STAR TREK - VOY - 09 - Invasion,Book 4 Of 4 - The Final Fury

Star Trek - Voy - 009 - Invasion, Book 4 Of 4 - The Final Fury

By Dafydd ab Hugh

PRELUDE

The war raged for a hundred thousand years.

The Furies once were hosts of heaven; but heaven was all but closed to them now. The Unclean swept

across the vast expanse of space, across the 217 million star systems known mapped, and held in heaven

by the Furies. The new enemy was unlike all those who had preceeded it: alone among the sentient races

of the galaxy, the insectoid Unclean were unaffected by the Terrors unleashed upon the disobedient by

the lords of heaven.

Taken by surprise, the host--six hundred and sixty-six separate races bound together into a single

people--were driven first from the planets at the rim of the galaxy, whence the Unclean invaded, drinking

energy and draining away the life-force of entire armadas of a million ships or more. Perhaps the Unclean

were the cursed union of vermin and castaway subjects, fleeing their rightful lord on the Throne of the

Autocrat. Perhaps instead they came from outside, and were not of this galaxy at all; the latter was the

more popular speculation among the war leaders among the Furies--it mattered not, for the Unclean

burst upon the

righteous hosts like an ocean upon the volcano, washing them away.

A fragment of a story dating from that dark time hinted at a greater darkness: that the subject races cast

their lot with the Unclean, rebelling against their righteous masters. They stood their ground even when

the Furies sent the Terrors. Though the subject races died like bugs beneath the Fury heel, and though

the Terror lash was used against them over and over, still they maintained, fighting until the end of the first

millennium--when the Furies were forced to retreat from the rim of the galaxy.

The farthest provinces were lost.

For century after century, the Furies retreated. There were battles--many times, the hosts stood against

monstrous swarms that flew through the starry void without ships, without life-support. The first great

stand engaged 93,109,907 Fury vessels carrying enough warriors to people a hundred planets against

Unclean too numerous to count; but the records left by Subcrat Ramszak the Ok' San, who stood four

meters tall and sported a hand where one ear should have been, gave the count as more than ten Unclean

for every Fury.

The last great stand involved a mere fifty thousand ships, give or take, with warriors spread thin among

them. Tiin,

the Cannibal Whose Bed Would Not Be Shared, commanded the final defense, this time from the

Autocrat's chair, Tiin traced his ancestory back through an entirely male line for a thousand generations to

Ramszak himself but he fared no better than his illustrious but defeated ancestor.

A small fleet of a few thousand ships lured the main contingent of the wasp like Unclean by attacking

them from out of the black. The attack broke a four-century truce; but the hosts of heaven were not

bound by promises made to insect minds.

The Unclean responded to the taunt. The entire remaining field-unity of Unclean pursued the marauding

fleet; and when the last Fury ships retreated, they numbered twenty-one out of more than four thousand.

The enemy approached them from different vectors; but

when the swarms assembled for attack, and the Furies prepared to die, a blast of light engulfed them.

The Furies fell through non space, their minds reeling from the passage.

The enemy made to follow the hosts... but as they approached, the light changed, their space-born,

space living bodies melted, fused, reduced in seconds to atoms, and then less than atoms, and everything

at last, after many steps, over the space of microseconds, transmuting to dead.

The light was so great that scientists among the subject races would be able to detect it even after three

or four millennia. The swarms were decimated but not annihilated; the remaining wasps fell upon few

remaining Furies as they passed through the swirling, gaseous debris that had once been living members

of the Unclean.

Tiin was unprepared for his responsibility, he was, in the end, a poor representative of the line that had

begun with Subcrat Ramszak. He lost control of his few ships, and the captains panicked, firing wildly...

almost as if they were suddenly bathed with their own Terrors--though all Furies were, quite simply,

immune to fear themselves.

Against the backdrop of a sky turned negative, black suns silhouetted against a sky yet white from the

collapsing stars, a single, small host made the journey along the entirety of the wormhole, a trip that took

four years--or no time at all. When they reached the other side, the light faded. Wherever they were,

there would be no return to their bright black heaven.

It was not until they found and settled a planet that they realized the enormity of the Unclean victory... for

the Furies were trapped in a hellish realm of space, so far from heaven that they sickened and began to

die from sheer loneliness. The Fury surgeons studied the disease for hundreds of years. The symptoms

were always the same: black depression, followed by ennui, then anomie, the loss of all ethical and moral

boundaries. They grew their population, even while the best and most promising were struck down in

their prime of intellect and will by the Factor, as it was called.

