CHAPTER 8
"Explain to me again how a small solar sailboat lands itself three light-years out from the nearest star by mistake?" said Tom Paris.
He stood between two of the strangest aliens he'd ever met. They called themselves the Po Lafimas, and they were built like something between an aardvark and an orangutan. The Po Lafimas had a single, bulbous eye set in a protruding socket near the crest of their long, narrow, forward-sloped skulls. Their mouths and nostrils projected from their faces on the end of a sixty-centimeter-long trunk, and their mouths were a veritable swiss army knife of moving parts. A retractable, tubelike set of lips formed a sheath around a long pair of pincer-shaped grasping tusks, a disjointed pair of mandibles that opened out like flower petals rimmed with flat teeth, a second, inner lip that dangled on either side of the upper teeth like fleshy mustachios and wiggled about like boneless fingers, and a forked tongue that darted in and out, around and between all the other moving parts almost constantly.
The over-complicated mouth, Tom assumed, would make up for their clumsy four-fingered hands. The Po Lafimas tended to rest their weight on their knuckles like apes, and their hands were thick and blocky to help bear their considerable bulk. They could grasp and handle simple instruments with their fingers, but for more delicate tasks, those slobbery mouth parts were bound to get into the mix.
Adding to their bizarre appearance, the aliens were covered in irregular patches of hair that might qualify as thin fur or just thick body hair, and they dressed in loose-fitting lavender gowns, patterned with a dense pictographic script in silver filigree.
And yet, standing between these two hulking aliens, Tom only had eyes for their spacecraft, which was currently dominating Voyager's shuttlebay. It was essentially an ion rocket with sails. It sat balanced on a tripod of fin-shaped struts, lifting the wide cone of its ion drive just centimeters off of the deck. The fat cigar-shaped hull of the ship balanced vertically on the struts like a spaceship straight out of Captain Proton, its sharply pointed nose one meter short of scraping the deckhead.
Two pairs of opposing sails were fastened to the rocket, the fore pair offset from the aft pair by ninety degrees, and both sets were currently folded against the hull of the ship like a collapsed umbrella. Given the multi-jointed, telescopic spars and the many, many layers of thin foil currently girding the hull of the vessel, Tom could easily believe that the unfurled sails would match the breadth of Voyager's secondary hull.
"Seriously, how did you guys get out this far?" said Tom. "I mean, there's nothing resembling a warp engine in there; just a low-yield ion thruster, fed by Bussard collectors and powered by a plutonium fission reactor. I mean, granted, with the kind of shielding you've got on her, I'm sure you could eventually reach full impulse without suffering fatal radiation exposure, but the time it would take you to make that velocity…"
He shivered, partly at the miserable notion of living in such a confined space for years on end, inching through space at a snail's pace, and partly at the joy of discovering this beautiful, quirky work of alien ingenuity; a kind of spaceship that he had never laid eyes on before.
"What, you void travelers don't have tachyon winds?" One of the Po Lafimas grumbled, sizing Tom up with his baleful monocular gaze. He was the talkative one so far, and he'd introduced himself as Pokey. His friend had yet to introduce himself.
Tom's brow crumpled as he tried to make sense of a sail ship that rode tachyon currents. In the last couple days, Voyager had been skirting a sector of densely clustered stars; a region roiling with gravitational waves, frequent ion storms, heavy stellar radiation, rampant subspace instability, and, yes, inexplicable torrents of tachyons. It was a refreshing change of pace after the months they'd just spent in the interminable blackness of the Void, a region of space with no stars whatsoever. But, there was no question of actually venturing into the cluster; the subspace and gravimetric turbulence would make maintaining a stable warp field impossible, and the veritable soup of exotic radiation would play havoc with ship's systems.
"Wow," said Tom. "You're natives of that star cluster? I'm surprised anything survives in there, let alone gets around in space."
"Likewise for you lot out here," grumbled the more talkative Po Lafimas. "What's our thrust right now? Feels like maybe a flartag per square tick, yeah?"
