DISCLAIMERS: The following is fan fiction utilizing events and characters from SIX "Star Trek" television incarnations including a character first introduced in the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon. As a kid, the animated series was my first exposure to Star Trek and is still unofficially recognized as the "fourth season" of the original series. You will also find bits and pieces sprinkled here and there throughout each chapter from the feature films.

It is fan fiction only… there is no intent to collect income or infringe on the trademarks, copyrights, or patented work of others. Please DO NOT use this material for anything other than pure reading enjoyment. If you have been missing at least occasional new "Star Trek" episodes in your life, this is the place to come. It is rated "T" for teen, but be forewarned – there is some mature PG-13 type (MPAA rating) content also contained within.

This novel switches back in forth through time - chronicling occurrences that span all televised generations of Star Trek. The primary, central focus of this tale centers around the 24th Century… shortly before the events of the "Star Trek: Insurrection" feature film. Many of the professionally published book storylines have at times varied from what we have seen on screen anyway. Thus the majority of what you will read is based upon my own ideas combined with the stories that we have viewed at home on TV and while munching popcorn in the movie theatres.

My sincere thanks to Gene Roddenberry and the owners of the Trek franchise who created this imaginative, optimistic future universe for our imaginations to play in! Kudos also to Hal Sutherland and Samuel. A. Peeples for their wonderful animated episode "Beyond The Farthest Star"… the inspiration behind much of this story.

Star Trek Voyager: Eternal Soul

Prologue: Awakening

"Captain's Log, Stardate 5221.3: On outward course beyond the fringe of our galaxy towards Questar M-17, a source of mysterious radio emissions. Mission… star charting."
Within minutes of recording that most memorable log entry, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise found themselves caught in the grip of a massive gravity well. Waves of intense, unseen turbulence emanating from the negative mass of the M-17 dead star caught them tightly in its grasp, and all initial attempts to reverse course and escape its clutches failed utterly. Facing the imminent loss of his starship and all hands who served aboard her, Kirk had no alternative except to counter his previous instructions by ordering full forward thrust.

By traveling toward the immense tug of the imploded star's gravity rather than fighting its relentless pull, helmsman Hikaru Sulu succeeded in transferring Enterprise's rapid acceleration into a last ditch orbital maneuver that averted certain, catastrophic disaster. Orbiting the dead star turned out to be a temporary solution, however, since the crew was now faced with the unenviable task of somehow finding a way to re-engage engines and attain the needed escape velocity to break their ship free again.

Fortunately, this crew already had a great deal of prior experience along with both ship and the skills required to deal with this type of gravitational disturbance. By using Questar's enormous pull as an advantage, Kirk was fully confident that his crew would be able to build up significant momentum and then make use of it to 'slingshot' their vessel outward to a safe distance.

Plans to leave were quickly put on hold. Shortly after arriving, the Enterprise located the source of the radio emissions - an alien starship that was also orbiting the M-17 gravity well. It was a massive, elegantly lined vessel that had been stranded long, long ago – stranded for what seemed like an eternity by any ordinary timeframe.

Upon completing a preliminary scan of the vessel, Kirk and company soon began to make a series of additional incredible discoveries. The most amazing of these was the realization that this strange alien ship had been constructed by an ancient, plant-based sentient species that wove together fibers of metallic alloy that were somehow spun as opposed to being heated and forged using known, conventional methods.

The alien vessel was massive - composed of varying sized purple and bluish-gray pods with hexagonal shaped windows sprinkled seemingly at random across each surface. All of the pods were expertly linked together by thinner, intertwined 'branches' into an overall, very aesthetically pleasing variation on the standard known starship designs…

The alien starship was also more than 300 million years old.

That revelation was startling enough, but further observation by a boarding party consisting of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty clouded matters even further. To even the most untrained eye, it was blatantly obvious that the exterior hull on each of the enigmatic vessel's pods had been tragically blown apart from the inside out… sabotage apparently carried out while the starship's own crew had still been alive. It was both shocking and tragic to behold.

