered her words. “Everything feels almost too close to the bone right now. I don’t know many who have the patience for lying. I think because none of us are sure anymore that there will be time in the future to speak the truth.”

  Kathryn nodded. “Good to know.”

  “Commander Glenn to Admiral Janeway,” the captain’s voice bleated over the comm.

  Tapping her combadge, Kathryn replied, “Go ahead.”

  “We’re ready to depart when you are, Admiral.”

  “Understood. Captain Chakotay will be on his way to the transporter room momentarily.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  Stepping closer to Chakotay, Kathryn remarked, “Not this one, though,” clearly referring to Commander Glenn. “She does everything by the book.”

  “She’s young.” Chakotay smiled. “Give her time.”

  Wordlessly, Chakotay finally took Kathryn in his arms and held her close for the few moments left to them. When she pulled away, her eyes met his and he saw defiance there.

  “There’s no reason to say good-bye,” she said. “I’ll see you in a few weeks.”

  Chakotay wanted this to be true, and for her sake, refused to allow any other option to enter his mind. “You will be missed,” he said. “And I assume it goes without saying that if there is anything at all you need from us while you are away, you have but to ask.”

  Kathryn smiled faintly.

  Chakotay bent his head low to kiss her lightly. She lingered there a bit longer than he’d anticipated, ending the moment on her terms.

  “A few weeks,” she said again, willing it to be true.

  Taking her face in his hands, he replied, “And then, no matter what happens . . .”

  Kathryn nodded in understanding as she took his hands in hers, kissed each of them tenderly, and released them.

  The morning briefing had already gone on almost an hour, and as best Lieutenant Kim could tell, Captain Chakotay had yet to be impressed. The suggestions he, Tom, and Seven had spent several hours preparing had clearly failed to pique his interest for their next mission. Commander Liam O’Donnell, Demeter’s captain, had remained silent, as if he had mentally checked out. His fellow senior officers—Lieutenant Commander Atlee Fife and Lieutenant Url, Kim’s counterpart aboard Demeter—had asked the occasional pertinent question. Fleet Chief B’Elanna Torres and the rest of Voyager’s senior staff—Lieutenant Conlon, Counselor Cambridge, science officer Lieutenant Devi Patel, operations officer Lieutenant Kenth Lasren, and the CMO, Doctor Sharak—seemed to hope that Chakotay would just settle on something so they could get on with their duties.

  In a way, Kim shared their desire. The fleet’s original mission profile had consisted largely of continued sweeps of former Borg territory. Much had been explored by Quirinal, Hawking, Esquiline, and Curie before their encounter with the Omega Continuum, but they had only scratched the surface of the space that was once held by the Collective. Apart from Voyager’s last mission to learn the fate of a small group of Borg severed from the Collective prior to the Caeliar transformation, none of the efforts of the Full Circle fleet had produced any evidence of any interesting activity, Borg or otherwise, except for a few cranky Malon. Continuing along the same path seemed likely to produce more tedium.

  After the fleet’s encounter with Omega, however, Kim wondered if this was a bad idea. From the moment Voyager had arrived, they had stumbled into one catastrophe after another. The Delta Quadrant had rarely been boring in Kim’s experience, but giving everybody time to regroup and get their feet under them sounded like just what the crew needed as a morale booster.

  The captain was convinced, however, at least to hear Tom tell it, that for the fleet’s mission of exploration of the Delta Quadrant to continue after all they’d lost, they were going to have to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that their work was vital to the Federation.

  Kim had found some of Tom and Seven’s proposals interesting. Seven was keen to attempt to make contact with several races known to have partially escaped assimilation, including Arturis’s people. Given how angry Arturis had been with Captain Janeway and the lengths he had gone to exact revenge, Kim wasn’t sure that would end well. Tom had proposed, among other things, that they attempt to find Kurros and his Think Tank. They, too, had proved themselves untrustworthy during Voyager’s initial encounter. It was likely, however, given their interests and expertise, that the Think Tank might have learned more than most about local changes of significance since the Borg’s presumed disappearance.

  It wasn’t so much the potential hazards of these and similar missions that Chakotay found objectionable. It was that they were treading over old ground. The captain wanted at least the potential for significant new information to be added to their databases, and thus far, nothing suggested seemed to fill that bill.

