STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  Tears were forming in Chakotay’s eyes. “I didn’t want to let go then. It wasn’t as easy as I made it look.” He glared straight at her. “I worked a long time to accept this new life. I’d accomplished that. Now ... you want me to abandon it without a second thought. I can’t do that.”

  [340] Janeway was incredulous. “It’s an illusion!”

  “Maybe so. But it’s been real for four years for me. I can’t ship myself off to somewhere else we don’t even know how to get to. Who knows—maybe that’s just some program, too, ‘Captain.’ ” He turned away.

  “All right,” Janeway said quietly. “It’s sudden. I understand. You need some time to think.” She produced a combadge from her pocket and handed it to him. “When you’re ready.”

  He took it from her reluctantly and tossed it on the table. Janeway withdrew from the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.

  Renaii wasn’t sure she heard the other woman leave, but she couldn’t keep up what amounted to hiding in another room. She’d heard everything that had happened—though admittedly not entirely by accident—and she was shocked by what was put forth that morning. She walked out of her bedroom to find Chakotay indeed alone, staring at the device Janeway had given him, unmoving, solemn. He must have been turning over his life in his mind, trying to make sense of what he remembered for the past four years. The silver and gold delta shield seemed to stare right back at him, even more stolid than he was, and with considerably less emotion.

  Chakotay picked it up. Even though it was replicated, a hologram, like everything else he could see, it pierced through the reality barrier and spoke to him as a relic of the true world. It was truth.

  “It’s beautiful,” Renaii said as she approached her husband.

  [341] “It’s a combadge,” Chakotay replied, void of expression. “I can contact Captain Janeway with it if I want to.”

  Renaii hesitated. “I know what it is.”

  Chakotay turned to her. “You heard us talking, then?”

  “I didn’t need to.” She took a deep breath and let the words spill by themselves from her mouth. “Chakotay, I’m sorry I never told you earlier.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Told me what?”

  “About this place. About the illusion.”

  For the second time that morning, Chakotay was stricken speechless. You knew!? There was nothing he could say to an admission like that. A part of the program knowing it was a program—

  —unless she wasn’t part of the program.

  He backed away from her. “Who are you?” he asked quickly.

  She stepped toward him, but more slowly than he was backing away. “I am Renaii,” she said, explaining as if to a child in doubt, “and I am your wife. And I do love you, Chakotay, please don’t think that I don’t.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I’m not quite sure what to think at the moment.”

  She ceased her advance. “But I’m also an operative for the Trevin Resistance Movement. I had a mission to carry out here.”

  Chakotay felt his former—real—and present—illusory—lives collide again. She wasn’t a program, she was flesh and blood. “Real” was a different question. He checked his previous thought—she was a part of the program, just not a holographic part.

  “Can we talk about this?” she was saying.

  [342] Chakotay almost looked as if he were going to respond directly. As it was, he responded the only way he could. He fingered the combadge.

  “Chakotay to Captain Janeway.”

  “I didn’t expect to be back so soon,” Janeway said as she walked in Chakotay’s door.

  “I didn’t expect my life to collapse this morning,” he replied. “But things turn up.”

  Renaii was seated at the table. “I haven’t asked her anything else,” Chakotay whispered to his captain. “Quite frankly, I don’t trust myself talking alone to her right now. And I have the feeling you’re going to need to hear this.”

  “Your feelings are understandable,” she whispered back. “And from what you’ve told me already, I definitely want to hear what she has to say.”

  The two Voyager crew members joined Renaii, Janeway across from her, Chakotay as far away from her as the table allowed. She tried to meet eyes with him, but he dodged them.

  Janeway was all business. “Renaii,” she said. The dark woman darted her head around to face her. “It was a pleasure to meet you this morning. I can only hope that we can continue having a pleasurable relationship.”

  “You’re easing into the interrogation, Captain,” Renaii replied. “I know you want answers from me, answers that, ideally, I could have given to you a while ago, but it wasn’t deemed wise at the time.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning; Chakotay told me you’re part of something called the Trevin Resistance Movement. Are you saying that there is actually a Trevin people?”

  [343] “This program didn’t come totally out of our imaginations,” Renaii responded. “A Trevin ship did crash on Draanis IV three hundred years ago, and the planet, including the gravity well, is pretty much as it is in this program. But of course you didn’t really crash there. And in the past century, there have been some pretty vast political changes there. Ships from a planet called Dernovin made contact with us about a hundred years ago—their ships could pass through the gravity well without much problem, because of some special technology they had. But they didn’t offer us passage home, even for a price. Dernovin annexed Draanis IV and used my people as slaves in developing computer technology. They stole what we had developed on our own and forced us to work on their projects, separated from each other, of course. But they couldn’t keep us apart all the time, or from learning a few things along the way.”

  She paused, and tried to gauge Chakotay’s response with a look. “Keep talking,” he said, steel-faced. “I assume there’s a bit more story before you get to the present day.”