D'Mass, the greatest Autocrat-in-Exile, who was the last to unite all the Furies, himself diagnosed the

Factor: they

had lost their way, their purpose, their reason for existing. The hosts of heaven were born to rule heaven,

not watch it from so far away that the light they observed was generated by the stars of heaven at

precisely the moment when Ramszak had staked everything on an all-or-nothing bid to destroy the

Unclean... and had lost.

Under D'Mass, all of the Furies worked together to develop and construct an artificial wormhole to bring

them back home. But when D'Mass died, his two sons fell to quarreling between themselves.

In the end, D'Vass sought to leave with nine-tenths of the Furies to found a new world and forget about

heaven; while his brother Bin Mass chose to stay and direct all efforts to the artificial wormhole. But Bin

Mass could not afford to lose the talent in D'Vass's host; they battled from dawn until dusk, then slept

together as brothers, only to wake and do battle again.

Millions of Furies died in the war, slain by their brothers out of heaven. At last, D'Vass fled-but with a

greatly diminished host, a mere forty thousand.

Bin Mass had conquered the hearts of his people; and by rededicating the Fury hosts to reclaiming

heaven, no matter how long it might take, he conquered the Factor as well. No longer were the Furies

lost and wandering; now they were focused and driven.

They would eradicate the Unclean from the blessed place, no matter what the cost. The time would be

ripe someday; the moment would come. And when it did, the galaxy would tremble once more to the

cold, brittle voice of the Autocrat.

CHAPTER

Captain Kathryn Jane way of the U.S.S. Voyager sat behind the desk in her quarters, swaying gently,

trying to avoid actually becoming ill onto the stack of duty rosters littering the desktop. The ship rolled

back and forth, causing the fluids in her inner ear to perform acrobatics.

Well, I knew it was going to happen, she thought; this far from the Federation, from the nearest star base,

without any chance for maintenance or repair other than what the crew did themselves, Jane way knew

the ship systems would begin to fail, one by one.

Unfortunately, the most recent one to fail was the inertial damper/gravi tic stabilizer system. Motion that

ordinarily would be damped down to a slight vibration instead became a lurching, rolling gait that was

causing terrible havoc with crew health... and morale.

Is this the torture that sailors on the old oceangoing ships had to endure? she wondered, swallowing

several times. If it is, I wonder how anyone survived to cross a small lake, let alone an entire ocean!

She stood, feeling the air clammy against her sweaty skin.

Like most everyone else in Star fleet, Captain Jane way had ridden on sailboats, sloops, four-masters--in

the holodeck. Controlled by a friendly computer that understood the unpleasantness of seasickness and

minimized the roll, pitch, and especially yaw.

But the present nauseating dance was constant, uncontrolled, interminable... and worse, it included the

fear, haunting the back of her mind, that if the ship hit a subspace fiber bundle, they would lurch

violently--as they already had once, throwing everything, including Captain Jane way herself, to the deck

in a heap.

Or into a bulkhead, headfirst; the holographic doctor was already treating one crew member who had

fractured one of his vertebrae and suffered a serious concussion, the next time, someone could be killed.

Jane way cleared her throat, swallowing again.

"Jane way to Torres," she croaked; her voice was so strained, it took the computer a moment to

recognize her.

"T-Torres here," said the equally strangled voice of the Voyager's chief engineer, Lieutenant B'Elanna

Torres; Jane way felt an uncaptainlike pleasure when she noted that Torres's vaunted Klingon half did not

prevent her from being as space sick as the rest of the crew.

"Do you have a new time estimate?"

There was no need to specify any further, the only problem on anybody's mind on the ship was the failure

of the gravi tic stabilizers.

"Estimate... excuse me, Captain." The sound cut off momentarily. When it returned, B'Elanna Torres's

voice sounded a bit weaker.

"Estimate unchanged. Twelve to twenty-four hours, depending on..."

"On?"

"On whether we can fix it at all, using these damned bureaucratic, stupid, useless--"

A new voice chimed in, annoyed; Lieutenant Carey rose to defend Federation procedure against un

orthodoxy.

"Depending on whether someone who shall remain nameless will just stick to the process, instead of

trying a hundred so-called shortcuts!"

Damn, thought the captain; they've been doing so well! It must be the nausea, she decided; everyone was

edgy, including Jane way herself.

The captain reached into the depths of her soul, bypassing as well as she could the depths of her

stomach; she spoke with the Command Tone she had learned at the Academy.

"That is enough, people. We're in a difficult enough situation without you two bickering. Torres, would it

help if I were to reconfigure the stabilizers to run off the replicatorholodeck power grid?"

