Ship of The Valkyries (Part Thirteen)

Ship of The Valkyries (Part Thirteen)

A Star Trek crossover Fanfic by Lt Taya 17 Janeway (TaTTooGaL)

It was a bittersweet victory, at best. They had won the game, but they more or less had lost their captain. Janeway sat miserably in her seat as the senior crew assembled again to discuss ways of remedying this.

They were desperate. For one thing, the men of the Voyager weren't going to be to pleased when they returned to their ship and found their captain had been turned into a mere specter of what she was before. For another thing, intangibility was beginning to get on Janeway's nerves, and an annoyed Janeway was not good news. She couldn't do anything except walk, sit and talk to others. As a ghost she had no need for sleep or nutrition, meaning she couldn't take advantage of Neelix's absence to try out some good pantry-cooked food. She couldn't even drink coffee. So she just slumped in her chair, sulking, and thinking of a million and one creative ways to kill Q the next time she saw him so they could share the same predicament.

As if.

After two days solid of suggesting ways of reintegrating Janeway with her body and trying the various methods out, they had yet to come up with a suitable means for success. Save for begging Q for help, they were fast running out of options. Desperate, they had turned given up on the metaphysical aspects and had gone back to simple medical techniques to try to revive her body. It hadn't worked, but they persisted anyway. There was even an old Chinese adage to describe the situation: Treating a dead horse like a live one. Except that Janeway was no horse, and she probably wouldn't appreciate being called one very much.

Troi sipped her cup of hot chocolate thoughtfully as they sat together in the briefing room. Janeway glanced enviously at her, wishing she were solid enough to pick up a cup of coffee. Sighing, she settled back in her chair as Jadzia suggested yet another means to bring her back to life.

"Perhaps the problem lies not in our techniques but in the … materials we have to work with. Maybe her body's been out of commission too long for her to be able to re-enter it," she postulated. "We might try cloning her…"

"Her body's been in stasis ever since Major Kira brought it on board," retorted Crusher. "I've even run it through a regenerative cycle to heal all the injuries she sustained in the fall. I don't think the body's the problem. Something- a single lettered omnipotent something, specifically- must be interfering with our plans."

"Q's really gone too far this time," Jadzia muttered darkly. "Games are fine as games, but they aren't fun when people start dying. Won't he ever learn?"

"Maybe he had a purpose in doing this," countered Kira. At the incredulous looks from everybody in the room, Kira hastily added, "I thought through this, and I realized her being a ghost set us up for the perfect excuse to breeze through the whole thing."

"I think I'd have preferred the fires of perdition to this," remarked Janeway dryly.

"So Q thought he was pretty smart, invented a way for us to cheat our way out of this one. This still doesn't explain why he doesn't allow us to bring her back to life," Jadzia pointed out.

"Maybe we should ask Cass for help," suggested Keiko.

"No-one knows where she is," replied Crusher. "That girl drifts in and out of the ship like a wind."

Vexed, Torres spun the small ovoid object that Cass had given them as a reward for one of their Quests. Originally Kira had thought that its Orb-like properties would aid them in bringing Janeway back, but apparently it didn't possess such usefulness. As it was, the crew found it an enigma in itself. Nobody could activate it. She gave it another quick turn as she contemplated other ways of bringing people back to life, drawing on Klingon mythology to inspire herself. Yet she came up with nothing.

Irritated, she gave the ovoid a hard turn. It skittered out of control and went spinning across the table, sliding to a stop before Janeway's seat. Torres rolled her eyes in exasperation, but otherwise made no move to retrieve it. Bored, Janeway began fiddling with the yellow object in front of her.

"Maybe if we tried storing her… spirit in energy form," mused Keiko thoughfully.

Seven looked up, then stopped and stared in alarm. "Captain."

Janeway stopped tossing the ovoid from hand to hand and gave Seven an intense blue glance. "Is there something wrong, Seven?"

"You are able to interact with the object."

Staring at the ovoid object in her palm, Janeway suddenly realized that it was true. She couldn't pick anything up, hold anything or even rest her elbows on anything without sinking through, yet this mysterious object responded to her touch. She turned it over to look at its underside, and noticed again the circle of pale yellow on the side which resembled a power button. None of the crew had succeeded in activating it. Wondering what would happen, Janeway curiously pressed the button.

Immediately the whole briefing room was filled with an ambient yellow glow as the ovoid opened up like a clamshell. Alarmed by the sudden influx of light energy, Janeway snapped the two halves shut before anything undue could happen.

Jadzia was staring at the small ovoid in awe. "Well, at least we're making some progress in one aspect…"

"We should try this under more controlled conditions," said Janeway. "I want to find out more about what this radiation is, and what properties it possesses. It should turn something up."

