STAR TREK - VOY - 15 - Echoes

VIP免费
2024-12-19 0 0 277.35KB 87 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
PROLOGUE
Time The first shift
Location 2,410 parallel universes to the right of ours
IT WAS A STANDARD YELLOW G-TYPE STAR SYSTEM,
with thirteen planets and three dozen-odd moons. Where the fifth planet had been, a ring of asteroids
slowly spread out around the sun. Some unknown event thousands of years before had destroyed the
planet in that orbit. The sixth planet held the beginnings of basic life, but nothing in this system promised a
humanoid civilization any time in the coming centuries.
Suddenly, a planet-sized sphere formed in the orbit where the fifth planet used to be, as if a ghost planet
had come into being. It existed for seconds, then vanished.
The shape of the planet remained faint in the dark of space, however, outlined by humanoid life forms in
their last struggle to breathe in the cold vacuum of space.
Three and a half billion humanoid bodies were
suddenly there in the cold of space where a planet had once existed.
Soon they were all dead, a sphere of bodies slowly moving in three and a half billion directions.
Time The second shift
Location 2,410 parallel universes to the right of ours
Two and a half hours later, three and a half billion more humanoids suddenly appeared in space in the
shape of the ghost planet. They floated among the dead from the shift before, struggling to survive in the
cold of space.
They quickly died.
Time The third shift
Location 2,410 parallel universes to the right of ours
Two and a half hours later, another three and a half billion humanoids died in the unforgiving cold of
space, floating among the dead from before.
Time The fourth through eighty-seventh shifts Location 2,410 parallel universes to the right of ours
Billions of bodies floated in the shape of the ghost planet as the emptiness of space continued to
fill with the grotesque shapes of death. Over and over, every two and a half hours, the unimaginable
became real, as an entire population of a planet died.
Time The first shift
Location 2,542 parallel universes to the right of ours
In the east, the sky paled. Globes of light hovering above the walkways dimmed in anticipation of dawn.
Cleaning machines scuttled across pale lavender pavement to polish off a few last stains before ducking
into their daytime niches under the curbs. Engines hummed beneath the transportation depot.
A turquoise bird flew from one pocket green zone to another, calling, its song echoing in the spaces
between low-shouldered, rounded buildings.
Lights winked and shimmered behind polarized glass walls as people rose, cleaned sleep from their
systems, and prepared their morning meals.
A woman stood beside a rooftop aviary, feeding her messenger birds and wondering who would enlist
her services today to send love and greetings and congratulations to special people in their lives. She
lifted her head to sniff the freshening breeze spicebark tea being brewed all over the city; the pleasurable,
inviting scent of a flower to a pollinator in a nearby green zone; a faint decaying food
scent from the waste collector below as it finished its rounds; and even fainter, the taste of rain and
change.
A young man who had been studying all night strolled the walkway to the green zone nearest the college
compartments, dodging the cleaners. He worked through an engineering problem again and again on his
handheld computer, trying to figure out where his calculations had gone astray. He could not get the
numbers to behave.
An old woman in another green zone sat on grass near a flowerbed and warmed her hands around a tea
bulb as she watched bright-eye flowers unfold their petals in response to dawn.
Children in thousands of family complexes woke in their sleepnests, emerged, and dressed, ready for
breakfast and the walk to their nearest socialization center.
Farm supervisors and weather workers yawned over spicebark tea and gathered what they needed for
the day before heading for transport that would take them to outlying areas for their day's work. Others
who planned to travel between cities or continents headed for the central transportation depot as well.
Merchants and administrators, cooks and teachers, city engineers and scientists readied for their jobs,
thinking about the latest newsbeams they had received as they rose from sleep.
Suddenly the deep blue of the morning sky filled with an intense white light that shimmered and grew
brighter as each second passed. People on the
walkways stopped to stare. Inside the glass-walled buildings, some cycled their glass darker to cut the
glare, and others waited as the light intensified, wondering what was happening.
The engineering student in the park stilled, his computer forgotten, his mouth open as he stared at the sky.
The old woman watching the flowers looked up as well, moaning as the flowers she had been watching
lost their petals in the onslaught of brightness.
The light increased until every shadow was gone and the color of every building, every tree, every blade
of grass was bleached white. All details washed away on the tide of light.
