"Mr. Kim... can we still operate the transporter?"

 

 

Kim shook his head.

 

 

"I don't know, Captain; unfortunately, the only way to find out is to try it."

 

 

As soon as the weapons board came back on-line, Kim reactivated the captain's program and unleashed another barrage of hell upon the Furies. Evidently, the electromagnetic pulse had scrambled their sensors as well, for they foundered, drifting along Newtonian orbits while they powered up-their systems again. "Like shooting drunks in a barrel," muttered the ensign, picking off first one Fury, then another by concentrated firepower.

 

 

Quickly, before the Furies could fully recover, Paris backed the ship away at full impulse speed, dropping photon torpedoes in his wake with speed-killing acceleration to park them in orbit depth charges. The Furies were forced to swerve around them, throwing them into non matching orbits through the stellar gravity well.

 

 

Then the second electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) wave struck, and Voyager was deaf, dumb, and blind, every sensor kicked off-line. "Visual!" commanded Jane way; Kim quickly switched to pure video, and they could see--Jane way thanked her lucky stars they weren't traveling at warp speed at that moment; the visual distortions of pure, unfiltered video feed at warp were stomach-turning and horrifying... few could watch for more than a second or two.

 

 

Captain Jane way stared at the screen with eyes that were sharper, thanks to modern medical tech, than those of the ancient Greeks who had invented astronomy; she looked for parallaxing stars that would indicate the enemy ships. If they were smart...

 

 

If WE were smart, she thought.

 

 

"Paris--shut down impulse engines; all stop! Mr. Kim, keep working on those sensors... passive sensing. We can't see them..."

 

 

"They can't see us," finished Paris, in sudden comprehension, getting it at last.

 

 

"Blind man's bluff. Wait, there's one--heading about two-eight-five, bearing--"

 

 

"I see him. Them."

 

 

"Magnify."

 

 

"Captain," said Tuvok, "without the sensors, the magnified picture will be unsteady."

 

 

Jane way was adamant; one picture was worth a thousand frets. "I want to see him... how badly did the pulse damage him?"

 

 

Kim touched a button, and the forward viewer replaced the star field with a shaky, long-distance visual of a Fury

 

 

ship. The ship was tumbling, and in a second, Jane way saw why: the aft end, which should have displayed three fusion engines, showed only one operating on one side. When the ship rotated again, they saw a bright white light and hot plasma escaping from one side; this unexpected "rocket" gave the Fury ship a tumbling motion.

 

 

"Containment field must have shut down," said Kim; "poor people."

 

 

"I doubt there are any people left alive to feel sorry for," said Tuvok matter-of-factly.

 

 

"I would guess the radiation count aboard that ship to be--"

 

 

"Please don't," said the captain, closing her eyes. Get used to it, she ordered herself; try to imagine what it will feel like to kill twenty-seven billion of them.

 

 

She blinked; a tear rolled smoothly down her cheek, but she ignored it. It wasn't really there.

 

 

"Captain, there are two Furies left," said Lieutenant Paris; "both are negative bearing, at about two-eight-zero and zero-two-zero."

 

 

Can't be much more exact than that, she realized.

 

 

"Damaged?"

 

 

"Not obviously. I think their engines are back on-line, but we haven't been tagged with fire-control sensors yet."

 

 

"Maybe they were burned out for good."

 

 

Paris turned back to his private viewer.

 

 

"Maybe you're right; they're firing up and accelerating in a search pattern."

 

 

"Are we in the projected cone of search?"

 

 

Tuvok quickly punched up the same image.

 

 

"Negative, Captain," said the Vulcan.

 

 

"If they maintain their present systematic search, they will not locate us for another five hours."

 

 

"They're not going to wait," muttered Jane way. No one heard her, so she was spared the curse of successful prediction when, five minutes later, the Fury ships rendezvoused clumsily--by dead reckoning, the captain guessed--and headed back toward the planet.

 

 

"Mr. Kim," asked Jane way for the third time since shutdown, "how long do you estimate for the sensors to be back on-line?"

 

 

Kim shook his head. Again.

 

 

"I... couldn't say, Captain. I'm working on it, but--the pulse fried everything!"

 

 

Jane way settled back; she began to realize how much she truly depended upon Lieutenant Torres. B'Elanna would have had the sensors back up in--no, that was unfair, Kim wasn't an engineer, he was doing the best he could. If you really want results, she told herself, you'd better take over the repairs yourself: No? Too busy? Then stop whining about Kim's engineering ability!

 

 

"Paris--follow them. Not too closely; if they start heading toward the moon, we have to stop them."

 

 

"Aye, aye."

 

 

The Furies maintained top impulse speed, evidently deciding that navigating at warp speed through a hurricane of plasma, electromagnetic radiation, and gravity pulses was not conducive to long life. After forty minutes, the two Furies and their surreptitious shadow pulled into the inner solar system. For a moment they slowed, hesitated--then altered course directly toward the artificial moon.

 

 

"Dammit!" swore Jane way in a rare loss of cool.

 

 

"Paris, get ready to--"

 

 

"Captain!" shouted Ensign Kim, stricken. He pointed at the screen, and Jane way followed his finger.

 

 

A tiny sliver of white streaked away from the moon at high impulse speed. Even at this range, the sliver was perfectly familiar. It was a shuttle craft... their own shuttle craft.

 

 

The Furies accelerated to attack speed and shot after the sliver; Voyager took up the chase, far behind.

 

 

Jane way half stood in her chair, staring at the drama unfolding before her eyes, out of reach; she was helpless! Yet somehow, she must help.

 

 

"Almost there..." muttered Paris, hunched over his console. "Almost there--just a few more--"

 

 

The first Fury ship opened fire on the shuttle craft. The second ship fired just as Paris fired a spread of torpedoes.

 

 

Voyager's shot ran directly up from behind the two ships, where the armor was weakest. Simultaneously, the powerful Fury disruptor beam sheered through the shuttle craft, a knife through butter.

 

 

The photon torpedo caromed the Fury ship into its comrade, flying in formation next door. The resulting fireball destroyed both ships in a microsecond.

 

 

But the shuttle craft exploded in a burn of white noise hurling pieces of knucklebone shrapnel in all directions.

 

 

Jane way stared, numb and sick at the same time. She didn't know whether to rage or collapse in mute sorrow.

 

 

"Ensign Kim," she said, "as soon as you restore communications, try to--try to contact the away team. See if there are... survivors."

 

 

Incredibly, all she could think was I wonder whether they rigged the moon before they died?

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

B'Elanna Torres kicked at the jammed door, kicked again, then threw herself bodily at the obstacle. How embarrassing! They had trekked six kilometers through a shifting maze of passages, all alike, betimes diving sideways to avoid Brobdingnagian columns sliding murderously across the slotted door of electrical connectors and fiber sheaths--only to be frozen scant meters before the shaft by a locked door!

 

 

B'Elanna exhausted herself, Klingon fury seizing control while the human half sat back in amazement at her futile, repetitive folly... unable to stop herself, able only to stare from a height while she beat her hands bloody and finally collapsed, gasping, in a crumpled heap on the floor.

 

 

"May I try?" asked Lieutenant Red bay, calm and collected comatose would be the fairer description.

 

 

"You? What can you do, scarecrow, if I can't even budge the damned thing?" She realized she was whining--human side giving vent to the frustration of the Klingon.

 

 

Red bay grunted.

 

 

He drew his phaser and blew the door out of existence.

 

 

B'Elanna stared reproachfully at the hole where the door

 

 

had been, the edges of the slide still glowing, radiating warmth.

 

 

Without a word or backward glance, she rose and pushed through, followed by Red bay. There was something terribly unaesthetic about... She sighed, staring at the image on the tri corder.

 

 

By rights, they should already be in the shaft, but she saw nothing but more corridor.

 

 

"It should be here," she muttered, turning in a slow circle, scanning.

 

 

"Are you sure? Dial up the scale."

 

 

"Maxed. Maybe we just have to walk forward another--awk!"

 

 

The last noise disappeared down the hole that opened suddenly at B'Elanna's feet; the floor gave way like a hollow pie crust, and she dropped twenty meters into blackness, landing on a raised track. Had they been in Earth-normal gravity, she surely would have broken a hind leg, and Red bay would have had to put her down.

 

 

"Are you killed?" he called from above, sounding not too terribly interested either way.

 

 

"No. I don't think so. Unless we both are."

 

 

A thump sounded in the darkness as Red bay leaped down beside her. Torres fumbled around, hunting for her dropped tri corder.

 

 

Suddenly, the ground was illuminated by a bright light from Red bay's phasoelectric torch. Must've been stashed in his boot, she thought.

 

 

B'Elanna swept her tri corder in a short arc.

 

 

"Power generator this way. This track is set up for magnetic levitation, and it's still powered. I think we might actually find a working subway, Red bay." They sped down the corridor, aware of passing time, and almost ran headlong into a low, flattened car with pointy edges; the exterior was blue and yellow with bright-red highlights.

 

 

"I guess we know why the Furies prefer dim lighting: because if the lights were turned up, they'd all die of terminal color-clash," said Red bay.

 

 

"Ho ho." The tri corder still picked up no life-forms, but B'Elanna continued to half-see them on the peripheral edges.

 

 

Curiously, the door was manual; they had to yank it open by brute muscle--Red bay didn't want to blow it off, since

 

 

they might need the air seal. Inside, the car was stuffed with seats, three different varieties, only one of which looked comfortable for humans. The "control panel" was nothing more than a blank panel with a narrow strip of hieroglyphs running along the top edge.

 

 

The interior was mostly white and mute gray, the seats molded plastic, and no seatbelt harnesses.

 

 

"How does this work?" asked Torres, touching the panel.

 

 

The car lurched forward, accelerating hard enough to hurl Red bay to the deck. B'Elanna would have joined him except she wrapped her arms around the "pilot's" seat, which had no piloting controls that she could see. The car accelerated at a rate of at least three gravities toward... what? The shaft looked like it headed into the planetary interior... but where? Anywhere near a power-conduit junction? Red bay struggled to his feet against the acceleration and scrambled into a crash chair designed for humanoids; but B'Elanna Torres dangled where she was, though her arms quickly began to ache from the strain.

 

 

After two minutes or so, the acceleration suddenly ceased.

 

 

Torres squawked and flapped her arms in the sudden shift of "down." She fell into place in the command chair, guessing they were now traveling somewhere around three and a half kilometers per second.

 

 

The first indication she had that the car was actually sinking lower in the moon was when she begin noticing a distinct lessening of gravity. She checked with the tri corder and discovered gravity had indeed dropped from 0.2 g to nearly 0.1 g; as they neared the core, the gravity continued to diminish... a process that would reach the limit of zero-g at the very center, assuming it was hollow.

 

 

Many minutes passed, more than half an hour, and they were still barreling along. They said nothing to each other, they had nothing to say. Temporary crew mates did not always become fast friends.

 

 

"This might be awfully rough when we decelerate," said the skeletal pilot. B'Elanna did not respond, but she understood the problem: the human body can stand far more acceleration forward than it can backward. But moments later, the seats in the cabin, including the pilot's chair,

 

 

slowly began to rotate. As soon as the seats were roughly opposite to the line of travel, the car shuddered and braked hard, just as hard as it had accelerated.

 

 

In the same length of time, two minutes, the car brought itself to a complete halt and automatically opened the cabin doors.

 

 

They were now so deep that gravitation was detectable only as a faint tug toward the floor plates--0.005 g, according to the handy tri corder, one two-hundredth of Earth's gravity. A slight movement pushed B'Elanna out of her seat and set her drifting toward the roof. Red bay was more circumspect, moving along the car and out the open door, after some fumbling around, Lieutenant Torres followed.

 

 

At the far-end platform, they tethered themselves as best they could with hands and feet, staring in silence. The platform dropped away in a kilometer-tall cliff face, the open space was so vast that the other side vanished into the blue haze of the moist air. Directly below them, the valley resembled nothing less than a monstrous data clip packet, a power router with power conduits that must have been big enough to swallow the Voyager, and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiberoptic cable as thick as small tree trunks; a number of logic switches that B'Elanna dizzily estimated to be in the low millions; spark gaps wider than Hero's Gulch on the Klingon Home world; and arcing over the entire valley, forming a glittering gold dome, a godlike version of Kubla Khan's Xanadu, was an inverted, convex power-grid antenna. It was made of the same filament wire as the Faraday cage surrounding the sun. And oddly enough, though the sun grid was built to a scale unimaginably bigger than the one that spread now before them, B'Elanna Torres was more shaken by the current, smaller version. She felt her stomach contract to a tight fist, felt her breath catch in her throat: the problem with the grid surrounding the sun was that it was too big; it defied the mind's ability to comprehend... so her mind gave up and accepted it as an intellectual proposition only.

 

 

But the current grid was possible to take in all at once--perhaps the maximal size an object could be and still

 

 

actually register as a single thing--unlike, say, a continent; no one walked around marveling at the size of a continent.

 

 

"Kahless's beard," she breathed, taking in the entire vista in one eyeful.

 

 

Red bay grunted.

 

 

"Damn thing's big enough to scare the brass off a bald monkey," he said.

 

 

"Don't tell me... that's the central power router, diffuser, whatever it's called. Isn't it?"

 

 

Setting herself to slowly rotate like a top, B'Elanna scanned in all directions.

 

 

"There's nothing else of this magnitude anywhere in the moon," she confirmed.

 

 

"This is it, Red bay."

 

 

He sighed.

 

 

"I suppose there's no way to blow up the diffuser grid."

 

 

"Not unless you have about two hundred photon torpedoes in your pocket."

 

 

"Just a fallen star. No, I have no explosives; I don't even know where you would get any."

 

 

"I brought tools, not bombs. Oh well; have to leave the antenna alone. But maybe we can reroute some of those fiberoptic cables... well, the smaller ones, anyway." She mused for a moment, slowly drifting back to the deck after her scanning rotation.

 

 

"I would bet the Furies built a thousand redundancies into the system; they couldn't know exactly how the power would flow during the supernova, and they wouldn't want to waste an erg. We can't just destroy systems; we have to set up an actual feedback loop that will channel the energy itself into an adjacent sector, frying all the circuits."

