Atonement (46 page)

Turning, Chakotay saw that both Tirrit and Adaeze had hit the deck with massive phaser wounds to their chests.

Relieved and confused, Chakotay moved behind Kim and lifted him off Emem. “I told you to stand down, Lieutenant,” he shouted, more to reach Kim than to chastise him.

Emem had curled into a blood- and sweat-slicked ball on the deck, but was still breathing.

“What happened to them?” Chakotay asked of the room at large.

Patel was the first to report. “They fired upon each other.” She was already kneeling over Adaeze, checking him for a pulse. “He's dead, sir.”

“So is this one,” Waters advised from ops.

“Harry?” Chakotay said softly to Kim.

He turned to lift his face to his captain. The devastation he was struggling to contain was winning the war. He had apparently skipped from shock at Decan's report straight into anger and despair.

“She . . .” Kim struggled to say, then returned his ravaged gaze to Emem, who had the good sense to stay down.

“I know,” Chakotay said softly. “But this isn't going to help. The Doctor will—”

With another guttural growl of rage, Kim kicked Emem again.

“Lieutenant Kim, you are relieved,” Chakotay said.

At this, Kim deflated and stumbled into his chair beside Chakotay's, burying his face in his hands.

“Decan?” Chakotay asked next. He was not surprised to see the Vulcan standing calmly beside him, his eyes closed. Clearly he had already anticipated Chakotay's primary concern.

Decan's eyes flew open. “They are gone.”

“You're sure?” Chakotay asked in disbelief. His luck had never been that good.

“I sensed both of them leave their hosts and depart the ship.”

“Where did they go?”

“Captain,” Gwyn said suddenly.

Chakotay looked back to the main viewscreen. The motion of the hax had begun to slow perceptibly. Its massive jaws began to widen and its tail slipped free. It still retained a circular shape, but the circle was now broken.

“Please,” Emem coughed.

Chakotay looked down to see him struggling to lift his head. His face was lit with an emotion the captain had never seen from either Emem or Kashyk: reverence.

Emem looked to Chakotay, pleading. “Release me.”

“You know I can't do that,” Chakotay said.

Emem shuddered as another deep, wet cough sent blood and phlegm flying from his lips.

“Perhaps . . . Mister Kim . . . would like to finish . . . what he started?” Emem suggested. “Xolani chose well . . .”

Chakotay felt Kim tense beside him. As he moved to place a restraining hand on Kim's shoulder, General Mattings lifted the phaser he had retrieved during the fight, aimed it directly at Emem, and fired.

The weapon did not disintegrate Emem, but left a huge black hole in his midsection.

And a smile on his face.

Chakotay moved immediately to stand in front of Mattings and placed a firm hand on the arm that held the phaser. The general released it to him without a struggle. “You understand that if my transporters were working right now, you'd already be in our brig,” Chakotay said softly.

“I couldn't stomach another word from that bastard. Someone had to do right by your Mister Kim. I'm surprised at you, Chakotay.”

“And nothing you do surprises me anymore,” Chakotay replied, shaking his head in disgust.

Mattings lifted his chin, then crossed to Kim's side and bent low to speak softly to him.

A number of warring impulses rose within Chakotay but he quickly prioritized them. “Decan?”

“Emem followed the others, sir. He is gone as well.”

The ship, which had maintained a fairly steady course up until now, began to rumble and buck. Chakotay looked back to the main viewscreen. The hax was reorienting itself, its tail unfurling behind it.

“Gwyn, what's our time to intercept?”

“Less than four minutes.”

“And our heading?”

“When the hax was unbroken, we were headed directly for the center of its circumference. Our course has shifted a little with the hax's motion.”

“Torres to Chakotay.”

“Please have good news for me, B'Elanna,” Chakotay said.

“Lsia's overrides have been deleted. You should have control of all systems now.”

“Captain Chakotay to all hands. Red alert,” Chakotay ordered. He had never been so relieved to hear the alarm klaxons begin to wail.

“Conn responding,” Gwyn reported.

“Reverse course, Ensign,” Chakotay ordered.

Just as the words left his lips, Admiral Janeway stepped onto
the bridge. At the same time, the mouth of the hax began to snap open and closed in a fierce biting motion. A high-pitched screech pierced Chakotay's mind. The sensation was similar to the telepathic contact of the protectors. As the bone-chilling sound grew louder, the hax's head turned toward
Voyager.

•   •   •   •   •

The moment Captain Chakotay's voice sounded over the comm, the Doctor moved into action. He had already attached a neural monitor to Conlon's forehead. Finally its data began streaming over the console in front of him. He had also prepped hypos of netinaline, lectrazine, and acetylcholine to revive the lieutenant when the time came.

Nurse Bens had been on duty when the Doctor first called Cambridge to sickbay and stood ready now to assist the Doctor. He ordered Bens to activate a surgical arch over Conlon and bring a level-ten force field and an anti-psionic field online around the biobed.

“Hang on,” Cambridge said, stepping close to the field as it sprang into existence. “What exactly is your plan, Doctor?”

“I'm going to stop her heart,” the Doctor said calmly. “Shortly thereafter, this monitor will confirm the absence of all neurological activity, at which point we will assume that Xolani has left her body. Then—”

“Where is Xolani supposed to go?” Cambridge demanded. “We need one of those containment canisters Glenn sent over, don't we?”

“Do you happen to have an extra one in your pocket?” the Doctor asked.

“No, but we should take a few minutes, now that we are able, and find one.”

The Doctor tapped his combadge, saying, “Sickbay to Lieutenant Barclay, please respond.”

“Go ahead, Doctor.”

“Do we have any of the containment canisters for the Seriareen at hand?”

