Previously in the Prologue:
Sam Carter from Stargate Command has been reported missing following an attack on the Alpha site. Meanwhile a temporal wave originating from an uninhabited planet reaches the starship Voyager with no immediate consequences. However, the crew soon learns that Kathryn Janeway and three crew members have disappeared while surveying the same planet.
Death Knell
Janeway fired at the figure who strode towards the rest of the away team taking cover behind the tree line. She huddled behind the meagre protection of a tree trunk when their attacker turned towards her. Wood exploded in her face, shards cutting through the air. She wiped her cheek, and her hand came up bloody.
The three other members of the away team fired in turn, drawing the attacker's attention back to them. Janeway took a deep breath and stepped out again, weapon steady in both hands. The man, all carapaced in black, fell on his knees under the combined onslaught of the four phasers, energy flowing around his armour.
To Janeway's dismay, the phasers sputtered, and the man rose back on his feet as if they'd been throwing one of Neelix's soups at him. Like revenge personified, he methodically swept the trees with his wrist weapon.
This was no man, Kathryn Janeway decided as she weaved her way between the trees towards the shuttle. Its movements were fluid as if it was alive, but its intent was inflexible, mechanical, ruthless. This was a war machine, and he became it in her mind. Not a Borg drone as far as she could tell, but close enough to be shown no mercy in return.
While running, she tapped on her combadge. Once again, only silence responded. She should have stayed on board Voyager as Chakotay had urged her to do. The ship could be under attack from the same army this thing was coming from, and here she was, stuck on this forsaken planet and chased by a maniac automaton.
After wallowing in the depth of her personal darkness during the two months Voyager had spent in the starless night, she'd spearheaded the search for much-needed dilithium. The crew deserved better than a captain feeling sorry for herself and abandoning them in the process. She had sought to regain their trust in her by doing whatever was necessary to get the ship back to its course to the Alpha quadrant.
The signal on the shuttle sensors had been brief, there and gone in a flash. Nonetheless, she had ordered a course direction to check the uninhabited planet. She'd been eager to hunt down any prospects of dilithium before re-joining the ship, but had not anticipated she'll be instead fighting a new and seemingly indestructible threat.
Crewman Jonys collapsed without making a sound, a hole the size of a fist right where his heart should be. Janeway fell on her knees and put her hand on his burning chest. His eyes wide open merely told her what she already knew: that another of her crew was dead on another alien planet. Bile came to her mouth at the ceaseless waste.
Why they were being attacked, she didn't know, didn't care, but if she didn't do something soon, the entire team would be wiped out. She pushed herself upright and focused her tactical mind on how to defeat the creature set on their destruction. It was slow to react to new threats but relentless once set onto a target. If she could distract itfor long enough, the two surviving ensigns would have a chance to make it to the small spacecraft leaning askew a mere fifty metres away.
"Stop shooting," she shouted. "Board the shuttle, I'll cover you."
Not waiting for an answer, she ran in a zigzag pattern into the open and fired in long bursts. From the corner of her eye, she saw the ensigns sprint towards the shuttle while the drone unhurriedly turned towards her as she had hoped it would do. Heart racing, she fired again to keep its attention on her before dropping behind a large rock, the phaser hot in her hand.
A volley of shots startled her. The ensigns had reached the cargo bay door and had resumed shooting to provide her with cover in return. She jumped from the protection of the boulder, hoarse from shouting.
###
Sam Carter stumbled across the remains of the unmanned aerial vehicle among a pile of rocks. She was down to her last reserves of energy, exhausted by the relentless chase since she'd fled the Alpha site hours before pursued by the supersoldier. The UAV meant that people from SGC would be coming to her rescue, but when they would show up was another matter. She could not afford to let the upgraded power unit she was carrying, the only weapon capable of killing drones, fall in the hands of their Goa'uld master.
The sound of weapon discharge rung clear in the late afternoon sky, and she hurried towards a large open clearing, keeping her head low and pulling the remains of the UAV behind her.
Her fear that her father was involved in the fight she was witnessing evaporated. Jacob was nowhere to be seen, and she hoped he was safe. She had no idea who the two women were, the bright yellow of their uniform shoulders standing out against the open door of a small vehicle she didn't recognise. She knew all about the Tok'ra and Goa'uld aircrafts, but this model was completely new to her.
The women were using strange energy weapons against the supersoldier with some small effect, but nowhere enough to stop it. A strangled yell sounded from her left. Energy sparkled on the back of the drone, but she could not see who was shooting from that new direction. Those three people had kept the supersoldier away from her when she most needed the respite. Three people doomed to die if she couldn't destroy it.
She turned the UAV on its back, opened the hatch underneath the small rocket attached to the wing and started to re-route the connections to trigger the missile manually. She kept an eye on the newcomers, wishing she could join them in the one-sided battle. She had no other means to defeat the drone but for what had fallen from the sky.
Its arm raised to the horizontal, its fist facing downwards, the supersoldier overwhelmed the women's shelter with deadly fire, ignoring the desperate attack coming from behind him. Their small arms hissed, then faltered. Carter flinched as one woman fell backwards under the relentless barrage, arms flung in the air. Her teammate turned, mouth open, but Carter didn't hear her scream over the unrelenting sound of the drone's weapon. Her body slid against the bulkhead, smoke floating upwards.
Carter forced her hands to stop shaking. These people had died for her. They had blundered into a fight that was not theirs and had helped her even if they could not know she was the drone's target.
She lifted the wing and balanced the makeshift missile launcher onto rocks. She would have only one shot at the drone. If it didn't work, she had no plan B. Maybe this was the day she would have to give up saving the universe from the Goa'uld.
