Strange New Worlds IV

by Dean Wesley Smith

Kathryn gave Chakotay a worried look. The jarring chime of her door almost made her jump.

  Without saying anything, Kathryn walked toward the hall. Could they have traced Chakotay here already? Of course they could have. This was Starfleet they were talking about.

  Hoping it was merely one of her returning crew members, she opened the door with a resolute jerk. No one was there. Only the last rays of the sun glowing red on the horizon and the slowly encroaching darkness. Puzzled, she started to close the door, but her eye was caught by a fluttering pinkness on her step. Bending closer she discovered an abundant bouquet of wild flowers tied clumsily with a pink ribbon. Relieved and puzzled, she bent to retrieve them and returned to the two men who stood tensely by the fireplace.

  “Flowers,” she said superfluously. They looked as puzzled as she was at this incongruous arrival. “Wait, there’s a card.” She pulled a rumpled piece of paper from the center of the colorful array.

  “Welcome home,” she read aloud from the childish scrawl.

  “One of the children we saw?” asked Chakotay. “But how did they know you’d been away?”

  Kathryn wasn’t listening.

  “Chakotay,” she said. “That wine tasted very familiar. I didn’t notice. What kind was it?”

  He grabbed the bottle and peered at the label. “It’s what we had last night—Picard vineyards 2363.”

  “We all woke up in pleasant circumstances, in the kind of circumstances we’d dreamed about, perhaps talked about. I woke up on a beautiful day, in my own home. Immediately I’m greeted by my adorable Molly and then by Mark. I find my favorite dress in the closet, even my favorite wine in the wine rack.” Chakotay nodded but he still wasn’t quite following her.

  “I need to find those children,” she said and turned toward the door. A flash of white light filled the room at her last words.

  “Kathy, how wonderful to see you.” Q tried to give her a hug but she pushed him roughly away.

  “How could you do this to us, Q?”

  “I haven’t done anything to you, my dear.” Q looked offended. “Do you think I would do anything this crude?” He looked around. “So this is your humble abode.” Noticing Mark and Chakotay, he raised his eyebrows. “Both of them, Kathy? Chuckles and Mark? You naughty girl.”

  Kathryn ignored him. “If you didn’t do this, who did?”

  Q sighed. “It’s so trying being a parent these days.” He picked up a wineglass. “Almost as trying as living with his mother.” He frowned. “But back to you.” He offered her a glass of wine and stepped closer. “You look enchanting—out of uniform.”

  “Leave her alone, Q.”

  Chakotay took a threatening step toward him. “Oh, take it easy, Mr. Facial Art. Let me have a little fun with her. Obviously you never do.” For a moment the three men seemed to square off in some ancient pattern of male rivalry. Kathryn ignored them.

  “Are you saying your son did this, Q? Where is he? And why didn’t you put a stop to this?”

  “Kathy, Kathy, Kathy. Children have to learn by doing. You can’t tell them everything. Besides”—he almost looked chagrined—“he was very sneaky about it. He is brilliant, you know. Takes after his old man. And his heart was in the right place, Kathy. He’s heard so much about his godmother, how you saved the continuum, how you are the most beautiful, most intelligent, most utterly charming female …” He had managed to take her hand while he spoke and had started to kiss it when they were surprised by a boyish voice.

  “Dad.” The dark-haired boy who had waved to Kathryn that morning poked his head out of the kitchen doorway. “Would Mom approve of that?”

  Q dropped Kathryn’s hand immediately. “Son,” he said,

  “where have you been? Come on in and meet everyone.” The boy stepped shyly forward as Kathryn gave him a big smile of encouragement.

  “Come in, dear. It’s all right,” she said.

  “I was merely explaining to your godmother how much we all adore her, especially your mother,” Q said quickly as the boy entered.

  Kathryn sat on the couch and patted the space next to her. The boy grinned and came to sit beside her.

  “I love the flowers, you know,” she confided. He beamed.

  “I tried to fix everything.” He looked up at her and his dark eyes glowed. “I came to watch you on Voyager. Only Dad said I wasn’t to bother you. He said something about not wanting me to hang around inferior species where I could pick up bad habits.”