Then the sky crackled, and with a slight rumbling, everything returned to normal suddenly, the intense
white light gone.
And with it every person on the planet.
Gone.
Only the city remained, now empty.
Elevators stopped at the floors they had been programmed for, discharging no one.
Meals finished preparing themselves and waited uneaten in their dispenser slots.
Alarm chirps in sleepnests sounded and no one shut them off.
Showers ran ceaselessly, their cascades of water uninterrupted by humanoid forms.
Automated newscasts beamed to home screens no one watched. Live broadcasts showed empty chairs,
empty desks, silent scenes.
Cleaning and maintenance machinery, sensing the absence of people, emerged from resting phase and
went to work.
On a rooftop, messenger birds flew out through the open aviary door and circled in the sky, wings edged
in early sunlight. Their message cavities were empty, their guidance nodes inactive.
A few automatic sirens went off.
Otherwise, the city was quiet.
And empty.
CHAPTER 1
Time The eighty-seventh shift Location Our universe
CAPTAIN KATHRYN JANEWAY GLANCED UP FROM THE screen of her book padd at the
stars out the viewports of the ready room. Something had jarred her out of a fictional early
nineteenth-century world back into the twenty-fourth century.
She had tired of reading about gloomy governesses in remote mansions on the moors, and was sampling
a period piece with a different flavor, a comedy of manners set during the British Regency, Earthdate
1816, though written a century later. In her off-duty hours she enjoyed reading about stratified, rigid
societies where people behaved according to outmoded codes.
Not that she had many off-duty hours these days. Off-duty minutes seemed more like it. The warp
engines had failed a week before, and she and B'Elanna had been putting in long hours getting them back
on-line. Then a personnel crisis had erupted among the junior engineering staff. Nor-
mally, she would have let B'Elanna handle it, but Klingons-even half-Klingons-had notoriously foul
moods when they were sleep-deprived. Chako-tay had tried to settle it, but his usual low-key style had
failed. Janeway had stepped in, using the last of her energy and all of her diplomatic skills. The crisis had
passed, but it had taken her reserves with it.
Both Chakotay and Tuvok had hinted that she needed rest. This afternoon, she took their advice, but she
couldn't bring herself to take the entire afternoon off. She had too much work to catch up on. She didn't
have time for her favorite holodeck program, so she picked up an old novel instead.
She liked books. A real book could be read in snatches, seconds of escape and relaxation, instead of an
afternoon's worth. Sometimes seconds were all she had.
But in those seconds, she could disappear into a good book. And this book was good. She wasn't
certain what jarred her out of it.
She scanned her ready room.
The stars looked normal, the long streaks of light that always appeared when the ship was traveling at
warp six. She shifted on the couch and glanced toward her computer console, where she had left her
commbadge, wondering if someone had hailed her.
Silence.
No. If someone had hailed her, she would have reacted instantly. What had startled her?
A faint shudder vibrated through her. She felt
the movement coming up through the couch. She glanced at the glass bowl of yellow-green star lilies on
the round table nearby. The flowers had come from Kes's wonderful gardens in airponics that
morning-another gift she had left them. Fresh flowers in the ready room were part of Neelix's morale
strategy.
The water wavered inside the clear glass. Ripples ringed the stems of the flowers.
With the touch of her finger, Janeway marked her place and slept her book padd.
This was what had disturbed her, this shudder.
Smoothing her uniform, she got to her feet. Everything in the ready room appeared normal. Illuminated
artwork hung straight on the walls, and her bottle and memento shelves looked undisturbed. Her mobile
work chair near the computer console had not shifted a centimeter.
She felt another shuddering bump through the floor.
Whatever this was, she could feel it through the whole ship. And that worried her. Anything that could
affect the entire Voyager was too important to be ignored.
Even though Chakotay hadn't deemed this phenomenon important enough to interrupt her off-duty time,
she had to know what was going on.
Janeway paused when she stepped onto the bridge.
Panels and consoles glowed with flickering colors in the half-light. Data streams, ship schematics,
starmaps, and lighted touch-control panels blinked normally. The sound and feel of engines and systems
hummed all through Voyager. She hadn't felt an odd vibration since she left the ready room.
