Title: Colony Author: Jemima Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net Series: VOY Part: 4/20 Rating: PG Codes: crew, J/C Date: November 2000 Disclaimer: Copyright has expired on the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson quoted herein. Certain of the names below have been trademarked by Paramount; be assured I am not conducting trade with them. ***** Part 4 ***** Overlive it--lower yet--be happy! wherefore should I care? I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair. The division did not fall neatly along Starfleet/Maquis lines as one might have expected. B'Elanna, for instance, was against helping the Leigi. She'd seen what the Periti could do to Voyager and she didn't want to have to clean up the mess - if there was anything bigger than space dust left of them - the next time. Tom wanted to help, as did most of the crew who had been aboard Voyager during the Periti attack. He never regretted that insubordination incident with the Moneans - getting demoted for his principles had made him just that much more of an idealist. He was itching to plunge in on the side of right again. B'Elanna chided him for his chivalry. "Now I understand why you joined the Maquis - it wasn't your bar tab, it was your death wish." Of course he denied it. "And it took you what? a week? to get captured by Starfleet." "So I was a bad Maquis--" he began to excuse himself, but she interrupted. "We were all bad Maquis. We were amateur soldiers in tin ships, and if we hadn't been sucked into this God-forsaken quadrant we would have died with the other Maquis when the professionals came along." "Lots of people died in the Dominion war. Klingons died gloriously in battle." She stared at him. She had no idea what to make of this - her offhand crack about his death wish was looking all too accurate. Tom went on, almost to himself. "Look at us, limping through the Delta Quadrant like so many beggars! Look at yourself, patching the ship together time and time again with nothing but nanoprobes and sealing wax. Behold the flower of Starfleet" - he gestured theatrically at the half-empty mess hall - "digging for tubers on every M-class planet we stumble across. And the remnant of the Maquis, that brave band of dreamers who took on the Cardassian Empire--" "And lost!" "--and now care more about where their next meal is coming from than about helping a free people who welcomed us as guests and defended us with their lives." "This is not a Maquis ship," B'Elanna replied angrily. "You're right. This is a funeral barge." "It will be if you have any say about it." Such arguments were repeated time and again across the ship; Delaney sister turned against Delaney sister, Neelix fell out with Sam Wildman, and Icheb argued with Seven about destiny and self-sacrifice. Harry looked nervous, Janeway ignored the subject and Chakotay grew grimmer than usual as the days wore on. ***** Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. News and refugees began to trickle in from other Leigan star systems. Because their propulsion systems were susceptible to theta radiation, they could not land on the surface, nor could they have transported through the poisoned atmosphere even if they'd had the technology. Voyager, still trapped in orbit, became a space station through which all visitors passed. Her hardy Starfleet shuttles were kept busy ferrying visitors and officials to and from the surface. The Captain did not approve. There wasn't much she could do about Voyager's newfound popularity, however - the impulse drive was still off-line, the warp drive still a hopeless wreck, and the only thing keeping them out of the stratosphere was the occasional push of a Leigan tractor beam. So she left the routine diplomatic duties to her first officer while she brainstormed with B'Elanna and Seven about ways to get the engines, any of them, back on line. Perhaps it wasn't the wisest thing to do, leaving the head of her Maquis in charge of commiserating with the Leigi, coordinating supply runs and rescue missions with the local government, and warning refugees away from the radioactive ruins of Leigus Fifteenth. So he had experience fighting ruthless enemies, organizing desperate colonists, winning against all odds - she didn't expect him to *use* it, for heaven's sake. She just wanted him to keep the neighbors happy until Voyager could get out of there under her own power. She had certainly done smarter things in her day, she reflected as she watched him speak before a crowd of Leigan officials at a particularly important strategy session he'd dragged her to. In the space of two weeks, her first officer had become a de facto leader of the shattered Leigus Union. All she had done was repair the impulse drive, and they weren't going to resume course for Earth on impulse power alone. After the meeting, he brought a few of those Leigi officials to the conference room to speak to the senior staff. The Captain half-listened to depressing reports about medical supplies. Said medical supplies were stocks of a certain enzyme produced naturally by the Leigi physiology in the presence of sunlight. They needed to carry supplies of it when travelling long distances in space. The manufacturing process was as delicate as its output and there had been malfunctions recently in the processing plants on Leigus Fifteenth and Leigus Prime. Voyager had brought more stocks of the enzyme from Leigus One-hundred-twenty-second, before the war. Now the Leigi attributed those malfunctions to Periti sabotage, especially since the blockade of Leigus Prime. The