 

 

"Cut and paste."

 

 

"You got it. But how do we get down there?"

 

 

Red bay twisted sideways, placed his feet against the edge of the cliff, and launched himself out over the valley. B'Elanna gasped, then realized instantly that the gravity was so low he couldn't possibly get hurt.

 

 

Lieutenant Torres gritted her teeth; she had never before felt any twinges of acrophobia, but she was feeling it now, a huge boulder of phobic panic crushing her so she couldn't breathe. Residual from the terror beam? She thought she

 

 

might be jumping at shadows for a long, long time to come.

 

 

Refusing to allow a mere human to show her up, she planted herself and launched just as Red bay had, trying to mimic his trajectory as best she could.

 

 

Nevertheless, they landed a kilometer apart. Leg muscles simply weren't precise enough engines to calculate a good parabolic intercept.

 

 

Tapping her communicator, B'Elanna said,

 

 

"Torres to Red bay; look toward the center of the valley... see that tall spike? I'd guess that was the focus collector for the antenna."

 

 

"All the power flows through there?" asked Red bay's disembodied voice.

 

 

"All the power flows through there. That's our target, Lieutenant; if we can loop those circuits around into a feedback loop, we've got a good chance to divert all the power long enough for the supernova to destroy the moon itself, and--"

 

 

"And the Furies get to sit and watch the tidal wave roll in." For the first time, B'Elanna heard real emotion in his normally grim, sardonic voice; she heard pure, malicious joy at the prospect of twenty-seven billion dead Furies.

 

 

A day ago, B'Elanna would have been appalled and sickened.

 

 

But her whole life had changed since then. A day ago, B'Elanna Torres had never felt the whisper of the terror-projector needle into her brain.

 

 

Yesterday, she had not yet experienced the degrading horror, the humiliation of paralysis, the mind-numbing, marrow-freezing terror it induced.

 

 

Today, she would pull the switch herself, instantly, to fry all twenty-seven billion without a second thought.

 

 

"Head for the needle?" asked Red bay.

 

 

Torres nodded, then realized he could not see her. "Rendezvous at the needle; we don't have much time if we want to return to Voyager."

 

 

Red bay laughed, then signed off. Now, what did I say that was so hysterical? she thought angrily.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Planting her feet, B'Elanna To res leaped as high as she could--more than sixty meters. She scrutinized the pole as it rolled past, looking for a panel, a door, an access port--a knob, anything. The antenna was smooth as glass all the way up; it was smooth as a mountain lake all the way back down.

 

 

She followed a slow spiral around the base; it was easier to move on her belly, as if she were climbing a cliff. The gravity was so close to zero that her stomach couldn't tell the difference; she was falling--a horrible feeling. She had dreaded every zero-g exercise at the Academy, and she still didn't like it.

 

 

At last she found something promising. At first, she didn't recognize the panel for what it was: it was colossal, an octagon with a diameter of eighty-four meters. She crawled the perimeter, at last finding a pair of three locks that evidently wanted a key but not an electronic key; the tri corder told her there were no circuits--it was purely mechanical. The locks wanted an actual hunk of metal with teeth and notches to insert and turn!

 

 

She was staring reproachfully at the locks when Red bay finally joined her.

 

 

"Ancient locks," she said, pointing.

 

 

"We need to find a--what did they call them?--a key ring."

 

 

"No we don't," said the dead-voiced lieutenant.

 

 

It took her a moment, but B'Elanna suddenly realized what he meant. She jerked away... a bad move under the circumstances, as Torres catapulted across the deck, landing twenty meters distant.

 

 

Red bay leveled an all-purpose lock pick and slipped it into the lock. Silently, the access hatch swung open.

 

 

Inside, they found at last the mother lode: bank upon bank of fiberoptic cables that carefully routed the electromagnetic pulse from surface, mirrors, and the giant collector into the various logic gates and circuits.

 

 

They had found the nexus where everything came together, the one piece of the system for which there were no failsafes, no redundancies, no dead-man switches to kill the power and try again. The Furies knew it would be a one-shot deal when the sun went supernova: there would be no second chances. Either the system would work, and they would be hurled through a brief, artificial wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant... or it would fail; and they would be dead, turned into ionized plasma by the stellar explosion.

 

 

But there are half a million of them! We can't make a difference!

 

 

B'Elanna had just removed one cable to read it when suddenly a horrible screech startled her. She dropped the pile of fiber optics, and stared about wildly for the sound, nine-tenths convinced they had activated some ancient alarm system, and that soldiers were at that moment materializing out of nowhere, surrounding them....

 

 

Red bay looked down at his commbadge.

 

 

"Oh. That's for me."

 

 

"What the--!"

 

 

"I instructed the computer aboard the shuttle craft to take whatever steps were necessary to lead the Furies away from us if they followed us here; that sound means they found the shuttle craft... which has now left the moon."

 

 

"Left... the moon? You mean here? We're stranded here?"

 

 

"I'm afraid so, unless the shuttle craft can outrun the Fury interceptors, which it can't."

 

 

B'Elanna stared at Red bay, who shrugged.

 

 

"Torres, if they found the shuttle craft parked just outside, how long do you think it would be until they came right here? If we can figure out that this is the Achilles' heel of the power collector, don't you think they can?"

 

 

"So that's it. We're... win or lose, we're not leaving."

 

 

Red bay said nothing, returning to stripping off the heavy sheathing designed to protect the cables from the electromagnetic pulse preceding the matter stream that would tear the moon apart.

 

 

B'Elanna hesitated only for a moment; then she resumed testing every major cable to find the critical ones. All the while, she tried to summon up the Klingon warrior within, the one who would rejoice to die killing her enemies. But all she felt was numbness. B'Elanna Torres had spent so many years brutally suppressing her Klingon side that now she was unable to readily call upon it when needed.

 

 

If I get through this alive by some damned miracle, she thought, I hereby resolve never to suppress my Klingon side ogain.

 

 

Her commbadge beeped, startling her. She slapped at it, but the beep died in the middle of the second sound. Torres. Is someone there?"

 

 

Silence; then the commbadge clicked alarmingly, a startled beetle. Then silence again. B'Elanna frowned; it was a creepy feeling, to be buried deep within an artificial, alien moon, waiting for a supernova to destroy her--and to be called by a mysterious ghost who refused to announce himself.

 

 

After another minute, her badge beeped again.

 

 

"Torres!" she snapped, hitting the metal repeatedly.

 

 

This time, she heard a stat icky sine wave--a faint, ghostly voice almost seemed to overlay the white noise, as if she were listening to a conversation in another sector, thousands of light-years away, underwater.

 

 

"I don't know if you can hear me," she said, "but if this is Voyager, please come closer!"

 

 

B'Elanna removed her commbadge and attached it to the tri corder, boosting the gain and expanding the antenna After another minute, the call returned... but this time, she actually made out most of the words.

 

 

"Jane way to Torres--[unintelligible] destroyed--do you read?

 

 

Do you [unintelligible] assistance?"

 

 

"Captain! This is Torres; comm link breaking up, can't make out everything. We're fine. We need more time, more time, more time. Keep the Furies off us!"

 

 

"Torres--[garbled] shuttle craft destroyed."

 

 

"We're fine. Red bay and Torres alive, working. What is happening? Is the ship all right?"

 

 

Suddenly the voice became clearer; the computer was beginning to compensate for the high level of electromagnetic interference put out by the collapsing star.

 

 

"The ship is operational. Do you require assistance?"

 

 

"No, we're all right. We just need more time. Are we under attack?"

 

 

"We were, but we're [unintelligible]. How much time? In three minutes [unintelligible] be able to beam you back if the sun explodes."

 

 

In three minutes what? They would, or wouldn't be able to beam them out?

 

 

"Say again, please," said Torres, holding her breath.

 

 

"Radiation levels increasing. [Unintelligible] inoperative in three minutes. You must decide whether to [garbled]."

 

 

Well, that answers that stupid question.

 

 

"Stand by, please, Captain." B'Elanna had been cutting through one of the massive fiberoptic cables with her phaser welding-torch while she spoke; now the cable severed into two pieces. Grunting, she hefted the "hot" end up to an input cable, into which she had already bored a hole.

 

 

They were in near zero-g; but the cables were so stiff and massive, it still took all of her considerable strength to bend them into a loop. They kept wanting to spring open.

 

 

Red bay held the cable in place while Torres applied the polymer bonder and almost decided.

 

 

"Captain, I..."

 

 

Torres stared helplessly at Red bay, who wouldn't look at

 

 

her. She didn't need to tell him what Jane way was really asking; he knew as well as she. They had no shuttle craft, and it certainly would be too dangerous to send one from Voyager to pick them up after the sun went supernova.

 

 

Now that the ship had found them again, their only chance of escape was the transporter but they would have to leave immediately, or they would lose the last window of opportunity.

 

 

B'Elanna Torres clenched her teeth, a lump rising in her throat. Before I heard the captain, she told herself, I already accepted the inevitability of my own death. Really, there was no choice to make. She had a duty that both human and Klingon could understand.

 

 

And Red bay--he lived for his revenge. He would be no problem.

 

 

"Captain--we won't be transporting out now. We have... there's too much to do. We'll let you know when we're inished."

 

 

"You won't [garbled] able--breaking up--[unintelligible] getting worse. This may be the last comm--[unintelligible]--chance--are you coming?"

 

 

B'Elanna finished gluing the cable and began cutting the next output. She stared down at her work.

 

 

"No. Thank you, Captain. I really enjoyed serving under you... and I even kind of enjoyed being in one of these uniforms again. I wish--well, I wish things hadn't turned out quite as..."

 

 

Sometime during her speech, she became aware that the comm link had broken, and her voice trailed off into silence. There was a lot of work to do.

 

 

An hour flew past unnoticed until B'Elanna looked down at her tri corder.

 

 

"Hey, it's getting pretty thick... uh-oh!"

 

 

"What's the problem?" asked Red bay with all the apparent enthusiasm of the man behind the complaints counter.

 

 

"Do you feel sick at all?"

 

 

"No."

 

 

"Well. You're going to."

 

 

"Radiation?"

 

 

"Not just EM; heavy particle radiation, hydrogen and helium nuclei; big, slow particles. Gamma, X-rays. It's getting dangerously high."

 

 

"You knew the job was dangerous when you took it," said Red bay comfortingly.

 

 

Torres's voice was small; she tried to make it bigger, but it trembled instead.

 

 

"I just hope we survive long enough to make a difference down here." It wasn't exactly what she had been going to say, but it was what she should have said.

 

 

***

 

 

Red bay stared at their handiwork for the last ninety minutes, loops of fiberoptic cables as big around as a human leg, dangling from other cables like Christmas tinsel. He had always celebrated Christmas... before reporting aboard the U.S.S.

 

 

Enterprise, the ship of his buddy Will Riker. Dead? Alive? When Red bay had driven through the wormhole, he might as well have left behind a dead world... for he could never hope to see any of them again.

 

 

And he was dying; every breath told him, sharp pain knifing down his lungs. He was feeling feverish, dizzy, he hadn't told B'Elanna, who seemed all right for the moment. Probably the Klingon genes. But he was sicker than he ever had been in his life.

 

 

And it would never get better, it would get worse and worse until he collapsed, entire columns of cells being crushed and collapsed by the blundering nuclear particles. A dead man; a walking, working dead man. But it didn't matter, because he was already dead. He died the day he discovered what waited for him beyond the grave. In the Furies' terror projector, Lieutenant Red bay discovered what lay beyond the curtain: nothing

 

 

When he died, he knew he would cease to exist, utterly and terribly. No afterlife, nothing to live on. His despair was as great as his terror... and it was a rarefied terror indeed. He had screamed and crawled just as Torres had done; but it was a different thing. She was too young and hadn't seen what the Furies could do--her fears were more visceral; and when the terror projector stopped, so did the fright, after a decent interval.

 

 

But Red bay's horror was total... for it never stopped. He had looked into the eyes of tomorrow's death and seen only empty pools of endless gray. Red bay staggered under the weight of such existential agony, the certainty of pure chaos. He stared toward his own death with a terror that mounted ninute by minute, until it threatened to overwhelm even that fragile peace earned by acceptance of his own nothingness. Like he never was, never would be again; Red bay looked into the mirror and saw only the empty walls of the room, no reflection.

 

 

His hands shook as he held up another heavy cable to be polymer-glued into place. He and Torres were systematically connecting outputs to inputs, bypassing the power distributor that was supposed to channel and filter the raw energy. They were constructing the fiberoptic equivalent of a blast furnace, turning the moon's own energy collection back onto itself--where the staggering power unleashed would tear apart the tough construction of the moon and destroy the circuits that produced the giant, artificial wormhole.

 

 

That is, if they could short enough cables. At this rate, thought Red bay, we should get it done--in about a year and a half. Dammit!

 

 

He looked at B'Elanna, and suddenly he saw her as a woman, a beautiful woman; the human trapped within Red bay's shell of iron reached out for a last touch of humanity.

 

 

"B'Elanna... would you--do you want to--be close one last time before you die?"

 

 

"No," she answered curtly.

 

 

So much for the brotherhood of humanity, he thought bitterly. Then he smiled, though she could not see; odds were he couldn't have done anything anyway, not sick as he was!

 

 

"Just a thought," he added, voice cold iron again. The brittle vulnerability was gone. He couldn't tell whether she had even hesitated before turning him down, but it didn't matter. The cables mattered; making sure twenty-seven billion Furies died by their own hand mattered.

 

 

"How much longer?"

 

 

"At least forever," said B'Elanna Torres, using the same tone of voice with which she had refused him.

 

 

"Maybe we'll live that long."

 

 

Torres grunted, bending up another stiff cable.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Captain Kathryn Jane way sat on the bridge, staring in utter fascination at the viewer, where the image of the Furies' sun seemed to roil visibly. They had powered the ship up again, and again she could look directly at the sun and watch the astonishing process of collapse.

