Cybersong (8 page)

Paris smiled evilly. “A cup of reallive Earth-origin coffee,” he said.

“You’re on,” Janeway accepted, grinning.

“Come on, gentlemen,” the captain chided them gently. “We don’t have the rest of the millennium.”

“Well, where should I put her down?” Paris asked, all business again.

“How about there.” The captain pointed to a spot that shone brilliantly when the lights of the shuttlecraft hit it. “Looks like there’s something important over there.”

“It’s where I’d put a command center,” Paris concurred. “Close to the front and center. Okay, Captain, we’re in.”

He brought them slowly toward what appeared to be the bright core of a dead command center. In the illumination from the shuttle it was full of high contrast and deep shadow. Nothing made any sense at all except that the reflected radiance at the core didn’t really seem to go with the rest of the dark, silent ship.

The cave that had become a ship.

“It makes sense,” Janeway mused aloud, her scientific curiosity unstoppable even when faced with a threatening enigma.

“Troglodytes taking to space. The dark and the isolation wouldn’t be difficult for them. It would be a natural extension of their habitat.”

Tom Paris ignored the captain’s theorizing. As he approached the sheared plating, he found that there was no decent landing site.

The entire deck was covered with jagged crystals and large projections up-thrust from what appeared to be a fragile crust.

“I’m going to destroy this stuff if I set down on it, Captain,” Paris admitted after one good look. “If you think we can risk it, I’ll go ahead, but …”

“No,” Janeway came back quickly. “I don’t want to compromise anything that might be part of their technical system. If we can use it, we will. No, let’s land three decks down. That’s empty, it looks like it might have been a cargo bay or something. Then we’ll have to walk.”

“In environmental suits,” Paris groaned.

It took a few minutes to pull on the suits. Paris hadn’t worn one since his training mission at the Academy, and he bet that everyone would have liked to keep it that way.

“How do I get the cooling on this down?” Paris fumed, sweat running down his face.

“Uh, Tom, I’ll take care of it,” Kim said. “Just let me finish with the captain. They tried to make it easier in this version.”

Easier. Right. Tom Paris had heard that before. It wasn’t easier, it was a mess. But Harry, more recently at the Academy, was familiar with the new design and got the suits adjusted to a pleasant temperature.

Not that being cool enough made it easier to move. It reminded Paris of how his mother had made him wear sweaters under his coat in the winters, and how hard it had been to bend his arms.

“Let’s go,” the captain said, and led the way out of the shuttle and into the torn alien craft. Her voice came through the helmet speakers and wasn’t as clear as the commbadge.

But as soon as they left the shuttlecraft, Paris was too interested to notice his discomfort.

The alien ship was amazing. He had thought it large when he had flown through the gash in her side. Now, standing in what he assumed had to have been a cargo or shuttlebay, he realized that his sense of scale had been wrong. It was not simply large, it was gigantic. These must have been a race of behemoths.

“The alloy is related to steel, but there is a particle in the mixture that the tricorder can’t identify,” Kim said. Harry had the tricorder while Paris held a phaser in his hand. Not that there could be anything alive here, and the readings had confirmed that, but he felt better with it anyway. The place was so eerie that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a colossal ghost.

The captain didn’t linger in the bay. Whatever had been here—cargo, craft, repair supplies, a garden—was gone now, sucked out by the vacuum of space. Or expelled by the internal pressure of an atmosphere the ship no longer had.

Janeway led them to a door that was sealed shut. Harry came over and pointed his tricorder at the complicated looking lock.

“I think it’s an airlock, Captain,” Kim said, amazement in his voice.

“Why would they have an inside airlock?”

“Maybe this was a flight deck,” Tom Paris offered. “Then they could open the whole thing to space and pull out quickly in formation.”

“Possible,” the captain agreed. “But maybe this is an early craft.

Most spacegoing people build their first ships in segments with airlocks in between that can be isolated in case of a breech.”

