Title: Homecoming: The Voyager Coalition (Volume 1)
Description: When the Voyager crew learns of an existential threat to the Federation, it leads them to make a bold new alliance and engage in battle with an old enemy. Meanwhile, the prospect of a promising new chance to return home means that for Janeway and her crew, soon everything could change.
Author's note: This is a somewhat-A/U two-volume story that is a sequel to my short stories "Year of Hell, Season of Hope" and "Equinox: At the Gate of Daybreak." I have designed this story to be able to stand alone, however, if you don't wish to read them first.
This story replaces the plot of "Endgame," an episode which disappointed me for a number of reasons. I swore the day I watched it that I would rewrite the finale myself, and 16 years later, I've finally done it. I would also like to note that I have not read any of the post-homecoming Voyager novels, so my story will not match up with them (unless by sheer coincidence!) Rest assured this story will be completed, as I already have most of it written.
Includes the pairings Janeway/Chakotay and Paris/Torres, though this is not primarily a romance.
Rating: K+ (mild language, moderate violence, no sex/nudity)
Disclaimer: I do not own the intellectual rights to Star Trek, and I don't receive payment for my fanfiction. I do it for the sheer joy of it!
Chapter 1
Kathryn Janeway, captain of the U.S.S. Voyager, could not shake a sense of uneasiness.
With every step she took the rocks crunched under her boots with unnaturally sharp cracks, even with the sound muffled by the helmet of her environmental suit. The gravity on this planet was not quite right, and as a result she constantly felt as though she were slightly off-balance. And the heat was sweltering, even with the coolant in her suit running at full efficiency. Sweat trickled down into her eyes and she blinked rapidly to clear her vision, unable to wipe it away.
She paused a moment to survey the desolate landscape. A vast panorama of rock formations filled her view, under a sky with an eerie red light glowing around the edges of thick noxious clouds. All signs of sun, moon and stars were obscured, nor was there an animal or a scrap of vegetation in sight, but that was only to be expected from a class Y planet. They were crazy to come here in the first place, but desperate times called for desperate measures. They needed the deuterium.
Where was the rest of her Away Team? They had been here only a moment ago. Now Janeway could see she was utterly alone, though the area immediately around her was wide open and afforded no hiding places for the others.
She pressed a few buttons on the wrist of her suit. "Janeway to Away Team. What is your location?"
There was no sound but the whoosh-hiss of her own breath in her ears.
"Janeway to Voyager. I've been separated from the Away Team. Please respond."
No answer.
What could have happened? She checked the oxygen level of her suit. Still a few hours left. She wasn't in any immediate danger, but why weren't the coms working? Tuvok had assured her the equipment could withstand the heat levels on the surface.
Janeway turned slowly in a circle, rocks crunching underfoot, trying to guess which way the Away Team might have gone. Still no sign of them.
She decided the best course of action would be to return to the beam-out site. She turned to the east, and then gasped out loud and staggered awkwardly back several steps.
Someone was standing only a few feet away from her. Not anyone from the Away Team. He was hideous, inhuman, and not even wearing an environmental suit. His face was bloated and scarred, with ragged patches of hair here and there springing from his lumpy skull. The lengths of his limbs seemed uneven, leaving him hunched slightly to one side.
He was Vidiian.
Janeway stared at him in horror, her brain working to explain what a Vidiian could possibly be doing so far away from their territory, and how he could have survived more than a few seconds in the toxic air of a Y-class planet.
She pushed the control on her wrist to activate the emergency beacon in the suit. Not that it would do any good if the com lines were still down. Then she lifted her chin and faced down the Vidiian.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice ringing loudly inside the helmet. "What have you done with my people?"
The Vidiian returned her gaze, mouth agape, and then he shuffled forward a step.
"We needed their organs," he croaked. "I'm sorry, but it was necessary. Their bodies will provide for our colony for months." He paused, and took another step forward. "As will yours."
Janeway didn't waste any time pulling a phaser out of the suit's holster. "Get away from me!"
The Vidiian laughed, a hoarse hacking sound that seemed torn from his throat, and kept coming toward her.