  Q cleared his throat and lifted his eyebrows.

  “But I felt sorry for you. And like Dad said, you couldn’t do much for yourself, so I thought maybe I could help you.”

  “Thank you, my dear …” She hesitated and glanced at Q, not knowing the boy’s name.

  Q shrugged. “Well, it’s Q, of course.”

  “Ah, yes, my dear Q.” She took the boy’s hand. “I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. But …” She paused. “I’m afraid it’s just not possible to do this… .”

  The boy looked at her questioningly. “That’s what Dad’s always saying. He say it’s not allowed to change the course of your ‘dustiny.’ I’m not sure what ‘dustiny’ is—he says it has something to do with you being made of dust. He says it’s a rule, but I don’t understand what’s wrong with it. And after all, like he says, you’re just humans.”

  Kathryn gave Q a long, cool look. “I see. Well, as much as I hate to admit it, I think your father’s right on this one. You see, if you fix one thing for one person, it could drastically change someone else’s life. Maybe there’s a reason we’re in the Delta Quadrant. If you bring us home now, we’ll never be able to accomplish the possibilities that await us there. We humans have come to believe that we must work with what we’re given, whether it be by accident or chance or fate, and do the best we possibly can with that. If we could just fix anything bad that happened we’d never know what true courage is or honor or accomplishment. We’d never learn the lessons of failure or how to deal with consequences. I know it’s hard to understand, but it makes us stronger, and I believe, makes us better human beings, to forge our own way in the universe. We are responsible for our own actions, and we create our own destiny.”

  “I told you she talks a lot.” Q shook his head.

  Kathryn put her arm around the boy. “You know what I like best of all about what you did for us?” He looked up at her questioningly. “The flowers. I’d like to keep those if I may, but I hope you’ll understand if I ask you to return us all now—back to Voyager.”

  The boy looked pleased. “Back to your ‘dustiny’?”

  She laughed. “Yes, back to our ‘dustiny.’”

  The door chime almost coincided with Q’s warning. “I think we’d better move quickly if we want to avoid that particular unpleasantness.” They understood. Kathryn rose and went quietly to Mark. She kissed his cheek and then looked into his eyes for a long moment. “I’m ready,” she said. The flash made her blink. When she opened her eyes she reached for support and felt the soft texture of her captain’s chair, and through it, Voyager’s soothing hum.

  Tom was at the helm, Tuvok and Kim at their posts, Chakotay beside her as always. They turned to her in silent amazement. Taking her seat calmly and deliberately, she let out a long breath.

  “Report, Mr. Kim,” she said firmly.

  “All crew on board, Captain. Systems functioning normally.”

  “Plot a course for the Alpha Quadrant, Lieutenant.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Chakotay bent forward and gently picked something up from the deck in front of them.

  “I believe these are yours,” he said as he handed her the bouquet of wild flowers tied with a pink ribbon. A crumpled card fell into her lap. “Welcome home,” it said.

  [SECOND PRIZE]

  Shadows, in the Dark

  Ilsa J. Bick

  Seven killed herself on the surface of a planet no one had ever heard of. She did it the way she did everything else: extremely well. It
took her thirteen seconds, and four were gone before anyone understood what was happening. By then, it was too late.

  Chakotay felt it first. His life leaking away, he dragged himself to her body. Through a film that grayed her vision, in eyes not her own, she saw his face, visible through the clear visor of his suit. Blood frothed from his lips, and his features were strange, twisted, alien. For a brief, precious fraction of a second, she thought she had waited too long: that she had failed and Chakotay would die anyway. But then she saw the tears. His fingers reached for her, gripping shoulders that were not hers, as she stared through eyes wholly alien. She saw his hands and knew that he held her, but the contact was faint, insubstantial, like an afterimage. A shadow. Strange, that within the body she was killing, Seven couldn’t feel the bite of the rocks she knew lay beneath this shell of flesh that was not flesh. Not that the body wasn’t going without a fight: it heaved and bucked, and Seven, dying, grappled for control. Methodically, inexorably, she killed it by degrees, without pity or remorse.

