***

 

 

Another stupid, useless meeting, thought B'Elanna Torres; another chance to find out that I'm unnecessary on this ship; a supernumerary, a third engine pod, a white elephant.

 

 

***

 

 

Ensign Kim cleared his throat. He and Paris had been trying, with limited success, to describe the vast machinery they had seen inside the moon.

 

 

Commander Chakotay, Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres, and Kes turned toward the young ensign.

 

 

"You have something to add?" asked the commander, command duty officer in Captain Jane way's absence. B'Elanna tried not to let her annoyance show. If she could change just one thing about Harry, she would make him bolder about offering his own opinion. Half the time, it seemed he allowed Paris to speak his lines for him, as if he weren't even present.

 

 

"Actually, a suggestion, sir. Can we adjourn and go down to the holodeck? I could feed the data clip from the holocam into the computer and simulate the machinery."

 

 

"Yeah," said Torres, a little too quickly; she was overanxious to please--and knew it.

 

 

"I second! Let me get a look at it. I promise I can figure it out."

 

 

Torres was uncomfortably aware that she had contributed very little to the discussion so far, actually, Paris's description had not been particularly helpful, but she did not want to say that. It sounded too much like an excuse.

 

 

Chakotay shifted the debriefing. Ten minutes later, they stood on an invisible platform, hovering half a mile above the gigantic machine... exactly the position from which Kim had used the tri corder.

 

 

B'Elanna stared down between her boots; she tried to get

 

 

an overall impression of the flow of the system as a whole before getting a close-up. The entire apparatus was too large to comprehend any other way.

 

 

"Power obviously comes in through those conduits in the southwest quadrant. Computer superimpose bearings over the image.

 

 

There--the conduits at one-zero-seven and one zero-eight. That's the power supply."

 

 

She paced back and forth, absently rubbing her Klingon brow ridge... an unconscious habit of discomfort. She noticed and stopped herself.

 

 

She held her hand out, palm down, tracing the probable movement of power from the input into the guts of the machine. "Subspace channeling gear... some kind of compression device--really huge, 102 , 10 to the 25th watts. Imaging gear--never mind, just for aiming, I think. Commander? They're right on the knife edge of transporter technology, but they go off in some funny direction. I can't tell exactly what it is. But I don't think we're going to like it."

 

 

"Why not?"

 

 

"I think when you put the whole thing together--and I have no idea if it's operable yet--you somehow have the power to reach out and crush something. Maybe even through subspace."

 

 

"Something?"

 

 

"I don't know... a ship, a planet, empty space, a sun.

 

 

Something--and crush it really hard, I mean; hard enough maybe to turn a sun into a neutron star, or even a black hole, if it starts out big enough."

 

 

"Are you sure?"

 

 

B'Elanna Torres flushed... an alien reaction for a Klingon; it came purely from her human half. But both sides understood doubt and embarrassment. He thinks I'm crazy, she thought. He doesn't trust me anymore.

 

 

Or am I just paranoid now? She licked her lips nervously, uncertain what to say or do next. She felt a terrible pressure to do something, anything! Say anything. Something, for Kahless's sake!

 

 

"Chakotay," said Kes,

 

 

"I think B'Elanna's right. I recognize some of this technology... it's similar to the way the Caretaker taught us to build our energy-distribution centers."

 

 

Chakotay nodded.

 

 

"If an engineer and a technician agree, then that is good enough for me. Ensign Kim?"

 

 

Kim shrugged; he didn't know enough engineering to offer an opinion. Nobody asked Paris.

 

 

"Let's review what we know," said the first officer.

 

 

"The aliens have built an energy-collection grid around their sun; it captures perhaps ten percent of the sun's radiant energy but beams it via microwaves to this artificial moon. The moon contains a giant apparatus--or more likely many such devices--that takes this enormous energy and converts it into a beam that can project a crushing force, possibly through subspace, powerful enough to turn a star into a neutron star. Is that a fair statement?"

 

 

"Put that way," said Torres, "it scares the hell out of me." She tried to imagine what anyone would want with such a collection of dangerous toys.

 

 

Chakotay nodded.

 

 

"Scares the hell out of me too. We also know the aliens have captured a crashed shuttle craft and possibly a still living pilot... and currently, they have Captain Jane way and Lieutenant Tuvok as guests."

 

 

Chakotay stood silent, thinking. B'Elanna could almost read his thoughts by watching his expression... he glanced at the empty space they unconsciously reserved where Jane way would have stood; glanced down at the huge machine a half-kilometer below their feet; fingered his comm badge.

 

 

At last he spoke.

 

 

"I believe we should request the captain's immediate return and tell her what we saw; I don't like this picture."

 

 

"Aye, aye, sir," said Ensign Kim.

 

 

"Request permission to return to the bridge."

 

 

"Does anybody have anything else to say?" asked the commander. No one spoke. B'Elanna especially didn't speak; all she had to say was I agree... and Chakotay didn't need a yes-person.

 

 

"Then the meeting is adjourned. e Kim, return to the bridge and contact Captain Jane way. Paris, stand by for an emergency beam-out, just in case. Torres, you monitor the moon; tell me if there is any sudden

 

 

power surge... I want to know if they power up their weapon.

 

 

Dismissed."

 

 

The rest of the senior crew scurried off about their tasks, but Torres remained behind with Chakotay, staring down at the huge machine... the huge weapon.

 

 

"Chakotay? Why would anyone want to crush a planet through subspace?"

 

 

"Let's hope that's all they can do," said the commander. "I'm afraid..." He did not elaborate his fear, and this time she couldn't read his thoughts; eventually, B'Elanna decided to give him some space to work it out.

 

 

"Captain," said Tuvok hoarsely. Jane way and Neelix each grabbed one of his arms and sat him down on an iron bench. The bench was decorated with skulls and spiderwebs. My God, thought Captain Jane way, he's just passed through the dark night of the soul!

 

 

"Tuvok, don't try to speak just yet," said the captain; "you've had a very bad reaction to--"

 

 

"Captain," he whispered,

 

 

"I am well aware of my reaction. I am perfectly all right now; I have controlled the outbreak."

 

 

"Maybe we should contact Commander Chakotay... the doctor should look you over."

 

 

"I assure you, I have regained full control of myself. It is an effort, but there will be no future outbreaks of emotion.

 

 

Captain, I must warn you about something, who these Furies actually are."

 

 

"Furies?" Jane way sat back, surprised by how right the name sounded. At once, her vague memory clicked into place. She had learned about the Furies-could they be the same Furies?--in her second-year Academy class in military history. A previous captain of the Enterprise had encountered hideous beings some six or seven decades earlier in Federation space; they almost destroyed his ship--they almost overran the quadrant!

 

 

At the time, she found the tale of marginal interest; she was worried about a term paper on rotating Okudagrams, and the adventure was just one of an improbable number of similar stories attributed to that ship and that captain.

 

 

Captain Kirk had not been stretching the truth, the similarities were too great. But if James Kirk discovered any special clues or insights into the nature of the Furies, that information did not remain in her faded memory of an Academy lecture. If the Furies were more than just monstrous-looking aliens, Jane way and Tuvok would have to "remember" for themselves, staring back along their own DNA histories.

 

 

She stared around the antechamber in which Navdaq had deposited them. The room was not quite round; the walls were not quite perpendicular; the room was an iron stewpot, indifferently formed by a careless ironmonger. A bench tilted against one side, and Jane way and Tuvok sat upon it recovering their self-control; but Neelix paced anxiously in front of the bench, keyed like an animal that smelled danger. His yellow cheek-streaks looked like burnt umber in the faint, red glow from the walls.

 

 

Jane way considered the Furies, wondering what Tuvok might remember, Vulcans had been civilized far longer than humans; there might be records.

 

 

"Well... I know they used to live somewhere else and hold other races as slaves. They used a fear projector, some kind of device to project terror into their slaves to prevent a revolt.

 

 

But I don't know how I know all that. It's as if..."

 

 

"Oh right," said the Talaxian, more peeved than usual; "like you were there!"

 

 

"Yes," said the Vulcan.

 

 

"As if I were there."

 

 

Tuvok closed his eyes. Calmly, unemotionally, he recounted the hell he had journeyed through for the past thirty minutes... and the memories it had raked up. Jane way listened with rapt attention, astonished and a little chilled by how close it struck to her own vision.

 

 

"We did encounter these Furies once before in recorded history," concluded the Vulcan.

 

 

Jane way nodded.

 

 

"Yes, I remember the original Enterprise fought them to a standstill some decades past. I read about it in Military History 120 or 140."

 

 

Tuvok raised an eyebrow.

 

 

"Indeed. I read about it in the message traffic at the time."

 

 

The captain stared.

 

 

"Tuvok, that long ago?"

 

 

"Indeed, I confess I did not pay sufficient attention at the time to benefit us now."

 

 

Jane way strained to remember everything she had heard or read about the Furies in years past; the intelligence amounted to a very little pile after all.

 

 

"But why bother to come to Federation space?" She turned her hands up.

 

 

"What's wrong with all this? Why isn't this enough for them?"

 

 

"Captain," concluded Tuvok, rational as any Vulcan,

 

 

"I

 

 

believe that heaven, as Navdaq calls it, was in the Alpha Quadrant. And the subject races included Vulcans... and doubtless your own."

 

 

"You mean--but we were never..." She pressed her lips together, it would indeed explain much about her own reaction, the unexpected and irrational fear and disgust she felt on first seeing Navdaq.

 

 

A hundred thousand years ago, humans might have had no reason to feel such horror at these Furies--early men might think them gods or demons, but they saw gods and demons everywhere!

 

 

Yet something had made the entire human race, and even the savage, violent Vulcan race, simply give up and allow themselves to be enslaved for tens of thousands of years, if Tuvok's racial memory was accurate; all so long before history began that there was no record... except in the DNA.

 

 

And then she recalled, with a chill, Navdaq's words: We shall return to keaven, whence we were cast out, and cleanse it of all Unclean.... Heaven shall be cleansed of all but the Furies.

 

 

She stood, blocking Neelix's path; he almost ran into her before noticing and stopping.

 

 

Jane way felt a sense of unreality. She had no illusions.

 

 

Biologically, humans of today were not that different from humans of a hundred thousand years ago.

 

 

If it worked then, it would work now.

 

 

The hour is at hand....

 

 

"Captain, did Navdaq describe the Unclean? I confess

 

 

there were many minutes when I heard nothing of what was said."

 

 

"I wasn't listening very well myself," admitted Jane way ruefully. She and Tuvok sat quietly for a moment until Neelix broke the silence by clearing his throat.

 

 

"Well, I was listening the whole time... and it did paint a reasonably complete picture of what it called the Unclean. It described them as a cross between a virus and a machine."

 

 

Jane way shook her head.

 

 

"That's no race I'm aware of in the Alpha Quadrant, at least not in the Federation or the Klingon, Cardassian, or Rom ulan Empires."

 

 

"Yet we encounter new races every day," said Tuvok.

 

 

"We may yet meet with their remnants in a few years. They may not be able to help us against the Furies, however, they have clearly degenerated far enough over the millennia to lose control over 'heaven' after once defeating Navdaq's people."

 

 

"Tuvok, I get the queasy feeling that we're the thin, red line." She glanced at the iron-red walls that gave no heat; unconsciously, she stepped away.

 

 

"I am unfamiliar with that reference, Captain."

 

 

"British Army, five hundred years ago. We, my friend, are the first defense of the entire Alpha Quadrant against this terrible invasion... assuming they're serious."

 

 

"I don't think Navdaq is lying," said Neelix.

 

 

"He seems quite sincere and passionate."

 

 

"Then we are in trouble, Tuvok. It's one ship against twenty-seven billion invaders. Been practicing with that phaser?" She smiled, taking the edge off the cut.

 

 

"Your point is taken, Captain."

 

 

Neelix interrupted.

 

 

"Why always look at the dark side? You should count your blessings that you found out in time. We can overwhelm them and stop the invasion!"

 

 

Jane way glowered at Neelix. Just what she needed: more swashes to be buckled!

 

 

"Next question: why all the nightmare architecture, the darkness, the moist, rotting air?"

 

 

Tuvok, fully himself again in Navdaq's absence, extracted his tri corder and scanned the local area.

 

 

"I detect a great

 

 

many microorganisms in the atmosphere, far more than on Earth or Vulcan."

 

 

"You mean germs?" worried Neelix.

 

 

"Are we inoculated against them? I don't want to come down with some bizarre, alien disease."

 

 

"It is not likely, Mr. Neelix, that alien microbes would even recognize any of the three of us as food. In fact, I believe these microorganisms are closer to plankton than to viruses or bacteria: simple, single-celled pl antlike organisms with no capability of reprogramming a cell's DNA."

 

 

"Plankton?" Jane way thought for a moment.

 

 

"Tuvok, is it possible that Navdaq and the other Furies are filter-feeders?"

 

 

"I believe that is a very likely scenario. The horns and tendrils on the heads of most of the races we have seen so far, and the worm like cilia in Navdaq's mouth, may well be organs that suck in moist air and filter out the microorganisms for nourishment."

 

 

"And the darkness and musty smell simply encourage the fungi and plankton to grow," she mused.

 

 

"I wonder... the remote ancestors of both humans and Vulcans used to dwell in holes in the ground, tens of millions of years ago. Yet now we associate being underground with death and damnation. When did we first begin doing so?

 

 

"Could the Furies have given us that fear, too?"

 

 

They fell silent, and fifteen minutes passed. There was still no sign of either Navdaq or the Autocrat. Jane way almost touched her commbadge to ask Chakotay what was happening on the Voyager; but she suddenly felt reluctant to announce that the brooch on her chest was a communications device--just in case they were being observed.

 

 

After a while, Jane way opened another line of inquiry, in fact, she had decided to initiate as many logical speculations as possible to keep her Vulcan lieutenant firmly grounded in his natural element.

 

 

"Tuvok, why is Navdaq being so open with us, with the very people the Furies once enslaved?"

 

 

"If I had to speculate, I would conclude that he does not see us as the enemy. After all, we are here, not there; we are

 

 

in the Delta Quadrant, and the Unclean are in the Alpha Quadrant."

 

 

"I'm getting a bit worried, Tuvok. Navdaq has been gone a long time, leaving us alone in this giant saucepan. I think we're being deliberately delayed... and maybe our cover is blown after all."

