Title: Tapestries
Author: Alixtii
Historian's Note: For those of you keeping track at home, Tapestries takes place during the fifth year of Voyagers trip home, sometime before the episode Dark Forces.
Disclaimers: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
The plot and background details of TAPESTRIES are solely the author's interpretation of the universe of STAR TREK and may differ in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.
STAR TREK and all related stuff are trademarks of Paramount Pictures.
Wesley watched as the tapestry unraveled.
It wouldn't be so bad if it were due to poor craftsmanship--after all, it was only his first try. He had expected to spend months working on it, instead of the mere weeks it took to mentally weave it. But no, the tapestry's unraveling was due to something much more sinister . . . and much more dangerous. Like the tapestry, reality it self was unraveling.
Wesley turned to one of the sacred wall hangings that the Traveler had made. They were much more complicated than Wesley's simple tapestry, but they functioned on the same basic principle. Like space and time, the strings of the tapestries were interwoven.
Like Wesley's tapestry, however, the Traveler's wall hangings too were unraveling. He stared at them, knowing that even before the tapestries finished unraveling, the indescribable force would hit Darvon V as well, and he would fade from existence.
The Traveler had gone to face the force, to try to stop it. Wesley knew that he had been destroyed in the process, or at least that the Traveler's mind had been severed from his body.
Wesley looked at the tapestry. All hope was not lost. Often, the Universe could right it self on its own, like a body fighting off a disease. But Wesley feared that this virus would be just too strong.
He ran his fingers along the hangings, surveying the lost. All of this would cease to exist. He reached out with his mind, and touched a part of the tapestry--touched a thousand minds, his mother and friends among them, on the new Enterprise-E. Starfleet had hundreds of ships just like it.
He let his mind wander, touching them all, until he reached one that made him start. There shouldn't have been a starship there; it was on the other side of the galaxy, in what Starfleet designated the Delta Quadrant. Suddenly something jogged Wesley's memories, and he remembered reading the Starfleet bulletins many years ago. A starship, Voyager (how aptly named!), had been lost, thrown across the galaxy by an arcane technology.
Wesley stared at the threads on the tapestry, and simultaneously at the Starship Voyager. He had a feeling, some instinct that he couldn't name but had learned to trust, that it was this ship that the fate of the universe rested in.
Janeway sipped her steaming mug of coffee as she stared at the padd. She had to read the entire thing. It didn't tell her anything she didn't already know--but ah, well. At least everything was going smoothly. The ship was in top condition, a somewhat rare occurrence, being cut off from Starfleet and constantly in need of supplies.
Suddenly, the ship lurched.
She had her hand on the comm badge practically before it beeped. "Janeway here," she said, cutting off Ensign Kim. "Red alert. Commander Chakotay and I will be right there."
The familiar red-alert klaxon immediately filled the Mess Hall, and Janeway watched as Chakotay broke off the long-winded conversation he had been having with Neelix. She nodded to him, and they made their way out of the Mess Hall, through the corridors, and into turbolift.
"Bridge," she ordered.
Kim nodded to them as they stepped out of the turbolift. "Maybe you can negotiate with him," he told them, doubtfully. On the screen was an extremely fat alien.
Janeway was sure that Kim had gone through the pleasantries with the alien already, so she opted not to go through them another time. "Stop firing on my ship," she ordered the alien in her most authoritative tone.
"When chukha freezes over." The alien turned around and spat out a command to his crew. "Puchawf!" An alien officer, not quite as fat as his commander, hastily punched a code into his console, and a bright beam of energy shot out of the ship.
Voyager's bridge lurched again.
"Get out of Cazore territory and maybe there will be something left of your precious kaluch starship!" The alien laughed. He definitely thought he had the upper hand. The problem was, he probably did.
This was getting nowhere fast, and Janeway had had enough. "End transmission. Fire at will, Tuvok."
The Vulcan nodded. "Firing phasers."
Janeway tapped her communicator. "Janeway to Engineering. B'Elanna, how long can we keep this up?"
Janeway heard B'Elanna's Klingon sigh. "I don't know, Captain. A few minutes at most. We've already been hit pretty hard."
"Shield structure at seventy-three percent, Captain," said Ensign Kim, as if to affirm B'Elanna's statement, "and losing integrity rapidly."
The ship in front of them fired again. "Captain, we've lost warp."
Janeway cursed to her self, silently. That was the last thing they needed.