"Nothing will help," said the half-Klingon engineer, letting her pessimistic human side take over.

"We'll never get the ship steady. I'm sick, and I just wish I were back in a nice, safe Maquis ship without

all this weird, bioneural circuitry!"

Jane way forced the conversation back to solutions.

"I'm going to redirect the power, keep working, stop arguing, and give me a better time estimate in fifteen

minutes. Jane way out."

The captain stood; it was hard to maintain balance with the deck rolling beneath her feet, but the nausea

was less intense.

If the Voyager struck another subspace fiber bundle, she would just have to hope she didn't break

anything on the way down.

Her stateroom was spacious by Star fleet standards... almost as large as any bachelor apartment in a

minor city on any insignificant planet in the Federation. But she loved it; it was hers. The entire ship was

her stateroom.

A voice full of peeved indignation invaded her space. "Neelix to Captain Jane way!" Neelix, the ship's

Talaxian cook, had never quite caught on to the fact that he did not need to bellow when initiating

communications; the computer would figure it out at normal speaking volume.

"Jane way here. What's wrong, Neelix?" She was glad not to be in Neelix's kitchen; she could imagine

the carnage wreaked upon pots, pans, and vats of food by the failed stabilizers.

"What's wrong is this insufferable turbulence! I'm trying to prepare a bravura meal for the crew, and I

can't even keep my ingredients from flying off the counters onto the floor!"

"Neelix, don't you think if we could stop the rolling, we would have already?" Ouch! Didn't mean to be

that harsh.

"We're working on it, Neelix." She leaned against her desk as the ship lurched again; a stack of reports

fell to the deck with a loud clatter.

"Well, why don't you simply stop the ship until you fix the problem? Surely we can afford one or two

days' delay. But we can ill afford a crew too sick to even enjoy the simple culinary pleasures."

Jane way rolled her eyes, grateful that the comm link was auditory only. She waited a couple of beats

until she could speak calmly.

"Neelix, if we stop the ship in our present situation, without gravi tic stabilizers, the angular velocity of the

warp-core reaction itself will cause the ship to start spinning like a top."

"Really? What an odd design decision."

"We're going the speed we're going precisely because it minimizes the roll."

"This is the minimum?"

"This is the minimum, Neelix. Now please return to your duties and let me return to mine. Jane way...

wait, what did you say you were cooking?"

"I didn't say. I'm cooking pate of Den ethan blood bladder, Ocampan cream punch, and a Federation

dish whose recipe I found in the computer... Three-Cheese Quiche!"

"Oh," said the captain, feeling her stomach begin to roll in the opposite direction from the ship.

"Very--very good. Carry on.

Jane way out."

Swallowing repeatedly, she shuffled forward through the door and onto the bridge.

"Captain on the bridge," chimed the computer protocol program, but as usual nobody paid any attention;

Captain Jane way was long on performance but short on ritual.

Everyone on the bridge looked grim-faced but determined; determined not to disgrace himself by actually

succumbing to space sickness, she thought. The curved bridge console actually seemed to warp slightly,

another trick of the instability.

Lieutenant Tom Paris used his elbows to

steady himself against the helm; his hands played across the console, making minor adjustments. Jane

way didn't know whether they did any good; perhaps it just made Paris feel better to be "doing

something."

Ensign Harry Kim hunched over his console, staring at his viewer, he had nothing much to do at the

moment, but he continued scanning the sector anyway... probably for the same reason Paris made

continual course adjustments.

Jane way was surprised to note that even Lieutenant Tuvok, who normally stood at his tactical station,

was seated.

She stood at the door to her ready room, preventing it from closing, and surveyed the bridge crew more

carefully assessing their health. Paris looked jovial and full of bonhomie; but he sweated profusely, and

his face was white. Tuvok appeared at first glance to be unaffected by the ship's motion, but Jane way

knew him well enough to understand that he felt as sick as everyone else; he simply placed the feeling in

the same category as an emotion--something to be ignored and suppressed.

Commander Chakotay, sitting in his command chair, looked inquiringly at the captain, his face asking

whether he should relinquish command. His face also looked slightly green.

Jane way smiled, gritting her teeth.

"I see the ancient nausea remedy of your people worked no better for you than it did for me."

Chakotay tried unsuccessfully to smile.

"It only works when the water comes from the Long Woman Mountains not the replicator."

Of all the crew on the bridge, Kim was the only one completely unaffected by the rocking and rolling of

the ship... a fact that Captain Jane way found both annoying and perplexing.