"What?" said Tom, "Was that a measure of velocity?"
The quieter Po Lafimas made a repetitive huffing sound that Tom was pretty sure was laughter.
"Acceleration," said Pokey. "I asked you what's our thrust."
Tom arched an eyebrow. "Pretty sure we're holding station while my captain talks to yours."
Pokey and the huffy one shared a look.
"Is there maybe someone we can talk to who understands more about how space travel works?" said Pokey.
Huffy emitted more of his breathy laughter, and Tom cast an annoyed glance his direction.
"I'm the pilot of this ship," he said.
Now both the Po Lafimas were chuckling, and Tom's hackles were on the rise.
Perhaps sensing Tom's pending outburst, Harry chose that moment to join the conversation. Tom hadn't noticed his approach, but he was grateful for the interruption. "I noticed your ship has no gravity plating or inertial dampeners," he said. "You rely on thrust to create artificial gravity, I take it?"
At the sudden presence of a newcomer, both Po Lafimas tilted their heads up and swiveled their eyes back to see behind themselves. After a moment, Pokey turned his considerable bulk to regard Harry directly, waving his tusk-tipped snout up and down in Harry's face, sniffing. Harry tried to bear the scrutiny politely, but couldn't help cringing back on reflex.
"Yeah, little-mouth," said the huffy one. "Obviously we don't got magical gravity plates or inertia neutralizers. No pixie dust or teleportation machines, neither."
It was Pokey's turn to chuckle at his crewmate's wisecrack. "Who do you think you're fooling with that mythological nonsense? You think we'll believe you just 'cause you live out here in the Big Empty? Like you're the creatures from all those old stories or something?"
Harry was about to respond, but Tom cast him a sidelong glance and shook his head.
"Got us there," said Tom. "But you never answered my question. How'd you wind up out here, so far from your star cluster?"
Pokey shrugged his heavy, sloped shoulders. "You little-mouths might find this hard to believe, on account of you've apparently never heard of tachyon wind, but we know a way to go faster than the speed of light."
Tom shared a look of mock-amazement with Harry, who was looking at him like he was nuts, but also trying not to crack a smile.
"Wow, that's amazing. How much faster than light?" said Tom.
Pokey drew himself up proudly. "With a stiff wind at our backs? Fifty, sixty times faster."
Tom did the conversion in his head and arrived at about warp 3.6, depending on spatial and sub-spatial conditions. He made an effort to look impressed.
"Wow. Can you imagine going that fast, Harry?"
Harry just glared at Tom and shook his head.
"But there are no tachyon winds out this far, are there?" Tom said to Pokey.
Pokey worked his mandibles in a chewing motion, an expression Tom couldn't interpret. "Not no more," he said. "About six turns back, though, there was a strong siren wind arcing back from the Artemic Starstrand that looked to point clear to the Halo of Neptis."
"Woulda cut a hundred turns off our journey," muttered Huffy.
Pokey's trunk arched up in a gesture Tom guessed was agreement. "Naturally, if the wind had held. The beauty of a siren wind is it runs contrary-wise to the prevailing winds, making for a tempting shortcut for them who's looking to quicken their trip up-spin. The downside is they can carry you clear out to the Empty before you even know it, and they don't always last long enough to bring you back into the Cluster again.
"So the wind died and left you… becalmed… in deep space," said Harry.
Both Po Lafimas nodded their trunks.
"Ah, that's a tough break," said Tom. "Lucky we came along, yeah?"
The Po Lafimas shared a glance, and Pokey bucked his trunk slightly, in what Tom interpreted as a non-committal gesture.
Tom sighed, wondering if this would be a good time to bring up what he actually wanted to ask of them. "Well, how about giving us a tour of that amazing ship of yours?"
Abruptly, both alien's trunks dipped, their chins flattening against their collars while their tusks and teeth oriented straight forwards, outer lips retracting to reveal the full suite of gnashing and cutting implements contained within. It was an obviously threatening posture.