She fired her phaser. Or, at least, she tried to. But all that happened was the weapon clicking in her hand. No energy beam. She frantically pressed various buttons, trying to get it operable, but the power was drained, every last drop of it.
Janeway turned to run. If she could just get back to the beam-out site, Voyager could whisk her away, assuming they still had a transporter lock there. And assuming the Vidiian ship that must be in orbit wasn't attacking them at this moment. It was awkward, running in the environmental suit, with the not-quite-right gravity of this planet threatening to knock her off balance at every moment. She risked a look back. The Vidiian was running clumsily after her, moving faster than she would have thought possible, considering one leg was longer than the other and he had to hitch his body from side to side in a weird rolling gait.
She ran on. Suddenly, Janeway's boot sank down into something soft, and she went down on one knee. Desperately she tried to scramble back to her feet, but her hands sank down into the soft stuff too, and now she was sinking deeper and deeper.
What was it? It couldn't be mud. There was no water on this demon planet. She struggled like a fly drowning in honey, but she couldn't get out. She noticed that the liquid she was stuck in, which spread out in a pool hundreds of meters across, was oddly metallic looking. Like liquid mercury. Like silver blood.
Like silver blood. Janeway's eyes widened. She had seen this before, on the other class-Y planet they had been forced to visit years ago: the pre-sentient lifeforms that had learned to imitate the bodies of her crew when it came in contact with them. But what were the odds of finding the same substance evolved here, thousands of lightyears away, eight years into their voyage back home? It hardly seemed possible. Despite her anxiety to escape the Vidiian, Janeway could feel the scientist inside her taking over, longing to get hold of a tricorder to scan the metallic liquid and see if it really was what she thought it was.
She didn't have to wait to find out, as it turned out. The silver blood was moving. Vague forms were rising up out of it. They were humanoid. They were exactly her height. They were beginning to change color, mostly black with a slash of red across their shoulders, their features growing more and more defined, until she was staring at dozens and dozens of Kathryn Janeways, all of them looking back at her with identical expressions on their faces. As one, they lifted their fingers and pointed behind her.
Turning with difficulty in the viscous fluid, Janeway saw the Vidiian standing behind her, staring with disbelief at all the Janeways. Then his slash of a mouth turned upward into a hideous grin.
"So many organs!" he chortled.
He pulled out a small device and pointed it at the duplicates, hitting them one by one with a short burst of green light, and as each Janeway was hit she froze motionless where she stood.
Janeway pounded at her wrist control. "Janeway to Voyager! Emergency beamout! Janeway to anyone! Please respond!"
No answer. Why wasn't anything working today? The com, the phaser, the vanished Away Team. The unprotected Vidiian surviving the toxic atmosphere here with no apparent discomfort. The silver blood, most improbably found on a second planet. It made no sense, any of it. It was like a bad dream.
Suddenly a flood of excitement washed over her whole body, and it was only with great difficulty that Janeway suppressed it.
How many times had she made it to this point, only to wake herself with the excitement she felt when she realized she was dreaming? Not this time. With all the effort she could muster she forced herself to concentrate on the images she was seeing, holding them in her mind, willing herself to believe that they were real. Just as Chakotay had taught her.
This time, it worked. She was still here in her dream, still watching the Vidiian freeze her duplicates with a happy grin on his malformed face. But now her fear was gone. Now she knew she was in control of everything that happened. Now she was lucid.
The alien turned his device on to Janeway and pressed the button.
Nothing happened. Squinting his eyes at the device, the Vidiian pushed more buttons, to no effect. He looked up at Janeway, and for the first time he looked a little worried.
Janeway smiled. "Not so scary now, are you?"
That gave her an idea. She concentrated, and in response to her thoughts the Vidiian began to transform in front of her. He grew rigid, and a pole sprouted from his back and extended into the ground, lifting him up several feet so that his feet dangled in the air. Yellow straw emerged from his sleeves and the cuffs of his pants. His eyes turned into black buttons, and now the wide grin was painted on a burlap face. For a final effect she added a floppy wide-brimmed hat stuffed with straw.