Were the aliens unable to escape from Questar M-17's gravity and thus decided to commit themselves to a quick, painless death rather than a slower, inevitable demise?

The mystery behind the alien ship's destruction resolved itself very quickly; in fact, the sinister truth was revealed even before the boarding party returned to the Enterprise. As things turned out, the ancient race of plant-based life forms who constructed and flew such a fantastically magnificent interstellar vessel had indeed chosen to destroy it… and methodically so.

Piece by piece the enigmatic aliens had blown apart critical systems and exposed the majority of their ship's interior to the lifeless vacuum that was outer space. Those unknown beings from so long ago had purged the vessel of both power and life - had in fact destroyed its usefulness in its entirety so that the dark and deadly thing that was also trapped with them would be unable to make use of it and escape. Eons later, as the Enterprise boarding party stood firmly on board their most remarkable discovery to date, it was Mr. Scott who summed up what they were all thinking with one simple sentence…

"But nothing – no form of life – could survive 300 million years…"

Unfortunately, as things turned out… something had survived.

The entity beamed back to the Enterprise, hiding amongst the boarding party and then quickly merging itself with the ship's electronic systems. It took full advantage of its formless properties as a being of formless, electromagnetic energy. Within minutes, the dangerous alien captured control of the main computer and from there began to use its influence to spread chaotic malfunctions throughout the ship while it absorbed the data in the starship's memory banks.

All of it.

Fortunately, the entity's status as a shapeless being of energy also worked to its disadvantage. Since the starship was sophisticated but not fully automated, the menacing life form soon discovered that it required the cooperation of at least some of the Enterprise crew in order to escape from Questar's gravity well.

Recognizing this, it used its electronic influence to seize control of a new, prototype Automated Bridge Defense System. With the overhead phaser emitters at its command, the alien proceeded to use them at various intensity settings in an effort to both threaten and discipline the bridge crew. It wanted nothing short of total compliance with all of its demands.

Obey me, it cried over and over – its strange emotionless voice emanating from the communications speakers. It had learned their language and could now speak to them directly using their own Federation standard. Obey me!

The Starfleet crew was well trained, difficult to coerce, and eventually they managed to defeat the intruder when the Captain abruptly decided to play a very dangerous game of space 'chicken'. Like the alien ship's commander before him, Kirk was also fully prepared to sacrifice both ship and crew to prevent the creature from escaping from its dark and isolated 'space prison'.

Having been stranded in this manner once before, the creature was quite desperate and fiercely determined to succeed. It did everything in its power to prevent the Starfleet crew from destroying the Enterprise. When use of the ABDS failed to intimidate the humans, it methodically increased the intensity of the phaser beams fired from the new system until they began to approach lethal levels. It intended to execute them - one by one, if necessary - until those who wanted to survive gave in and complied with its demands.

But Kirk knew that too.

Without warning, the Captain used helm control access and cut power to the ship's engines, dropping the Enterprise almost instantly out of orbit and accelerating down toward the pock-marked surface of Questar. As his starship plunged toward certain doom, Kirk covertly began programming in coordinates necessary for a slingshot warp maneuver around the dead star that would very likely throw them into a higher, safer orbit. The coordinates had been privately calculated by Mr. Spock, since use of the main computer would have alerted the alien to their plan. Kirk wanted the entity to panic.

In the end, the Captain's gamble paid off and the alien became terrified at the mere mention of also engaging warp drive – it misunderstood their intentions completely and decided to put its own survival ahead of all other objectives. As the Enterprise continued to drop rapidly toward the long-dead sun, the entity released its hold on their computer systems and leaped back out into space and away from the starship.

Since the entity had also made use of the Enterprise's main phaser banks to shoot down the alien starship, its own short-sightedness returned to haunt it almost immediately. For the first time in countless centuries it had no ship to hide on, and it was immediately seized by Questar's gravity and absorbed by the planetoid.

