Atonement (30 page)

“She's a bomb,” Thulan realized.

“With
a short fuse. I'm the only officer who can order that protocol rescinded, and I'm going to have to do it in person,” Farkas added apologetically.

“Why have you brought me here?” Thulan demanded.

“Several months ago, your First Minister Odala did something I'm guessing many of your leaders found odd. Rather than continuing the xenophobic tendencies for which the Voth are famed, she coerced her fellows into joining an alliance of several alien species called the
Kinara
. The purpose of that alliance was to take down an even bigger alien alliance, The Confederacy of the Worlds of the First Quadrant. I'm not sure what she promised you, but she probably said that this was critical for your people because my Federation had recently dispatched a rather large fleet of ships to the Delta Quadrant with more powerful propulsion systems than the
Starship Voyager
.

“Odala then sent a few small ships out to investigate our communications relays and when her intelligence was confirmed, those ships began meticulously destroying key relays in order to eventually destabilize the whole network.”

Thulan crossed his arms over his chest.

“You haven't contradicted anything I've said yet,” Farkas observed.

“Go on,” Thulan replied.

“The
real
First Minister Odala would never have been able to conscience such an alliance with inferior species, let alone allocate resources to the
Kinara.
The
real
First Minister Odala was murdered by an alien we know as Lsia of the Seriareen. Lsia is a hologram. She can take any form she wishes. She has probably been impersonating your minister since the first day she gained access to Odala. I can't guess as to what form she took at that time. I only know what the result was.”

“Are these Seriareen part of your Federation?”

“No, sir. The whole story is a little complicated for the few minutes of life both of our crews now have left to them. This padd contains all of the intelligence we have on Lsia and her people, their history, and their current goals. It also contains
sensor readings from a battle that took place a few days ago near the Gateway to the Confederacy. Your ship, the
Scion
, took a beating during that engagement, but was able to escape. I'm assuming you're here because the
Scion
has yet to report in.”

Thulan's silence confirmed Farkas's guess.

“You have a choice to make. I'm not here to turn millions of years of Voth doctrine on its head. I'm not here to ask for a new beginning between our people, although I wouldn't mind it. I'm here to help you. Are you going to let me do that, or are we both going to spend the rest of our lives on this beach wondering what we should have done differently?”

Thulan shook his head. “I haven't understood a decision the first minister has made for months,” he said, extending his hand to accept the padd she held out to him.

“I'd read quickly,” Farkas suggested.

VOYAGER

General Mattings had been looking forward to boarding
Voyager
since the first moment he'd laid eyes on her. Like all of the Federation's vessels, her lines were sleek and graceful and turned his thoughts to art rather than technology. He'd rarely seen the two exist so comfortably together.

His first peek inside her consisted only of a quick walk from the transporter room through several gray, nondescript halls, into a small elevation device and down a short hall into a briefing room containing a midsized utilitarian table and several soft chairs. Not everything he had imagined, but he was growing more accustomed each day to frustrated expectations.

Captain Chakotay and Lieutenant Kim greeted him cordially, offering him a beverage before taking a seat at the table. Admiral Janeway was on her way to join them. Mattings wanted to request the strongest drink the replicators—he'd heard so much about—could produce, but settled for a spiced cider the captain suggested. It had a nice bite, but did little else to calm the general's nerves.

“What
did you think of our transporter, General?” Lieutenant Kim asked politely. Kim was a good man and was clearly hoping to set the general at ease. Chakotay was also a good man, comfortable on his ship, but still less so in the general's presence.

“My journey was over before I knew it,” Mattings admitted. “Extraordinary. It didn't even tickle.”

Kim smiled and looked to Chakotay, who did not. Although the two of them had enjoyed several productive exchanges since the battle at the Gateway, it was clear that Chakotay still harbored serious misgivings about the general and the Confederacy he served. He hoped that was about to change.

Admiral Janeway entered, greeted the general warmly, and took the seat beside him at the table. Her aide was with her and provided the admiral with a small data tablet and a cup of something dark and steaming before taking his place at the far end of the table.

“I apologize for my absence,” the general began.

“No apology is necessary,” Janeway assured him. “In the interim we have completed preparations for our upcoming joint mission and taken custody of three of the Seriareen prisoners.”

“My men are welcoming Mister Emem on board as we speak and have reported no difficulty integrating your anti-psionic technology into our security systems,” Mattings reported. “But I'm afraid my apology is going to have to stand, Admiral.”

She looked puzzled until he said, “You see, I've just returned from Grysyen.” These were the first words the general had spoken that clearly sparked Captain Chakotay's interest.

“Why did you go there?” Chakotay asked.

“Two reasons,” Mattings replied. “Captain Chakotay is the first officer I've ever met to describe the Unmarked as anything other than terrorists. It would have been easy to blame his error on cultural differences, but I've come to know him quite well over the last few months and found it difficult to dismiss the passion with which he argued for the lives of the four individuals he captured at Lecahn.

“I know it doesn't matter now, Captain, but what I saw at
Grysyen convinced me that you had the right of that discussion, and my actions, while proper based on my orders, were misguided.”

Chakotay bowed his head, taking this in. Finally he nodded at the general.

“I visited the planet's surface. I was appalled at what I found there. What I learned convinced me that the CIF's actions there were not based on any real understanding of the circumstances, the needs of our citizens, or compassion. I've ordered all tactical operations in the system halted until a thorough review can be conducted. It's going to take a long time to make things right on that planet, but if I have anything to say about it, we will.”

“Will the presider approve?” Chakotay asked.