 

 

"Blown? Do you mean they've figured out who you are?" Neelix began to glance suspiciously into every dark, dank corner, as if expecting a horde of Navdaqs to pop out with pitchforks.

 

 

Almost as if in response, a crack as bright-red as fire opened in the iron wall immediately opposite them; slowly, an oil wood door began to creak open.

 

 

Beyond it, they saw only the red glow of more "hot" iron.

 

 

"I believe the doctor will see us now," muttered Jane way.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

I never understand what she's talking about, thought an annoyed Neelix as they rose and slipped through the door. The red walls were not particularly hotter than the rest of the planet; they were noticibly brighter. Neelix wondered whether such comparatively bright light bothered the Furies; was the corridor intended to put local suppliants off their game, make them nervous before meeting their Autocrat? It had the opposite effect on the Talaxian, tired of the black gloom.

 

 

The glowing-iron corridor wound around a series of bends that were perfect right angles; the floor remained on the same level; the ceiling lowered, then in a trick of suddenness exploded up and out of sight. The glow grew steadily brighter until even Neelix had to squint against it, a glow like metal heated to the searing temperature. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all of a color, so that the Voyager's guide had a hard time telling exactly where one ended and the other began--the corners were lost in the glare. He could not see how far the corridor extended, and that disturbed him.

 

 

I'd better be ready to defend the crew, he thought, casually brushing the phaser on his belt. Then belatedly: I'd better not die down here, or Kes will kill me. Somehow, the Fury planet brought up the most morbid thoughts.

 

 

Not being able to really see when the corridor turned, the away team several times piled up against the wale thankful that it was not as hot as it looked.

 

 

Then they turned and saw a black spot in the distance, the only disharmony of color since leaving the antechamber. It was a door, a simple dungeon door of some local oily wood. A mechanical lever--mechanical!--jutted from the bottom. Neelix boldly squatted down to yank on it.

 

 

The door flew open with a bang, wrenching itself from the startled scout, who yelled and lunged backward, flaring his arms to shield his companions from whatever was coming through the door--nothing, as it turned out.

 

 

Inside was a room so bright it hurt all three pairs of eyes, bright and hellish white: a combination to strike terror in the guts of a local, used to musty darkness as they were. Neelix did not need the captain's tri corder to know the air was dry and sterile, devoid of comforting plankton-food and yet another blow to the self-confidence of a Fury.

 

 

A huge figure sat in black silhouette at the far end of the room. The Autocrat's face and flesh were obscured by the difference in light; but his bulk was unmistakable. Seated, he towered even over Tuvok, while his shoulders were as wide as he was tall. His neck and arms articulated in the wrong places, and Neelix's stomach turned slowly.

 

 

There was something dreadful about the Autocrat. He slowly rose and fell, groaning up to full extension and slithering down against the desk.

 

 

As Neelix's eyes adjusted, he began to scope the room.

 

 

Again, it was badly fitted, walls meeting at strange angles, alien geometry that made Neelix dizzy. The light was so intense, it hurt even Neelix's eyes. A gigantic, U-shaped desk and riveted-iron chair occupied one entire side of the room; there were no other chairs, and the three supplicants had to stand before the Autocrat like accused criminals. Beyond the Autocrat, or behind the away team, Neelix could see little because of the intense lighting.

 

 

The voice was the dry rattle of bones down a chimney, a

 

 

serpent's sound, the voice of a deadly Th rack Gourd-Shaker lizard.

 

 

"So. You. Have come. For trade deal."

 

 

Neelix answered earnestly, pretending to be unaffected by the sights and sounds.

 

 

"Quite so, O great... potentate. I am Captain Nedix of the merchant vessel Sunbird I--"

 

 

Jane way, standing to Neelix's side, shifted slightly as if by accident and trod upon his foot.

 

 

"Owl Of the merchant vessel Songbird, and these are my assistants. Lowly, unimportant assistants. The clumsy one on the left is Vice-President Jane way, while on the right is--"

 

 

"But what. Have you. For our interest?."

 

 

"Ah, why, we can probably find in, er, storage any item from the vast reaches of the Delta Quadrant you desire... the fabled Britelflowers of Dazan Two, whose merest odor fills the heart with intense longing for the object of one's affections--that is, if you have need of such an item here. A necklace made of the teeth of the Drug ga Bear, the most beautiful, symmetrical carboniferous crystal teeth you've ever... no? Well, surely no person of discriminating taste could pass up an opportunity to buy Distak 'nk'Arat lava water, the most intense intoxicant in the quadrant, and no lingering aftereffect! A special price, half the going rate... special introductory offer for new customers only." The Autocrat began to make a peculiar noise that sounded like the death gurgle of an animal dying of pain and thirst. He's laughing at me, thought Neelix in a flush of anger.

 

 

"We have no."

 

 

"Well, if you don't have--"

 

 

"Need for such. Items of frivolity. What have. You for. Our holy quest?"

 

 

"You--mean weapons? Navigational charts?"

 

 

The Autocrat rattled at a much higher frequency.

 

 

"Ari facts!

 

 

Have no. Need for tools. Can make ourselves. What can you. Offer of. Spiritual nature?"

 

 

Neelix opened his mouth for a moment, then shut it. He repeated the action, then a third time. Honesty! he told himself.

 

 

Why not give it a whirl? When all else fails...

 

 

"I'm sorry," he admitted,

 

 

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

 

 

Abruptly, Navdaq's voice spoke from behind the Autocrat.

 

 

Neelix had missed the huge Fury in the glare.

 

 

"He means, you tendril less coward, that all that the Furies really need is the courage to face the Unclean; the purity to gain heaven; the loyalty to obey without pause; the cruelty to war without mercy against whoever wishes to keep us from our destiny! But we find such values in short supply aboard the Songbird. Or was it the Sunbird? We've lost track."

 

 

Uh-oh

 

 

"Sir, you impugn my motives and my character!"

 

 

The Autocrat "laughed" again, sending a chill down Neelix's spine.

 

 

"Yes! Yes yes. You understand! It is good."

 

 

The captain's commbadge beeped; Neelix jumped, startled by the sound.

 

 

"Captain," said Chakotay's voice, "we've detected a fleet of ships lifting from the planet at constant bearing, decreasing distance. Prepare for emergency beam out."

 

 

"Chakotay, get the ship out of--!" shouted Jane way. From nowhere, from behind, a hand with suckers and squirming, worm like digits wrapped around her mouth, cutting off the rest of her command and her breath. Quick as Nick, Navdaq stood before her; he ripped the badge from her uniform, tearing a strip of cloth and exposing her under tunic. He flung the badge across the room, while more Furies did the same to the commbadges worn by Neelix and Tuvok.

 

 

Neelix held his breath, desperately hoping the Voyager had gotten a lock before the reference point headed south. But he felt no welcome uneasiness of de materialization.

 

 

"Your emergency weapon beam will do you no good, no good.

 

 

Unclean, and ally of the Unclean who destroyed our projection antenna! You are nothing before the rage of the Furies. You will live to see your filth cleansed from heaven. And you, traitor to your own, friend of Unclean--" Navdaq turned his fury upon Neelix, who was doing his best to maintain dignity and doing a remarkable job.

 

 

"You made your impious way along the right-angle path, and so shall you share now their fate. Favored, take them below."

 

 

Neelix struggled uselessly for a few moments while the

 

 

"favored" gripped his wrists in a grasp of steel to push him directly toward a painfully bright wall. The wall contained a loophole, invisible in the glare, and the guard propelled him through.

 

 

He stole a glance at Jane way and Tuvok; they were docile, allowing themselves to be gently shepherded--brawling was hardly an option, outnumbered as they were--by two of twelve massive creatures, hexapedal, a rim of what must be vision organs around their heads protected by alien visors.

 

 

Damn! Damn my instincts--and why didn't I LISTEN to them? He had no answer, it was a humiliating position for an interstellar explorer of Neelix's repute.

 

 

Neelix relaxed and went where they pushed him. They made progress into an immediate corridor as dank and dungeonesque as would warm the feeding-tendrils of any self-respecting Fury. When Neelix's eyes adjusted to the midnight dark, he saw that the favored had removed their visors, revealing six eye-orbs: two in front, two in back, one each on the side. Their limbs were articulated so that there was neither front nor back; they could move or act in either direction with equal facility.

 

 

Once in thieves' blackness, the favored dropped to four of their limbs and began to gallop, forcing their bipedal prisoners to sprint to stay ahead and avoid being knocked down and trampled. The favored steered them through hall after hall, down a spiral staircase on which Neelix tripped and fell hard on one wrist, then across a courtyard full of gaze-averting natives.

 

 

The Talaxian caught a quick glimpse of metal-grate floors and oil wood walls, of high, iron ceilings and buildings that rattled like fiery furnaces. But he could not track the route, for they were dragged too quickly.

 

 

Any thought of escape was thwarted by the breakneck speed of the hunt and the single, unyielding hand that closed around both of Neelix's wrists. No one so much as glanced up; the prisoners were stampeded through the ruly crowd, then under a skull-bedecked archway to a pit.

 

 

The favored yanked them all to a stop. Jane way and Tuvok were out of breath, but Neelix was destroyed! His heart pounded like the Autocrat's laugh, and he could not

 

 

catch his breath. I'm too old for this nonsense! he bemoaned, not for the first, tenth, or last time. The one problem with swashbuckling as a profession was the tremendous demand placed upon the physical body.

 

 

Neelix's eyes were screwed shut, his mouth wide open sucking in the acrid, burning stench with its minute trace of oxygen, a mere contamination (so it tasted to Neelix) of an otherwise caustic gas.

 

 

The favored conversed, Neelix guessed, in extremely high-frequency, highly compressed data packets. The much ballyhooed Star fleet Universal Translator did nothing, could not even detect that the occasional squeak they made to each other was an unreasonably speeded-up monologue; when two or more squeaked in unison, they were probably interleaving a conversation faster than the ear--or Neelix's ear, in any case--could follow. After the conference, the mob set off again, somewhat slower.

 

 

Down, down, down they continued, through dungeon and cavern tilted alarmingly, throwing off Neelix's balance, wrapped by walls of indifferent, disordered joining that seemed not quite right to the eye. Now they began to pass barred cells, and Neelix's sides ached, his lungs a searing agony. There was no oxygen at all! He was going to pass out from the exertion.

 

 

But he staggered on, driving himself forward more by pride than fear Neelix would not be the one who collapsed; he would not shame the captain and Lieutenant Tuvok.

 

 

The favored wrenched the away team to a halt, nearly pulling Neelix's arm out of its socket. He kept his feet, though his knees buckled. He leaned over at the waist and focused his mind on one breath, then another.

 

 

He turned his head to the side, still seeing stars.

 

 

Jane way's face was pale in dim lamplight, her eyes unfocused; she was having no little trouble of her own. But Tuvok remained unperturbed; his eyes were half-lidded, face impassive, Vulcan chest rising and falling in slow rhythm. He comes from a hot, dry planet, Neelix reassured himself, none too different from this, save for the humidity. He still felt a hard lump of resentment.

 

 

One of the favored skittered forward and extracted a

 

 

ridiculous key, a physical key from some sort of pocket somewhere--Neelix could not see where. It inserted the flat card into a slot and the cell door slid noiselessly open.

 

 

The favored did not move. When Tuvok began to move toward the cell, his favored let him go. Jane way began to join him, but she hesitated a moment at the cell door, a limb struck her back with brutal force, smashing her to the ground at Tuvok's feet.

 

 

The Vulcan helped her up.

 

 

Neelix stepped briskly into the cell with the other two. The guard pulled tight the door, with a rush of wind, the favored departed along the corridor in the same direction they had been traveling.

 

 

Neelix let out a breath, sucked in another greedy lungful. "I was afraid"--he gasped--"they would slap me--in my own cell--out of respect for--my local status."

 

 

The beginning of a stately, old, human poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge kept running through Captain Jane way's head; she couldn't stop it:

 

 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

 

 

A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

 

 

Jane way began to prowl the cage while Neelix caught his breath. She was annoyed more than anything else by the spectacularly bad timing of Chakotay's communication, forcing her to reveal to the Autocrat what the pendants were. If the damned Furies had just held their horses a few minutes longer and attacked the Voyager after the away team was slapped in chokey, the favored might never have guessed that the pins were devices.

 

 

Without communicators, they had no prayer of being beamed out, even if the ship was still in orbit... which she doubted.

 

 

Chakotay would obey his order to protect the Voyager, which meant getting the hell out of orbit, considering the odds they faced.

 

 

She felt the bars; metallic, very hard, the alloy not one she was familiar with at first glace, though she would need a tri corder to tell for certain. Tuvok joined her, and the Vulcan cautiously pushed his hand between the bars as far as he could, up to his forearm.

 

 

"Captain," he said,

 

 

"I do not believe there is any force shield on this cage." "You mean all that's standing between us and freedom are a few lousy steel bars?" Jane way shook her head, staring in amazement up and down the corridor at the long rows of similar cages in the cell block. The cells faced each other with no privacy; even the lump that must be the toilet was placed in the middle of the room, in full view of the rest of the cages--not to mention the other prisoners that would be held in the cell itself, which was obviously designed for four inmates. It was barbaric... unless the Furies did not have even the concept of actual privacy, which made a certain amount of sense; presumably, if a Fury prisoner used the facilities, the rest would avert their eyes, as they did when passing in the "streets" (which were actually underground corridors).

 

 

"The bars are not exactly steel; but your point is, in essence, correct."

 

 

Jane way sighed.

 

 

"This is such a strange quadrant. They have warp drive, directed energy weapons, subspace communication--but no shields, replicators, or holodecks; and they seem to have room here for a few hundred prisoners in this block alone, and who knows how many other blocks there are? I always thought our different pieces of technology would go hand in hand... and all would go together with freedom."

 

 

"Evidently, our society is more a fortuitous accident than we like to believe," said the Vulcan.

 

 

"But what the Furies don't have is so easily deduced from what they do have!" She paused, considering; on the other hand, the Federation had no idea how to make an artificial wormhole.

