“Oh, no.” Neelix’s face darkened at the thought.
“He was rescued by the Starship Titan,” Harry said, relieving Neelix’s concern, “and accepted a commission there under Captain Riker.”
“And what sort of ship is Titan?” Neelix asked.
“Their primary mission is deep-space exploration,” Chakotay replied. “I understand, however, that Tuvok’s wife was asked to join the crew. I believe he is enjoying his new post tremendously.”
“Enjoying?” Tom asked.
“Not that he’d show it,” Chakotay agreed.
“I don’t know,” Harry said softly. “He lost his son when the Borg destroyed Deneva.”
Neelix’s heart broke anew at this news.
“No,” B’Elanna said softly.
“I sent him a message when I saw the casualty report,” Harry added. “But I never heard back.”
“I’m sure he appreciated it,” Neelix offered.
A somber silence descended around the table.
Rising to his feet and taking his glass in his hand, Neelix said, “May I propose a toast?”
Murmurs of assent all around were his response.
“B’Elanna told me several weeks ago of Admiral Janeway’s passing. I have to say that even now, the idea is hard to accept. I wish I could have attended the formal ceremony that honored her life, but as that was not possible, I’d like to say now that I believe in my heart that she would have been proud to see all of you still working together, even in the face of great personal tragedy.” The eyes that met his all around began to glisten. “I owe more to her than I can ever say,” Neelix went on. “Not the least of which was the opportunity to travel with you for as long as I did. I miss her,” he finished simply, further words catching in his throat.
Chakotay lifted his glass a little higher and finished Neelix’s toast for him.
“To absent friends.”
“Absent friends,” the others repeated softly as the Doctor placed a gentle hand on Neelix’s shoulder.
Once the clinking of glasses had ended, Tom said, “I’m beginning to think it was a mistake to turn this back into a private dining room.”
“And why is that?” Chakotay asked.
Tom shrugged. “I just liked it better when we could cook our own food.”
“Don’t you mean when Neelix could cook our food?” B’Elanna teased.
“Yeah, I don’t remember seeing you slaving over that stove too many times,” Harry added.
“Does Demeter have a galley?” B’Elanna wondered aloud.
“Demeter?” Neelix asked.
“It’s one of our mission-specific ships,” Chakotay explained. “It’s filled with aeroponic and hydroponic bays to grow fresh food for the fleet, and to collect botanical samples as we travel.”
“Like the ones Kes designed?” Neelix asked.
Chakotay nodded. “She would have loved it,” he added.
Neelix sighed. It seemed no matter how far they traveled, there would always be empty spaces among them that time would never erase.
Absent friends, Neelix thought again.
“Are you all right, Neelix?” Seven inquired softly.
Neelix nodded in response. “Do you have a new morale officer?” he asked.
“No,” Harry replied. “That’s one set of shoes no one but you could ever fill on this ship.”
Neelix smiled at the compliment and chose not to question its sincerity.
“I want you all to promise me something,” he finally said.
“Name it,” Chakotay replied.
“As long as you’re all here in the Delta Quadrant, I want to hear of your progress. Captain Eden has promised to make regular contact, but I want to hear from all of you as well. I have my hands full on New Talax, but even from a distance, I’ll always feel a part of this crew.”
“Consider it done,” Chakotay assured him.
“Do you have any idea where you’re headed next?” Neelix asked.
No one did until Chakotay said, “Have you ever heard of a species that call themselves the Children of the Storm?”
Neelix had to confess he hadn’t. “They don’t sound terribly friendly,” he observed.
“Who are they?” the Doctor asked.
Chakotay sighed. “I don’t want to turn this lovely evening into a mission briefing, but I have a feeling we’re about to find out.”
“Afsarah,” Counselor Cambridge greeted the captain as she stepped into his quarters. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”
Hugh had known her for almost five years. She had come to him as a patient through a referral by Admiral Montgomery shortly after her divorce from Willem Batiste had been finalized. He had seen her through the grief that attends the end of every long-term relationship, whether it had been solemnized before one’s gods or not. Once Afsarah and Hugh’s professional relationship had ended, a cordial friendship had begun. She referred people his way, and once she had joined Project Full Circle, she had been personally responsible for his posting aboard Voyager.
Any first-year counselor could have seen by the deep shadows and puffiness under her eyes and the tension she held at the corners of her full lips that Eden was deeply troubled. And any first-year counselor would probably have jumped to the wrong conclusions about the source.
On the surface, they were easy to catalogue. The stress of her position as fleet commander was the tip of the iceberg. But Hugh knew that Afsarah lived for stress. She slept only a few hours each night, preferring to fill her time with constructive labor, the more intense the better.
Some people would have been terrified by the prospect of returning to starship duty after so many years spent riding a desk on their way to a cozy admiralship, but that wasn’t really Eden. She had given up command of the Hennessy to marry Willem, and once their marriage had run its course, she made no secret of her desire to return to an active command. Her assignment to Voyager was natural after her work with Project Full Circle. Apart from Chakotay, she was the best person for the job.
