Disclaimer: The usual deal. Voyager and her crew are property of Paramount. Yada yada yada.
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Star Bright
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It was a pleasant weekend evening. The night air in the garden was warm with a gentle refreshing breeze. After months of preparations, practice and planning, it was nice just to sit back and enjoy the moment. All around the world, he knew, similar vigils were being held for an age was about to end.
They were ready. Finally ready. How many centuries had led to this moment, soon to come? he wondered, staring silently up at the night sky. The stars winked back down at him, soon to possess one less. What would the sky look like without its brightest star? How would his people push forward without its presence to challenge their imaginations and inspire them?
There was a whisper of sound, and a dark figure stepped out of the shadows.
"Ah, Mr. Gotana-Retz. I was hoping I'd find you here. Might I have a word with you?"
The former pilot stood and wheeled around quickly despite his advancing years. A non-descript middle-aged man was standing in the patio entrance, his hands clasped loosely behind his back. He looked unthreatening, but a lifetime in the public eye had taught Retz that appearances could often be deceiving. Besides, the fact he was standing here meant that he'd gotten past the security team.
"I've actually been trying to contact you for some time," the man said, stepping further into the light. "While I'm on the subject, I'd like to compliment you on your choice of secretary. A charming young woman, and a wonderful liar to boot. But then the Space Force is good at arranging that sort of thing. Or so I'm told."
The pilot's hand snuck towards a small button on his watch. It looked like any other button, but had a function unrelated to the telling of time.
"You have a talented security team as well, Mr. Retz," he continued, fully in the garden now. "Unobtrusive, armed to the teeth, ready to take a bullet for you too, I'm sure. I'm afraid, though, that they've all been caught... napping." Catching the look on the pilot's face, the stranger chuckled darkly. "They'll be fine. I just administered a light sedative to them so we could talk in private. And I have jammer for your panic button, and also one for any listening devices you might have installed out here. You may as well not bother."
He pressed the button anyway.
"You're very well informed."
"You're not a hard man to keep track of, 'world's most famous man' and all that. I also have certain connections."
"But you couldn't arrange to meet me normally?" Retz asked pointedly.
"I'm not quite that well connected. I did say I tried," the stranger replied wryly, and chuckled again. "Relax, Mr Retz, I'm not here to hurt you, if that's what you're thinking. If I were, I'd have done it by now. You know that."
He was right there, at least. No attacker would have gone to the effort of getting this close undetected and not immediately make a hostile move. Retz relaxed slightly. Only slightly, however: several assassination attempts over the years had given him a healthy edge of paranoia when it came to dealing with midnight intruders.
"Then what do you want?"
"To talk a bit."
"Most people-"
"And to make a request."
"What sort of a request?"
"A simple one." The man smiled a strange smile and took up a position on the garden bench opposite. "I need you to send a message to the Sky Ship for me."
Forgetting his situation for a second, Retz laughed aloud. "You and half the planet! Do you have any idea how many 'Messages for the Sky Ship People' we've gotten since this project started? We have a staff of over one hundred dedicated to telling them why we can't do that! Half of them even expect a response."
"This is different. I have more reason than most, and I certainly know better than to expect a response. I need to send something to a, well, distant relation, I suppose you'd say. I certainly can't think of a better way to put it."
"A distant relation?" Retz frowned. "That's impossible."
"Let me see if I can't refresh your memory, Mr. Retz. Several years ago, you paid a visit to a family in the Northern Protectorate. This visit was on behalf of one of the Sky Ship people. The one that had lived here for a time. He'd left a family of sorts behind"
"That's common knowledge, yes." He hadn't wanted it to be. The request from the ship's Doctor had seemed to be a private thing.
Since his return from the Sky Ship his every move was eaten up hungrily by the press. They followed him relentlessly despite all best efforts. While he thought he'd evaded them at the time, it hadn't been long before someone found out and the first of many camera crews arrived. And that had only been the start. It made headlines for weeks, and the family in question had to go into hiding.
"Their reaction to what you had to tell them was surprising, wasn't it?"
Retz nodded. They had politely and courteously listened to what he'd had to say without the faintest hint of shock or surprise. It was almost as if they'd known. And they had. One of them - the family matriarch - had silently handed him a large book with a slight smile, thanked him for his time and then showed him the door.
He still had it somewhere. 'Stories of the Sky: The Collected Works of M.A. & J.R Tabreez'. Beautifully illustrated children's stories, interspaced with musical scores of varying complexity, it was a series hugely popular over a century ago, telling how the Sky Ship People had ended up at this planet. He'd read through some of them on the way home that evening. Intelligent but outrageously fanciful - full of aliens and space battles and technological wonders, even time travel. And they were all true.