Tom Paris raised his phaser to blast open the lock. The captain raised her hand. “Let’s not damage this if we don’t have to. If it’s an early design, it should be fairly straightforward. And there’s a good chance it isn’t locked. Airlocks are for keeping atmosphere in, not interlopers out.”

She stepped toward the lock and ran a gloved hand over a handle easily three times the size of anything Paris had ever seen before. She pushed at it from various angles. Finally, she struck it head on, trying to get the oversize thing to move at all.

“If it’s that old, it could be jammed, Captain,” Harry started to say as a weak automatic light came on and the door heaved open.

The three of them in their suits fit easily into the middle chamber of the airlock. The outer door shut and it was utterly black inside.

“Really old design,” Kim said, impressed. “I’ve never even seen this technology before.”

Then it was just dark and silent. Time ceased to mean anything, and Paris thought it could have been a minute or ten before the inner door came open onto a corridor where a few lights still made a feeble attempt to brighten the gloom.

But the lights were embedded in the crystals that hung like icicles from the ceiling, and their flickering showed off an array of color that was as beautiful as it was mysterious. Under their feet the surface was smooth and polished between rows of up-thrust crystals that lined the walls.

The projections weren’t regular at all. The colors varied and the size and shape of each of the projections was unique. Yet, overall they gave the impression of perfected nature. Like his mother’s cottage garden, Paris thought. Everything looked like it had been left to happy natural chance, but in fact it was carefully planned. He was impressed.

“Are you getting all this, Mr. Kim?” the captain asked.

Harry replied in the affirmative, turning constantly to capture yet another projection or get some recording of the effect of the whole.

“Do you think we can take the suits off now, Captain?” Paris asked.

Now that there was atmosphere, the thing was definitely miserable.

“It’s still a hundred below zero in here,” Kim answered. “It’s amazing that anything at all works here. Unless they were using superconductors.”

The corridor took a sharp turn that had been obscured by the projections. When they rounded ,the corner, they found themselves in front of an interior door. There was no lock here.

“Open sesame,” Paris muttered.

The door opened.

“Wait a minute, that isn’t supposed to happen,” the pilot protested.

“Maybe the suit communicator triggered it,” the captain said.

And they were surrounded by the angels again. The one with the indigo skin and the silver white hair, the Christmas pair and the pale blue one and the one that was shot with gold, they were all there, smiling, welcoming.

And they were tall, but not at all of a size to have built this ship.

In fact, they were all about the same size, Paris thought.

Taller than he was, but not so much so that they were abnormal for a human. They were still a hair under two meters, Paris was certain of it.

“Thank you for coming to our aid,” the indigo-skinned one said.

“We have been waiting so very long, and no one comes. We are safe in here from the thing that waits. Here we can be at home.

You must come here and stay, all of you.”

“What thing that waits?” the captain asked. Though her voice sounded neutral, Tom Paris caught the note of disbelief in her tone. The captain was having none of them, he thought. And neither was he.

“Captain, nothing is registering on the tricorder. Not on any life reading at all. I’ve adjusted it for other compositions, including metallic, and the only thing I’m getting is energy concentration and coherent light.”

“Gentlemen, we’ve reached the holodeck,” the captain announced.

“I thought it would have to be something like this. Created especially for us.”

“That’s more sophisticated than that simple airlock would indicate,” Harry Kim said.

“And they’re not big enough for this ship,” Paris added. “They aren’t to scale around here.”

“It is beautiful here, and everything is provided. And it is safe.

You can stay here and have everything, and that which waits will be satisfied. It will not harm you. It has no wish to harm if we do not interfere with its needs.” The indigo-skinned one made the little speech.

“Well, we would like to see the rest of the ship,” Janeway said, and went back for the door again.

Only there was no door. It had disappeared, along with all the walls and the strange projections. In its place was a small pond with goldfish flickering under the surface and violet lilies blooming on their pads. One of the angels, this one colored turquoise and red, sprinkled what appeared to be crumbs over the water. They were in the middle of a garden with a fountain on the far side and carved white benches around a small table. Pink creeper roses covered a large sycamore tree that dripped down over a picnic blanket where several of the angels were setting out food no one on Voyager had seen in months.