Mattings shrugged. “She's fighting on every front right now. Normally this wouldn't even see the surface of her desk. Dreeg would have seen to that. She'll allow me to make my case, and I believe she'll agree with my assessment.”

“That's good to hear, General,” Janeway said. “But you indicated that you had
two
reasons for going.”

“The presider didn't lie when she told you that nothing in our records exists regarding the Seriareen or Nayseriareen. But there are worlds, like Grysyen, whose writings have been less widely dispersed over the years, given their controversial nature. Grysyen is the closest Confederacy world to the wastes where we believe Seriar might be found. Grysyen's academies contain millions of documents that never made it to our central database. I spoke with a number of scholars, asking for records that might confirm what Lsia has told us.”

“Did you find any?” Janeway asked.

“I found more than I cared to know,” Mattings replied. “A lot of it was fragmented. I'm told that's common when the records in question are so ancient. The historians on Grysyen have long referred to the period we're talking about, between five and ten thousand years ago, as the ‘dark times.' ”

“They were that bad?” Kim asked.

“What little we know of them was, but I believe the term
is meant to convey the paucity of data available more than any judgment on the people or their actions.”

“Were there explicit references to the Seriareen or Nayseriareen?” Janeway asked.

“No. But there were many tantalizing and suggestive ones. There are myths about sacrifices to powerful gods who demanded the bodies of the youngest and strongest. Those children ‘died to themselves' but were reborn as gods.”

“That does sound vaguely familiar,” Chakotay agreed.

“There's an epic ballad that tells the story of a boy who had fallen in love with a girl. The gods came for him and tried to take him, but he refused their gifts. He died fighting them, but never succumbed.”

“So perhaps not all of the Seriareen's hosts were as excited about their new lives as we've been led to believe,” Chakotay said.

“I don't read a lot of love poetry, Captain,” Mattings admitted, “but that was my conclusion as well.”

“Still, the presence of these artifacts does give credence to Lsia's story,” Janeway observed.

“The strongest support came from another, very unlikely place,” Mattings continued. “You have to understand that when my people came here, armed with their faith in the Source and ready to convert all who intended to join us, old ways were set aside in favor of our new revelations.”

“That's not uncommon,” Chakotay said.

“The Grysyen people's reputation as upstart troublemakers also makes sense in hindsight, as do the lengths the Consortium has gone to maintain this fiction. Their Science Academy contains records going back thousands of years prior to our discovery of the planet,” Mattings admitted. “Among those records are detailed descriptions of experiments done to create the protectors.”

“What?” Kim interjected.

“My people first discovered the technology we use to create protectors on the last
lemm
, as you know,” Mattings replied. “I never knew we had any idea where that technology originated.”

“On
Grysyen?” Chakotay asked.

“As best I understand it, the few spacefaring races that existed at that time had already discovered the streams, although none of them credited the existence of the streams to the Source. The streams we use now are a small percentage of those that originally existed. Some had been destroyed, as Lsia said. But many others simply collapsed. There weren't enough protectors left to sustain them. The ancient inhabitants of Grysyen pooled their resources and expertise and found a solution.”

“They learned how to make new protectors, to stabilize the streams,” Kim guessed.

“It looked like they had some help from another alien species that wasn't local,” Mattings said. “Eventually, they set out to map the rest of the existing streams and apparently, once they were too far from this area to utilize the technology they'd left here, they re-created it on other worlds, like the last
lemm.

“We don't know why the inhabitants of Grysyen abandoned this work,” the general added. “We only know that by the time we arrived, they had.”

“Once the problem was solved,” Kim suggested, “they might have simply turned their attention and efforts elsewhere.”

“A choice that left them ripe for conquest when the Confederacy came calling,” Mattings admitted sadly.

“Did anything you discovered contradict what Lsia has told us?” Janeway asked.

“No,” Mattings replied.

“Very well,” she said.

“I'll be honest, Admiral. I went there hoping to prove her a liar.”

“I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if you had, General,” Janeway acknowledged. “That said, I think we're ready to proceed. Captain Chakotay will brief you on our analysis of the wastes. We both believe that the risks inherent in traversing the area are too great for both of our ships to venture in.
Voyager
is prepared to take the lead in our initial investigations.”

“Why don't
we make that decision when we've both had a chance to take a good look, Admiral,” Mattings suggested.

“Fair enough,” Janeway agreed.

•   •   •   •   •

“But even if we could identify the source of any individual engram, how would we segregate it?”
Commander Glenn asked.

The Doctor considered the question carefully. He'd been reinstated as
Voyager
's CMO that morning and spent most of the day consulting with Glenn. The Commander had already subjected Tirrit and Adaeze to a battery of tests, and while their neural scans distinctly showed the presence of multiple engrammatic patterns, she was correct that determining which individual engrams were essential to each of the essences now sharing a single body was not possible with their technology.

“Wouldn't the weaker ones most likely belong to the host, while the stronger ones are part of the invading consciousness?” the Doctor asked.

“Yes, but we're talking about a fluid process. We all hold thoughts in our minds for fractions of seconds. ‘Weakness' as you are describing it might as easily point to the significance of the thought as its origin.”

“And we are talking about essences that had multiple previous hosts. Some of the weaker signals might have carried over from former victims.”

Glenn shook her head. The Doctor could see her weariness.
“I'd hoped this analysis would reveal the tapestry of these minds
,” she said.
“I thought I'd be looking at individual threads we could follow and remove.”

“Instead, you're looking at a cake,” the Doctor agreed. “The eggs, flour, and sugar are still there, but once the cake is baked, you can't remove the eggs anymore.”