Her eyes blinked back sweat. When she peered down to align the weapon, the situation had changed once more. The supersoldier had turned around and was now striding towards the sole survivor who stood her ground. Her left arm hung loosely at her side, right arm firing at the drone's head, causing it to miss. Carter caught a flash of red through the dust raised by the enemy's energy beams. The supersoldier had only to walk twenty metres at most to finish its doomed assailant at point blank range.
She brought the two electric wires together. The blast shook the ground around the drone, and yellow swirls of fire rose into the air. When Carter looked up again, there was no trace of the supersoldier.
###
The world spun around Janeway, her ears ringing from the explosion. When the planet eventually steadied, she got up on shaky legs and choked on the dust hovering in the air.
Gravel and dirt settled into new mounds where her attacker had stood a few minutes before. The smell of burnt flesh reached her, coming from Anderson and Dorado's bodies contorted in painful death throws just outside the cargo bay. As she walked towards the shuttle, she put the hand holding her phaser to her mouth, repressing a dry heave. The drone might have been pulverised into harmless atoms, but she had not been able to save her team.
She leaned against a boulder. The shuttle had taken numerous hits, on top of the damage it had suffered during its abrupt touchdown. She doubted it was in good enough condition to fly back to Voyager, three dead crew members in its hold and no dilithium to show for their courage and sacrifice.
"Hey."
Janeway turned on her heels, weapon at the ready. A woman looking the worse for wear stood a few metres away, a bloodied bandage tied high around the left thigh and nasty gashes marring her face. She lifted empty hands in the air.
"Who are you?" Janeway asked, not prepared to lower her phaser. Something had gone very wrong to find herself on a supposedly unoccupied planet in the Delta quadrant, talking to somebody who looked very much like a human.
A small ripple of gravel travelled across the ground behind the newcomer.
"I am Major Samantha Carter. That supersoldier you'd been fighting was hunting me," the young woman answered. Or maybe not that much younger than herself, behind the tousled dirty blonde hair and the dog-tired blue eyes.
Carter pointed at Janeway's left shoulder which was throbbing like a warp core out of phase. "You're hurt."
"I'm fine," Janeway answered wearily, triggering a raised eyebrow from the woman. "Why was that thing after you?"
Her hand supporting her injured leg, Carter lowered herself onto the gravel slope. "Long story. Look, I'm really sorry I couldn't act sooner. I only had one shot at it."
Janeway relaxed her stance and lowered her weapon. She could hear the sincerity in Carter's voice. The woman had obviously been through a long and difficult ordeal, but she had defeated what had resisted the frontal assault of four phasers on maximum setting.
"You did a better job killing it than we managed. How did you do it?" she asked. If more supersoldiers and their ships lurked around, she needed to know how to fight them for Voyager's sake.
Her question was rewarded with a coy smile, and Janeway's misgivings eased a little more. "A bit of bricolage, but it work—"
The entity which had slaughtered three of her own rose from the ground, gravel and dirt sliding down its dull armour like water.
"Get down," Janeway shouted as she brought her weapon up. Carter's face crumpled in disbelief and dread, her nemesis coming back to life and taking aim at her.
If phasers and a blast had not destroyed the drone, Janeway knew she wouldn't succeed, but she was not going to stop trying. There were things in this universe that did not deserve to live. Her weapon flickered on and off, the red-hot handle burning the palm of her hand. The drone ignored her, its focus solely on Carter.
A short burst hit the supersoldier from the side, making it stagger. Glancing at the source of the shots, Janeway saw a large man standing across the open ground and holding a weapon she didn't recognise. He handled the device with ease as if he could do it all day long. Thankful for the reprieve, Janeway leapt behind a nearby boulder, her injured shoulder slamming against the rock.
She took another pot shot while Carter skidded to safety behind a pile of rocks a few metres away. A second man, tall and grizzled, appeared at the woman's side from nowhere, shooting at the drone, which teetered but did not go down. Carter handed the man a small object that he immediately fitted to his weapon. He fired twice.
The supersoldier fell and stayed down this time even when the large man with gold on his forehead approached and put a foot on its chest.
Janeway let herself slide down the face of the boulder. Carter leaned against the tall man who put his arm around her, a simple gesture that made Janeway's heart miss a beat. She averted her gaze, glancing at the shattered combadge still attached to a torn piece of her uniform. Waves of pain spreading from her shoulder were making her feel lightheaded.
She looked up as a shadow loomed above her. Samantha was standing over her, her eyes only showing concern. "Are you okay?"
Janeway nodded and stood on unsteady legs, jarring her shoulder once more in the process.
Carter turned towards the large muscular man. "This is Teal'c. He is a Jaffa." The man with the gold tattoo tilted his head without saying a word, an enigmatic smile on his lips. Maybe a Vulcan offshoot, Janeway thought irrelevantly as her eyesight narrowed.
"And Colonel Jack O'Neill," Carter added.
"And you are?" the tall man asked, his face sombre. His weapon was facing the ground but Janeway knew it would not take him more than half a second to bring its muzzle in line with her chest if he deemed her a danger to his team.
Something was wrong. Very wrong. There couldn't be any Jacks or Samanthas on this planet thousands of light-years from Earth. And yet, she could understand them without the help of the universal translator.
"I am Captain Kathryn Janeway." Caution whispered in her ear not to append 'of the Federation Starship Voyager'.
She pushed aside the mystery that was the three people standing in front of her. She needed to go back to her ship, alert the crew to the threat of men in dark armour coming back from the dead. There was so much to do, sensors to recalibrate, maps to check, dilithium to find, always on the move, always looking for a way home.
The scorching phaser slid off her fingers and made a faint noise as it struck the ground.
Because home is not here. It can't be.
All went dark.