Cybersong (6 page)

“I can try it, Captain,” the engineer replied. “I’m not sure it’ll work, though. Tachyons are so high energy and invasive that they’re harder to filter than most other interference.”

“What if we do a quantum reset?” Kim asked suddenly, obviously interested in the project. “I read a paper about that right before we left. It’s a kind of new use of an old technology, but it sounded really promising.”

“Mr. Kim, accompany Lieutenant Torres back to Engineering and give her whatever assistance you can,” the captain ordered. “I want to scan these ships as soon as possible for lifeforms and find out just how dangerous the conditions are for these people.

If there really are any people,” she added under her breath.

***

Just stepping onto the holodeck made Kes sick to her stomach. It was much too real. She could taste the grit in the arid air, she could smell the stench of the other captives and the Kazon who guarded them.

She could barely remember that she had had plenty of water earlier in the day and a shower besides and enough to eat.

This was a hideous mistake. She didn’t want to think that The Doctor had prescribed the wrong treatment, but she wanted to leave the holodeck right now. There was no point in going through with this. It would only make everything worse.

“Hey, you, back to work,” one of the Kazon guards grunted as he prodded her with his blast rifle.

“Oh, that one,” the guard’s superior said, laughing. “Let her come here if she’s too lazy to dig. These Ocampa are fragile anyway. They don’t last very long. But she’s a looker.”

The guard growled at his superior, and the superior shot the guard.

Not killed, but winged badly enough to make him obey orders.

The the superior came over to Kes as she tried to fade back into the dark mine entrance. If she could get into the dark … she knew her way around the tunnels and wasn’t disoriented by being underground. In fact, she felt contempt for the pirate chasing her. He’d never be able to follow if she got out of the light, and if he did get to her, she’d kill him. She swore it, she’d kill him somehow.

She slipped into the tunnels, forgotten mazes that riddled the surface rock of her home planet. She was silent, her bare feet soft on the smooth rock and dust below her. The guard clomped behind in thick boots, calling for her.

As if she’d answer, she thought. Disdain for his stupidity filled her along with the anger. She had to be careful, she knew.

Underestimating the enemy would only lead to mistakes.

She couldn’t afford a mistake.

She crouched low. There was almost no light at all, but she could hear so clearly that she knew when the guard hit her corridor. She stayed down, silent, her breathing very slow and careful. There could be nothing, nothing at all to give her away.

She could feel the heat of him as he approached, smell his skin.

The Kazon bathed no more frequently than their prisoners here, and his odor was as easy to follow as his heavy, labored breathing.

She waited while he passed her. That was the hardest part. She could smell his boots as he came by. She was afraid, terribly afraid. But the fear seemed farther away than the rage. That filled her, gave her courage.

He went past, scuffling a little in the abandoned shaft. Just a little more, to where the rock ledge stuck out …

Kes pounced low, slamming his knees with her shoulder. He went down flailing, shrieking. She grabbed his sidearm, turned it upside down, and used the heavy grip on the back of his head. He fell silent.

Quickly she checked his pulse. He was still alive. Kes was almost disappointed. Fury filled her, and she touched the trigger mechanism of the weapon, wondering if she should just shoot. Her outrage demanded justification.

Caution prevailed. If she killed him they would find out. She slipped away. He would never report it. He would be too ashamed. And she still had the weapon, fully charged. Quickly she concealed it under her tunic. Only then did she realize that she was shaking with pure rage.

Kes realized that she’d forgotten the rage. That she had suppressed it, that she hadn’t felt lonely at all. No, she had felt angry.

Angry, and very afraid, but ready to defend herself no matter what she needed to do.

This was the holodeck on Voyager, she told herself. Everything she had experienced was part of the past. It lived in memory, even her anger was only a memory. There were no Kazon here. As she tried to calm herself in cool darkness, she heard footsteps.

“Don’t try it,” she said, amazed at the menace her voice carried.

