Atonement (26 page)

“This way,” Gretchen said.

They walked to the willow tree in silence. Seven remained as Gretchen had last seen her. Although Gretchen feared to get too close, Julia seemed to accept with complete equanimity the fact that a woman in a lotus position was floating above the ground. She moved to stand directly in front of Seven and, tapping her gently on the shoulder, began to say her name softly and urgently.

“Seven? Seven?”

It took a few moments, but finally Seven's eyes fluttered open. Gretchen had imagined that the moment the spell was broken,
Seven would tumble to the ground. Instead, she brought her feet down gracefully and stood as if she had just risen from a very comfortable chair. Her cheeks had good color and her eyes were bright. She even appeared well rested.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Seven,” Julia began. “Tom sent me.”

“I know. We must go,” Seven said. Turning to Gretchen, she stepped forward. “Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Janeway.”

“Anytime,” Gretchen said, and meant it.

VOYAGER

Y
ou're kidding me, right?”

Ensign Aytar Gwyn was
Voyager
's best flight control officer. She was half-Kriosian, and Paris had long ago concluded that she flew by a sixth sense. Commander B'Elanna Torres wasn't surprised by the young woman's analysis of the area of space
Voyager
was preparing to explore. It was displayed with dispiriting clarity on the astrometrics lab's large viewscreen.

“No,” Torres replied. “Lsia has provided Admiral Janeway with intel on Seriar's location. Based on a number of calculations, including the intersection of those six streams you see there, just outside the affected area,
this is it.
”

Running a hand through her short aquamarine hair, Gwyn asked, “Can we even call that space?”

Lieutenant Kim spared Torres the explanation. “Lsia told the admiral there was heavy fighting between her people and the Nayseriareen with advanced weapons near Seriar. She doubted the damage to subspace would have repaired itself since then.”

“So the admiral is okay spending at least a year out here navigating this mess?” Gwyn demanded.

“We're all
hoping you can shave down that estimate a little for us,” Torres noted, although she didn't think it was far off.

The first time Torres had studied this region was several weeks earlier, while
Voyager
was en route to Lecahn and she and Conlon were trying to produce a map of all of the streams running through Confederacy space. Initially, she had thought this vast dark spot on her charts was another cloaked area, similar to the one that surrounded the Ark Planet. It covered several sectors, and its outermost border was near the edge of Confederacy territory in that area. Clearly the CIF already knew what Torres now realized. It wasn't cloaked space. It was space that had been laid waste by terrible weapons, filled with subspace instabilities and exotic radiation, and no sane spacefaring folk would risk entering it.

Gwyn stepped back from the display, crossed her arms at her chest, and inhaled deeply. Closing her eyes, she stood motionless for a long moment. Torres looked to Kim, who could only shrug.

Abruptly, Gwyn stepped back up to the console that controlled the lab's display. She started to place her hands on the controls, then lifted them, saying, “Can one of you highlight anything in the area that might once have been a subspace corridor?”

Torres stepped to Gwyn's side. “Why?” she asked, even as she began to run the appropriate calculations. “None of them will be stable enough at this point to utilize. I doubt the CIF even has the appropriate frequencies.”

“Yeah, I wasn't thinking about entering them,” Gywn said. “I was just curious.”

“Ensign,” Kim interjected, “Captain Chakotay and Admiral Janeway need a briefing in the next half hour. We don't have time for curiosity right now.”

“Look,” Gwyn said, pointing to the huge screen before her. “Do you see that?”

Kim had no idea what she was pointing to. More than a hundred stars, planets, and streams were displayed before them.

“What?” Kim indulged her.

“That
system a few light-years above the intersection of those streams,” Gwyn replied. “The one inhabited planet there is Grysyen.”

“And?” Kim asked.

Torres suddenly understood what Gwyn might be getting at, and why Harry didn't. “When we engaged the Unmarked at Lecahn, while you were still on the
Twelfth Lamont,
the ship whose crew we captured was able to catch up with us by executing a maneuver I'd never seen. They were from Grysyen.”

“They bounced,” Gwyn said. When both Torres and Kim shot her the same confused look, she continued, “Those corridors require an access key, a precise harmonic resonance that allows a ship to slip inside. The
Frenibarg
transmitted a frequency to open the stream just before it accelerated, at a distance of about ten thousand kilometers from the point of ingress. Then they cut their engines completely. Their momentum carried them toward the corridor but instead of pulling them in, they just bounced across the instability between normal space and subspace that exists once a corridor has been opened.”

Torres smiled at Gwyn in admiration. Kim appeared horrified at the thought.

“What?” Gwyn demanded. “I'd never seen a ship move like that. I spent the next week studying our sensor readings until I figured out how they did it. It looked like fun.”

Torres returned her gaze to the astrometrics display and inhaled sharply. While there were no stable streams displayed, dozens of fragments were present that appeared to be permanently open.

“I'd bet my life this is where
Frenibarg
's pilot learned that maneuver,” Gwyn said.

“You're not suggesting we try the same thing?” Kim asked.

“How long do you want to spend in that mess?” Gwyn asked. “If we try to navigate around all of the various instabilities out there, we could spend the rest of our lives at one-quarter impulse and still never find that planet. This way, if we find sections of
corridors that remain stable enough, we can make up a lot of time.”

As Harry paused to consider this, the doors to the lab hissed open.

“Commander, Lieutenant, Ensign,” Lieutenant Conlon greeted them.

“Hi, Nancy,” Torres said. “What's up?”

