Cybersong (17 page)

“Because I want you to know that while Harry is in no condition to do anything productive, as he improves, he might be able to think about your problems and follow the adjustments. It would certainly take his mind off his troubles. And even if he can’t actually contribute, in a day or two he’ll be able to at least scan something for errors.”

That last sentiment made sense to Torres. In fact, if she was hearing correctly, the assistant was saying that Harry would be ready to work on the project by tomorrow. Only they would have to call it something else, and he would have to stay in sickbay.

That was good enough for B’Elanna.

B’Elanna wished the Ocampa would just say things directly rather than hint and indicate. But Kes was one of those healer types who saw physical health and well-being as the most important possible goal in life.

B’Elanna Torres found that attitude incomprehensible. It was obvious to her that the first duty of anyone aboard a spacecraft was to make certain that the ship ran. That the engines were powered, that the warp core was intact, that there was power for all of Voyager’s major systems. She could not imagine any other task being so absorbing, so fascinating, or nearly so important.

As she returned to Engineering, she wondered why she found this particular situation so frustrating. She had been in worse circumstances. She had even enjoyed the challenge of emergency repairs, or needing to make sudden changes in configuration to accommodate new conditions.

But this time she hated what was happening. She couldn’t solve it, she couldn’t even talk to her systems. And that was the real problem. The computer was not her true area of expertise. She had to rely on someone else to do the job, and she was never happy about that.

Moreover, she had to rely on Daphne Mandel.

Mandel was smart, certainly, maybe even brilliant. But she was also selfish and self-indulgent.

And now Mandel had disappeared because she was too much of a prima donna to work decently with Tuvok. Torres wanted to scream. It was hard to need the services of someone she never wanted to see again.

She couldn’t do this one alone. She couldn’t go that deeply into the operating system. She didn’t have the talent for that as she did for more mechanical things. It was all so much mumbo jumbo to her.

So she was shocked and more than a little ambivalent when she arrived in Engineering to find Daphne Mandel back at the direct contact workstation. Tuvok stood next to the cartographer, so B’Elanna did not immediately order her from the premises.

Instead, she pulled the Vulcan aside.

“What is she doing here?” Torres hissed.

“Captain’s orders,” Tuvok said. “Supplies are critical. If we do not leave here very soon, we will run out of food before we get to the next supply stop.”

B’Elanna wanted to break something. Preferably someone’s bones, but if they weren’t available, the computer would do. It was at the center of this mess, after all she had done.

“Have you scanned the alien log yet?” Tuvok asked.

B’Elanna blinked. She had the tricorder in her hand and had forgotten it completely.

“I don’t know how this will work given the computer malfunction,” she admitted.

“Oh, the problem only relates to the drive and engines, and navigation and the helm,” Mandel called out from her terminal.

“It shouldn’t affect analytic abilities at all.”

“How reassuring,” Torres said, and then inserted the tricorder into a download slot and told the computer to analyze.

At first the screen display filled with a mishmash of alien symbols in bright green on an orange background. Eyes glued to the screen hoping to make some kind of sense of it all, B’Elanna knew it was hopeless.

Without a lot more help from the translation center of the computer they were lost. Besides, the neon colors flashed to red on turquoise and then electric blue on pink. Just looking at the screen hurt her eyes.

The picture changed to what appeared to be the interior of the alien ship, with a single creature at the center. The lights on the projections in this sequence were not a crazy jumble at all but glowed a steady pale pink that gave the alien speaker’s face a warm cast. A very few indicators showed amber or green, and B’Elanna realized that the colors were real codes and that the mess the away team had seen was the aftermath of destruction when everything had gone wild.

The alien was like none she had ever seen. There was nothing to scale, but she recognized that the four arms were resting on projections that were about the height of her shoulders. Its skin was a soft, warmish gray, though B’Elanna thought the color could be a result of the lights. And its face, while utterly inhuman, showed sorrow and intelligence and a kind of confused resignation that seemed all too human.