There. A scarecrow, much like the one her childhood neighbor back in Indiana had built to stand guard over his fields. Janeway smiled at the juxtaposition of the cheery stuffed man guarding the desolation of the demon planet, with a blood-red sky behind him. Chakotay was right. This was great fun.
She turned back to see her duplicates still standing knee-deep in silver blood, rooted to the ground by the power of the Vidiian's device. Speaking of Indiana, she knew just what to do with them. She thought back, drawing from memory as best as she could, and the Janeways, too, began to transform. Their bodies grew taller and thinner and turned a shade of green, and their heavy heads darkened to chocolate brown, framed by strands of hair that rose up rippling and resolved themselves into yellow petals.
Now the barren landscape was almost entirely hidden behind a broad field of sunflowers, but they looked all wrong in the red light. Not like Indiana at all. Janeway closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, golden sunshine was pouring down through a baby-blue sky. Eagerly she took off her helmet and took a deep breath: fresh air, warm and humid, and scented with grass and soil. She could hear bees buzzing nearby, and now the ground beneath her feet was soft enough for her to leave footprints as she walked slowly forward until she was completely surrounded by sunflowers. The sunshine filtered through the stems and warmed her hair, and a glorious wave of familiarity washed over her.
She was home.
A wild, fierce joy took hold of her heart and threatened to spill over into ecstasy. Without hesitation she wriggled out of her environmental suit and left it lying on the ground so she could walk unimpeded through the rows of sunflowers. She spread her arms wide so that her hands brushed against the leaves as she walked. Every texture, every sensation, every scent, was exactly as she remembered. In the distance, a dog barked. She could almost imagine that at any moment she would hear her mother shouting at her from the backyard that dinner was ready.
She started to jog, leaves whipping at her body, and sun and shade flashed in her eyes alternately as she went faster and faster, and she couldn't help but laugh with sheer exhilaration. She ran and ran, and the sunflower field seemed to go on for miles, yet she never got tired or lost her breath.
Finally, up ahead she saw blue sky through the swaying stems. She slowed to a walk just as she emerged from the field.
She was standing near the edge of a cliff. An enormous crack in the earth opened up before her feet, with the far-distant blue glimmer of a river just visible at the bottom. Trees clung tenaciously to the steep sides. The canyon was impossibly wide and deep, reminescent of the Grand Canyon, and one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen. The sun was turning a rosy red as it began to dip down to the horizon on the other side.
Something was parked near the edge. A hang-glider? It had a primitive look to it, and as she got closer she suddenly recognized it. It was Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine, the one she had flown with the holographic maestro on a now-distant alien planet. The crew had dismantled it and stored it in Cargo Bay 1 long ago, and yet here it sat, just waiting for her. As if on cue a strong breeze sprang up and pressed against her back. How perfect.
She got behind the machine, gripped the handle firmly, and waited for a gust. When it came, she took a hard running start and pushed the machine off the edge of the cliff, jumping up onto a strut just in time. The white fabric of the wings rippled and snapped in the wind, and after a single deep dip downward that made her stomach lurch in an alarming fashion, the flying machine leveled out and she was sailing through the air, hair whipping wildly across her face. It was glorious.
She hung suspended in the sky like a bird, enjoying the view of the river far below. Time seemed to slow and she felt as though she might have been flying for hours when suddenly a chime sounded loudly. Startled, her hands nearly slipped from the handle, but she hung on. That chime had sounded very familiar. Where had she heard it before?
It was the Starfleet door chime. Why had that intruded in her dream? It didn't belong here at all.
Dreaming. She was dreaming. This was a dream. The realization hit her like a thunderclap: the canyon wasn't real, the river wasn't real, and the flying machine she was currently hanging onto for dear life wasn't real.
Instantly she lost her control over the lucid dream. The flying machine lurched suddenly in the breeze and then began spiraling down to the ground. Janeway had only time to emit one aggravated shout before the dream disappeared and her eyes snapped open.
