Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  “HOW ABOUT YOU, SEVEN?” TOM PROMPTED. “WANT TO LET US IN ON YOUR PAST?”

  “I think you should speak instead,” she announced in her forthright way, a statement which caught Tom somewhat off guard.

  “Good idea,” said B’Elanna wryly. She had peppered Tom with questions about his life ever since their friendship had started developing, and he had managed to answer in the vaguest of terms. That would be his instinct in this instance, too, but after Chakotay, Harry, and especially B’Elanna, had been so honest, so intimate, anything less from him would seem cowardly.

  The thought of releasing some of his buried feelings was suddenly appealing. This prisoner-of-war camp might be the occasion in which they weren’t able to cheat death, and if that should prove the case, Tom wanted, finally, to unburden himself.

  “Okay,” he said to the group. “I don’t know how this will come out. But here goes.”

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  STAR TREK VOYAGER®

  PATHWAYS

  JERI TAYLOR

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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  Copyright © 1998 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  Originally published in hardcover in 1998 by Pocket Books

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  ISBN: 0-671-02626-7

  ISBN: 978-0-6710-2626-4

  eISBN: 978-0-7434-5385-1

  First Pocket Books paperback printing September 1999

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For

  Andrew and Gina

  Acknowledgments

  The Usual Suspects:

  John Ordover is the editor extraordinaire, combining patience, compassion, intellect, and insight. I thank him for the opportunity to spread my literary wings.

  Rick Berman, handed the Star Trek mantle by Gene Roddenberry, has worn it with vision and integrity. I thank him for being mentor, colleague, and friend.

  Brannon Braga and Joe Menoksy are fonts of creative passion. I thank them for the inspiration and the fierce loyalty they have given me over the years.

  Andre Bormanis is a wealth of knowledge in all fields, and a gracious, generous human being. I thank him for sharing his intelligence and for keeping me (mostly) on the scientific straight-and-narrow.

  David Moessinger, my husband, is my anchor, my rock, my heart. I thank him for being.

  CHAPTER

  1

  TOM PARIS WAS WELL AWARE THAT BRINGING A SHUTTLE into a planet’s atmosphere was easy if you followed procedure; it only became challenging—and interesting—if you deviated from Starfleet’s carefully regulated system.

  He had developed a number of ways to cheat the routine, but the only one that consistently provided what Tom wanted—the ineffable thrill that accompanied danger—was what he had termed the Yeager maneuver, after an ancient but renowned pilot of the twentieth century. Now he had the chance to try it again.

  Captain Janeway had deposited an away team, including the ship’s senior officers, on an unoccupied M-class planet that promised abundant foodstuffs as well as time off their starship, Voyager. She then took the ship on a diplomatic mission to a nearby system where she hoped to secure safe passage through a part of space rumored to be rife with danger.

  Tom had requested shuttle time during the away mission, not an unusual request. Logging shuttle time was required duty for every pilot, a necessary means of keeping one’s skills honed. First Officer Chakotay hadn’t hesitated when Tom suggested he use this downtime to log a few hours on his file.

  The request was legitimate, of course, and Tom had no pangs about making it, even if he did have an agenda that had gone unspoken. The two functions weren’t mutually exclusive, and he saw nothing wrong with combining them.

  Now, at the controls of the Starship Voyager’s shuttle Harris, he saw the planet looming before him. It was a watery sphere, much like Earth, and the marbled blue-and-white orb gave him a few pangs of nostalgia—a fact which surprised him, for he usually found himself far happier in the Delta Quadrant than he had been at home. He shoved the feelings aside and made the necessary preparations for entering the atmosphere, which, his instruments told him, would first be encountered some thirty thousand meters above the surface.

  First would come the mesosphere, where molecular structure was thin and porous, bleeding into the stratosphere, where atmospheric pressure heightened and friction became a genuine concern; finally, the descent into the full oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and the landing. The Yeager maneuver was accomplished just at the transition from mesosphere to stratosphere.

  Atmospheric flight was always done under thruster power, and as such was accomplished much as it had been with pre-warp vehicles. There were safety mechanisms in place now, of course, that hadn’t been available to earlier craft, but safety systems could always be taken off line. That was the first thing Tom did as the image of the planet filled the window of his ship, growing larger by the minute.

  At the point where gravity began to exert a substantial pull on the shuttle, Tom tilted up the nose of the vessel and cut the thrusters, so that the ship began sinking toward the surface tail first, without power.

  And that’s when his body went into an autonomic response: pulse rate increased, blood pressure heightened, and adrenaline was released. These systemic reactions were biochemical and as old as man’s earliest ancestors, but to Tom Paris they provided a state of crystalline awareness that was almost hallowed. All his senses sharpened as endorphins flowed into the brain, creating a mix of fear and pleasure that were mysteriously and inextricably linked.

