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Star Trek: Voyager #9: Invasion! #4: The Final Fury [Secure eReader (recommended)]
eBook by Dafydd ab Hugh
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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description:  To face the fury ... for the fate of the galaxy! For ages they have sought to claim our worlds. Now, at last, we take the battle to them.... Far from the Federation's desperate war against the invading Furies, the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager encounters something they never expected to hear again: a Starfleet distress call. The signal leads them to a vast assemblage of non-humanoid races engaged in a monumental project of incredible magnitude. Here is the source of the terrible invasion threatening the entire Alpha Quadrant--and, for the Starship Voyager, a possible route home. But soon there may not be any home to return to...
eBook Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc./Simon & Schuster Inc., Published: 1999
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2002
This eBook is part of the following series:
Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended) - What's this?]: SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [297 KB]
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
eReader (recommended) ISBN: 9780671040987
 
CAPTAIN KATHRYN JANEWAY OF THE U.S.S. VOYAGER SATbehind the desk in her quarters, swaying gently, trying to avoid actually becoming ill onto the stack of duty rosters littering the desktop. The ship rolled back and forth, causing the fluids in her inner ear to perform acrobatics.
Well, I knew it was going to happen, she thought; this far from the Federation, from the nearest starbase, without any chance for maintenance or repair other than what the crew did themselves, Janeway knew the ship systems would begin to fail, one by one. Unfortunately, the most recent one to fail was the inertial damper/gravitic stabilizer system. Motion that ordinarily would be damped down to a slight vibration instead became a lurching, rolling gait that was causing terrible havoc with crew health ... and morale. Is this the torture that sailors on the old oceangoing ships had to endure? she wondered, swallowing several times. If it is, I wonder how anyone survived to cross a small lake, let alone an entire ocean! She stood, feeling the air clammy against her sweaty skin. Like most everyone else in Starfleet, Captain Janeway had ridden on sailboats, sloops, four-masters -- in the holodeck. Controlled by a friendly computer that understood the unpleasantness of seasickness and minimized the roll, pitch, and especially yaw. But the present nauseating dance was constant, uncontrolled, interminable ... and worse, it included the fear, haunting the back of her mind, that if the ship hit a subspace fiber bundle, they would lurch violently -- as they already had once, throwing everything, including Captain Janeway herself, to the deck in a heap. Or into a bulkhead, headfirst; the holographic doctor was already treating one crew member who had fractured one of his vertebrae and suffered a serious concussion; the next time, someone could be killed. Janeway cleared her throat, swallowing again. "Janeway to Torres," she croaked; her voice was so strained, it took the computer a moment to recognize her. "T-Torres here," said the equally strangled voice of the Voyager's chief engineer, Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres; Janeway felt an uncaptainlike pleasure when she noted that Torres's vaunted Klingon half did not prevent her from being as spacesick as the rest of the crew. "Do you have a new time estimate?" There was no need to specify any further; the only problem on anybody's mind on the ship was the failure of the gravitic stabilizers. "Estimate ... excuse me, Captain." The sound cut off momentarily. When it returned, B'Elanna Torres's voice sounded a bit weaker. "Estimate unchanged. Twelve to twenty-four hours, depending on ..." "On?" "On whether we can fix it at all, using these damned bureaucratic, stupid, useless --" A new voice chimed in, annoyed; Lieutenant Carey rose to defend Federation procedure against unorthodoxy. "Depending on whether someone who shall remain nameless will just stick to the process, instead of trying a hundred so-called shortcuts!" Damn, thought the captain; they've been doing so well! It must be the nausea, she decided; everyone was edgy, including Janeway herself. The captain reached into the depths of her soul, bypassing as well as she could the depths of her stomach; she spoke with the Command Tone she had learned at the Academy. "That is enough, people. We're in a difficult enough situation without you two