Architects of Infinity

by Kirsten Beyer

  But apart from this incredibly minor inconvenience, the site was perfect. Dozens of replicated beach chairs were set up beneath wide umbrellas. Crates of blankets and towels were ready for sunbathing. Those who intended to stay the night, like Paris, had been told to provide their own camping gear. His family tent was already set up on a small plateau about twenty meters from the water. Out of deference to the carefully controlled ecosystem, no camp fires would be permitted, but Paris had brought down a portable heater with exposed coils that would be perfect for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, or whatever version of those two delicacies the replicator could manage.

  Two large semipermanent structures had been erected to house the provisions that had been sent down. Crates filled with a diverse menu of replicated snacks and ration bars were present with large cisterns of water. Inside the smaller base, Tom had installed a portable replicator, ostensibly for emergency medical needs, but the fifteen extra battery packs B’Elanna had scrounged up from Vesta’s stocks ensured that the replicator could and likely would be used to create more exotic food and beverages once the re-creating really began.

  Lieutenant Ranson Velth—Galen’s chief of security—and Lieutenant Commander Atlee Fife of Demeter had assisted Paris for the last several hours in making these preparations. Velth had already traded his uniform for a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and was wading along the water’s edge while Fife sat on a nearby beach chair fiddling with a tricorder.

  “Gentlemen,” Paris said, approaching them, “I believe we’re ready to face the hordes.”

  “I don’t know, Paris,” Velth said. “I think at least one more security sweep might be in order.”

  “Of what?” Paris asked.

  “Did any of our advance teams check out the water?” Velth asked. He looked serious, but his light tone couldn’t quite sell the concern.

  “They scanned it, but you’re probably right. Someone needs to give it a try.”

  “Fife,” Velth called.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” the gangly young man asked, looking up.

  “Can you give me a hand here?”

  “Of course,” Fife said, setting his tricorder aside and joining Paris at the water’s edge.

  The next thing Paris knew, Velth had grabbed him under the shoulders and was lifting him from the ground. Without missing a beat, Fife secured his legs.

  “You know what they say, Mister Paris?” Velth said good-naturedly.

  Paris struggled, knowing full well it was futile. Suddenly, he was eleven again, at a family reunion at Lake Shasta. He’d been a scrawny kid then, no match for his older cousins who had decided to make the admiral’s only son the butt of all their jokes and pranks.

  “That assaulting a superior officer is a great way to get your shore leave revoked?” Paris asked.

  “He’s right, Fife,” Velth said. “Let him go.”

  Paris could see Fife’s face. “Of course, sir. Apologies. On three?”

  They counted together, swinging Paris between them. At their mark, Paris found himself flying through the air.

  Paris had never allowed his inner child to wander too far from home. It got a lot of play these days when he was caring for Miral and Michael. It was rare, however, for men closer to his age to give rein to the younger selves, the boys they had been before the Academy and Starfleet service wore down the rough edges. As he hit the water, Paris decided he was going to enjoy making Fife and Velth pay for this.

  The water wasn’t too deep but as soon as he entered it, Paris felt for the bottom. Letting the last of the air out of his lungs and grasping for the sand, he floated beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment.

  It took fifteen seconds for Fife and Velth to begin to worry enough to start wading toward him. Paris darted forward and grabbed Fife around the ankles, dragging him under before breaking the surface to catch his breath. Fife bobbed up quickly and got his feet under him. Velth stood nearby, his hands on his knees, laughing at both of them. A simple look exchanged between Paris and Fife cemented their alliance. Both of them rose from the water, their uniforms soaked and clinging in uncomfortable places, and after a brief game of chase, they had wrestled Velth to the ground and tossed him into the water.

  Paris clambered back toward the shore, and as the water receded to about waist-deep, he bent over, breathing heavy. “When the hell did I get this out of shape?” he asked.

  Fife and Velth were treading water several meters deeper but both stared with blank faces over Paris’s shoulder.

  “What’s this,” a familiar voice asked, “the best two out of three?”

  Paris turned to see B’Elanna standing near the water’s edge holding Miral by one hand. Michael was strapped to her body in a sling.

  “Daddy, you forgot your swimsuit,” Miral chastised him.

  “I was going to leave these two with you and cover engineering for a few more hours, but now I’m not so sure,” Torres said.

  It was a struggle for Paris to pull himself and his drenched uniform the last few meters out of the water, but he managed. “No, no,” he said. “You go. I’ve got this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t I look sure?”

  Torres shook her head. “You look like you lost a bet.”

  Paris started to wrap his dripping arms around her. Then he realized that Michael would get soaked first and opted to simply lean in and kiss his wife tenderly.

  “Still love me anyway?”

  Torres patted his cheek. “Just keep them alive until I get back. I’ll bring dinner.”

  “Did you pack me a suit?”

  “It should be in the tent.”

