Atonement (31 page)

“I know this isn't what Admiral Janeway's hoping to hear,”
Glenn noted.

“The admiral knows how to deal with disappointment,” the Doctor reminded her as a soft alarm began to sound on the Doctor's data panel.

“What's that?”
Glenn asked.

The
Doctor sighed deeply, shaking his head. “I'm afraid I am going to have to sign off for a few hours.”

“Why?”

“It's part of my
treatment
,” the Doctor replied, his disdain for the word clear. In response to Glenn's puzzled look he continued, “Counselor Cambridge believes it is essential that I engage in brief periods of rest. During these times, I am not permitted to work on medical issues—except in the event of an emergency, obviously.”

“What are you supposed to do
?”

“Meditate,” the Doctor replied.

“And the thought of that fills you with anxiety?”
Glenn asked kindly.

“I suppose,” the Doctor admitted.

Glenn smiled.
“Would you like a little help?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I spend a fair amount of time meditating daily,”
she replied.
“It's an active process, intended to clear and focus the mind. It is incredibly effective and restorative.”

“Hm.”

“My first experiences were with guided meditations. One of my teachers would help me settle and focus my thoughts. From there, I learned to enter a meditative state without external cues.”

“I appreciate the offer, Commander, but I know how busy you are.”

“I've been at this for twelve hours straight, Doctor. I could use a short break as well. Come on, let's give it a try.”

After a few more half-hearted protests, the Doctor relented. At Glenn's instruction, he dimmed the lights in his office, locked the door, assumed a supine position on the deck, and closed his eyes.

Glenn's voice quickly became the only exterior sensation of which he was aware. She spoke in a calm, low tone, asking him first to imagine a pristine lake bordered by soft grass bathed in warm sunlight.

The Doctor soon realized that much as he tried to focus only on her words and the images they evoked, other thoughts would
intrude. She counseled him to simply observe these thoughts without following them. Eventually, his imaginary mental landscape became his sole focus. He was only vaguely conscious of Glenn's voice. All other mental processes ceased.

Half an hour passed before the Doctor realized how effective Glenn's guidance had been. She brought him out slowly, and by the time he was sitting up inside his darkened office, all anxiety at the prospect of engaging in Cambridge's “treatment” was gone. He thanked Glenn profusely and she promised to work with him daily and forward him some other meditations she found particularly helpful.

The Doctor rose and increased the illumination of his office to a standard setting. He turned back to his desk and was momentarily disoriented to see himself sitting before his data screen, tears streaming down his face.

“She's dead. I failed her.”

This was a memory. The Doctor had not accessed it since he was deactivated, but the black curtain in his mind behind which his “muted” memories now lived had been pulled back ever so slightly. The Doctor was reliving an experience he'd had shortly before the cascade failure that had destabilized his program.
Or was this shortly after?
He did not know. Fortunately, he did not feel the same emotional distress he was observing. Simple awareness of this fact allowed the memory to fade. As soon as the connection was made, the Doctor found himself alone again in his office.

Conscious that he should record this event in his personal log, and actually looking forward to sharing it with Counselor Cambridge, the Doctor moved toward his desk.

A tall male alien with deep-red-tinted flesh stood before him. “
Release me!
” he bellowed. A strange short sword rested in the alien's hand. Distant crashes and booms echoed all around them.

The Doctor did not hesitate. He stepped toward the figure, took the sword, and plunged it into the alien's chest.

•   •   •   •   •

Commander B'Elanna Torres knew better. She should be sleeping, but her brain was not cooperating.

Miral had been in a rare terrible mood at dinner. Torres had assumed Tom's absence was to blame until, while tucking Miral in for the night, the little girl had revealed that Nancy had forgotten their ice-cream date. The chief engineer had become quite close to Miral, especially since Tom's departure, spending several free hours distracting the child, but those free hours had disappeared from everyone's schedule when the deflector dish was destroyed. Conlon had promised to make it up to Miral this afternoon, but apparently she'd forgotten.

Torres didn't blame her. The computer indicated that Conlon was in her quarters, but she wasn't answering hails. She'd probably already turned in for the night. Torres had broken down and replicated delicious sundaes for both of them, which they finished off in bed. Mollified, Miral had fallen asleep.

Torres had then decided that the quickest path to joining Miral lay in reviewing the last few days of engineering reports. The fleet chief had already received verbal updates, but she was required to sign off on the written ones as well. One or two at the most should dull her mind sufficiently and sleep would soon follow.

It didn't.

The first report contained the full analysis Conlon had completed on Harry's mysterious and destructive power surges. Conlon's conclusions were reasonable, just not probable, given the supporting data. It seemed the lieutenant had taken a few shortcuts in her analysis, particularly when it came to the issues of the affected shuttle. That wasn't like Conlon.
Of course, it wasn't like she had nothing else to do
, Torres told to herself.

Torres was so focused on the report that she barely heard the chime at her door. Only when Harry began to knock softly and call her name did Torres ask the computer to grant him access.

“Hey, Harry,” she greeted him as he crossed to her replicator, ordered a synthetic ale, and settled himself on her sofa, putting his feet up on the coffee table. Realizing he intended to stay, she began, “Is everything okay?” meaning to follow it quickly with
because I have a ton of work to do
.

But Kim's
forlorn face stilled the words. Rising from her workstation, she moved to sit across from him.

“What's going on?” she prodded.

“Nothing,” Kim replied. “Want to watch a little TV?” he asked, nodding to the antique set that had been a fixture in Tom Paris's personal quarters even before he and Torres were married.

“It'll wake Miral,” Torres replied. “She'll probably think Tom's back. He's the only one who ever watches it with her. She misses him a lot.”

Kim nodded. “She's not the only one.”