"No way, no how," growled Pokey.
Tom and Harry stepped back instinctively. "Ok," said Tom, "It was just an innocent request. No need to get up in arms, now."
"Arms?" muttered Huffy. "I could cut you in half with my arms strapped to my sides." He flexed his grasping tusks to emphasize his point.
"I don't doubt it," said Tom.
"Tom, let's just go," said Harry.
Tom cast a glance at the security personnel posted around the doorways of the shuttlebay, Crewman Steiner and Petty Officer Vance. They looked passive; bored, even, but Tom knew they would have their phasers in hand in a flash if the need arose.
"We got clear instructions," Pokey grumbled. "No little-mouths come within sniffing distance of the Tusk of Neptis."
Tom held up his hands placatingly and put on his friendliest smile. "All right, guys," he said. "I hear you, loud and clear."
Harry nodded towards the door, and Tom decided, given the sudden tension in the shuttlebay, he'd better follow Harry's lead.
"I'll see you later," he said to the two aliens as he headed for the door. "You've got a very nice ship," he added as he left.
In the corridor outside the shuttlebay, Harry said, "Now I see why you didn't join the Diplomatic Corps."
Tom shrugged. "I just wanted to see inside."
"How many times do these aliens have to tell you 'no' before you'll stop asking?" said Harry.
"At least one or two more times," said Tom. "I really want to see inside. Harry, they've been getting around space at warp velocities without even a deflector array! One stray pebble could blow that tin can to smithereens!"
Harry cocked his head to the side thoughtfully. "With as much duranium and diburnium as they've got plating the nose of that ship? Maybe not."
"Yeah, but where did a bunch of aliens that can't even create artificial gravity learn how to forge diburnium? Aren't you curious?"
Harry nodded. "Yeah, I am. But freaking them out with nosy requests that they've already denied several times isn't going to get us answers. Now, come on. The captain will probably call a briefing as soon as she's done talking to the Po Lafimas captain."
Tom sighed and followed Harry's lead. He hoped the captain would make more headway with the aliens than he'd been able to.
-o-o-o-
Ever since their Po Lafimas guests had sequestered themselves on their quaint little sailrocket a couple weeks ago, half Owen's duty shifts had consisted of standing in the shuttlebay, staring up at the bizarre craft, and wondering what it would be like to wander the starways year after year in a ship even more cramped than Voyager. He hadn't seen hide nor hair of the aliens since that first day, and spending half his time staring at their inert ship was horribly boring.
Owen didn't cope well with boredom these days. He didn't like where his mind went.
"Voyager to Vance, hello?"
Owen snapped out of his reverie and realized Crewman Thorold was standing in front of him.
"I don't know what planet you're on, Owen, but you're supposed to be guarding the shuttlebay."
Owen shrugged. "Sorry. It's been a long shift."
Jeffrey nodded, but doubt and pity were in his eyes. Everyone looked at Owen that way, anymore. "Well, I'm here to relieve you."
"Right," said Owen. "Nothing to report. I stand relieved."
Crewman Thorold nodded, and Owen turned and walked through the sliding doors of the shuttlebay without preamble.
The rest of the day after his shift, like most days anymore, he was positively restless. He spent a couple hours in the gym working off his excess energy until he'd sweated all he could stand for the day. He went back to his quarters, took a quick sonic shower, ate a replicated steak and homefries, and tried to focus on his studies.
Owen had given up the sensor tech certification after Tuvok had banished him from Astrometrics. He was confident he could pass if he took the qualifying exam, but there just didn't seem to be any more point to it. His gambit hadn't been a complete failure, though; Seven had looked over his plans, thrown them out, and then designed her own modification for the sensor array to nearly triple the range of detection of type-3 wormholes. Even if his own work had been discarded, Owen was satisfied that his actions had driven Seven to reconsider. He may have further bungled his career and his relationship with the crew in the process, but at least it wasn't all in vain.
