Caretaker (19 page)

“Yes.” Kes’s voice dripped with a frustration that bordered dangerously on disdain. “We’ve gained a talent for dependence.

For simply taking what we’re given.” She shook her head at Toscat, and took up Neelix’s hand again in a gesture of clear defiance. “I’m going to help them whether you like it or not, Toscat. And I think my friends will join me.”

The young farmers all around them murmured agreement, and Toscat flushed again as he shot a scowl into the quiet crowd. “You defied the Caretaker by going to the surface, Kes. Learn from the experience.

Follow the path he has set for us.”

Kes sniffed a little laugh. “I’ve learned very well, Toscat. I saw the sunlight!” Groans that could only have been from painful longing tore from half the assembled Ocampa. Janeway’s heart went out to them, knowing—if only a little—what it must be like to grow up under the brow of the earth without even the touch of the sun. “I can’t believe that our Caretaker would forbid us to open our eyes and see the sky,” Kes went on. She looked proudly up at Janeway, then back at the other Federation men behind her.

“Come on. We’ll find your people.”

She spun with rigid determination, Neelix scurrying along behind her in a daze of wide-eyed admiration. Janeway watched Toscat as the knot of farmers broke apart into a quiet stream to follow Kes down through the gardens, leaving the elder to wring his hands in the front of his robe and shake his head somewhat sadly. A parent, unhappy with the road his children have taken.

Confident that his disapproval might sink into despair but never over into violence, Janeway motioned her people to stay with her, and started after Kes toward the still far-distant city.

They’d known the tunnels would be long, and dark, Kim reminded himself.

The Ocampa nurse had warned them of that—more than once, even—before smuggling them out of the infirmary what felt like an eternity ago.

Somehow, though, all her warnings had only made Kim more certain that he understood what to expect. They seemed to leave so little to his imagination. But now, aching in every muscle as though he’d been beaten, and barely able to force his body to take the next upward step, Kim wished he’d imagined more, and that he’d had the sense to believe in his imaginings.

For all her descriptions and cautions, the nurse still hadn’t managed to capture the dank hopelessness of the place. The tunnels were barely high enough to stand upright in—some of them weren’t. A rickety spiral of metal stairs climbed the sides of passages that faced straight upward, and the metal creaked and crackled with every bouncing step, as if gathering itself to plunge down into the darkness below.

Wetness dripped, dropped from the rock all around them, and Kim thought he smelled the peculiar sweetness of rotten fabric more than once as they crawled or climbed through the dampness. He didn’t try to hunt down the source of the stench.

Torres insisted that they use their flashlights as sparingly as possible, since neither they nor the Ocampa had the faintest idea how long the old devices would last. “If we keep going up,” the Maquis had stated quite reasonably, “we’ll know we’re going in the right direction.” That seemed a little simplistic to Kim, but it wasn’t any worse an assumption than the one that said they’d be able to climb out in the first place, so he didn’t question it. It was cold and lonely in the darkness, though. He wished the single-file construction of the tunnels didn’t keep them too separated to at least hold hands.

Kim’s foot banged against a webbed metal runner, and he stumbled to his knees with a crash that echoed through the chamber so loudly that it completely drowned out his accompanying cry of pain. I don’t want to do this, a weak little voice inside him said. I don’t want to climb anymore. I don’t want to hurt. I just want to go home and be done with all this. Instead, he remained crouched over the heavy tool pack he’d dropped onto the stair above him, and waited for the pain and dizziness to go away.

Light exploded like a bombshell in his head, and Kim groaned as he buried his face harder against his hands. On the other end of the newly lit flashlight, Torres came back down a few clanging steps to stand above him. “Come on.”

The pure whiteness of the artificial light felt like it was burning through the back of his skull. Kim only shook his head.

He was ready to stay.

“Don’t let it beat you, Starfleet.” A startlingly gentle hand fitted itself under his elbow, encouraging him to stand without forcing him.

“Come on,” Torres said again, more plaintively.

