The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

by Una McCormack

  I’ve talked to other crew members about this whole episode, and I know we were all shaken at the extent to which some of these memories still seem real to us. A huge shock to your sense of self, and one or two have reported that they sometimes still wonder whether or not they are inside a simulation. Well, that way lies madness, I think; you have to proceed as if what’s going on around you is real. But the thought of how the ship was taken over this way gave me many sleepless nights. The holodeck was a great solace to us across the years, but also proved an Achilles heel on many occasions. Some people cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and sometimes, our own daydreams worked against us. There was one occasion, however, where our encounter with a simulation led to genuine rapprochement, and this time with a species we had real reason to fear.

  I cannot describe how uncanny it was to encounter, on a space station so far from home, a near perfect recreation of Starfleet Academy. Yet there it was—up to and including our beloved Boothby, friend and mentor to so many of us during our time as cadets. I sent Chakotay and Tuvok to investigate, and they learned that this was a simulation created by Species 8472. This added significantly to our alarm: what could a species so terrifying that even the Borg withdrew in the face of them, want with our Academy? I ordered Seven to prepare warheads using Borg nanoprobes; I hoped, too, for a diplomatic solution.

  Chakotay’s investigations were uncovered, and Species 8472 were alerted to the fact that at least some of the humans within their simulation were exactly what they appeared to be. Chakotay was captured and interrogated by an individual who appeared exactly like Boothby; he described to me later how disconcerting this was—to know that behind this familiar, beloved, trusted face lay an intelligence of which we knew so very little. He learned from this simulated Boothby that Species 8472, having encountered us, was now afraid that Starfleet intended to invade fluidic space. The simulation had been created to prepare them for further encounters with us. I, in turn, was terrified that this simulation was a prelude to invasion—a training ground for Species 8472 before they took on the Alpha Quadrant for real. For a while, this seemed a dangerous and unresolvable stalemate. I wondered, however, if there was something of the real Boothby in this simulation and tried to speak to it with some of the warmth and trust I would have extended to the real man. It seemed to work. We traded information on Borg nanoprobes for expertise that Species 8472 had on genetic modification. We moved on—the truce holding, and I for one slept a little easier in my bed that night, knowing that an understanding had been reached with a truly terrifying species.

  But wishing, truly wishing, that the simulation had been real, and that somehow, we had transported all that long way back to the Academy. All that long way home. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or so they say; I would say too that a moment of presence makes absence just a little harder to bear.

  * * *

  As the fourth year of our time in the Delta Quadrant drew toward its end, I found myself taking stock of our situation. We had all, more or less, come to terms with our life here, even those of us, like Harry, who were still hoping that our return would be sooner rather than later. We had found ways to live with the distances and the absences; we had found solace and friendship in each other. And then, quite unexpectedly, this equilibrium was disrupted. Seven of Nine, working on our sensors, had expanded their range significantly, and discovered an extensive relay-station network. By tapping into this network, she’d been able to locate a Starfleet ship on the very edge of the Alpha Quadrant, the U.S.S. Prometheus. This was not a ship with which I was familiar, and no wonder: this was a secret experimental warship under development for the war against the Dominion. Who the hell were they? What the hell was this war? And what was the significance of Romulan noninvolvement? Given our position, these were hardly questions to which we could readily gain answers. What we could do—or the Doctor could do on our behalf—was send news of us to the Alpha Quadrant. We temporarily transferred the Doctor to the sickbay of the Prometheus, and, speaking directly to Starfleet Command, he told them that Voyager was still very much intact, and that her crew was trying to find their way home.

  I won’t forget that conversation with the Doctor in a hurry. So much news, all at once. Learning that we had been declared dead more than a year ago and thinking about how dreadful an experience that must have been for all of our friends and family. My poor Mark, thinking himself widowed a second time; my poor mother, the loss of her husband compounded by the news of the loss of their older child… No, soon they would both know. All of our families and friends would know. We were alive and well and trying our very best to come home. And more than that, we knew now that Starfleet was working on our behalf. They would be working to bring us home, however they could, as quickly as they could. Most of all, they had a message for us: You’re no longer alone.

  It was a great privilege of my life to be able to pass that message on to my crew: You’re no longer alone… I watched as the ramifications of this sank into their faces. There were tears: of relief and joy, and a few tears at the thought of what families must have suffered, believing that we were dead. Harry was almost beside himself with worry: I think he spent much of the next week quizzing the Doctor about what he’d seen and what had been said. Poor Harry, he went through torments thinking about Libby and his parents having to come to terms with his death, and then the shock of learning we were still out there. “But will she know that I’m still on board?” he kept saying. “Will she know that I’m okay?”