The large forward viewscreen displayed the long, colored chalk marks of star systems passing to either
side of Voyager's route. She heard the beeps and peeps on controls as they responded to her crew's
manipulations. The smell of people and uniforms and power and ship's metal welcomed her. There was
no feeling of frenzy here.
Ensign Harry Kim frowned at his console. Commander Chakotay leaned forward in the command chair,
alert, and Lieutenant Tom Paris, at the helm, glanced from the viewscreen to Kim and back. Lieutenant
Commander Tuvok stood at his station, his dark brows lowered. Ensign Julie Starr studied ship status
arrays.
On this routine leg of the journey, the bridge crew was down to half strength.
"Commander," Janeway said as she made her way to the command chair. "What are these vibrations?"
Chakotay stood the moment he saw her. "Subspace waves, Captain. They're very weak. I thought I
would investigate before disturbing you."
"I'm not that tired, Chakotay," she said, even though she appreciated his concern. She had been working
very hard these last few weeks. Both Chakotay and Tuvok had made a point of mentioning it to her. And
now, it seemed, they had conspired to give her more time away from the bridge.
She would stop the coddling immediately. The next time one of them told her she needed a rest, she
would remind him, quite sharply, that only she and the doctor could determine the state of her health.
"You should have called me to the bridge as soon as you felt them," she said.
"My mistake, Captain," Chakotay said.
"Have you pinpointed the source of these waves?" Janeway asked as she took the command chair.
Chakotay moved to his normal place beside her.
"Mr. Tuvok?" Chakotay asked.
"The waves appear to be spherical in nature," Tuvok said. "I will have their point of origin in
one-point-two minutes."
"Spherical?" Janeway asked. "As if someone tossed a stone into a puddle of water?"
"It is more complicated than that, Captain," Tuvok said. "It-"
"But the analogy does work," Ensign Kim said. Janeway smiled at him. He was becoming good at
forestalling Tuvok's long, unnecessary explanations.
Tuvok stared at his screen. "I have pinpointed the origin, Captain. The waves emanate from a system
thirty light-years away from us."
"What kind of transmissions are these?"
"Unclear, Captain. The energy signatures match nothing in our database." Tuvok sounded puzzled.
Janeway activated her own science screen and called up the information on it. She didn't recog-
nize the signatures either. "Mr. Kim, I want you to see if these are carrier waves or data transmissions.
Analyze these waves using the ship's language database. See if the universal translator can make sense of
it, if all else fails."
"Maybe it's some kind of weapon," Paris said.
"Doubtful, Mr. Paris," Tuvok said. "There are more effective ways to use weapons in space."
"Actually, Tuvok," Janeway said, "Mr. Paris has a good point. This effect may be caused by a weapon
we're unfamiliar with."
She examined her screen more closely and found that the wave still eluded her.
"Will these waves affect the ship?" Chakotay asked.
"No, sir," Kim said. "Our shields will protect us."
"But how far?" Chakotay asked. "Can we get closer to the cause of this thing?"
"Yes," Tuvok said. "The shields would protect us even if we were at the point of origin."
"At the point of origin," Janeway repeated. She shoved her screen away. "Tuvok, how far off course
would we have to go to investigate this disturbance?"
"Two-point-six light-years," Tuvok said. "But it might be dangerous. The pattern and regularity of the
waves suggest that the disturbance is artificial. A civilization that has the power to create such regular
subspace waves must have a highly advanced technology."
Janeway sighed. Much as she loved investigating
new things, she knew better than to veer off course to satisfy her own curiosity. "Monitor the situation,
Chakotay," she said as she stood. "See if you can discover from this distance what's causing those
waves. And let me know if they get worse."
"Aye, Captain," Chakotay said, although he made no move to resume the command chair.
"I'll be in my ready room." The novel no longer sounded exciting to her. She loved discovery, loved to
explore each nook and cranny of the universe. Which gave her an idea. She stopped and turned around.
"Tuvok, filter any information you gather into my computer."
She ignored the slight shaking of Chakotay's head. She would investigate from there. It would, in its own
way, be as relaxing as the novel. And she did need the relaxation. Much as she disliked Tuvok and
Chakotay's heavy-handed reminders, they had a point. She hadn't been sleeping more than four hours a
night since the warp engines went off-line a week ago. She had enjoyed the work, but not the following
personnel crisis. Those things always put her teeth on edge, and interrupted her sleep.