It appeared as if the alien’s mouth was moving, but no sound came out.

There was a lag.

“Band search,” Torres ordered the computer.

Then the voice came through the speaker. It was not the computer’s usual bland female voice, but one deeper and gravelly.

Male, and tense, Torres thought immediately. Words rushed out, each of them falling over the others, all of them completely meaningless at first in their original language.

And then it changed. The voice remained, but the words became comprehensible. The translation center was working. If the translation was accurate.

“We are being consumed by this creature, which is no living thing but the evil spawn of consciousness,” the alien voice said. “The deterioration has increased geometrically. The longer we are here, the faster our food spoils, the faster our power is drained. We are not sure which we will lose first—life-support or food.

“In any case, we are beyond help. We have called on the gods to no avail, and we have called on our elders to give us guidance in this extremity. But our elders have been silent, and the gods are content to laugh at our suffering. So be it. To amuse the gods is no small thing.

“If they are our gods. There are some here who say our enemy wears the guises of the Beloveds only in order to entrap us. But how could this alien thing, this construct, know who it is we worship? Or who we think is the Created of Beauty?

“And so we are frozen here, watching ourselves die. Nothing is worse than this waiting, knowing that there is no hope, that forever is declared.”

There was a long static burst on the screen as the picture broke up.

“Is there any more?” Tuvok asked. “Computer, advance to next entry.”

B’Elanna Torres blinked away a stray tear as she looked at the Vulcan.

As she noticed the other members of her team at their stations, she realized that only Tuvok showed no reaction. Even Daphne Mandel was watching, no longer lost in her own universe of code. Mandel’s eyes were wide and soft with a compassion that Torres thought she reserved only for machines.

“There are no more entries,” the computer said in its usual voice.

“Computer, go back as far as possible and begin translation in text format,” Torres said. She didn’t want to hear the story of the destruction of this ship in the pained, ragged voice of the dying captain. Text would cover all the important information without upsetting her entire department even more. There was certainly enough work to be done that they couldn’t afford to listen—and think of how closely their own situation paralleled that of this alien.

And yet, the knowledge of what had happened to the aliens was hauntingly familiar. They had fallen into a trap, a thing that somehow knew more about them than it ought and was able to entice them until it drained all their resources and they died.

Voyager was not going to suffer that fate, Torres decided. Not if B’Elanna Torres had anything at all to do with it. To live, to fight, to go on and go home.

And yet at her core she knew that part of her will to fight was for that alien captain who had cared so deeply for his ship, for his people. She would make sure that his words reached their home.

Harry Kim hurt. His head hurt, his back hurt, and his right side hurt most of all. But he wasn’t nearly as hurt as he was bored in sickbay.

At least The Doctor had finally let him sit up. And Kes had brought over a monitor for him to watch Daphne Mandel’s debugging procedure.

She was good, he had to give her that. She was more than good.

And that made him feel even more useless.

It didn’t help that when Kes arrived with lunch, his tray contained soup and crackers and a very bland baked tuber that Neelix usually fixed with spices and vegetables. But for sickbay it was dead plain and dull, and if he hadn’t been so hungry, he would have ignored it altogether. How did they expect someone to get well on such boring food?

“It’s motivation,” Kes told him when she came to clear the tray away.

“You know that in order to get anything you like, you have to get well.”

“Fine. I want to get well anyway. I am welt really. Just a couple of aches that’ll go away with a little time and exercise.

And a decent diet.”

Kes picked up the tray. “You’re supposed to rest now,” she told Kim.

“If The Doctor comes back and finds you working …”

“I’m not working,” Kim grumbled. “I wish I were working. At least then I’d have something to think about other than every time my side twinges. And I’d get some of that onion hot sauce for this thing. Do you think maybe you could get me some hot sauce for dinner?”

Kes considered for a moment. “If you will go back to bed now and sleep for a few hours, I will try to get you hot sauce. Or at least some kind of sauce.”