Even without the sensor tech position to pursue, though, Owen had plenty of material to go over. He needed to learn everything there was to know about wormholes, subspace architecture, and artificial intelligences, each of which was a challenging and broad-ranging topic representing a lifetime of study in its own right. Owen had never exactly been an honor roll student in the first place, and yet, he was driven to immerse himself in the subjects and seek out every relevant scrap in the ship's library.
Except on nights like tonight, when his head felt full of cotton, and trying to grasp the intricacies of folding layers of subspace through a warp field manifold was about as feasible as trying to grasp subspace with his bare hands. He couldn't study if he couldn't concentrate, no matter how badly he needed to.
Every moment that Owen wasn't occupied with duty or routine tasks, he needed to be preparing for the day he found her, the day he could finally save her. At every idle moment, he was assailed with visions of her suffering at the hands of that inhuman AI.
Maybe, it was taking her apart, piece by piece, figuring out what made her tick. Maybe, it had packaged her up to sell like a commodity sitting on a shelf, or maybe it was forcing her to do back-breaking labor, day and night, at the barrel of a phaser.
Slowly but surely, these visions of torment and horror would stoke the embers of dread and panic in Owen's breast. That toxic energy needed to be purged somehow.
Hours spent in the gym were a weak salve. Hours spent on his studies (if he could concentrate well enough to study at all) often left him with the crushing sense that it would never be enough, that he could never be good enough.
Used to be, when it all became too much, Owen would lock himself in the holodeck. He would run some bloody, violent program, like simulations of the hairiest battles of the Klingon War, or house-to-house urban warfare in St. Petersburg during Earth's second world war.
Then he started playing around with the old Insurrection: Alpha holonovel that had been making the rounds a couple years ago. He'd expected it to have been purged from the computer after the booby traps Tuvok and Paris had stumbled over while working on it, but he was surprised to find it still in the database. There was a note from Tom Paris attached to the program declaring it free of traps and "up for adoption" if anyone wanted to finish writing the holonovel.
Owen wasn't a writer, and he wasn't even sure how he felt about playing the program again, let alone writing it. He needed an outlet for his frustration, not his creativity. He instructed the computer to extrapolate the behavior of the characters from the point where the writing stopped, which meant the story would continue on its own, even if it wouldn't follow any of the strictures of the modern holonovel, and then he gave it a try.
He still didn't know what had drawn him back to this program, though. Owen had hated it when it first came out. Why would he want to play out a scenario where he had to fight his fellow crewmates for control of the ship?
He played it through until the plot got lost in the weeds of computer-generated events, then he left of the holodeck, certain he wouldn't be returning to that particular scenario.
He played it again the next night. He was really starting to worry about where his head was at, finding himself drawn to a program that offered him the choice of shooting either Chakotay or Tuvok and then a bunch of his other crewmates.
On his third playthrough, he realized what was actually drawing him back every night.
Owen was leading three loyal security crewmen through the lower decks, trying to flush out a cadre of Maquis before they could succeed in their objective to sabotage the power distribution grid. The established plot of the holonovel had run its course, and this time around, he'd managed to free the Starfleet loyalists and lead a counter-insurrection.
He and his men had already met the enemy at a couple junctures and exchanged fire. The Maquis were being led by Lieutenant Ayala, and by this point, the gloves had come off. The Maquis phasers were set to kill.
At every exchange so far, Vance and his men had managed to push the Maquis back, working in conjunction with another strike team to corral the Maquis away from vital systems, and then in the course of their campaign they'd blundered through the Bioneural Lab, and there, Lucy Kang was crouched behind a console, Kigon dead on the floor behind her, while Ayala, the Maquis BNG technician Raeger, and a couple other Maquis peppered her hiding spot with phaser fire.
She covered her head and huddled in place, screaming into her comm badge for backup.
