VOY - String Theory 2 - Fusion (c) Read online

  “It’s possible we’ve had an intruder on board,”

  Janeway said.

  “B’Elanna discovered that the artifact given to me by the Monorhans when we left their planet, the Key to Gremadia, is actually made up of living sporocystian remnants. They are currently resonating, similar to the way the Caretaker’s remains did when we encountered Suspiria. We haven’t ruled out the possibility that another Nacene might be nearby.”

  “That adds a decidedly unsavory piece to the puzzle,” the Doctor observed.

  “I agree. Keep me informed. I’ll be on the bridge,” the captain said, following him out of his office.

  The Doctor halted in their approach to Naomi’s biobed, where Phoebe stood over the girl. Turning to Janeway, he asked, “Captain, who is this woman?”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke, Doctor? You know my sister,” Janeway replied, gesturing toward Phoebe.

  “Captain…I…” the Doctor stammered, and blinked out of existence.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2005 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

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  For David,

  without whom I would not be possible

  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good

  belongs to you.

  —WALT WHITMAN, “Song of Myself”

  Prologue

  She should have insisted that her personal cabin contain a window. It would have been simple enough to add to the design of the ship, and her children would have enthusiastically seized any opportunity to provide their rih-hara-tan with the most extravagant comfort, let alone a small portal to the stars.

  Instead, her last living glimpse of the constellations of the Monorhan system, intricate designs she had been taught to name almost as soon as she could speak, was stolen as she had been all but carried by her shi-harart, Naviim, and three terrified harans through the dank, lifeless corridors of a forsaken alien space city into the docking bay where her ship was berthed. The sadness of this realization didn’t hit with full force until she found herself locked securely in her cabin aboard the vessel she had christened Betasis twelve…could it have been only twelve?…short rotations ago, when this catastrophic journey had begun.

  “Oweninum’s Belt,” she whispered to the darkness. On the homeworld, this cluster of seven stars had shown brightest in the final days of the harvest. Weeks later, the first crystals of wantain would blanket the fields in luminescent temporary death, until they were melted away by the timeless dance of Monorha’s two suns, Protin and her partner, the Blue Eye, at the dawn of the planting season.

  She activated her silent cabin’s internal lights with a thought and turned her attention to the hand-painted star chart that covered the wall behind her personal command console. So well attuned was the Betasis’s organic circuitry to her mind and body that the dimness she now traversed as she crossed from the entrance alcove to the magnificent rendering of a thousand stars seemed to eerily echo her despair. Or perhaps her ship simply knew, as she did, that the task she was now determined to complete was best accomplished in the faintest hint of light.

  “Is this, truly, the price of heresy?” she asked, gently caressing each of the seven stars of Oweninum’s Belt that had been lovingly re-created by her ati-harat. It would be her final question of the Blessed All-Knowing Light, though she was uncertain if she still had the right to speak His name, let alone address Him in prayer.

  The library of scrolls sat along the far wall, swathed in rich and ornately woven casings. Technically the property of the entire tribe, they were traditionally entrusted to the care of the rih-hara-tan for her private study. The original twenty-seven letters of Dagan that had been the hope of her people for countless generations, and the inspiration behind this final doomed voyage into the unknown, rested in a place of honor among them.

  Steeling herself against the wave of nauseating rage that threatened to overwhelm her with thoughts of Dagan and his cursed visions, thoughts that would easily transform her into a frantic-braying kuntafed if given leash, she forced herself to draw a ragged complete breath and reached for the scroll of Jocephar. There she would find the invocation to meditation required to begin the ritual. She was certain that what she was about to attempt hadn’t been contemplated in Jocephar’s time. But if anything of her or her people was to survive the next few hours, she had to try. She had miserably failed them once. She would not permit herself to do it again.

  This ritual of transference was meant to be the final gift from one rih-hara-tan to the next. It gave the tribe a seamless continuity as the wisdom and experience, the very essence of its leader, were bestowed upon the next in the line of succession when it was clear that the rih-haratan was near death.

  But her last potential successor, Lynarra, a mere child of eight cycles, was dead already; dead, along with ten thousand others, almost the entire population of Monorha’s Fourteenth Tribe.

  “And for what?” she asked herself.

  For the ravings of madman was the only answer that came.

  Even as this blasphemous thought knifed through the surface of her mind, she saw the face of Klyrrhea before her. Time had carved gentle lines around the deep green eyes of the rih-hara-tan who had preceded her. But those incandescent pools where she had often found understanding and comfort taunted her now, asking, “Where is your faith, child?”

