Caretaker (12 page)

“Now,” she said, trying to pull the Maquis’s attention back to what mattered. “We have a lot to accomplish, and I suggest we all concentrate on finding our people and getting ourselves back home.”

Tuvok made his allegiance official by moving away from Chakotay to stand at Janeway’s elbow. “Based on my initial reconnaissance, Captain, I am convinced we are dealing with a single entity in the Array. I would suggest that he scanned our computers in order to select a comfortable holographic environment. In effect, a waiting room—to pacify us, prior to a biometric assessment.”

“An examination?” Paris asked.

Tuvok dipped a single nod—but to Janeway, not to this new crewman who had no functional rank. Janeway reminded herself to brief Tuvok on the situation later. “It is the most logical explanation,” the Vulcan said. “Why else would we have been released unharmed?”

Paris gave a little snort. “Not all of us were.”

Which brought them back to the real reason for their unsteady alliance.

“Break out the compression phaser rifles,” Janeway ordered Tuvok.

“Meet us in Transporter Room Two. We’re going back. We’ll divide into two teams. Mr. Tuvok, while Chakotay and I look for Kim and Torres, your job is to find out as much about this Array as you can.” She dared a frowning glance at the cloudy viewscreen and the alien structure that still dominated it. “It brought us here; we have to assume it can send us home.”

As Tuvok led Chakotay and the other Maquis toward the turbolift, Janeway turned back to Rollins and the rest of her waiting bridge crew.

“Mr. Rollins, maintain red alert. Keep us on constant transporter locks—” “Captain?”

She stopped with one foot on the steps, burning to be out and doing, irritated at Paris’s interruption. But when she twisted to look back at him, the simple bravery displayed on the young man’s face caught her by surprise.

“I’d like to go with you,” he stated simply.

A nanosecond flash of internal argument annihilated itself at the back of her brain. “If this has something to do with what Chakotay said—” “It doesn’t.” Paris came up the steps to stand with her, his voice disarmingly sincere. “I’d just …” Something that was almost a blush moved across his features. “… hate to see anything happen to Harry,” he finished awkwardly. But he met her measuring stare steadily, and there was none of his usual flippancy in his eyes.

Maybe not a waste after all. Janeway clapped him on the shoulder, nodding him toward the door as she sprang into motion again. “Come on.”

Ducks still drifted placidly on the mirror-bright surface of the holographic lake. Willows shushed in the warm summer breeze, and the sun hung precisely forty-five degrees above the gables of the blue-and-white farmhouse. Eternally a June mid-afternoon, just as they’d left here, only without the mercurial dog or the farm-folk revelers. Only the banjo-playing farmer remained, perched on the great porch’s steps with his eyes closed as he plucked something eerily wistful out of the banjo’s strings.

Janeway wondered if the aliens in charge of this simulation had somehow identified this man and this house as the optimal soothing images for the current visitors, or if the holographic equipment involved was limited after all in how many patterns it could store and recombine for each new visit.

Tuvok opened his tricorder and released its song to drown out the banjo player’s picking. “There are no humanoid life-forms indicated, Captain.” He closed the device again. “Kim and Torres are not within tricorder range. They may not be on the Array.”

Chakotay motioned at the banjo player with his compression rifle.

“He can tell us where they are.”

Yes, he very probably could. But Janeway wasn’t so confident that they’d convince him to tell them. Shifting her own rifle to her left hand, she tapped the Maquis standing next to her and motioned him to join Tuvok. She didn’t want the Vulcan wandering off without armed backup. “Maintain your comm link,” she told Tuvok. “I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

The Vulcan nodded, then swept away with his tricorder open in his hand again, his head bent over the readings as though concerned with where his feet might go. Waving Paris and Chakotay to flank her, Janeway silently released the safety on her rifle before starting forward toward the house. She had no intention of using the gun unless forced to, but she wasn’t about to be caught off guard anymore.

The hologram on the steps of the porch opened its eyes and stopped playing its half-senseless melody, then remarked, “Why have you come back? You don’t have what I need.”

Janeway swallowed an urge to slap the banjo out of the hologram’s hands. “I don’t know what you need. And, frankly, I don’t care.