The full story had never been released to the press, though some smart alec had discovered the stories at some point along the line. But still, even despite the stories, everyone had thought it was a revelation to the small family. No-one could possibly keep a secret that big for that long.
"They already knew. How did you know that?" He looked harder at the intruder, trying to find some identifying mark. "That was never made public, and you were part of that family I'd recognize you."
The stranger smiled and ignored his question. "Of course they knew. It's a grand old family secret. Mind you, half of them thought it was only a grand old family legend."
"I got the impression that the Doctor never told anyone here."
"He told one person, a person he could trust. And she swore never to tell another living soul. Including their son. Hence he sent you in his stead."
"He never told me that."
"I don't imagine he wanted to get into trouble by having it known even to one person that he'd violated the Prime Directive. Their most sacred tenant, as I recall, and the primary reason they never made contact with us."
Retz nodded again. "So then the only explanation was that the woman he lived with told someone."
"Mariza? No, she didn't. She wouldn't have."
"But then how..?"
"I did."
A glint of metal in the starlight. Retz blinked.
"But if you're -"
"I'm here. And I'm also there."
"But how?"
"An accident of some kind. The kind regrettably prone to happening with the device they used to bring me here with in particular, I'm afraid. There are actually several recorded instances of something similar to this happening. Beyond that, I'm not at liberty to say. You understand, I'm sure."
Retz nodded mutely.
"Anyway, returning to the topic at hand, I would consider it a personal favour if you'd deliver this to its intended recipient," the other man said, pressing a small data cube into the pilot's hand. "The exact delivery instructions are on there as well. Follow those, and no-one from Voyager should detect the transmission."
"Of course."
The other man stood and made a formal half-bow.
"Thank you for your time, Mr. Retz, but I believe your security forces should be waking up soon, so I should probably be away. I appreciate what you're doing for me, and also for fulfilling your original promise to my counterpart. Perhaps we'll meet again someday."
He melted back into the darkness and was long gone before the security team arrived and belatedly bundled their charge off to a more secure location.
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The EMH sat at his desk in Sickbay, alone, watching the planet fade slowly from sight on his monitor. All his patients were gone now that the shooting had stopped and repairs were completed. How strange it felt to be back here, back in uniform, back in his Sickbay. Nothing seemed quite right. Sickbay was smaller than he remembered it, and his uniform was too tight after the clothing he'd worn on the surface. And, worst of all, he felt as though something was missing.
He was currently trying very hard not to let himself think about what that something was.
It wasn't that he wasn't glad to be back on Voyager. No, not at all. He truly had been relieved and even excited to be back home. A great cloud had seemed to have been lifted from his head. No more worrying about being discovered, or malfunctioning with no-one to repair him, about getting left behind. It was just that, well... Couldn't they have taken just a little bit longer to bring him back? Another hour of Voyager time? Another few minutes even?
That was the problem, he supposed. Everything up here was exactly the same as he'd left it, while far below his feet...
He swallowed and turned off the monitor. He could never go back.
The ship rumbled beneath his feet. The warp engines were back online. Onwards to the next planet, he supposed. He sighed and stood up. There had to be something he could do to keep himself occupied. Maybe he could re-familiarise himself with the holodeck. Or wasn't there a project he was working on before he left?
He was mulling this over when the monitor in front of him blinked back to life. Frowning at the blank but active screen, he reached down to turn it of but before his hand got halfway there, an unfamiliar face appeared on the screen. A Prottaran face. He sank back into his chair as the transmission began to play.
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"Hello Doctor.
"You don't know me, or at least, you don't know me anymore. It's a little hard to explain, and it sounds just a little crazy, but you're me. And I'm you. The copy of you that got left behind.
"From what I've been able to gather dirt side here, you weren't aware at all that I exist. Truth to tell, I wasn't actually aware of *your* existence either until rather recently by our time - when Captain Gotana-Retz returned from his mission. As to how I was created, obviously something went wrong during the transport back to Voyager. I'm not sure exactly what that something was, though I suspect someone attempted to remove the emitter from the transporter beam. My guess would be Mariza, but she denied it. She was a little shaken up at the time, however.
"The beam itself was visible for over a day here, you know, so it was probably a small mercy this didn't happen in public. You could imagine the uproar. There was problem enough with the 'Blue Lights of Hosdarath' when we first arrived, if you recall. It would have been one for the tabloids indeed. At any rate, the interference, or whatever it was, somehow caused a duplicate copy of the emitter and our program to be created. You returned to Voyager, I remained here. Which one of us is the copy and which is the original, I can't say for certain. It doesn't really matter anyway.