bickering. Torres, would it help if I were to reconfigure the stabilizers to run off the replicator-holodeck power grid?" "Nothing will help," said the half-Klingon engineer, letting her pessimistic human side take over. "We'll never get the ship steady. I'm sick, and I just wish I were back in a nice, safe Maquis ship without all this weird, bioneural circuitry!" Janeway forced the conversation back to solutions. "I'm going to redirect the power; keep working, stop arguing, and give me a better time estimate in fifteen minutes. Janeway out." The captain stood; it was hard to maintain balance with the deck rolling beneath her feet, but the nausea was less intense. If the Voyager struck another subspace fiber bundle, she would just have to hope she didn't break anything on the way down. Her stateroom was spacious by Starfleet standards ... almost as large as any bachelor apartment in a minor city on any insignificant planet in the Federation. But she loved it; it was hers. The entire ship was her stateroom. A voice full of peeved indignation invaded her space. "Neelix to Captain Janeway!" Neelix, the ship's Talaxian cook, had never quite caught on to the fact that he did not need to bellow when initiating communications; the computer would figure it out at normal speaking volume. "Janeway here. What's wrong, Neelix?" She was glad not to be in Neelix's kitchen; she could imagine the carnage wreaked upon pots, pans, and vats of food by the failed stabilizers. "What's wrong is this insufferable turbulence! I'm trying to prepare a bravura meal for the crew, and I can't even keep my ingredients from flying off the counters onto the floor!" "Neelix, don't you think if we could stop the rolling, we would have already?" Ouch! Didn't mean to be that harsh. "We're working on it, Neelix." She leaned against her desk as the ship lurched again; a stack of reports fell to the deck with a loud clatter. "Well, why don't you simply stop the ship until you fix the problem? Surely we can afford one or two days' delay. But we can ill afford a crew too sick to even enjoy the simple, culinary pleasures." Janeway rolled her eyes, grateful that the comm link was auditory only. She waited a couple of beats until she could speak calmly. "Neelix, if we stop the ship in our present situation, without gravitic stabilizers, the angular velocity of the warp-core reaction itself will cause the ship to start spinning like a top." "Really? What an odd design decision." "We're going the speed we're going precisely because it minimizes the roll." "This is the minimum?" "This is the minimum, Neelix. Now please return to your duties and let me return to mine. Janeway ... wait, what did you say you were cooking?" "I didn't say. I'm cooking pate of Denethan blood-bladder, Ocampan cream punch, and a Federation dish whose recipe I found in the computer ... Three-Cheese Quiche!" "Oh," said the captain, feeling her stomach begin to roll in the opposite direction from the ship. "Very -- very good. Carry on. Janeway out." Swallowing repeatedly, she shuffled forward through the door and onto the bridge. "Captain on the bridge," chimed the computer protocol program, but as usual nobody paid any attention; Captain Janeway was long on performance but short on ritual. Everyone on the bridge looked grim-faced but determined; determined not to disgrace himself by actually succumbing to spacesickness, she thought. The curved bridge console actually seemed to warp slightly, another trick of the instability. Lieutenant Tom Paris used his elbows to steady himself against the helm; his hands played across the console, making minor adjustments. Janeway didn't know whether they did any good; perhaps it just made Paris feel better to be "doing something." Ensign Harry Kim hunched over his console, staring at his viewer; he had nothing much to do at the moment, but he continued scanning the sector anyway ... probably for the same reason Paris made continual course adjustments. Janeway was surprised to note that even Lieutenant Tuvok, who normally stood at his tactical station, was seated. She stood at the door to her ready room, preventing it from closing, and surveyed the bridge crew more carefully, assessing their health. Paris looked jovial and full of bonhomie; but he sweated profusely, and his face was white. Tuvok appeared at first glance to be unaffected by the ship's motion, but Janeway knew him well enough to understand that he felt as sick as everyone else; he simply placed the feeling in the same category as an emotion -- something to be ignored and suppressed. Commander Chakotay, sitting in his command chair, looked inquiringly at the captain, his face asking whether he should relinquish command. His face also looked slightly green. Janeway