I just want our people back, and I want us all to be sent home.”

“Well, now …” The hologram blinked at her with an old man’s thin, patronizing smile. “Aren’t you contentious for a minor bipedal species?”

“This minor bipedal species,” Janeway snapped, “doesn’t take kindly to being abducted.”

It shrugged, turning back to its banjo. “It was necessary.”

She felt Chakotay start to move more than saw it, and stopped the Indian’s forward lunge with her elbow. To her surprise, he obeyed the silent command, but gripped her arm in unconscious frustration as he yelled at the hologram, “Where are our people?”

His volume had no impact. “They’re no longer here.”

“What have you done to them?” Janeway pressed.

“You don’t have what I need,” the hologram replied, as though answering some other question, or just refusing to answer that one. “They might.” The strings on its instrument warbled unpleasantly, as though warping out of tune, but the hologram didn’t seem to notice. “You’ll have to leave them.”

Chakotay shook his head. “We won’t do that.”

The melody twisted around itself to resolve back into something almost resembling music. Nodding its head to the rhythm, the hologram said nothing.

Janeway sighed and lowered her arm from in front of Chakotay.

“We are their commanding officers,” she explained tightly. “We are entrusted with their safety. They are our responsibility.

That may be a concept you don’t understand—” “No.” For the first time, the eyes it turned upward at Janeway looked completely alive.

Not a projection, not an image, but a real, living thing that suddenly exposed itself through the guise of this old country man. Janeway wanted to lunge forward and grab whoever this was before it faded away.

“I do understand,” the alien told her. “But I have no choice.

There’s so little time left.”

Janeway held her breath for fear of shattering the rapport.

“Left for what?”

“I must honor the debt that can never be repaid.” It looked between their faces, its own expression bleak. “But my search has not gone well.”

She glanced back at Paris and Chakotay, but saw only the same confusion in their eyes. “Tell us what you’re looking for.” She turned to face the hologram again with what she hoped it would recognize as open honesty. Or, at least, a facsimile of same.

“Maybe we can help you find it.”

“You?” It sniffed in amused derision—a frighteningly human sound.

“I’ve searched the galaxy with methods beyond your comprehension.

There is nothing you can do.” Sighing, it looked down at its banjo, and Janeway noticed with a start that all the strings were broken.

“You’re free to go. If it’s ever possible to return your people, I promise you I will.”

“That’s not good enough,” Chakotay growled, and Janeway spoke over him in frustration.

“You’ve taken us seventy thousand light-years from our home! We have no way back unless you send us—and we won’t leave without the others.”

The hologram stood and hugged its banjo to its chest, staring off toward the duck pond and the swollen sun beyond it. “Sending you back is terribly complicated,” it sighed. “Don’t you understand? I don’t have time… .” The bright pond faded, swallowing the trees behind it, then, the lowering sun, then the sky. “… not enongh time …”

Then, somehow, before Janeway had fully registered the fading of the light or the disintegration of the landscape, brightness took over where the artificial world no longer stoodAnd she was back on board the bridge of Voyager, facing the other four members of her landing party with no idea what to say to them, no idea what had brought them here.

No idea what to do.

He didn’t hear their voices so much as feel them.

“He’s regaining consciousness …”

Then the light flared painfully bright in front of his eyes, and Kim realized he was seeing it through his lids, burning through the pink tissue and black dreams. He flicked his eyes open, only to be instantly sorry when the brilliance burned past pain and seared the back of his skull. He wanted to tell them to move the light away, but couldn’t force more than a hoarse moan past his lips.

Still, the brightness receded on the heels of his thought, and the pain washed aside as he blinked his vision clear.

A face swam suddenly into focus above him. Above me? He was lying on his back. The awareness came abruptly, like a lightning flash. He was lying on his back, on a bed, and he was cold. And the warm face bending over him belonged to a man he didn’t know, a smooth, beautiful man who could have been young or old if not for the wealth of wisdom in his large eyes. He smiled at Kim, and asked gently, (How do you feel?)

Terrible, Kim thought. I can’t even see your lips move. But he made himself take an unsteady breath and say, “What am I doing here? Where am I?”