  But Klyrrhea had never been asked to witness the senseless death of her people in a matter of days. She hadn’t been forced to watch the fear and anguish in the eyes of their loved ones, as the first of her brothers and sisters who had explored the city had succumbed to the slow, wrenching death that those creatures had inflicted upon them. She had not stood by, helpless as they fell, one after another, silently infected by the parasites. These instinct-driven, nonsentient life-forms should have died out centuries ago, when their makers or keepers had abandoned this place she had mistaken for the promised city of Gremadia.

  But the parasites had been only the first assault her people had faced. As the nightmarish days had passed, another threat had made its presence known to her and the few who managed to avoid infection. They were invisible, but their presence was powerful and terrifying. Their chaotic thoughts and feelings, inarticulate and constant, reverberated within the part of her mind that had been reserved for the unique and sanctified connection between the rih-hara-tan and her tribe. Her people knew this connection intimately. They experienced it within the safety of their hara. What separated a rih-hara-tan from any other Monorhan was the ability to extend that connection to include the entirety of h
er people. This made her mind more vulnerable than her children to the frightful intense need of the invisible presence.

  She had attempted once to open herself up to the presence, in hope that some form of communication might be possible. But that first attempt had been such a brutal and violent sullying of the most sacred spaces of her mind that she had abandoned all thought of the presence or its needs. That door within her mind was shut and sealed. But there was still the vulnerability of her body to the inevitable and inexorable approach of the parasites that remained.

  My rih? Naviim’s thoughts interrupted her own…. danger…She did not hear the rapid patter of his lower tongue muscle against his palate, but the vibration entered her mind at the exact same second as his greeting. He is terrified, she realized, almost tasting his fear.

  I am here…her mind answered, as she did her best to distance herself from his terror, knowing as she did so that he did not deserve the brusqueness of her tone.

  They have breached the inner hull at deck nine, section twenty-one, he began, the feelings interwoven among his words threatening to drown her in a surge of cascading waves of anger and fear.

  “Enough,” she barked aloud, silencing him. She knew his last memory of her, proximate mother of every member of the Fourteenth Tribe, would be of an impatient, brisk crone, but she didn’t care. If she could trade her name and reputation, the way in which she would be remembered for all eternity, for even a fraction of the numbers of her children already dead, she would gladly have given her own life in peace.

  There was no more time for pleasantries. No more time for pride. There was only this one desperate chance that she could transfer her consciousness into her ship’s organic circuitry. The telepathic gifts of her tribe had been tested in the past, though she was certain a transfer had never been attempted, let alone completed between a living, breathing Monorhan and an organic construct like the Betasis. She knew it was risky. But she also knew it was possible. To succeed, she would first have to recall the wisdom of the ancient schools she had been raised in from infancy to completely separate her mind from her body. It required absolute peace and internal harmony. And it would be shattered completely if she had to hear one more time about what “they” were doing to her ship.

  Secure the memory core and get to your preservation pod, she demanded of Naviim, careful to add as much…peace…and…safety…as she could to her thoughts. And then she was alone again, within her mind.

  The Betasis had been Klyrrhea’s dream, a dream she had nurtured to reality with the help of a brilliant scientist named Gora. So fervent was Klyrrhea’s literal belief in the existence of Gremadia that she had marshaled the unimaginable resources of two generations of her tribe in the construction of a ship large enough to carry them from the surface of Monorha to the space between the stars where the All-Knowing Light was said to have constructed the promised city. There, His true followers would join Him to do final battle with the Others for the freedom of them all.

  Or so they had believed.

  The Fourteenth Tribe’s adherence to this belief, first set down in the letters of Dagan, had sustained their faith for thousands of years, even as the other thirteen tribes of Monorha shunned them for this heresy. Over time, members of the Fourteenth Tribe had been restricted then forbidden by law to hold public office or participate in the intertribal council. Their lands had been “redistributed,” or more accurately, stolen by the other tribes, and they had been banished to a nomadic existence, difficult at best to eke out from the least hospitable regions of their otherwise fertile planet.

  But Klyrrhea’s vision had been the dawn of a new era for her people. She had managed to convince them all that the Time of Knowing was upon them. Monorhans had finally gained the skill and technology needed to travel beyond the surface of their planet to the stars around them. Talk had begun within the council of colonizing new planets, though no suitable candidates had yet been discovered. When Klyrrhea had offered to end the tension and occasional violent disruption that her “heretical” kinsmen wove into the otherwise placid fabric of Monorhan culture, the council had agreed almost too eagerly to aid her in her quest to build a city-ship, capable of transporting the entire Fourteenth Tribe to the new home they believed the protector of them all had created for them.