The only reluctance she might have felt would have come from serving under her ex-husband. But Willem had left her long before his rather unnerving performance of a few days ago, confirming what Hugh had suspected: that the end of their marriage really did have nothing at all to do with Afsarah. Likely it had brought her closure rather than opening the scar tissues Batiste had left in her heart.
Hugh knew that none of these issues had brought her to his door this night.
So what has?
“I think it would be a good idea for us to resume our regular counseling sessions,” Afsarah said flatly.
“Then you should see my assistant about scheduling something during regular office hours,” Hugh said with a smile.
“You don’t have an assistant.”
“Yes, pity, that.” He nodded as he gestured for her to take a seat in the deep leather chair he reserved for his patients.
The captain took a few restless moments to settle herself while Hugh replicated some warm tea. This late in the evening, anything stronger would have left him sleepless. When Eden had taken a few sips and finally sat in a semblance of comfort, she met his scrutinizing gaze with less certainty than he’d ever seen in her.
“It’s your dime, Afsarah,” he suggested.
A brief smile, more like a grimace, flashed across her lips.
“You don’t think this is a good idea?” she asked.
“I serve at your pleasure,” he replied with too much irony to be taken seriously. “I’m wondering now why you don’t think this is a good idea.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
She pulled herself up a little straighter in her chair, placing both feet flat on the deck and entwining her hands around her knees.
“I don’t remember much of my childhood, until I was around five years old,” she began.
“Shame we don’t have a Ullian on board,” Hugh quipped. “Isn’t memor
y recovery one of their specialties?”
“I don’t need you to help me remember,” she went on. “I only wanted you to know.”
The counselor nodded for her to continue.
“In my earliest memory, I’m with my uncles, Jobin and Tallar. They were studying some paintings in a cave on a planet in the Beta Quadrant. I was playing in the sand, making pictures of my own. I came across some soft, colored rocks. When I crushed them, they stained my hands. I remember looking at the cave drawings and deciding they were wrong. There were supposed to be colors. So I used what I had on my hands and began defacing a priceless archaeological treasure.”
“And how much trouble were you in when your uncles discovered this early tendency toward juvenile delinquency?”
“That’s the thing. They weren’t mad at all. They made notes about what I had done, catalogued the images, and we were off to the next planet.”
“How progressive of them,” Hugh decided.
“I don’t know …” she replied.
Though Hugh was intrigued, he couldn’t imagine where this was going. That alone piqued his interest. “Remind me. Were your uncles professional archaeologists?”
Afsarah smiled faintly. “They were ‘Renaissance men.’ Tallar was a trained geneticist and both were explorers. They’d met in Starfleet, but resigned their commissions before I was born. They collected so many different kinds of information from so many worlds. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what they were looking for. Only that they loved what they did.”
“Were they your mother’s brothers?” Hugh asked.
Afsarah’s eyes thinned. “We weren’t related, and they weren’t actually brothers.”
“Ah.” Hugh nodded knowingly. “Then how did you come to be with them?”
“I don’t remember,” she went on. “They said they rescued me from my homeworld, a planet called Sbonfoyjill. They said my family had died and that one day they would take me home, but they didn’t get around to it before the time came to send me to Earth to begin my formal education. I remember being terrified to leave them on their own. I always felt they needed me. But they insisted I go to school, and I did love school once I was there. The last time I saw them I was about to enter the Academy and they were off to the Gamma Quadrant. They never came back,” she finished without a trace of self-pity.
“So they died?”
“They must have.”
“But you don’t know?”
“I know that if they were still alive, I would have heard from them. It didn’t matter that we weren’t related by blood. If Jobin had had his way, they wouldn’t have sent me to Earth. It’s the only thing I ever heard them argue about.”
“Sending you to school?”
Afsarah nodded.
“So forty-odd years later you find yourself leading a fleet of Starfleet vessels into the unknown. Three of your ships have yet to report in. Your former husband just made a spectacularly humiliating exit from all of our lives. The new captain of your flagship wasn’t fit for duty a month ago. Our first first-contact situation was a textbook example of everything you don’t want to happen when you introduce yourself to a new species and in the process we’ve managed to unleash upon the quadrant a powerful and potentially hostile force who escaped with some of our most advanced technology.” Hugh paused to let his words sink in before concluding, “And you’re worried about two men you last saw when you were fifteen?”
“It’s more than that.”
“It better be.”
“One of the first things I did when I had access to the Federation’s databases was to try and locate Sbonfoyjill.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Hugh admitted, and given the amount of work he’d done over the years comparing the mythological beliefs of thousands of species, that was saying something.
“That’s because it doesn’t exist.”
“You’re sure? Maybe you misremembered the name.”
“They made it up,” Afsarah insisted.
“That’s quite an assumption.”
“It’s an anagram. Sbonfoyjill is Jobin’s Folly.”
Hugh kicked himself mentally for not having seen that one coming.
“So you’re losing sleep these days because you don’t know where you came from? Is there a reason why a basic fact of your existence that you must have made peace with decades ago is suddenly so important to you?”
“Do you remember the artifact from Voyager’s first trip to the Delta Quadrant that I sent to you just before we launched, the one discovered by the Mikhal Travelers?”