  He stared only briefly into the black sky, which, he knew, would soon begin to change color, becoming more blue as the atmosphere thickened. From now on he had to keep his eyes down, locked on the control panel. Because very soon the shuttle would be pulled into a violent spin, and a glimpse out the window would produce instant and disabling vertigo. Then he’d be doomed.

  The only way to restart the thrusters now was to get the ship into a dive, nose-down, so that air was forced through the intake manifolds, which would start the magnaturbines spinning and build up the RPMs. Atmospheric oxygen would then combine with fuel from the shuttle’s tanks in a supersonic combustion chamber, providing power for the thrusters.

  The ship
snapped into a flat spin, whirling right over its center of gravity, like an ancient pinwheel. The force of the spin drove Tom back against the seat, his head on the outer edge of the circle.

  This was the moment he’d waited for.

  He could pull out of this if he functioned perfectly. He needed every sense, every instinct keen and chiseled, responding with diamondlike clarity. And that’s what the fear gave him—intensified awareness that would allow him to make the moves to save himself.

  The trick now was timing. He had to gauge—through a combination of skill, experience, and luck—just the right time to maneuver the nose of the ship down. Too soon and it would throw him into an end-over-end tumble from which it was almost impossible to escape. Too late and the atmosphere would be dense enough to keep the shuttle nose-up and he would continue to spin out of control, screaming into the atmosphere at a speed that would incinerate him.

  His body was being slammed against the seat with increasing pressure, his head filling with blood from the centrifugal force of the spin. He forced his eyes to bore into the control panel, watching as the altitude was displayed. He was falling about fifty meters a second, three thousand meters a minute. He estimated he’d have to engage his emergency drogue field at an altitude of about thirty thousand meters, and that was coming up fast.

  At thirty-one thousand meters, he realized he was in trouble. His vision was darkening and his head throbbed as blood sloshed through it. He’d better engage the field now . . . but he knew it was too soon. He’d go tumbling into an endless somersault until he and the craft became a hellish fireball.

  He had to wait . . . until it felt right. But how would he know when it felt right? Maybe his judgment was becoming impaired by the unnatural rearrangement of his bodily fluids. Go ahead, something told him, the altitude’s close enough . . . engage the drogue field. His fingers slid with practiced ease to the controls.

  But no! screamed through his mind, and his fingers responded, poised over the panel, refusing to enter the command. The ship was now under thirty thousand meters. Was he heading for dangerously turbulent atmospheric levels?

  Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . .

  Darkness was overtaking him, and the panel was nothing more than a dim arrangement of lights that swam in his field of vision. Much longer and he wouldn’t be conscious to enter the field engagement command. Hang on, Tom . . . hang on . . .

  Suddenly, the startling image of the incident from long ago—another time when he had told himself to wait . . . wait . . . wait—ripped through his mind like a phaser, and he cried out involuntarily. He thought he was over that, had long ago purged himself of those awful sights, but there they were in his mind’s eye, brilliant and indelible, shot through with colors . . . colors of fire, colors of death . . .

  The shock of the memory cleared his vision briefly and he saw that he was under twenty-nine thousand meters above the surface.

  Now.

  His fingers danced on the controls and the drogue field engaged . . . within seconds he would feel the tug as the ship nosed down and fell out of its spin. He drew great gasps of air because now he felt light-headed and dizzy—had his eyes flicked for a half second to the window? He was sure they hadn’t, and yet he was unaccountably queasy . . . why wasn’t the nose pitching down? Had he entered the wrong command? The beginnings of panic crackled in his mind like arcing plasma.

  That wouldn’t do. Can’t panic. Think. Nose down . . . why not happening . . . think . . .

  He had just promised himself that if he got out of this, he’d never flirt with danger again—when the long-awaited tug pulled at him and he felt the shuttle pitch downward. In a flash, he realized that nothing had been wrong, after all, except his perception of time, distorted by his biological responses. Everything was going as it should.

  Air flooded the intake ducts and the thrusters began to respond. Tom regained control and drew the shuttle into a vectored descent, then looked out to see the ripe blue sky of the alien planet, familiar and welcoming. Soon he was dropping to the surface, searching for a landing spot, telling himself that his promise not to try things like this anymore should be nullified because nothing had really been wrong, after all.

  Beneath him, he saw the figures of the Voyager crew, tiny as dust motes at first, then gradually increasing in size as he descended.