  I had a responsibility to keep spirits up, however, and I kept myself all smiles and laughter while I was among the crew. But I’ll not deny that when I was back in my quarters that evening, I was close to shedding a few tears of my own at that message. The loneliness: that had been by far the worst thing for me. The fact that, ultimately, Kathryn Janeway was captain of Voyager, and that here in the Delta Quadrant the buck stopped with me. Nobody would arrive in the nick of time to pull us out of any desperate situation in which we found ourselves. But this small communication reminded me that I was part of something greater: I was part of Starfleet. Contact had been established. Whatever happened next, whatever trials they were undergoing back in the Alpha Quadrant, I knew that some small part of this fine organization, some of those brilliant minds, were now at work on behalf of me and my crew. Captain Kathryn Janeway was no longer alone. Knowing this made it truly possible for me to bring my crew and my ship back home. I took a moment to be proud of myself—to acknowledge how far we had come, how far we had brought us—and then it was back to work. Miles to go before we sleep.

  * * *

  This contact was quickly followed by a transmission from Starfleet Command via the network, but after a tantalizing few words the transmission ended. Naturally this became our priority, although this was not without complications, given that the hostile Hirogen controlled the array via which the message was sent, and were intent on using this to hunt down our ship, and that our ship was shaken by gravimetric forces coming from the array. Nevertheless, we had to get closer, and were soon able to download the message from Starfleet Command. It was seriously degraded, but I set Seven of Nine to work to get what she could from it. Letters from home. What we had all been longing for. Oh, be careful what you wish for…

  Shock after shock. The devastating news for Chakotay and B’Elanna and others that the Maquis had been wiped out, the Cardassians and their allies from the Gamma Quadrant (that shadowy Dominion of which we’d heard) triumphant, and their friends either dead or in prison. It’s a measure of how far we had all come that, as far as I know, the reaction of all the non-Maquis crew was only shock and sympathy for our friends and colleagues. Whatever our thoughts about the rights and wrongs of the Maquis, we knew that those people who had chosen to resist the terms of the treaty and fight for their worlds had on the whole done so as a matter of conscience. Their resistance had not deserved to meet such a brutal end. And it was terrifying, also, to think that the Cardassia
ns had made an alliance that was destabilizing the fragile peace that had been constructed along the border, and were, if we understood what we were reading, on the warpath, and in the ascendancy. I tried to put these thoughts aside: much as I would have liked to have been serving alongside my fellow officers in whatever conflict now threatened the Federation, I was too far from home to be able to make any difference whatsoever. But the news was troubling, the uncertainty unhappy.

  For others, the news was only good: we were able to celebrate the new addition to Tuvok’s family, and all of us were glad to see how happy Harry was to have some contact with his people at last. Harry’s regret was these communications were hardly likely to be a regular occurrence. There wasn’t going to be a weekly mailshot, bringing his family up to date on his news, hearing from them what they had been up to. Poor Harry. For Tom Paris, meanwhile, the lack of a message was its own relief. Tom still had a way to go before he could feel free of the burden of his father.

  As for me… The good news was that Mollie was thriving, and so were her pups…

  But Mark was lost to me, forever. My handsome fiancé, the first man that I had been able to imagine spending my life with… As I had on some level feared, a second widowhood had been too much for him, and he made the wise choice—the choice that he had been forced to make once before—and moved on. I think what was hardest to bear was how narrowly we had missed each other. He had remarried only four months ago… But that was not a useful way to think. It was more than a year since we had been declared dead, and he would have made himself move on at that time. I did not, and could not, begrudge him this. Perhaps even if we had made contact, I would have told him to move on. Seventy years is a long time to wait for someone to come home from a work trip… He wanted to marry; he wanted a home life, and he wanted children. I knew this. I would not have made him wait for me… but pretending that he was had been solace. Now this fantasy was no longer available for me. I was alone.

  “You’re hardly alone,” Chakotay told me, echoing that message from Starfleet that only a little while before had given me such comfort. I didn’t talk to anyone beyond Chakotay, although I found that I missed Kes all over again. I would have taken some time to sit with her, I thought, to tell her how I felt. But she was gone. How much we had gained, in those few short weeks. But how much we had lost already. How many others on my crew must have gone through the same experience? There’s no place like home—but even home cannot stay the same. What would we find, should we ever get there?

  CHAPTER TEN

  A LONG WAY FROM HOME—2375–2376

  I HAVE BEEN TOLD ON MANY OCCASIONS THAT I TAKE DECISIONS on behalf of my crew that they would not take on their own behalf, and I must confess that there is some truth in this. But the fact is that while we were in the Delta Quadrant, I could not afford to lose the expertise of a single person. If the crew fell below a certain number, then Voyager was no longer sustainable as a working ship. I would not be able to staff her; I would not be able to bring the people remaining to me home. There are occasions, therefore, where I put the well-being of the whole above individual wishes. I know B’Elanna has a few words to say on this subject; so might the Doctor, if asked. I shall leave others to judge.

  In B’Elanna’s case, I made a call about saving the life of a necessary member of my crew, someone vital to the continued operation of Voyager and therefore the likelihood of our reaching home, rather than respecting her own wishes. We had responded to a distress call and found a ship containing a single, nonhumanoid lifeform, which we beamed directly to sickbay. This creature— which was scorpion-like in appearance—attacked B’Elanna, wrapping itself around her body, and piercing her with its “sting.” The effect was to create a biochemical bond between them—but the prognosis was not good for B’Elanna, and the Doctor was not able to find a way to separate them that would not result in her death. Searching the ship’s data banks, he learned about work conducted in this area by a Cardassian exobiologist, Crell Moset, and he programmed the holodeck to recreate Moset. Together, they set to work to find a cure for B’Elanna.