“It’s me,” The Doctor answered. “It seems that you have experienced a therapeutic catharsis before I could even begin to take notes.” He sounded disappointed.

“Program off, keep medical hologram running,” The Doctor ordered.

“And some furniture, a sofa and some chairs,” Kes suggested.

The holosuite complied. “Do you want me to lie down?” Kes asked.

“No, I don’t believe that’s necessary,” The Doctor replied. They both sat down before he continued. “You reacted very strongly in there.

You showed a great deal more defiance and courage than anyone could have expected.”

“I’m surprised at it myself,” Kes agreed. “The odd thing is, in my dream I was terribly, horribly lonely. All I wanted was someone to talk to. And here, today, all I wanted was to kill him.” She shuddered delicately at the thought and perched uneasily on the edge of a light green chair.

The Doctor sat down facing her from the sofa. He clasped his hands on his lap and waited for her to continue. Kes took a deep breath and began again.

“The real question is, I don’t recall feeling lonely at all,” she said slowly. “In the real memories I was angry and afraid and determined.

So why did I dream about feeling lonely? Why was that so important?”

The Doctor looked at her quizzically. “There could be several explanations for that. It could be that you’re feeling isolated here on Voyager, and you can’t accept that, so you’re trying to assign the feelings to another part of your life.”

Kes blinked in surprise. “But I’m not isolated at all here,” she said.

“I have more friends than I’ve ever had in my life.

You’re a wonderful friend and a teacher. And I’m with Neelix.

No, that doesn’t fit.”

“Odd,” The Doctor countered. “Among the more empathic races, this kind of reaction is often considered to be generated outside the subject.

But we don’t know for sure if the Ocampa are empathic.” Kes settled into her chair and paused to consider The Doctor’s remarks. There were traditional Ocampa stories that sounded like the kind of empathic experiences of Betazoids. And it was well known that Betazoids could mistake others’ projected emotions for their own, if they were not properly trained.

“According to Jarzeman Anla, the classical Betazoid authority on empathic behavior, if you try to think of the feelings as outside of yourself, as something you are receiving rather than generating, you will have some distance from them. The feelings will not go away, but they won’t affect you so strongly.” The Doctor stood up abruptly. He seemed ready to end the session.

But Kes wasn’t. Not yet.

“What if they are my feelings?” she asked quickly.

“Then the exercise shouldn’t affect you at all,” The Doctor reassured her rather too briskly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he continued, making a face. “I undoubtedly have some ski injuries awaiting me in sickbay.” Kes barely acknowledged The Doctor as he exited the holodeck. She was too busy considering his suggestion. He was right, thinking could not hurt her. And even if it could, she had stood up to bigger, to stronger adversaries.

Surely nothing in her own head could mean her as much harm as the Kazon!

That clear to her, she began. She had never done anything remotely like this before, but it seemed as easy and natural as walking or breathing. The strange feelings that were without a rational source were somehow separate from the rest of her thinking. She imagined a box around them, an Ocampa party box covered in pink cloth and decorated with fresh white flowers.

She had been given such a box once, by her parents on the occasion of her maturity. It had contained her great-grandmother’s necklace, her naming bracelet, and a reader-player with all the most obscure traditional songs, each performed and annotated. She wondered where the box and its contents were now. She had had them with her in a bundle when she had taken the tunnels to the surface.

The bundle had disappeared. Maybe it had been recovered by another of the traditional rebels. Or maybe the Kazon had it, which would mean that the jewelry was sold or adorned some ragged pirate, and that the reader-player was trash. That made her sad in a way that had nothing to do with the strange emotions at all.

In fact, she could clearly feel the difference between this thought, which came from her own authentic life, and the feelings now wrapped in the box that had nothing at all to do with her.

She hesitated telling The Doctor. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know she was an empath like a Betazoid. That would make her a thing again, the way she had been in the mines. And she was through with that forever.

Besides, if the feelings were not hers, she would have to discover whose they were. She was suddenly worried that they were Neelix’s.