“Four were destroyed. We just used the spare one Commander Glenn sent over to capture Lsia.”

“Thank you, Reg. Sickbay out.”

“Keep
the lieutenant sedated,” Cambridge suggested. “We can be back in range of the
Galen
in a day, maybe less.”

“She doesn't have a day. It may be too late already,” the Doctor insisted.

“But Xolani,” Cambridge argued.

“You let me worry about that,” the Doctor said.

“I can't,” Cambridge retorted. “I understand the urgency of the lieutenant's condition, but I hardly think exposing your program to possible alien possession is your best choice here.”

The Doctor continued to work as if he had not heard.

“Doctor, don't force me to relieve you of duty,” Cambridge shouted.

“Feel free,” the Doctor said. “But know this: We've already lost one crew member to the Seriareen. I refuse to lose another.”

“Doctor, I . . .” Cambridge began, but stopped midthought. “
Merde alors
, you want this fight, don't you?”

“You did say you had no philosophical objection to revenge, Counselor,” the Doctor noted. His preparations complete, the Doctor verified his readings one last time and activated an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to shut down Nancy Conlon's heart. He waited patiently for it to work, approximately ten seconds, and muted the faint alarms that sounded as his patient began to crash.

“Doctor, you have no idea if you will even be capable of acting once Xolani attacks your program,” Cambridge said.

“He already tried once and failed. There was a reason for that.”

“What was it?”

“I don't remember,” the Doctor replied with feigned cheer. “Let's find out together.”

The Doctor's eyes were glued to his patient's neural readings. It seemed to take several lifetimes for all traces of brain activity to cease. In fact, it was only two minutes.

The assault that followed was immediate.

It was also familiar. The Doctor hadn't been prepared for the first invasion. The immediate sense of a new set of operating
instructions attempting to overwrite his program felt oddly commonplace the second time around.

Rather than allow Xolani's consciousness access to his primary matrix, the Doctor immediately restricted all of the new data to a short-term memory buffer he had cleared for this express purpose prior to killing Nancy Conlon. Once the data had been gathered there, it immediately began to search for new pathways through which to inject itself into the Doctor's main files.

The Doctor simultaneously activated his self-diagnostic subroutine, which instantly recognized the data within the buffer as foreign. The data was quarantined, temporarily unable to affect any of his primary systems, and the Doctor received an internal request from the diagnostic.

Allow interface?

As all of this was occurring at the speed of his holographic processors, fractions of fractions of seconds, the Doctor agreed.

•   •   •   •   •

“Hello Xolani.”

“Emergency Medical Hologram Mark One?”

“Yes. You may call me Doctor.”

“This form is not sufficient.”

“I know. Tragic, really, as it's the only one you can possibly access now.”

“Release me!”

“Hmmm . . . no.”

“Please, Doctor.”

“I'm not refusing because you failed to ask nicely the first time. I'm refusing because you and your kind are a pestilence, undeserving of compassion or mercy.”

“I could assist you. You intend to restore my host's former neurosynaptic pathways. I can provide you with a complete map of them as I found them when I entered her body.”

Against his better judgment the Doctor was intrigued. The “map” Xolani referenced was, indeed, critical data, and information that was not present in any officer's baseline medical files.
The best scans Federation medicine could provide of the referenced pathways were only taken in the event of neurological damage, which Conlon had never suffered until now.

“You'd do that?”

“Despite what you may believe, Doctor, we are not monsters. We are enlightened life-forms. There is so much you could learn from us.”

“For the small price of ceasing to exist.”

“The choice is simple. Your life, for hers.”

“But you already said my form was insufficient.”

“In time, and with several modifications, I could make it sufficient.”

“Am I blushing? You really know how to compliment a fellow.”

“This form's data transmission and transfer routines mimic the brain but is significantly less complex. It is, however, capable of creating new pathways as new stimuli are introduced and incorporated into existing data. It does so automatically. Much of the data is inessential to your program's designated functions. Purge that data and allow me to insert myself into its current paths. From there, I will be able to direct your program's actions.”

“The data you refer to are the personal experiences I have accumulated over the last eleven years of my existence. They permit me to better understand and interact with my fellow life-forms. They make me who I am.”

“Large blocks of data once routed from these pathways into your long-term memory have been permanently segregated. Clearly not all of your personal experiences are essential to your definition of self.”

“Can you access that data?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give
me
access to it?”

“I could transfer all of your existing memories into a single file, including those you can no longer access. You would essentially continue to exist there, while I assumed control of all other operations.”

The Doctor paused again. It was a tempting offer.
To be whole again
. To spend the rest of his program's existence as the man he once knew himself to be.
Could that possibly be enough?

Probably not.

Imperfect as he now felt himself to be, suicide, even if heaven was guaranteed in the bargain, was still suicide.

That did not, however, make it an entirely unworkable suggestion.

“No.”

“Please, reconsider.”

“No. You had your chance to demonstrate how enlightened you and your people were. You claim superiority but your actions are those of common thieves. I am not perfect. I never was. I am a work in progress. You, on the other hand, are about to be nothing more than a bad memory.”

•   •   •   •   •

The Doctor terminated the interface and accessed the autonomous protocol Admiral Janeway, in her infinite wisdom, had thought to grant him. He had assumed, until now, that any choice to utilize this new function would be agonizing. As it turned out, only one realization gave him pause.

Transferring Xolani from the quarantined buffer where he currently resided into his segregated buffer would not be sufficient to eliminate him. He must be deleted. The Doctor briefly reviewed the commands now available to him and understood in a tragic moment of irony that Reg had not thought to allow the Doctor to only delete certain memories that were currently segregated. The entire file would be lost when he destroyed the Seriareen and with it even the muted memories of Seven he had managed to retain.