  Nothing is ever this simple, however, and word about the Doctor’s simulation of Moset passed around the ship. You will recall that I had one or two Bajoran crew on board Voyager, and one of these, Ensign Tabor, learning about Moset, confronted the Doctor in sickbay. Moset was notorious on Bajor; his work had involved experiments on thousands of Bajoran prisoners. Tabor wanted the work to stop—and, unfortunately, B’Elanna, overhearing the conversation, and, as a former Maquis sympathetic to the plight of Bajor, agreed with him. She did not want to be cured by any procedure developed by Moset, simulation or not. I understood her scruples, but I could not let her die. But I deliberated hard. The historical comparisons from our own human history were hard to put out of my mind—Thomas Parran and the Tuskegee experiments, or Joseph Mengele’s work. I understood both Tabor’s distress, and B’Elanna’s scruples. But I could not let her die. We removed the alien—and were able to send it back to its own kind—but B’Elanna was very angry with me. We deleted the Moset program, and I remain uneasy about the choice I made to use the procedure that the Moset simulation and the Doctor devised together—but I do not, and I cannot, regret saving the life of B’Elanna Torres.

  There were other occasions where I had cause to reverse my initial decisions. One such situation arose when the shuttle of an away team comprised of Ensign Kim, Ensign Jetal, and the Doctor came under attack. The Doctor managed to force the alien out of their craft, and fled back to Voyager, but by this point the unknown weapon used on them had sent Kim and Jetal into synaptic shock. Back on Voyager, the condition of both ensigns became critical, and the Doctor had time only to operate on one (nobody else was capable of performing the surgery). He chose Kim, and Jetal died. Nobody blamed him for this; absolutely nobody. He made a choice, and he saved a life. But the Doctor began to blame himself. He became obsessed with his choice, trying to determine why he had picked one ensign over the other. He entered what we could only call a feedback loop, with his ethical and cognitive subroutines at odds with each other. It manifested as obsessional thoughts, over and over, as he tried and failed to reconcile the decision to treat one over the other. He was in danger of breaking down completely. I made the decision to erase his memories of the circumstances of Jetal’s death, and, indeed, of the ensign herself.

  What can I say? I needed a functioning medic. These events in and of themselves had shown how close to the wire we were: there was nobody else—not a living flesh-and-blood person—able to perform the surgery that the Doctor had performed to save Kim’s life. That alone showed how vulnerable we were in some areas of expertise. I could not afford to have my only medic out of action.

  Well, the repressed invariably returns, and, after several months, after we had put the whole unhappy series of events behind us, the Doctor, conducting routine checkups, learned that Kim had undergone surgery—surgery which only he could have performed. By this time, of course, we had taken on a new crew member, Seven of Nine, and, with her customary combination of doggedness and technical acuity, she uncovered the deleted files, confronting the Doctor with memories of an ensign whom he did not know. I tried once again to delete them… but the Doctor was ahead of me. I explained, in general terms, what had happened, and that the deletions had been necessary to prevent the Doctor from a complete breakdown. To his mind, however, he had been operated on without his consent. I was prepared to do the same again— until Seven of Nine came to speak to me.

  It’s humbling, to say the least, to have your ethics called out by a Borg drone. But it was hard to refute Seven’s arguments. If the Doctor was primarily a machine, she said, then to some extent so was she. When would I decide that I had the right to operate on her? I grasped her point immediately. Seven had been operated on without her consent; that little girl Annika Hansen had been transformed into a drone. How did this differ? How did I differ from the Borg who had eradicated her personhood? She left me struggli
ng to see how. This is how Seven of Nine changed us. I had made this decision to eradicate the Doctor’s memories before her arrival; with her on board, there was no question of doing the same again. It would have made a mockery of our attempts to humanize her. Seven told me that despite all the pain she had undergone, both mentally and physically, in her attempt to regain her individuality, she would not change a thing.

  What course could I take, after that? I had to let the Doctor find his own way and live with the consequences. We restored his memories, and for two weeks we sat with him, as he wrestled with the choice he had made. I took on the bulk of this: this was my responsibility, after all. I listened to him repeat himself, over and over, and I despaired that he would ever find a way through. What finally drew him back was when he saw that I was ill. The solution to his pain was to see the pain of someone else and make a move to alleviate it. I guess we could call it compassion. I was sent off to bed (I had a headache and a fever), and the Doctor… I suppose he upgraded. He transcended his programming, yet again. All thanks to Seven of Nine.

  I reflect often upon this decision of mine. Nothing in my Ethics of Command classes had prepared me for a Borg who had a greater sense of individual needs than I did, or a hologram that was in every meaningful sense alive. Our mission: to seek out new life. I am grateful to Seven for giving me the chance to make amends, for giving me the chance to change my mind. Recognizing our mistakes is part of what makes us human too, I guess.