  “Is there anything else?” Chakotay asked, clearly disap
pointed but trying to remain encouraging. “The floor is open.”

  Paris’s shoulders slumped visibly, and Seven sat back, resting against her chair, clearly nonplussed. Kim was inspired by the general level of discontent to take a risk.

  “There might be,” he said and was suddenly conscious of eleven pairs of eyes shooting toward him. O’Donnell alone remained lost in his own thoughts.

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant.” Chakotay nodded.

  “It was a while ago,” Kim began, sitting forward and interlacing his hands before him on the table. “Just after we started our journey home,” he went on. “We were celebrating Kes’s second birthday on the holodeck, and we encountered a spatial distortion ring that pretty much twisted the ship into a pretzel as we moved through it.”

  The first officer’s eyes widened, as if he could not believe Harry would bring up the encounter. Kim remembered well how difficult it had been for all of them to accept the fact that there was nothing they could do to combat the distortion and the few minutes they had spent awaiting what they believed would be their destruction surrounded by some of Tom’s more annoying holographic creations had been a low point in those early years.

  “I remember,” Chakotay said.

  “As do I,” Torres said, her displeasure evident.

  “We didn’t learn much initially about the phenomenon,” Kim allowed.

  “We didn’t learn anything,” Paris corrected him. “It dumped a ton of information into our databases and uploaded ours, but the data was too corrupted to be of any use.”

  “We purged it all a few months later, didn’t we?” Torres asked of Seven, who shrugged. “Sorry,” she quickly realized, “that was before you joined us.”

  “Did I miss much?” Seven quipped, bringing a slight smile to Cambridge’s lips.

  “We did purge the data,” Kim said. “But I kept a copy in my personal files.”

  “Why?” Paris demanded.

  “Because it always bothered me,” Kim replied. “It was a powerful device of some sort, and it obviously had a purpose. It seemed like such a waste that it would have tried to provide us with all of that data we could never use.”

  “You felt bad for the poor distortion ring?” Paris asked, incredulous.

  “He was looking for a shortcut home,” Torres suggested more gently. “You thought there might be one buried in all that information, didn’t you, Harry?”

  Kim sighed. “At first, yes. I knew it was a long shot, which is why I never mentioned it. It became a pet project of mine. Whenever I had time on my hands, and there were some stretches over the years, I went back to it, tried a few new algorithms. It was a puzzle, but almost too complex to ever solve.”

  “Did you solve it?” Chakotay asked.

  “Some of it,” Kim replied. “Most of the data was beyond retrieval. A lot of what I did recover was star charts of areas we had already scanned. But there were also bits and pieces that seemed to be expressions of want or need on the part of the phenomenon. I’m not saying it was a life-form—I believe it was constructed by someone or something. I got the sense that it had surpassed its original parameters. I also know, for a fact, that it came from a considerable distance from where we encountered it. I found the distortion ring’s initial coordinates. It had traveled more than twenty thousand light-years in the course of at least two hundred years before we encountered it. We thought it had just passed by to say ‘hello,’ but I think it was asking for help.”

  “You found a distress call?” Chakotay asked.

  “It sounded like one to me.” Kim nodded.

  “Why didn’t you say something back then?” Paris asked.

  “It took me six years to decipher what I did,” Kim countered. “By that time, answering the call would have taken us forty thousand light-years or so in the wrong direction.”

  “It would not have been practical to suggest,” Seven concurred.

  Kim shook his head. “And it’s not something I was supposed to be working on. But we could investigate now. I know it’s been more than nine years, but in the life of that phenomenon, it was the blink of an eye.”

  “Perhaps two blinks and a nod,” Cambridge suggested.

  “Are you certain it was technological and not a life-form of some sort?” Patel interjected, clearly intrigued.

  Kim shrugged. “None of the readings we were able to take during our first encounter showed anything other than high EM discharges. But it altered space and subspace as we moved through it. And it did manage to make what might have been a telepathic connection with Admiral Janeway. It was an incredibly complex and powerful entity.”

  “One I’d like to avoid encountering again,” Paris mumbled.

  As silence fell around the table, all eyes turned back to Chakotay.

  Before he could speak, Commander O’Donnell asked, “What did it say, exactly?”

  “It was twenty million gigaquads of data,” Kim replied.

  “You said it asked for help,” O’Donnell clarified.