  “Give me five minutes to change?”

  Torres nodded as Miral began to inch toward the water.

  Paris started toward their temporary encampment but turned back as he heard his daughter cry out in delight.

  “Mommy, look!”

  She stood only ankle deep in the lake, but a few meters beyond her, multicolored lights flashed over the water, forming a small rainbow. A smile bright enough to light the sky lit his daughter’s face.

  Young Tom Paris had made it his mission in life to taste every delight available from the Federation’s most exotic worlds: the fragrant fields of Artan, the soft packed snow on the mountains of Mons Tianus, the pools of tranquility on Sirangai, and an entire menu of delights on Risa. That day, Commander Tom Paris decided that the waters of an unnamed planet in the Delta Quadrant seen through his daughter’s eyes put them all to shame.

  • • •

  Kathryn Janeway hadn’t felt her mind hum with the heady anticipation of discovery in a long time. This is the problem with promotions, she decided. They never tell you this is what you’re sacrificing for the good of Starfleet, because if they did, no one would ever accept the offer.

  After spending a couple of hours walking over the surface of the massive metal plate, the command officers had broken into two groups to explore the areas directly north and south of the construct. Janeway and Chakotay took the southern forest, planning to take samples of the soil and plant life, while O’Donnell, Farkas, and Glenn set off to scout the northern plain.

  The temperature dropped slightly inside the blue forest. Janeway had half expected that the opposite would be true. According to her scans, however, despite the presence of several pools scattered ahead and the generally warm temperature, there simply wasn’t enough humidity in the atmosphere to create a tropical climate. Instead, the shade of the wide leaves that capped the trees simply blocked some of the ambient heat, creating a comfortably cool interior.

  Chakotay had paused to examine an outgrowth of long, thin red fronds that burst forth from the base of a nearby tree.

  For her part, Janeway kept turning over O’Donnell’s analysis in her mind. This isn’t how nature works. One or more of these species should have conquered the rest and thrown this entire ecosystem out of balance. But they hadn’t. Four thousand years later, these life-forms seemed designed
to simply maintain the status quo. But life, at least as she understood it, just didn’t do that.

  Except when it did.

  Watching Chakotay remove small samples of the soil and foliage around the base of the tree, Janeway thought back to the instinctive reluctance she felt a few days earlier when she thought Chakotay might have intended to propose to her. Where did that come from? It was fair to say that since their relationship had transformed from platonic to physically intimate, they’d suffered several setbacks. Trust did not seem to come as easily to either of them as their long shared history might suggest it should. That lack was at the heart of all of their recent disagreements. At first she had believed it had to do with their respective positions within the fleet. During the time that she had been presumed deceased, Chakotay had taken ownership of his command. He rightly chafed against any order or decision she made that put them in what he perceived as unnecessary jeopardy. When she’d had his job, she’d been as merciless with the admiralty as he was now. But since she was an admiral, and he knew her devotion to be no less than his, she had assumed this was one set of battles they could avoid.

  They hadn’t. He had fought her at so many steps along the way during her first months leading the fleet. He had made assumptions that wounded her deeply, partially accurate as they might have been. More important, he had either lied directly to her or withheld information that was critical to their mission when he wasn’t absolutely certain how she would respond.

  And yet, each and every time, they had found their way back to each other’s arms. Neither of them had seemed able or willing to upset the status quo. They were moving into the future together, but it was hard to see that motion as forward progress.

  Was that what she feared? Were she and Chakotay only able to maintain what they’d built together in an uneasy stasis? Was this the only future she could envision for them?

  “I don’t think these are living organisms,” Chakotay said, startling her from her reverie. “I think they are incredibly well-preserved fossils.”

  She moved to the base of the tree he was scanning with his tricorder. “Don’t they scan as life-forms?”

  He shook his head. “Inconclusive. There are traces of what might be remnants of ancient DNA. O’Donnell seemed to think these species were designed to grow incredibly slowly, but I wonder if these are actually dead.”

  “But he also said that they are critical to maintaining the ecosystem, the conversion of radiant energy and oxygen to carbon dioxide. They couldn’t do that if they were dead, could they?”

  “Maybe only a small percentage regulate the atmosphere,” Chakotay posited.

  Janeway moved to the next closest specimen, a thick blue trunk with distinct rings around it spaced roughly ten centimeters apart. She took baseline readings with her tricorder and found the same confusing results Chakotay had described, essentially lifeless life-form. Setting her phaser on its lowest setting, she cut a small square segment from the trunk six centimeters deep and placed it in a small vial for later analysis. “We’ll see what the microspectrometers back on Voyager make of it,” she began, but paused when a low crinkling sound met her ears.

  “Chakotay, do you have a SIMs beacon handy?” she asked.

