Caretaker, p.10
Caretaker, page 10
She glanced back at Paris and Chakotay, but saw only the same confusion in their eyes. “Tell us what you’re looking for.” She turned to face the hologram again with what she hoped it would recognize as open honesty. Or, at least, a facsimile of same. “Maybe we can help you find it.”
“You?” It sniffed in amused derision—a frighteningly human sound. “I’ve searched the galaxy with methods beyond your comprehension. There is nothing you can do.” Sighing, it looked down at its banjo, and Janeway noticed with a start that all the strings were broken. “You’re free to go. If it’s ever possible to return your people, I promise you I will.”
“That’s not good enough,” Chakotay growled, and Janeway spoke over him in frustration.
“You’ve taken us seventy thousand light-years from our home! We have no way back unless you send us—and we won’t leave without the others.”
The hologram stood and hugged its banjo to its chest, staring off toward the duck pond and the swollen sun beyond it. “Sending you back is terribly complicated,” it sighed. “Don’t you understand? I don’t have time….” The bright pond faded, swallowing the trees behind it, then the lowering sun, then the sky. “…not enough time…”
Then, somehow, before Janeway had fully registered the fading of the light or the disintegration of the landscape, brightness took over where the artificial world no longer stood—
And she was back on board the bridge of Voyager, facing the other four members of her landing party with no idea what to say to them, no idea what had brought them here.
No idea what to do.
* * *
He didn’t hear their voices so much as feel them.
*He’s regaining consciousness…*
Then the light flared painfully bright in front of his eyes, and Kim realized he was seeing it through his lids, burning through the pink tissue and black dreams. He flicked his eyes open, only to be instantly sorry when the brilliance burned past pain and seared the back of his skull. He wanted to tell them to move the light away, but couldn’t force more than a hoarse moan past his lips.
Still, the brightness receded on the heels of his thought, and the pain washed aside as he blinked his vision clear.
A face swam suddenly into focus above him. Above me? He was lying on his back. The awareness came abruptly, like a lightning flash. He was lying on his back, on a bed, and he was cold. And the warm face bending over him belonged to a man he didn’t know, a smooth, beautiful man who could have been young or old if not for the wealth of wisdom in his large eyes. He smiled at Kim, and asked gently, *How do you feel?*
Terrible, Kim thought. I can’t even see your lips move. But he made himself take an unsteady breath and say, “What am I doing here? Where am I?”
Something very much like unhappiness flashed across the man’s face, and he turned a look toward someone on his right. Kim followed his gaze, and saw a woman with the same indeterminate yet beautiful features. She took the man’s shoulders and steered him away as she moved to stand beside Kim’s bed.
It occurred to him without warning that he was in some kind of hospital. The smells—antiseptic yet sick—and the colors—heartless and drab—gave the place away as much as the overly calm and practiced behavior of this woman and all the others in the too-big room.
“Please, don’t try to move yet.” Her voice purred pleasantly, but the intonations sounded false somehow, not quite right. “You are very ill.”
“Ill?” He didn’t feel ill. Confused, maybe. Frightened, yes. He pushed up onto his elbows and tried to kick himself free of the ice-green sheets tangling him to his bed. “There’s some mistake,” he tried feebly to explain. “I’m not—”
Then he saw the thick knots of flesh distorting his hand and arm, and his voice constricted into a tiny cry.
What’s wrong with me? Kim had never seen such grotesque masses on anything still purported to be alive. He jerked open the neck of his gown, found even more thick swellings there, and had to blink hard against the swirling darkness of shock when it pressed the edges of his vision.
What’s wrong with me what’s wrong with me what’s wrong—?!
“No!”
The scream sounded human enough, although the volume wasn’t something Kim had ever heard before. He jerked toward the painful sound just as one of the quiet medical attendants crashed into a table filled with equipment and shattered it to the ground. A boil of movement exploded from where the attendant had been, and a powerful figure leapt over the downed man with no more effort than Kim would have expended in swatting a fly. He couldn’t believe anyone could look so graceful in a thigh-length hospital gown.