“Oh, come on,” Torres said. “
Acting first officer.
That's huge for you. And you're doing a great job.”

“Yeah, but my work-life balance is suffering,” Kim noted.

Torres smirked. “What's that?” she teased.

Kim shrugged. “It's my fault. I'm giving it everything I have. I can't do less. But I also can't shut it off. Tonight I made a special effort. Nancy and I haven't had dinner in days. But by the time I got to her quarters, she was already asleep.”

“I think the exhaustion has finally caught up with her,” Torres agreed. “She forgot a date with Miral today.”

“Miral and Nancy are dating now?” Kim asked.

“Yep. And the kiddo is stiff competition, so you'd better step up your game.”

“I can't compete with that face,” Kim conceded.

Torres laughed lightly. She hadn't done that in a while, and it felt good.

“Why aren't you asleep?” Kim asked.

Torres nodded toward her desk. “Reports.”

Kim brought his feet to the floor and started to rise. “I'll leave you to it so you're not up all night.”

“What are you going to do?” Torres asked gently.

Kim shrugged. “I think I'll spend the next few hours trying to figure out why we're not all dead.”

“Huh?”

“It's been bugging me for weeks. I need to review the tactical logs of our battle at the Gateway. Looks like I finally have some time.”

“What
are you looking for?”

“The answer is probably in the
Scion
's rate-of-fire indices. I just remember
knowing
that right after the dish went, we were dead too. But the Voth held their fire.”

“No, they didn't,” Torres said. “The
Shudka
called for a cease-fire. The
Scion
was honoring that.”

“There wasn't time,” Kim argued. “The cease-fire order came several seconds too late to save us. But there might have been a power drain or delay or
something
else going on. They destroyed, what, thirty other ships in five minutes? Why were we spared?”

“Harry, that's a really depressing thing to be fixating on when . . .” Torres began, but a new thought caused those words to trail off. Rising quickly, she returned to the report she had just been reviewing, the one where Conlon blamed their power surges on faulty bioneural interface regulators.

Torres read for a few minutes in silence until Kim interrupted. “What is it?”

She lifted her face to him, but her eyes were glued to the blank wall over his shoulder. “We're on our sixth generation of bioneural gel packs. System integration errors have been nonexistent since the third upgrade. There's nothing wrong with the interfaces.”

“Apparently there is now,” Kim corrected her.

“No, there isn't. But Nancy is right. The regulators are the weakest interface point, and you
have
to get past those in order for the surges we detected to affect other systems.”

“Right. The regulators malfunctioned and the surges spread,” Kim said. “I still can't figure out how they affected our holodeck's segregated power supplies. It's not as if they are disconnected from the rest of the ship. They're just a discrete system.”

Torres sighed, shaking her head. “Forget the holodecks for a second. The first surge detected was in the
Van Cise
.”

“So?”

“That was the shuttle Neelix returned to us. The one Meegan stole. We rebuilt most of the central processing and power distribution systems when Neelix brought it back to us. I always
assumed she was in such bad shape because of what the Talaxians did to her to get her flying again. But they didn't give us their engineering reports. For all we know, they didn't even touch the primary systems. We were all focusing on the data cores that were completely fried apart from the logs Neelix was able to restore.”

“Did you replace the gel packs?”

“All of them,” Torres replied. “So they all had brand-new regulators that wouldn't have come from the same stock as the ones on
Voyager
that have been in use for almost a year now.”

“Maybe we have a bigger problem with the regulators than we thought: a design issue.”

“The moment the shuttle was returned, our diagnostic scanners were connected to it via hard lines; anything on that shuttle could have moved into our primary systems,” Torres offered.

“But there are buffers in those lines that screen for any unusual signals. Nothing showed up at the time, did it?”

“No,” Torres agreed. “But we weren't looking that closely, either.”

“What do you think was on that shuttle?” Kim asked.

“Something that could live in the gel packs until it found a way to move into our primary systems,” Torres replied. “A virus, maybe.”

“Something meant to destroy the ship?” Kim asked.

“No,” Torres insisted. “If you're right, and the
Scion
spared
Voyager
after disabling us completely, that means
they wanted us alive.
Meegan ordered them to hold their fire.”

“Lsia.”

“Whatever. If
she
wanted the ship intact it would only be because there is something of value here, something she
sent back to us
on that shuttle.”

Kim nodded thoughtfully. “I'm going to—”

“Review those tactical logs,” Torres finished for him. “And I'm going to go over those shuttle diagnostics again.”

“Should I wake up Chakotay?”

“Not yet,” Torres said. “Not until we know what we're dealing with.”

STARFLEET HEADQUARTERS

SAN FRANCISCO

C
ommander
Tom Paris took it as a good sign that shortly after his arrival at Admiral Montgomery's office, he, Doctor Sharak, and Lieutenant Wildman were ushered inside by his aide. That optimism endured until the moment he saw the admiral's face.

“Commander Paris,” Montgomery began, “I trust you've been keeping yourself out of trouble while enjoying your liberty?”

Paris smiled tightly. “As I'm sure you're aware, Admiral, an issue has arisen regarding a civilian assigned to the Full Circle Fleet, Seven.”

“I am,” Montgomery confirmed. “She was briefly released from her duties at Starfleet Medical and has failed to report back in a timely manner. Starfleet security is now scouring the surface of this planet for any sign of her. It appears her last recorded transport was performed by a cadet with whom I know you are familiar. The transport logs in question show signs of tampering. While no blame has yet been assigned, Cadet Icheb has been relieved of his post until the matter can be resolved. We both know Seven and Icheb are very close. It will be a great disappointment to his Academy advisors should it be confirmed that he has been assisting her in evading our personnel.”