  Die.

  Chakotay was screaming, but his voice was weak, because he hadn’t the strength: “Seven! Seven! No, don’t! There must be another way…. Captain, Captain, can you hear me? You’ve got to stop her, you’ve got to …!”

  Seven seconds. Six.

  Crouched beside her, at the helm, Janeway was shouting: “Seven! Stop what you’re doing! Stop … Doctor, dammit, do something! Get Tuvok to hold on to her …!”

  And Tuvok, in what remained of her mind, his thoughts urgent, insistent: Seven listen to me, listen only to me. You must stop, you do not understand, you must …

  And Ensign Kim: “Doc!”

  And the Doctor: “I see it, Mr. Kim! Beam her to sickbay … now!”

  “Initiating transport!”

  Janeway, her face wild: “No! Wait!”

  A hum, and the space around Seven rippled and broke apart in the transporter beam, but they were all screaming—all the voices of her mind, in tongues alien and familiar—to stop, stop, stop what she was doing, that she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t die, she couldn’t….

  One second left. A half.

  The air shimmered. Seven let out her last breath in a long sigh, because it was so beautiful.

  “I must,” she said. “I must.”

  And then she did.

  It was eight hours before Seven killed herself.

  Chakotay was dreaming, not pleasantly. He didn’t know he was dreaming either, which was even worse, because the dream was particularly bad. Trapped in his dream, Chakotay lived the scene over and over again: the pale oval of the woman’s face twisting in horror, the lurch of the ship as the enemy opened fire, a blinding flash. That peculiar scream metal makes when it ruptures and the rush of air being sucked into space. And then, pain. Darkness.

  Then Seven said his name again, more loudly than before, and he awoke. At first, he thought he was still dreaming, because he was lying down. Then he heard the sound of his breaths hissing in his ears and realized that he was flat on his back, in an environmental suit, staring through a ten-meter gash that cracked the ship’s hull from stem to stern, like the shell of a boiled egg.

  Stunned, Chakotay squinted, blinked against the fog clouding his brain. The space outside the ship swam before his eyes, as if he were peering through flawed glass. Something was wrong with space. It seemed—the word jumped into his mind—alive. The space twisted and flowed, like seaweed caught in the rush of a retreating sea.

  Startled, he flinched—an involuntary spasm of his head and arms—and instantly a wave of vertigo washed over him, bringing a violent surge of nausea in its wake. His head spun. Closing his eyes against that strange space, Chakotay swallowed convulsively. His stomach lurched. God, no … he couldn’t afford to vomit into his suit. He tried taking a deep breath, but sharp, razor-edged pains lanced through his left side. He moaned. His chest. Something was wrong with his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Maybe he was running out of air. What was going on? Chakotay fought back a rising tide of panic. His legs felt dead, heavy … were they broken? But he didn’t know; he couldn’t see, because the metal frame of his seat pinned him at the waist, like a butterfly to a specimen board.

  Trapped. Chakotay’s skin went icy. He was alone, trapped in this ship, and he would run out of air…. Chakotay struggled against the impulse to cry out. His tongue worked around a metallic taste, like crushed aluminum, and when another spasm of pain shot through his chest, he coughed out a spray of bright red blood.

  The blood scared him. So did the ripping sensation in his chest. He probed his mouth with his tongue but couldn’t feel anything obvious, nothing torn or slashed. But the tearing sensation gave way to a dull sense of heaviness deep within his chest, on the left: not a pain now but a pressure, like a bruise.

  Chakotay tried ordering his thoughts. Everything was wrong: the space, this ship. Even this—he patted the suit—wasn’t Starfleet-issue. He craned his neck to the side and tried to make out the instrument panels, but the explosive decompression had blown his flight seat into a back bay.

  And with that, he remembered.

  On cue, Seven’s voice came again, dispassionate, succinct. “The alien was killed in the explosive decompression. You are extremely fortunate the concussive force threw you against a bulkhead, and the speed of your descent provided enough inertia to keep you there.”

