Cybersong (7 page)

“We will send over a shuttlecraft as soon as we are within a reasonable range,” she said. “Stand by.” And she cut the connection.

“What’s with a shuttlecraft range, Captain?” Tom Paris asked, confused.

Janeway just smiled. “I think we have a thing or two to learn about our would-be refugees before we go picking them up,” she said.

“That’s a Tsranan ship, Captain,” Neelix said. No one had noticed his arrival. Now it simply was natural that he was there. “Looks like one of their freighters, though I can’t say they look like much.”

Janeway was slightly startled by his voice. She hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t been aware of his presence. She asked if he had seen the message and could identify the race of the people asking for aid.

“I haven’t seen anyone like them,” Neelix said quickly. “I haven’t even heard of anyone like them. A race where no two people have the same color, that’s absurd.”

“Or cosmetic,” Tuvok observed.

“And why would anyone go to all the trouble of that much cosmetic variation when they’re in danger?” Janeway asked, more for herself than to elicit a reply.

“Ritual, perhaps,” Tuvok said. “Or they mark rank and position by their coloration. Or maybe it’s a deeper part of identity.

This is known among at least three groups we have contacted, two in the Alpha Quadrant and one in the Gamma Quadrant.”

“Or maybe it’s something much simpler and closer to home,” Janeway mused, turning the idea over in her head and on her tongue at the same time. Then her voice shifted to a stronger one, that of command.

“Computer, replay that last transmission without audio. Slow down picture and magnify the faces.”

They came on the screen again, each of them perfect, frozen.

“Computer, play this with an image of the earlier transmission.”

There was the one with the pale blue hair again, almost overlaid over the red-skinned individual in the last broadcast.

“They could be twins,” Paris said. “They’re almost identical.”

“Not almost, Mr. Paris,” the captain corrected him gently. “The faces are the same. Look. Computer, go to black-and-white screen.”

And there it was. Without the color, all the angels had one single face.

“There’s no indication of any lifeforms,” Paris said. “We’re getting a clear reading now, and there isn’t anyone to be rescued.” He turned around and looked at the captain. “It’s a trap.”

Kathryn Janeway smiled. “That much is obvious,” she said quietly.

“The real question is why whatever set this up is trying to lure people in.”

“This must be whatever killed the Rhiellians,” Neelix said softly. “He said something about there being people there, beautiful people who were calling to them. Only what a Rhiellian would like is not anything you or I might like, Captain.

Rhiellians are six-legged and have an exoskeleton. I wouldn’t think they’d be impressed with these images.”

“So whatever is there tailors the display to the race it finds,” the captain said. “Which means they aren’t even looking for a particular kind of sentient being, a single species or even a class. They’re looking for whoever’s out here.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly the shopping district of Rigel,” Tom Paris said. “You’d have to take what you could get out in the middle of nowhere.”

The captain stood and smiled without humor. “It might not always have been the middle of nowhere,” she said grimly. “But that doesn’t matter now. We just have to get out of here.”

She touched her commbadge quickly. “Mr. Kim, meet us in shuttlecraft bay two.” Then she turned her attention back to the staff on the bridge. “Mr. Paris, you’re with me. We’re going to get out of here now.”

***

In the shuttlecraft, Tom Paris took the pilot’s seat. Though both the captain and Harry were more than qualified to fly the shuttlecraft, Paris was the best pilot on the ship. The captain expected him to be able to do things that no one else could pull off.

Like fly through this tachyon field that would distort instrument readings and get them to the empty shell that was broadcasting the images. Not an easy task, but one he relished. When he was flying, especially doing something that taxed his skill and his nerve, he was most truly alive. And like many true pilots, he enjoyed flying shuttlecraft as much as he liked being at the controls of Voyager herself.

“Voyager, do we have any further readings on this broadcast, or on the shell?” Janeway asked as the shuttle peeled away from Voyager and darted forward on its own course into the heart of the storm.

“No, Captain, only that the readings we are getting are contradictory and we cannot get a lock on anything substantial,” Tuvok said.