 

 

They couldn't bring people back by cloning them from the dead body. They couldn't just use the transporter to disassemble an injured or sick person and

 

 

reassemble him without the medical problem. Neither could they make a deflector shield they could beam through, create a tractor beam powerful enough to bend a phaser beam, fly ships as fast as subspace communications--and for that matter, they hadn't even managed to move beyond the need for a huge fleet of starships to protect them from marauders and looters.

 

 

How long before they developed powers like the Organians'?

 

 

Evidently, forever.

 

 

"The view back is always sharper than the view ahead," quoted Neelix. He sounded annoyed; he didn't seem to appreciate being reminded that in some ways, his quadrant was backward compared to the Alpha Quadrant.

 

 

"Maybe so," said Jane way, not wishing to oflfend.

 

 

"But the important point is how we get out of this cell. As a famous poet once remarked, 'Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."

 

 

Tuvok, still methodically testing each bar, absently muttered,

 

 

"I believe you will find that the author is Richard Lovelace, and the poem is Lucasta, 'To Althea: From Prison," 1649."

 

 

"I'll take your word for it."

 

 

"Well," said Neelix, "these walls and these bars look an awful lot like a cage to me."

 

 

"Damn; I wish we still had communicators. It would be easy for the Voyager simply to beam us out. We have to figure a way to stop the invasion!"

 

 

Neelix looked surprised.

 

 

"You don't have a communicator?"

 

 

"Neelix... you saw Navdaq take them, along with our phasers and tri corders, anything we could use as a weapon or communications device."

 

 

Neelix looked incredulously at the captain.

 

 

"Are you trying to tell me that, as useful as those things are, you don't carry spare communicators?"

 

 

"No, why should we?"

 

 

"In case someone takes it away from you!"

 

 

Jane way felt her face begin to flush, she didn't like to think of herself as unprepared--but Neelix had a point.

 

 

"Great idea. Mr. Neelix-'the view back is always sharper

 

 

than the view ahead." Did you happen to bring a spare communicator?"

 

 

Neelix looked pained and offended... his natural expression, when he was not looking officious and self important. "I most certainly did!"

 

 

Pained, offended, officious, self-important, touchy, jealous over Kes, and a highly idiosyncratic cook--he was all those things, thought Jane way; but he was also right more often than he was wrong--and he'd gotten them out of a number of scrapes--and he was a tiger in combat--and it looked like Neelix had once again been the present one What would we do without him? she thought, highly irritated that she had to think it once again.

 

 

The short, chubby Talaxian sat on the edge of one of the bunks in the cell and pulled off one boot; a commbadge slid out onto the floor, tinkling loudly.

 

 

Jane way's flush deepened. She envied Tuvok, who could suppress any feelings of being unprepared.

 

 

"In fact, I brought two," added Neelix, removing his other boot

 

 

"I, ah, don't suppose you brought a spare--"

 

 

Neelix pulled free the second boot, and a second commbadge fell out. A phaser followed, and Jane way bit off the end of her question.

 

 

Wordlessly, Neelix picked up the phaser and both commbadges and handed them to Jane way, who handed one of the badges to Tuvok. The cook-guide-adventurer-equipment-storage-locker frowned.

 

 

"I can't imagine why it's not standard Star fleet procedure to issue each crewman a half-dozen of the little things or better yet, with your extraordinary medical technique, why don't you simply have communicators surgically implanted?"

 

 

Jane way had no good answer, Tuvok merely raised one eyebrow, the standard Vulcan expression meaning anything from Did I just hear you correctly? to I think we all just learned a lesson here, depending on context. Jane way gave Neelix a smile that was actually closer to a wolf baring her teeth.

 

 

"Good thinking, Mr.

 

 

Neelix. I'll enter a commendation for you when we return to the ship."

 

 

A good captain had to know when to yield gracefully and cut her losses.

 

 

She tapped the commbadge.

 

 

"Jane way to Chakotay... Jane way to Voyager, emergency away-team beam-out, these coordinates...."

 

 

Nothing happened; there was no response.

 

 

She exhaled through clenched teeth.

 

 

"Either there's a communications shield, or else Chakotay took the ship-far enough away that they can't hear us."

 

 

"The Furies have not shown any propensity for constructing shields. I suggest that the ship has problems of its own and is either maintaining a communications blackout or is out of range."

 

 

"All right," she said, "stand back from the bars. Let's get out of here under our own steam." Captain Jane way aimed the phaser at the non-iron bars that a very effective cage made.

 

 

***

 

 

Neelix back pedaled, turning his face and covering his eyes, in case the Federation weapon decided to bounce. Just before the captain fired, however, Neelix heard voices approaching. "Wait!" he whispered urgently.

 

 

Jane way paused, staring curiously.

 

 

"What? Why are we waiting?"

 

 

Oh, why can't humans hear anything! fumed the Talaxian.

 

 

Tuvok the Vulcan suddenly cocked his larger, pointed ear.

 

 

"I

 

 

believe I hear Furies approaching."

 

 

"You do? Oh, wait; now I hear them too." Evidently, Captain Jane way didn't hear the sudden note of tension in Tuvok's voice; Neelix heard it clearly. The Vulcan did not react outwardly, but he was still strangely affected by these aliens.

 

 

The team waited until the Furies ambled past, staring curiously at the human, the Vulcan, and the Talaxian. Tourists! snorted Neelix to himself. Irritatingly, the last one lingered, peering at them from under its hood and cloak. A strange odor permeated the cell; the Fury had been dunked in some sort of perfume or cologne.

 

 

But Tuvok relaxed, surprising Neelix. Of course, this batch of Furies included many races, but not the race to

 

 

which Navdaq belonged. That must be the one that enslaved his home world, Neelix realized.

 

 

By the time the last, dawdling sightseer finally decided it had seen enough and moved on, Neelix's sensitive ears picked up another pair of Furies coming the opposite direction along the cell block.

 

 

Captain Jane way waited, frustrated, while again the Fury spectators stared at the most fascinating creatures they had ever seen in their lives-actual Unclean from heaven! Neelix began to notice various odors: Maybe they tell one another apart by scent, not by visual image? Or is that how they distinguish rank or position? It made sense in a low light situation; the powerful smell was quite identifiable, even for citizens who offered a form of privacy by averting their eyes from any passing strangers.

 

 

Two more sets of sightseers simply insisted upon finding occasion to stroll down to the dungeon and check on the prisoners something which must have been a terrific violation of etiquette--unless the rule was that the Unclean have no rights and so cannot be offended or insulted.

 

 

"Captain" Neelix had never been considered a patient man, even among his fellow Talaxians, nor a sociable man who enjoyed large mobs of people. He'd spent most of his life in space. He especially didn't like being the object of a mob of gawkers. More than once, he wished he had kept the phaser, instead of generously and loyally giving it to his captain, so he could... Well, it wouldn't be a smart move, he consoled himself.

 

 

Captain Jane way herself looked ready to chew her way through the bars with bare teeth by the time the fourth batch of tourists finally rolled on down the corridor, leaving them alone.

 

 

"All right, let's do it quickly, men--before a whole guided tour shuttle bus comes driving down the cell block... stand back!"

 

 

The captain pointed the phaser at the nearest set of bars and followed Neelix's lead, covering her eyes against the possibility of the unshielded metal shattering under the energy impact. She pressed the button, firing a thin beam at the most powerful setting.

 

 

The bar glowed dullish red at the point of contact but was not otherwise affected. She ceased firing, and the glow faded immediately.

 

 

Tuvok put his hand near the bar, then touched it.

 

 

"I do not believe the phaser fire affected it, Captain," he announced unnecessarily.

 

 

"Perhaps if we had a high-powered cutting phaser."

 

 

Neelix stared in surprise.

 

 

"Don't you carry a spare high powered cutting phaser? It seems like a remarkably useful tool." It was cold, he knew; but he couldn't resist; he managed a sober expression, as if he were serious.

 

 

"Mr. Neelix," said the captain, "unless you have one tucked under your shirt, would you please shut up?"

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Neelix almost reached out and touched the bars in his astonishment; the Federation phaser had done nothing, they weren't even glowing! But he refrained, just in case.

 

 

"Tuvok--explain!" said the captain, seemingly as startled as the Talaxian.

 

 

Never put all your faith in technology, Neelix thought; it's what I've always said--trust people, not playthings.

 

 

Lieutenant Tuvok leaned close to the metal tubes, fingering them so gently that for a wild moment, Neelix wondered whether he was mind-melding with them--excuse me, Mr. Bar, but why weren't you phase red out of existence?

 

 

"Captain, I cannot say for certain without a detailed analysis, but this metal has some of the same properties as the metal that Mr. Kim scanned on the artificial moon. I suspect the Furies use this as an all-purpose shielding material--which does imply that they have the capability of scanning, else there would be no reason to shield against it--and in any event, no ability to do so."

 

 

"Can we cut it?"

 

 

Neelix stared at the bars, as thick around as his forearm and dark as th rat blood. Cut it? With what, a pocketknife?

 

 

He said nothing, only sat on one of the beds; it was uncomfortably hard and had no blanket.

 

 

"I do not believe so," answered Tuvok; "not with the materials we have at hand. I do not now believe a cutting phaser would work, even if we had one."

 

 

"Captain," said Neelix,

 

 

"I'm sorry for that jest about the--"

 

 

"Bend it? Freeze it? Break it?"

 

 

"We have no means of freezing the metal," continued the Vulcan, "but if we did, it might become brittle enough to shatter. As far as bending, the tensile strength required for construction of the artificial moon is approximately..."

 

 

Tuvok half-closed his eyes, apparently making warp speed estimates using rules of thumb and constant engineering coefficients.

 

 

"Three point one times that of steel. The metal may be stronger than that, but probably not much stronger, as that would render shaping difficult."

 

 

Neelix stared at the lock, a boxlike device colored so black it was almost blue. If there was a weak spot, that was it.

 

 

"But can we bend it? Even a little?"

 

 

"Captain, Lieutenant, maybe we should look at the--"

 

 

"Not with the tools we have available, I'm afraid."

 

 

The captain hestitated for a moment, listening for more guards; still quiet.

 

 

"Captain," began Neelix again; but she held up a hand. Then she turned the phaser on the wall for a few moments.

 

 

Fuming, he let her make another futile gesture. The wall was even less affected than the bars; it did not even glow.

 

 

"Damn," she muttered.

 

 

Jane way tried to push her arm between the bars; she had better luck than Tuvok, getting just past her-elbow to her biceps; but there she stuck. In fact, she retrieved her arm back through the bars only by bracing with her foot and pushing.

 

 

"I can't get much of my arm through; but that's all right--I haven't a clue what I'm reaching for, anyway."

 

 

Neelix leaned back onto the bed, searching for the proper way to talk the two Star fleeters out of brute force and into an approach that depended upon some finesse. He sat up and stared through the bars at the cell directly opposite studying the locking mechanism as best he could, remotely. How do you open a lock? Well, how about with a key?

 

 

"Captain," said Neelix, "why not just wait for the next troop of Furies to wander by, stun them with the phaser and take their key-cards?"

 

 

Jane way paused for a moment, looking slightly embarrassed. "What if they're wearing some of that metal as phaser proof armor?"

 

 

Immediately, Neelix saw the problems with his first-draft idea. Flushing, he started to withdraw it; but before he could, Tuvok administered the coup de grace: "There is also the problem, Mr. Neelix, that the guards may not have the appropriate key-card. They may fall out of reach. They may return fire and wound or kill one of us. For a number of reasons, we must reject the naive approach of violence."

 

 

"I'm sorry," said Neelix, his feelings wounded.

 

 

"I was just trying to help." Great help! You've just undone weeks of effort getting these people to start taking you seriously!

 

 

"Captain," said Tuvok,-"I believe that the weak point of the cell is the locking mechanism itself. We cannot affect the bars or the walls, but the lock might perhaps be activated by means of a tool other than that which was intended for the purpose.

 

 

"You mean we might be able to pick it," said Neelix quickly.

 

 

Too quickly; in fact, he had just been about to make the suggestion himself, but the Vulcan beat him to it

 

 

"I believe that is the vernacular, Mr. Neelix."

 

 

"With what?" asked Jane way.

 

 

"I have not yet thought of a suitable alternative."

 

 

Jane way crouched to stare at the annoying box at eye level. "Tiny, little electrical thing, isn't it? Almost cute. I'd like to fire a photon torpedo... into its keyhole."

 

 

"How about the phaser?" gingerly suggested Neelix. "Can you shoot it into the lock and short it out?" "Wait--" said Neelix, this time answering his own second-draft idea.

 

 

"You'd probably just fuse the locking mechanism so it would be impossible to open."

 

 

Jane way and Tuvok continued to nag each other, but

 

 

Neelix tuned them both out. He stared around the room... something, something tickled the back of his brain, something they could use. Something--not phasoelectric; more primitive.

 

 

Something...

 

 

I demand a brilliant idea... I want a light panel to go of in my head! He lay back on the slab the Furies called a bed, staring up at the ceiling.

 

 

The bright ceiling.

 

 

The bright, illuminated light panel in the "I see the light!" shouted Neelix, jumping up. The captain and Tuvok stared at him curiously.

 

 

"Can't you see it? Look, the light!" Neelix pointed triumphantly at the light panel.

 

 

"The light?" asked Jane way, looking up. The light was bright by Fury standards, illuminating the cell to approximately two hundred lux, or half the light of a reasonably well lit room on the Voyager.

 

 

"That's your energy source!" announced the Talaxian.

 

 

"Use that to blow the lock."

 

 

Jane way nodded slowly, obviously impressed for once by Neelix's suggestion. Hah, take that! he beamed.

 

 

"How many watts, do you think?" she asked Tuvok.

 

 

"I cannot begin to estimate. I do not believe much would be needed to overload the locking mechanism."

 

 

"Only one problem." Neelix stood on the bed to stare up at the tube.

 

 

"How do we get the electrical current from here to over there?"

 

 

The distance to cover was approximately four and a half meters from the light to the cell door, but it might as well have been four kilometers... not even Captain Kathryn the Great could carry electricity in a bucket.

 

 

She fingered her hair, Neelix noticed that she did it unconsciously in times of stress. A ghastly thought was beginning to gel in his mind. "Can we pop the light-panel cover and see whether we can even get at the electrical connection?"

 

 

Neelix went and stood directly underneath the ceiling mounted light panel, supporting it; Tuvok began working the end closest to the bars, while Jane way stood on the bed to try to wriggle her nails under the opposite end.