  Mainstream Monorhan culture had always looked upon the writings of Dagan with thinly veiled contempt. The idea that the All-Knowing Light had fought and lost a battle with beings as powerful as He implied first that there could be other beings that were all-knowing, and this was simply unacceptable. But Dagan was a child of the Fourteenth Tribe, a seer gifted beyond any who had come before or since, so legend told. Unable to simply disregard his difficult teachings, his tribe had embraced him and his beliefs, and now, thousands of years later, had paid the price: total annihilation.

  As she laid the scroll of Jocephar upon her workstation, weighing down the edges with ceremonial stones, dimly aware that she had subconsciously begun the long, low hum that initiated the transference ritual, Dagan’s words sprang unbidden to her mind. She would have given anything to wipe them forever from her thoughts, but they rose stubbornly, just as she had recited them, hundreds of times in tribal assembly, piercing her heart with their sad beauty. Even as she wished that they had never been written, as they wound their way through her mind, she saw them for the first time in the light of these last days, and found in them an unexpected measure of comfort.

  I, Dagan, Linuh-harat of the Fourteenth Tribe of Monorha, record this true vision of The First and Last Battle to honor the Rih-hara-tan Montok.

  …The battle was lost, but not the war. The stench of death suffused the air, chilled by the absence of the suns, as the All-Knowing Light surveyed the fruits of His labors…the remains of His brothers and sisters scattered on the purple dunes of the Galhada Wastes. Darkness crept closer, threatening to overwhelm this cursed field that had never known life, and He feared that this darkness would be the last.

  And then He remembered.

  Fear was for the lesser beings, whose regrets of the past and desires for the future blinded them to the reality that this moment contained more than the substance of then, now, and beyond. The battle had been lost tomorrow. The war would be won thousands of years ago. Time flowed and bent and danced and vibrated with infinite possibility that only the All-Knowing could truly appreciate.

  He would begin again.

  The Others might choose to subject themselves to tortured exile, but He would preside over the days to come in this new world and rip from the darkness shards of light to guide Him to victory for all His kind.

  He gathered the bodies where they had fallen. Their flesh had already begun to nurture the field and He knew that in years to come new life would rise, even from this desolate present. He knew the Others would forbid it, but He cared not. Life was never meant to be contained. That was the simple truth that made time and its variations insignificant.

  Then He turned His face to the heavens and, raising His right hand, He chose the space between the stars where He would make His final stand.

  “I GO!” He cried in defiance. “And those who come after will know to follow. I will guide them through the darkness, when they have reached the Time of Knowing. Together, we will smash the gates that divide us from the Others and return to the infinite flow that will never again know the absence of light.”

  He blessed those who had fallen with these words: “All that are of us will once again taste life beyond time. Their sacrifice will transform this desolate place. I will make from their remains the Key to our victory. And when my followers reach the gates, knowing that to be bound to one existence is to be a slave, I shall show them their first glimpse of freedom. This place I will prepare…I will call it…Gremadia…”

  The rage was gone. Fearless acceptance had entered her heart in its place and calmed her tormented mind.

  The battle was lost…but not the war.

  Although she could no longer light t
he way for her own people, she could live on. The soulless parasites could never reach her within the organic circuitry of the Betasis. The ship would remain forever in one of the dozens of docking bays of the alien city she had thought to be Gremadia. And she would remain with it, a prisoner of eternity.

  One final thought consoled her. If there was an All-Knowing Light, and if the life-forms that rose to consciousness on Monorha were truly His chosen followers, then perhaps the members of the Fourteenth Tribe had already found the freedom they had been desperately seeking, not in life, but in death.

  A motorized whine that signaled the failure of the Betasis’s security grid alerted her to the fact that Naviim’s defensive measures, however thorough, had been no match for the parasites. Time was short.

  The soft clanging of her door chime confirmed this truth, though the largest part of her no longer cared. She had begun the transference ritual the moment she opened the scroll of Jocephar, an unnecessary aid to her meditation.

  The gentle thrumming sensation that accompanied complete alignment of her mind and body began to rise from her toes, warming the bones of her legs, the lean muscles of her thighs, and the hollow center of her birthing canal, which would never know the spark of a new life force growing within her. With the last conscious fragment of her mind she willed the door to open, granting Naviim access.

  “My rih?” he asked reverently, well aware that access to her mind would be denied him in this sacred moment.

  “Is the Betasis’s memory core secured?” some distant disembodied voice asked from a mouth that was somehow her own, and at the same time completely disconnected from her.

  “It is,” he answered, trying desperately to maintain the composure rigorously ingrained in a shi-harat.

  “And are the three harans secured in their preservation pods?” came again from the voice not her own.

  “They are, my rih,” he replied.