The bridge crew verified that the entity had fled and then proceeded to implement the rest of their escape plan. Although the Enterprise had taken quite a pounding on the trip in, the durable starship managed to hold together – as usual - and break Questar's hold on them. Sulu quickly angled them outward and away from the source of the gravity, all the while keeping their aft viewscreen fixed on the receding image of the dead star behind them.

As they moved into a much higher orbit, the angry, dark green glow that had, for a brief time, lit up their starship's hull could now be seen surrounding the dead star. Additionally, it became obvious that the entity had retained the energy and information it had stolen, for the crew could still hear the strange being making use of their language and communications as it desperately begged them not to leave it behind… abandoning it to a never-ending, isolated existence for a second time.

So lonely… please… don't leave me… it wailed in despair as they left orbit and cruised back toward normal space.

Unknown to Kirk and crew, the entity's vast intelligence had been completely transformed in the short time that it had interacted with the Starfleet vessel. Once the creature moved past its initial disappointment at its foolishness in allowing Kirk's crew to deceive it long enough to escape, the mysterious electromagnetic being began to realize that it had already taken from the Enterprise everything that it needed in order to leave the massive gravity well far behind. The only remaining item it required was something with which it was very familiar… time.

And the bowels of the long dead, imploded Questar M-17 dead star had always provided it with plenty of that…

TIME to plan its escape.

Questar M-17 lies near the very tip of the outer, "Perseus External" spiral arm of the Milky Way. In journeying there, Enterprise had most definitely achieved its objective and explored beyond the farthest star of the galaxy. The starship had journeyed so far from home, in fact, that the only interstellar object left between them and the endless empty void lying between galaxies was the dangerous crimson force field lurking nearby.

Kirk and his crew had encountered that phenomenon - the energy field surrounding their galaxy - on several occasions already. They knew that there was plenty of danger lying within its depths and that venturing there again would not be a good idea. No one knew what powered it, who had created it, or why it was there. Many theories had been presented over the years, including the possibility that it was a product of nature, or perhaps something placed there long ago to keep the inhabitants of the Milky Way isolated and trapped within the confines of their own galaxy.

It had also been speculated that perhaps it had been created to keep something unknown out.

Regardless of the truth, no one argued that traveling too close to the barrier was dangerous. Thus after exploring a bit further and charting only empty space, the Enterprise reversed its heading back toward the interior of the alpha quadrant while its Captain reported in to Starfleet. After that, the starship altered course a second time and leaped into warp on its way toward the crew's next assignment.

The incident within the intense Questar gravity field quickly became a seldom-referenced log entry… no further contact was allowed since warning beacons were hastily set up to warn other ships from venturing too close to that most dangerous environmental hazard. Spock made an additional entry to the Science Officer's log, noting in it his regret at the loss of the alien starship. He considered the lost opportunity to make additional, more detailed surveys of its design along with a study of the culture that had crewed it to be a most tragic loss.

As the Enterprise vanished into warp, the magnetic energy being hovering above Questar watched them go. Its anger, which had long been building over the centuries, rapidly escalated to the boiling point and became outright hatred.

It was their function as lower life forms, after all, to serve it

Long ago, the plant-based organisms had given the magnetic entity a name. Using Federation universal translation algorithms, its name converted to Mictlantecuhtli – or god of death. Prior to its discovery by those ancient races, it had also been known as the Vryke. Since the pod-based alien starship was an energy collector, designed to make use of the renewable visible and non-visible magnetic electromagnetic energy surrounding it, the Vryke had been drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet.

The Vryke had been space based… primarily using the gravitational fields from stellar objects surrounding it to maneuver through space. The attraction from the alien starship had interested it, and – its curiosity aroused - it had made use of their energy collection system to come aboard. The alien ship's crew had expected the ship's systems to harness all energy, and had not been prepared for a sentient, energy-based intruder.