 

 

The Bela-Neutron devices--cosmic nanotechnology--were already absorbing so many hot bosons, the heavy particles like protons and neutrons, and leptons, the electron like particles, as well as photons, units of light, that the sun was startlingly dark and cold. A human could almost stare at it directly... but not quite. The surface temperature remained a steady six thousand degrees, but the core, which had jumped dramatically when the sun suffered the first collapse from hydrogen-fusing to helium-fusing, was dropping again as the Bela-Neutrons gulped energetic particles and pumped out useless neutrinos.

 

 

Momentarily, the core temperature would drop cold enough no longer to be able to support helium fusion... and the sun had already contracted too tight to be held apart by mere hydrogen fusion. It would collapse again, causing the core temperature to rise staggeringly high... hot enough to begin fusing the next atomic element, lithium. Repeat as needed.

 

 

Eventually, the sun would blow itself apart in a colossal supernova The Bela-Neutron devices would absorb a significant fraction of that energy, flinging it away uselessly; but the remainder would be more than enough to power the creation of a wormhole large enough to swallow the entire Fury planet and belch it forth into the Alpha Quadrant. The entire planet... twenty-seven billion warriors determined to rid heaven of all the Unclean.

 

 

Twenty-seven billion... and certainly some way to move the entire planet as if it were a starship, probably at warp speed.

 

 

The Furies made the Borg look like pis hers.

 

 

And 1.5 hundredths of a second after projecting the Fury planet through the momentary wormhole, the moon would vaporize.

 

 

B'Elanna Torres would vaporize, and Red bay, too.

 

 

Or would they? A strange thought occurred to Jane way: Given the characteristics of the Bela-Neutron device, the energy that actually reached the moon might not be enough to rip the molecules apart. She shook her head; it was an impossible equation to calculate or even estimate, since no one had ever made a real, working Bela-Neutron device, so far as Jane way knew.

 

 

But what if--what if the energy were enough to crack the moon like an egg, blowing it apart, but not enough to turn it into an ionized plasma of constituent atoms?

 

 

What if B'Elanna and Red bay were on the dark side of the tide-locked moon when it blew? Would they be flung into space to die horribly? She shuddered; far better if they were killed in the initial explosion.

 

 

Such thoughts made her morose, tempering the edge of her excitement. As a captain, Kathryn Jane way had several times ordered men, and one woman, to their deaths. But never with such certainty before. She started to feel the pain and quickly closed off the empathic section of her brain. She could not afford emotions now; she must become like Tuvok, for a few moments, at least... lest she try some

 

 

wild, harebrained stunt to try to rescue them and lose the entire ship as welt

 

 

They're gone. They're already dead, she kept telling herself over and over. They're already gone!

 

 

She closed her eyes and saw B'Elanna spinning through the black, starry sky where once a planet had orbited, clawing piteously at her mouth, desperately trying to find air where there was only interstellar dust. She opened her eyes again and stared at the sun.

 

 

The ship's intercom beeped; the tense silence, as all waited for the inevitable, was broken by the doctor's voice. He sounded tense and agitated--an odd state for a hologram to be in. "Captain! Captain Jane way, I just had either a small epiphany or a ridiculous dream."

 

 

"A dream? Doctor, are you functioning properly?"

 

 

"I think so. Hold on a minute--yes, all systems are functioning within normal parameters."

 

 

"How did you come on-line?"

 

 

"Well... the truth is, nobody remembered to turn me off after I finished treating casualties from your little escapade with the Furies."

 

 

"I thought we gave you the ability to turn yourself off."

 

 

The doctor looked pensive, another neat trick.

 

 

"So you did.

 

 

But I... more and more, I find myself preferring to stay conscious. Conscious? Is that the word I want? I feel conscious."

 

 

Jane way felt herself getting impatient.

 

 

"Doctor, is this going somewhere? What was your epiphany?"

 

 

"First, I have to ask you an engineering question: How violent will the explosion be by the time it gets to the moon?"

 

 

Jane way's eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. It was disconcerting in the extreme to have one's mind read by the emergency medical holographic program.

 

 

"I've just been thinking about that very problem. I could run some simulations... but my gut tells me the explosion will destroy the moon-or at least the side facing the sun--but will not be powerful enough to vaporize it."

 

 

"What about the other side, the dark side? How much damage?"

 

 

"I don't know. Maybe it will remain mostly intact. Maybe my gut is wrong, and the entire moon will turn into a white, glowing plasma Where are you going with this?" Despite her short tone, Jane way thought the doctor might well have something somewhere that would mutate a Kobayashi Maru exercise into something winnable, the way that James T. Kirk had reprogrammed that particular futile exercise.

 

 

"Well... I know it's a bit unorthodox, but it occurs to me that the human body may be a lot tougher than we generally think.

 

 

I assume you know what happens when a human is suddenly subjected to a vacuum?"

 

 

"Um--explosive decompression?" It was only a difference of one atmosphere, like ascending through the water from a depth of ten meters to the surface.

 

 

"Um, I think blood vessels in the lungs would rupture."

 

 

"Excellent; are you sure you don't want to join Kess as a medical student? I've run a few simulations while we spoke, and there are a lot of things that will go wrong to kill the human but none of them instantaneously. The skin will freeze--but in empty space, it's not easy to radiate heat away, as you well know from your engineering studies. That won't happen as quickly as if the patient were dipped in liquid nitrogen, which is not as cold but transfers heat faster."

 

 

"Yes... yes-Doctor, are you saying that a person...?"

 

 

"Blood vessels will rupture in the lungs, nose, and eyes; the patient will suffocate, but that would take longer than anything else."

 

 

"Doctor... what are you saying?"

 

 

The doctor paused; he was probably simply running all his simulations one more time to be sure, but it gave Jane way the impression of a man hesitating before suggesting something that might sound crazy.

 

 

"Captain, I believe the particular radiation that wreaks havoc with our transporters is the heavy neutrino flux from the Bela-Neutron devices, is it not?"

 

 

Jane way nodded, and the doctor continued.

 

 

"And after the shock wave of the supernova passes by us, the Bela-Neutron devices will be destroyed--and we'll regain functionality on our transporters."

 

 

Captain Jane way said nothing; her nod was barely perceptible.

 

 

"Then, Captain... if the away team is standing at the far side of the moon when the shock wave hits, and it is less severe than a normal supernova because of the Bela Neutron devices, then they may survive the destruction. And if they do, Captain, I believe--I will stake my medical reputation that they can sunive the vacuum of space for a few seconds, as long as ninety seconds, before they lose sufficient heat to be unresuscitatable.

 

 

"We can beam them directly to sickbay, Captain. One or both might survive."

 

 

Jane way stared, feeling a peculiar numbness touch her hands and feet. It was insane--let yourself be blown out into space, gambling that the Voyager can find you, lock on, and beam you aboard before you die? She had never heard of such a thing in all her years in Star fleet.

 

 

On the other hand, no one had ever seen an artificial supernova used to power an artificial wormhole, either. The universe, said the ancient Earth biologist J. B. S. Haldane, is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

 

 

"Doctor, prepare sickbay to receive a pair of very, very cold crew members."

 

 

"Aye, Captain. EMH program out."

 

 

"Commander Chakotay, you have the cone."

 

 

"Yes, Captain. Where are you going to be?"

 

 

"Engineering. We must find a way to communicate with Torres and Red bay and tell them to get to the dark side as soon as they're able. Chakotay, monitor the sun using subspace sensors when it goes nova, we'll have--what? seven minutes before the electromagnetic pulse hits, and another three hours for the shock wave of thrown off star stuff to arrive. Keep the shields up; we'll ride out the explosion as best we can, then return and start fishing."

 

 

Jane way hopped up, more energized than she had felt in hours, and almost ran to the turbo lift.

 

 

*** B'Elanna Torres let go the fiberoptic cable she had just epoxied and went limp. She was amazed how beat she was, even working in near zero-g... she was drenched with sweat, her hair plastered to her skull by the surface cohesion of salt water. She drifted on the random air currents, her feet pinioned to prevent her from drifting entirely away. She panted, eyes shut and mouth open.

 

 

Lieutenant Red bay held on to the cable, watching her, he seemed unaffected by the long, hot, sweaty work.

 

 

"Can't you even be a little exhausted?" she demanded angrily.

 

 

Red bay smiled, and B'Elanna shuddered. His rage gives him all the energy he needs, she realized.

 

 

They had done good sabotage. Scores of enormous cables now looped output directly into input, or directly into circuitry, input to input, output to output--anything that seemed likely to fry the ability of the moon to channel the energy of an exploding star into a productive, wormhole producing beam of coherence.

 

 

She opened her eyes, unhooked her feet, and did a slow, 36-degree pirouette; and B'Elanna's heart sank, even in zero-g.

 

 

It was not enough.

 

 

It was nothing! Nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of cables still left, snaking "down" from the antenna to the power-grid circuitry beneath their feet. B'Elanna shook her head, gritting her teeth to hold back a scream of frustration, anger, and futility.

 

 

What? What do we damn well have to do? We're not even making a dent here!

 

 

"Do you really think this is going to stop the projector?" asked Red bay suddenly.

 

 

Torres gasped, staring at the mysterious lieutenant. Was he a psychic? Did he have one of those much-discussed human wild-talents?

 

 

"Why did you ask that?"

 

 

"I followed your gaze. There are a hell of a lot of cables, aren't there? Are we making any difference?"

 

 

B'Elanna shook her head, defeated.

 

 

"Then maybe," suggested Red bay, "we should think of doing something else."

 

 

"Oh, thank you! Nice suggestion, Lieutenant... what do you suggest? Set the phaser on overload and blow up the moon? Spin the whole damn thing around to point into empty space? Stick a cork in the barrel of the wormhole cannon?"

 

 

Red bay smiled crookedly, like a homicidal Klingon just before going on a rampage with a bat'leth.

 

 

"Now, there's an idea."

 

 

"Put a cork in it? Dammit, we don't even know where the barrel is!"

 

 

"No, the one before that."

 

 

"The phaser on overload? There's not enough power to--"

 

 

"No, no! The middle suggestion... turn the moon to point the wrong way."

 

 

"Turn the...? Red bay, we can't turn the whole--"

 

 

"Look, the moon is tide-locked, right? And we all assumed that was because it needed to be pointed at the sun to collect the energy from the grid, right? But it's not just tide locked, Torres, it's in the L-four stable-orbital position with respect to the sun and the Fury planet, isn't it?"

 

 

"I--did we ever check that? Probably... it's in the same orbit as the planet, about sixty degrees ahead of it. Yes, that would be the Lagrange-four stable-orbital point."

 

 

"And that means the sun, the planet, and the moon do not move with respect to each other, right?"

 

 

"That's the definition of L-four."

 

 

"Torres, don't you see it? They're not in L-four to point toward the sun... that's easy! It's the brightest thing in the solar system, you can't miss it.

 

 

"Torres, they're in the L-four spot so they'll always point toward the planet. They have to be pointed at exactly the right spot, or the wormhole won't form... or it will form away from the planet, and they won't pop through it or it'll take them the wrong direction--something!"

 

 

B'Elanna stood with her mouth open for a moment, mentally performing dozens of simulation calculations.

 

 

"Blood of my enemies--you're right! It has to be! Red bay, do you know what this means? The slightest jar, the slightest change to the aiming mechanism, and the wormhole might miss the planet entirely!"

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

"It's been a couple of hours since Voyager lost contact with us," said Red bay.

 

 

"How long before the explosion?"

 

 

B'Elanna shrugged, she had no special knowledge.

 

 

"No possible way of telling; as short as thirty minutes or as long as six hours."

 

 

"Then we'd better get moving fast, Lieutenant, we've got to find the aiming circuits soon, like yesterday, and start hooking up cables to short them out."

 

 

For nearly forty-five minutes, B'Elanna Torres scanned with her tri corder, reprogrammed the search pattern, and scanned again. Red bay alternately clenched and relaxed his hands.

 

 

B'Elanna basically knew what she was looking for: a delicate mechanism surrounded by inertial and subspace navigation sensors with a direct connection to a point near the fulcrum of the eight-hundred-kilometer-long tube that was doubtless the "barrel" of the wormhole projector. The problem was that the description still produced a depressingly large number of possible "hits," which had to be sorted and evaluated by B'Elanna herself.

 

 

But she learned. When she found a potential valley site, she narrowed the focus and carefully worked up a three

 

 

dimensional picture of the location. Each was a bust, one way or another insufficient energy to move the barrel, no line-of-sight to the planet... B'Elanna refined her search engine until, finally, she found a site she could not eliminate, not after ten minutes of fiddling.

 

 

"All right--I think... I think I might have it here. It's the best shot, anyway."

 

 

"We'd better take it," said Red bay, staring at his chronometer.

 

 

"We can't afford any more time. It's this one or nothing, and we fail."

 

 

"Five kilometers, bearing, uh, that away."

 

 

Torres in the lead, they hopped like antigravity jackrabbits. The five kilometers flew beneath them in a few minutes, and Torres finally brought them down within a few hundred meters of the objective.

 

 

The beam-navigation chamber was not on the valley floor, but two hundred meters straight down, though down was a weak term this far toward the center of mass of the moon. There was no obvious access panel, and Red bay used his phaser to burn a path to the circuitry. Then, at B'Elanna's direction, he phased off thirty huge fiberoptic cables. The hand phaser was rapidly becoming the most useful tool they had brought with them, much to B'Elanna's annoyance; it was the only tool she hadn't foreseen.

 

 

They polymer bonded one end of each cable to power-out junction boxes and pushed the other ends into the hole Red bay had carved. Then, together, the two lieutenants slid over the hole, grabbed the edge, and propelled themselves two hundred meters downward.

 

 

They worked feverishly, attaching cables to every delicate-looking circuit they could find, praying they could stick enough before the unseen sun went supernova--if it hadn't already.... It would be more than seven minutes, B'Elanna calculated, between supernova and the power surge striking the moon. The shock wave would be almost an afterthought, arriving a few hours later, depending on the violence of the explosion. When it did arrive, it would shred the moon like confetti.

 

 

It might already be all over. We might be walking, talking dead peopJe, thought B'Elanna grimly.