Owen's heart skipped a beat. Everything seemed to freeze for an extended moment, and then a ringing sound filled his ears, and the world went red. Without a thought in his head, Owen led his men directly into the line of fire, got two of them killed taking down Ayala and his men, and then turned around and beheld Lucy's corpse, struck dead with a phaser in her hand. She'd come out of hiding to help in the firefight.
Owen's heart froze. The strength left his legs, and he fell to his knees by her side. "No!" He felt her neck for a pulse, even as her vacant, staring eyes told him exactly what he'd find. Nothing.
"Do you think we got them all, sir?" said Crewman DeVries, the last remaining member of his team. He was whispering, hunched down, scanning the exits, while Owen cradled Lucy's lifeless husk.
"Why couldn't you just stay behind cover?" he asked her, tears pouring down his face. "You always pull this sort of crap! Dammit, Lucy! Why?" and then he canceled the program and immediately started it over.
This time, Owen ignored the plot of the novel and made his way directly towards the BNG lab, only to be caught alone out in the open when the mutiny started. He was shot in the back by a Maquis as he went for his phaser, and he ended the program rather than sit in a locked cell for the remainder of the hour he'd booked in the holodeck for the night.
From then on, there'd been no question that Owen would be coming back to the program. The timing could not have been better; Voyager had started its months-long journey through the starless expanse of the Void, and no one thought much of his desire to spend every possible moment in the holodeck. The ship was a very boring place those days, and the holodeck was in very high demand. In spite of that fact, Owen could normally manage to book a solid hour for himself around oh-three-hundred.
Every time he ran the program, his goal was the same, although he played around with different tactics. Most of the time he played a Starfleet loyalist. A few times, though, he tried joining the Maquis, playing along with their plot, taking over the ship while Captain Janeway was away, rounding up Starfleet officers and offering ultimatums until his path inevitably crossed with Lucy Kang's. Then he would betray the Maquis, shoot Chakotay and the others, and start up a counter-insurrection.
That strategy usually backfired, though. The Maquis held a special degree of animosity towards him for his betrayal, and Starfleet never fully trusted him, either. Lucy was particularly hard to convince.
So, he began developing a fool-proof plan for saving Lucy as quickly as possible, every time without fail, without compromising the trust of the Starfleet side. It started by surviving the shootout on the bridge and taking refuge in the Jeffries tubes while Chakotay captured Tuvok and Kim. With the senior staff all either off ship, captured, or turned traitor, and with the security forces divided between Maquis and Starfleet, Owen found he could take command of the Starfleet side fairly easily.
He would then put into motion a battle plan that centered around securing the BNG labs first and protecting the technicians there at all costs.
That was actually the easy part. The hard part was leveraging a plan that prioritized saving one person into a plan that could defeat the Maquis and let him and Lucy live happily ever after.
Dozens of times, his strategies led his Starfleet shipmates to their doom. But after a month of refining his tactics, devising counters to the Maquis' tricks, learning where and when to feint and where and when to press the advantage, Owen finally had it down pat. He could orchestrate the scenario so that Lucy Kang had a front row seat as he handily defeated the Marquis, saw to the captain's safe return, and released the loyal members of the senior crew from captivity.
And every time he strode into that bioneural lab, phaser rifle in hand, having daringly rescued Lucy from mortal danger and saved the day for one and all, she would greet him with a heartfelt "Thank you," and if he was lucky, a handshake and a smile.
No matter how many times he saved her, Lucy Kang's program did not include any personal attachment to his character. He could flatter her courage, show off his daring-do, stun half a dozen combatants single-handedly in front of her, confess his undying love and devotion, and even convince the captain to promote her to a bridge science officer, but he still couldn't inspire one iota of warmth or affection in her. He could reassure himself that the important thing was that she was safe, but the truth was, she was just an empty hologram, and his hard-earned victory was every bit as hollow as she was.
After winning the program five times in a row and growing increasingly dissatisfied with the outcome, Owen contemplated expanding the program, writing some more plot to give a more satisfying conclusion to the scenario, and while he was at it, revising Lucy's code, adding a romantic subroutine and redrawing her a bit more the way that he remembered her, and then he finally saw what he'd become, and recoiled.