A single crystal bowl held fresh pineapple and mandarin oranges and pears. An entire turkey on a silver platter took pride of place, but it was surrounded by bread and several decanters of wine and plates full of spinich pies and rice and Tuscan white beans in rosemary.

“Come, take off those suits. It is pleasant here,” the indigo one said. “You can enjoy a repast, and then we can make arrangements.”

“Mr. Paris,” Captain Janeway’s voice cut like ice through the soporific blandishments of the aliens. “Your phaser. Now.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. He turned away from the images of the beings and opened fire at full power.

Nothing happened. The phaser had been fully charged before he left Voyager. He had checked. He knew he wanted to be armed on this mission, and he wouldn’t leave a thing like that to chance.

But it should be working.

Maybe it was too cold, maybe the internal synapses of the phaser had frozen.

That was ridiculous. Phasers didn’t freeze. Phasers that worked two hours ago still worked.

So he shot again, a protracted blast that ran the power gauge down two notches.

“According to the tricorder, there’s a big smoking hole where Tom just shot,” Harry said incredulously.

“Well, let’s just walk out and see what happens,” Janeway said.

She turned away from the images of the people who weren’t there at all, walked straight into the sycamore, and disappeared from sight behind the creeper roses.

“You are making a great mistake,” the indigo angel said after her.

“But if you return, we will try to help you. No one survives here without help. No one can outfight it. We can only accept what we can have here and enjoy it. You will return. We shall be glad to see you.”

Paris and Kim followed the captain into the tree. When they reached it, they found they could walk through it easily.

Turning around, they saw shreds of the garden through a haze, as if there were a curtain of mist forming where the wall had been.

“It seems to be repairing itself, Captain,” Kim said, looking at the tricorder. “It’s completely inorganic, but there’s an energy field forming and seems to be creating a matrix for matter.”

“Maybe there’s something in that we could use,” Janeway said briskly.

She looked around briefly. “This isn’t the way we came in.” Then she struck out down another hallway through the projecting crystal light.

Engineering was dark and disemboweled, Chakotay thought as he motioned to B’Elanna Torres to follow him to a more private corner. For some reason the dark made it seem hushed as well, though several work crews were engaged in repair operations. It seemed they were talking only in hushed whispers, as if with the warp core that was the center of their lives dead and dark, they were at a funeral. The harsh emergency lights and hand lanterns created an eerie chiaroscuro effect that reinforced the whole atmosphere of untimely death.

Chakotay could tell that B’Elanna Torres was upset. Not simply angry but confused on top of it. She hated being confused. He had rarely seen her having trouble understanding the nature of a problem.

This was not one of those times. She didn’t look at him as she spoke, she studied her readout instead as if that would finally provide the revelation.

“I’ve run a level four diagnostic,” she said before he could begin.

“I’ve checked every single one of those connections we cut. This does not make sense. The computer is functioning properly, the connections were all working on the correct interface. According to all the tests, there’s nothing wrong.”

She spat out the last few words as if they tasted bad.

“But there’s still a problem,” Chakotay said, trying to get her to go over all the details. Not that he would find a solution that she couldn’t see. His talents were limited when it came to engineering.

But if B’Elanna heard it one more time, she might find some insight.

And then she could fix whatever was wrong and they could leave.

That was Chakotay’s goal, to have the ship running on full power and under their guidance by the time the captain returned from the away mission. He had thought it was a fairly straightforward task. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“There’s a big problem,” Torres said, and sighed heavily. “The computer doesn’t acknowledge that there was any error in navigation coming to this place.” She sighed and tapped her fingers on the console. “You know, I used to trust computers.

They aren’t like people, they don’t do things for stupid reasons, like they like the way you wear your hair or the color of the sky today is orange. But this computer isn’t behaving like that. It feels almost as if I’m dealing with an irrational biological being who has all kinds of selfish reasons for making trouble.”