The U.S.S. Voyager finds itself in a system where a planet might have existed, but doesn't. Where the planet should have been, millions and then billions of people are appearing from nowhere and dying in the vacuum of space. To solve the mystery and save billions of lives, Captain Janeway will have to face alternate versions of herself and the crew of Voyager -- not just one almost-mirror-image, but many. Janeway will have to find a way to work with her alternate selves, with whom she shares much but each of whom has a different agenda. At stake is the survival of Voyager and the lives of billions of innocent people.
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. Normally, she would have let B’Elanna handle it, but Klingons—even half-Klingons—had notoriously foul moods when they were sleep-deprived. Chakotay 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 recognize 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 viewscreen, 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 ...
Table of contents
Cover
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
'Best and the Brightest' Preview
Copyright
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