Janeway knew that he didn’t approve. He was far too disciplined to tell her so, but she knew what he thought. A captain’s place is on the bridge. Always go in fully prepared.

But she was fully prepared, or as prepared as she could be. And as for being on the bridge, well, that was a captain’s place. It was also the captain’s place to lead, to go where others might fear, to make first contact, to make decisions.

She would not ask anything of her crew that she would not do first herself. That was something Kathryn Janeway had lived by as long as she had been in Starfleet. She was not about to stop now.

Instead, she watched Tom Paris at the controls. Now he was flying on visual information as much as using his instruments, obviously correcting for the inaccuracies introduced by the tachyon field.

From the copilot’s seat she had a good view of the window as well as the control panel. She leaned back in the seat, content to let Paris do his job and to do hers—to watch, observe, understand what was happening around them. And to take care of Voyager. Always that came first, her ship.

“You are cleared for exit,” the computer voice announced. “Seven seconds until decompression. Six. Five. Four. Three …”

The great door of the shuttlebay opened. After the light from the interior, the darkness of space was blinding. Janeway lowered the ambient light level in the shuttle so that they were able to adjust and see what surrounded them.

Large segments of dead spacecraft wheeled aimlessly around them in a ballet choreographed by gravity and velocity and nothing more. Except for the regular shapes and obviously created fragments, this could have been an asteroid belt. But the glimpses of insignia on torn metal, of corrosion on a clean surface, reminded her that this was a graveyard.

The eternal silence of vacuum seemed to have engulfed the shuttle. No one talked as they watched the debris that was the deaths of ships go by.

They were closing now, and Janeway could see the assortment of junk that had become a trash armada. The remains of ships of unimaginable configurations were grouped randomly, so far as she could tell. Some had smashed into each other, others were slowly drifting in their own debris.

Most were white or black or showed mostly the material from which they had been formed. But a few still had bits of bright paint clinging.

One was covered with flat orange where abrasion had not sanded it away.

Another bore lines of hieroglyphs on every smooth surface.

Then the captain turned her attention to the large hulk near the center. Except for the gash on one side, it appeared to be intact.

The outer hull was some matte dark material that glinted with deep blue when light hit it. Almost a match for space itself. Janeway wondered whether this coloring was meant as disguise or as an attempt to honor their environment.

Clearly derelict, there was no reason to even suspect there had been life aboard. The message they had received was strange, a trap set long ago, Janeway suspected. And now the transmissions still went out without anyone who benefitted. And many who had died.

She thought of a spider’s web, each of the ships caught by the tachyon field and the distress call. She wondered how the broadcast could be so neatly tailored for each species that visited, and if such a technology could be adapted for her own purposes.

They had run across other hopes before. Just knowing that one people had learned to fold time-space made her think that others must have learned it as well. Not to mention the Caretaker’s technology, which was so advanced Voyager might as well have been a wooden ship with sails.

No, there was hope out here. And there were things to learn.

With no life aboard, whatever she found in these bits of antique flotsam was going to be theirs. She regretted that she hadn’t brought B’Elanna Torres along. The engineer probably would be able to recognize and figure out the workings of some of the more esoteric finds.

But B’Elanna had her hands full with the disconnected drive and whatever additional damage the field had done. Once she had a better idea of what was out here and exactly what they might want to investigate, she could send Torres. Much more efficient that way.

Otherwise her chief engineer would want to take apart every moving part in the entire assembly.

“Talk about a bunch of hangar queens,” Paris said, interrupting Janeway’s thoughts.

“Hangar queens?” Kim asked. Janeway smiled. She hadn’t considered that before, but the assumption was obvious.

“A ship that sits in dock so you can cannibalize parts of it to repair everything else,” Tom Paris said, smiling. “Kind of like supplies on the hoof. They did it all the time in the Maquis.”

“You weren’t a Maquis that long,” Harry replied.

“Long enough to pick up a few pointers,” Paris protested.