 

 

***

 

 

Captain Kathryn Jane way--temporarily self-demoted to chief engineer--nervously wiped her hands and rearranged her hair bun, staring at the viewer on which was projected her newly devised comm-link procedure. Could she? Would she?

 

 

An hour's worth of brutal brain work had convinced Jane way that there was a way to power up the communications link and punch through the radiation interference; but to do so, they would have to take the wedge-shield off-line and risk collapsing it utterly. The same modification that Carey had found to put a bend in the shield allowed Jane way to extrude the shield several hundred thousand kilometers in the direction of the bend.

 

 

That meant it could actually shield the comm link from the background radiation, but at a price: the shield would stretch so thin it would not function as a shield anymore. In fact, it might well stretch thin enough that the two sides touched; that would short out the circuitry, and the shield would flicker out of existence--permanently. Or at least until they repaired it--hours, maybe.

 

 

Dared she risk it?

 

 

"Lieutenant Carey, I need some input. How likely is the shield to break?"

 

 

Carey licked his lips. He hates being put on the spot for an estimate when there's simply not enough data, the captain thought.

 

 

"That would depend on how far we extrude the shield, Captain. The farther, the--"

 

 

"I'm looking for a number, Carey; a percent chance."

 

 

Carey stared blankly.

 

 

"Um, I'd give it a thirty-seven-percent chance, Captain," he said. His face flushed; he was starry-voiding, and she knew it. I wonder where he pulled that number?

 

 

Jane way knew it was fictitious; but she didn't care. "Thirty-seven," she said, pretending to take the number seriously.

 

 

"That's not so bad. Done--prepare to extrude the shield, Mr. Carey."

 

 

Shaking, Carey nodded.

 

 

"Aye, Captain." He placed his ; finger over the viewer, waiting for Jane way's command.

 

 

She swallowed.

 

 

"Engage, Mr. Carey."

 

 

Carey touched the screen over the ProgStart label; Jane way watched the graphic in horrified fascination as the shield pulled together into a spike curve, the sides coming perilously close as the point extended for kilometer after kilometer. She watched the process, a mother cat watching her kittens; then she jabbed a forefinger and stopped the shields at just a hundred thousand kilometers' extension.

 

 

"I'm afraid to go any farther," she admitted.

 

 

"Now, let's get down tight and dirty on that moon and get that comm link up!"

 

 

Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres worked in a frenzy, feeling the fool-killer creeping up behind her, his hands almost touching the back of her neck. Any minute now the sun would blow, any minute, any She felt driven, out of control, truly understanding Red bay for the first time since he was hauled aboard the Voyager. She had felt the secret terror, she knew. Never again could she calmly consider whether stopping the Furies was worth twenty-seven billion deaths. She knew.

 

 

When her commbadge beeped, Torres didn't respond. The sound seemed almost unreal. Then it beeped again, startling her out of her reverie, and she answered hurriedly.

 

 

"Torres, this is Captain Jane way. We have a brief window, I must tell you of a strange, new tactictal development." So the captain began; B'Elanna found the theory wildly implausible and faintly cowardly, but she was lured by the thought of being the first Star fleet officer to take a swim in deep space without a suit and live to tell about it.

 

 

If she did live.

 

 

"B'Elanna, I won't lie to you. I don't think this procedure has much of a chance for success."

 

 

"It's better than zero, which is what we have now."

 

 

"Yes."

 

 

"You'll be able to scan for our bodies?"

 

 

"I think so. Probably. Is there any way for you to get to the other side of the moon? Maybe you'd better start now."

 

 

"Actually, we have our ways. How long from when you detect the final collapse until the sun actually explodes?"

 

 

"We're not sure, Lieutenant; maybe as long as thirty minutes."

 

 

"That's all? That's pushing it... we might not make it to the other side. Captain, can you warn us as soon as you detect the final collapse?"

 

 

"Yes. You'll leave immediately for the other side?"

 

 

"Aye, Captain. Wait..." B'Elanna trailed off as she got busy gluing another fiberoptic cable into the beam-aiming system.

 

 

"We'll call you as soon as the sun collapses. Jane way out."

 

 

As soon as the captain signed off, Red bay spoke.

 

 

"I thought they couldn't contact us again."

 

 

B'Elanna shrugged. They had not wasted time discussing the obvious. Evidently Jane way, with her magnificent grasp of engineering, had even figured a way around that problem. She returned to her new, gainful employment as a saboteur. After a moment's thoughtful gaze into the ceiling, Red bay appeared to dismiss the unexpected miracle chance for survival and get down to the serious business of stopping the invasion.

 

 

Captain Jane way ceased communications, but she kept open the comm link. Almost immediately, Ensign Kim's voice came over the ship's intercom.

 

 

"Captain... solar flux increasing significantly. We're having some trouble with navigation; the heavy-particle stream is interfering with our sensors."

 

 

"Ensign, stay in this orbit! Don't drift away... this is a very fragile comm link. Is Lieutenant Paris still--"

 

 

"Aye, Captain," interrupted Kim--a rare occurrence.

 

 

"Paris is preoccupied keeping the ship on--"

 

 

"Well, don't let's break his concentration. Should I come up?" Jane way held her breath, then got the answer she was looking for.

 

 

"No, Captain; I think we're all right if we just shut off the thrusters and orbit naturally. We'll be less likely to...

 

 

Holy--! Captain, we're drifting!"

 

 

"Oh, no." Jane way stared as the field began to stretch,

 

 

growing narrower and narrower.

 

 

"Jane way to Paris! Lieutenant, why are we moving?"

 

 

"Captain," said Paris, "we've got a stuck impulse throttle!

 

 

Trying to compensate... The radioactive bombardment--"

 

 

"Kill the engines, now!"

 

 

"I've been trying," said Paris's professionally calm voice. "Controls are frozen... it's because we don't have enough shielding from the ambient solar-radiation flux."

 

 

Jane way let out an exasperated sigh.

 

 

"Great! Paris, without this shield extrusion, there wouldn't be any reason to be here in the first place!"

 

 

"Captain," said Lieutenant Carey,

 

 

"I don't want to intrude, but the extrusion is stretching dangerously thin."

 

 

Jane way stared. Carey was right.

 

 

"Carey, prepare to terminate shield extrusion. Paris, get that damned engine under control! Carey, on my signal: three, two--"

 

 

Kathryn Jane way never got to zero. As she said the word one, at the tip of the extrusion, the two sides of the shield wedge touched. The shield was not infinitesimally thin, it had a thickness... and when the total diameter shrank below twice that diameter, the opposite sides had no choice but to contact each other, like stretching a rubber balloon.

 

 

With not a bang but a whisper, all shield-intensity readings across the engineering console dropped immediately to zero. The pointers rotated all the way counterclockwise to the idle amplitude. The forward shields were dead.

 

 

They had lost their corridor, within a few hundredths of a second, they lost their comm link. Jane way stared in shock, realizing it would take hours to restore the shields, and in the meantime, if Voyager were facing toward the sun when it exploded, then the ship would end up slagged like the artificial moon itself.

 

 

"Paris," she said, grabbing control again, "turn the ship directly outboard the sun and hold that position; keep the sun aft!" That was the most important point; the aft shields would probably be sufficient to protect the ship, if they kept their stern pointed directly toward the sun.

 

 

Carey looked stricken.

 

 

"Captain... should I--?"

 

 

"Start rebuilding the forward shield? Yes... and get that

 

 

wedge into it so we can try to restore the comm link... move it!"

 

 

They wouldn't be able to warn Torres and Red bay. All Jane way could think was that she had promised to warn the away team, and now they weren't going to get that chance. B'Elanna and Lieutenant Red bay would have no idea the explosion was coming until the force of it struck their location, turning the moon into a floating cenotaph.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

B'Elanna Torres tried to un cramp her fingers, but her hand remained stubbornly clenched around a lump of fiberoptic cable. "Damn," she muttered. She strained back the epoxy held, welding the cable end to the aiming circuit but her abused muscles held as well, and she flapped uselessly from the cable like a flag attached by only one stanchion.

 

 

"Don't just float there," she snapped, "pull me off!"

 

 

"You look so picturesque," offered the deadpan Red bay "wafting gently in the breeze."

 

 

"You need sleep. You're hallucinating. It's a human thing; Klingons don't need--"

 

 

"My hand isn't locked in the On position," pointed out the expatriate lieutenant.

 

 

"Shut up! Just unhook my fingers. When the hell is that Federation going to call us? She should at least check in and let us know the comm link is still up."

 

 

Red bay stared unblinking.

 

 

"If it is still up."

 

 

Suddenly filled with the sense of something urgent forgotten, B'Elanna slapped her commbadge.

 

 

"Torres to Jane way.

 

 

Torres... Captain, do you read? Does anyone read? Great! Just peachy! It's down--it's been down for... for I don't know how long--the sun is probably gone supernova, and we're going to be fried in about seven minutes!"

 

 

"Torres, I think we've done about as much as we can here." Red bay gestured; all but three limp cables had been attached to various junctions and black boxes on what they hoped was the wormhole cannon aiming system.

 

 

"We're not done yet."

 

 

"If you want to live, I suggest we leave."

 

 

"We're not done yet "

 

 

Looking into B'Elanna's determined face, Red bay shrugged.

 

 

It's all the same to him, thought the Klingon; he died fifty thousand light-years back in the Alpha Quadrant Red bay pried her hand loose from the cable, and she flexed it while Red bay took over the glue job.

 

 

They took fifteen more minutes; as the hours had progressed, they became steadily faster at attaching cables to inputs, outputs, and logic switches.

 

 

"Well, Princess, can we leave orbit now?"

 

 

B'Elanna tapped at her tri corder with aching fingers.

 

 

"I

 

 

think there's a subway shaft heading toward the surface, opposite the sun, about six kilometers away, bearing one one-one."

 

 

Taking long, slow, graceful leaps, they made the distance quickly. The shaft began some two hundred and fifty meters above their heads; evidently, the maintenance workers who serviced the valley would have used some sort of transport vehicle to get around... a not unreasonable guess, anyway.

 

 

But a quarter-kilometer was a long, long way to jump--even in such a low gravity. Red bay looked dubious.

 

 

"That's like a jump of over a meter on Earth," he muttered, shaking his head.

 

 

"So?"

 

 

"I don't think we can make it."

 

 

"We? What do you mean we?"

 

 

Red bay looked at her.

 

 

"Oh? How high can you jump?"

 

 

"I may be half human, but I'm also half Klingon. We value athletic ability. I can make it."

 

 

"If it's all the same," said Red bay with a cryptic smile,

 

 

"I

 

 

think I'll help you a bit. And I really have enjoyed working with you."

 

 

"Oh... uh, thanks." What was he talking about? B'Elanna shook her head; humans--Star fleet officers--were unpredictable even in the best of circumstances, let alone under pressure.

 

 

Red bay made a cradle with his hands; B'Elanna stepped into it and he launched her. She timed her leap to give her maximal push-off from his hands. B'Elanna Torres sailed into the air, closer and closer to the ladder like rungs of the end of the subway shaft.

 

 

Her upward motion slowed and peaked... thirty meters below the target; slowly, like a petal in the wind, she fell back to the valley floor. They tried once more with even less effect; this time, B'Elanna got a bad push-off and rose only about fifty meters.

 

 

Red bay stared upward.

 

 

"Shame you don't have three hundred meters of rope."

 

 

"Eh? I have plenty of Nylex rope."

 

 

Red bay stared at her.

 

 

"More than two hundred and fifty meters?"

 

 

"Four hundred."

 

 

Shaking his head incredulously, he asked for it.

 

 

"You wouldn't happen to have a grappling hook, would you?"

 

 

"A what?"

 

 

"Hm." He tightened the beam on his phaser to a fine, thin cutting blade and proceeded to cut away a hunk of some strange alloy--not the phaser-impervious metal--and shape it into the rough form of a three-pronged hook. Then he tied it off to the rope and began to cast. It took him eleven tries to finally hook the grapple through one of the ladder rungs. He tugged a few experimental times, then pronounced it fit to climb.

 

 

"Torres," he asked, puzzled, "why didn't you tell me you had the rope? And don't say because I didn't ask."

 

 

Torres swallowed the reply she had been about to make.

 

 

"I

 

 

was just going to tie it off on the shaft so you could climb up. "

 

 

"You were going to...?" He shook his head, amazed.

 

 

"I

 

 

thought--only one of us was going to make it out."

 

 

"Don't be a jerk. I am human, not just Klingon."

 

 

"You are Star fleet," he said softly, "not just Maquis."

 

 

She glared, then took the rope and began to climb.

 

 

The shaft led straight up seventy meters, then debouched onto a sloping mag-lev track. No subway car waited for them. "Look for a button," B'Elanna suggested. The feeling of impending doom tightened her gut. Any moment now, the sun could--or maybe it already had. There would be a lag time of seven and a half minutes until the energy pulse hit them, perhaps another hundred and eighty before the heavy particle bombardment, the expanding explosion, tore the moon apart. At the core, even if they survived the initial explosion, it would take the Voyager too long to sort them out from all the other debris. They would die, either incinerated by the residual radiation left behind by the supernova... or, if the Bela-Neutron devices absorbed enough of the energy, frozen in the interstellar vacuum.

 

 

B'Elanna checked her trusty tri corder, a device she was more and more beginning to think of as her lifeline back to the light, out of the long darkness of their suicidal mission. She stared, seeing a strange reading. It took her a few moments to figure out what was rushing toward them.

 

 

"Hey, Red bay--what did you press?"

 

 

"Nothing. I haven't found any--"

 

 

"The subway's on its way; we should see it in... hell, there it is!"

 

 

The blur in the distance raced closer, alarmingly fast; then it braked to a rough, angry halt scant meters from where the two stood, immobile with surprise. The doors popped open; quickly, before it could change its mind, Red bay and Torres launched toward the open hatch. B'Elanna missed slightly, grazing her head on the hatch rim. She struggled to a chair and pushed herself into it, using her feet against the seat ahead of her, only then did she clench her teeth and rub her injured scalp, which bled profusely. The blood drifted out and finally down, bright globules of red darkening visibly as they wafted toward the deck.