 

 

After much rocking back and forth--interrupted once by another group of curious, staring Furies-the away team managed to work the cover down low enough that they could peer inside.

 

 

They saw an intricate swirl of light tubes, almost like a small intestine, irregular in shape and connected at one end by a four-pronged plug and socket.

 

 

"Looks like an old excited-gas system," the captain mused, "I haven't seen such a museum piece since--well, since the last time I visited the Hieronymous Museum of Irreproducible Technology on Urban ia. If we shatter the tube, we might be able to connect directly to the leads."

 

 

"With what?" asked Neelix, his aching arms souring his mood. "Our fingers?"

 

 

Captain Jane way frowned.

 

 

"Now, that's the best suggestion you've made all day, Mr. Neelix."

 

 

"What do you mean? I only wanted to know what..." His voice trailed off, and the spikes on his ears spread wide. He felt his face flush bright orange.

 

 

"Oh, no! Oh, no you don't! You are not going to get me to stick my fingers in a light socket just to see what happens!"

 

 

"I wouldn't dream of it, Neelix."

 

 

"Well, thank goodness for small favors."

 

 

"Tuvok is going to stick his fingers in the light-tube socket, and you're going to hold Tuvok's other hand while he does it."

 

 

"What!"

 

 

"And I'll hold your hand."

 

 

"Captain, listen to me closely--you're overworked. I'm not one of your Federation doctors--I'm a real person--but I prescribe a long rest, a cup of my very best Dyzelian coffee, and--"

 

 

"Very intriguing, Captain," said the Vulcan, unperturbed by Jane way's wild, harebrained scheme, "but how do you propose to complete the circuit with the lock?" Jane way played with her hair again, but to a purpose, this time.

 

 

"With this " she said, extracting one of the pins that held her hair in its severe bun.

 

 

Tuvok raised his eyebrow.

 

 

"I believe the hairpin is

 

 

indeed the traditional tool for extralegal operation of a locking mechanism."

 

 

Neelix sighed; he hadn't meant to be so loud, but both the captain and Tuvok turned toward him.

 

 

"You're determined to do this, aren't you?" asked Neelix peevishly. She's going to get herself killed! he thought, but said nothing. He certainly was no stranger to being determined to do something dangerous and foolhardy.

 

 

"Neelix," said the captain, "there is no other way to get out of this cell... and it's more than just our lives at stake; we have to think about--"

 

 

"Yes, yes, I know, Captain." Neelix drew himself up to his full height, staring her directly in the collarbone.

 

 

"I once had a planet too. Remember?"

 

 

"I'm sorry, Neelix. I didn't mean to condescend."

 

 

He shrugged.

 

 

"It's a human thing; I understand. But Captain, if you're really determined to electrocute us all trying to blow the lock... then I absolutely insist that I be the one to stick his fingers in the light socket."

 

 

Instantly, a small voice inside Neelix's head screamed Are you insane? You'll die! Oddly, it sounded like Kes's voice.

 

 

Jane way didn't know what to say; Lieutenant Tuvok merely raised one eyebrow--a Vulcan thing.

 

 

Now, why in free space did I volunteer to do that? Neelix wondered. But the answer was clear: Talaxians understood duty, and Neelix especially understood risking his life in a good cause. The Furies had nothing to do with the destruction of his home world... But they might as well have, he realized; they were tyrants and slavers--how different were they really from those who all but destroyed his home?

 

 

But how could he convince Jane way?

 

 

"Captain," he began. For a moment, he floundered, then his natural glibness asserted itself.

 

 

"We Talaxians have a--special resistance to electricity.

 

 

It doesn't injure us the way it does you humans, or Vulcans."

 

 

"You have not mentioned this before," pointed out the stubborn Tuvok.

 

 

Neelix snorted.

 

 

"You've never asked me to stick my fingers in a light socket before!"

 

 

Even Tuvok had to concede the situation had not come

 

 

up previously. But Jane way still looked dubious.

 

 

"Are you sure? A special resistance?"

 

 

"Special resistance to electricity," repeated Neelix, sticking to his yarn. Rule Number One when lying, he had been taught: Don't change stories in midstream!

 

 

"I hope Mr. Neelix is not being literal," said the Vulcan. "We need a current flow, not resistance." Several moments passed before Neelix wondered if this was a droll sort of Vulcan pseudo-joke; but by then, the Talaxian was too nervous to ask.

 

 

The captain took off her slightly torn uniform jacket, pushing her bare arm as far through the bars as she possibly could; when it stuck just past the elbow, she compressed her biceps with her other hand and pushed even farther.

 

 

"Um, Tuvok," asked Neelix, "isn't the current going to short at the bars?"

 

 

"No," said the lieutenant firmly.

 

 

"The metal does not conduct electricity at all... it is too dense. It is not properly even a metal. If it did, the phaser would have disrupted the electrochemical bonds and vaporized the bars."

 

 

Jane way gritted her teeth; probably the pressure was cutting off the blood flow in her brachial artery. It's going to tingle a damn sight worse, sighed Neelix.

 

 

She still could not quite reach the lock with her hairpin. "Tuvok," she called, wincing against the pain,

 

 

"I need your help.

 

 

You've got to get my arm farther through the bars."

 

 

"It is a dangerous maneuver," said the Vulcan, "you may get your arm so wedged in that we cannot extract it. If the circulation is cut off long enough, serious damage may occur."

 

 

"If we wait here for the Furies to execute us, serious death may occur."

 

 

"You have a point." Tuvok put a hand on either side of Jane way's muscle and began to squeeze. He got her arm just far enough through the bars that she could hold the hairpin between her middle and ring fingers and insert it into the card slot.

 

 

"Quick! Neelix, do it now--my hand's going numb--I'm going to drop the pin!"

 

 

Swallowing hard, Neelix grabbed Tuvok, who seized Jane way's groping hand. The Talaxian swallowed hard, his heart pounding at triple speed. Am I really going to do this? His own hand trembled; he moved quickly before she could see. This is for you, Kes, he swore to himself; he didn't believe his own lie, but it worked anyway.

 

 

Neelix reached up and shattered the tube and closed his eyes tight, then licked his fingers and pressed them fimnly against the pair of leads.

 

 

Ice hands clutched both sides of his body and dug their spirit fingers into his flesh. Exquisite ecstasy flashed through him, burning away the mortal corruption, the cobwebs that accumulated around a person's life. He convulsed as a jolt of high-voltage electricity ripped through his body. He could not let go! His hand crushed that of Tuvok, who crushed the captain's hand in turn.

 

 

Neelix heard a loud crackle and smelled roasting meat; but with the current disrupting every nerve and neuron in his body, he could noe even think about any damage it was doing, let alone worry about it.

 

 

Then as suddenly as the surge began, it ended. Blinking his eyes back into focus, Neelix noticed two things simultaneously: he lay on the floor all the way across the cage from the light panel... and the cell door was slightly ajar.

 

 

The lock was fried.

 

 

Alas, so too was Captain Jane way's arm, nearly so.

 

 

"Tuvok--I don't want to open the door until we can start running, in case there are guards. But I've got a problem...."

 

 

Tuvok and Neelix quickly moved to her side; past the bars, her arm was bone white.

 

 

"Captain, can you move the arm?" asked the Talaxian.

 

 

She tried; her hand twitched slightly, but all she felt was pins and needles.

 

 

"Maybe the nerve is pinched," she gasped.

 

 

Tuvok tried to compress her arm to extract it as he had wedged it in; but the only result was a stifled scream from the captain. The arm was stuck solid.

 

 

"Neelix," requested the Vulcan, "would you happen to have any sort of lubricant? Oil, or soap, perhaps?"

 

 

Neelix shook his head sadly.

 

 

"Captain, I'm terribly, terribly sorry... I do usually carry machine oil, but today I was using it in the kitchen."

 

 

"Not, I hope, in your latest culinary offering, Mr. Neelix." It did seem that Tuvok was on a roll, perhaps trying to distract Jane way; but Neelix glared him down.

 

 

Jane way smiled wanly at the attempt; but she was in too much pain to be distracted.

 

 

"Certainly not!" said the sometime-cook.

 

 

"I was oiling a sticky--"

 

 

"Captain, I believe your brachio radial and pronator muscles are in spasm, and they have contracted so tightly they are now wider than the gap between the bars. If we had a muscle relaxant, we could probably extract your arm without difficulty."

 

 

"Do you--want to try--borrowing one--from the guards?"

 

 

"Your joke may in fact be worth exploring. If we make sufficient commotion that the guards hear and come to investigate, they may be able to administer medical aid."

 

 

"Or else they may just cut her arm off in retaliation," snapped Neelix, exasperated with these Star fleeters who never could seem to think their way out of problems.

 

 

"Tuvok, they don't even think of us as people... we're animals to them--dangerous animals! We can't rely on them to help the captain."

 

 

"I fear you may be correct, Mr. Neelix."

 

 

"We've got to get her arm out--we've got to get it out, because we can't count on anyone else. And I, for one, will not leave unless she leaves with us."

 

 

"No one is suggesting abandoning Captain Jane way. But we need some means of relaxing her muscles, or we shall all remain here until the guards come and notice the open door. Then the question becomes moot."

 

 

"Well, can't she just relax it? Meditate, or something?"

 

 

Jane way tried to calm herself; she breathed deeply. But the pain interfered with her ability to concentrate. After a few seconds, she gave up, her arm throbbing rhythmically with every blocked beat of her pulse.

 

 

"Can't--concentrate.... "

 

 

At once, the odd idea struck Neelix. Why not stun her? After all, they had a phaser, didn't they? Stunning relaxed the entire body.

 

 

While Tuvok futilely tugged on the bars, the arm, the bars and arm in combination, Neelix strolled over and picked up the nearly forgotten phaser lying on one of the beds. He started to explain his idea, but Tuvok was busy tugging and Jane way was busy agonizing. You know, maybe it's best they don't know until after I do it....

 

 

Neelix studied the phaser. The power setting looked relatively straightforward, though in the past it had usually been handed to him preset by whoever led the away team. He thumbed it all the way over to one side.

 

 

"Stand back," he said to Tuvok, barely giving the Vulcan time to get clear before he pointed it at Captain Jane way, and pressed the contact. The beam lashed out, glowing orangeish in the red light of the Fury world, and Jane way grunted loudly; the noise faded into an extended sigh. Rubbery legs collapsed slowly, bringing her to her knees.

 

 

The swelling ebbed. She relaxed and fell into a trance, nearly unconscious. Every part of her became liquid, supple, soft. Smooth.

 

 

Slippery.

 

 

Neelix and Tuvok gently worked her injured arm backward; it stuck, he pushed... suddenly, she fell back onto her rump, dizzy and confused, blinking back to conscious awareness. As if waking from a particularly vigorous, muscular dream, she rubbed her arm, her face a mask of confusion, as though wondering where she was.

 

 

Then full awareness returned.

 

 

"Neelix--you shot me!"

 

 

"Yes, Captain," said the Talaxian, nervously smoothing his hair back.

 

 

"You don't mind much, do you?"

 

 

"Good thinking."

 

 

Neelix smirked, aware that he had not just recovered lost territory, he had forged ahead in his plan to prove to the Star fleeters that he was as good a swashbuckler as he often claimed.

 

 

"Tuvok," said Jane way, "let's get the hell out of here.

 

 

I think I hear more 'tourists' coming!"

 

 

Tuvok and Neelix helped Jane way to her feet and dragged her behind them. She was having trouble making her legs move swiftly enough.

 

 

"Wait," she whispered, just as they stepped into the corridor.

 

 

Stooping, she forced her recovering arm to reach forward; numb fingers picked up the hairpin. She had to do it by sight; it was obvious that she still could not feel a thing.

 

 

"Let 'em wonder," she explained, as they ran away from the approaching footsteps into the comforting gloom.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Commander Chakotay wanted to pace back and forth across the bridge. He wanted to run to every duty station and take personal charge. He wanted to scream and shake his fist and pitch somebody down the turbo lift shaft. He sat calmly in the command chair, doing nothing but casually crossing his legs, not allowing the young crew to see any emotion but calm certainty.

 

 

The captain and Tuvok were down on the planet; Paris and Kim were back in the infirmary, arguing with the emergency holographic medical program about his prescription of "rest and recuperation." On the bridge were Chakotay, a single officer to handle all science, and engineering, and ops--B'Elanna Torres--and three crewmen: Dalby, Chell, and Jar ron. Torres had been remarkably silent, saying nothing except in answer to a direct question.

 

 

The Voyager played "hunters and buffalo" with now six alien ships, a veritable battle Beet; the Voyager kept dodging from one bearing to another, sliding around the planet, trying to keep the ships in line, so only the lead ship could shoot... easily deflected by the shields. But if Chakotay gave the wrong order or the helm officer responded too slugishly, the aliens could open fire with four or five ships; then the Voyager could be crippled or killed.

 

 

The situation taxed Chakotay's renowned inner calm to the limit.

 

 

"Turn right, bearing zero-two-zero degrees, mark forty... back up, bearing one-eight-zero, one-quarter impulse... good.

 

 

Hold this position; let's see if they're going to fire again."

 

 

The alien ships paused; they too were tired of the game.

 

 

They had begun to realize that the Voyager was more maneuverable and faster than their own ships. So far, they had utterly failed to box her in.

 

 

But there were some close calls: once, Chakotay had ordered the helm to turn starboard, then port too quickly, luffing the ship; while it wallowed in its own impulse wake, three alien ships had locked on and fired their directed energy weapons from the port side slightly below.

 

 

Dalby's quick thinking saved them. Without orders, he engaged a course of 000 mark 90--straight up. The shots missed by a few hundred meters.

 

 

"Good initiative, Crewman Dalby," said Chakotay laconically; inwardly, he was kicking himself in the rear for screwing the turn... he had been thinking of his smaller Maquis ship.

 

 

"Gentlemen," said the commander, "it is good to remain at large with hull integrity intact; but we can't dodge their disruptor shots forever. We must find an end to this duel, but an end that allows us to close within transporter range of the planet to extract the away team."

 

 

"Perhaps we should fight them, sir," suggested Dalby from the helm. Fortunately, Chell had the weapons... Dalby's impetuousness had been good, as when he dodged the phaser blasts; but this was something else.