He lifted his head and made himself sit back until he could look up into Torres’s eyes. She’d moved the flashlight behind her, so that the light was more diffuse. It set her off from the darkness like a wild-maned troll. Kim wanted to stand for her, wanted to be strong and angry as she was, so that he could earn the right to live and see his family again. But everything looped and pitched too sickly, and he couldn’t force his breathing to slow down and clear the pain out of his thinking.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, sinking his head down into his hands again.

Torres’s face creased with unaccustomed sensitivity, and she let go of his elbow as though afraid that moving too quickly would break him.

“It’s all right. We’ll rest a minute.” She sat without taking her eyes off him, crossing her hands over her knees.

Kim tried to smile up at her, but was afraid the expression came closer to fear than friendliness. “Maybe I’d do better if I had a little Klingon blood in me.”

She made a gruff sound of amusement for his benefit. “Trust me.

It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

As badly as he hurt now compared to her Amazonian composure, he had trouble believing that was true. Stiffening to will away another spasm of ghostly pain, he didn’t even try to shrug off the hand she rested silently on his shoulder. He shook his head, choked with laughter at the irony of it all. “I spent my whole life getting ready for Starfleet. And on my very first mission …” He reached up blindly to twine his fingers with hers. “…

I’m going to die. …”

Her hand closed tightly around his. “We’re not finished yet. I know a few things old Sneezy didn’t teach in his Survival Course.”

The remark seemed to come out of nowhere. “Sneezy?”

“Commander Zakarian.” Torres smiled at his confusion, and Kim thought he sensed a certain underlying relief in the way she playfully joggled his arm. “Remember? He must’ve been allergic to everything.”

A sudden vivid memory of a lean, white-haired instructor with eyes as red as his face flashed across Kim’s mind. They’d been in the Appalachians, and had been forced to cut the excursion short when something in the local flora shut down Zakarian’s breathing without warning. Kim’s Academy class had made an especially good grade for finding its way from wilderness to civilization without instructor guidance in record time. “You went to the Academy?”

“Actually made it into the second year before we `mutually agreed’ it wasn’t the place for me.” She smiled as though the memory didn’t bother her, but Kim recognized Starfleet’s euphemism for expulsion. He squeezed her hand in sympathy, and, just as quickly as it had come, the moment of rapport passed and she pulled her fingers from his grip. “I fit in a lot better with the Maquis,” she finished with a shrug.

“You know,” Kim told her, “I never really liked Zakarian.” It was easier than what he would have liked to say.

Torres seemed to hear him both ways. Grinning somewhat wickedly, she chucked him under the chin, then pointedly settled back on her step to stare up in the direction they still had to go, giving Kim his minute to rest, but nothing more.

The sculptures in the open courtyard rattled, dancing about on their bases as the thundering shocks from the Array’s pulsed signals grew in power and speed. Janeway looked up, peripherally aware of every other Ocampa in the vicinity echoing the gesture with a little cry of surprise. Unlike whatever the Ocampa were looking for, Janeway didn’t really expect to see anything. When a sound as pervasive and intrusive as the hammering of these pulses rained down on you from overhead, though, there was just some human instinct that made you look up to see where the noise was coming from. As though by catching sight of the demon, that somehow gave you power over it. Janeway’s brain teased her with some faint memory of how seeing demons more often made you an easier target for them, but dismissed that as nonsense as she turned her attention back to her landing party in the courtyard.

They’d made good time into the city by following Kes and her friends through a complex tangle of walkways and public transports. Along the way, Janeway had not seen a single act of public misbehavior or disrespect. It was almost macabre. As though everyone in the Ocampa city had been replaced by a perfectly tooled robot that never stepped outside its programmed little niche. Or maybe they had all been given special drugs to flatline the delightful arabesques of emotion that Kes’s farmer friends seemed to display so freely.

It isn’t our place to judge, she reminded herself sternly.

True. But just because you didn’t pass judgment on a society’s behavior didn’t mean you had to approve.

Kes and Daggin had left the landing party here among the artfully placed tables and half-eaten food. They had friends in the clinic, Kes had explained. It would be easier to gather information without a lot of strangers trailing behind like avenging angels. Janeway had reluctantly agreed, but only after extracting Kes’s specific promise to return the instant she learned anything. She even almost gave the girl a comm badge. I don’t like the sound of things, Janeway had wanted to tell her.