The last time Owen stood in the holodeck, he'd frozen the program in the middle of his last victory. Lucy was chatting amiably with Harry Kim on the bridge, and Janeway was in the middle of ordering Lieutenant Paris to set a new course.
Owen stood looking at Lucy, standing proudly at the science station, her brilliant smile lighting up the bridge, as beautiful as the day he'd first laid eyes on her.
There was always something deceptively strong inside Lucy's delicate countenance, and something deceptively fragile in the headstrong way she confronted the world. She'd always had an unshakable certainty that she was meant to be so much more than just another technician on the lower decks of a starship, and Owen had known it, too. In fact, he had feared it. Someday, he knew, she was going to get the recognition she so clearly deserved, and then she'd rise so far above him, he'd never be able to reach her again.
Now, he wished for that fate more than anything.
But this hologram of Lucy didn't hold that ambition, that potential. This hologram portrayed Lucy as just another face in the crowd, fodder for the cannon, grist for the mill. Owen had moved heaven and earth to save her life over and over again, obsessively studying the mechanics of a holoprogram for weeks. But this was never the thing he'd been trying to save.
Owen patted the hologram on the shoulder, felt the convincing warmth and solidity of her body through the fabric of her Starfleet uniform, and then he called out, "Computer, end program." The holodeck dissolved back to its standard gold-on-black grid pattern, and she dissolved out of his grasp. "Erase the modifications and the user profile of Owen Vance on this program," he said, and the computer chirped in acknowledgment.
Owen marched out of the holodeck and resolved never to come back here on his own, knowing that if he did, the temptation to sink back into self-indulgence might be too much to resist.
-o-o-o-
So anyway, that ruled out the holodeck as a release valve for Owen's rising anxiety. On nights like these, Owen was left with just a few unsatisfying choices: drink toothless, synthetic alcohol, engage in mind-numbing entertainments on his PADD or his desktop console, or pace the halls of the ship.
Tonight, Owen paced.
He wandered past the mess hall, gazed in at the lively mix of crewmates enjoying their leisure time, playing little games of kal-toh or dom-jot and engaging in friendly conversation. He moved on.
He passed through the engineering sections, listening to the clipped and professional conversations of the second-shift engineering team as they carried on day-to-day maintenance, and he moved on.
Owen's feet carried him past Astrometrics, a place he was still forbidden to enter. He picked up his pace as he came near the open door, not wanting to be accused of lurking around where he shouldn't be. But then he caught wind of the earnest conversation that was unfolding inside, and he paused, just out of view from the doorway.
-o-o-o-
"Yes, I believe that is the most likely explanation," said Seven.
"But surely there are other possibilities," said Captain Janeway, hoping desperately that for once, Seven might be mistaken. "There must be other phenomena that have a similar signature."
"Of course," said Seven. "But this is an exceedingly close match."
Janeway heaved an exasperated sigh. Anywhere else in the galaxy, she would have been elated by this news. "And how deep into the star cluster does the signal originate?" said Janeway.
"It's approximately fifteen light-years from navigable space," said Seven, "although on our current flight path, Voyager will not come closer than one hundred and seven light-years."
Janeway mulled over those figures. She'd made longer detours for less. "Let's say we change course," she said. "Say we get as close as possible before entering the cluster. It's only fifteen light-years."
"Voyager would not make it further than four," said Seven, "Five at the most. The intensity of these tachyon fields is sufficient to collapse our warp envelope, and the subspace instability could cause a complete warp field inversion. The gravimetric radiation would wreak havoc on Voyager's internal systems. The theta radiation would be harmful to the crew. Need I go on?"
Janeway got the picture. She understood the perils of the Argus Cluster almost as well as Seven did, but she couldn't bring herself to give in so easily. "If the Po Lafimas can get around in there…"
"The Po Lafimas have evolved to withstand theta radiation. Their ships are engineered specifically to operate under the astrometric conditions of the Argus Cluster, and their adaptations are entirely incompatible with Voyager's spaceframe."