She whirled as if sensing him, and their eyes locked for just a moment. I know you! Kim thought in stark surprise. He remembered her face—dark, big-boned, and brooding—on one of the slabs in the back of the holographic barn. Oh, God, that seemed like a century ago. She must be one of the Maquis. Which meant he wasn’t here alone.
Or maybe everyone else but the two of them were gone….
Kim didn’t have a chance to ponder the details. Orderlies were suddenly filling the room, and the Maquis female nearly killed two of them fighting her way toward the door. She almost made it, too. But the attendant who had first smiled down at Kim and spoken without making the words wormed his way into the struggling knot of bodies with some unrecognizable device clutched in his hand.
*Hold her still!*
She howled like an animal, bucking underneath the combined weight of so many enemies. Then the smiling attendant—not smiling now, Kim noted grimly—reached past the wall of orderlies, and Kim heard the unmistakable hiss of a hypospray just before the Maquis fell still and silent at the bottom of the bundle.
The attendant heaved a groaning sigh and flopped back to the ground in evident relief. * Bring her over here * he instructed as he climbed wearily to his feet.
Kim hugged the sheets against him as he watched the orderlies gather the unconscious woman with a gentleness that was almost bizarre. It wasn’t their silence that held him riveted, or even the reverent care with which they now handled someone they had so mercilessly plowed to the ground only moments before. It was the coarse, ropy growths discoloring the Maquis’s arms and neck that trapped his attention. That, and the very real knowledge that whatever was wrong with them might very well be what had happened to the rest of the crew. Which meant their chances of survival were not very good.
He wished their captors—caretakers?—had left him something more to wear than this gown and this blanket. Thinking of death with no one else here beside him, Kim suddenly found this dull alien hospital unbearably cold.
CHAPTER
10
“CAPTAIN’S LOG, STARDATE 48315.6…”
Janeway cycled through the images on the data padd as it lay, unprotesting, on her desk. Picking it up seemed too much effort at such a late hour. Besides, that would require lifting her head off her other fist and actually sitting upright, which was not part of the bargain she’d made with her body for tonight. As long as she didn’t require herself to be energetic and proper, her brain was allowed to stay functional long enough to file her last reports, review the damage and casualty lists, and decide everyone’s role for the cleanup and repair teams tomorrow. So far, using one hand to tap at the controls had not been a violation of treaty, but she was fairly certain any movement approaching sitting up or standing would be. Scrubbing at her eyes, she forced her attention to divide again so she could finish her log and organize the repair details somewhat simultaneously.
“We’ve traced the energy pulses from the Array to the fifth planet of the neighboring system, and believe they may have been used in some fashion to transport Kim and Torres to the planet’s surface.”
The computer chimed, very politely, and she was forced to raise her head anyway so she could glance at the monitor for some sign of what she’d done wrong. Her words blinked placidly back at her. Janeway stared at them for nearly ten seconds before realizing that what she’d heard was the signal to the ready room’s door, telling her that someone wanted in. Sighing, she sat back in her seat and made an effort to square her shoulders as she turned to face the entrance. “Come in.”
Tuvok paused a painfully proper four steps into the room, his hands laced contritely behind his back. Over his shoulder, Janeway caught the briefest glimpse of the darkened, damaged bridge before the doors whisked shut and hid the image away. Had he been working out there all alone? This late at night? She wondered sometimes if Vulcans ever slept.
“Captain,” he reported formally, “I have observed something peculiar about the pulses. They are getting faster.”
She sat a little straighten “Faster?”
Tuvok dipped a single nod. “The interval between each pulse has decreased by point-four-seven seconds since we arrived. I can offer no explanation.”