 

 

The train started with a lurch--Red bay had touched the forward panel--and B'Elanna was kicked back into her seat

 

 

with an acceleration eight hundred times what they had lived in for the past seven hours.

 

 

She fell back into her seat in agony, unable to breathe, still dizzy from the blow. Her inner ears refused to orient themselves; her balance insisted she was lying on her back on a terribly dense planet, being slowly crushed to death.

 

 

At last, after two minutes, the acceleration ceased abruptly, and B'Elanna Torres could breathe again. She gasped for air while gravity slowly returned to the "bottom" of the car, increasing perceptibly with every second's travel of five kilometers, some of it upward.

 

 

"Now--comes--the long wait," she wheezed.

 

 

"We going--to make it?"

 

 

Red bay did not answer. Looking across the car toward the front, B'Elanna saw that the man was sound asleep.

 

 

She debated waking him, then realized that he would have plenty of time to wake up and panic when the explosion came, the explosion that would almost certainly kill the pair of them anyway. Both would have the same chance to get a last breath before being blown into free space to die horribly.

 

 

They were virtually at the surface itself, by the tri corder's estimation, when suddenly the lights flickered. A huge, loud thud jarred B'Elanna's sensitive ears; the whole car skewed violently to one side, and she heard a loud scraping noise. It took her a second to realize that the car had lost all power... the electrical power was gone.

 

 

With a chill, Lieutenant Torres realized that the electromagnetic pulse had just struck the moon. It's all over, she thought in near panic; either we won or we lost... either the Furies jumped to the Alpha Quadrant, and when we return, we'll return to a dead, alien battlefield, or they didn't make the jump, and And what? There were too many possibilities.

 

 

"Red bay,"

 

 

she called, as the train ground slowly to a stop, friction eating away at even their terrific speed.

 

 

"Red bay, wake up!"

 

 

"I'm awake," he said, bleary-voiced.

 

 

"Who turned out the--"

 

 

"Start the timer, Lieutenant. The car didn't make it all E

 

 

the way to the top before the pulse fried the power circuits.

 

 

We've got about a hundred and eighty minutes before the explosion three hours to make--looks like two point five kilometers. A little less than a kilometer per hour straight up." It was harsh, but just barely possible in the low gravity of the moon.

 

 

"B'Elanna? It was a pleasure working with you. I'm glad we--"

 

 

"Red bay, didn't we go through all this? We're dying in battle, of a sorts, with the greatest enemy our quadrant has ever faced. Isn't that enough?" Silence. Then Red bay responded, cynical and sardonic as ever.

 

 

"Sure. My little heart is all aglow with the honor of it."

 

 

B'Elanna closed her eyes. The tri corder was programmed to give her a signal every hour, then at the final thirty minutes, ten minutes, and a big alarm the last minute before the explosion, to give her time to hyperventilate, supersaturate her tissues with oxygen, a last-ditch technique she had discussed with Red bay.

 

 

It would alert her. She could close her eyes, offer a last prayer for an honorable death to Kahless the Eternal. They started the long climb up the ladder that ran along the inside of the shaft. Three hours for two and a half Icilometers--not impossible on level ground. An absurdity climbing a ladder

 

 

She smiled; she would finally get a chance to see whether she was human or Klingon in the end.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Come on, urged Captain Jane way silently to herself, come up--just for a moment, just long enough to warn Not for the first time, Jane way wondered why they don't teach the most important command course at the Academy: how to be in two places at the same time. She was in engineering, monkeying with the shields; she desperately needed to be on the bridge.

 

 

"Captain," said Lieutenant Tuvok from the bridge,

 

 

"I must inform you that we are being bombarded by subspace chroniton particles. I believe the final, chain-reaction collapse has just begun. In approximately one and a half minutes, the star will experience full collapse and will explode into a supernova We have about nine minutes before the radiation front arrives."

 

 

"Mr. Kim...?"

 

 

"We're not at a safe distance, Captain."

 

 

"Mr. Paris, take us into the moon's shadow. If we're lucky, that's where Torres and Red bay will be anyway. I'm on my way to the bridge. Carey, keep on those shields! Damn--I wish we had sensors." Jane way cut off the rest of her complaint; the radiation levels were simply too high.

 

 

"Aye, Captain." Paris pressed an illuminated square on his viewer, and the ship changed course.

 

 

Jane way continued her frenzied work, trying with Lieutenant Carey to restore the forward shields and give them their new wedge shape, so she could extrude the shields and restore communications--or work the transporters--despite radiation interference. But the bioneural circuitry of the Voyager had reacted badly to the short when the shield walls touched; in fact, if the doctor were to examine them, he would probably pronounced the cells "in anaphylactic shock," as if they were truly biological and suffering a severe allergic reaction to each other.

 

 

Now she stepped off the turbo lift; ship safety had just taken precedence even over the shield operation. Chakotay rose and shifted to the his seat as Jane way sat down

 

 

"Kept it warm for you," said the commander with a wink.

 

 

"Jane way to all ship's personnel," said the captain. She waited a beat, then spoke to the entire ship.

 

 

"Attention crew; this is Captain Jane way. As I explained, the star is just now collapsing and will momentarily become a supernova There may be disruption of critical systems; I'm putting the ship on red alert.

 

 

"The Voyager will easily survive the explosion. I want all transporter manned with a double staff, immediately

 

 

"Thank you all; it is as always a pleasure being your commanding officer. That is all."

 

 

Jane way waited a moment for the computer to realize her transmission was over.

 

 

"Activate EMH program "

 

 

"Please state the nature of the emergency," said the doctor from the viewer, then he nodded.

 

 

"Ah. I see you are about to engage in some dangerously theatrical maneuvers in the middle of a supernova. Do you, by any chance, expect any casualties?"

 

 

"This isn't the time for sarcasm, Doctor. Prepare sickbay for crew injuries and for the imminent arrival of Torres and Red bay."

 

 

"Aye, Captain. The ERT crash-crew is already standing by."

 

 

"Good. Now all we have to do is wait for--"

 

 

"Captain," interrupted Tuvok, "two large Fury ships off the starboard bow." His laconic voice belied the shocking intelligence.

 

 

"What? Where?" Instinctively, Jane way glanced first at her own sensor-slave display on the arm of the command chair.

 

 

"The sensors do not register them because of the radiation.

 

 

They are, however, visible on the forward viewer."

 

 

Jane way looked up. The two Fury ships were nothing like the small patrol craft they had fought earlier. These were long, cigar-shaped, sporting hundreds of metallic tendrils with pods on the ends--weapons? Sensors? Fighter spacecraft? It was impossible to tell until they did something, by which time it might be too late.

 

 

"Paris--how'd they get so close?"

 

 

Lieutenant Paris squinted.

 

 

"Um... they're not very close, Captain; by the magnification and the parallax effect, I'd say they were, oh, a couple of hundred thousand kilometers."

 

 

The bridge fell silent, everyone doing the same calculation. "Tuvok," said Jane way with quiet authority, "check my math on this: assuming Mr. Paris is correct, how big are those ships?"

 

 

"Mr. Paris's estimation is essentially correct," concluded the Vulcan, "and the Fury ships are approximately two hundred and eighty kilometers long, seventy kilometers in diameter, and the pylons supporting the pods extend some three hundred kilometers from the center. By the albedo and color, I suspect their hulls are made of the same dense metal we observed on the Fury planet."

 

 

"Mr. Paris, come about one-eight-zero degrees," ordered the captain without hesitation.

 

 

"Turn around?"

 

 

"Yes, Lieutenant. Turn and run like hell."

 

 

A bright flower bloomed at the forward end of a pod, then another at another pod; while Paris turned the ship, maintaining a video feed at the ships in the upper half of the forward viewer, Jane way watched seven more cowers bloom blood red from seven more pods.

 

 

"Evasive maneuvers, Mr. Paris, those are weapons of

 

 

unknown strength--but probably a damn sight more deadly than the scout ships' disruptor cannons!"

 

 

The Voyager began an intricate, preprogrammed series of evasion--Jane way recognized the pattern as EMP 11-Delta--but the flowers kept turning to track. They moved somewhat slower than photon torpedoes, but faster than the nuclear missiles the smaller ships had occasionally fired.

 

 

"Kim," snapped Jane way, "can you get a phaser lock on the missiles?"

 

 

"Uh... uh... no, ma'am! I mean Captain! The sensors won't--"

 

 

"Mr. Kim, photon torpedoes; program them to home by visual image on the missiles. Fire as soon as you've set the program."

 

 

"Aye..." Kim pounded frantically at the console, muttering below the audible range.

 

 

Jane way sat in her command chair, staring at the screen, forcing herself to remain outwardly calm, confident, in command: the consummate starship captain. Inside, she was screaming in utter panic; these Fury ships dwarfed the biggest thing the Borg had ever thrown at the Federation... and the Voyager had no forward shields!

 

 

One of the missiles had already tracked too close for a safe shot by the photon torpedo; fortunately, the torpedo's own programming caused it to bypass the near missile and focus on one farther away. The torpedoes and the flower-missiles met in empty space; the explosions lit the starry sky with a flare so bright that the viewer could filter it only by whiting out the entire field of view, both ahead and behind. In the brief flash before the light flared, Jane way could actually see a shock wave spreading at about half light speed; six hammer blows struck the ship's rear shields, sending the Voyager skittering in a random direction, tumbling so hard the inertial dampers could not keep up, and the crew were flung against their combat harnesses.

 

 

The tumbb saved them; the shock waves blew the ship out of the first missile's path, and it could not turn fast enough to track. It brushed past and continued into nowheres ville, out of sight and out of mind--so Jane way thought.

 

 

"Damage report!" she shouted, trying to be heard over the residual explosions and the red-alert klaxon; "and shut that bloody noise off!"

 

 

Tuvok killed the klaxon while he rattled off a list of decks damaged by the multiple explosions.

 

 

"Captain," said Kim, his face paling as he stared at the rearview viewer.

 

 

"One, two, three, four more rose-missiles launched from the second Fury ship!"

 

 

"Wonderful," snarled the captain. Then she smiled.

 

 

"Mr.

 

 

Paris--hard about one-eight-zero again; let's try driving right down their throats... see how smart their missiles really are."

 

 

Paris grinned; but it was a bloodless smile. He manhandled the ship hard about and began dancing and dodging toward the closest Fury. "Captain," said Tuvok, cutting through the soldier's fog that had seized the bridge crew, "the missile we evaded has turned around and is closing on us again."

 

 

"Still? What's the intercept ETA?"

 

 

Tuvok closed his eyes for a moment; in a pinch, the Vulcan could calculate quicker than consulting the computer.

 

 

"At the present velocity and course, it should strike us just about the time we intercept the nearest Fury ship."

 

 

Jane way leaned back; she was so awash in adrenaline--battlefield pump--that she was actually intoxicated on it. She smiled, mirroring Paris.

 

 

"Gentlemen," she said slowly, "have you ever played the ancient Earth game of chicken?"

 

 

"No," said Kim.

 

 

"Of course," said Paris simultaneously. Chakotay merely sucked a breath through his teeth.

 

 

"I am not aware of such a game," added Tuvok pettishly.

 

 

"How is it germane to our present difficulties, Captain?"

 

 

"Mr. Paris: dead-on toward the closest Fury ship, constant heading. Ramming speed," she added thoughtfully.

 

 

"Aye, aye, Captain!" Paris changed course to point directly toward the gigantic target and increased the Voyager's velocity to full impulse.

 

 

"Show them who's chicken," he mumbled.

 

 

The two ships closed at a terrific rate, and behind Voyager, the missile gained on them both. As they cracked

 

 

the hundred-thousand-kilometer range again, a number of smaller weapons on the pylons opened fire on the Star fleet ship. Energy beams, the terror projector, and tracers flared across the gap, trying to focus on the incoming kamikaze.

 

 

"Captain," reminded Chakotay, leaning forward, chin in hand, like Rodin's Thinker, "we have no forward shields. One shot and we're dead."

 

 

"If we're flying blind, they're flying blind. Ensign, return fire, photons and phasers. Aim manually using the computer... let's see whose fire-control system is the better!"

 

 

Like two wounded duelists riding toward each other firing their flintlocks, thought Jane way, slipping into a fantasy from the era of her favorite holodeck program, one of us ends up with a pistol-ball in his gut.

 

 

Tuvok called the distance: "Fifty thousand... forty... thirty..."

 

 

Paris's hands began to tremble as they hovered over the helm console, ready to pull away. But Jane way did not give the order.

 

 

The ship loomed so large it overflowed the viewer, Paris stepped back the magnification, but within seconds, they stared at a solid wall of metal at normal view.

 

 

Lieutenant Paris aimed Voyager for the largest viewport--the window alone could swallow the entire Federation ship.

 

 

At ten thousand kilometers, Tuvok began ticking off each thousand

 

 

"Nine, eight, seven, six--"

 

 

Captain Jane way crossed her legs. She folded her hands neatly in her lap. She said nothing. She quickly lost all perspective: the Fury ships were as large as good-sized asteroidsl Dark in color with few reference points or markings; seconds before impact, an impact that would destroy the smaller ship, Jane way hallucinated that they were dive bombing an enormous city of the dead--or PanDemonium, City of All Demons in hell.

 

 

Next to her, Chakotay leaned back in his chair, gripping the sides. The computer continued firing, aiming at the weapon sites up and down the pylons. Still, the Fury fire control computers had not been able to lock on to the onrushing starship.

 

 

Chakotay sucked in yet another huge breath, face white as porcelain. He grinned through clenched teeth, unblinking. Jane way understood perfectly; she wanted to duck and put

 

 

her head under her arms--but she was "driving," in a real sense.

 

 

"Two thousand--one thousand--seven six five four--" At one hundred fifty kilometers, Paris evidently couldn't stand the suspense. He grabbed the console in a panic, not waiting for orders, and threw the guidance control all the way right and forward.

 

 

The shriek of ripping metal--not the hull! begged the captain--cut through the bridge silence like needles through a drum skin. Jane way was pulled so violently against her seat that for an instant, less than a second, she blacked out. When she blinked back to consciousness, she saw nothing but the artificial moon ahead of her, in the rear view, she saw the Fury ship illuminated against a flash as bright as a stellar core.