"But perhaps we could modify a shuttle," said Captain Janeway. The fanciful image of a Class 2 shuttle with gigantic sails crossed her mind.
"Captain," said Seven, and she looked at Janeway with a degree of concern that the former Borg drone rarely evinced. "I understand how significant even one member of the crew is to you. I also know that you rarely back down from a challenge. But the Borg have never succeeded in traversing Spatial Grid Zero-Seven-Zero in their history, and not for lack of trying."
"You said the Borg were unaware of any species worthy of assimilation in the Argus Cluster," said Janeway, "so why would they put any effort into going through it?"
"Frankly, because it's in the way," said Seven. "It has proven more efficient to route entire transwarp corridors around the star cluster than to find a way of crossing it."
That didn't sound promising. On the other hand, Janeway always enjoyed finding new ways to beat the Borg. Maybe, if they spent the month it would take to reach their entry point into the Argus Cluster rebuilding a shuttle, maybe even building a new kind of shuttle from the ground up… give it gravimetric shielding to protect against gravimetric interference… devise some sort of a deflector-generated force-sail or a tachyon-tolerant warp field geometry… regular hyronalin inoculations for the theta radiation…
Which would protect a crew for a few days, after which they would need to switch to arithrazine, which would buy them a few more days before the detrimental side-effects of arithrazine began to cause neurological damage...
"In two days," said Captain Janeway, "We'll drop off our passengers at the boundary of the Argus Cluster. At that time, we'll need to decide whether to keep chasing this signal or resume our course towards home."
Seven nodded. "You'll want to discuss your decision with the senior staff," she said.
Janeway considered for a moment and shook her head. "We'll convene at twenty-one hundred. Just you, me, Torres, and the Doctor."
Seven tilted her head curiously. "Not Chakotay?"
"No," said Janeway. "Chakotay still takes Ensign Kang's fate too personally. Before I start raising his hopes and everyone else's, I need to know that we have a reason to hope in the first place. I need technical expertise."
"Very well," said Seven, and she squared her shoulders. "Then first, allow me to lend you my own expert evaluation."
"You've made the challenges of the Argus Cluster more than clear, Seven," said Janeway.
"Not about the cluster," said Seven, "About the wormhole."
"You said the Borg don't have much knowledge about type-three wormholes," said Janeway.
"They don't," said Seven. "But here's what I know: the odds that the wormhole will persist in its present position for the month it would take us to circumnavigate the cluster are minute. Type-three wormholes are inherently unstable. The Borg have been unable to study such a phenomenon in over a thousand years, and the data acquired have largely been deemed irrelevant, primarily because such phenomena have always vanished well before a Borg vessel could reach it."
"Maybe that's because whoever opened it didn't want to be reached," said Janeway.
"Perhaps," said Seven, acceding the point with a nod, "Or perhaps it's because they radiate enough dark energy to reverse the local curvature of spacetime. I learned this from Voyager, Captain. Not the Borg."
Janeway thought back on their last encounter with the Delurididug wormhole, and with a sinking sensation, she realized Seven was right.
Janeway heaved a sigh. "Still," she said, although she felt the conviction draining out of her with every word, "We should meet. Just you, me, Torres, and the Doctor. Maybe…" She shook her head. "I don't know, Seven. We need to at least talk about it. Maybe there's something we're missing."
Seven arched an eyebrow. "Some way of traversing a hundred and twenty light-years of hazardous space at faster than warp nine point nine, Captain?"
"Twenty-one hundred," said Janeway, and she headed for the door. She paused as she reached the doorway and added, "No one else needs to know about this, Seven."
Seven gave a silent nod of understanding.
"No use getting anyone's hopes up for nothing," she said, and she walked out of the astrometrics lab and into the empty corridor, feeling the weight of her failure towards Ensign Kang all over again.