"Captain." Kim's voice had a touch of surprise in it. "I'm getting a faint distress signal."
"From where, Mr. Kim?"
"The same place those waves are coming from."
"Well," Janeway said, moving back to face the main screen. "That clearly means the waves aren't some
form of communication. You're certain you're getting a distress signal?"
"Absolutely, Captain."
She didn't like the thread of anticipation that ran through her. Her curiosity had been aroused more than
she expected it to be. "Well, then, Mr. Kim, it seems we have an invitation. Mr. Paris, set a course for
that system. Let's see who needs our help."
CHAPTER
2
Time The eighty-seventh shift Location Our universe
THE SUBSPACE WAVES WERE DISQUIETING. JANEWAY leaned forward as another vibrated
through the ship. Nothing harmful happened, yet the wave felt somehow wrong. She wasn't certain if that
was because subspace waves had, in the past, been indicators of disasters, or if it was because she was
so attuned to Voyager that the least little difference set her teeth ajar.
Probably a combination of both.
And neither.
Sometimes she had a sense, a mild sense, of things that were about to happen. Mark used to say she was
so attuned to the world around her that she could pinpoint the cause and the effect of any difference,
giving her a slight prescience. She preferred to think of it as an edge. An instructor of hers at the
Academy said that all leaders had such an edge. It was a way of thinking about the details of a situation
that marked a successful leader.
The instructor believed it was a skill that could be taught and developed.
He had certainly instilled it in Janeway, if she hadn't had the ability already.
"Captain, we're approaching the planet where the waves originate." Paris gave her the information as he
took them out of warp.
"On screen," she said.
From the angle Voyager approached the planet, half of it lay in darkness. In the forward view-screen,
Janeway studied the spots of yellow and orange light along the eastern seaboard of one of the larger
continents in the southern hemisphere.
Cities.
"The distress signal, Mr. Kim?" she asked.
"We're still receiving it," he said. "It hasn't changed. It seems to be automated."
Nothing looked out of place. The atmosphere-softened crescent planet glowed deep-sea blue beneath a
few scarves and tatters of brilliant white clouds, with a desert-banded continent and a string of green
islands just coming into view around the dayside curve of the horizon. Though the continental shapes
were different from those of Earth, the greens and ochre of the land masses, the shades and nuances of
blue in the ocean, the white swirls of an equatorial storm, the glint of the icy polar caps were so similar
that she could almost imagine she was coming home, that somewhere below Mark and her dog, Molly
Malone, waited to greet her.
She wondered if she would ever get over that longing for Earth. It arose at the strangest times.
"Mr. Tuvok, have you located the source of those waves?"
"They are emanating from the planet, Captain."
Janeway smiled. "That's why we're here, Tuvok."
He didn't respond, but a single eyebrow rose in acknowledgment of her sarcasm. It used to baffle him so,
but now he was used to it.
"Mr. Kim," Janeway said, "lock onto that distress beacon, but don't hail them yet. I want to know a bit
more about this planet before we contact them."
"Aye, Captain," Kim said.
"Captain," Tuvok said, "it will take me some minutes to discover the source of those waves. I suggest
contacting the surface. They will-"
"Yes, Mr. Tuvok." Janeway waved a hand. "All in good time."
She got up from her chair and went to Ensign Kim's station. "What sort of readings are you getting, Mr.
Kim?"
"It looks like this is standard early-warp culture," Ensign Kim said, "with a population of nearly three and
a half billion. There are a number of satellites and other celestial objects in orbit around the planet. Their
energy signatures are consistent with early-warp."
"Very good," Janeway said. She had expected a bit more advanced culture. But early-warp problems
were usually something that Voyager could handle. Warp cultures seemed to go through the
same types of development, no matter how many light-years apart they were.
"Mr. Tuvok," Janeway said, "when is the next subspace pulse due?" Because they had dropped out of
warp, the time between pulses had lengthened. Janeway knew Tuvok would be keeping track.
"The next pulse will hit in six minutes, five seconds, Captain," Tuvok said. "I am still searching for the
cause."