That made sense. They were deeply bonded, and he was central to her life. He had rescued her, been brave for her sake.

If this was his trouble she was experiencing, she didn’t want to reveal it. Not to anyone. Not ever.

“We’re in scanner range,” Paris announced.

“Then take a look, and let’s see if there really are any lifeforms in that—mess,” Janeway said.

There really was no other word for it. Ship, at least to a Starfleet officer, meant something spaceworthy. Whatever was out there certainly was not. Even from this distance and with all the interference, and the screen jury-rigged besides, it was obvious that this was not something any sensible Federation teenager would buy cut-rate from a Ferengi.

What was discernible of the metal was dark and matte. It wasn’t black or really blue either, but some indecipherable shade in between. A few markings in bright orange were scattered over the main cylindrical segment, but were so worn and pitted that the original shapes of the letters or images were not clear.

At least in design it was recognizable. The main segment was a simple cylinder. The other pieces were all curved and curled, and it was impossible to tell what their original alignment on the alien ship had been.

“It” was too specific, actually. There were several pieces, or things, all different designs as if they had been trashed together in the sector junk heap well after any usefulness had been sucked out of them.

At least one was ripped open to cold space and the tachyon bombardment that seemed to be coming from the central object in the collection.

This one was smaller than many of the ships around it, more compact, and looked as if it had taken less damage.

“Looks like the aftermath of a battle,” Tom Paris said to no one.

He was right, it did look like the debris left by a skirmish, now ancient and lost to history. Perhaps these warriors had been dead when Earth itself was still covered by primal seas.

Prehistoric space battles in skies that the Federation had never seen, for planets that might now be as dead and cold as the hulks outside.

But they were far distant from any planetary base. They were far enough from any star system that supplies were a problem. If this was a moment of truth from the storybooks, it had drifted well away from its origin.

“Mr. Neelix, come up to the bridge,” Janeway said into her comm badge.

“There’s something you might be able to identify.”

“The scans aren’t reading clearly,” Paris said. “It looks like a negative, then there’s tachyon interference, and it spikes into the positive range. Always in the same place, as if whatever life is there is concentrated in one area.”

He hesitated and looked up from his console, turned and faced the captain. “I don’t trust it, Captain,” he said. “The negatives are too clear too close to that area. The particle bombardment could be giving us false readings.”

The captain used her commbadge again, this time to Engineering.

“Can you filter out more of the interference?” she asked.

“There’s still too much coming through for us to get a clear reading.”

“We’re doing our best, Captain,” Torres replied. “The field is fluctuating pretty violently here. Once I match it, it seems to jump again.”

“Do what you can,” the captain said, knowing full well that Torres and Kim were doing more than anyone else could imagine.

Still, she was frustrated and intrigued at the same time. The curiosity that had made her a good science officer was full of questions and speculations about what could be going on.

The screen sputtered again, and again cleared to the interior of a ship filled with the people who were colored like Christmas angels. In fact, this time she saw a green-haired, silver-skinned one and one with skin as red as her uniform with glossy black hair.

Somehow Janeway had the impression she had seen something like them before somewhere, she just couldn’t place it. And they were both so beautiful and so bizarre that it seemed very odd to her that she couldn’t recall where she’d seen anything like them before.

Unless it was in some kind of painting, perhaps.

The indigo-skinned one came forward again. “Please hurry,” the being said, pleading. “We need your help. Please. We can direct you in.

We can take you over if you like.”

“Won’t the tachyon bombardment and fluctuations interfere with your transport device?” Janeway demanded.

“We are adapted to this phenomenon,” the indigo angel said softly.

“But of course, if you wish to use your own equipment, we are more than pleased that you do so. We want you to trust us. We need your help.”

Something about the way the angel made the statement made Captain Janeway’s skin crawl. She didn’t know whether it was the neediness in the plea itself or the way in which it was delivered, but she was certain this was no routine rescue.