 

 

"No, we can't fight them, Crewman," said the commander; "they still have the captain. And may I remind you they also hold Lieutenant Tuvok and Neelix?"

 

 

Dalby grunted in resignation. Recently, Dalby, Chell Jar ron, and Henley--all former Maquis-had developed a

 

 

solid working relationship with the Vulcan, who trained them in a mini-Academy course.

 

 

"Couldn't we just go out of the solar system?" suggested Chell.

 

 

"And abandon Captain Jane way?"

 

 

"No no! I mean we could shift into warp and whip around the system, coming back from the opposite side of the sun and hide there."

 

 

Chakotay answered immediately. "shell, think about it a moment. The aliens have impulse power, they have warp. They would simply follow us the whole way."

 

 

At once, Chakotay realized to his astonishment that the impossible had occurred: the Star fleet ship had an entirely Maguis bridge crew! The commander smiled; my wildest dream come true--we've finally "stolen" a Federation starship right out from under them... and we can't do anything with her!

 

 

He heard a faint cough, paid it no mind. It repeated, followed by a voice so meek and uncertain that at first, Chakotay could not even tell where it came from. Then Jar ron, the Bajoran, repeated himself.

 

 

"Sir... if we were--I mean if they thought we were destroyed, they wouldn't--you know, follow... never mind.

 

 

I'm sorry."

 

 

"Keep talking, Jar ron."

 

 

"Well, if--I mean, if they thought we were destroyed, you know."

 

 

"Do you have anything in mind?"

 

 

"Well--if we dropped debris, or something?"

 

 

Chakotay shook his head.

 

 

"Not enough; they would board us to investigate."

 

 

"I'm sorry."

 

 

"Don't apologize, you're on the right track. Anyone else have any follow-up?"

 

 

Dead silence. Dalby stared at the screen, watching the immobile alien ships in case they decided to attack again. Chell stared in anguished astonishment at the commander, his normal expression. And Jar ron, who had shot his only arrow, returned to his navigation console and tried to cringe inside himself.

 

 

Suddenly feeling the expectance of speech from behind him, Chakotay turned. B'Elanna Torres opened her mouth, starting to make a suggestion, then closed it again. When she had repeated the maneuver twice more, Chakotay asked,

 

 

"Do you have any sort of idea, B'Elanna?"

 

 

"I, ah, don't mean to butt in, but it occurs to me..." She faded out.

 

 

"Go on," said the commander, still aware that Torres' confidence had taken a severe nose-dive.

 

 

"If they--" Torres's Klingon side suddenly seemed to assume control, disgusted at the human side's indecisiveness. "Commander," she snarled Klingon-style, "if they thought we had burned up in the sun, they wouldn't bother looking for us."

 

 

"Let me see if I've got this straight. You propose to take us into the sun?"

 

 

"We have shields," explained B'Elanna; "they don't. Our shields might protect us from the intense heat and pressure their ships would be crushed. They'll think we destroyed ourselves because our mission was a failure."

 

 

"You seem to understand them well, B'Elanna."

 

 

"They're a lot like my people. Half of my people."

 

 

"You said the shields might protect us. I don't like the sound of that might." B'Elanna was silent for several seconds. When she spoke, she sounded somewhat more human than Klingon.

 

 

"This isn't good. I just did a simulation, and it shows us being crushed and incinerated in forty-two point six seconds."

 

 

"The shields give out?" "Yes, Commander."

 

 

"Well... can we increase power to the shields?"

 

 

"I calculated for max shield power."

 

 

"But did you calculate including every bit of power on the ship, including engines, backup battery, replicators, the holodeck, and life-support? Everything but the Doctor... I suspect we'll need him."

 

 

"No, I didn't! Wait just a moment." She added a belated, distracted "sir" while recalibrating.

 

 

"Amazing... Commander, the new calculation shows us surviving for almost a hundred and fifty seconds."

 

 

"Two and a half minutes," mused Chakotay, "can be a very long time indeed. Start making the necessary modifications, Torres." She turned away.

 

 

"And Torres--good initiative."

 

 

"Commander!" cried Chell, stricken.

 

 

"The aliens have powered up their weapons again--they're going to shoot!"

 

 

"Are the shields still at full strength, Mr. Chell?"

 

 

"Yes, sir."

 

 

"And they're still bottled up in a line? Then let's wait to see what they're going to do. I have a good notion... there's a tactic I've been expecting them to try for an hour now, but so far they have disappointed me."

 

 

A new voice spoke from the turbo lift; Lieutenant Paris had just entered the bridge.

 

 

"Would you possibly mean... the starburst maneuver?"

 

 

"You're familiar with it?"

 

 

"I have a nodding acquaintance." Paris winked, but Chakotay did not understand the reference.

 

 

"Do you want to take the helm?"

 

 

Dalby looked sour, his face flushing. He still was not used to being a junior member of the crew, after having lived the exciting life of a Maquis helmsman.

 

 

Paris noticed Dalby's reaction--and was impressed that the normally irrepressible motor mouth said nothing.

 

 

"Nah, I think I'll just watch, come up to speed. Change in watch in fifteen minutes, I'll wait."

 

 

"Thank you, Mr. Paris. Mr. Dalby, let me know the moment you have confirmed a starburst maneuver."

 

 

"Commander, what's a starburst maneuver?"

 

 

"You'll know it when you see it," said Paris cryptically.

 

 

"--They're moving, sir." Dalby watched for a second.

 

 

"Oh! I see what you mean--starburst maneuver, sir."

 

 

The alien ships each took off in a separate direction, exploding like a fireworks rocket in a cone surrounding the Voyager. In a moment, every ship had a clear shot; all six immediately opened fire on the sitting-duck Star fleet ship.

 

 

"Mr. Dalby, Bank speed, bearing zero-zero-zero mark zero."

 

 

The Voyager shot straight forward, toward the core of the starburst... the one spot where there were no ships.

 

 

"Now if we're incredibly lucky--or they're incredibly stupid..." Chakotay allowed himself a small smile of expectation.

 

 

"I don't believe it!" muttered Lieutenant Torres. She stared at her scanner.

 

 

"Sir, you're not going to believe this."

 

 

"Try me."

 

 

"But their guns are following us. They're going to hit--correction, they have hit one of their own ships. Two of their own ships-three!"

 

 

Chakotay turned to look at Paris, who was unsuccessfully trying to stifle a laugh behind his hand.

 

 

Chell finally recovered his wits to make a report.

 

 

"Sir... as we passed between them, all but one of the ships continued to fire, even when their own fleet was in the line of fire."

 

 

"Running the gauntlet," muttered Paris, still breaking up.

 

 

"One alien ship destroyed," reported B7Elanna Torres, "two others damaged, one seriously."

 

 

"Not bad for still not having fired a shot," said Chakotay soberly. He had tremendous empathy for Tom Paris; were it not for Chakotay's own tremendous self-control, he would be holding his sides and laughing like a hyena.

 

 

"Commander," said Torres--she did not appear to be on the verge of laughter... more's the pity, thought Chakotay--"I've completed the modifications to the shield power grid. I can send full power to the shields on your order."

 

 

After a moment, when Chakotay remained lost in thought, B'Elanna asked,

 

 

"Sir? I said I've completed--"

 

 

"I heard you, Lieutenant." Do I have the guts to do it? he asked himself. Chakotay shrugged, feeling his heart begin to race just at the thought; but he had no choice... he had to get the Furies off his tail, and that meant they had to think the Voyager was dead meat, glop on a stick.

 

 

"B'Elanna," he said after a moment, "how long would it take you to reconfigure the shields to met aphasic?"

 

 

"About two minutes; but why would I want to... Chakotay!

 

 

You can't be thinking of--"

 

 

He nodded, lips pressed together either in a grim smile or an amused grimace.

 

 

"Directly into the sun," he confirmed.

 

 

"Do you think they'll follow?"

 

 

Nobody responded; Chakotay took the first step along the trail.

 

 

"Jar ron, open a channel to the alien flagship, assuming it isn't one of the damaged ones."

 

 

"It's damaged but not seriously," mumbled Jar ron; Chakotay had to strain to hear him.

 

 

"Channel open."

 

 

Chakotay leapt to his feet, turning himself beet-red and screaming so violently that spittle flew from his mouth.

 

 

"We will never be captured alive! We won't spend even an hour in your torture chambers! We'd rather die like men than live like animals! Songbird out!"

 

 

Jar ron was so startled, he almost forgot to kill the transmission. As soon as the red light went dark, Commander Chakotay sat back down in the command chair, perfectly calmly, and wiped his mouth with his hand.

 

 

"Mr. Dalby, lay in a course directly for the sun, full impulse, and engage immediately."

 

 

It took the entire crew several seconds to recover from their astonishment and perform their tasks. Chakotay frowned; he could not help thinking that a Star fleet crew would probably have responded three times as efficiently.

 

 

He did not like his inevitable conclusion that there really was a qualitative difference between a crew trained by Star fleet and a Maquis crew. He made a mental note to speak to Captain Jane way about expanding Tuvok's mini Academy to include the senior officers... including himself

 

 

They certainly had plenty of time, even for the full, four year Academy course.

 

 

The sun suddenly surged forward, growing in size until it filled the viewer. The smaller, individual strands of the grid began to come into focus, silhouettes against the filtered yet still painfully bright image of the star.

 

 

"Ah--Commander?" Torres seemed a bit nervous.

 

 

"Shall I transfer power to the shields?"

 

 

"Time to contact with the sun's corona, Mr. Dalby?"

 

 

"How far out? The corona extends from--"

 

 

"It's a G2 star. Let's say the photosphere, about a million kilometers from the center. Should be about six thousand degrees at that point."

 

 

"Seven minutes, fifty seconds, sir."

 

 

"Chakotay--six thousand is hot enough to boil the hull of the Voyager."

 

 

"Can the shields as they currently are protect us?."

 

 

"For a few seconds!"

 

 

"Chill the ship as cold as you can make it, Mr. Torres, before you transfer environmental power to the shields. It's going to get mighty hot in here while we're in there; let's get a head start on the heat exchange."

 

 

Lieutenant Torres, at least, responded instantly. Within less than a minute, Chakotay began to feel distinctly cold as the cryogenic unit whined into action.

 

 

"Pursuing," announced Jar ron, so loudly that at first Chakotay did not recognize the boy.

 

 

"Are they firing, Mr. Chell?"

 

 

"No. Wait--yes! No, I don't thin... yes, definitely yes."

 

 

"Mr. Chell!" "My mistake. Yes, Commander, they're definitely firing."

 

 

"You can't commit suicide," declared Paris, dryly speaking as the alien fleet captain.

 

 

"We have to execute you!"

 

 

"Reinforce the aft shields, Mr. Torres."

 

 

"Aft?" she demanded, incredulous.

 

 

"But the sun is directly ahead of us!"

 

 

"And the hostiles are directly behind us."

 

 

"Would you rather be fried or shot?" inquired Lieutenant Paris.

 

 

"Reinforce aft shields, Lieutenant Torres. Don't even think about firing, Mr. Chell. Find something constructive to do, Mr.

 

 

Paris."

 

 

The cryos began to strain against the heat of the sun, now only partially shielded. The Voyager closed to within 0.25 astronomical units from the sun.

 

 

Some of the crew paradoxically began to shiver violently; the internal temperature was down to -15 centigrade. A voice cut through the cacophony on the bridge.

 

 

"This is the emergency medical holographic program... what the devil is going on up there? I have crew members all

 

 

over the ship collapsing from the cold.... Oh, I see. I have just scanned the computer log. We will all be dead in a matter of moments."

 

 

"Not now, Doctor--please."

 

 

"My, but you people lead exciting lives. Emergency medical holographic program out."

 

 

"Jar ron!" called Chakotay, a little too loudly.

 

 

"Alert me when we're approaching the collector."

 

 

"We're... we're approaching it now, Commander. Aren't we?"

 

 

"Don't ask me, tell me!" Come on, he doesn't respond well to being shouted at.

 

 

"Jar ron, tell me when we're within twenty seconds."

 

 

"Aye, sir. We're within twenty seconds now, sir."

 

 

"Mr. Dalby," said Chakotay, getting his voice under control, "how wide are the strands at the widest point?" Seeing the sun loom so large, Chakotay unconsciously reached up and wiped his brow, despite the chilly bridge temperature.

 

 

"Commander, we've got plenty of room--eight or ten meters on each side if we hit it just right."

 

 

Eight meters! Chakotay ordered Paris to take control of the helm... either Paris would come through, or they would all die.

 

 

The grid rushed toward them. This close, Chakotay could see that it was not, in fact, a uniform color, but a prismatic spray of the entire visible spectrum, as if the strands functioned like tiny light prisms, scattering the sunlight in every direction.

 

 

Probably captures each frequency separately, he thought... while not forgetting to admire the sheer, overwhelming beauty of it.

 

 

His father had always taught him never to lose the hawk in its feathers.

 

 

Swallowing hard, seeing the inappropriately called "strands" loom larger and larger--they were in fact monstrous cables nearly ten meters in diameter--Chakotay silently commended his soul to the Sky Spirit, but asked if perhaps he might be allowed just a little more life.

 

 

The gap loomed--they were off course! Dalby made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and tapped frantically. The Voyager jerked gracelessly, barreled into the

 

 

web... and burst through! Chakotay heard the faintest ping as they passed.

 

 

"Well," said a white-faced Paris a few moments later,

 

 

"I

 

 

guess I overestimated slightly." He grinned sheepishly, but Chakotay had more important details to be concerned about.

 

 

"Coming up on the photosphere," said Paris, sounding preternaturally calm.

 

 

"Thirty-five seconds." Under the stress of the moment, he had passed beyond emotional reaction to pure action--an admirable quality for a future Star fleet officer, noted Chakotay for his internal record.

 

 

"Torres!" barked the commander.

 

 

"You have thirty seconds to tell me that you've finished adapting to met aphasic shielding."

 

 

"I'll have it ready in twenty!" she snapped from down in engineering.

 

 

"Then, Mr. Torres, prepare to re-norm shield concentration and feed the extra power on my mark. Twenty seconds. Ten seconds five, four, three, two, one, mark."