Conlon extended a padd to Torres, saying, “I've analyzed all of the power disruptions Lieutenant Kim discovered.
Voyager
's systems weren't the only ones affected. One of our shuttles suffered similar surges. None were bad enough to damage any of the systems that weren't holographic. It appears the source is the bioneural interface regulators. At some point we are going to have to go in and replace all of the affected regulators, but the surges have stopped for now, and I've programmed the main computer to advise us if any new ones are detected. I was also able to restore the holodecks.”

“The crew is going to be happy to hear that,” Kim said, smiling.

“Is there anything else?” Conlon asked.

Torres considered Conlon's brisk report. They had both passed their wits' end days ago, but now that all of the major repairs had been completed, Nancy should have started to unwind a little.

Of course, Torres knew how she had felt when
Voyager
was damaged while she was her chief engineer. She
had
believed it was similar to what a parent might feel watching someone hurt their child, right up until she'd had Miral and understood that the two sensations were nothing alike. One induced anger and frustration; the other, primal madness.

“Our flight controller thinks she might have figured out a way for us to use the subspace corridor fragments in this wasteland we are about to explore to cut time off our work.” Turning to Gwyn, she said, “You need to show Lieutenant Conlon all of your research and together run simulations before we decide to try it.”

“Understood,” Gwyn said eagerly.

“Of course,” Conlon said, nodding.

Torres looked to Kim. He was studying Nancy's face, disconcerted. Conlon hadn't made eye contact with him since she'd entered the room. The fleet chief engineer made a mental note to speak to Harry about it later. She knew the two of them had been seeing each other, but Harry needed to understand the distance Conlon required right now. She'd shouldered the responsibility for getting
Voyager
repaired over the last several days and had rightly devoted herself entirely to it. You didn't just shut off that kind of focus or drop your defenses the moment the work was done. For the next several months, every time the ship made an unexpected move beneath her feet, Conlon would feel the impact that almost destroyed the ship. Torres would too. But she'd been down this road enough times to know what was happening to Conlon. This had been Nancy's first major test as
Voyager
's chief engineer. She'd passed with flying colors. She just didn't know it yet.

“Come on, Harry,” Torres said. “Let's leave these two to their work. We have to brief the captain and fleet commander.”

“Sure,” Kim said, nodding to Conlon, who returned a tight smile before focusing entirely on Gwyn.

GALEN

Three days into their work together, the Doctor and Counselor Cambridge were making progress in fits and starts. Neither trusted the other enough to listen without judgment or speak without first rallying their defenses. But despite this, they had stumbled across a few insights.

Cambridge had already indicated that he believed the Doctor was ready to resume his normal duties, although their sessions would continue to be part of the Doctor's daily schedule.

The counselor sat across from the Doctor, his left leg crossed over his right, swinging like a metronome set at its widest interval. The Doctor had detected an inverse relationship between
the counselor's level of frustration and the speed of his incessant ticking: the slower the pace, the shorter his patience. At the moment, the motion was almost glacial.

They had spent the last hour discussing a new sense of despair the Doctor had begun to experience. Counselor Cambridge considered this progress. The Doctor was clearly moving rather briskly through the requisite stages of grieving the man he had been when his memories had remained intact and accepting the man he now was.

The Doctor was disinclined to celebrate this progress.

“Have you considered the possibility, Doctor, that your creator has, perhaps inadvertently and in the most ham-handed way possible, given you an experience that, in time, might enhance your ability to empathize with your organic patients.”

“I already—” the Doctor began.

“To
better
empathize,” Cambridge allowed.

“I really don't see how that's possible.”

“None of us are perfect. Now that includes you,” Cambridge said.

The Doctor started to reply, but paused as he calculated the statistical probability that the counselor could actually be complimenting him.

“You possess an encyclopedic understanding of ways in which an organic body can be damaged. By the time most physicians acquire that amount of knowledge, they have also accumulated a lifetime's worth of personal challenges, losses, and pain to go along with them. I
know
you have also faced your own fair share of difficulties. You have lost friends you held dear. You have loved with and without reciprocation. Didn't I read in your record that you once created a holographic family for yourself to better understand the human condition and interpersonal relationships?”

“I did,” the Doctor replied, suddenly wishing that
this
was one of the memories Doctor Zimmerman had thought to mute. While he did not consider the experiment a failure, the Doctor would forever be tormented by the death of his holographic
daughter. He had learned soon enough that
real life
came with enough painful eventualities. Seeking them out in the name of personal betterment was unnecessary.
Why rush the inevitable?

Of course, now it might be possible to add Belle's memory to my segregated file,
the Doctor suddenly realized. It only took a fraction of a second for him to dismiss the notion. He had lost too much of himself already. He would not willingly part with more.

“But you have never really been physically injured, have you?”

“I suppose not,” the Doctor said. “Past damage to my program was repaired. The insights that came from facing personal challenges diminished the regrets for lapses and unintentional transgressions.”

“You learned from your mistakes.”

“Like everyone else.”

“And now,
finally
, like everyone else, you find yourself damaged, with no perfect fix. Numerous conditions exist that our medical technology cannot reverse. You treated Seven's aunt. Her Irumodic Syndrome is one of the most difficult to witness, given the slow mental degradation that accompanies it. You counseled Seven to accept the unacceptable because there was no other choice. There was no way to repair Irene's brain.

“Likewise, your
brain
, for lack of a better description, has now been damaged. Your memories are a casualty of that damage.”

“You believe I should accept my current condition?”

“I believe that rather than simply wallowing in the loss, it might be helpful for you to consider what you have gained in this unusual transaction.”

“I'm sorry, Counselor,” the Doctor said. “I'll try to wallow more quietly.”

“You'll have to forgive my inability to pity you, Doctor,” Cambridge said. “Admiral Janeway's decision to alter Doctor Zimmerman's modification and allow you to control the segregation and deletion of your current and future memories is a boon the rest of us should have long ago demanded of the gods.”