Caretaker (23 page)

Janeway could only stare at the projection in stunned disbelief.

“You’ve been trying to procreate?”

In a blink, the projection shrank in size and huddled back among its shadows again. The structure of its face barely supported features anymore, just the suggestion of humanity, the possibility of life. “I needed someone to replace me,” it sighed in a spidery, whisper-thin voice. “Someone who would understand the enormous responsibility of caring for the Ocampa.

Only my offspring could do that.”

But how long did it take such a long-lived creature to breed?

And who would have cared for the young between their birth and adulthood once the Caretaker died? “Did you ever consider allowing the Ocampa to care for themselves?”

It seemed horrified at the suggestion. “They’re children.”

As would be your offspring. Instead, Janeway scooted around in front of it in an effort to make it look at her instead of out into nowhere.

“Children have to grow up.”

An expression that was clearly anguish writhed across what was left of its features. Janeway reached out to touch its arm, but pulled back when her hand slipped through the image, encountering nothing. “We’re explorers, too,” she said. “Most of the species we’ve encountered have overcome all kinds of adversity without a caretaker. It’s the challenge of surviving on their own that helps them to evolve.” She wished again that she could touch it. “Maybe your children will do better than you think.”

“They are ignorant,” it sighed mournfully. “Dependent bipeds …”

“Then educate them before you die. Give them the knowledge they need to survive.”

It shook its head and huddled smaller down into itself. “Would you put your most dangerous technology in the hands of your children? I would be sending them the means to destroy themselves.”

“You said yourself that in a few years, they’d be doomed anyway.”

Janeway didn’t like seeing the pain her words obviously caused it, but she couldn’t help speaking the truth as she could see it.

“We have another saying— `If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.”” Watching the projection absorb the information reminded her of Tuvok committing a string of variables to long-term memory. With both creatures, she didn’t know what they would make of the data once they were done squeezing every byte of information out of it, but she’d learned how to trust that good input made for good output, whatever the processing device.

Her comm badge interrupted with an urgent beep. “Voyager to Janeway.”

She wondered for an instant what had happened to Rollins, then remembered that they had Kim back. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve got problems here,” Kim’s voice returned, and the crash and wail of ship’s sirens wove a horrible reinforcement to his words. “The Kazon just got some backup!”

Sensors put the newly arrived Kazon cruiser at a good eighty times the size and mass of the little grunge fighters they’d already been hammering for the last ten minutes. Power and engine output flashed right off the screens, and Chakotay didn’t see any reason to waste the time recalibrating sensors just so he could get an exact reading. All told, if the big cruiser had the good sense to vaporize Voyager before turning her attentions to the peanut gallery, Chakotay figured he had about forty seconds of life left in which to get his personal affairs in order. It seemed a good thing just then that the Maquis lifestyle didn’t leave much in the way of loose ends.

Chakotay bared his teeth with a certain grim satisfaction as one of Torres’s phaser burns cut a long scar across the prow of one of the smaller Kazon fighters. If he’d had photon torpedoes on this little junk-bucket, they and Voyager combined could have knocked both these scows clear to kingdom come. The Kazon had half-decent shielding, he had to admit as another of their polarized plasma bolts chewed at his starboard bow, but their weaponry wasn’t even as formidable as Cardassian disruptors, and they hadn’t the finesse God gave a dung beetle. A couple of good commanders in a couple of functional ships would have left a serious mark on Kazon history before jaunting back to their own side of the cosmos.

Now Chakotay had a very bad feeling that the only mark he was going to be making was as a new ice-and-carbon debris field. And not a very impressive one, at that.

Communications to and from the Voyager kept up a steady patter across the open subspace channels. “Status of the Maquis ship?”

Janeway was asking.

“Holding their own, Captain” was the young officer’s quick reply.

Yeah, hold this, you little washichu! Another blast, this time from behind, threw Chakotay forward into his panel. He stole a glance at Torres, and she shook her head. Meaning no worse damage than normal, and nothing they could do about it anyway.