  He wasn’t sure when he realized that something was wrong—maybe when he saw that several people seemed to be running in unnatural patterns, as though they were driven by some urgent need but couldn’t quite figure out what they were supposed to be doing. Then he saw that a great number of them were lying on the ground, motionless.

  “Paris to away team. What’s happening down there?”

  There was no answer. For the first time since he began his descent, Tom checked his sensors and realized the Voyager crew wasn’t alone on the planet. There were alien life signs, dozens of them. Where had they come from?

  He quickly put down the shuttle and opened the hatch, hurrying to reach his friends and find out what was happening and where those aliens were. But as soon as he stepped outside he became dizzy, and found himself lurching, staggering as though drunk. Vaguely he noted a certain sick sweetness in the air and knew it was responsible for his rubbery legs. Ahead of him, most of the away team was now slumped on the ground, though whether dead or just unconscious he couldn’t tell. He saw Chakotay, the last person standing, sink to his knees, and then Tom, too, succumbed, wondering for an instant if he had survived the dangerous descent through the atmosphere only to die in this cloying poison.

  When Chakotay regained consciousness, he didn’t know exactly where he was. Inside a structure of some kind, for he could see walls and a low ceiling by virtue of a few lights spotted on the walls of the room; they emitted a dim yellowish light that cast small pools of illumination before being absorbed by a foreboding darkness. He raised up to a sitting position and realized the rest of the away team was in the room as well, some still lying unconscious, others sitting in a kind of groggy stupor.

  His head throbbed and his mouth was parched. He couldn’t seem to produce saliva. Where were they? What had happened to them?

  He spotted B’Elanna Torres nearby, sitting perfectly still and staring at nothing, dark hair a matted mass and dirt smudging the Klingon ridges on her forehead. Chakotay struggled toward her on hands and knees.

  “B’Elanna?”

  She turned to him and stared dully. She seemed remote and uncomprehending. “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  Several seconds passed before her eyes flickered in understanding. “Chakotay . . .” she whispered hoarsely, her throat as dry as his. “What happened to us?”

  Only when she’d asked the question did he realize he didn’t know. The last memory he possessed was of being on the bridge of Voyager—and then he woke up in this strange, dark room. “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “I was on Voyager . . . and then suddenly I was here.”

  Around them, others were beginning to stir, moving out of their curious sleep like drowsy bears emerging from hibernation, ponderous and heavy. It occurred to Chakotay that he should get up and search the room, but his legs felt unequal to the task. He turned back to B’Elanna and saw that the Vulcan tactical officer, Lieutenant Commander Tuvok, had crawled to join them, looking as stuporous as everyone else.

  “Where are we?” rasped Tuvok, and Chakotay had a moment’s amusement at the thought of the disciplined, controlled Vulcan reduced to the same confused state as everyone else.

  “We’re trying to figure that out. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Tuvok’s upswept eyebrows rose and his dark forehead knotted in concentration. “Being on Voyager. At my station on the bridge. But I have no idea how we got here.”

  Chakotay felt as though his head were beginning to clear slightly, though it still ached. There were things they had to do. “We have to count heads—see who’s here. Ask them if they remember anything about what
happened to us.”

  The three struggled to their feet and moved off through the languorous bodies, each in a separate direction, exhorting their crewmates to wake, to sit up, to try to remember anything they could about their strange predicament.

  A few minutes later a head count had been taken, revealing that fourteen members of the crew were present. Presumably the others were still on Voyager, wherever the ship might be now.

  Suddenly Neelix spoke up. The orange-tufted Talaxian was wearing one of his typically garish outfits, but it looked unusually subdued in the darkened room. “A picnic,” he said tentatively.

  Everyone turned to him. “Picnic?” echoed Chakotay. He sensed this was important. “Are you saying we were on a picnic?”

  Neelix looked momentarily confused. “I think so . . . I can almost remember the captain telling me I should pack food for . . .” He trailed off vaguely, unable to come up with anything more.

  But it had triggered others’ thinking. “On a planet,” called out Harry Kim, the black-haired operations officer. “We all went to the surface of a planet.”

  “He’s right,” chimed in Seven, the beautiful blond human woman who had lived most of her life as a member of a Borg collective, and who had been on Voyager for less than a year. “The captain said we all needed to get out and stretch our legs. I remember thinking that was an odd thing to do.”

  Several people smiled at that. Seven had made remarkable strides in her return to humanity, but some of the nuances still escaped her. Her memory, however, fueled that of several more people, and as they all began tossing out the bits and pieces they recalled, the story began to emerge.

  It was Tom Paris who remembered the sickly-sweet smell in the air, as soon as he’d opened the hatch of the shuttle, and when he mentioned it, many of the group added their similar recollections.