"Did you notice a pattern?" said Guinan suddenly. "All our rewards are being used to aid us in subsequent Quests. On the first one we got Ro, who later went on to complete another mission on her own, then we have this ovoid object, which might help us now, and the child's toy which helped us locate Quinlan, and then Q's so-called undying gratitude which more or less helped us with the last Quest."

"I'm a reward? Thanks so much. How flattering," muttered Ro, shaking her head.

"Well, that can only tide good news for us," said Janeway optimistically. She held up her hand with the ovoid object. "We'll conduct more experiments on this in Astrometrics, where we can get detailed scans on what happens when the artifact is opened." As an afterthought she added, "Bring my body along. I might need it."

******

The whole meeting's venue had been shifted from the briefing room to the imposing room of Astrometrics. Janeway sat perched on the tier before the viewscreen, cradling the ovoid enigma like a lost treasure, which it most likely was. The rest of the crew quickly assisted Seven in setting up the scanning equipment, while Crusher brought her body out of status and prepped it for possible reanimation.

Finally, they were ready. With bated breath, they watched as Janeway opened the clamshell. The warm yellow ambient light filled the room again. Reading off her charts like a computer, Seven reported high intensities of neutrino flux and EM radiation, which spiked as the glow from the sphere grew brighter. Janeway just stared at the apex of the object, eyes wide open as if mesmerized, the yellow light throwing her oddly angular face into sharp relief.

The yellow brightened to a point where it was more a painful actinic white, and most of the women squeezed their eyes shut to avoid being blinded. Still Janeway stared into its depths with a beatific expression on her face. "I can see beyond…."

With a soundless explosion, a wave of blue energy swept outwards from the clamshell and spread through Astrometrics.

Jadzia cautiously opened one eye. The clamshell object had clattered to the floor, and Janeway's ghost was nowhere to be seen. She picked up the object and scanned it, but it seemed to have returned to its normal inert state. She still couldn't open it. She looked around the room. "Captain?"

There was no response. Slowly the rest of the women began opening their eyes. "Where is she?" Torres asked, glancing around the room in alarm. Had they inadvertently transported her into some inaccessible higher dimension?

Then Crusher let out an astonished gasp. "She's alive!" Instantly everyone turned. Crusher was grasping Janeway's hand in excitement. "There's a pulse….captain, can you hear me?"

Janeway's eyes fluttered open languidly, as if she was waking from some long, dark slumber. Then something in the back of her mind clicked, and she snapped upright, saying, "I'm back-" That was as far as she got before she got smothered in Torres' exuberant embrace.

There were whoops and cheers in Astrometrics as Crusher scanned Janeway and pronounced her one hundred percent alive. Guinan even went as far as to do a little victory dance with Jadzia around the perimeter of Astrometrics.

After a short while everything more or less settled down. Janeway still sat perched on the corner of the stasis unit, her legs swinging in the air like a little girl's. Seven disappeared for the nearest replicator and came back bearing a tray of cups of coffee.

"You know," mused Keiko quietly, "you mentioned that we've used all our rewards to help us with one Quest or the other. But there is one we haven't made use of yet. The scepter."

"Mmm." Janeway smiled as Seven approached her with a cup of coffee. "Is that for me? Thank you." She held out her hand to accept the cup of coffee.

It shot out of Seven's hand and flew directly into hers.

Janeway stared at the cup of coffee in absolute surprise.

******

Three hours and many grueling tests later, it was confirmed: the reanimation of Janeway had somehow endowed her with Q powers. Nobody knew how, or why this had happened, although Jadzia had a few theories in mind, all of which began with the capital letter 'Q'.

They were seated around the long table in the Mess Hall when Cass reappeared. The Diocese was dressed in a simple figure-hugging nylon suit with pastel pink leggings She just popped up in the usual Q style of a flash of light between Kira and Ro, causing the latter to drop her cup of coffee onto the table. The cup shattered.

With a snap of her fingers, Janeway flashed the mess out of existence.

Cass smiled. "So it worked."

The women glanced at her in interest. "So this was all planned?" Janeway asked. "Turning me into a ghost, then bringing me back as a Q? What's the point?"

"It was planned," Cass admitted, "but not by Q." She smiled conspiratorially.

"You did all this!" Kira exclaimed. "How? And more importantly, why?"

"Let's just say I'm a good predictor of Q's temperament and character," said Cass silkily. "And I enlisted the help of a few friends to provide all the necessary equipment. And of course, all of you followed the script to the letter."

"That's nice," said Torres mildly, "but how in the world is that pertinent to us? Can we just finish our last Quest now and have everything returned to normal?"

"Forget the last Quest." Cass held out her hand, and the scepter of rubies appeared in her hand. She slid it over to Janeway, who picked it up, studying the huge red ruby in its center with interest. "I have… something else in mind."

Janeway smiled in a feral manner as she realized what it was that Cass wanted her to do.