Harry Kim thought about the benefits of the trade, and with a sigh, he got up and returned to his medical bed with all the attachments and readouts. To be honest, he was tired. Sitting up like that had been hard, and it was the first day he was really able to leave the bed at all.

Still, he had too much pride to let on quite how exhausting even simple things were. And he was honestly bored out of his mind.

He lay there, half drifting but not quite asleep; when someone hissed by his bedside. “Harry, hey Harry, c’mon. If you don’t wake up, they’ll catch me and I’ll get thrown out again.”

In a slightly slurred voice Harry asked, “Again?” He didn’t remember any visitors. He had a strange dream with B’Elanna on the alien ship, and a few times Tom Paris and Tuvok and Captain Janeway had drifted through his semiconscious fantasies. Now for the first time he questioned whether those were entirely illusion or if maybe some of it really had happened.

“I brought you something,” the voice whispered again.

Harry opened his eyes slowly. It took him a moment to focus and recognize Tom Paris. Tom was holding out something wrapped in foil.

“Take it, take it fast before The Doctor catches us,” Paris hissed.

“It’s Maderlion hot dumplings with Tla gravy and a double Vulcan mocha, extra sweet.”

Harry’s eyes were suddenly clear and he felt wide awake. “Vulcan mocha? Maderlion hot dumplings?” he asked, hoping that this was no dream, that he wouldn’t wake up and find out that Kes hadn’t even gotten his hot sauce. Maderlion hot dumplings were something he hadn’t tasted in months, not since he had decided to use his replicator rations for more useful objects. Or at least less ration-intensive foodstuffs. “How did you get them?” he asked.

Paris just smiled. “I figured you could use something to cheer you up and get you mending so that you can help clean out this computer mess.

Because, Harry, you and this drip Daphne Mandel are the only people on Voyager who know enough about debugging operating systems to be trusted with this job.”

“Made a real ugly mess,” Harry agreed. “But Mandel is doing okay.

I’ve been watching when they let me.”

“Yeah, well, okay isn’t good enough. And it isn’t fast enough, either.

The captain has called a staff meeting a couple of hours from now to discuss that log you got on the tricorder before the explosion, do you remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

“Well, I thought you might be interested to know what it says.

While you eat your dumplings, of course.”

“But …” Harry protested.

“You can’t hide them,” Paris insisted. “They’ll just take them away.

And that would be a real waste, since I just used two days of replicator rations to get them for you.”

Kim didn’t waste a moment opening the package and picking up one of the warm dumplings covered in thick sauce. He hesitated for a moment, realizing that there were no utensils available. He really didn’t want to eat with his fingers, but there was no choice. And he was so hungry.

“So we’ve got the condensed text version. Basically, what it says is that this alien ship we were on had all the same problems we have.

Only they also had a progressive problem with food spoilage as well.

They couldn’t connect to their drive, and their computer refused all data from the helm and navigation.

They got their best computer people on it, and they thought it looked like a virus, but they couldn’t understand how something so specific to their operating system could be written by someone who wasn’t one of their own high-level computer people.

“So they started a purge. They were looking for a saboteur. And all the time they had these messages and `visions’ of what they thought were their gods. Or images of their gods.”

“Just like us seeing the angels,” Harry said between bites. He had only one dumpling left, and he wanted to make it last. He had forgotten just how delicious they were, the perfect balance of spicy hot and vinegar sharp. He licked his fingers where the juice had run over them.

“Exactly. Only how could our angels be their gods?”

“Maybe because they’re the same beings,” Kim suggested. “Maybe these same beings have traveled all over the entire galaxy.

Maybe they are related to the Caretaker and can travel even farther.”

“Exactly. The Caretaker’s race,” Paris said, his eyes gleaming.

“And if we can find them, or the one of them that is creating this whole thing, we could get home.”

“If,” Kim reminded him. “I don’t want to get too hopeful. I would hate to be disappointed. You didn’t happen to bring any dessert, did you?”