  He brought her the small light and focused it on the area from which she had extracted the sample. She set the vial aside and again focused her tricorder on the damaged section. Under the bright illumination of the beacon, they watched together as small blue filaments emerged from the heart of the incision, weaving and coiling around one another until, a few minutes later, it was almost impossible to tell that there had been any damage to the organism at all.

  Janeway’s heart was racing. Without thought, she took Chakotay’s hand. He squeezed hers in return, a small gesture of comfort and commiseration.

  “Not dead,” she said softly.

  “But not living, either,” he added.

  She lifted her eyes to his, searching for a classification in which to place the minor miracle. “Zombie?” she ventured.

  A smile of genuine amusement lit his face. “That would be a new one for us.”

  “We need to try that again,” she said.

  They moved through the forest together, taking several more samples of six different strains of plant “life.” Each one was obviously a distinct species. None of them scanned as “living” until they were damaged and the repair process began. Once it was complete, they reverted to the strange “indeterminate” readings they generated when inert. Oddly, none of the samples they extracted exhibited the same regenerative properties.

  Once their work was done, they set a steady pace back toward the metal plate, brimming with hypotheses and eagerly anticipating the reports of the rest of their team.

  When they reached the edge of the “zombie forest,” as it would now forever be known, Chakotay retrieved two full canteens and they slaked their thirst gratefully. In the distance, Farkas and Glenn could be seen approaching.

  “What do we have,” Janeway said once they were met, “and where is Commander O’Donnell?”

  “About two clicks north there’s a string of low hills,” Glenn reported. “He wanted to check several unique plants growing there. Or not growing.”

  “I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I’m not sleeping on the surface of this planet tonight, or ever,” Farkas said.

  “Why not?” Chakotay asked.

  “It’s not right,” Farkas replied. “I don’t know what this place is, but it’s just not right.”

  “Several of the plants we examined have an unusual capacity for regeneration,” Glenn said. “It’s the most amazing thing.”

  “I know,” Janeway said, grinning.

  “You saw it too?” Farkas demanded.

  “I’m dying to know what O’Donnell makes of it,” Chakotay added.

  “Well, you should feel free to ask him,” Farkas said. “Myself, I just think it’s spooky.”

  “But it explains so much,” Janeway said, her thrill at their discovery not diminished in the slightest by Farkas’s fears. “This may very well be an entirely new kind of life-form.”

  “One we don’t have the slightest idea how to communicate with or tame,” Farkas said. “To my mind, that makes them dangerous.”

  “They’re just plants, Regina,” Glenn insisted. “They can’t hurt you.”

  “How do you know that? How many plants have you seen elsewhere that can repair themselves quicker than you can cut them down?”

  “None,” Glenn said. “But even on Earth there are many regenerative life-forms: worms, lizards, starfish. This isn’t an unprecedented biological phenomenon.”

  “All those things are definitely alive,” Farkas countered. “Our tricorders don’t even know what to call the grass we’re standing on right now. It all reads as inert.”

  “We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Captain,” Janeway said gently.

  “Excellent. I look forward to reading your report when you do. In the meantime, I’m going to head back to Vesta and make sure we’ve got clear transport locks on all of our away teams. I know we can’t cancel shore leave because this place gives me the willies, but I want to make damn sure our people can be pulled out the minute this goes pear shaped.”

  “A wise precaution,” Janeway agreed. “But if O’Donnell is making camp for us, at least come back and join us for dinner in a few hours.”

  “Is that an order, Admiral?”

  “No. A request. Part of the point of this exercise is for us to share our unique perspectives and insights. That will be hard to do from Vesta.”

  Farkas sighed. “Very well. Dinner. But no promises on dessert.”

  A few moments later, Farkas disappeared in the glowing cascade of the transporter effect.

  “It’s unusual, isn’t it,” Glenn said, “to see someone whose career has been as long and storied as hers so affected by a strange natural phenomenon.”

  “Don’t judge her too harshly,” Janeway suggeste
d. “We’re trained to respect our gut instincts. That’s all she’s doing.”

  “You think she’s right? Do you believe anything here poses a serious danger to us?” Chakotay asked.

  “No,” Janeway replied. “Actually, whatever this is, I don’t think it is the slightest bit interested in us.”

  “For now,” Chakotay said.

  8

  * * *

  DK-1116

  The slow and steady march from the edge of the stepwell down to the water had been challenging. Standard-issue wet suits were designed to breathe out of the water and conserve maximum body heat once submerged. Even the newest versions of these marvels were better at the second than the first.

  In the past, when suits were worn for extended durations on shore, it was a simple matter to cool down by removing the boots. Even before Ensign Vincent had provided a practical demonstration, Devi Patel understood that wasn’t an option. In fact, she had insisted that both Lasren and Jepel also wear their gloves as they made their way down the narrow ledges, just in case they needed to use their hands for balancing as they descended. By the time they came within safe jumping distance, the faces of all three were plastered with sweat and their breathing had become labored.