 

 

"Met aphasic shielding is on-line, and functioning nor--"

 

 

"Sir," interrupted Paris, "entering photosphere in... five, four, three, two, one, mark."

 

 

"Helm, full reverse! Don't pop out the other side of the sun! B'Elanna, pump full warp-engine power into the shields, and let's call upon our ancestors to help us wait them out."

 

 

The impulse engines strained backward, their whine rising so loud that everyone, Chakotay included, had to cup his hands over his ears. Again, they overloaded the inertial stabilizers, subjecting the entire ship to the instantaneous equivalent of more than fifteen times the force of gravity straight forward--for a tenth of a second.

 

 

Chakotay felt like he had been kicked by a mule. He rocketed forward into Chell, who sprawled across the console. Within a couple of microseconds, however, the rebuilt stablizers compensated, reducing the forward acceleration to a mere four g's.

 

 

After four seconds, even that cut off as the ship almost literally screeched to a halt.

 

 

Dazed, Chakotay noticed that Paris had found something

 

 

constructive to do: he had sat down with his back against the forward bulkhead next to the turbo lift.

 

 

Chakotay floundered, dizzy and stunned; but Paris was up the second the gravity returned to normal-fortunately, for the entire rest of the bridge crew lay unconscious.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Paris worked the controls. They were very sluggish... un surprising, considering that the Voyager sat in the middle of a G2 star.

 

 

It was all Paris could do to maintain position; convection currents inside the sun buffeted the ship fiercely, threatening to tear it to shreds long before the heat and radiation fried them, were it not for the supercharged shields.

 

 

He could hardly complain. In his single (required) astrophysics class at the Academy, Paris had learned that without such currents, it would take tens of billions of years for the very first photon to random-walk its way from the steller core, where it was produced by hydrogen fusion, to the surface.

 

 

In other words, without convection currents to bring the photons up like gas bubbles in water, the surface of every star in the entire universe would still be black as ink and cold as the depths of interstellar space.

 

 

"I don't care," he snarled aloud; "they're damned inconvenient right now!"

 

 

Fighting the bucking bronco of a ship, Tom Paris backed

 

 

away from the opposite side surface to a point about a third of the way toward the stellar core; closer, he dared not go--the core temperature was several million degrees, and he was not sure even B'Elanna's modified shields would guard against that much energy.

 

 

He almost made the mistake of a lifetime. He almost snapped on the sensors.

 

 

He stopped with his hand just touching the panel, shaking with suddenly awakened fear. Turning them on would have been like flipping on searchlights. The aliens would immediately know.

 

 

Instead, he activated passive sensors only. He would have to hope to pick up random, subspace fluctuations from the aliens' warp cores.

 

 

"Computer, begin record, all readings."

 

 

Certainly it was absurd even to check for ion trails, he was sitting in the biggest ball of ionized plasma for billions of kilometers!

 

 

Spotting the alien ships was like sitting inside an antimatter reaction chamber, trying to detect someone using a communicator outside.

 

 

The hull temperature steadily climbed, despite the shields.

 

 

It reached three hundred thousand degrees, and still no one else had awakened.

 

 

As Torres materialized on the surgical table, the doctor swiftly moved to her, without the chief engineer, the ship might never make it out of the sun intact.

 

 

He injected a cortical stimulant, then gently slapped her face. She groaned but did not respond.

 

 

Oh, well, thought the doctor, she is a part Klingon, after all.

 

 

Winding up, he slapped her across the jawline.

 

 

Torres bellowed like an angry bull and vaulted to her feet in a defensive posture. She swayed, then fell to one knee, clutching her head in agony.

 

 

"The pain will pass quickly," said the doctor, a useless piece of advice, since it would have already passed before he finished the sentence. The pain was caused by the sudden return of blood flow to the cranial arteries after they had been drained by high acceleration.

 

 

"We're in the middle of the sun," explained the doctor quickly.

 

 

"What? Already? But we had a couple of minutes to--"

 

 

"Micro amnesia Goodbye."

 

 

Without another word, he beamed B'Elanna Torres directly to engineering.

 

 

As soon as B'Elanna Torres faded in, her brain thoroughly muddled from two sudden and complete changes of perspective, her commbadge started beeping insistently.

 

 

"Paris to Torres! Are you there? Repeat, are you all right?"

 

 

"Am I where?" she replied crossly.

 

 

"I'm in engineering... I think. Where am I supposed to be?."

 

 

"That'll do. Quick!" demanded the thoroughly annoying Thomas Paris.

 

 

"Without using the fire-control sensors, tell me if there are any ships left outside the photosphere... we've got to get the hell out of this hell, or we're going to melt like butter!"

 

 

She turned to the sensor-array control apparatus, so dizzy she had to grab a bulkhead to keep from falling to the deck. She powered up VLAs two and seven, looking nine to three and three to nine, respectively--the full hemisphere forward and the full hemisphere aft.

 

 

She studied the blips, starting to sweat heavily in the extremely hot, dry air.

 

 

"Yeah. Two ships. Both aft of us. Wait a third ship just passing bearing two seven zero. It's rounding the sun, checking to see if we came out the other side."

 

 

"Damn. I was hoping they would just go home."

 

 

"How long have we been in here?"

 

 

"Two minutes, fifteen seconds."

 

 

"Damn--Paris, ships or no ships, we've got to get out of here now."

 

 

"No way, Torres. We've got to give your trick time to work.

 

 

The shields are holding out better than expected. They're still at seventy-two percent."

 

 

"They are?" She checked the power-decay curve and overlaid the projection.

 

 

"You idiot! That's three percent below the projection!"

 

 

"How long do we have?"

 

 

"According to my model, the shields will fail suddenly and rather spectacularly in about ten seconds."

 

 

"How long will the hull hold out after that?"

 

 

"About ten seconds."

 

 

"Don't touch the controls."

 

 

Torres held on, counting silently to herself. She had reached five when suddenly she said,

 

 

"Paris! They're leaving orbit, heading back to the planet!"

 

 

"Can they still see the back side of the sun?"

 

 

"Yes... but wait for it--wait for it--Shields just failed.

 

 

Lasted two extra seconds. Well, lover, been nice knowing you.

 

 

Goodbye."

 

 

"Can they still see--damn, I can't touch the controls they're so hot! No time, no--"

 

 

Paris punched the button, she thought, the Voyager lurched forward, ripping through the flesh of the sun and just clearing the corona as the hull temperature hit two hundred thousand degrees.

 

 

B'Elanna stared at the internal temperature gauge in mounting horror as it hit two hundred degrees--but it lasted only a couple of seconds.

 

 

Over the next hour, the ship slowly returned to normal operations. Chakotay and the rest of the bridge crew recovered, the hull cooled, the shields returned to normal, and the cryogenic units cooled the interior of the ship to a manageable thirty degrees... uncomfortably hot, but not catastrophic.

 

 

B'Elanna returned to the bridge, taking the longer, scenic route by turbo lift this time.

 

 

The aliens were nowhere to be sensed. They had swallowed the con without demur.

 

 

Paris parked the ship a couple of million kilometers off the surface of the sun, on the opposite side from the planet. He matched velocities with the alien planet, using the impulse engines to maintain his altitude above the sun--for of course, the Voyager was moving too slowly to hold an actual orbit at that point.

 

 

Captain Jane way clenched and released her fist, pins and needles dancing up and down her arm, as she, Tuvok, and Neelix skittered down the cellblock hallway, seeing neither

 

 

prisoners--not the shuttle craft pilot--nor more guards. The escape was not long being discovered, however, the lights began to flicker, growing nearly bright enough for a human for a fraction of a second then dropping to their normal gloom. Since the bright light probably hurt the Furies' eyes, Jane way deduced it was the equivalent of a red alert.

 

 

At first, the captain insisted upon stopping and looking sharply into each cell on left and right; after a minute, she merely glanced to either side.

 

 

"Neelix," she said at last, hearing the wild hunt of pursuit not overly far behind them.

 

 

"Captain?'"

 

 

"You look in the left cells, I'll check the right. Tuvok, keep an eye behind us... we've got to find the pilot and get the hell out of here!"

 

 

They ran full speed, hoping they would not turn a corner and smash into a favored. The cells in their section were all empty; evidently, the Furies had no intention of allowing different batches of Unclean to mingle.

 

 

Each cell was a replicator-quality copy of their own: six by five meters, two bunks along walls and even floors that did not quite meet at right angles. As Jane way ran, she frequently stumbled when the floor went funny.

 

 

Dammit, there's a limit to Lovecraftian geometry! she insisted to herself. Evidently, the Furies disagreed.

 

 

The away team bolted down a long corridor, counting eighty-four cells, including their own. At its end was a locked door.

 

 

Jane way stopped at the lock; she heard a shout of triumph behind her.

 

 

"Tuvok--got any bright ideas for picking this lock?

 

 

It's mechanical for goodness' sake!"

 

 

"Yes, Captain. May I?"

 

 

Jane way stepped aside. Tuvok stepped back, raised his foot, and kicked the door just above the handle. The jamb splintered with a noise like Baba Yaga gnashing her iron teeth and the door sagged inward. Tuvok shouldered it open and the away team ducked through as the guards fired a badly aimed shot.

 

 

A large, five-sided room; a door directly opposite.

 

 

"I've got this one!" shouted Neelix.

 

 

He barreled toward the door with a shoulder lead; just as he reached it, it dilated, four pieces pulling back from the center.

 

 

Neelix sailed through without a sound, until they heard a muffled thump.

 

 

Jane way and Tuvok glanced at each other, and the captain grinned. Tuvok merely raised one eyebrow, meaning... Before Jane way could fill in the meaning, they head a scuffle from the room Neelix had just entered so dramatically.

 

 

Rushing to the door, which opened as politely as before, Jane way saw her cook writhing on the floor with a horrific, slithering serpent with stubby legs and muscular arms. She jumped through the doorway, reaching for her phaser.

 

 

Before she could get off a shot, however, Neelix twitched in a way she could not follow, and the snake-man stiffened and slid to the floor. Neelix stood over him triumphantly.

 

 

"Captain," said Tuvok, "may I point out we have only scant seconds before the guards enter this room, and they are armed far better than--"

 

 

Without comment, Jane way raised the phaser and fired a full-power blast at a small box jutting from the wall next to the door.

 

 

"Now we've got all night," she predicted.

 

 

Moments later, they heard a terrific pair of thumps as the point and second-point of the guard squad ran full-tilt into the unexpectedly inoperative door. They began to pound, shouting dire threats about immortal souls, bright lights, and parting the Unclean on a square.

 

 

"May I suggest the window?"

 

 

"Not much choice, Tuvok. Can you see out? Is there anybody waiting for us?"

 

 

Tuvok stood on tiptoe, peering out the dark, volcanic obsidian.

 

 

"I cannot see very clearly, but I do not see any witnesses," he said.

 

 

Tuvok used his elbow, tapping tentatively on the black glass, then winding up for a full-strength strike. The glass cracked; two more blows and it finally shattered.

 

 

Jane way used the phaser butt to break off the sharp points sticking into the window space.

 

 

"Hoist me up," she said.

 

 

In the courtyard, the captain looked up, hoping to see sky; outside, they might possibly be able to contact the Voyager.

 

 

Alas, she saw overhead only the same grayish metal that neither phasers nor sensors were able to penetrate.

 

 

"Don't these guys ever want to look at their own sun?"

 

 

"To crowd twenty-seven billion sapient life-forms onto this planet," said Tuvok, "one must assume a certain un interest in outdoor scenery."

 

 

"Hm. To each his own, but I sure wouldn't want to live here."

 

 

They prowled the perimeter of the courtyard; the wall was iron, rusted in many parts, and it enclosed a large series of rounded, stone artifacts.

 

 

"Are these... burial sites?" guessed Jane way.

 

 

"Without a tri corder--"

 

 

"You can't tell where the bodies are buried. I know, I know, Mr. Tuvok. I'm amazed at how much cuing we took from our captors virtually everything associated with them now scares humans to death."

 

 

"There are many ancient Vulcan symbols of bad fortune and terror as well, Captain."

 

 

"Great!" interrupted Neelix.

 

 

"Now, if you two amateur anthropologists are finished comparing historical notes, can we get back to the escape plan?"

 

 

The courtyard bent around an L shape, then stretched on for more than two kilometers. Past the bend, the yard was full to overflowing with ghastly Furies, wandering purposefully with faces down and eyes averted.

 

 

"I think we'd better get lost in the crowd," suggested the captain.

 

 

They approached.

 

 

"Captain," said Neelix quietly, "maybe we had better liberate three hooded robes? We don't exactly look like Furies."

 

 

She shook her head.

 

 

"We don't dare get into a fight now; we're no way prepared to attack a body of them. We'll just have to trust our luck and the pseudo-privacy of the Furies. Maybe they won't look up and see us, or won't know who we are if they do."

 

 

Breathing deeply to calm herself, she slowly advanced along the courtyard until they joined the crowd, melting into a train of aliens--two snake-men, a shambling, red

 

 

eyed thing, and one Fury who looked like Navdaq's species. The crowd pressed in on either side, crushing the away team by sheer weight of numbers.

 

 

"Take my shirt," Jane way called softly over her shoulder.

 

 

Neelix caught on at once, grabbing her under tunic. She caught Tuvok's jacket ahead of her.

 

 

The crowd surged around them, ebbing and flowing; its movements were best described using the language of fluid flow.

 

 

Were it not for the tight grip they held to each other, they would have been separated for certain.

 

 

"Captain!" shouted Neelix in Jane way's ear, startling her. "Look over there."

 

 

She followed his finger. Ahead and to the right was a group of six Furies of yet a different species: skins so wrinkled they looked like rhinoceri, pink in color, covered in dense, bristly hair, and with unshod feet that looked remarkably like hooves from a distance. They showed a series of tails running up their spines.

 

 

But the most remarkable thing about them was how they were dressed: they wore Star fleet uniforms.

 

 

Wait, thought Jane way, not exactly... But she saw a mixture of yellow and red shirts and black pants and ankle boots. True, some of the jackets were both yellow and red; still, they looked extremely similar to the away team's clothing. The captain, science officer, and cook clawed their way through the wall of flesh to the group, falling in step behind them, heads bowed, looking neither left nor right.

