Ghost of a Chance (24 page)

“Whose responsibility is it to protect the Drenarians?” she asked. “I mean, if we can’t protect them, who can?”

“No one,” Neelix said.

“I guess it would be whoever built the planetary defense system,” Paris offered.

“Yes,” Janeway said, looking at him, “but whoever that was is gone now.

The defensive system, however, is still here. And that must be the key.”

“It would seem the system is faltering, Captain,” Tuvok said.

“And we do not know enough about it to address that particular problem in the time remaining.”

“But that’s just it, Tuvok,” Janeway said, growing more excited, seeing the solution more clearly as she turned and paced just behind Paris’s back. “I think I may know what’s wrong, thanks to something I saw in a dream.” She stopped and faced Chakotay.

“Something the ghosts showed me.”

“Captain,” Neelix said, “what Tuvok said, about there not being enough time, well—” “And if I’m right, I can think of only one way to fix it.” She spun half about once more. “Lieutenant Torres.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I’ll need a shielded antimatter container fitted with a detonator. I want it charged and ready for transport as soon as possible. And two antigravity floaters. How soon can you supply them?”

B’Elanna shrugged. “In about five minutes, Captain.”

“Good. Meet me in the transporter room in six minutes.” She paused again, still finishing the idea in her mind. “Mr. Tuvok, have the transporter room get a fix on that underground power source everyone is so interested in. There is a plateau down there, at the western end, I think. Have them locate it. I want to get as close to ground zero as possible.”

“What do you plan to do, Captain?” Paris asked, staring at her.

“Blowing yourself up won’t help.” His expression was one of intense concern.

“I’m going to try to recharge that defense system’s batteries.

I’m not sure it will work, but I know I have to try, and I think we have just enough time.”

“You’ll need someone to go with you,” Paris volunteered, rising out of his chair.

“No, I’ll go,” Chakotay said. “If anything goes wrong, Paris can get the ship to safety as quick as anyone.” He looked hard at Janeway. “I stayed behind the last time. This time I’m going.”

“What if you succeed, and that defense system decides to come after us?” Neelix hastily asked. “As Tuvok said, we don’t know enough about it.”

“The captain may know more than you think,” Chakotay said.

“You’ll have to trust me, Neelix,” Janeway told the Talaxian, who silently nodded in return.

Chakotay stood beside the captain, pressing her for a response to his request to accompany her.

Janeway sighed audibly. She didn’t like the idea, but she didn’t hate it enough to deny Chakotay his wish. She had gotten to know the commander well enough to recognize the look in his eye. He was a Maquis, after all, and they seemed to have a preference for being in the thick of things. Besides, if her plan didn’t work, the rest might not matter anyway. “Very well,” she said. “Let’s go.”

***

“The Federation ship launched a photon weapon of some type at Gantel’s cruiser. A direct hit,” Tatel said, anxiously watching her tactical panels while maintaining contact with Triness, her counterpart on the bridge of Gantel’s ship. “The cruiser has lost its forward shields.”

“Impressive, for a single strike,” Daket said, managing at least to sound self-assured. “Small wonder Gantel is so interested in acquiring that ship.”

“I have downloaded a report on the Federation’s secret weapon,” Tatel added.

Daket was already somewhat familiar with this—a secret technology that somehow had allowed these Federation people to make their enemies, Gantel’s emissaries, vanish into thin air without any visible actuators or support apparatus. Capturing such a device was indeed a most enticing prospect, as long as the would-be captor did not become a victim.

“Transfer the report to my console. I’d like to read it,” he said. At least, I’d like to try, Daket thought, not certain he would get the chance.

“You have it,” Tatel said. She went back to scanning her screens again, and listening to communications from orbit. She frowned suddenly, an unusual public expression for any Televek.

Daket didn’t like the look of it. “What?” he prodded.

“Gantel is planning to continue the attack. They are rebuilding their forward shields, transferring power.” She paused, apparently waiting.

“What now?” Daket asked, certain he wanted to know, though increasingly certain he would not like what he heard.