She was laying on her back on the couch in her living quarters, the akoonah still warm under her fingers where it rested on her belly. The light was dimmed, a depressing sight after all that golden sunshine, and out the window she could see the black of space, streaked with stars that slid past Voyager at warp speed.
Janeway sat up and looked over where Chakotay was sitting in her high-backed wing chair with eyes closed, head flopped to the side and a PADD laying on his lap. She hadn't made a sound, at least not that she recalled, but already he was stirring, rubbing at his eyes and looking around disoriented for a second until he saw her.
"Chakotay!" she said eagerly, swinging her bare feet over to rest on the floor. "I finally did it! I took control!"
"About time," he mumbled, sitting up straight and trying to look alert. "What did you do?"
"I went home. To Indiana."
He smiled slightly. "I might have known. What on earth are you going to do when we actually do make it home?"
Her smile faded a little. "What do you mean?"
"What will you have left to dream about?"
She scoffed, feeling slightly offended. "Quite a bit. I had dreams before we got stranded in the Delta Quadrant, you know."
"Such as?"
"Oh, I think I should be able to keep a few mysteries to myself for now, don't you?"
Chakotay looked more than a little intrigued by this, and she half-expected him to start trying to tease it out of her, but after a short silence, all he said was: "Did you try flying?"
"I did. I recreated da Vinci's flying machine and jumped off a cliff."
Chakotay chuckled. "You don't need a machine to fly in your dreams, Kathryn."
"But I wanted one. It was lovely. Until I dreamed my door chime went off and I lost control."
Chakotay frowned, his tattoo distorting as the creases in his forehead deepened. "I heard a chime in my dream, too."
At that moment, Janeway's door chime sounded. They stared at each other, baffled.
"What time is it?" Janeway asked, fumbling around the coffee tabletop in the dim light trying to find her replica of Captain Cray's pocketwatch, which she could hear ticking nearby. Chakotay found it first.
"02:00," he said, squinting at the small numbers.
Who on earth would be visiting her quarters at 02:00? After the Doctor's "birthday" celebration - with eight candles on the cake, to mark the years since his first activation - they had left Harry Kim in charge of the Bridge for the night shift. If something had happened, Lieutenant Kim would have paged her or activated a red alert. But all seemed peaceful and quiet.
Janeway stood up quickly, intending to answer the door, but then she looked down at her dressing gown, and then over at Chakotay, sitting there in his pajamas with his hair mussed and a five o'clock shadow on his chin, and felt her stomach drop.
"This is going to look bad," she said.
"Uh..." Chakotay said, getting up and looking around helplessly for an idea. There was only one way out of her quarters, and that was through the doorway where someone was currently standing out in the corridor.
"Here. This way." She quickly hustled him toward her bedroom.
"How is putting me in your bedroom going to look any better?" he objected, but he didn't resist when she gently pushed him through the door and thrust the akoonah into his hands.
"Don't move a muscle, don't make a sound, don't even breathe," she whispered.
"You have a sword in your bedroom?" Chakotay whispered, looking around curiously. "Why do you have a sword-"
"Not a sound!" she hissed, and closed the door on him. Quickly she straightened the crushed pillow on the couch and ran her fingers through her rumpled hair before going over to answer the door.
It was Seven of Nine. She was wearing her science uniform and her hair was obscenely neat in its little blond twist, despite the fact that this was the middle of the night for Seven, too. Then again, Seven had the advantage of "sleeping" standing up. She didn't even have to change into pajamas.
"Captain," she said, her hands folded neatly behind her back. "I am sorry to wake you. May I speak with you?"
Janeway found herself instantly afire with curiosity. Seven rarely came to her quarters at all, and the one time she had come in the middle of the night, it had been to plead for Janeway to change her mind about deleting the Doctor's memories of Ensign Jetal. This must be something important, to bring her out of her regeneration alcove in the wee hours of the morning.
"Yes, of course," she said, stepping aside to let Seven in. "Have a seat." She was careful to gesture at the couch, in case the chair still held lingering warmth from where Chakotay had just been sitting. "Would you like some coffee?"
Seven sat on the couch stiffly. "I do not know. I have never tried it."