She sat heavily in her chair, whence she checked the forward viewer, the computer stabilized the image,

but it couldn't stabilize Jane way's head. Thus, she saw the stars as jagged lines, rather than dots; the

effect was disconcerting, to say the least.

"Ensign Kim," she called.

Harry Kim eagerly swiveled his chair around.

"Yes, Captain?"

"I wrote a--excuse me--I wrote a program that transfers power from the replicator-holodeck power grid

to the gravi tic stabilizers. Implement it."

"Aye, Captain."

"Activate Emergency Medical Holographic Program."

The doctor's face suddenly appeared on the viewer; Jane way found him much easier to look at than the

star jags.

"Please state the nature of the emergency," said the doctor as programmed; but he immediately appended

"that is, if it's something different from the emergency I'm already very busy attending to."

"Doctor, please tell me you can do something."

If it was possible for a hologram to look pained, the doctor managed it.

"Captain, the situation is unchanged. As I've told you, all my remedies lose efficacy over time. I presume

that the ship will at some point, actually stop rolling. If you insist upon allowing the ship to continue rolling

indefinitely, there is nothing I can do.

"The situation is unchanged here as well," said Jane way, softly.

"Correction," said Lieutenant Tuvok from his station; "the situation has changed rather dramatically."

The captain held up her hand to the doctor and turned to her science officer.

"Captain," continued Tuvok; "I am picking up a distress call."

"From whom?" asked Jane way, simultaneously grateful for the distraction and irked at the poor timing.

"Is it any race we're familiar with?"

"Yes," said Tuvok, "we are quite familiar with the signal.

The distress call is coming from a Star fleet shuttle craft." In the shocked silence, Captain Jane way

asked,

"Another wormhole? Is the signal current?" Once before, they had been fooled by a communication that

came through a freak wormhole; but that transmission from a Rom ulan ship turned out to have come

from decades in the past.

"The signal is of the type currently in use by Star fleet," said Tuvok, "it comes from a Galaxy-class

starship shuttle craft, the Lewis, which Star fleet records indicate is attached to the U.S.S. Enterprise."

"Does its star date match ours?"

"Yes, Captain. I do not believe the signal is coming to us through a wormhole. The indications are that the

shuttle craft is, indeed, in this quadrant, approximately two-point-one-five light-years distant."

Tuvok stood; Jane way noted that even the Vulcan had to grip his console to steady himself.

"Captain, it is reasonable to assume that we are not the only representatives of the Federation in this

quadrant. Despite the distance, which ordinarily is far beyond our capacity to scan in any detail, I picked

up a single life-form aboard... a human male. He is not moving but is alive."

"How is this possible, Tuvok? That you could scan him, I mean."

"I can only conclude that something is boosting both transmissions, our scan and the shuttle craft's

distress call."

Jane way sat back, nonplussed. A Federation ship and pilot?

She had dreamed of such a break for so many months; and now, maybe... maybe...

She dismissed the daydream. As captain, she had a job to do; she had a ship to protect. She could not

allow her reason to be overwhelmed by what she wanted to be true.

"Shall I lay in the course, Captain?" asked Paris.

Captain Jane way hesitated. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have assented even before Paris

finished the question. But the circumstances were not ordinary.

She looked at Lieutenant Paris, who still wore his frozen smile, holding down his nausea by a great act of

will. He sat poised over the helm console, ready to engage the course he had already computed.

Everyone stared at Jane way. Oh well, she thought, I guess this is why they let me wear the four pips.

"Stand by, Lieutenant Paris." She raised her voice.

"Jane way to Torres. Lieutenant, have you been monitoring the distress call?"

"I just picked it up," came the engineer's voice, stronger now.

"Captain, it might be a trap! We're being lured closer....

There couldn't possibly be a Federation ship out here."

"I might point out," said Tuvok, with impeccable, Vulcan logic, "that there is a Federation ship out here:

the U.S.S.

Voyager."

"Tuvok's right," said Jane way; "if we can be sucked here by an unknown force, so can someone else."

"I can feel in my gut that there's something wrong with this entire setup," insisted B'Elanna.

Again, Tuvok spoke up.

"Captain, Star fleet protocols require that we--"

"I am well aware of Star fleet protocols," sighed Jane way.

The question was, did the safety of her ship take precedence over a shuttle craft distress call? And so far

away from the Federation, was there even a Star fleet, let alone protocols?

As soon as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. Wherever there was a Star fleet ship,

there was Star fleet. "Lieutenant Paris, lay in a course and engage. If the door opens in one direction,

perhaps it will open in the other direction as well."

