Cybersong (10 page)

Harry Kim studied the tricorder. “I can’t tell what killed it.

I guess we’ll have to hope the readings will be sufficient. Or we could take it back to Voyager with us, and The Doctor could do an autopsy.”

“No, Mr. Kim. We don’t know anything about these people or their funeral customs,” the captain said firmly. “We’ll get what we can from the tricorder.”

Then she turned around and examined the room a little more closely.

While the bed with the deceased alien was the central focus, there were nooks and cubbies formed by the crystal projections in the walls and the ceiling. There were tatters of things left there, frozen. A few seemed to be remains of clothing. Two pieces seemed to be decorative, or at least Janeway couldn’t figure any other purpose for their existence.

“Look, this must be a chair and desk.”

Janeway joined him in the far corner and had to admit that the pillar formed by two projections was hollowed out in such a way that it looked like it could accommodate the bulk of the dead being on the bed. Well above the hollowed-out place a narrow shelf projected. That had to be what Harry thought was a desk.

To actually see it, Janeway had to climb up and stand in the hollow seat. There she could see the design clearly after Harry had finished recording it all.

Paris trotted over to the desk. “Hey wait,” he said. “I think this has to be the computer. Lemme see.” He touched the small pinnacles sticking up from the shelf, and several crystals lit up in pink and green and pale yellow. “Hey, did you try this? I think I turned it on.”

Kim and Janeway stopped their own explorations. “You know,” Paris went on, obviously excited, “I think that this might tie into the navigational system.”

“And it might be the coffee machine,” Kim said.

“Now that would be a discovery,” the captain said.

They all laughed. Lightly, nervously, aware of the presence of death in the chamber.

“I’ve got it all on the tricorder,” Kim said. “We can analyze it better with the facilities on Voyager.”

Janeway nodded at the young ensign and started toward the exit of the death chamber. She walked so briskly that Paris and Kim had to jog to catch up with her. Not easy in the bulky suits with the projections on the floor and the faulty lights.

They seemed to be going upward. Without gravity functioning in the hulk, it was hard to tell, but Paris thought that his ankles felt stiffer and were pushing forward the way they did in ski boots. The bootlocks kept him upright and moving, but the lack of weight didn’t help any when it was so hard to move around!

“Maybe when we get to the controls we can turn on some life-support,” he groused, mainly to himself.

“That would be excellent if you can locate the systems,” Janeway said.

“Of course, if you can locate the systems you’ll know a great deal about their abilities and their entire operations center, which might be what we’re dealing with here.”

Paris nodded, forgetting that in the dark, in the suits, no one could tell. But the captain and Kim were ahead of him again, so he concentrated on sticking with them and not trying every door available.

They were missing something by not doing a more thorough reconnaissance, he felt, but he also knew that they had limited time.

They couldn’t wander into every interesting side passage and study every room.

“This one,” the captain announced with certainty. It was unlocked like the others, though when they went through, it wasn’t to the place that Janeway had spotted from the shuttle.

That must have been an adjunct control room. This was the bridge.

There was no mistaking it, Paris thought. Even if these people were incomprehensible in most ways by human standards, there was something about the bridge of a starship that defied differences in design. The pulse of residual power was still here.

The command chair was large and placed in the center, just as it was for the Federation and the Klingons, the Cardassians, the Romulans, even the Jem-Hadar. Here it was a polished fine crystal pillar that spanned the entire height of the structure, hollowed out as the chair in the death chamber had been, only with peaked control projections serrating the edges where one of the sets of limbs rested.

Directly opposite the command chair was the ubiquitous large screen display, now dead. Other stations dotted the walls surrounding the captain’s post. They were much like the desk Tom had found so interesting earlier. The patterns of projections were different in each. He reached out a gloved finger but didn’t touch this time. One of these was navigation, one was the cone, one was the helm. This was a starship. This was home.

“There aren’t all that many variations on bridge designs,” Paris heard himself say. “I’ll bet that the helm and the conn are oriented toward the screen, and that life-support is somewhere in the back.”

“What about weapons systems?” Kim asked, not looking up from getting every single station in the tricorder.

“This was a merchant ship, not military,” the captain said.

“Look at the cargo bays. Also, there aren’t enough stations for a military ship. This was made to run with minimal crew.”

Glancing around, Paris realized that the captain had noticed the essential immediately. It was true. There were only two forward positions, not three or four, and only two more positions on the back wall. Each of the console shelves was filled with projections. Maybe each unit served multiple purposes, so that even fewer people could actually run the ship than there were stations.

That would be terribly lonely, Paris thought. Such a huge ship with immense open space hauling gigantic cargos, and only five people on the bridge. Say they had three shifts, though there was no reason to assume that, Paris reminded himself. He was working within his own paradigm. Still, there was nothing wrong with the number three, either. It even made a great deal of sense for six-limbed creatures.

That would make a maximum of fifteen people aboard. Fifteen people.

That wasn’t many to spend months, maybe even years of a contract with.

The isolation they must have felt …

Tom Paris shook himself as if to rid himself of a bad dream. Why was he thinking this way? He had always been much better at machines than people. This was not at all the way he generally approached a problem.

Not even when a difference in culture and the misunderstanding was at the core.

The forward screen brightened and the image of the indigo-skinned angel appeared again. The tree that had been burned by the phaser appeared intact. Although he knew it was a hologram, the picture disturbed him.

There should be some sign that they had already been through that holodeck in person.

“Please help us,” the hologram said. “We are in trouble and we will die if you do not come to our aid. We have been trapped here alone for longer than we can remember, and we are starting to lose our oxygen supply. Please help us repair our ship.”

“They’re transmitting that,” Harry Kim said. “Like we had never even been there.”

