Janeway had now of providing enough protection to take her
ship closer to the fiery star.
"Mr. Paris, move us closer. Thrusters only."
"Aye," said Paris, and they watched as the solar disc grew
larger still. "I can't guarantee how long we'll be able to
keep the metaphasic program stable," Chakotay warned. "It's
draining our power reserves pretty rapidly."
"The Tokath can't survive this much longer,"
replied Janeway. "They'll have to let go and get away from
the star, or be incinerated."
"Hull temperature at fourteen thousand degrees. Radiation
levels at seventy rads per minute."
"Distance from the star, twelve hundred kilometers."
And still the creatures clung to the shields.
Janeway stared at the viewscreen, amazed at their tenacity,
and willing them to admit defeat and let go.
Minutes passed, silence broken only by Rollins's sonorous
announcements: 293
"Hull temperature fifteen thousand degrees.
Radiation at seventy-five rads per minute."
Now, even with the metaphasic program in place, the
temperature again began to rise inside the ship. Janeway
felt herself growing light-headed. She knew that the stress
of the last eight hours was taking its toll, and she took
several deep breaths to get oxygen to her brain. In her
mind's eye, the image of the closed door suddenly appeared,
and she shook her head to clear it.
Why was that bothersome illusion cropping up now? A wave of
anxiety flooded her, and she felt a moment's panic that she
was losing control. But gradually the apprehension faded,
and she refocused her attention to the viewscreen.
"Captain, the metaphasic shielding is losing integrity,"
Chakotay reported. Janeway turned to him. Without that
added buffer, they couldn't survive this close to the star.
"Can you stabilize it?" "I'm trying-but without power
reserves it's not going to be easy." "Hull temperature
seventeen thousand degrees. Radiation levels at ninety
rads. Cabin temperature sixty-two degrees."
Janeway wiped perspiration from her forehead. A decision
was being forced on her: they had to move away from the
star. A wave of frustration swept over her as she looked
back at the viewscreen. The Tokath were beginning to drop
off.
They all noticed it simultaneously. "It's working!" crowed
Paris. Rollins chimed in with his sensor readings: "Life
signs are disappearing from the shields, Captain."
One by one, the brown and green bodies fell away from
their field of vision, revealing the flaming disk of the
star more fully. The temperature on the bridge was now
almost unbearable.
"Metaphasic shielding is failing, Captain," said Chakotay
tersely. "We have to move away from that star."
"Just a minute more-Rollins, tell me when the shields are
clear of the Tokath."
"We're there, Captain. No life signs showing on the
shields." "The metaphasic program is collapsing-was
"Lieutenant, get us out of here."
Paris worked, and Voyager veered away from the star.
Janeway moved to her chair and sank gratefully into it,
listening to damage reports as they filtered in.
"Shield integrity barely holding at thirteen percent-was
"Damage to the aft port ventral-was "Hull buckling on deck
fourteen-was "Initiating repairs to propulsion systems-was
"Sickbay reports twelve crewmen suffering from radiation
sickness-was The well-trained crew was already springing
into action, doing whatever was necessary to restore
Voyager to operating condition. Soon repairs would be
completed and they could—
comwhat? Be on their way? Abandon their comrades on the
planet and hope they'd find a way to survive? Continue the
journey home without the great and good friend Tuvok?
Tuvok, whom she'd initially disliked so fiercely but had
grown to love as a brother . . .
. . . and sweet Kes . . . and dear Neelix . . . Greta Kale
. . . Nate LeFevre . . . over twenty people in all that
they'd never see again . . . She realized Chakotay was
seated next to her, addressing her. She turned to him.
"dis . . though the Kazon don't appear to be a danger
anymore, we can't risk another attack by the Tokath. We
wouldn't survive another trip into the star."
"What are you suggesting, Commander?"
Chakotay hesitated, knowing the seriousness of his
recommendation. "I don't see any way we can return to the
planet, Captain."
She looked away from him, instinctively wanting to deny
his statement. Quickly she reviewed the options as she
understood them, and quickly she realized there weren't any
more. She might have found a way to defeat the Kazon, but
that other, unexpected nemesis-an ancient, brilliantly
evolved life-form-was apparently invincible.
She looked back at Chakotay, whose wise, patient eyes held
hers, reflecting concern and empathy, and nodded once. It
was over. She'd fought with every bit of her skill and
ingenuity, and she'd lost.
The defeat was palpable. A chill passed through her and she
became light-headed again. Images of her crew, trapped on
the planet-perhaps under attack from the Tokath?-swirled in
her mind. She began to feel disconnected from the present,
from what was happening directly in front of her. The
bridge began to spin.
She felt as though she were encased in her own warp
bubble; time seemed to freeze, the voices of the crew
faded, and the bridge washed out into a pastiche of pale
color-an abstract impression of sound and motion.
She was moving toward the closed door, hand outstretched,
determined to open it this time. No impediments, no
obstacles-nothing would keep her from finding out what was
behind that barrier. It must be cleaned out. Her heart
pounded as she reached out, and an overwhelming sense of
urgency cascaded through her.
The door opened at her touch. surprisingly easily, after
all. She took a breath and stepped through, ready to greet
the clutter and mess she was sure lay there.
She was freezing. All around her was a white wilderness,
bleak and unremitting, a milky landscape of snow and ice.