"All right, Ensign," Janeway said to Kim. "I think it's time to-"
"Captain?" Lieutenant Torres's voice broke in from Engineering. She spoke rapidly, and she sounded
excited.
"Go ahead," Janeway said.
"There are traces of armacolite in the structures below."
"Armacolite?" Janeway asked. She sat back in her chair. They had gone out of their way for a distress
signal and encountered a bit of luck. If they had had armacolite earlier in the week, Janeway wouldn't
have lost all that sleep helping Torres get the warp engines on-line.
"Yes, Captain," Torres said. "They seem to have it everywhere. Far more than enough for us to replenish
our supplies."
"I have the same readings," Kim said. His voice rose with excitement as well. The entire crew knew how
important this discovery was.
Armacolite was a rare and valuable mineral they needed to rebuild the Oltion Coils in their warp engines.
In the Alpha Quadrant, there were plants
that manufactured armacolite in several sectors, but its use was apparently not widespread in the Delta
Quadrant. They had only found one source since arriving, and their dwindling supplies had been a
constant worry. It had led to some rigging of the engines that made them even more sensitive than usual.
"Captain," Tuvok said. "I have still not pinpointed the cause of the disturbance."
"Captain?" Torres said, her voice nearly covering Tuvok's. "I would love to take an away team-"
"As soon as we discover the problem, B'Elanna. The armacolite will have to wait. I will contact you."
Janeway signed off. "Tuvok, keep working to find that disturbance. Mr. Kim, it's time to answer that
distress call."
"Aye, Captain."
She stood in the center of the bridge, and adjusted her uniform. Now their mission to this planet had a
twofold purpose She would see if she could help solve the problems the planet was having, and she
would try to leave with some armacolite.
Kim worked over his console. He stared unseeing across the bridge as he listened to his ear transmitter,
his hands moving over the controls. "Exploring bandwidths for-I've found their normal communications
frequencies. Isolating signals. Sending hail. Receiving ... On screen!"
An auburn-haired, brown-skinned humanoid appeared on the forward viewscreen. He looked mus-
cular, solid, and startlingly human, right down to the deep worry grooves in his forehead. His short hair
stuck up in tufts on one side of his head, as though he had just risen from sleep and hadn't had time to
groom.
The curved wall behind him was green and glassy; clouds were visible through it and inset with a squiggly
gridwork of yellow and darker green lines or wires. Light flickered from bits of the gridwork.
The humanoid's gray eyes widened as he stared out of the screen at them. He wore a toga-like green
garment edged with narrow blue lines, and had a wide gold chain around his neck. "Greetings, stranger
ship. Are you receiving? Can you understand me?" He looked down at something out of view and moved
his arms. Static buzzed a moment. He glanced up again, eyebrows lifted. "Is that better?"
He certainly didn't seem panicked. But Janeway had learned long ago that different cultures handled
stress differently.
She decided to ignore his questions and give him the standard greeting. It would show him that she was
receiving clearly. "I'm Captain Kathryn Jane-way of the Federation Starship Voyager. We answered
your distress signal."
"Ah, wondrous!" the man said. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Out of the corner of her eye,
she saw Chakotay shifting slightly. Tuvok had raised his head. He would say, if he could, that this man's
reaction wasn't logical.
"We assumed you were in some sort of distress."
"Yes, thank you." The man clapped his hands together like a child with a new toy. "A ship of a design
I've never seen, and yet we can converse. Astonishing!"
Tom Paris turned in his chair. His eyes were wide.
Janeway ignored him as best she could. She would have to assume that they were the first true aliens the
man had ever seen. "We were thirty light-years away when we received your signal," she said again,
thinking that if he were nonresponsive this time, she might have to explain the use of a distress signal to
him.
"Thank you for responding to our beacon," he said, bobbing slightly. "I'm R'Lee, head of the World
Council of Birsiba."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir," Janeway said. "What is the nature of your emergency?"
"It is quite . . . unsettling." R'Lee had stopped bobbing. His hands remained clasped together, and he
pressed them against his chest. "I assume you know of the subspace waves radiating out from our
planet?"
"We encountered them before we received your signal," Janeway said. "Are they the source of your
distress?"