“They’ve opened fire again. Voyager’s shields are weakening.

Gantel believes that if he can deplete them another ten percent, they will collapse. If he waits, they may be able to recover, or outmaneuver the attempt. The Federation ship is apparently quite agile. Gantel has stated—” Tatel went silent. She held still for a moment, staring down, then she played her fingers once more over the panels before her.

After a few seconds her hands rose, then hovered in the air just above the console, as if she feared what it might do.

“Report, Associate,” Daket insisted.

“We have lost contact with Gantel’s ship,” she said, turning away from her controls. “They must have taken damage.” She was looking at Daket with eyes full of pain and… remorse, perhaps, which was clearly misplaced.

A character flaw, he decided. As if she could have done something. As if they mattered more than she did, Daket mused, scoffing at the idea.

Already he was getting to know her too well, perhaps. A replacement would be best, when they got back home.

“Check your instruments,” he told her.

“Functioning normally.”

“Then their communications must have been knocked out.”

“No,” Tatel said, slowly shaking her head.

When she said nothing else, Gantel asked: “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean they’re gone. No readings, no telemetry, nothing on sensors.

Only the Federation ship is showing up.”

She looked worse now; Daket was sure he had never seen such an alien expression on a Televek face before. Tatel wasn’t quite right, he decided. Able, efficient, loyal, but not right. This was no time for futile laments. Everything had just changed. It was time to act, to address the facts. The prospect of disaster was real, something Daket was already having trouble dealing with.

He felt every muscle in his body growing tense, a condition he had been fighting, a minor battle he had lost. Nothing compared to Gantel’s, of course.

At least not yet.

“If there is a positive spin to be put on any of this,” Daket told the bridge crew, stating only the obvious, “I would be interested in knowing what it is. How long before we can lift off?”

“Three minutes. Most of our personnel have returned. We have only—” Daket cut Tatel off. He had decided pretense was largely useless at this point. “Anyone who has not returned in three minutes… will wait here. Time has run out. The fleet will arrive in less than an hour. We will be on hand to greet Shaale.”

With luck—something that seemed to be in short supply this day—Daket would learn precisely what had befallen Gantel’s vessel, so that he could avoid that same fate. Or he could simply stay out of harm’s way until the fleet arrived, which was clearly the more attractive option, provided he could make it work.

In any case he couldn’t just stay on the surface. If the earthquakes didn’t destroy him, Shaale would see his career destroyed. He could have no defense for such inaction. He’d accomplished next to nothing, which was hardly an excuse for continuing to do so. Gantel’s unfortunate end meant there was no one to help, and no one on whom to shift the blame—but it also meant that if anything good did come of this mission, Daket was in a position to take most of the credit for it. A delicate and risky position, to say the least, which did nothing for the throbbing in his head or the burning sensation in his stomach, but an opportunity nonetheless. A beginning… or an end.

“Two minutes,” Tatel said.

Daket felt his chest tighten. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

***

The place looked much as it had in the dream, but the differences were immediately apparent. Everywhere, Janeway could see signs of deterioration in the great underground cavern. She stood with Chakotay in what might have been the exact spot her consciousness had occupied when she had visited here before, and as she breathed, she was reminded of the stark reality of this place.

The smell of smoke and sulfur made each breath difficult, though oddly, it was not as bad as she had perceived the same air to be during the vision.

The machine was every bit as massive and remarkable as she remembered, but it had been damaged in numerous places. Dozens of tubes had been broken or crushed by falling rock. The entire plateau was littered with rubble, Janeway noticed, as she let go of the package they had brought along, leaving Chakotay to tend it. She turned slowly in a circle while Chakotay steadied the antimatter container. Large sections of the cavern walls had been sheered away, collapsing into piles of debris; some of them had even tumbled over and into parts of the machine. In those places, the bright tubes had gone dim, or completely dark.

The walls themselves were marked by massive cracks that ran from the roof of the cavern to the floor of the plateau, or beyond it and over the edge, reaching toward the great abyss below. Some of the cracks were clearly very deep.