"I told you it would sound crazy. But since when have you heard of a transporter accident that wasn't similarly bizarre? We have a fairly extensive database on the subject and we've met the product of at least one before in Tuvix. I just suppose we're lucky it didn't wipe us both.
"At any rate and returning to the topic at hand, I'm sending this transmission because I rather thought you'd like to know what happened to everyone. Mr. Retz confirmed that assumption when he came knocking some time ago. Let's see, where to start…
"Mariza and I married eventually, about 5 years or so after you left. We had our ups and downs like any other couple. She continued to write music for most of her life, and was eventually made a director at the university conservatorium, a long-overdue appointment. You know as well as I that the selection board had no taste. She also started writing up some of the more interesting adventures we had on Voyager to read to Jason at night. He got quite kick out of them. So did a great many other children after a local publishing company snapped them up. The first was on the best-seller lists for almost a full year, and several others achieved the same level of success. We were able to live quite comfortably off the royalties after that.
"She passed away quite some time ago, peacefully, in her sleep. There wasn't anything I could do save make her comfortable - it was simply old age that got her in the end. There have been one or two since her, but nothing particularly lasting. It never quite felt right.
"As for Jason, well, he grew into a wonderful and talented young man just like we knew he would. He did well in school, and studied Law and Environmental Science at university, much to our initial disappointment. We did get over it eventually, though, but I still think he would have made a fine doctor. Mariza had her sights set elsewhere for him, as you can probably imagine. He eventually married a nice young woman named Astrana, and they had three children.
"We also adopted another child - a girl - shortly before we married. We named her Kara, after Mariza's sister. She became quite an accomplished musician, and gave us two more grandchildren."
"As for myself, if you're wondering what that would have been like, well, let's see... I eventually attained tenure at CPDU. I must say it was a brilliant move on our behalf to go into linguistics when we arrived. Unfortunately, I had to kill off that identity not long after Mariza passed away. I've created and maintained several others since then. Normal citizens age, after all. Odd to think that I've gone from having no name to having more than I can keep track of, some times. You've got to remember who you're supposed to be each day. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, I strongly suggest that you get Lt. Torres to give you some advanced lessons in holographic programming. It would have to be much better than learning it all on the fly, as I have.
"I keep in touch with our descendants to a certain extent, but over the years I've found that it's best to leave them to their own devices. Things can get a little, shall we say, awkward at times. Very few of them know I'm still actually around. That's not to say I don't take a somewhat covert interest in their comings and goings. I'm actually one of Broric's - one of our great-great-grandchildren - teachers. He's studying medicine.
"It hasn't always been easy, but I've generally gotten by, taking it one day at a time. Patience is a virtue you'll come to prize as you get older, I'm sure. If you come to live as long as I have you will for certain. You'll find that things generally get better if you wait them out, people will change their minds, circumstances will change... People themselves will also come and go, and you won't be able to control that. You may find yourself, as I have, outliving those near and dear to you. You just have to find those moments that make it all worthwhile and cherish them.
"Before I found out about your existence, I'd often wondered exactly how I'd make the transition back myself, knowing what I know now, being who I am now. You have no idea how relieved I was to discover your existence. I realised a while ago that there's no way I could return to Voyager now. I've lived here far too long. If anything life aboard the ship is a distant memory for me. Protorra is my home now, and will remain so until the end."
"I can, however, imagine what it's like back up there for you now - I said I'd given the subject not just a little thought, after all. It's not going to be easy to make the readjustment. You spent half your life down here, and I don't imagine that anyone on Voyager will ever truly realize that. You were gone not even half an hour for them, and their minds will have trouble adjusting to the fact that it was much more time for you. I don't know, maybe it will be easier all around if you pretend it never happened, pretend it *was* only half an hour for you. Maybe it won't be. I don't know. But I have to say I don't envy you to go from such freedom to such limitation, not at all. Sickbay is going to seem small after having an entire planet to roam. Perhaps now you'll be able to get those quarters we always wanted.
"I suppose the worst thing for you will be to know that you lost it all the moment you stepped off that transporter pad. At least the rest of the crew have a chance of going home again. They have hope. That's why I've done this. There's as much video footage as I could find, also records, pictures, stories, paintings... Everything I could scrape together. I've also managed to overcome the technological limitations and include some of my own memory files. I know it's not the same as being here for it all, but I thought you'd want to have it. To at least know what happened to them all.
"Good luck, and take care."
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-End-
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