R'Lee's hands seemed to push harder against his chest. "The waves started eight days ago as we
activated our worldwide transport system for the first time. We think we may have triggered some
sort of subspace rift far beyond our power to handle. And now we can't turn it off."
Janeway glanced around at Tuvok. "His explanation is consistent with my findings," Tuvok said.
"Although I am still unable to pinpoint the exact source."
"You can't turn off your transport system?" Janeway asked. "Or the source of the rift?"
"We believe the system is the source of the rift, and we cannot shut it off," R'Lee said.
"So you have no way of testing the theory," Janeway said. "Are these waves causing problems for your
people?"
R'Lee's hands dropped to his sides. "Nothing of consequence," he said, "and yet it all has consequences."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Janeway said.
R'Lee glanced down at his toga, then to the side. He leaned off screen for a moment, then lifted a cube
into view. "My family," he said, displaying a holographic representation of himself, a handsome, thin
woman, and a pleasant-looking large woman with her arms around the shoulders of a grinning pixieish
child of indeterminate gender.
Janeway smiled and nodded, not understanding what this had to do with the waves.
R'Lee tilted the cube so he could see its image. He frowned. "Lula, our child-in every memory I have of
her, her eyes are green, like her gene mother's. But here in the cube, they are gray like mine."
Janeway hoped they were having another com-
munication difficulty. She didn't like the trivial nature of the exchange. "Surely the image is flawed."
"I have had this cube on my desk for two years," said R'Lee. "I glance at it often while I work. Always
I'm comforted by the sight of my daughter, the light in her eyes. Her green eyes."
"I see," said Janeway, not seeing at all. Was this man delusional? Had they responded to a distress call
because someone had had a bad dream or couldn't remember the color of his daughter's eyes? Was this
a measure of how stressless this planet usually was, that the head of the World Council could ask the
universe for outside help because of such a minor glitch?
"I realize this does not sound like a major problem," R'Lee said, echoing Janeway's thoughts. "A picture
changing is not a large event. Few of the changes people have reported to my staff from all around the
world seem major. Perhaps the color of bedding in someone's sleepnest has shifted from light blue to
dark blue, or someone discovers the wrong flavor of spicebark tea in his storage compartment, or
someone finds cherputa in her window herb box instead of gloven."
He frowned, glancing around as if almost embarrassed. "Taken each alone, these changes are trivial. A
mere annoyance. A chance to try something new. Cumulatively, though . . . the accretion of changes
following each subspace wave is alarming. Every time one of the waves pulses, some other thing is
different."
Janeway took a deep breath. Little differences, all over the planet. Each time a subspace wave hits. Like
the vibrations running through Voyager. Small, subtle, and letting her know something was wrong.
"Are these changes universal to your population?" she asked.
R'Lee frowned. "Not everyone, or every time. Sometimes everything stays the same for some people.
Sometimes it changes a lot for others. Some have woken up in the wrong apartments, a few even in the
wrong city or on the wrong continent." He shook his head. "Each pulse takes us farther away from the
lives we knew. What will the next pulse bring?"
What indeed? Janeway suddenly understood the nature of the disturbance. A runaway system with small
implications, leading, perhaps, to something larger.
But if they had caught it early enough, a small solution might be all that is needed. And if they were able
to stop the waves, then R'Lee's people might be willing to part with some armacolite.
R'Lee said, "I have science teams working on this problem around the clock, and we have been unable
to come up with solutions on how to shut down the transportation system. We need help!"
"We'll be glad to see what we can do," Janeway said.
"Ten seconds to the next wave," Tuvok said.
"Stand by, sir," Janeway said. "We will resume communication after the wave hits."
She signaled to Kim to shut off the communication. Then she said, "Record every piece of data you can
about this pulse. If we can help them with this, we might just be able to do some trading."
"Good idea," Chakotay said.
Kim smiled, then went to work.
"I want the planet on screen," Janeway said. She turned to face it as the new image registered.
Slowly ripples formed in the upper atmosphere of the planet below, blurring the colors and the outlines of
the land masses and oceans. Then the entire planet was bathed in a blinding white light.
Ensign Starr gasped. Paris put up an arm to shield his eyes from the glare.