  She gave up trying to look at him. “Three months ago, the Trevin Resistance Movement was able to gain control of one of the Dernovinian ships that landed on Draanis IV; we connected to its main computer through a remote link. A small group of us escaped from that planet, and we vowed that we would liberate the others, by any means necessary. It was decided that we needed to stage some kind of attack on Dernovin. But we knew we couldn’t do it with the ship we hijacked; we needed something more powerful.”

  “And Voyager just happened on by,” Janeway said sardonically.

  [344] “It wasn’t an accident that we picked your ship. It’s quite famous, you know. We’d heard stories, almost legends, about your ship, about all the battles you’d been through, how powerful it was. And since you would be heading close to us, we decided we’d take it. All we had to do was be sure we could figure out the computer so we could set up the same kind of remote link we did with the Dernovinian ship. That wasn’t a problem; your systems are remarkably ... I believe your culture’s term for it is ‘user-friendly.’ ”

  “We aim to please.”

  “After we’d taken control,” Renaii continued, “we wiped your short-term memories and implanted approximately four years’ worth of new engrams in your long-term, so we could hold you, all of your crew in various holodecks, in this program while we used the ship. It hasn’t really been that long, Captain—most of your memories since the crash were artificially implanted. The program has only been running six weeks.”

  “Six weeks?” Janeway leaned forward. “I have quite vivid memories of watching my starship and my crew die. Are you telling me that didn’t happen even on the holodeck? That those are just implanted memories?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. With a ship full of programmers and scientists, it wasn’t hard to figure out your holodeck or your brains. They’re basically just very intricate computers. I have four years of false memories, too, to make sure I could play my role, keeping the world in here and the other holodecks running with none of you suspecting anything, accurately. But no one expected I would have to keep
it up this long.”

  Janeway rose and paced away, around the room, back to [345] the table. “All right. You commandeered my ship. Why put us in here? It would have been much easier to kill us.”

  “We didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “You stole my ship to attack a planet!”

  “We didn’t use direct force!” Renaii calmed herself, and hoped Janeway would keep calm as well. “This was less work-intensive than keeping you all unconscious for long periods of time. Our plan was to use Voyager’s deflector dish to create a powerful, directed solar flare that would knock out power systems in the settlements on the bright side of Dernovin’s moon. It was intended as a demonstration, a protest, rather than a violent attack.”

  “You sound as if it didn’t work.”

  Renaii glanced down. “I don’t know. They put me in here completely independently. They would find some way to contact me if they needed to, but they didn’t want to risk having any links to the outside, other than holodecks, in here. I haven’t heard from them at all.”

  “How long was this attac—mission supposed to take?” Janeway made a point of not catching her misnomer in time.

  “A week, maybe two.”

  “Sounds like we’ve been hung out to dry.”

  “They probably just ran into some unexpected contingencies,” Renaii insisted.

  “I have a hunch those unexpected contingencies were a trained Starfleet crew taking advantage of some tiny mistake they noticed with your plan,” Janeway said confidently. “Someone out there reinstated the safety protocols in this holodeck, and somehow I don’t think it will be long before that same person finds a way to get us all out.”

  The air crackled.

  [346] As if on cue, Chakotay’s cave house disappeared, replaced by a large black, silver, and yellow room with two dozen confused Starfleet personnel scattered throughout. The main door slid open, with a much-missed mechanical thunder, and a figure appeared just in front of it.

  “Welcome home,” the Doctor chimed.

  Janeway stepped slowly out the door, taking in the lighting, the contours of the starship’s gray paneled corridor. There was no debris; everything was intact; her ship was healthy, whole. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected, but four years of false life had resigned her to the sight of a dead, broken hulk. This ship was definitely not dead or broken. Although—it wasn’t exactly brimming with life either.

  She snapped out of her amazement and turned to the Doctor, still standing just inside the holodeck. “Doctor—good work. I can’t tell you how good it is to be back.”

  “I can sympathize,” the man of light responded. “I’ve only just been able to reactivate my holographic matrix. I’ve been stuck inside a data loop between my own systems and the holodecks’ for six weeks now.”

  Janeway became disappointed. “So you can’t give us a status report.”

  “Sadly, no. I’ve only had access to systems directly related to my functions, and that would be only the sickbay holoemitters and the holodeck. But that is how I was able to punch through the Trevins’ programming and rescue you—and, soon, the entire crew—in, I must say, a brilliant bit of virtual negotiations.”

  She cut him off. “I’d love to hear about it, but I’m afraid [347] we have a ship to retake. Do whatever you did with the other holodecks, get the rest of our people out, but warn them not to use the main computer. We have to act quickly if we’re going to take the Trevin by surprise.” Her captain’s instinct was screaming at her; she could tell the starship was adrift, moving just enough to have been not completely stopped, or perhaps jarred from a stop. Either way, it was not what she would have expected from a ship being used to launch an assault on a moon, but the fact remained: Voyager was not hers. And she needed it back.

  After she’d filled everyone in on what they needed to know in order to function once again as Starfleet officers, she led them to the nearest storage locker and keyed it open to reveal phaser rifles for her and several others. “Torson,” she called to the only crew member she could identify as security personnel, “keep an eye on our friend Renaii here. I don’t want her giving her comrades any warnings. Get her to the brig if you can.”