Janeway stared at her. "You still haven't...? Well, this is the perfect time to start." She walked over to the replicator and got two cups of coffee. She had the feeling she was going to need the boost to get through whatever it was Seven was going to say.
She handed Seven her cup and sat down next to her. Seven smelled the coffee suspiciously and took a hesitant sip. She immediately grimaced.
"It is offensive," she said, and put it down on the coffee table.
"You might like it better if it had milk and sugar in it..." Janeway began, trying very hard not to look over at the bedroom door, nearly certain that Chakotay would be having a fit of mirth in there just now. As long as he could have it quietly...
"It smells bad and tastes worse," Seven said flatly. "I do not believe any alteration could change that."
Janeway gave it up as a lost cause and took a long pull from her own cup. "So," she said, "how was your date tonight? Ensign Bronowski, wasn't it?"
"I did not terminate the date early this time," Seven said.
"Well, that sounds... encouraging," Janeway said.
"However, I did not come here to discuss my date," Seven continued.
"Oh?"
Seven paused for a long moment, and then finally said, "While I was regenerating just now, I was contacted by Axum."
Janeway sat up straight. "Axum? But... when we destroyed Unimatrix Zero, I thought you wouldn't be able to reach each other anymore."
"That was my belief as well," Seven said. "He informed me that with the help of Korok, he was able to reach me through my interplexing beacon using my translink frequency." Her expression changed, and she looked softer, more vulnerable, almost hesitant. "He took a great risk to speak to me this way. The Queen is still looking for the drones from Unimatrix Zero. He could have been caught."
Janeway patted her knee sympathetically. "It must have been good to see him again."
"Yes," Seven said softly. Then she cleared her throat, and suddenly she was all business again. "But he did not call me for a frivolous purpose. He wished to give us a warning."
Janeway set her cup down and looked at Seven. "A warning?"
Seven nodded. "Axum is on a cube that was instructed by the Queen to expand its patrol route because several of the other cubes in his sector are being diverted to a transwarp hub."
"A transwarp hub?" Janeway repeated.
"Yes. A transportation hub with conduits that lead to various locations in the galaxy."
"I'm familiar with transwarp conduits, but if every cube is outfitted with a transwarp drive to open their own conduits whenever and wherever they need one, why would the Borg need to built a hub?"
"These are permanent transwarp conduits, which take years to construct. They permit vessels to move at exponentially greater speeds than their engines alone are capable of," Seven explained. "A journey that would normally take months even with a transwarp engine could be completed in mere hours. The Collective has six such hubs in the galaxy, which greatly aid in its ability to move large numbers of vessels quickly."
"And assimilate civilizations before they can mount a defense," Janeway said.
"Precisely. Axum informed me that more than a hundred cubes are being diverted from their sectors to Hub 5. Some of them will travel directly there, while others will travel to the nearest hub to them and then take a conduit to Hub 5. Even at transwarp speeds, it will take months for all the chosen cubes to gather there, but once they do ..."
"The Borg will have massed a fleet ready to strike any target they can reach with their transwarp conduits," Janeway finished grimly. "Where is Hub 5, Seven?"
"It is in sector 33, grid 2, 14 lightyears from our current location."
"We'll have to be sure to steer well clear of it," Janeway murmured. "More than a hundred cubes ..."
"There is more," Seven said. "The Collective maintains algorithms to determine which species potentially pose the greatest threat to their quest for perfection. This permits them to choose the most efficient targets and neutralize enemies before they grow too strong. Axum informed me they have recently calculated new results, and changed their priorities accordingly."
"Species 8472?" Janeway asked. Voyager had had several encounters with the strange aliens who lived in fluidic space, and learned that thanks to their dense DNA and advanced bioweaponry, the species had proved immune to the Borg's attempt to assimilate them. In retribution for the Borg attacks, Species 8472 had nearly wiped out the Borg in their own territory.