smiled, gritting her teeth. "I see the ancient nausea remedy of your people worked no better for you than it did for me." Chakotay tried unsuccessfully to smile. "It only works when the water comes from the Long Woman Mountains, not the replicator." Of all the crew on the bridge, Kim was the only one completely unaffected by the rocking and rolling of the ship ... a fact that Captain Janeway found both annoying and perplexing. She sat heavily in her chair, whence she checked the forward viewer; the computer stabilized the image, but it couldn't stabilize Janeway's head. Thus, she saw the stars as jagged lines, rather than dots; the effect was disconcerting, to say the least. "Ensign Kim," she called. Harry Kim eagerly swiveled his chair around. "Yes, Captain?" "I wrote a -- excuse me -- I wrote a program that transfers power from the replicator-holodeck power grid to the gravitic stabilizers. Implement it." "Aye, Captain." "Activate Emergency Medical Holographic Program." The doctor's face suddenly appeared on the viewer; Janeway found him much easier to look at than the star jags. "Please state the nature of the emergency," said the doctor as programmed; but he immediately appended "that is, if it's something different from the emergency I'm already very busy attending to." "Doctor, please tell me you can do something." If it was possible for a hologram to look pained, the doctor managed it. "Captain, the situation is unchanged. As I've told you, all my remedies lose efficacy over time. I presume that the ship will at some point, actually stop rolling. If you insist upon allowing the ship to continue rolling indefinitely, there is nothing I can do. "The situation is unchanged here as well," said Janeway, softly. "Correction," said Lieutenant Tuvok from his station; "the situation has changed rather dramatically." The captain held up her hand to the doctor and turned to her science officer. "Captain," continued Tuvok; "I am picking up a distress call." "From whom?" asked Janeway, simultaneously grateful for the distraction and irked at the poor timing. "Is it any race we're familiar with?" "Yes," said Tuvok, "we are quite familiar with the signal. The distress call is coming from a Starfleet shuttlecraft." In the shocked silence, Captain Janeway asked, "Another wormhole? Is the signal current?" Once before, they had been fooled by a communication that came through a freak wormhole; but that transmission from a Romulan ship turned out to have come from decades in the past. "The signal is of the type currently in use by Starfleet," said Tuvok; "it comes from a Galaxy-class starship shuttlecraft, the Lewis, which Starfleet records indicate is attached to the U.S.S. Enterprise." "Does its stardate match ours?" "Yes, Captain. I do not believe the signal is coming to us through a wormhole. The indications are that the shuttlecraft is, indeed, in this quadrant, approximately two-point-one-five light-years distant." Tuvok stood; Janeway noted that even the Vulcan had to grip his console to steady himself. "Captain, it is reasonable to assume that we are not the only representatives of the Federation in this quadrant. Despite the distance, which ordinarily is far beyond our capacity to scan in any detail, I picked up a single life-form aboard ... a human male. He is not moving but is alive." "How is this possible, Tuvok? That you could scan him, I mean." "I can only conclude that something is boosting both transmissions, our scan and the shuttlecraft's distress call." Janeway sat back, nonplussed. A Federation ship and pilot? She had dreamed of such a break for so many months; and now, maybe ... maybe ... She dismissed the daydream. As captain, she had a job to do; she had a ship to protect. She could not allow her reason to be overwhelmed by what she wanted to be true. "Shall I lay in the course, Captain?" asked Paris. Captain Janeway hesitated. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have assented even before Paris finished the question. But the circumstances were not ordinary. She looked at Lieutenant Paris, who still wore his frozen smile, holding down his nausea by a great act of will. He sat poised over the helm console, ready to engage the course he had already computed. Everyone stared at Janeway. Oh well, she thought, I guess this is why they let me wear the four pips. "Stand by, Lieutenant Paris." She raised her voice. "Janeway to Torres. Lieutenant, have you been monitoring the distress call?" "I just picked it up," came the engineer's voice, stronger now. "Captain, it might be a trap! We're being lured closer.... There couldn't possibly be a Federation ship out here." "I might point out," said Tuvok, with impeccable, Vulcan logic, "that there is a Federation ship out here: the