She laughed a little—a dark, frustrated laugh that she didn’t like the sound of much—and waved him forward to join her. “That’s only one of the mysteries we’re dealing with, Mr. Tuvok. Look at this.” Turning her monitor to include them both, she leaned discreetly to one side so that Tuvok could bend over her shoulder without risking the unseemly possibility of physical contact. Janeway had heard rumors during her career about why Vulcans eschewed even casually touching humans, but had never been sure quite what to believe. All she knew was that Tuvok was always quietly consistent about maintaining what he considered an appropriate distance, and she had no intention of violating that.
He watched the planetary diagram spin beneath the glowing line of her words, the Array’s dramatic flashes reduced by equations to little more than a series of short lines passing between Voyager’s current position and the planet’s surface. Janeway reached up to tap the planet’s statistics. “It’s virtually a desert—the whole planet. Not one ocean, not one river.” She sat back again, shaking her head. “It has all the basic characteristics of an M-class planet, except…” This time, she chose a particular string of figures out of the planet’s description, and blew them up to fill nearly half the screen. “…there are no nucleogenic particles in the atmosphere.”
Tuvok glanced down at her, one eyebrow arched. “That would mean the planet is incapable of producing clouds and rain.”
Janeway nodded, chewing her lip. “I’ve studied thousands of M-class planets—I’ve never seen an atmosphere without nucleogenics. There must have been some kind of extraordinary environmental disaster.” A yawn captured her suddenly, and she hid it behind a vigorous face scrubbing. “As soon as repairs are complete,” she continued when her voice was back, “we’ll set a course for the fifth planet.”
“Captain, you require sleep.”
She felt a blush push into her face—embarrassment at being caught in a lie, frustration at being caught in weakness—and reached for her waiting data padd without looking up at the Vulcan’s calm face. “Kim’s mother called me just after he left Earth… a delightful woman…” She paged through the data in front of her blindly. “Her only son.” The words were even harder to say than to think. “He’d left his clarinet behind, and she wanted to know if she had time to send it…. I had to tell her no.” She glanced up at Tuvok without meaning to. “Did you know he played clarinet in the Juilliard Youth Symphony?”
Tuvok said nothing for a moment. Then, “I did not have the opportunity to meet Mr. Kim.”
It sounded so final when he said it that way. As though he knew he’d never have the chance now. “I barely knew him,” Janeway admitted. “I never seem to have the chance to get to know any of them. I have to take more time to do that.” It was a good promise, one she knew she’d made to herself before this, on other ships, with other crew. “It’s a fine crew,” she said out loud, defensively. “I’ve got to get them home.”
“The crew will not benefit from the leadership of an exhausted captain,” Tuvok pointed out with his traditional patience.
Janeway couldn’t help but smile, just a little. “You’re right. As usual.” She sat back in her seat and sighed up at him. “I’ve missed your counsel, Tuvok.”
He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “I am gratified that you came after me so I can offer it once again.”
It was so close to a Vulcan admission of feelings, Janeway wasn’t entirely sure what to say. She’d once read a quote from a famous admiral that said, “Friendship with a Vulcan is like sculpting with radioisotopes. Very few people ever try it, and the ones who do have a hard time explaining how the milliseconds of closeness when it all comes together can make such an experiment worthwhile.” Sometimes, staring into the darkness of Tuvok’s calm expressions, Janeway found herself thinking that the admiral should have warned her that those daring few who forged friendships with Vulcans didn’t exactly choose to follow that path—it happened without your planning in the first millisecond flash when you looked into a Vulcan’s eyes and realized that he understood that you had feelings, and vice versa.
Caught by her own overlong silence, Janeway said, “I spoke to your family before I left.”
A human would have reacted. Tuvok only asked, “Are they well?”
“Well,” Janeway told him. “But worried about you.”
One of many Vulcan nonexpressions—most of which stood in for more human displays of annoyance, disgust, or impatience—ghosted across Tuvok’s face. “That would not be an accurate perception, Captain. Vulcans do not ‘worry.’ ”
Or feel gratitude. “They miss you,” she amended.