Something very much like unhappiness flashed across the man’s face, and he turned a look toward someone on his right. Kim followed his gaze, and saw a woman with the same indeterminate yet beautiful features.

She took the man’s shoulders and steered him away as she moved to stand beside Kim’s bed.

It occurred to him without warning that he was in some kind of hospital. The smells—antiseptic yet sick—and the colors—heartless and drab—gave the place away as much as the overly calm and practiced behavior of this woman and all the others in the too-big room.

“Please, don’t try to move yet.” Her voice purred pleasantly, but the intonations sounded false somehow, not quite right. “You are very ill.”

“Ill?” He didn’t feel ill. Confused, maybe. Frightened, yes.

He pushed up onto his elbows and tried to kick himself free of the ice-green sheets tangling him to his bed. “There’s some mistake,” he tried feebly to explain. “I’m not—” Then he saw the thick knots of flesh distorting his hand and arm, and his voice constricted into a tiny cry.

What’s wrong with me? Kim had never seen such grotesque masses on anything still purported to be alive. He jerked open the neck of his gown, found even more thick swellings there, and had to blink hard against the swirling darkness of shock when it pressed the edges of his vision.

What’s wrong with me what’s wrong with me what’s wrong—?!

“No!”

The scream sounded human enough, although the volume wasn’t something Kim had ever heard before. He jerked toward the painful sound just as one of the quiet medical attendants crashed into a table filled with equipment and shattered it to the ground. A boil of movement exploded from where the attendant had been, and a powerful figure leapt over the downed man with no more effort than Kim would have expended in swatting a fly. He couldn’t believe anyone could look so graceful in a thigh-length hospital gown.

She whirled as if sensing him, and their eyes locked for just a moment.

I know you! Kim thought in stark surprise. He remembered her face—dark, big-boned, and brooding—on one of the slabs in the back of the holographic barn. Oh, God, that seemed like a century ago. She must be one of the Maquis. Which meant he wasn’t here alone.

Or maybe everyone else but the two of them were gone. …

Kim didn’t have a chance to ponder the details. Orderlies were suddenly filling the room, and the Maquis female nearly killed two of them, fighting her way toward the door. She almost made it, too. But the attendant who had first smiled down at Kim and spoken without making the words wormed his way into the struggling knot of bodies with some unrecognizable device clutched in his hand.

(Hold her still!)

She howled like an animal, bucking underneath the combined weight of so many enemies. Then the smiling attendant—not smiling now, Kim noted grimly—reached past the wall of orderlies, and Kim heard the unmistakable hiss of a hypospray just before the Maquis fell still and silent at the bottom of the bundle.

The attendant heaved a groaning sigh and flopped back to the ground in evident relief. (Bring her over here,) he instructed as he climbed wearily to his feet.

Kim hugged the sheets against him as he watched the orderlies gather the unconscious woman with a gentleness that was almost bizarre. It wasn’t their silence that held him riveted, or even the reverent care with which they now handled someone they had so mercilessly plowed to the ground only moments before. It was the coarse, ropy growths discoloring the Maquis’s arms and neck that trapped his attention.

That, and the very real knowledge that whatever was wrong with them might very well be what had happened to the rest of the crew. Which meant their chances of survival were not very good.

He wished their captors—caretakers?—had left him something more to wear than this gown and this blanket. Thinking of death with no one else here beside him, Kim suddenly found this dull alien hospital unbearably cold.

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 48315.6 …”

Janeway cycled through the images on the data padd as it lay, unprotesting, on her desk. Picking it up seemed too much effort at such a late hour. Besides, that would require lifting her head off her other fist and actually sitting upright, which was not part of the bargain she’d made with her body for tonight. As long as she didn’t require herself to be energetic and proper, her brain was allowed to stay functional long enough to file her last reports, review the damage and casualty lists, and decide everyone’s role for the cleanup and repair teams tomorrow. So far, using one hand to tap at the controls had not been a violation of treaty, but she was fairly certain any movement approaching sitting up or standing would be. Scrubbing at her eyes, she forced her attention to divide again so she could finish her log and organize the repair details somewhat simultaneously.