Periti had flooded the atmosphere of that unfortunate world with dust - whether gathered in space or kicked up from the planet's surface was unclear - blocking out almost all sunlight and dooming two billion Leigi to a slow, painful death. She had heard the various rescue plans discussed at the first meeting: smuggling in equipment to repair the processing plant on Leigus Prime, smuggling in enzyme stocks - a gargantuan task, and a stopgap solution at best - or driving off the Periti, but with what? Very few ships plied the Leigan spaceways now, and they were scattered, while the Periti forces were concentrated around Leigus Prime. There was nothing the crew of Voyager could do for these people except listen sympathetically to their woes. Or half-listen, in her case, but then a change of topic caught her attention. ***** Morel, one of the higher-ranking survivors of the local government, was speaking about recent events on Leigus Prime. "Our legends tell us that our ancestors travelled an immeasurable distance on their way here. They toured the galaxy for thousands of years, but eventually parked their ship in orbit around Leigus Prime and settled down. Slowly, the Leigi spread through these sectors, always colonizing uninhabited worlds, making deserts bloom. No one remembered the ship, until the accident a few months ago." "We suspect the 'accident' was actually an attack by a cloaked Periti ship. An ore transport careened out of control over Leigus Prime, but a lucky shot from one of our patrol vessels managed to deflect the ship into the gravitational field of our moon. The cargo was highly unstable and exploded on impact - a 10,000 teracochrane blast." "The moon is not inhabited, nor did we think it habitable. Our astrophysicists dutifully calculated the minor divergence in the moon's orbit which such an explosion should have caused. They checked the sensors, but they found nothing. Then they checked the sensor logs. The evidence, which has since been destroyed, was unmistakable: the moon had corrected its orbit." "That's impossible," Neelix interjected. "Why did you destroy the sensor logs?" Tuvok asked. "Even before the recent Periti attacks, we knew they were bent on our annihilation. They say we invaded their space, that humanoidkind doesn't belong in this galaxy." "But your civilization is thousands of years old," Janeway protested. "Forty-seven thousand, by our reckoning, but the Periti have a long memory. Every five thousand years or so they start a war. They expend all their resources, knocking themselves back into the Stone Age and leaving half the sentient population - themselves, us, noncombatants - dead for parsecs around. Then they regroup, while we recover." "Just our luck - always in the wrong place at the wrong time," Tom muttered. "When we found out about the moon, we realized we must keep it a secret. If they knew we had an escape route, a way to transport our civilization to a friendlier corner of space, they would go mad with rage. They would push the ship into the sun even if it cost them a million Periti lives, 'to keep the humanoid infection from spreading'. So we destroyed the sensor logs." ***** Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. "Exactly where do your people say you came from?" the Captain asked. Chakotay had seen her near death, beyond it, and even assimilated by the Borg, but he'd never seen her quite so pale. "Computer, display the night sky over Leigus Prime." Morel pointed and said, "This is the origin point of the humanoid races." "That's not a star," Tom said nervously. A pilot knows his stars. "What do you mean? What else could it be?" Neelix demanded, disturbed by the tension suddenly filling the conference room. "It's the Perseus Galactic Cluster," Tom answered. He shuddered visibly. "Abell 426," Seven explained, preferring the numerical classification, "three hundred million light years from our current position." Her voice was tinged with an awe she usually reserved for perfection. "It is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster, which contains more than a thousand galaxies." A cold vacuum, three hundred million light years wide, seemed to fill the small conference room. Tom was exceedingly nervous - a pilot knows his captain as well as his stars. "That ship must have a faster-than-warp drive," Janeway said. The chilly light of distant stars glittered in her eyes. "That's putting it mildly," Tom commented. The Captain wondered why the Leigi had chosen to share this particular secret with the senior staff of Voyager. Was it just their implicit belief in the fellowship of humanoidkind? She glanced at Chakotay, but his expression was unreadable. He saw her inquiring look and knew that she hadn't understood. He'd asked the Leigi not to lay this trap for her, not to tempt her with that moon, but they wouldn't listen. They wanted his help, his professional help as a freedom fighter, and that meant convincing Janeway to let him help. It'll take more than a little dilithium to get her involved in your war, he'd told them - she wants a transwarp drive, and only the Borg have that kind of technology. That was when they'd told him about the moon. Tom interrupted the long silence with one last question for the Leigi. "Pardon me if everyone asks you this, but if you enjoy colonizing so much, why don't you just move?" "The Periti would follow us. We will not lead them to the worlds of other humanoids. The Leigus Union has been a match for them so far - but without us to keep them occupied, they would do even greater damage to humanoidkind." *****