  Chakotay’s head sagged back against the deck. He remembered now. The neural link, effected as a precaution by the Doctor before Chakotay had gone on board the alien’s ship, made it seem to Chakotay that Seven spoke aloud, so he answered in turn, because it was more natural. “How bad is it?”

  To his horror, his voice quavered, like that of a dying man. A sudden involuntary spasm rippled through his body, and he began to shudder, uncontrollably. Shock, he told himself, you’re going into shock.

  If Seven felt his fear—which, of course, she did—she didn’t comment. “You’ve fractured four ribs on your left side. Fortunately, the lung is contused, not punctured. There is evidence of internal bleeding in your upper abdomen, most likely the result of a crush injury caused when you made contact with the bulkhead.”

  He was going to ask her about coughing up blood, but he didn’t, because he didn’t want to know what it meant. Besides, he reasoned, Seven must know, and if she chose not to comment … well, so much the better.

  Instead he asked, “What about my legs? I can’t move my legs.”

  “They are undamaged, merely trapped beneath the seat. You should be able to cut yourself free using the welding tools aboard the alien’s ship. They’re in a storage bin, approximately one-half meter away, thirty degrees from center to your left. Judging from your current position in the craft, you can reach them, if you stretch.”

  She offered the suggestion so dispassionately that Chakotay had to laugh, something he instantly regretted as the raw ends of his fractured bones grated against one another, like shards of broken glass scraping over sandpaper.

  “Try not to make sudden movements,” Seven warned, unnecessarily.

  “Right,” Chakotay grunted. Instinctively, he tucked his left elbow down into his side and felt the muscles along his rib cage tense. Panting shallowly, he wet his lips, tasting salt.

  Finally, when he could speak again, he asked, “How do you know all this?”

  “The environmental suit the alien gave you is biomechanical, with synaptic-actuated command internodes. In essence, your brain controls its systems—mixture, temperature, and limited sensor capabilities—and that, in turn, allows me to access the suit’s database via a focused data stream channeled through my interlink node.”

  “How extensive is the database? Can you help me pilot the ship?” As soon as he said it, he realized how futile that was.

  Seven confirmed it with her reply. “Irrelevant, Commander. The ship is not spaceworthy. Further, we’re not certain where you are.”

  “You mean, you can’t get a fix on the ship?”

  “Not precise
ly. You are …” She hesitated, uncharacteristically, and it seemed to Chakotay that she was receiving instructions before returning with, “We don’t believe you are in the immediate vicinity.”

  “Oh. How far away am I? Am I in the same sector?”

  “No. That is, we’re not sure.”

  It still didn’t click. “Did I go through a wormhole? A slipstream?”

  “No.”

  He could have thought of more possibilities, but he was too tired. “What then?”

  “As far as we can determine, there was a propulsive surge, most likely created when the attacking vessel fired a chroniton-quantum torpedo. The surge caused a momentary yet violent energy influx into the ship’s subatomic structure. At the same time and perhaps as a result of the same pulse, a dark-matter baryonic mine exploded. Its energies were added to the surrounding space. This combined to push the craft’s relative acceleration. We estimate your speed approached, or exceeded, warp ten.”

  “That’s impossible, at least not without a transwarp conduit.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “For how long?”

  “Point-eight nanoseconds: long enough to pierce the space-time fabric in the immediate vicinity and send you … elsewhere. Out of our space and into another. Parallel space perhaps, or a simultaneity.”

  Chakotay digested all this. In the blink of an eye, the ship had absorbed so much energy that the vessel’s molecular structure—and time—had altered. He might be in another time or a different dimension, with no way of gauging how far he was from Voyager, or if distance still meant something here. He let his gaze roam about the ruined ship. Wherever “here” meant. He thought about the fact that he was breathing canned air and tried remembering if he’d seen another suit in the equipment locker.

  Seven answered the unspoken question. “There was, but that section of the ship is gone.”

  Chakotay exhaled, very slowly. “Okay,” he said, though it was anything but.

  Then he thought of something. “Wait a minute. I can still hear you.”

  He felt a surge of hope. “When we went into fluidic space after Species 8472, you lost contact with the collective. Seven, that has to mean you can gain access to this space.”