 

 

A fraction of a second later, the shock wave from the hunting missile struck the Voyager.

 

 

The bright blue glow of hell surrounded the ship in all directions, matting out the stars, the missiles, the faint, twisted threads that once were Fury ships. For a brief instant, before the video feed in all directions went blank, Kathryn Jane way saw the outer skin of the moon boiling away like water on a hot plate.

 

 

The supernova's radiation front had finally arrived.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Still groggy, Jane way started to recoil before remembering she was looking at a video--a video that had just vanished, as the external holocams were fried by an electromagnetic pulse of many giga-ergs.

 

 

She staggered to her feet to rouse the others, but Tuvok was already doing so. The Vulcan lieutenant appeared unruffled, but it took the two of them to get Kim and Paris back to consciousness; the weapons officer had struck his head on his console when he was slammed down by one of the explosions.

 

 

While Tuvok revived his auxiliary cadet crew members Jane way took command of the situation.

 

 

"Kim, get that viewer repaired."

 

 

"Captain, the exterior monitors are gone." Kim held his hand to his head; Jane way could see blood dripping from the slash, but she couldn't spare the ensign, not even long enough to send him to sickbay.

 

 

"Replicate new ones and send someone EVA--in a red suit-to replace them... we've got to have our eyes! We don't have much time. Jane way to EMH program."

 

 

"EMH here."

 

 

"Doctor, how many injuries?"

 

 

"I was already treating twenty-two casualties. I've got a lot more now, mostly minor."

 

 

"Casualty report?"

 

 

"There are no deaths among the crew, Captain. Seventy-two reported injuries so far, mostly from falling and striking body parts against panels, railings, and consoles."

 

 

"We've got a head injury up here; can you send a medtech up for Ensign Kim?"

 

 

"On her way, Captain."

 

 

"Thank you. Jane way out. Paris! How long before we can see again?"

 

 

"Uh... looks like engineering is estimating two hours to get the monitors back on-line."

 

 

"Two hours! We only have three total!"

 

 

"Well, that's what they're saying," responded Paris reproachfully.

 

 

"All right, get 'em hopping. Offer them time and a half."

 

 

"Offer them what?"

 

 

"Never mind. Old Earth reference. Sensors?"

 

 

Tuvok answered.

 

 

"You will not be able to use the sensors for at least seven hours, unless you depart the immediate vicinity of the supernova. There is too much radiation of all types at every frequency."

 

 

"Great. We have to get those monitors up. Get all nonessential crew members to viewports--filtered viewports. When that shock wave hits, the moon will literally disintegrate. I'll want every eye on this ship watching for B'Elanna and Red bay.

 

 

Report any sighting immediately to Lieutenant Tuvok for relay to the transporter teams."

 

 

The turbo lift doors slid open and Kes hustled into the room, carrying a medikit. The elfin Ocampan stood over Ensign Kim and expertly repaired his split scalp.

 

 

"It's nothing major," she said, loudly enough that Jane way could hear.

 

 

The captain fidgeted, waiting for Kes to make some cold point about what they had done; but Kes surprised her, saying nothing.

 

 

The Ocampan finished with Kim, then

 

 

tended to the rest of the cuts and bruises on the bridge

 

 

"The doctor is handling the serious cases in sickbay," she said, wiping the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand. Her hair was matted; she looked harrowed. She's not going to sleep very well, thought Captain Jane way. I wonder if any of us will.

 

 

The last thought echoed around the caverns of Jane way's skull as she nervously felt behind her for the captain's chair, trying not to show the hollow emptiness she felt.

 

 

She sat down again.

 

 

"Well, that's it, gentlemen. Whatever was going to happen, happened. Either the Fury planet disappeared or it's not going to." She paused, almost afraid to ask the next question.

 

 

"Well...? Can anybody pick it up on visual?"

 

 

Chakotay leaned into the ship's intercom.

 

 

"Attention, all crew, this is Commander Chakotay. All nonessential personnel are to report immediately to any filtered viewport on decks seven through nineteen. Do not, repeat, DO NOT use the viewport on the hangar deck, since it has no radiation filter.

 

 

"For right now, each crew member should look for the Fury planet. Our external sensors and monitors are inoperative... we're down to eyeballs, people. So look sharp; senior officer or petty officer in every viewport stateroom report to the bridge what you saw. Chakotay out." He turned to Jane way.

 

 

"Well, now we sit. And wait."

 

 

"Damn, I hate this," she said quietly.

 

 

"I wish there were something more we could do. I can't stand just sitting. Chakotay, you have the cone; I'm going to inspect the ship."

 

 

"Captain," said Tuvok,

 

 

"I do not wish to overly alarm you, but I suggest you continue working on restoring the shield extrusion instead."

 

 

Jane way frowned.

 

 

"I was going to make a damage inspection of the ship and see to the wounded in sickbay."

 

 

"Our aft shield is too flat; when the stellar material strikes us, it will act as a sail on an early sailing vessel, propelling us forward. Captain, unless you restore the wedge-shield and point the bow toward the supernova, we will be blown far off course by the particle barrage... perhaps into the moon itself at twelve thousand kilometers per second, sufficient energy to destroy the ship with or without a shield."

 

 

"I hadn't thought of that. Yes, the wedge would deflect the particle stream to either side and stabilize us."

 

 

"And unless you're-create the shield-extrusion formula, we will find ourselves unable to lock on to Lieutenants Torres or Red bay to beam them aboard, even should we find them."

 

 

I forgot about that too, she raged to herself. I'm fading fast--what's the matter with me? But outwardly, she nodded and said,

 

 

"Yes, I know." The captain of a starship had a duty to appear calm and confident in front of the crew.

 

 

Commander Chakotay spoke up, interrupting his stream of commands to various departments on the Voyager.

 

 

"If it's all right with you, Captain, I'll conduct the inspection and visit the wounded. I had a lot of practice patching up ruptures in my old Maquis ship."

 

 

Jane way smiled.

 

 

"Ganging up on the captain, eh? Banishing me to engineering? Well, good luck. Kim, keep a sharp eye out for more Fury ships. And Paris--recalculate the moon's orbit assuming assuming the Fury planet suddenly vanished. Just in case."

 

 

"I've finished," said Kes. Jane way jumped; she had completely forgotten about the Ocampan.

 

 

"Finished?"

 

 

Kes's hair hung in front of her eyes, muting her look--for Which the captain was profoundly grateful. She did not want to meet Kes's stare, not yet.

 

 

"Yes, Captain. I've finished tending the wounded. May I leave? The doctor may need me in sickbay."

 

 

"Disappear." As Kes turned to leave, Jane way added,

 

 

"Oh, and Kes?

 

 

If you get a chance when the time comes... take a look out a viewport. Might see something. Every eye counts." Jane way smiled.

 

 

Kes, standing at the turbo lift doors, nodded slowly; but the said nothing, just turned and left. During her entire visit, she hadn't said a word about the Furies, the dead, the potentially inconceivable destruction.

 

 

In a way, thought the captain, I almost wish she had.

 

 

Jane way rose; just as she was about to enter the turbo lift,

 

 

Chakotay stopped her with a word. He listened grimly, nodding occasionally, though the communication was audio only--directed so that only Commander Chakotay could hear it. He looked up as he severed the connection.

 

 

"Captain," he said, his voice at once sad and sympathetic

 

 

"I've heard back now from four view stations, including two department heads."

 

 

Feeling a cold hand grab her intestines, Jane way asked the sixty-four-kilobar question: "Is the planet still there, Ex?"

 

 

Chakotay said nothing for a moment. The invisible hand squeezed hard; it was all Jane way could do not to double over from the pain... was it stress?

 

 

"No, Captain," said the executive officer at last.

 

 

"The planet is no longer in orbit around the sun. It has..."--he turned his hands palm-up--"... vanished," he concluded.

 

 

Utter silence reigned on the bridge. Not a man or woman there did not know what that meant. All their plans, all their "Captain," interrupted Lieutenant Tuvok,

 

 

"I have an anomalous reading."

 

 

"Yes, Mr. Tuvok?" Jane way suddenly was so weary, she could fall asleep on her feet.

 

 

"The reading is difficult to isolate because of the extreme level of electromagnetic radiation enveloping this system. But tetrion particles are singularly transparent to high energy photons, and are produced in copious amounts in the vicinity of a wormhole.

 

 

"Using the stream output, I was able to make a reasonable estimate of the main direction the wormhole occupied.

 

 

"Captain, wherever they went, they were not heading toward the Alpha Quadrant."

 

 

Jane way hesitated.

 

 

"They weren't? Which way were they headed? Where does the wormhole terminate?"

 

 

Tuvok checked his screen.

 

 

"I cannot tell without better sensors where the wormhole terminates; but the part of it I can readily see is heading in the general direction of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud."

 

 

Jane way could not figure out what Tuvok was saying exactly; but she knew enough to relegate it to the back

 

 

burner, so she could concentrate on the most important task: restoring the shield system, wedge and extrusion and all, before the wave front arrived and flung the Voyager millions of kilometers away.

 

 

Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres hauled herself up another hatchway, flopped over the lip, and lay on the floor, exhausted.

 

 

She had never before in her life attempted to climb a kilometer straight up; even in the relatively low gravity, every muscle in her body felt as if it had been seared by red hot iron bands. Her only satisfaction, a grim one, was that Red bay's strength of despair had long ago given out; he could only climb a few rungs up each ladder and wait for B'Elanna to help him the rest of the way up.

 

 

At first, he had suggested she leave him behind. But this was not the warrior way: a Klingon did not leave fellow warriors behind... and the human side of B'Elanna rebelled at the thought of letting a fellow human die, even if he was Star fleet. Killing enemies in battle--that was acceptable, even heroic! But not letting former enemies be blown to pieces in a lifeless moon.

 

 

This time, however, Red bay could not even make it to the ladder at all. He lay on the deck plates, a level below Torres, panting.

 

 

Lieutenant Torres unslung the tri corder she had stubbornly carried up meter after meter. She checked the time: two hours and twenty-eight minutes; they had exactly thirty-nine minutes until the tri corder timer read 03:07, B'Elanna's best estimate of the time from the explosion--seven and a half minutes before the mag-lev failed. It took light and other electromagnetic waves seven and a half minutes to travel from sun to moon; the expanding shell of stellar matter that would destroy the moon would take twenty-five times longer to reach the moon.

 

 

Unless, of course, it's moving faster than I expected. She had not shared that worry with Red bay; it was a silly fret... after all, the star stuff could just as well be moving slower.

 

 

Without analyzing the supernova itself, there was no way to tell.

 

 

"Call it thirty-five minutes," she announced between gasps, "to make--half a klick. We're doing well, Red bay--come on, just a half a kilometer... move!"

 

 

Red bay glared up at her with the first honest emotion he had shown toward anyone but the Furies: desperation beyond words. He looked down, utterly spent.

 

 

B'Elanna climbed back down.

 

 

"You think you're exhausted, but you're not. You can always take just one more rung, one more, one more, until you make it or you die from the effort." She dropped lightly to the deck, faking strength and breath she really didn't have. It worked; Red bay struggled pathetically to his feet.

 

 

B'Elanna steered him toward the ladder, then climbed right behind him to push him forward.

 

 

They slogged the last, bitter half-kilometer, while B'Elanna deliberately did not stare at her timer. She even turned off the alarms when they began sounding faster and faster... it made little difference whether they hyper ventilated if they were still a quarter-kilometer below the surface.

 

 

But they made slow progress. At last, they reached the surface. B'Elanna whipped her tri corder around and stared at it.

 

 

T plus fourteen. T PLUS fourteen... so much for time estimates!

 

 

"Well, Red bay, we're fourteen minutes late. Fortunately, the particle front is no prompter than we. Better start hyper ventilating; it probably will strike at any-"

 

 

As darkness dosed around B'Elanna Torres, she heard and felt the distant impact of a Klingon war hammer against her entire body. Then she floated in timeless discontinuity.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

For the thirteenth time since Captain Jane way and Lieutenant Carey began trying to reconstruct the forward shield, introduce the fold to make a wedge, and re-create the extrusion formula, the captain hallucinated exactly the right figures that indicated success.

 

 

For a moment, her heart rate rose to full impulse; then she checked herself. Twenty-nine previous hallucinations tempered her momentrary feeling of triumph.

 

 

But this time, the figures did not melt back into the real numbers, different enough to turn success into total failure. In fact, this time, the more she stared, the more the figures looked like a real, bona-fide solution.

 

 

"Lieutenant," she said, "check my eyes on this. What does the bioelectrical Griffin potential read?"

 

 

Carey turned his own glazed eyes onto the screen; he squinted, shook his head, then sat bolt upright.

 

 

"Captain, the shield's up," he breathed, so quietly it was almost as if he were afraid to shout for fear of knocking over the fragile thing with too boisterous a shout.

 

 

"Time check."

 

 

Carey looked at his screen timer readout.

 

 

"About, what, four minutes?"

 

 

"Jane way to bridge: Chakotay, the forward shield is up."

 

 

"Yes, Captain, we just noticed."

 

 

"Turn us around while--"

 

 

"We already have, Captain. Give us a wedge... hurry!"

 

 

Jane way smiled.

 

 

"Aye, aye, Commander. Captain Jane way out."

 

 

The minutes ticked by as Jane way followed exactly the recipe she had used successfully to introduce the fold the last time.

 

 

After a time lapse, she glanced at the ship's chronometer. Eight minutes had passed; they were already into overtime.

 

 

"Let's hope it's a really slow explosion," she muttered.

 

 

"Two more sequences," hissed Carey, hands trembling as he typed the instructions.

 

 

Jane way forced herself not to watch the viewer, the wave front would come when it came, and watching would only waste more time. Carey, however, was not so circumspect.

 

 

"Captain!" he said. "I can see it--I see it coming!"