U.S.S. Voyager." "Tuvok's right," said Janeway; "if we can be sucked here by an unknown force, so can someone else." "I can feel in my gut that there's something wrong with this entire setup," insisted B'Elanna. Again, Tuvok spoke up. "Captain, Starfleet protocols require that we --" "I am well aware of Starfleet protocols," sighed Janeway. The question was, did the safety of her ship take precedence over a shuttlecraft distress call? And so far away from the Federation, was there even a Starfleet, let alone protocols? As soon as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. Wherever there was a Starfleet ship, there was Starfleet. "Lieutenant Paris, lay in a course and engage. If the door opens in one direction, perhaps it will open in the other direction as well." "Everyone hold tight," warned Paris; "without the stabilizers, this is going to be a rough turn." The captain braced, but she wasn't prepared for what she felt: the Voyager felt as though it suddenly accelerated backward at several g's. It was a trick of perspective; all the rolling was ultimately an illusion. Under classic subspace theory, she recalled, the ship doesn't really exist at all at warp speed; as near as Janeway could judge from watching the crew sway, no two members of the crew reacted to precisely the same motion. They all reacted to a horrific forward force when they turned, however. Janeway felt as though she were dangled upside down by her feet with a kilogram weight attached to each eyeball; but when Paris completed the turn, the ship returned to the familiar enemy of stomach-churning rolls. "En route to intercept the shuttlecraft," gasped Paris, swallowing hard. "En route to intercept the shuttlecraft," gasped Paris, swallowing hard. We had better have a plan of action long before we arrive, she decided. "In my ready room," said the captain, rising as smartly as possible under the circumstances. * * * The senior staff assembled around the discussion table -- or the "peace rock," as Chakotay jokingly thought of it. Chakotay looked around the room, trying to gauge reactions: B'Elanna looked suspicious, Paris excited, Kim nervous, and Janeway worried. The captain turned to her helmsman. "Mr. Paris, how long to reach the shuttlecraft?" "I'd give it a good two days to be sure." Chakotay spoke up. "We might be able to shave that down to twenty-four hours by accelerating to warp seven, but at that speed, we might lose some crew members to sudden gravitic neutralization." "I'm not willing to risk killing my own crew," said Janeway. "The castaway will have to wait the extra day." She looks haggard, thought Chakotay; she's lost track of her spirit guide. Of course, so have we all, he mentally appended; when mind and body were out of balance, mistakes became more likely. "Mr. Tuvok," asked the commander, "how did you first pick up the signal?" Tuvok still controlled the spacesickness that had laid low everyone else except Harry Kim. "Commander, the signal appeared mysteriously, already activated. I cannot be certain, but I believe I caught a faint echo from the wormhole itself. I was only able to scan at such a long distance by using the distress beacon as a carrier wave." Janeway typed at her console, possibly playing with some equations. "People," she said, "I've modeled every variation for power-boosting I could think of, and I simply cannot come up with a scenario by which a shuttlecraft could project a distress beacon two light-years. A starship, maybe ... but the power is simply not present on that shuttlecraft." "The signal must be boosted somehow," said Tuvok. B'Elanna Torres, sitting next to Chakotay, called up the schematics of the shuttlecraft; the commander watched over her shoulder. "You're right," said B'Elanna to the captain. "I knew there was something wrong with this entire scenario! It is a trap, and this proves it. We should get as far away from here as possible, Captain." Ensign Kim sat on Chakotay's other side; the young man appeared to want to say something but was worried about interrupting his elders. Chakotay knew how he felt. "Mr. Kim, you have a comment?" "Sir," said Kim, "when I was a kid, my best friend and I had a pair of communicators his mother gave us. We used to talk late at night, when we were supposed to be asleep, comparing interpretations of Paganini and Bizet." B'Elanna stared at Kim for a moment, seemingly embarrassed. She opened her mouth to speak, but Chakotay put his hand on her arm. Kim continued. "Then Alex moved to Singapore, far outside the range of the hand communicators we had. But we were still able to communicate: at prearranged times, we each got near the local comm-sat repeater, and it picked up the weak communicator signal and bounced it off the satellite. We