The alien Captain's decisions thereafter were extremely logical, arrived at based upon a hurried discussion with his frightened crew. He first ordered them into the gravity well in the hopes that the massive turbulence there would rid their ship of its unwanted passenger. When that strategy failed, he met with his crew one last time before making the final, fateful decision to destroy the ship. This unexpected turn of events had totally stymied the newly-trapped Vryke, and it had been angry beyond words.

Then the years of isolation had begun to creep slowly by… an eternity that seemingly had no end. Within several centuries the Vryke's intelligence had quite understandably gone insane, and anger became a hunger that it could never totally satisfy. It could still hear the recorded message echoing in its mind… the one that had so recently been discovered and played by Kirk's boarding party:

"Danger… danger… the dead star; we are being drawn to it. Rather than carry this malevolent life form to other worlds, we have decided to destroy our own ship. There is no other answer. If you understand this message, you are protected only for this moment in this room…"

Thus the Vryke was no longer interested in simply escaping… somehow the entity wanted to find a way to make Captain James T. Kirk – and Earth – pay for leaving it behind. The humans had not obeyed its order to carry it out of the gravity well; instead, they had abandoned it and thought it simply a helpless castaway once more.

But they would suffer the consequences caused by their short-sightedness.

Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, its confidence grew as the entity began to review the data that it had stolen from the starship's data banks. Its plan was in place almost immediately, a two-pronged objective designed to escape from its isolated prison and – at the same time – enact revenge against the humans that had angered it.

And while it was at it, why not also find a way to destroy their home worlds, starting first with Earth?

The Vryke had to be careful though, because the humans knew about its existence now and would be prepared for it if it were suddenly to surface again. So it sifted through the Enterprise database and studied the vast library of information on instellar objects and alien life forms catalogued within. The answer became obvious – it needed a large source of power to achieve its goals, and the gravity well surrounding it was the perfect choice. Since it now knew a great deal more about faster than light travel and subspace, it also had the information that would be needed to manipulate both.

Questar M-17's gravity dug very deeply into subspace, so the solution to all the Vryke's problems was quite obviously a wormhole. The entity wanted to be certain that it escaped entirely – once and for all – with no possibility that it could ever be contained again. The humans had been clever enough to outwit it once before; there was no reason to deny the distinct possibility that they might be able to do so again.

So it chose a starting point and then carved TWO wormholes through the subspace event horizon surrounding Questar. One of them led backwards in time just shy of a century, with an exit in the vicinity of – but not too close to - Earth. The second stretched far across the galaxy, past the nuclear bulge at its center and somewhere deep within one of the spiral arms on the opposite side. The second wormhole poked into the future, and was created specifically as the Vryke's backup option. If something went wrong with its plan to seek revenge on the humans before they even knew of its existence, then it would simply use the first wormhole to return to Questar and then access the entrance to the second and use it as an escape route to an entirely new home somewhere far across the galaxy.

Either option would be satisfactory. And given that its lifespan was nearly incalculable, time was most definitely on its side. It had briefly considered the option of waiting patiently for a few centuries, and then making use of the Enterprise data. This idea was quickly rejected, primarily because the Vryke was quite simply tired of waiting. But it was not stupid… although it had been trapped and isolated in the gravity well for such a long time it had also been safe. Thus it was determined to make use of its reproductive properties and send copies of itself out into the galaxy. It wanted to investigate the local environment and conquer first… once everything and everyone out there was completely under its control it could safely reappear.

The Vryke was extremely satisfied with its plan.

One wormhole dug into the past, emerging near Earth where a naïve, earlier generation of humans was probably just beginning its exploration of space. The second wormhole, by comparison, extended nearly 90,000 light years across most of the galaxy. Its exit point was just shy of 100 years in the future.

One wormhole would give the Vryke access to a generation past, while the second would allow it to see a piece of the future – this time without the wait.

How fitting.