"Everyone hold tight," warned Paris; "without the stabilizers, this is going to be a rough turn."

The captain braced, but she wasn't prepared for what she felt: the Voyager felt as though it suddenly

accelerated backward at several g's. It was a trick of perspective; all the rolling was ultimately an illusion.

Under classic subspace theory, she recalled, the ship doesn't really exist at all at warp speed; as near as

Jane way could judge from watching the crew sway, no two members of the crew reacted to precisely

the same motion.

They all reacted to a horrific forward force when they turned, however. Jane way felt as though she were

dangled upside down by her feet with a kilogram weight attached to each eyeball; but when Paris

completed the turn, the ship returned to the familiar enemy of stomach-churning rolls.

"En route to intercept the shuttle craft," gasped Paris swallowing hard.

"En route to intercept the shuttle craft," gasped Paris, swallowing hard.

We had better have a plan of action long before we arrive, she decided.

"In my ready room," said the captain, rising as smartly as possible under the circumstances.

The senior staff assembled around the discussion table--or the "peace rock," as Chakotay jokingly

thought of it. Chakotay looked around the room, trying to gauge reactions: B'Elanna looked suspicious,

Paris excited, Kim nervous, and Jane way worried.

The captain turned to her helmsman.

"Mr. Paris, how long to reach the shuttle craft?"

"I'd give it a good two days to be sure."

Chakotay spoke up.

"We might be able to shave that down to twenty-four hours by accelerating to warp seven, but at that

speed, we might lose some crew members to sudden gravi tic neutralization."

"I'm not willing to risk killing my own crew," said Jane way. "The castaway will have to wait the extra

day."

She looks haggard, thought Chakotay; she's lost track of her spirit guide. Of course, so have we all, he

mentally appended; when mind and body were out of balance, mistakes became more likely.

"Mr. Tuvok," asked the commander, "how did you first pick up the signal?"

Tuvok still controlled the space sickness that had laid low everyone else except Harry Kim.

"Commander, the signal appeared mysteriously, already activated. I cannot be certain, but I believe I

caught a faint echo from the wormhole itself. I was only able to scan at such a long distance by using the

distress beacon as a carrier wave."

Jane way typed at her console, possibly playing with some equations.

"People," she said,

"I've modeled every variation for power-boosting I could think of, and I simply cannot come up with a

scenario by which a shuttle craft could project a distress beacon two light-years. A starship, maybe... but

the power is simply not present on that shuttle craft."

"The signal must be boosted somehow," said Tuvok.

B'Elanna Torres, sitting next to Chakotay, called up the schematics of the shuttle craft; the commander

watched over her shoulder.

"You're right," said B'Elanna to the captain. '"I knew there was something wrong with this entire scenario!

It is a trap, and this proves it. We should get as far away from here as possible, Captain."

Ensign Kim sat on Chakotay's other side; the young man appeared to want to say something but was

worried about interrupting his elders. Chakotay knew how he felt.

"Mr. Kim, you have a comment?"

"Sir," said Kim, "when I was a kid, my best friend and I had a pair of communicators his mother gave us.

We used to talk late at night, when we were supposed to be asleep comparing interpretations of Paganini

and Bizet."

B'Elanna stared at Kim for a moment, seemingly embarrassed.

She opened her mouth to speak, but Chakotay put his hand on her arm.

Kim continued.

"Then Alex moved to Singapore, far outside the range of the hand communicators we had. But we were

still able to communicate: at prearranged times, we each got near the local comm-sat repeater, and it

picked up the weak communicator signal and bounced it off the satellite. We sort of piggy backed the

signal."

Tuvok had been quietly typing on a terminal from the moment Kim mentioned a repeater.

"Captain," he said "the signal does show evidence of having been boosted by a repeater, similar to Ensign

Kim's scenario; the records indicate a faint subspace echo in the original signal, which our computer

filtered out before we heard the message."

"Lieutenant Torres," said Jane way, "are you satisfied with this explanation? Does it seem reasonable?"

B'Elanna hesitated a long time, her rational, human side arguing with the warrior mentality of her Klingon

side. She gave a questioning glance at Chakotay, who reassured her with a smile; you are taken

seriously, he tried to convey.

"Well... it is possible, I guess," she said.

"I--I withdraw my recommendation that we ignore the signal, Captain."

"Good; I don't like to buck my senior crew. I much prefer we all sign on to a particular course of action."

Chakotay blinked.

STAR TREK - VOY - 09 - Invasion, Book 4 Of 4 - The Final Fury

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