 

 

"Thank you, Lieutenant. Now stop staring at the viewer and type!" Carefully, checking each character, Jane way typed her last command, a direct, bioneural assembler-code sequence... the final piece of the Carey formula: the command sequence was actually a set of construction instructions that forced the neural-net shield-control computer to conform to a discontinuous function... the shield bent, and bent, and suddenly forded neatly along the line of force-equilibrium.

 

 

"Got it," announced Jane way, smiling in triumph muted by the grim possibilities awaiting them after the wave passed them and struck the moon.

 

 

"Fifteen seconds to spare," said the captain; "hardly even a raThe expanding shell of super energetic debris, nearly ninety percent of the former sun's mass, struck the Voyager head-on. The ship jerked with the shock and was driven backward at 0.15 impulse speed, about 11,500 kilometers per second, the speed of the impact shell. Slapping her

 

 

commbadge, the captain bellowed,

 

 

"Jane way to bridge: compensate!"

 

 

If there was an answer, she didn't hear, the ship rumbled like thunder, shaking violently. Jane way had once felt a 7.9 earthquake on Sprague XI, the hedonistic paradise sometimes used for shore leave; the shaking was nothing compared to what her own ship now suffered.

 

 

In the viewer down in engineering, the stars were jagged streaks where they weren't obscured by the roiling mass of superheated plasma bursting past the Voyager; without the shields, the ship would not have lasted a microsecond. But Tom Paris kept it on course; the computers compensated for the buffeting, and the great part of the particles deflected off of the forward shield-wedge and broke to either side, stabilizing the ship left to right; the impulse engines took care of the relative movement up and down, and Chakotay and Paris refused to allow the ship to be driven backward.

 

 

The shaking was worse than when they were en route to the Fury star system and the gravi tic stabilizers broke--was it really a thousand years ago?--and again, Jane way caught herself fighting back nausea. Lieutenant Carey lost the battle.

 

 

Then suddenly, it stopped; the bulk of the shell continued past, headed toward the moon, which it would batter apart in just a few seconds.

 

 

Captain Jane way lurched to her feet, fumbling for her badge. "Jane way," she croaked.

 

 

"To the moon, Paris!" Then she dropped back down; nausea or no, she had to restore the shield extrusion immediately, as in yesterday.

 

 

B'Elanna floated back to consciousness, feeling nauseated, sore, and dizzy, with a head big enough for its own set of moons.

 

 

Three questions lined up for attention; the first was What the hell was I drinking?

 

 

Then she woke fully.

 

 

"Why the--the hell is there still gravity?" she demanded aloud. Belatedly, she allowed the third question: "And why is it pinning me to the ceiling?"

 

 

She staggered up and discovered she had no sense of balance.

 

 

She fell heavily, weighing more than she would on

 

 

the Voyager. Red bay was across the upper chamber, which was dark, lit only by light streaming in the jagged holes in the bulkheads.

 

 

He lay against the floor, upside down by B'Elanna's reference, as if he were glued there.

 

 

Jagged holes? In a flash, B'Elanna Torres realized what had happened: The entire chamber had been ripped loose by the shock wave, and it spun through space, pressing the two away-team members against the perimeter by centrifugal force.

 

 

Spinning through space! By itself--and the hurricane rush past her ears indicated the air was rapidly gushing out the gashes in the metal seams, the super dense Fury metal torn apart like cardboard.

 

 

B'Elanna wasted precious moments gawking; outside the rips, the vast, black abyss of space was neither, filled with glowing gas that lit the inside of the chunk with a hellish glare.

 

 

"Red bay!" She belly-crawled along the perimeter, fighting the increased acceleration when she got into the corners, which were nearly one and a half times as far from the axis of rotation as where she had been thrown... which meant they dragged her down at one and a half times the gravity.

 

 

She reached the stricken lieutenant and shook him into semiconsciousness.

 

 

"Red... bay?" she gasped, becoming lightheaded in the thinning air.

 

 

"Get up, get--breathe deep!--get get out--find us-beam..." B'Elanna fell over, panting with the exertion. Already, the sound of the air was growing distant and tinny, her own voice sounding like it came from the bottom of a well. The thin air didn't carry the sound.

 

 

She summoned up some strength and slapped Red bay rousing him fully. He stared at her, looking sick, miserable, and at last showing some real, honest fear. He had come back to himself--only to come back to a nightmare.

 

 

"Breathe!" she screamed, costing her enough oxygen that her head pounded and she almost fainted. Weakly, she pointed at the nearest rip.

 

 

Hyperventilate, she warned herself. She began to pant like an overheated dog, and Red bay noticed and imitated her. She could not watch the stars and bright mist swirl past the rips; it made her sick, and the very last thing she needed at that moment was to waste precious time and invaluable air vomiting.

 

 

The room seemed unnaturally white; her peculiar, oxygen-starved brain spat up the most useless piece of information it could find: that the low pressure and lack of oxygen was affecting the rods and cones in her retinas, washing the color from her vision.

 

 

EYES! She remembered.

 

 

"Close... eyes??" she croaked, pointing to her eyes. Red bay nodded, terrified beyond words.

 

 

Together they rose to hands and knees and crawled toward the rip, toward death and emptiness. Toward the only silly hope they had left. They panted, trying to suck down as much air as possible to prolong the agony before their brains finally suffered fatal damage due to oxygen deprivation.

 

 

Red bay balked; Torres grabbed him by the seat of the pants and hurled him out the rip. Bones of my ancestors she thought sickly; that's the first time in my life I've ever thrown someone out the airlock into deep space. She flopped over the hole in what felt like the floor, though it looked like a bulkhead, and was hurled, tumbling, into interstellar nothingness.

 

 

B'Elanna shut her eyes tight and rolled into a tight, tight, fetal ball, wrapping her arms around her to preserve as much heat as she could. It was unnecessary; the instant she was out and unshielded, she felt searing fire across her back her legs, and her arms. It's a million degrees! screamed her shocked and tortured mind. It's the debris, it's superheated gas from The shock bit deeper into B'Elanna's body and brain? and consciousness slipped deeper and deeper beneath her thick?

 

 

Klingon hide.

 

 

She was--she was going--she was going toKes pressed so hard against the window port, her nose began to bleed. She didn't notice Neelix, crowded right next to her and everyone else. But they were too busy staring and squinting, trying to pick out a pair of tiny figures who might lurk anywhere within the bright, expanding gas cloud,

 

 

which the Voyager followed at an altogether indiscreet distance.

 

 

"There!" Neelix shouted, pointing at a speck.

 

 

"No," she said, "that's a piece of conduit."

 

 

"Are you sure?"

 

 

"Yes... wait! What's that over there?"

 

 

Neelix shoved against the port as if the extra millimeter might make a difference.

 

 

"Yes, it could--I think I can see--yes!

 

 

No!" He pulled back involuntarily, angrily swatting the transparent aluminum as if it were to blame.

 

 

"No, no, no! It's just another..."

 

 

Ocampans had good eyes, better than human eyes. She liked to think Neelix's Talaxian eyes were better. In the far, far distance, to the left, Kes just barely made out a speck. It was at the limit of her vision. The ship was paralleling it, and it was growing no larger.

 

 

"Neelix," she breathed, suddenly faint,

 

 

"I think I might have something solid."

 

 

"Where? Where?"

 

 

Keeping her eye on the dot, Kes moved behind Neelix and pointed past his face--"To the left," she whispered in his ample ear, "further... now up a bit--there."

 

 

Neelix stared for a moment. Then he touched his commbadge. "Neelix and Kes," he said.

 

 

"We've got one."

 

 

"Coordinates," snapped the unemotional, uninflected voice of Tuvok.

 

 

"Um..." Neelix felt his heart race, he wasn't used to the Star fleet system.

 

 

"It's a little to the left and--"

 

 

"What port are you standing at?" interrupted the annoying Vulcan.

 

 

"Um..."

 

 

From behind Neelix, Kes shouted,

 

 

"Number UVeighteen!"

 

 

"There is no need to increase your vocal volume," said Tuvok.

 

 

"The comm link includes you as well."

 

 

On the bridge, Tuvok said,

 

 

"Captain, I suggest we turn to heading one-nine-seven."

 

 

"Proceed, Mr. Paris," said Jane way.

 

 

"Increase to thirty meters per second." Paris engaged the new course.

 

 

"It's

 

 

crunch time," continued the captain.

 

 

"Mr. Kim, extrude the shield but on your ensign's pips, don't let the shield walls touch."

 

 

Licking her lips, Jane way touched her commbadge.

 

 

"Captain to engineering. Mr. Carey--are you ready with that modified monitor?"

 

 

"No," said the acting chief engineer.

 

 

"Good. Turn it on anyway; let's see what we can see."

 

 

The forward viewer, a blank wall at the moment, Bickered and displayed a few dozen diagonal lines of color.

 

 

"I told you it wasn't ready," said Carey.

 

 

"Extruding the shield now," announced Kim to an unappreciative audience. Sweat rolled down his face, it was one of the most terrific responsibilities he had yet faced on his first, and probably last, ship assignment.

 

 

"Dammit, Carey, we can't see a thing!"

 

 

"Something must be loose, a connection."

 

 

"Do something--kick it!"

 

 

"Captain, it's probably in the monitor itself! That's outside... I'll have to go EVA and--"

 

 

"Kick the stupid interface! It's right in front of you!"

 

 

Tuvok looked puzzled.

 

 

"Captain, I fail to see what good-"

 

 

The image lurched, then settled into an oddly flat picture of bright splotches of color--hot, ionized plasma gas--with here and there a star visible through the glow. The image was bizarre, disorienting, with so many of the ship's systems off-line, including the replicator, it was the best they could do. It was weak, dizzying; but they finally had eyes... or rather, one eye.

 

 

After a moment, she stood from her chair.

 

 

"I see them! One of them; Tuvok, can you get a visual lock and send it to transporter room two?"

 

 

"Not yet, Captain," said the science officer.

 

 

"Jane way to transporter two; prepare to area-beam a humanoid directly to sickbay from coordinates that will be transmitted by Lieutenant Tuvok. Jane way to EMH program, prepare to receive a patient, Doctor."

 

 

"I have a visual lock now, Captain; transmitting to transporter room two."

 

 

"Energize when ready, transporter two."

 

 

Tense seconds passed. Jane way stared and stared; but before she could make out anything more than two arms and two legs, Tuvok announced,

 

 

"It's Lieutenant Red bay." Before Tuvok finished the sentence, the speck de materialized.

 

 

"Doctor to Jane way," said the disembodied voice of the emergency holographic medical program.

 

 

"I have Lieutenant Red bay.

 

 

I am initiating CPR now."

 

 

Jane way nodded, absurdly since it was a voice link.

 

 

"Where is she--where is she?"

 

 

The universe moves by strange and bizarre turns. With all the eyes on the bridge scanning the glowing plasma cloud for B'Elanna Torres, it was Chell, of all people, who spotted her.

 

 

Chell, who was only on the bridge as an observer--with no responsibility except to watch and observe.

 

 

Tom Paris yanked the helm to port without waiting for an order from Captain Jane way, she barely had time to say

 

 

"Proceed, Mr. Tuvok" before the sharp-eyed Vulcan oriented the jury-rigged monitor to center Lieutenant Torres and transferred the coordinates to the transporter room.

 

 

"Energizing," said Transporter Chief Filz.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Voyager matched velocities with the tiny, remaining core that used to be the Fury star just an hour earlier. Commander Chakotay, Lieutenant Tuvok, and Ensign Harry Kim slowly took measurements as the frenetic crew got the ship's systems back on-line after both the electromagnetic pulse and the plasma shock wave. The bridge crew measured traces of chroniton particles, neutrino flux, subspace folding effects, residual super string twists, alpha-particle radiation levels and directions, and residual heat in the form of radio echoes.

 

 

But Captain Kathryn Jane way had a more pressing problem down in sickbay.

 

 

The doctor circled around and around Lieutenant Red bay, whose skin was burnt bright red over a disturbing pallor.

 

 

Red bay's eyes were open, but the pupils did not respond. Neither did the eyelids blink; Kes, the doctor's assistant, reached across every few moments and re hydrated Red bay's eyes from an eyedropper of saline solution.

 

 

"There is as yet no brain activity from Mr. Red bay," said the doctor, "well, for either of them. But I'm more worried about Red bay. I have applied cardiac stimulators, but as

 

 

yet, his body is not even producing autonomic nervous responses."

 

 

"B'Elanna is doing better?"

 

 

"Lieutenant Torres is unchanged. She is not on life support, but we took her off six minutes after she was beamed here. She required only a few forced breaths to begin breathing on her own but she, too, is still in a coma."

 

 

Jane way closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the scene had not changed. She was so tired, but it wasn't all just a dream.

 

 

"Will they recover?"

 

 

The doctor shook his head.

 

 

"That is up to Torres and Red bay.

 

 

There is little I can do except monitor and--"

 

 

"Doctor!" interrupted Kes.

 

 

"B'Elanna just went into cardiac arrest!"

 

 

The doctor raced to Lieutenant Torres and ran a fast scan with his medical tri corder.

 

 

"Cortical seizure," he diagnosed. "I'm going to try to stabilize her with a cortical stimulator."

 

 

"What's happening.?" demanded the captain.

 

 

"Doctor, you said she was doing all right! Why is she--"

 

 

"Be quiet!" snapped the doctor.

 

 

Jane way clamped her mouth shut, then backed swiftly away.

 

 

After a moment, she commanded herself to turn and leave the sickbay. It was the hardest order she had ever given or received.

 

 

She waited in the passageway, pacing back and forth. Kes and the doctor didn't need her inside distracting them; they most decidedly did not need her presence at that moment.

 

 

The doctor frowned. I'm not supposed to feel anything, he thought; I can't feel--I'm just a hologram! But it certainly felt as though he felt concern, worry--even fear. Evidently, the programmer, Zimmerman, did a more thorough job than anyone had imagined, least of all the doctor himself. He had experienced quite a few feelings lately. "I stabilized her," he announced, "for the moment, at any rate. How is Mr. Red bay, Kes?"

 

 

Silence. The doctor turned to find Kes standing over Red bay's bed. The Ocampan looked stricken.