I don’t like feeling like the roof’s about to come crashing down.

But she did her best to maintain a certain aura of composure—for the sake of Paris and the others, if nothing else—as Kes and Daggin trotted off toward a distant doorway and left their friends the farmers to mill near a food dispensary and make disdainful noises.

And then, in the passing of one heartbeat to the next, the thunder from the Array just stopped.

Silence.

Janeway exchanged a startled look with Tuvok, who interrupted his own control just enough to lift one eyebrow and glance pointlessly surfaceward. Ignoring an impulse to do likewise, Janeway slapped at her comm badge. “Away team to Voyager.”

Rollins answered immediately. “Yes, Captain?”

“What’s going on with the Array?”

He hesitated only slightly, but Janeway could feel the uncertainty resonating down the open comm channel. “It’s no longer sending out pulses, Captain. And it appears to be realigning its position.”

Oh, God, if it was preparing to leave the solar system, they had better hope it couldn’t reach warp speeds. Otherwise they’d never have time to catch up to it after locating Kim, and their chances of getting home anytime soon would disappear right along with it. “Keep me informed” was all she said aloud to Rollins.

“Janeway out.” But their window of opportunity had just nudged closed another crack.

Paris summoned her attention with a quick touch of his hand, and Janeway turned where he pointed to see Kes and Daggin hurrying toward them through the eerily noiseless clots of nervous Ocampa.

Were they fretting telepathically among themselves? Janeway wondered.

Or just standing around in shock to find themselves in true silence for the first time in what had to be centuries? She wondered whether any of them realized that their world would probably sound like this from now on.

“They haven’t been at the clinic for hours,” Kes called as she and Daggin drew closer. Her porcelain brow was wrinkled with concern.

“We can search the city,” Daggin offered. He indicated the farmers who had gathered tight around them again. “Ask if anyone’s seen them.”

Janeway nodded her agreement, and the group of young Ocampa dissolved in a dozen directions, slipping themselves neatly into the surrounding crowd. Janeway tried to imagine Kim and Torres fitting in so unobtrusively, and couldn’t. “If they were trying to get to the surface,” she said, turning back to Kes, “how would they go?”

“Probably the same way I did—up one of the ancient tunnels.”

Janeway didn’t even want to think about how far underground they were, or how long those tunnels must run. “Mr. Paris, go with her and start checking them out.”

“Wait!” Neelix scurried after Paris as the young pilot motioned Kes to lead the way. “You might need an extra hand.”

Mostly, Janeway suspected, Neelix wanted to make sure Paris didn’t find the opportunity to impress the pretty Ocampa too thoroughly while Neelix wasn’t around to put things in perspective. It was such a charmingly trivial thing to worry about when compared with the fate of a single starship, she almost smiled in appreciation of the pudgy alien’s innocence.

“We need to talk to every doctor and nurse at this hospital.”

She started for the distant clinic without waiting to see if Tuvok and Chakotay were following, trusting them to stay close.

If either of them realized the captain was leading them back toward the clinic Kes had suggested they not be seen around, they didn’t mention it. “I want to see what they can tell us about Torres and Kim—” The floor bucked upward with a skull-crushing boom, and screams shrilled like sirens through the subterranean valley as Janeway slammed into the ground. She rolled, gasping for breath, and grabbed at the hand Chakotay extended to pull herself to her feet. Nearby, Tuvok already had his tricorder balanced on his palm, trying to frown coherent readings off the screen as Ocampa all around them scattered like buckshot birds in all directions.

“Voyager to Captain Janeway!”

Rollins’s voice barely reached her above the chaos. Janeway found herself standing tensely, waiting for the world to move again and staring up toward where a ceiling ought to be as if that would somehow help it stay there. “Go ahead.”

“Captain, the Array is firing some kind of weapon at the surface.”

Instruments chirped and sang somewhere on the distant bridge. Rollins gave a little cry of surprise. “It seems to be trying to seal the energy conduits.”