"They were already at the top of the list," Seven said. "But now someone other than the Borg has made contact with Species 8472. Us. We have learned how to open a portal to fluidic space. We have studied one of their bioships. We have samples of their DNA. We opened peaceful negotiations with the aliens training at the Starfleet headquarters simulation. The Borg have learned all this, and the Queen is ... concerned. She believes we may form an alliance with Species 8472, or else develop their offensive capabilities for ourselves. She cannot allow that to happen."
Janeway felt her heart sink down to her toes. "They're coming after Voyager?"
"Not just Voyager," Seven said. "The Federation."
"You mean ... that fleet they're amassing at Hub 5 ..." Janeway hesitated. "Seven, are you telling me those conduits lead to Federation territory?"
Seven nodded slowly. "One of them leads directly to Wolf 359."
A sick feeling blossomed down in Janeway's stomach. Only 7 lightyears from Earth. The Federation would not have time to muster more than a handful of ships, certainly nothing that could hope to counter more than a hundred cubes ...
"They intend to take the fleet to the Alpha Quadrant and destroy multiple Federation colonies simultaneously," Seven continued quietly. "Each colony they assimilate will then provide additional ships and drones to attack more colonies. The Collective's small-scale assaults - the Battle of Wolf 359 and the Battle of Sector 001, each using only a single cube - have taught them that the Federation is highly resistant. They will not risk another failure. This time, they intend total conquest. They will make Federation space a second Borg stronghold. They will do this even at the cost of leaving their Delta Quadrant territories underprotected for a time."
"But why?" Janeway demanded passionately. "The Federation knows nothing of Species 8472. Only we do, and we're still 30,000 lightyears away. We haven't even found a way to contact Starfleet. Everyone at home believes us to be dead; they're not even looking for us-"
"The Collective cannot take that risk," Seven said. "All it would take is a single stroke of luck for Voyager - the discovery of a communications relay, or a wormhole, or another successful journey using the slipstream drive - and the Federation would gain knowledge that could enable them to repel the Borg effectively."
"And even if they destroy Voyager first," Janeway murmured, "we know from the accuracy of Species 8472's Starfleet headquarters simulation that they must already have the means to travel from fluidic space to Earth. If the aliens choose to make contact with the Federation directly, an alliance could be formed even without our help."
"Precisely," Seven said. "The Queen's strategy of pre-emptive attack is a sound one." Her tone was brusque, almost admiring, but before Janeway could move to rebuke Seven for her tactlessness, her expression changed and she dropped her eyes. "... if unfortunate for the Federation," she added quietly.
She was being sincere, there was no doubt about it. Janeway knew Seven's feelings toward her own heritage were complicated, but she also knew they had evolved over the five years Seven had spent onboard Voyager. Seven had not overcome the worship of perfection inculcated by her years as a drone, and perhaps never would, but she was also far more accepting of human sensibilities than she had been. Once, years ago, Seven had told Janeway in anger and arrogance that Janeway had failed to remake Seven in her own image. And that was true. What Seven hadn't realized then was that Janeway had never intended to. She wanted Seven to abide by the same rules everyone else on the ship did, yes, and be a willing participant in Voyager's community, but she didn't want Seven to be her double any more than she wanted Harry Kim or B'Elanna Torres or Tom Paris to be her double. Their differences made them stronger.
Still, as strong as they were, Janeway felt herself blanch at the thought of more than a hundred Borg cubes invading the Federation. What could they do, a single ship, to prevent it? They did not have the firepower to destroy even one cube, and they were powerless to deliver a warning. Hadn't they spent the last eight years doing everything possible to get home? And in that time they had managed to cover only half the distance between themselves and Federation space.
Now it seemed that, barring a miracle, in a few months they would no longer have a home to return to.
When Seven had told everything she knew and left, Janeway stood in the middle of the floor, lost in thought. Behind her, she heard the door to her bedroom swish open, and Chakotay came to stand beside her. They looked at each other soberly. It was clear Chakotay had heard everything.
Janeway pushed away her despair. It would be nothing but a distraction to her. Meeting Chakotay's gaze, she lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes in determination.
"We'll find a way," she told him.
He put a warm hand on her shoulder, his dark eyes were steady and reassuring.
"Of course we will."
TO BE CONTINUED