Hugh nodded briskly.
“What did you see when you looked at it?” Eden asked, rising and crossing to the large window behind the desk in his work space.
Hugh crossed and recrossed his legs, discomfited and at a bit of a loss.
“It looked like a layman’s rendition of a starscape,” he replied. “Lovely, and crude. Like something a child, or a civilization not terribly advanced, might produce.”
“A cave painting?” Afsarah suggested.
“Maybe. I didn’t find any particular comparative pieces that might point to a specific origin. It was too similar to thousands of other images.”
Finally she turned. “That’s disappointing.”
He sat forward.
“How so?”
“It’s a map,” she replied simply. “Or part of one, anyway.”
“Does it correlate to a system in our databases?”
“The Hanara constellation.”
Hugh paused, searching his memory. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Because that’s what my people call it,” she said, turning to face him and beginning to shake. “I have no idea if anyone from the Federation has ever even laid eyes on it.”
Hugh rose. “Your people?”
She nodded.
“You are human,” he said.
“According to every Federation doctor who has ever examined me, I am,” she replied. “But ever since I learned about Jobin’s Folly, I’ve wondered.”
The counselor’s astonishment turned to concern.
“And it happened again today,” Afsarah went on.
“What happened?”
“Captain Dasht presented me with a gift he’d picked up en route to rendezvous with us, a staff inscribed with a language no one else has ever translated. It was a warning not to trespass ‘on my ancestral grounds.’”
“Where is the staff?”
“In my quarters.”
Hugh took a deep breath. “I think I understand your problem now,” he finally said. “You accepted this mission because command unwittingly offered you a chance to find out who you really are and where you come from. You received confirmation today that there’s actually a chance you might succeed. You’re worried that the closer you get to the truth, the less interested you’ll be in exploring the Delta Quadrant. You’ve just lived through the havoc Willem caused by making this mission personal, and you’re afraid you might do the same.”
“Have I come to the right place for help?” she asked.
“Most definitely.”
Chapter Six
FIFTEEN DAYS EARLIER
U.S.S. PLANCK
T’Mar stood in his vessel’s modest cargo bay, examining the containers of food Lieutenant Commander Fife had personally brought to him. The space was almost completely filled, and the ambient temperature had been lowered to preserve the food’s freshness.
“There is enough produce to last ten days,” Fife advised him, “assuming each of your crewmen eat only regulation portions at each meal. Naturally, things will go a lot further if you stretch them, perhaps in soups or stews. We’ve brought a small supply of herbs for seasoning. Most weren’t ready to harvest, but we’ve given you all we have.”
T’Mar wasn’t sure what a “regulation portion” was, but he assumed it wouldn’t be an issue. “We really appreciate your efforts, Commander,” he replied.
“Although there is a stock of legu
mes, you’ll want to continue the protein supplements,” Fife went on. “Within the next few months, we’ll also be able to distribute kala eggs, an excellent source of protein, but our production has been slower than we anticipated.”
T’Mar didn’t know what a kala was, but if it needed a little time to get settled in its new home before it started producing eggs, he certainly understood.
“You have livestock on board as well?” he asked.
“The kala is a root, native to Kressari. It is a happy coincidence that its fruit bears a striking resemblance in form and consistency to the eggs most birds produce on other worlds.”
“Ahh.” T’Mar nodded, now happier than he’d been at first that they’d be skipping the “eggs” for now.
“Do you require any additional information about preparing the produce?” Fife asked.
“I’ve assigned four of my crewmen, who all claim to be skilled chefs, to oversee our food preparation,” T’Mar replied. “It should be a nice change of pace for them for the next several days.”
Fife nodded.
T’Mar was about to dismiss him for transport back to Demeter when Lieutenant Tregart called out over the comm.
“Captain T’Mar, please report to the bridge.”
The stress in his voice was unmistakable.
“On my way,” T’Mar replied, nodding to Fife as he matched his steps to his words. “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”
“Alien vessels have been sighted and are approaching our position.”
T’Mar’s brisk walk broke into a run. “Transport our guests from Demeter back to their ship immediately,” he ordered. “How many contacts are there?”
He was stunned by Tregart’s answer.
U.S.S. QUIRINAL
Lieutenant Phinnegan Bryce was supposed to be asleep. He’d pulled two extra duty shifts in as many days, working on a special project he’d been assigned by his chief, Lieutenant Ganley.
When the fleet had made their first slipstream jump of any real distance from the Alpha Quadrant to the terminus of the Beta and Delta Quadrants, all vessels had reported the presence of microfractures in the benamite crystals that powered the slipstream drive. Quirinal’s weren’t initially as severe as some of the others, but their journey deep into the Delta Quadrant had caused the size and quantity of the fractures to increase significantly. Ganley estimated that they might have to tap their benamite reserves before they rejoined the fleet unless the slipstream specialists on Phinn’s team could find a solution in the next two weeks. The use of the reserves would shorten Quirinal’s stay in the Delta Quadrant by more than eight months, and Phinn was determined to make sure it didn’t come to that.
Star Trek: Voyager: Children of the Storm Page 7