  He took a phaser and grabbed Renaii’s arm. She tried again to make contact with Chakotay, but he was already in conference with his captain. “We should assault the bridge first,” he was saying, vehemently ignoring the woman he’d called his wife as she was led away. “We don’t have enough people to split up effectively if they’ve fortified Deck 1. We’ll have to take them out one room at a time.”

  “We will split up,” Janeway said, “but only to get on different turbolifts to the bridge. I’ll signal all the teams and we’ll simply burst out and attack.”

  “Clean and simple. Always seems to work best.”

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  [348] Chakotay found himself wishing there were more complexity to their plan on the lift up. There was nothing he could say to the crew members in the small compartment with him, so his thoughts naturally turned to Renaii. We were incredibly happy together, he thought. Almost perfect, even on that hell of a planet. Too bad you were lying the whole time.

  The lift stopped. No one moved for a few minutes; Janeway was making sure all the turbolifts made it to the bridge before she gave the word to invade. It was a tense silence. But I suppose I’m used to it by now, being betrayed by women I love. Seska, you—not a big deal anymore. He gripped his phaser rifle tightly, eager to get on with their takeover.

  He swore it was an hour before the almost inaudible click of combadge activation preceded by a millisecond Captain Janeway’s signal. “Now!” called every Starfleet insignia in the chamber at once.

  Chakotay surged toward the door, and as it parted, the other crew members leaped into action as well. They had taken the rear center lift; Jules and Tarrine swung around to cover the security station usually occupied by Tuvok; Kardesh, Hume, and Y’Lanni concentrated on the aft stations; all of this happened nearly instantaneously, automatically, with no conscious thought necessary.

  “No one move!” yelled Janeway from across the room.

  No one moved.

  When the crew took the concentration to examine their targets, they discovered why.

  “They’ve all been dead for weeks,” Chakotay whispered incredulously.

  The captain’s chair, ops, the conn—every chair on the bridge held a decaying, rancid body of what he could only [349] assume was a member of the Trevin Resistance Movement. Their clothes were all perfectly intact, but their skin was literally hanging off their bones, their skeletons slumped in their seats.

  “I have the feeling,” Janeway said, “this wasn’t in their mission plan.”

  “Relax, everybody,” Chakotay recommended. “Doesn’t look like there’ll be any firefight here today.”

  “Computer,” Janeway called, looking up, “are there any humanoid life-forms on this vessel other than those in holodecks and on the bridge?”

  “Two,” came the electronic reply, “one human, brig; one unidentified humanoid, brig.”

  “Renaii and Torson.” Janeway moved gingerly between the bodies, giving a particularly nasty look to the one in her chair. “Something killed everyone on this ship,” she said, addressing everyone in the room. “Get into all the automatic logs, and the Trevins’ logs if they kept any. I want to know what did this.”

  “They did this to themselves.”

  Chakotay was hunched over an engineering station on the bridge, decoding in his mind scattered bits of sensor readings and internal recorders into a logical narrative. Reports of various information that might be somehow useful had filtered in from officers all around the bridge over the past few minutes. The final piece had just clicked into place, and Chakotay had immediately called Captain Janeway over to the station.

  “Are you saying they all committed suicide? Like some kind of cult?”

  [350] Chakotay clarified himself. “No
—it looks like an accident. They didn’t know how to use Federation equipment properly. Remember the plan they were going to use?”

  “Focus the deflector beam on the sun,” Janeway recited, “and create a solar flare to knock out power on Dernovin’s moon.”

  “Right.” He brought up a series of graphs and diagrams. “They definitely fooled with the attenuation of the deflector dish. This frequency and power curve are nothing like what’s normally used for displacing interstellar matter.”

  “I’ll say. They channeled nearly everything Voyager has into a beam the thickness of a pencil. That’s probably dozens of times more powerful than even what the Enterprise tried to use against the Borg just before Wolf 359.”

  “It was—that was the problem.” Chakotay turned away from the console. “That much raw energy slamming into a tiny point on the surface of a ball of pure nuclear fusion created a hell of a reaction. Now, that’s what the Trevin were hoping for, but they didn’t get their calculations quite in sync with the technology they had to work with. They couldn’t focus the flare, and a part—a big part—of the flare’s energy traveled straight back through the deflector beam.”

  Janeway gasped. “We’re lucky the entire ship wasn’t vaporized!”

  “Lucky, maybe—that the Trevin were at least smart enough to shut off the beam once they saw what was happening at the other end. A good portion of the flare still made its way directly into our systems, knocking everything around horrendously. Some of the secondary hull was vaporized. It’s nothing we can’t repair, but duranium vapor, when mixed with phaser coolant and a host of other [351] materials also released by the explosion, is highly poisonous. It was only a matter of minutes before the whole interior of the ship was gassed to death.”

  Janeway turned aside and sat down heavily on the side stairs. “Only the holodecks, with their independent life support systems, weren’t affected,” Chakotay elaborated. “Sometimes being a prisoner isn’t so bad, I suppose.”