 

 

"Doctor, you'd better look at this." She held up her own tri corder.

 

 

"Lieutenant Red bay's neural receptivity is failing. The cortical stimulator can't maintain the electro colloidal circulation... he's dying, Doctor."

 

 

The doctor stared. There was no need to check Kes's readings; he had trained her well.

 

 

"I might be able to rebuild the pathways," he said.

 

 

"The operating table is prepped. Which patient should I transfer?"

 

 

The doctor looked back and forth.

 

 

"This is the worst part about being a doctor, Kes," he said, voice firm.

 

 

"Remember what I said about triage, during our conference? Well, here it is in all its ugliness."

 

 

Triage: deciding who would live--and who would be leR to die. This case was different... but really the same. There was no truly medical reason to choose one patient over the other. The doctor scanned his entire library of writings on proper triage and found no comfort, no help. Red bay's case was the more difficult; but with the proper care, he stood a good chance of living... neural receptivity collapse--"cortical stiffening"--was better understood than Torres's cortical seizure.

 

 

But in reality, neither was a text dip case; because, simply put, no one had ever before been fished out of deep space without a spacesuit in the middle of an exploding supernova.

 

 

The doctor ran every computer program in his limitless--he had thought!--medical profiles; but no mere program could convincingly tell him whether to save Lieutenant Red bay or Lieutenant Torres. Of course, each program picked one of the two but there were as many hits for the first as the second.

 

 

It always comes down to this, he thought, exasperated and concerned; it always comes down to the gut feeling of the doctor.

 

 

But holograms don't HAVE guts.

 

 

There was, he concluded, no convincing medical method to resolve the triage dilemma; each patient had his own reasons to live, to die, to sacrifice for the other.

 

 

"Doctor?"

 

 

What do I do? What do I do? He swiveled his virtual,

 

 

holographic head back and forth, virtual mind wrestling with a very real dilemma. No amount of prior programming could help him.

 

 

You make a decision, that's what you do!

 

 

"I'll call the captain," said Kes, reaching for her commbadge.

 

 

"No!" the doctor almost shouted, grabbing her wrist.

 

 

"I'm the doctor... this is my responsibility." But WHAT DO I DO?

 

 

He turned away, covering his holographic face with unreal hands.

 

 

"How can I be torn like this? I'm not even a real man!"

 

 

After a moment, Kes spoke, so quietly the doctor had to increase his receiver gain.

 

 

"You're real to me, Doctor."

 

 

"Maybe that's what being real means: making decisions that can't be made by a... by an emergency medical holographic program."

 

 

"You have to choose. B'Elanna's cortical stimulator can't stabilize her--" Kes fell silent, allowing the doctor to speak, to choose.

 

 

"She's a member of this crew. And--and I guess she's my friend. I know her--I can't make this decision!"

 

 

"Should I call the captain?"

 

 

"No! Help me--wait for me. Trust me, I know the time! I can't help knowing, I'm a computer program."

 

 

"You're real. You're a man and a doctor. And my teacher."

 

 

"But I have no objectivity!"

 

 

"Not every decision should be objective."

 

 

At once, the doctor relaxed. His virtual shoulders slumped.

 

 

He turned around with a deadpan expression. "Transfer--B'Elanna--to the surgical table, Kes. I'll--I have to--"

 

 

Without another word, the doctor crossed the distance between the tables, reached out, and removed the cortical stimulator from Lieutenant Red bay.

 

 

"Med--Medical log: Lieutenant Red bay pronounced deceased." Almost angrily--a comic sight, he thought--the doctor swiftly removed the respirator and pacemaker as well, laying them on one of the other beds in intensive care.

 

 

Kes had already transferred B'Elanna to the surgical table

 

 

using the antigravs and begun fitting the neuro surgical helmet over the lieutenant. By the time the doctor approached the table, Kes had already activated the holoprobe and micro scanner and focused both on the outer portion of B'Elanna's cerebral cortex.,

 

 

"Prepare to terminate the cortical stimulator," said the doctor, forcing himself not to look at the convulsing Red bay... a man already dead, dead ever since he fought the Furies the first time, a man who didn't know he was already dead, who fought it for nearly a minute.

 

 

"Terminate the stimulator, Kes; and get ready to immobilize her with repeated shots of desoasopine. She's half Klingon, and I think she's going to fight us every step of the way."

 

 

"Captain to the bridge," said Chakotay's voice from nothingness, startling Jane way.

 

 

"On my way," she said, grateful for the excuse to cut and run. She had dreaded being called in and told that B'Elanna had suffered irreparable brain damage; irrationally, Captain Jane way half convinced herself that even standing in the hallway would "jinx" her engineer's chances--but she was afraid that simply leaving, abandoning B'Elanna, would give the wrong impression.

 

 

"What's happening, Mr. Chakotay?" she asked as the turbo lift doors slid open at the bridge.

 

 

"Nothing."

 

 

"Didn't you just call me to the bridge?"

 

 

"Yes, Captain. It's what happened an hour ago that I think you need to see."

 

 

Tuvok took up the tale.

 

 

"We have spent considerable time using every means available to track the Fury wormhole. It has been, I must admit, an unsatisfactory experience. The supernova left high residual radiation levels: the sector's current temperature is still several hundred degrees, broadcast as electromagnetic radiation in the infrared and radio wave portion of the spectrum. This temperature dissipates the energy signature left behind by the wormhole."

 

 

"Give me the short version, Mr. Tuvok."

 

 

"The Furies' attempt to create an artificial wormhole

 

 

large enough to transport their entire planet was largely successful."

 

 

Jane way was silent for a long time.

 

 

"Then we failed," she said at last, mastering her emotions so completely that Tuvok was impressed.

 

 

"Not exactly," said Chakotay.

 

 

"I don't know what B'Elanna and Red bay did down there, but the Furies didn't jump to the Alpha Quadrant."

 

 

"Tuvok just said--"

 

 

"I said the effort was largely successful, Captain. They did, in fact, jump... away from the Alpha Quadrant."

 

 

Jane way looked back and forth between her senior officers. "Do we know where they jumped to?"

 

 

"No, Captain," said Chakotay.

 

 

"We cannot narrow down the trail smaller than about a ninety-degree spread. They could have gone in any direction within that spread."

 

 

"All right, where might they have gone? Which direction?"

 

 

"They might have jumped into the Gamma Quadrant, or they might have jumped completely outside the galaxy."

 

 

"Mr. Tuvok, what are the odds that the Furies will jump anywhere near a star system?"

 

 

"I have insufficient data to make even a plausible conjec~ sure, Captain."

 

 

She thought about a planet of twenty-seven billion condemned to wander for eternity, lost between the stars. Twenty-seven billion souls whose only crime was attempting to eradicate or enslave every living being in her home quadrant.

 

 

"They must have had some provision for supporting their population away from a star," she mused; "they were planning a blind jump into our quadrant, after all."

 

 

"That would be logical."

 

 

Jane way leaned her head back, closing her eyes, not caring who saw her in such a state of exhaustion.

 

 

"We didn't have to kill twenty-seven billion people. That counts for something, doesn't it?"

 

 

She hadn't expected an answer; she got one anyway, from Tuvok.

 

 

"It counts for much, Captain."

 

 

"Have we merely unleashed the same horror on the Gamma Quadrant?" Jane way opened her eyes; the entire rest of the bridge crew was silent, staring at her. She looked from one to the other, pausing at last on Chakotay's inscrutible face.

 

 

"I don't think so," he said.

 

 

"They were utterly peaceful to everyone except the ones they called Unclean: us, in the Alpha Quadrant." The commander paused, pressing his lips together.

 

 

"I

 

 

think the rest of the galaxy is safe... unless somehow the Furies make it back to a planet in our own quadrant."

 

 

"Tuvok?" asked the captain.

 

 

"Insufficient data to estimate the odds," said the Vulcan.

 

 

Jane way shuddered. Eventually, when the dust settled, the Furies would take stock. They would not lose interest in their holy war; they would begin building the same technology all over again, as soon as they found a star to suck dry for the energy to jump across the galaxy to hurl themselves again upon what they knew was theirs.

 

 

All over again, it would happen all over again, and again and again, until finally--somebody did kill them all. Or until they succeeded.

 

 

Somebody, someday; but not Katherine Jane way, not this day. "Still... it's--it's quite something to think about. What we did."

 

 

"We defended ourselves!" exploded Paris.

 

 

"We defended our civilization," corrected Tuvok.

 

 

"Aren't you the ones who preach about Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations? They simply wanted to retake what had once been theirs."

 

 

"What they held by force and terror."

 

 

Chakotay sat back, simply observing; he allowed Paris and Tuvok to carry the point. But the captain held her own.

 

 

"Yes, a slave revolt. For thousands of years, they nursed their hatred and determination to retake heaven, which their god gave them, they believed. What will they do now? I think they'll figure out pretty quickly that they went in the opposite direction and can never get back. Then what? What violent race have we unleashed upon another part of

 

 

the galaxy, driven into permanent exile? Will they set up a Fury empire in the Gamma Quadrant? Will they start enslaving the races in the Magellanic Clouds?

 

 

"I would rather we had stopped them completely and killed every last one of the twenty-seven billion. That guilt I could live with, or die with, as the case may be." Chakotay spoke out.

 

 

"I feel no guilt whatsoever, Captain. We did what a warrior must do. We took the best victory condition offered."

 

 

"Is your spirit guide okay with this?"

 

 

"I will find out tonight."

 

 

"Take me with you. Please."

 

 

Chakotay inclined his head in the affirmative.

 

 

"Captain," said a hesitant Ensign Kim,

 

 

"I didn't want to interrupt. But I just monitored a log entry by the EMH program."

 

 

"Yes?"

 

 

"The doctor just pronounced Lieutenant Red bay dead. He thinks Lieutenant Torres is going to make it."

 

 

Jane way rose and crossed to the young ensign. She put her hand on his shoulder.

 

 

"You care very much about her, don't you? I think Chell can use some watch standing experience... why don't you go down to sickbay."

 

 

Kim stood without a word and hurriedly walked to the turbo lift.

 

 

CHAPTER

 

 

Two days after the supernova, the radiation level had

 

 

dropped substantially in the sector that once had belonged to the Furies, the first true terrorists of the galaxy. The U.S.S.

 

 

Voyager remained in the sector; Captain Kathryn Jane way had ordered them to maintain orbit around the remnants of the Fury sun until Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres regained consciousness.

 

 

Jane way wanted to know what happened, what Torres and the strange Lieutenant Red bay from the Enterprise had done, before the captain decided whether it was safe to leave. That meant Torres had to wake up.

 

 

Twelve hours later, B'Elanna sighed. It was a good sign but not spectacular; she had emitted sounds before. But the sigh was followed by weak sobbing, and that was exciting: it was the first actual emotion she had shown since she was beamed aboard.

 

 

The captain took B'Elanna's mummy-wrapped hand, while Kes gently touched the patient's brow. Tucked as she had been, the lieutenant had mostly shielded her face from the intense, searing heat. The rest of her body would take

 

 

weeks to heal fully, even with the most advanced skin repligrafting techniques in the Delta Quadrant.

 

 

B'Elanna opened her eyes and began to scream. When the doctor moved to restrain her, she bit his hand hard enough to sever his thumb--had he been flesh and blood. Fortunately, B'Elanna did not break her teeth on the holographic force field.

 

 

They held her and talked her back for another half hour before she was coherent enough for Jane way to debrief her Haltingly, B'Elanna Torres told of finding the aiming mechanism at the very last moment and sabotaging it.

 

 

"It's a damned good thing you thought of that," said the captain.

 

 

"None of the other gremlins you pulled did a thing. the beam still fired, created the wormhole, and the planet still passed through it to... to anybody's guess where."

 

 

"I saved us?"

 

 

"You saved us, Lieutenant."

 

 

"Are the Furies gone?"

 

 

Jane way smiled, an oddly down-turning expression that simultaneously expressed warmth, reassurance, and deep sadness. "They're gone. They were sent into the middle of nowhere; I doubt they'll ever find their way back to our galaxy, and definitely not to the Alpha Quadrant. Not ever."

 

 

"We fished you out of the exploding supernova," said Kes. "You were really badly burned and more than fifteen bones were broken! But you're going to be all right."

 

 

"And... Red bay?"

 

 

Jane way answered quickly before any awkward pauses.

 

 

"He didn't make it, Torres. I'm sorry."

 

 

The doctor leaned close.

 

 

"You survived in part because you're half-Klingon, Lieutenant. Lieutenant Red bay was a human, and his body couldn't take the strain."

 

 

She stared at the doctor as if he'd grown a second head She did not seem pleased. Then B'Elanna closed her eyes and tilted her head. So once again, my face is rubbed in it, she thought; either I'm flying off the handle because I'm an angry young Klingon; or I survive a supernova because I have a tough Klingon hide! Can't I ever just be ME?

 

 

But she knew the answer almost before she asked the question: she was who she was, and part of who she was was a bumpy-headed, thick-skinned, warrior-hearted Klingon. She could no longer deny it. And now it had saved her life!

 

 

Later, when the doctor had moved on to other patients~ and Jane way had left, Kes returned to B'Elanna's side. Ocampan eyes met the Klingon face; Kes bit her lip and finally asked a question that had built inside her like an overinflated balloon. "You said you were hit by the Furies' terror beam... what was it like? That kind of fear. I've never..." Kes paused, admitting her grievous fault.

 

 

"I've never even imagined that kind of emotion!" she blurted.

 

 

B'Elanna said nothing.

 

 

"Is it different from just being afraid? I have to know...

 

 

I have to know there was a reason why all the races of the Alpha Quadrant would rather be slaves and give up freedom than face that weapon. It has to be something more than just being afraid of death or pain."

 

 

"I don't remember," said Lieutenant Torres.

 

 

"Selective amnesia. The doctor said it might happen."

 

 

Kes lowered her brows, puzzled.

 

 

"But you remember everything else!"

 

 

"I said," hissed Torres,

 

 

"I--don't--REMEMBER." Cold, defiant, Klingon eyes burned into the Ocampan face. Kes understood, and she dropped the subject.

 

 

The End