  You were listening? Kim thought. “The exact phrasing was something like ‘. . . require aid . . . unable to sustain as ordered . . .’ ”

  “Unable to sustain what?” O’Donnell asked.

  “The next retrievable data was a set of coordinates.”

  “What were those coordinates?” Chakotay asked.

  “A moment, please.” Kim rose to cross to the room’s main data interface panel. He quickly tapped into his personal archive and a brief search yielded the required results. He then activated them for display. “This is much farther out than our previous mission was intended to take us. We have no idea what’s out there.”

  At this, Seven leaned in to take a closer look. After a moment she said, “This region is more than ten thousand light-years from any area of space ever held by the Borg.”

  “Well, that settles it then, doesn’t it?” O’Donnell said.

  “Sir?” Paris asked, clearly not having reached the same conclusion.

  “This has to take priority over any other mission. We’re still in the business of answering distress calls, aren’t we?” O’Donnell asked.

  Paris looked to Chakotay. Kim saw a familiar glint lighting his captain’s eyes.

  “We are,” he agreed. “Excellent work, Harry.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kim said, relieved.

  Chakotay turned to Paris and said, “Tom, have Gwyn plot a course. Nancy, bring the slipstream drive online and coordinate our flight plan with Demeter. Devi, I’d like you and Seven to work with Doctor Sharak. Review all of the information from our first encounter with the distortion ring and everything Harry was able to coax from the data it provided. I’d like to know before we arrive at those coordinates if we’re dealing with a life-form.”

  “It took two hundred years to find us some forty thousand years from this location,” Paris interjected. “You don’t think it was headed home or made it there in the last nine, do you?”

  “No,” Chakotay replied. “But there’s a chance it wasn’t one of a kind, either, isn’t there? Dismissed,” Chakotay ordered, then rose and crossed to Kim.

  Paris warned him softly, “So help me, Harry, if another one of those things is out there and comes at us again with the bending, twisting maneuver, I’m throwing you out of an airlock to meet it.”

  “Hey, you wanted exciting.” Kim shrugged.

  Paris was prevented from further comment by Chakotay’s presence behind him. “You have your orders, Commander,” he said pointedly.

  “Do you want me to cancel or postpone our final high-resolution sensor sweep of the asteroid belt for Lieutenant Barclay?” Paris asked, rising.

  “Train sensors aft, get what data you can,” Chakotay ordered.

  Paris moved on, joining the others returning to their posts as Chakotay paused before Kim.

  “A pet project?” he asked.

  “I almost abandoned it until we entered that void, about five years in, remember?”

  “I do.” Chakotay
nodded.

  “I hadn’t made any headway. But I could only stand losing to Tuvok at kal-toh so many times. I found another brick wall to bang my head against.” Kim shrugged. “There were actually a number of Borg-inspired algorithms that came in handy, along with some of the enhanced linguistic tools we picked up from Arturis before he tried to send us back to Borg space.”

  “Obviously we’re going to need countermeasures in the event there are more distortion rings out there, but I’m entering a commendation in your file now for sheer tenacity.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kim said.

  “I want you to take point with our research groups. You’ve earned it, Lieutenant,” Chakotay added.

  “Happy to.”

  “Let’s get to work.”

  As Kim turned to follow the captain out, his step was a little lighter. He had always suspected that his transfer from operations to tactical and security was as much a promotion as an effort by his superiors to give him the widest possible range of experiences before moving to the command track. Kim certainly hoped that one day, he would have a ship of his own to lead. If he was right, and if this mission did turn up anything interesting, he might be closer to that now than he’d ever been at any time in his career.

  And that felt awfully good.

  Chapter Four

  GALEN

  Kathryn Janeway had actually put this moment off longer than she should have. Her obligations to Starfleet and those who had survived the recent tragedy had taken priority, along with her early work with Cambridge to try and regain her equilibrium.

  Still, she wasn’t certain her mother was going to understand.

  She felt light-headed, and her pulse began to race while she waited for the ship’s operations officer to establish the necessary connection. Her anxiety intensified as the Federation insignia on the small screen before her stretched and clouded with static. Several unbearable moments later, however, the screen was filled with the careworn yet still undeniably beautiful face of Gretchen Janeway.

  At first, Kathryn could find no words. She simply stared at her mother and watched Gretchen squint a little as if she couldn’t clearly see the image she was receiving.