“We need more time,” Janeway continued to her own crew. On the screen, the monster ship had already carved halfway through the starship’s forward hull and was dogging it like a terrier on a bone. “Can you hold them off for another few minutes?”

“We’ll do our best. Kim out.”

Torres looked up at the young Starfleet officer’s sign-off, but Chakotay couldn’t read the expression on her face.

“They’re in trouble,” he admitted needlessly.

Torres turned back to her panel. “Neither of us has enough firepower to stop that ship.”

Hell, Chakotay thought, we barely even have a ship left! He thumbed through the readings on his comm, verifying for about the millionth time that they’d sustained no warp-core malfunctions or breaches to their antimatter pods. It was somehow undignified to think about going up like a junior sun with nothing to show for your effort but a good story once you got to the spirit realm.

His eyes slipped back up to the viewscreen, tracking Voyager’s unsteady attempts at swerving its carved-up hull away from the cruiser’s slashing. He couldn’t help wondering what the point was of piloting a small antimatter bomb if you didn’t plan to detonate it at least once in its lifetime. Plotting the Kazon’s coordinates against its speed and size, Chakotay Found himself almost grinning with anticipation.

“I’m setting a collision course,” he told Torres, still intent on his work. “But the guidance system is disabled—I’ll have to pilot the ship manually.” He cut off any protest she might have voiced by waving her off and commanding, “Get the crew ready to beam to Voyager.”

Kind of a nice concept, he admitted to himself as Torres started shouting at the rest of the bridge crew to prepare an evacuation.

He got to rescue a Starfleet vessel and take it over, all in the same grand gesture. How many Maquis would ever get a chance to say that?

Opening a subspace channel, he kicked in the top impulse this dying artifact could give him. “Paris!” he shouted above the engines’ whine. “My crew is coming over. Tell one of your crackerjack Starfleet transporter chiefs to keep a lock on me.”

The first of the smaller Kazon ships veered frantically out of his path, phasers blazing but missing their mark, “I’m going to try to take some heat off your tail.”

The first transporter beams began to sear the air somewhere out of sight behind him. Chakotay felt a certain relieved peace at hearing his crew lifted to at least some place of relative safety.

“Acknowledged,” Paris answered, whether in response to Chakotay or the arrival of the first transports, Chakotay wasn’t certain. The Maquis watched Voyager jerk briefly into warp, then fall back into normal space again. “But don’t even think for a second this gets us even.

Your life is still mine, Poocuh.

Paris out.”

Chakotay gritted his teeth and hung on to the console as the huge alien cruiser began its lumbering turn to face him. There was something distinctly unsatisfying about saving the life of a smart-ass. Maybe after he got on board Voyager, he’d teach Paris a few things about the counting of coup. Or if their crackerjack transporter tech turned out not to be so brilliant after all, he could always haunt Paris until the end of eternity and make his life completely miserable. That was almost worth looking forward to.

As he tore past Voyager and homed in on the Kazon monster, Chakotay found himself wishing he’d been able to come up from behind, as he’d first envisioned. He didn’t have much left in the way of screens, and even those were down to allow the removal of his crew. Just get close enough, just get close enough-“almost” counts when you’re playing with antimatter… .

The Kazon loosed a ball of burning plasma that slammed the front of the ship with enough force to make the hull creak and scream.

Chakotay rose from his seat, leaning back toward Ops to shut down seals in the lower decks before the atmosphere breach could roar up and swallow him. Paris’s voice came at him through the wailing of alarms.

“I’m getting you out of there, Chakotay—” “Not yet.” Slapping down life-support to every deck but his, he threw the shields forward and cut impulse by a third. The next blast from the Kazon exploded a panel at the back of the bridge, but didn’t make it through the shielding.

“You’re breaking up! Stand by to transport!”