“Besides, B’Elanna’s gonna love this.”

“Before we start dividing up the spoils, perhaps we should take a look at what we have,” the captain said dryly. “Mr. Paris, take us in nice and easy. I don’t want to trigger whatever other traps have been left here.”

The pilot smiled and turned the shuttlecraft in an elegant arc around the outer edge of the heap before slowing down and entering the precinct. Here he had to fly as though he were maneuvering through an asteroid belt. The major ships themselves were easy to avoid, but the oversized detritus that had detached from the main array whirled crazily.

Harry Kim sucked in his breath audibly while Paris dodged a couple of particularly nasty looking bits of wreck. The captain was so calm she could have been playing 3-D chess in the Voyager lounge.

Paris pulled out suddenly to avoid a wildly spinning bit of flotsam that seemed to be headed straight for them. He hit the acceleration hard across the paths of two major ships to avoid the debris. There was nowhere else to go, not enough time, not enough space to maneuver.

He cursed under his breath, his teeth clenched as he swung the ungainly little shuttle across the bows of two enormous hulks.

He yanked the shuttle down and hard port just as the dead weapons of an ancient warrior opened fire.

He had been fast but not quite fast enough. They were jolted from behind as broad beam energy weapons discharged just meters above them.

Paris went into fighter maneuvers, pushing the chunky shuttlecraft to the edge of its limits, stressing the hull with the quick turns and intricate foils designed for fighter craft.

He pulled them to starboard so hard that the captain and Kim were flung against their armrests. There hadn’t been time to tell them to strap down before he began the evasive procedures.

“What was that, Captain?” Kim asked as he got up off the shuttlecraft floor.

“I would suspect an automatic passive trigger,” Janeway said, brushing off her trousers and the palms of her hands. “Those were not merchants.”

Tom Paris was grinning broadly. “But I pulled us out near the center ship. We should be in the clear now.”

“Unless there’s something else here to shoot at us,” Kim said.

“I thought there weren’t any lifeforms here.”

“There aren’t,” Janeway said. “These were old pieces on automatic.

I’ve heard of traps like this.”

“The Cardassians pull this kind of trick all the time,” Paris said.

“But they have lifeforms reading on those ships.

Sometimes they bundle people they consider traitors or prisoners together to watch their ship fire passively at their rescuers.

Chakotay told me about being in a trap like that once.”

Harry Kim looked very anxious.

“Let’s get on with our job, gentlemen,” the captain’s crisp, positive tone wiped away some of the lingering chill of the attack. “Mr. Paris, take us in.”

The breech in the hull was so large it was like entering one of the berths at McKinley Station. Tom Paris could do it in his sleep, but after the encounter with the odd attackers, he was grateful for an easier charge. The adrenaline that had rushed through his body during the encounter with the live weapons subsided now, leaving him cold and quivering with a slight metallic taste in his mouth.

The sight before him was awe-inspiring. In the dead vacuum that had preserved the cavity nothing moved. But it was easy to imagine some kind of people here. Where the plating had been torn away, all the decks were open to view.

“They must have been giants,” Harry Kim said.

Neither the captain nor Paris answered. They didn’t have to.

The cavernlike living and working quarters spoke for themselves under the high illumination from the shuttle.

No furniture was recognizable as such. Each of the spaces had sparkling crystals hanging from the ceilings and more squat, rounded matching pieces projecting from the floor. It looked like a natural formation, like a true cave carved by rivers before time.

“What a sense of beauty,” Janeway said softly. “No wonder they appear as beautiful no matter what form they take.”

“I don’t see anything that looks like a control area or Engineering,” Paris said. “It all looks like a cave. B’Elanna’s going to have a field day with this one.”

“We’re too far away to tell,” the captain reminded him. “When we get closer, I would bet that several of those projections are very recognizable controls.”

“You’re on, Captain,” both Paris and Kim said together.

The captain smiled. “I think you’ve both been spending too much time playing pool on the holodeck. What are the stakes?”