sort of piggybacked the signal." Tuvok had been quietly typing on a terminal from the moment Kim mentioned a repeater. "Captain," he said, "the signal does show evidence of having been boosted by a repeater, similar to Ensign Kim's scenario; the records indicate a faint subspace echo in the original signal, which our computer filtered out before we heard the message." "Lieutenant Torres," said Janeway, "are you satisfied with this explanation? Does it seem reasonable?" B'Elanna hesitated a long time, her rational, human side arguing with the warrior mentality of her Klingon side. She gave a questioning glance at Chakotay, who reassured her with a smile; you are taken seriously, he tried to convey. "Well ... it is possible, I guess," she said. "I -- I withdraw my recommendation that we ignore the signal, Captain." "Good; I don't like to buck my senior crew. I much prefer we all sign on to a particular course of action." Chakotay blinked. "Say, does anybody else notice anything different?" B'Elanna was the first to speak. "Yes; the ship isn't rolling anymore!" "To be precise," corrected Tuvok, "it is still rolling at approximately twelve-point-three percent of the former range of motion." "I can live with that," mumbled Paris, his face slowly returning to a more normal shade. His smile did not look quite so strained to the commander. "So," said Torres, "it seems I was wrong about your power-shunting trick as well, Captain. I seem to have been wrong about everything. Not the best quality in a ship's engineer." Uh-oh ... Lately, Chakotay had noticed B'Elanna's self-confidence dropping. He knew her better than anyone; this is more serious than a momentary phase, he realized. He would definitely have to talk to Janeway about it. The captain tried to reassure her engineering officer. "B'Elanna, it was just an idea I remembered from an systems problem set back at the Academy." "Maybe I should have stuck it out at the Academy." "You're a good engineer, B'Elanna. Just because you didn't take the full course at Starfleet doesn't mean --" "Captain, may I return to my station? I want to fully incorporate your innovation to eliminate the final twelve percent of roll." Worse, thought Chakotay. B'Elanna's Klingon half would never allow her to admit her insecurity; she would not be able to turn to anyone, not Harry Kim -- not even Chakotay himself. "Certainly, B'Elanna," said Janeway. "Let me know when you think you'll regain full control of the stabilizers." Chakotay winced as he heard the captain emphasize you'll in the order; B'Elanna picked up the emphasis in a heartbeat, and she took it as patronizing. He had known B'Elanna for a long time, and that was definitely the wrong approach. Chakotay could see her stiffen visibly. "I think we've discussed about all that we usefully can before arriving at the signal," said Janeway. "Now, let's get back to work." B'Elanna Torres left the ready room and returned to the engineering deck and quickly brought up a visual representation of the wave equation the captain had uploaded. Torres told herself the slight tremble in her hands was a lingering effect of spacesickness. Spacesickness also accounted for why she had not seen before what was so clear now: that Janeway's casual idea was the nucleus of a damping field that could entirely replace the gravitic stabilizers. Of course; the stabilizers are basically redundant using the new system. All the time I spent repairing them was just wasted time, now that the captain has solved the problem by waving a magic technowand. You failed, whispered the tiny voice in B'Elanna's ear; failed failed failed failed -- and here comes Carey to gloat. Lieutenant Carey sat down beside his division officer, obviously very upset. "Sir, I'm really sorry I undercut you like that in front of the captain. I was very queasy, but that's no excuse." "Thank you, Carey. But you were right about Starfleet procedures, and I was wrong." "Well, I didn't figure it out either! It's the captain; she's just so -- well, if she weren't a captain, she'd be the best chief engineer in Starfleet. Let's forget about the argument and just get on with the job. Deal?" "You're right," said Torres without emotion. Without audible emotion; even she did not know which statement she was agreeing to, what Carey said out loud or what B'Elanna was convinced he really meant. Within thirty minutes, building on the brainstorm of her friend and commanding officer, Torres fully controlled the ship's roll. She went through the remainder of her duties hollowly, wondering when the axe would fall, when Janeway would realize that Torres was really just an impostor in a Starfleet monkey suit.
Copyright © 1996 by Paramount Pictures
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