If Voyager transported now, the Kazon would dust this little ship like so much space debris, and all they’d have for their efforts was one less target to draw the enemy’s fire. “Wait!” He had their timing down now. Glaring powerfully through the splintering viewscreen, Chakotay waited until he saw the weapons tubes at the mouth of the vessel glow orange, then ducked his limping ship straight downward when it was too late for the Kazon to alter their lock. The shot went wild above him. That left a good six seconds before they could bring whatever cannon they were shooting back up to charge. Pumping the last of his ship’s power into a leap he knew would probably rip its loyal engines apart, Chakotay spiraled toward the cruiser’s wide-open belly and waited until nothing but starship filled his viewscreen, nothing but momentum still powered his craft.

“Now!”

The brilliance of destruction overwhelmed him, blasting away even the coarse boom! of impact and the undignified reality of pain.

Then the spangles of triumphant light closed around him in a column of warm, welcome song, and lifted him away into nothing.

A peal of what might have been summer thunder trembled through the darkened barn, and Janeway found herself glancing upward in response.

She wondered what was happening with the battle outside.

The holographic projection lifted its whiteless eyes to a point beyond Janeway’s shoulder. Twisting around, she saw Tuvok approaching softly through the darkness, his tricorder now folded shut in one hand. “I can access the system to send us back to Federation space,” he reported, squatting beside her, “but it will take several hours to activate.”

Several hours the Kazon weren’t likely to give them. Janeway turned back to the entity with hand extended. “Unless you help us …”

It looked away, its face all but fading. “I wish I could. But I have very little time left.” Lips moving, it stared blindly outward for several seconds before its voice abruptly returned.

“I am taking your advice. I’ve begun to transmit the contents of my data banks to the Ocampa.” It blinked, all attention coming back to them in a flash. “I have also initiated a self-destruct program.”

Janeway’s heart leapt into her throat. “If you destroy the Array, we’ll have no way to get home!”

“The Ocampa’s enemies cannot be allowed to control this installation,” the entity whispered. She didn’t know if she was hearing its voice, or simply reading the words off its fading lips. “In minutes, it will be destroyed.” Its face loomed closer, and this time the voice came from nowhere specific that Janeway could name. (You have to go now.)

She thought at first that the entity had physically banished them, thrown them somewhere far from the Array with the same powerful abruptness with which it had seized their ships and stolen their bodies. Her body felt battered, plummeting down to nowhere, striking a hard surface that pitched and slewed beneath her like the deck of a dying ship. Then the darkness of the barn leapt back into existence, flickered away, dashed back again.

Janeway pushed up onto her elbows, craning around for Tuvok.

Cloudy, smoke-filled light suddenly became the final reality, and she recognized her security officer climbing to his knees a few meters away at the same time as she placed the huge, open room now around them as the same depthless chamber Kim and Paris had discovered on their first visit to the Array. Whatever had happened, it had eradicated whatever maintained the holographic projection system. Janeway didn’t know if that was good or bad.

She rolled onto her back, slapping at her comm badge. “Voyager, report!”

“A Kazon vessel just collided with the Array, Captain. …”

Paris’s voice crackled and broke across the open channel. Behind him, Janeway could hear the battering Voyager must be taking.

“Are you all right?”

“Affirmative.” She took the hand Tuvok held out for her and pulled herself to her feet. “Stand by.”

Where the entity’s holographic projection had huddled only moments before, a huge, vaporous creature now heaved and groaned.

(The termination program … has been … damaged …) It recoiled from Janeway’s instinctive approach. (The Kazon … must not gain …) Something deep inside its fragile bulk seemed to flux against itself and shatter. (… control … of this installation …) Then it folded down with a heavy sigh, ever smaller, ever darker, until the last glimmer of its physical form misted completely away.

At Janeway’s feet, a misshapen lump of what looked like some alien ore twinkled weakly before slipping into total darkness.

The captain wished she had time for a respectful farewell, not to mention some idea what the Caretaker would have considered appropriate.

Instead, there was hardly even time left to save themselves.

Tuvok moved up alongside her. “Shall I activate the program to get us back?” he asked softly.

Janeway couldn’t tear her eyes from the Caretaker’s pitiful remains.

“And what happens to the Ocampa after we’re gone?”