 

 

All this while, they had walked alongside a building so massive, they had not even recognized it for what it was. The ceiling even bent up, rising toward infinity. How far down from the surface were they? As soon as they cleared the building, Jane way glanced to the side from the corner of her eye and saw what could only be computer terminals... dozens of them lining the building's other face like public subspace communicators.

 

 

In a second, Jane way yanked on Tuvok's shirt and tugged him in the direction of the terminals; Neelix followed, of course.

 

 

"If these connect to a central guard database," she said,

 

 

"I might be able to get into the system and find out exactly where the shuttle pilot is being held."

 

 

She stood in front of a terminal about halfway back, hoping not to attract attention.

 

 

Jane way chewed her lip, tapping the flat screen here and there, getting a feel for the system.

 

 

"Can you get in, Captain?" asked Tuvok.

 

 

"If I can't," she muttered, "then I guess I'll never make chief engineer." She winked at her Vulcan friend and began to work in earnest.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Tuvok and Neelix stood on either side of the frantically tapping Captain Jane way, keeping watch.

 

 

The Fury computer system used a sophisticated, one-way key code security encryption. Poking around the edges, Jane way determined that it wanted a seven-hundred-character password.

 

 

"Well, no possible way to guess that," she muttered.

 

 

"Captainr?"

 

 

"Nothing, Tuvok. It looks like we're sunk." She scowled; this was silly--to be stopped by a mere schoolboy encryption scheme! Jane way pulled the commbadge out of her pouch to make another futile attempt to contact the ship.

 

 

"Wait--belay that. I think I know how to..."

 

 

She faded out, staring at the commbadge.

 

 

"Yes." Smiling cryptically, she placed the badge on the terminal. The badges had a simple, artificially intelligent data clip in them that detected an open-communications command, such as Jane way to Commander Chakotay. The The clip was simplistic, a moron compared to the ship's computer.

 

 

But it was still a computer, and it was the best they had.

 

 

"Commbadge," said the captain, "identify your model and year."

 

 

She jumped as a voice, the computer's voice, popped out of the badge.

 

 

"I am a Star fleet general-issue Tang Bioelectrics Model 74-A communications badge manufactured at Riven dell Prime in 2362."

 

 

Neelix stared.

 

 

"I never knew you could do that."

 

 

"I never thought of trying before." She licked her lips. "Commbadge, locate a receiver circuit in the terminal unit you're sitting on. Signal when you have done so."

 

 

After a silent second, the commbadge beeped.

 

 

"Transmit the following commands through the Universal Translator to the receiver circuit. Activate prisoner manifest." She watched the screen; after a moment, it went blank, then displayed a screenful of unfamiliar but clearly not encrypted characters.

 

 

"Fascinating," said Tuvok.

 

 

"She has bypassed the entire encryption system by jumping over it, as it were, and communicating directly with the brain of the terminal."

 

 

"Um... I'll take your word for it."

 

 

"I never told you I was half-Ferengi, did I?" said Jane way with a wink.

 

 

"Command: Display schematic of prison cells; highlight cell containing the Unclean captured on the moon."

 

 

An architectural drawing of a series of huge, roughly rectangular buildings (none was quite right-regular) appeared one of the buildings then displayed a schematic of the cells. The building expanded until h filled the viewer, and a cell at the inner end glowed blue.

 

 

"Command: Show location of this terminal in relation to the highlighted cell."

 

 

A dot appeared on the side of the very building they wanted.

 

 

All three stared at the wall they faced, then back toward the front they had seen.

 

 

"Show all entrances to the building." She studied, memorizing the map. The nearest entrance was on the back side of the huge cell block.

 

 

Jane way paused; the next command was the big one.

 

 

"Command: Unlock the door to the cell in which the Unclean is kept."

 

 

The terminal hesitated, then flashed a legend in the Fury's language, or one of them. Then the entire terminal went blank

 

 

"Unauthorized access or command," guessed Tuvok.

 

 

"Captain, I strongly suggest we remove ourselves from this location before the nearest guards arrive." Resisting the urge to bolt, they slowly continued down the side yard toward the back.

 

 

The back of the building looked exactly like the front: featureless, the angles all wrong, dark and chilling, even in the heat of the Fury planet. But in the center was a ghastly, leaning, leering doorway that beckoned like an open mouth.

 

 

Jane way approached, ready to find a door that was open, locked with an electronic or mechanical lock, or ready to dilate as soon as she got close enough. She held her phaser ready.

 

 

In fact, the door was none of the above. It was closed and locked with a peculiar contraption that she only dimly recognized as a centuries-old padlock. The padlock actually dangled from an eyelet in the handle.

 

 

"Amazing," she said, shaking her head. The mix of modern and stone-age on the Fury planet was beginning to get under her skin.

 

 

The padlock was made out of the same indestructible material they were unable to cut through earlier. Jane way paused, temporarily defeated. Then she smiled, set her phaser on high, and proceeded to cut a Jane way-sized hole in the door itself--the door was made of mere steel-bound wood, an oily, warped wood. For once, the Fury peculiarities worked in the away team's favor.

 

 

She left the last centimeter of the top attached; when the edges had cooled-Neelix remembered himself this time--the three of them peeled back the flap with some difficulty. The flap did not drop or make any great noise; they ducked underneath into the building.

 

 

The layout was similar to their own cellblock a door leading to the cells dilated as they approached; long corridors marched into the distance, all of them lined with metal-barred cages, each with its corresponding key-card lock. The away team kept close to the sides, in shadows deeper even than the normal gloom of the Fury world; it was a good thing, for when they rounded the corner that led to the block containing the pilot's cell, according to the database, Tuvok saw a strike team of guards checking out the cell.

 

 

He silently waved the captain and Neelix back. Around the corner, Tuvok whispered.

 

 

"They must have responded to the attempted unlock command, Captain. The guards must realize some unauthorized person accessed the database. They will not leave the prisoner now."

 

 

Jane way nodded.

 

 

"I agree. We've run out of options."

 

 

"You mean we're just going to let him rot in there?"

 

 

"Certainly not, Neelix. We've run out of peaceful options.

 

 

I'm getting damned sick and tired of being poked, stared at, and imprisoned--me and the rest of you, including the pilot. I think this has passed far beyond the Prime Directive territory and deep into the realm of self-defense."

 

 

"I concur, Captain. These aliens are conspiring to launch an invasion of the Federation, and as such they are outside the domain of any treaty or law... including General Order Number One."

 

 

"It's time we showed them what Star fleet officers can do.

 

 

Mr. Tuvok--you take the right flank. Neelix, you're on the left to prevent anyone from escaping for reinforcements. I'll take the middle two. Neelix, make believe Tuvok is your enemy; you look more like you could be a weird species of Fury. Ready?"

 

 

They rounded the corner, easily; Jane way lay on her stomach in the shadow, while Neelix and Tuvok walked deliberately toward the cell. The guards had closed the door, leaving a lump in a vaguely recognizable, burned and shredded Star fleet uniform; now the Furies surrounded the cell, seven strong. As soon as they caught sight of the pair approaching, they leveled their weapons.

 

 

Tuvok put his hands in the air, while Neelix pushed him none too gently in the small of the back.

 

 

"Get along there, you!"

 

 

The confused guards backed up, still leveling their weapons but unsure what was happening and who they should believe. Ca pain Jane way kept as still as a corpse... she presumed the Furies could see in the dark; she counted on

 

 

their vision being based around movement, as was human and Vulcan vision. If she stayed still enough, she might not attract any notice.

 

 

"Holy ones," said Neelix,

 

 

"I have captured one of the prisoners. Ah... should I hand him over to you?"

 

 

The guards stared back and forth between Neelix and Tuvok.

 

 

Almost certainly, the former was violating numerous social cues and unspoken protocols--the away team had had no time to study the society to be able to successfully blend.

 

 

While the guards puzzled out that paradox, they allowed the pair to close within arm's length.

 

 

"Sirs," said Tuvok, his hands still in the air,

 

 

"I wish to make a complete confession." He lowered his hands onto the necks of the two of guards on the right and used the Vulcan neck-pinch... it worked as well on Furies as it did on most other races.

 

 

As soon as they started to sag, before the others had a chance to react, Jane way opened fire from her position on the floor, steadying her aim for the long-distance shot by planting her elbow and using her hand as a tripod. She stunned two before they could fire a shot.

 

 

Two of the remaining three bolted toward her in the confusion. Tuvok turned and gave one of them a solid push as he stumbled past; the guard sprawled full length on the ground face-first, grunting in pain. She tried another phaser blast at the one who still approached, but this time he was ready; the guard ducked under the shot and connected with Jane way at her midsection, pounding the air out of her. The pair went down in a tangle of bodies.

 

 

But Jane way was a captain in Star fleet, and she had received hundreds of hours of armed and unarmed combat training The guard was too big for her to handle by herself--but she was not by herself. After a few seconds, she managed to get the heel of her palm against the Fury's chin and press his head back a little bit.

 

 

It was enough. Tuvok stepped over the guard on the ground, who still struggled to get up, and pinched Jane way's assailant into the Land of Nod. The captain rolled to the side, getting a clear shot around Tuvok, and stunned the sixth guard just as he got to his knees. He fell heavily to the ground once more.

 

 

Kathryn Jane way blinked, then suddenly remembered the last guard: when numbers five and six had bolted toward her, the seventh turned tail and made a laser-line for the opposite door.

 

 

Suddenly realizing the danger, Jane way leapt to her feet and tried to get off a shot; but Tuvok was in the way, and the guard was far, far out of her reach.

 

 

A yellow blur flashed across her field of vision: Neelix charged after the last guard, leaping onto his back just before the Fury reached a lever-style switch. The cook tackled the guard centimeters away from the alarm switch

 

 

"Did we get them? Is that all of them?" Jane way quickly checked each of the seven, making sure he was unconscious. Then she returned to the cell, accompanied by Tuvok.

 

 

"All right, got any good ideas about opening the lock from the outside?"

 

 

"Not at the moment," said the Vulcan.

 

 

"The light panels in this hallway are mounted high enough that I doubt we could reach them."

 

 

The captain was in the process of removing her hairpin as a preliminary step when Neelix gently coughed.

 

 

"Um, Captain--maybe I'm being dense, but can't you just use this?"

 

 

He handed her the key-card that had been carried by the guard he cold cocked.

 

 

Flushing slightly, Jane way inserted the card in the slot; nothing happened. She removed it, and the cell unlocked and hinged open with a noise like a rusty wheel rolling along cobblestones. They entered and discovered what once had been a man, a human Star fleet officer. He wore command red, but they could hardly tell, for most of the fabric was burned beyond recognition, probably in the fiery crash of the shuttle craft. His commbadge was missing; whether it fell off or he removed it was unknown. He once had been a tall man; now he was stooped. He once had boasted bright, red hair; now, only a few, discolored wisps remained, and the rest was gray and frayed. Ugly brown spots and blotches covered his skin; they might once have been freckles, now

 

 

grown monstrous under tortures that must have involved ultraviolet radiation. His eyes were vacant and stared far out over the horizon. The man's skin was pallid where it wasn't spotty, with blood red cracks marbling the surface.

 

 

Tuvok carefully felt his carotid artery pulse and declared him alive. He bled from a dozen serious lacerations, and his shoulder was dislocated. He had a crushed wrist and fractured ribs--this much determined by a cursory examination of his swollen joints and chest. But whether he would live or die, whether indeed his brain was functioning somewhere under the trauma, pain, and incoherence, only the dcctor could tell. The man was not talking; he stared at the away team with no shock of recognition or relief and did not respond to their urgently whispered questions. His pupils were dilated and reacted sluggishly and unevenly to light.

 

 

Jane way hesitated only a moment.

 

 

"Gentlemen, we have to get this patient to the ship; he is our top priority. Besides, I'm fresh out of ideas for stopping the invasion... but maybe if we can figure out where he came from, how he got all the way out here, maybe we'll have a clue how to get back ourselves and warn the Federation."

 

 

"Or perhaps," added Tuvok, "we can covertly accompany the Furies when they invade and take that opportunity to issue our warning. I believe our best chance to return to the Alpha Quadrant is at hand."

 

 

"Either way, we have to return to the ship--which means we have to find the surface of the planet somehow... or at least coordinates we can beam from."

 

 

"How about the place we beamed to in the first place?" asked Neelix. "Can you find it again?"

 

 

"I--can't say for certain, but I think I can. I can try."

 

 

"That's more than Tuvok or I could do; we were in no condition to note the route."

 

 

Tuvok grabbed the lieutenant around his waist and hauled him to his feet. Miraculously, he stuck there, swaying a bit; but his eyes still stared into nothingness. Jane way gave the man an experimental push, and he staggered forward a couple of steps, then stopped. By a combination of pushing and turning, they got him moving; the captain supported him with her shoulder to speed things up.

 

 

Jane way led them back through the dilating door to the plaza; then Neelix took over. They tried to get into the Fury mode of walking, keeping their heads down, eyes averted, really getting into subsuming their individual identities in the crusade of the group to recover a particular piece of real estate at the expense of their entire multicultural existence, if necessary.

 

 

After all, what could possibly outweigh the chance to storm heaven? That is what Jane way told herself, and evidently it worked, for they were neither stopped nor questioned while Neelix led them down one blind alley and along another false trail. Each time, he added "--but now I know where we're going!" and the Star fleet officers patiently followed, each supporting one of their new companion's arms. He felt clammy to the touch.

 

 

At last, Neelix insisted,

 

 

"Wait, this time I really know where we are..." and that time, he was right. He led them around another pair of corners, across a courtyard that Tuvok agreed looked familiar, down some more passages where Neelix agreed the geometry was loathsome, to a square that even Jane way admitted was the original beam in spot. They returned to the approximate location they had entered, and the captain touched Neelix's secret commbadge.

 

 

"Jane way to Voyager--Chakotay, are you out there?"

 

 

The voice crackled with static, but it was unmistakably her executive officer.

 

 

"Captain! We have been trying--"

 

 

"Four to beam out right now, Mr. Chakotay--lock in on the communications signal."

 

 

"Yes, Captain, it'll be a little tricky, but we'll get you out."

 

 

Jane way turned back to Tuvok and Neelix.

 

 

"All right, we've got the ship; now all we have to do, gentlemen, is survive until she gets here."