She'd been here before, of course. She had crashed here
with her father and Justin, who'd lost their lives beneath
a cold, dark sea. She'd almost died, as well, her body
temperature dangerously low before a rescue ship had picked
up the automatic distress signal and beamed her aboard.
Why was she back here? Why did the closed door lead here?
It was not a place she wanted to revisit. She tried to
bring her focus back to the bridge, back to the here and
now, but something refused to let her go. Images of the
death planet lasered her mind with cruel clarity. She'd
been buried in a snowbank . . . and then she looked up . .
.
stood, painfully . . . and saw an iceberg.
The iceberg. She'd stared at it for the longest time,
confused, trying to decide if it were an iceberg. Why had
that seemed so crucial? Why had there been doubt?
Now, in her memory, she was facing away from the iceberg,
and she began to doubt that it was actually there.
She had to turn and make sure it was-but she was
frightened. Terrified, in fact. She was equally compelled
to turn, and not to turn.
A dreadful minute passed as she was pulled on this rack,
agonizing, paralyzed. On the one hand, what did it matter
if she turned and looked at the iceberg? It would be there-and if it weren't, what did it matter? This was a memory,
nothing more.
But it was a memory she'd kept behind a closed door for a
long, long time. What did that mean? Why was the iceberg so
potent an image? What gave it that power?
The only way to incapacitate it was to turn and look at
it. Demystify it. Turn, Kathryn, turn . . .
Slowly, slowly, a millimeter at a time, she forced
herself, in her mind's eye, to turn and look at the
iceberg. The turn seemed to take forever, during which time
she began to realize something would be vastly different
when she completed the turn.
And so it was no great surprise when she looked into the
middle of the dark sea-the frozen sea which had been
cruelly penetrated by a flaming object from the heavensand
saw no iceberg.
She saw the shape of an iceberg. An object jutting from
the sea which might have resembled an iceberg if it were
made of ice, if it had in fact broken from a glacier and
floated, shards sticking out, through the alien sea. But of
course no icebergs floated in the alien sea because it was
frozen over, except for the dark gash which had been rent
in it by the plummeting spaceship.
It was that ship whose fuselage now projected from the
watery bed, nose up, violated and broken, looming out of
the water like a huge and formidable iceberg. It was that
ship in whose cabin she could clearly see her father and
Justin, dazed and bloody, but alive.
She had immediately gone into action. Of course, she
would-she was accustomed to pressure, to emergencies, to
disasters. They were simply challenges, and Kathryn Janeway
had always risen to the challenge. She had figured out how
to multiply elevens and derive the distance formula, she
had become a good tennis player and she'd saved Hobbes
Johnson from drowning, she'd convinced Admiral Paris to
mentor her and she'd saved Justin from death once before,
at the hands of the Cardassians. She would not fail to save
the two people she loved most in life. A console was
flickering in the section of the cabin in which she'd
ridden to the surface. There was still power, something was
working. She flew to the controls and began entering
commands; to her relief, they responded. She might be able
to transport her father and Justin from the shell of the
ship's cabin.
She focused intently on the console, quickly realizing
she'd have to cobble together several circuits in order to
have enough power for a site-to-site transport.
To transport two people she'd need eight hundred megawatts.
Their patterns would already be encoded within the ship's
systems, of course, standard practice for the crew of any
vessel.
She glanced over her shoulder to take a visual sighting of
their positions, and made a mind-numbing discovery: the
ship's fuselage was sinking. It was almost a meter lower in
the sea than when she'd begun working, though the two men
in the cockpit were still safely above the yawning pit of
black water.
She turned back, working quickly. Two emergency
microfusion generators were still on-line.
They could be routed to the primary energizing coils.
She brought the targeting scanners on-line and initiated a
coordinates lock. This process would verify that the
transporter system was functioning within operational
standards, something she couldn't be sure of because of all
the damage.
The scanners refused to lock on to the two figures in the
ship's cockpit. Quickly checking the system, Kathryn
understood why: the annular confinement beam was too
unstable to hold two bodies in the spatial matrix within
which the dematerialization process occurred. She had
enough power to transport only one person. Not two. One.
Fear clutched at her. Though the air was bone-chilling,
she didn't notice the cold.
Adrenaline coursed through her body, her heart hammered,
and her head pounded with every heartbeat. She looked back
at the sinking ship, its two occupants slumped over their
seats, but moving slightly, still alive. Justin, her
fiancd, whom she loved and adored, and with whom she would
spend the rest of her life. And her father, beloved Daddy,
who had challenged and inspired her and made her what she
was. How could she choose that one would live and the other
die? Flash visions of life with Justin-knowing she had
sacrificed her father to allow him to live-flooded her 299
mind. How could she be happy with Justin after paying that
price? Life without Justin, knowing she had sacrificed him
to save her father, was equally intolerable. How could fate
have presented her with this bitter dilemma?
She took a deep breath of the frigid air, trying to clear
her mind and rise to this challenge. She would thumb her
nose at fate. She wouldn't yield to this situation, but
create the situation she wanted.
She would transport both of them, somehow. There had to be
a way. She turned to the console, mind racing with every
fact and figure she could remember about this experimental
ship. The phaser banks were recharged through a neodyne
capacitor circuit. If the capacitors retained enough
residual charge, she might be able to bring the annular
confinement beam up to eight hundred megawatts-the minimum
she'd need to transport both men. But the only way to find
out was to tap into the capacitors. She'd have to try to
engage the beam and see if it gained enough power.