That seemed to suit him better, although what passed through his eyes was a simple tenderness Janeway wasn’t accustomed to seeing there. “As I do them.”
“I’ll get you back to them.” The statement blurted out of her, as unexpected and honest as Vulcan friendship, and Janeway felt the words burrowing in to stay even as she spoke them. “That’s a promise, Tuvok.”
He accepted it as stoically as he would any other truth. Janeway smiled wearily, and watched as the Vulcan nodded his good-night and retreated through the ready-room door. Now if only she could believe herself so easily.
CHAPTER
11
FIVE HOURS LATER, SHE WAS no closer to belief—or sleep—than when Tuvok first left the ready room.
I probably should have gone back to my quarters. Even a starship’s bunk was more comfortable than a couch that Janeway suspected was constructed more for the sake of its appearance than for its usefulness. But her quarters held what was left of her unpacked luggage, the two articles of civilian clothing she had brought to remind her of autumn back home, the pictures of Mark and darling Bear. She’d learned long ago that while guilt can be a great motivator, it can also be a great destroyer—it thrived on stolen energy.
An innate awareness of this fact no doubt had something to do with why, somewhere between shutting down the screens and killing the lights last night, she’d been overwhelmed with the conviction that a return to her quarters would somehow represent a surrender. That by going to bed the way she would have on any other day of her career, she was accepting that this was how she would be going to bed from now on—that this was where she would be going to bed, with no hope of ever seeing a real home again. So she’d stretched out on the hard, aesthetically pleasing gray couch and draped one arm across her eyes, and told herself that she was just being efficient by sleeping so close to the bridge. In case she was needed.
Five hours into her nonsleep vigil, she knew that there were seven primary welds in the ready-room ceiling, and that the bridge air-recirculation system turned on an average of twice every hour.
I should have gone down to sickbay and had that holographic medical program anesthetize me.
She should have made sure Mark understood that every mission meant a chance the captain might not come home when she asked him to watch Bear while she was gone.
She should have said no when Starfleet asked her to head up this assignment.
Growling with frustration, she rolled onto her shoulder and covered her face in her hands, trying to grind away the insidious should-haves with the pressure of her fists against her eyes.
Her comm badge chirped and saved her from further self-anger. “Bridge to Captain Janeway.”
Apparently, Tuvok really didn’t sleep. “Go ahead.” She tried to sound rested and alert, but knew she failed miserably.
“Sorry to bother you, Captain.” Tuvok’s eloquent way of letting her know he could interpret human tone of voice even if Vulcans chose not to emulate them. “But we’ve encountered a vessel within a debris field. We’re showing a humanoid life-form on board.”
“On my way.” She rolled to her feet and ran her hands back through her hair. I may not look presentable, but at least I can look driven. She slipped through the door to the bridge while it was still only halfway open. “Hail them.”
Rollins turned toward the ops station to comply, and Janeway moved to the foot of the command station to study the image on the main viewscreen. A vast scattering of ships glittered and tumbled among what could only be satellite debris and the remnants of wrecked probes. A squat, dishdecorated cylinder that looked like nothing so much as Earth’s earliest Martian probe drifted behind the skeletal remains of an Exian freighter whose cargo had long since eaten its way through the hull. The thought of there being any sort of humanoid life still living in this dark, silent sargasso chilled her.
The screen brightened abruptly, and a small, dome-headed alien with eyes a strikingly chocolate brown announced, “Whoever you are, I found this waste zone first.”
Janeway allowed herself a slight smile. Judging from his stooped shoulders and awkwardly raised chin, there was only so much dignity one could adopt when squeezed into a cabin not even as tall as yourself. “We’re not interested in this debris, Mister…”
He seemed to understand her expectant pause. “Neelix.” He introduced himself with a flare of his arms that rapped his knuckles against either wall. “And since you aren’t interested in my debris—” A delightful smile split his hairless features. “—I am delighted to meet you.”