Janeway realized that Chakotay had been silently following her gaze, seeing all of this for the first time. And they could see quite well.

Not only the machine itself, but also the dozens of fixtures surrounding it radiated light. They combined to form a small subterranean sun. But in the vast region beyond the plateau the darkness gathered quickly, concealing the distance entirely.

“It’s a natural cavern,” Chakotay said softly.

“I believe so,” Janeway said.

“Nature can be a powerful creative force.”

In the silence between their words a low rumble could be heard, a sound that came from deep beneath their feet and reverberated in the chasm all around them. “It also can destroy what it creates,” Janeway said, just as the mild aftershock sent a small cascade of rock and gravel tumbling down a wall somewhere beyond their sight, out in the darkness.

She turned again toward the cavern wall behind them. “There,” she told Chakotay. “That’s what all the fuss is about.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he said, steadying the antimatter container. “It looks so simple in a way.” He squinted at the machine. “Was it in this condition in your vision?”

“No. It’s been damaged, but that isn’t all that’s wrong with it.

That isn’t why we’ve been reading such erratic and continuously fading power levels. At least I don’t think so. There’s another factor.

That way,” she said, nodding in the other direction.

Chakotay stared at the wall of glowing tubes for a moment longer, then he turned and grasped his side of the antigravity unit.

They started slowly toward the edge of the plateau, keeping the container between them, careful of their footing. When they were less than fifty meters from the edge, Janeway paused and pointed.

“That’s it,” she said. “Down there.”

She hadn’t seen this in a vision, not exactly, but she had known, somehow, what she would find if she came here. The ghosts had wanted her to come here; it was something she knew she had to do.

This close, and with their eyes adjusting further to the dimming light beyond their position, more detail emerged.

The mighty ocean of glowing molten lava that had boiled for kilometers below the cliff had grown cool and dark. A lava dome had formed there, containing the fires of the planet’s heart.

Fires that had burned here for ages.

Janeway let the antimatter container hover again, let Chakotay steady it, while she pulled her tricorder free and flipped it open. She scanned, rotating in a full circle, switching band widths. After a moment she looked up. “I had to be sure,” she said.

“Of what?” Chakotay asked, the perfect audience.

“The defense system, the machine, it uses geothermal energy as a power source. It’s virtually unlimited unless something cuts off the flow of lava.”

“Like an earthquake?”

“Or several dozen of them. I suspected something like this when Nan Loteth told us that the volcanoes to the south were new.”

“So you think that when the crust shifted, part of the lava flow was redirected away from here,” Chakotay said.

“Exactly. Apparently this pool never completely drained, but it cooled enough to allow a dry dome to form over the top of it.”

She examined the tricorder readings again, confirming her hunch as best she could. “Subsequent quakes have returned much of the flow to this area, as far as I can tell, but it’s trapped under the lava dome. If we can open a big enough hole in the dome, let the lava underneath it come up, I think it might return…”

Janeway fell silent as a sudden wave of dizziness nearly toppled her.

She felt herself stumble forward, toward the edge. Then her eyes saw nothing, yet her head was filled with images. She faced the ghosts again, many of them this time. They seemed to be crowding all around her, pressing nearer, whispering all at once. Their messages were jumbled. But slowly, clearer impressions emerged. As before, no words were spoken, but Janeway understood. Her perspective had changed. She wasn’t in the cavern anymore, but on the surface, in an area just outside the village, a place she somehow recognized, even though she was certain she had never been there before.

Anguish filled her heart as she went with the ghosts to this place.

They took her through the trees, past the bodies of numerous dead Drenarians. Abruptly they emerged into a clearing, the place where Nan Loteth had told her the second Televek cruiser had landed. But as they broke out of the woods the reason for the ghosts’ great concern became apparent. Winds swept the grasses and nearby branches as the cruiser boosted itself off the ground, rising skyward, fully operational, as Janeway had expected. It rotated until it was nose up. Then it slipped away through the clouds and was gone.