Kim hit polarizing dampers for the viewscreen, cutting the light down to bearable levels. Janeway blinked
at retinal ghosts.
Suddenly, in a strange silence, like the cessation of breath and heart, the pause between one instant and
the next, everything shifted.
Instead of just one planet below, there were thousands, slightly overlapping, like beads strung on a loop,
leading off to right and left in repeating, diminishing orbs away into infinity, the sort of distance visible in
face-to-face mirrors.
"What. . ." Janeway said. She'd never seen anything like this before.
Above every second planet was an orbiting Voyager, a glinting image against the white and blue swirl of
clouds over ocean. How strange, Janeway thought, to see her ship stroboscopically like this Blink, it was
there over a planet; Blink, it was gone
over the next planet; Blink, and there it was again-thousands of Voyagers telescoping into the distance as
far as Janeway could see.
But only above every second planet.
The sight lasted for just over three seconds, then vanished as quickly as it had come.
The ship rocked slightly from the impact of the subspace wave. Below them the planet had apparently
returned to normal.
Silence filled the bridge. Janeway knew they had seen something of incredible magnitude, something her
crew had never seen before.
She had wanted to explore each facet of the universe It seemed she was getting her chance.
"Find out what that was," she said, and the crew snapped into motion.
CHAPTER
3
Time The eighty-seventh shift Location 2,410 parallel universes to the right of ours
CAPTAIN KATHRYN JANEWAY SAT IN THE COMMAND chair, staring at the debris field in the
forward viewscreen, the apparent origin of the strange subspace pulses Voyager had been experiencing
at regular intervals since they had arrived in this sector. She twisted her head slightly. Her braid was too
tight, and when she had pulled it into its customary crown around her head, she pulled too hard. Now,
with the debris before them, she didn't have time to take care of the irritation.
Long-range scans had uncovered mostly mysteries about this dense cloud. Tuvok had already
determined that the debris field did not have the mass of a planet, though it had a strange, almost
planetary appearance. It was compressed at the poles but broad at the equators, and had a
cohe-siveness that was difficult to understand, given its lack of mass. It was a strange object to find in an
asteroid belt where a fifth planet had once been; strange to find anywhere, actually, but here there was
something particularly unsettling about it.
Something ghostly.
The mass of debris did not have the necessary gravity to produce the orbit or spin it was undergoing,
making Janeway wonder if there was a local gravitational anomaly that would explain both the
appearance of this peculiar object and the strange subspace pulses emanating from it.
At the left helm position in front of her, Tom Paris rubbed the back of his neck above his orange and
black uniform jacket as he stared up at the screen. To his right, second helmsman Ensign Par-voneh
studied her control panels and arrays. Voyager was approaching the debris field at a quarter impulse,
cautiously edging closer to the source of the pulses. Commander Chakotay sat to her left, his back rigid
as he surveyed the scene.
"Captain," Ensign Harry Kim said, "one minute until the next subspace pulse."
"Prepare our sensor array," Janeway said. "We need to collect data on as many spectra as possible while
that pulse is being emitted."
She stared at the debris field as it slowly grew on the screen. There was something disquieting about it,
and the disquiet came not just from its scientific anomaly. If she had to use an unscientific description, she
would have chosen one from her North American ancestry A ghost walked on my grave.
She didn't like that thought. She stood and moved up to the communication post.
"Ensign Kim, how are those spectrometric analyses of the debris field coming?" asked Janeway. They
had been beyond scanning range during the most recent subspace pulse.
"Captain," Kim said softly. "I-" Then he stopped.
Janeway looked at him. His face was pale. Sweat dotted it. Then he turned green. She thought he was
going to be ill. He gripped the console, his knuckles white, his gaze fixed.
"Ensign?" she asked.
He didn't seem to hear her.
"Ensign, what is it?" She used her command voice, trying to recall him to a sense of where he was and
what he was doing.
"The mass ... the sphere . . ." he managed to say, then gulped and closed his eyes. He swayed, but
remained standing.
"Hold it together, Harry," Paris said. "What did you find?"
Janeway didn't mind the breach of protocol. It was more important to learn what Harry had seen than to
learn it in proper fashion. Paris and Kim were friends, and Paris knew he, if anyone, could reach Kim.