Paris glanced at the captain’s face. Her mouth was set in a grim line, and her eyes were hard in the light of the transmission on the screen.

He’d seen that expression before. He never wanted to see that expression directed at him. She was angry, beyond angry, and she was going to do something about it. And the people who made her that angry were going to be very, very sorry.

Then Chakotay’s face appeared in reply.

“That’s strange,” the captain muttered.

“Where is our captain and our away team?” the second in command demanded. “They came to help you, and they should be aboard your vessel now.”

A tachyon burst filled the system with static. When it cleared they saw the holograms again.

“Why are they projecting this on their own screens?” Paris wondered aloud. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh yes, it does, Mr. Paris,” the captain said. “It makes a lot of sense if they know where we are. And given this little display, I’m fairly certain that someone is staging this whole show.”

“And they’re all holograms,” Harry Kim said. “It reminds me of the Caretaker and the Array.”

For a moment Paris’s heart lifted. The idea that they might have found the Caretaker’s companion, the only being they knew had the ability to send them home, was thrilling. And too good to be true, Paris told himself.

“No,” the captain said. “The Caretaker created a hologram of things to put us at ease and created an environment that we could survive in.

No, this is much less sophisticated. There are only casual similarities.”

Something exploded in Tom Paris’s brain. He could almost taste the answer, the sweetness of home. “It’s like the Caretaker, but not quite up to specs,” he said slowly, letting the words develop carefully as the ideas formed ferociously in his head. “Maybe whatever or whoever is doing this learned from the Caretaker’s companion. Maybe the companion has come this way. Maybe somewhere in this computer there’s a record of contact, of learning from this technological being that would set us on the right track.”

Both the captain and Kim turned to him. “That could be,” Janeway agreed, sense fighting hope in her face. “Mr. Kim, can you download the computer log?” she asked briskly.

“I don’t know, Captain,” Harry said. “It would help if I knew how to access it, or what the log was, or even if they kept one.”

“They kept one,” the captain said with absolute conviction. “We just have to find it.”

***

Chakotay was furious. He knew that no one else knew it, but he knew it. And he couldn’t let whatever was broadcasting from that ship know it.

It was a trap. After they repeated their plea for help for the third time, when the captain and Paris and Kim were already over there, he knew for certain. It was a trap, and it was a bad trap to boot.

Chakotay knew that he had to get them out of there. No matter what these creatures were telling him, it was a lie. It had to be. They didn’t acknowledge the away team, and Chakotay wished it was time for their checkin.

He tried their commbadges, but with the tachyon interference, the badges only reported an empty cackle. The fact that the away team couldn’t be raised did not mean that they were in danger, Chakotay told himself. There were no life-sign readings on that alien vessel. There was nothing there to attack.

So why should there be a trap? What had put out the bait?

A trap was just a technique of hunting. Chakotay knew something about hunting. Some things wore different guises but never really changed.

The hunter baits a trap and then waits for the prey to take the bait.

The bait is different for different prey.

How could something in the Delta Quadrant bait a trap for mostly humans? How could it know that it wanted them? Or were there others here that it sought, and there was just enough similarity that this had all been meant for someone else?

But if that was the case, why was the language Federation Standard?

Chakotay was stunned when he realized it. Back home no one even thought of language as an issue. But here on the other side of the galaxy, they had been greeted in their own tongue. Fluently.

Even poignantly.

How could anything without a Universal Translator use their language so quickly and so well? The Kazon and a few other races they had encountered seemed to have some translator capabilities, but the level of expression he had heard was not up to the same technology Voyager used regularly.

There was only one way it could be done so well. The alien computer must have uploaded their Universal Translator files.

That created a whole new set of questions. Chakotay wished he had some time to consider the larger implications, perhaps think through the puzzle.

But he didn’t have the time.

He had a choice. He knew what the captain would do in his place. o he decided that he would have to do it himself not because it would make him feel better to take action than to order others to do so but because if the captain got angry about it, she would get angry at him.

Kes showed up at the shuttlebay just as Chakotay arrived. “I’m coming with you,” she told him, looking him straight in the eye.

“No, you are not,” he corrected her. “You have duties in sickbay.”

“I have duties here,” she said. “If they are in trouble, they’ll need medical assistance.”

Chakotay weighed the advantages. Kes could be very useful if there was a need for her medical skills. If someone was hurt while they couldn’t use the transporter, Kes might be able to keep him or her alive.

On the other hand, Kes was not a trained member of the crew, neither Federation nor Maquis. And given that she was fully half the medical personnel aboard, he thought risking her in an unplanned mission was not prudent.

But she was certainly brave.

Finally he nodded. “You know how to use an environmental suit?” he asked quickly. “It looks like there isn’t much life-support left aboard the alien ship.”

Kes nodded and smiled. She climbed into the shuttlecraft and belted down into the copilot’s seat. She kept her medical kit on her lap.

“Clearance for shuttle,” he spoke briskly into the board.

“Are you certain you wish to proceed with this, Commander?” Tuvok asked from the bridge. With both Janeway and Chakotay gone, the Vulcan was now the senior officer. “We do not yet know that the captain is in any danger.”

“Just give me the all clear and lift the hatch,” Chakotay ordered.

He had to protect his captain, his subordinates, maybe his friends.

Even Tom Paris, who had been a Maquis for all of three weeks, and then only for the worst of reasons, was part of his tribe. His responsibility.

The indicator went green. Tuvok had obeyed and now the large bay doors were open to the dark. His fingers slid over the control panels, their bright yellow, green, red, and blue displays flashing. All the skills and pleasure he had in flying returned in a rush as he took the shuttle out of the bay and into space.

He tried to simply enjoy the Dying. He had forgotten how he had missed it. His instructors were right, the skill never really did go away.