 

 

"That may not be as easy as it sounds," declared Tuvok. He pointed at the guards, including the feared favored boiling out of the building they just left and out of two others just like it.

 

 

"We might possibly escape detection by remaining within this crowd," suggested the Vulcan.

 

 

The captain of the guards made a peculiar pinging noise that might have been the equivalent of a human's whistling for attention. The guards gathered around--except for the favored, who inched close enough to hear but remained proudly aloof from the ordinary guards. The guard captain spoke animatedly, his oddly articulated limbs gesturing in impossible directions. Then he whipped out a bulky, boxlike item. Now what? thought the captain, she didn't appreciate new rules introduced into the game in such a late round.

 

 

"It could be a Fury tri corder," guessed Neelix.

 

 

"New plan: We take our so-far un rescued prisoner and get as far away from here as possible. I'll leave the commbadge carrier signal operating, so as soon as Chakotay gets close enough, he can lock on."

 

 

Jane way took one arm of the prisoner around her neck and Tuvok took the other; they hurried as fast as they could, with Neelix dashing forward a few meters, then dashing back, looking remarkably dog like.

 

 

"Get behind a building," Jane way suggested; "maybe their own tri corders are no better at poking through it than ours."

 

 

"We will have gained little," said Tuvok; "they can still follow our life signs."

 

 

"Yes, but they'll have to follow us then... they can't head straight toward us. We can lead them in circles."

 

 

"The idea is not without merit."

 

 

Jane way shifted to their rear, poking her nose around the corner to watch the guards' progress. Temporarily safe, at least until they had to move on to the next building, thirty meters away, Jane way looked up at the ceiling high overhead and tried to mentally will the Voyager to materialize right that instant and beam them out.

 

 

Neelix joined her, watching the guards.

 

 

Tuvok began trying to revive the shuttle craft pilot; they would make much better time if he could be induced to move under his own power. But none of the standard means of bringing an unconscious human about worked; although the man was semi aware--he groaned and occasionally rolled his head from side to side and attempted to wrap his arms protectively around his head--the Vulcan could not get him fully awake, not even enough to move his legs or balance on his own without swaying like a sapling in a wind.

 

 

"Uh-oh," said Neelix, "they've figured it out... they're casting for us--wait, they're going the wrong way!"

 

 

Jane way held her breath as the guards, the favored in front, crowded around the door they had just exited, weapons out; then the biggest favored rolled forward like an armored fighting vehicle, gathered speed, and burst through the cut-out hole, firing his disruptor-like weapon as he went. His bulk ripped off the flap that Jane way had left; the others followed him through, and there were a few moments of confusion while they determined that they had followed the scent in the wrong direction--a fifty-fifty chance in that sort of tracking operation.

 

 

Jane way spoke up: "Now's our chance--Tuvok, let's move quickly before they figure it outl"

 

 

Neelix and Tuvok again picked up the pilot and followed Jane way around the building.

 

 

"Captain," said Tuvok, panting, his voice nevertheless cutting through the noise, "can you cross and recross our own trail several times? It might serve to confuse our pursuers further."

 

 

Keeping a wary eye on the door--the Furies had left a guard, of course--they dodged into the courtyard again, slipping from one line of pedestrians to another. Jane way could feel the Furies' confusion and resentment at being jostled, probably a severe breach of politeness; but she jumped from one conga line to another, slowly enough that Neelix and Lieutenant Tuvok could follow, and worked her way back to a spot she remembered traversing. She walked their own trail for a few meters, then cut to the left; she zigged in the other direction, into the mob again, followed it around a circuitous route, then zagged back across the previous path at right angles.

 

 

Then she got nervous. The guard outside the building leaned through the hole and talked to someone just on the other side; then he looked around as if searching for them.

 

 

"Neelix--move it, quick! Behind the next building over there!"

 

 

Just as Jane way feared, the guard reached through the

 

 

hole and took the tri corder from its previous owner, then he idly scanned the area.

 

 

He froze suddenly, then pointed directly at the fleeing away team. Jane way and crew bolted for cover, but it was too late; they were spotted. The guard produced his own version of the pinging noise, and his cohorts leapt back out through the hole.

 

 

The guard captain was the third one back through, and he made the smart tactical decision not to wait until he had regrouped. He pointed directly toward them and shouted something loudly enough that the away team's Universal Translators picked it up: "Give chase to the Unclean, for if they escape, we shall all be excommunicated!"

 

 

That is a potent threat indeed, thought Jane way, when all of society is ordered around the Great Holy Crusade. To a Fury, being excommunicated probably meant losing all reason for living.

 

 

Suicide might follow quickly, if they were a race capable of such self-immolation.

 

 

She thought this as she ran as fast as she could, carrying her burden, expecting with every step the harsh blow of an energy weapon in the back. Or worse, the terror projector. What hell would that be? she wondered frantically.

 

 

Tuvok gave only the tiniest portion of his consciousness to willing his legs to move; running away from the Furies was something he literally could do in his sleep, so deeply was his fear of them ingrained in the wilder parts of his psyche. He passed his left hand around the pilot's back and up to touch his left temple, then pressed his right hand to the pilot's other temple. The Vulcan tried to find and extract the tiny ball of consciousness he hoped existed somewhere inside the wall of pain, the fleshy prison. Tuvok was trying a Vulcan mind-mad on the run, something that had never before occurred to him.

 

 

Here and beyond, Tuvok caught fleeting images of horrific memories--an alien ship, an attack; battle scenes, the dying, explosions and confusion--panic, the shock of being hit-the pilot hy in sickbay, he was in pain, he was trying to protect a friend another Star fleet officer...

 

 

Tuvolc almost drew back out of the man's mind; he was

 

 

well aware of the essential, ultimate invasion of privacy the mind-meld required... and clearly, the man had suffered severe trauma... but it was not so clear whether the Vulcan should continue or back out of the man's thoughts.

 

 

He hesitated only a moment; then Tuvok recalled the central tenet of the Vulcan philosophy, a saying attributed to Surak himself: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one.

 

 

But would the pilot himself agree? Would Captain Jane way?

 

 

Humans were not Vulcans, and they had a peculiar love-hate relationship with such obvious, logical, utilitarian philosophy.

 

 

In the end, Tuvok decided that the decision was his own, and he had no problem with it. The away team needed rescuing; the Federation needed saving; and both required the pilot to become at least somewhat conscious. The man's own need not to have his most private thoughts violated must take second place in importance.

 

 

Tuvok again entered the pilot's mind, forcing himself deeper and deeper, trying to find the lowest portion of the brain. Along the way, he saw many more images, horrors etched in the man's brain--the man... a name floated past, and Tuvok grabbed it.

 

 

The man was Lieutenant Red bay.

 

 

Then, just behind the name, Tuvok found what he was looking for: he found the reptile center, the site that controlled such simple activities as walking, balancing, running. Open, thought Tuvok, trying to restart the segment, let me in... I am a friend. Your life is in danger; you must revive and begin running.

 

 

Then Tuvok was surrounded and attacked by the mind's I, the "Red bay" of Red bay's mind. Invader! Assassin! Murderer! Get out get out get OUT of my head, get out, get Do not be afraid of me; I have come to help. You are in danger, you must begin moving immediately.

 

 

--devils hurling terror before them like light beam tearing through the ship invading invading! in mortal danger must take the shuttle craft through the wormhole before...

 

 

Tuvok was fascinated; a wormhole? What wormhole?

 

 

Could they return through it and warn the Federation of the impending attack... an attack about which they knew no operational details?

 

 

But perhaps Red bay knew. Tuvok pressed harder. Sir, you must return to consciousness, whether you are to fight me or the ones who did this to you. Follow my voice follow me....

 

 

Tuvok backed slowly away; the

 

 

"Red bay' grabbed hold, trying to wrestle Tuvok's consciousness to the metaphorical floor--but the Vulcan was the stronger, and slowly, inexorably, Red bay was pulled out of his self-built prison... a prison that might have saved him from total madness.

 

 

The only logical conclusion was that Red bay had been exposed to the Furies' terror-projection device.

 

 

***

 

 

The pilot groaned again; but it was a groan with more purpose than his previous ones. Jane way felt him straighten under her arm; when he stood, he was taller than she, of course, which made her suddenly a burden, not a support. She hastily let go, simply helping him to balance on his hind legs.

 

 

Neelix had been watching the three of them, transfixed; then he turned back and started squawking

 

 

"Run! Run away--they're here!"

 

 

The away team bolted, and astonishingly enough, so did the shuttle craft pilot. He staggered after them under his own impulse power. The quartet ran across the courtyard, under the iron "sky," pursued by those guards who had made it back out--which did not include any of the favored, fortunately, else the Voyager team would have been trampled in seconds. The favored are evidently swift of foot but not of mind, thought the captain.

 

 

But the other guards were fast enough, motivated, and unencumbered by a still-woozy comrade. They gained and steadily closed the gap, reaching for Neelix, who brought up the rear.

 

 

At last, Neelix dug in his heels and whirled to face the angels of death, straight-arming the first one. The rest came for him with a roar.

 

 

They whirled their facial tentacles in rage; they screamed and leapt at him like wild animals; but they leapt at an

 

 

empty patch of air as Jane way, Tuvok, Neelix faded into non corporeality in front of the Furies' snakelike snouts.

 

 

Jane way discorporated and disappeared, leaving a confused, enraged, and terrified mob of cops in her dust... cops who would soon face their own, even more terrifying commanders with a story of failure quite unlikely to be believed.

 

 

Captain Jane way almost--almost--felt sorry for them as she re materialized on the Voyager transporter pad.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

"Am I dead?"

 

 

Kes waited anxiously in the transporter room, standing first on one foot then the other, while the away team took about nine years, an entire Ocampan lifetime, to materiallize. The stranger, an emaciated human who looked like a ghost, sparkled into view with that horrible question on his lips: "Am I dead?"

 

 

After Kes embraced Neelix, she propelled the stranger--Red bay, according to Tuvok--straight to sickbay, while everyone else headed bridge ward.

 

 

In sickbay, Kes watched, concerned, while the Doctor checked Red bay quickly and determined that there was nothing physically wrong with him aside from a few broken bones, deep lacerations, bruises, and general ill treatment.

 

 

Kes desperately wished she knew if Neelix were safe- but she remained with the doctor. Red bay suffered from a deep psychological wound that would be difficult to cure while still on a starship... perhaps impossible, as soon as the young lieutenant recovered sufficiently to realize their dire predicament. He had lost quite a lot of weight and had clearly been tortured physically and psychologically. The man looked like a walking corpse. His color was bad, bone white, and he did not lose the long-distance stare.

 

 

"Am I dead?"

 

 

"No," said Kes; "you're aboard a Star fleet starship." Lost in space, forever, never to return. You may as well be dead, she did not add.

 

 

The doctor took up the conversation.

 

 

"You have some severe injuries which I will now heal, if you'll stop squirming long enough to let me do so. You may feel some discomfort and stiffness for a few days, especially in the wrist. Try not to use it as much as usual. In fact, try not to use it at all."

 

 

"This is the U.S.S. Voyager," said Kes, "but you're still in the Delta Quadrant. My name is Kes, and this is the doctor.

 

 

The captain's name is Jane way, she's the one who rescued you with the Vulcan. Neelix, the other one who rescued you--not the Vulcan, the third one--is my... a Talaxian native.

 

 

"Kes is my assistant," the doctor explained.

 

 

Kes watched Red bay carefully; in fact, she had struck up the conversation, hoping to jar his mind away from his morbid hallucinations.

 

 

"Is this hell? Am I in hell now?"

 

 

Kes sighed and began telling Red bay all about the Voyager and how it came to be in the Delta Quadrant. I'll entertain him all night, if I have to, she decided bleakly, concerned about the patient's frame of mind.

 

 

Jane way slid into the command chair as if she had merely stepped out to eat a quick meal; the ordeal behind her, she wanted her ship back in hand.

 

 

"Mr. Chakotay, what's happening?

 

 

Pursuit?"

 

 

: "Glad to have you aboard, Captain. We worried we had

 

 

lost you for a time. Mr. Paris?"

 

 

"Nothing yet... I plotted a course that stayed well away from the aliens' moon; that's how they caught us last time."

 

 

"Where are we now?"

 

 

Kim answered.

 

 

"We shot around the sun, beamed you up

 

 

on the fly, and now we're right back where we started: on the opposite side of the sun from the planet; except now we're far enough out for a real orbit."

 

 

Jane way nodded.

 

 

"Continue correcting course to keep from being seen.

 

 

"Did you miss me?" The voice sounded from the turbo lift.

 

 

"Welcome back, Neelix," said Kim.

 

 

"Of course We missed you especially around dinnertime Lieutenant Paris drew the black marble and had to cook."

 

 

"Mr. Neelix," said the captain, "you performed with exemplary courage, as did Mr. Tuvok, under difficult conditions.

 

 

I will make an entry to that effect in the log. But right now, we have a serious problem. Senior officers to my ready room; I have to tell you what we discovered. Activate--I mean, Jane way to the doctor."

 

 

"Yes, Captain."

 

 

"Doctor, how is Lieutenant Red bay?"

 

 

The doctor frowned on the viewer, putting his finger on his chin in an eerily human gesture.

 

 

"Physically? I've done my usual brilliant job. But he still has some lingering psychological problems. Kes is talking to him now--I think he'll be able to leave sickbay in a short while."

 

 

"Kes!" shouted Neelix.

 

 

"Can you hear me? Are you there?"

 

 

The Ocampan moved into the frame.

 

 

"Neelix, I was so frightened when we couldn't find the away team. I thought you might have been captured."

 

 

"We were! We had to break out--the captain used her hairpin to pick the--"

 

 

"But are you all right? Can you come down here?"

 

 

"I'm sorry, Kes," said Jane way, "but I need Neelix up here for right now. He's fine. I'll send him down as soon as I can.

 

 

Jane way out."

 

 

Chakotay was staring at her.

 

 

"What did you pick with your hairpin? This I have to hear."

 

 

"In good time, Commander. Senior officers in the ready room.

 

 

Mr. Kim, contact Torres and and get her up here."

 

 

* **

 

 

Chakotay sat back and listened to his captain. He was surprised how relieved he was to have her aboard again. A few months ago, I would cheerfully have left her behind, he realized.

 

 

"That is as much as we could glean of the Furies' plans.