But Kim, for the first time since he set foot on Voyager, appeared unable to answer. Whatever he had
seen had bothered him so deeply he could not find the words.
Janeway moved back to her own chair, sat down, pulled up her science console, and punched in the
coordinates. As she did so, she snapped, "Tuvok,
tell me what these readings are. And someone see to Ensign Kim."
"Captain." Tuvok's voice sounded cold, almost strangled.
"Captain," he said slowly, his voice just barely under control, "the mass of debris in the shape of the
planet is composed of organic material."
"Organic material?" Janeway asked. "Is it alive?"
"No, Captain," Tuvok said. "It comprises, in my estimate, over three hundred billion separate humanoid
forms. All dead."
"Three hundred billion?" Janeway's mind couldn't grasp what Tuvok had just said.
Three hundred billion. That number had no meaning in her mind. She turned to face the front screen,
where the dark round planet-sized mass hung in front of the ship in space.
Billions of humanoid bodies.
All floating in space in the shape of a planet.
No. That wasn't possible. It had to be a hallucination.
She glanced at her own console. Her readings came out the same way.
Her fingers shook.
She glanced at her bridge crew, her mind not grasping what was on the screen as anything possible.
Paris had closed his eyes.
Chakotay stared coldly at the screen.
Parvoneh had tears streaming down her face.
Kim was beginning to regain control. His skin
was still pale, and he seemed vaguely sick, but his dark eyes focused on her when she looked at him. In
them, she saw understanding and an incomprehensible sorrow.
"I'm sorry, Captain," Kim said, his voice shaky. She wasn't sure if he was talking about his failure to
respond to her earlier question, his emotional reaction, or her sudden realization of what was going on.
He knew, just as she did, that no one on the crew had ever seen this kind of slaughter before.
"Are you fit to continue duty, Ensign?" she asked, unwilling-unable-to think about the emotional
ramifications of their discovery. If she did, she would have a response like Kim's, and she couldn't afford
to. She needed to maintain tight control of herself in order to maintain tight control of her ship.
Until she knew what caused those deaths, and those bodies to be piled the way they were, Voyager
herself could be in danger.
"Ensign Kim," she said again. "Are you fit?"
"Aye, Captain," he said slowly. "I'm fit."
"Good. Magnify-"
"Captain," Tuvok broke in. "Another subspace pulse is commencing."
Suddenly the mass of bodies vanished in an eye-burning flash of white light, and then the entire scene was
replaced by a strange sight.
To the left, a stretch of repeating asteroid belts like the one she had seen in the viewscreen before the
pulse, diminishing with distance, each second
one with a Voyager drifting near it. There must have been at least a hundred or more asteroid belts, but
she was very glad to see that there was only one mass of bodies. And that was in front of her ship and
her ship only.
Only one.
In front of her ship. She didn't know what that meant. Beyond the hundred or so asteroid belt images, a
shimmering string of ocean-blue, white-clouded planets, lovely as mirages or heavens, slightly
overlapping, disappeared into the distance, an infinity of mirror images facing each other, limited only by
the distance of vision.
To the right was another beautiful string of planets curling off into another distance.
Above every second planet was another Voyager. Not every planet, but every other planet, as if there
was a gap in the reflective mirror. Janeway instantly wondered why every planet and asteroid belt didn't
have a Voyager. If this were a trick of light somehow, how to explain the deletion?
The scene lasted for what seemed to be an eternity to Janeway, but was only a few seconds. Then space
returned to normal.
"Captain!" Kim's shaky voice had recovered much of its power. "Another three and a half billion bodies
have joined the mass in front of us. And-" His voice broke again for just a moment. Then he said words
摘要：

PROLOGUETimeThefirstshiftLocation2,410paralleluniversestotherightofoursITWASASTANDARDYELLOWG-TYPESTARSYSTEM,withthirteenplanetsandthreedozen-oddmoons.Wherethefifthplanethadbeen,aringofasteroidsslowlyspreadoutaroundthesun.Someunknowneventthousandsofyearsbeforehaddestroyedtheplanetinthatorbit.Thesixth...

展开>> 收起<<
STAR TREK - VOY - 15 - Echoes.pdf

共87页,预览18页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：87 页 大小：277.35KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-19

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 87
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注