Then the Cazorean ship disappeared.
"What the hell happened?" asked Paris.
Janeway turned to Tuvok. "A cloaking device?"
"No, Captain. There are none of the signs of a ship engaging its cloak."
Ensign Kim shook his head in bewilderment. "They just disappeared from our sensors. Their ion trails, all the traces that they ever existed--it all just disappeared."
"Except the information in our sensor logs," Tuvok clarified.
Janeway shook her head. What the hell was happening?
If there was one thing Janeway didn't like, it was feeling like she was being duped. They had been working on the puzzle of the vanishing ship for two days, and they still hadn't solved it. Her entire complement of senior officers was gathered in the conference room. They all had the same thing to report: the only evidence the Cazorean ship ever existed was in the ship's sensor logs and the crew's memory.
"Look, it wasn't just some type of mass hallucination," argued Paris. "We have sensor data to back us up--that ship just vanished!"
"It is possible that the ship's computers malfunctioned," said Seven.
B'Elanna shook her head. "If so, it affected over twenty different systems. That's practically impossible."
"But not totally impossible," Tuvok intoned. When Janeway looked up at him, he added, "If you really must know, Captain, the odds are 3,452,578 to one."
"Which means, in short, that it's impossible," B'Elanna said.
"Semantics, semantics," said a voice, one that belonged to none of her officers. "It's all a question of semantics. It's a result of your primitive human language being so imprecise." Janeway turned around to see the most nauseating man (if you could call him a man) she knew. Suddenly, she realized she had a headache.
"Q, why are you on my ship?" Janeway demanded to know. Then, thinking better of it, "Actually, I don't care why you are on my ship. Just get off it."
"Unfortunately, my dear captain," intoned Q, "I am not here for the immense amounts of enjoyment I always receive from my visits on Starfleet's fine vessels, but to both warn you and to ask for your help."
Janeway didn't budge. "You've asked for my help before, Q."
Q sighed. "This is no time for your petty human grudges, Captain. The universe, as you know it, is in danger."
Tuvok asked, "In danger from what?"
Q shrugged. "You couldn't understand it."
Janeway looked at him with a gaze of steel. "Then give us an analogy we can understand."
"Very well," Q said. "The best analogy, I guess, would be anti-matter. An incompetent member of the Q (now, of course it wasn't me) accidentally opened a. . . portal, let's say (your human language is so limited, you really need a new one, perhaps Q-ese?), and unleashed the anti-Q. The substance is rushing out of this portal, and, whenever it comes in contact with a Q, it completely obliterates him."
"Good riddance," B'Elanna muttered under her breath.
"Careful, Lieutenant, or you might find your self stuck in a shuttle full of tribbles."
Janeway rose. "I think B'Elanna has a good point. You told us that you came to warn us. I assume that it was not to warn us that we will be missing your jovial charm?"
"You Starfleet captains never appreciate me. The Q do more than antagonize humans, ma capitine. We are custodians of the universe. Without us, your universe would . . . cease to exist. Already your universe is beginning to dissolve."
Tuvok raised an eyebrow a fraction of a centimeter. "The vanishing ship."
"Yes, and it is only a matter of time until the anti-Q gets me. Then Voyager vanishes."
"How much time do we have to work with?" asked Janeway.
"Less than a half hour."
Janeway sighed. Q never had good timing. "What are we supposed to do in that amount of time?"
Q shrugged. "An inverse karokian fluctuation pulse would seal the portal."
"And what is . . . whatever you said?"
Q shrugged again. "I probably could describe it to Tuvok here in a matter of minutes. The rest of you might never get it."
"The question is, how do we generate this thing?"
Q's face took on an expression Janeway had never seen on it before: genuine concern. "I don't know. Your physical world has no such equivalent - it exists only in the world of thought."
Janeway frowned. "Why did you come to us if we couldn't fix the problem."
Q looked ashamedly at the other officers in the room. "The truth is, you humans can have a unique outlook on things. You were my last chance."
Janeway's day was getting better by the minute. She would actually have to help Q. "Very well. Explain the concept to Tuvok. Let's see if human intuition saves the day today."
Janeway watched as Tuvok exited the conference room after being briefed by Q. "Well?"
"Captain," Tuvok said, in carefully monitored tones, "he wants us to do the impossible."
A/N: This is a very, very old story. As in years old. Goddess knowsI've gotten a lotbetter as a writer since then. But I can't see any reason not to post it, either.