Title: Colony Author: Jemima Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net Series: VOY Part: 6/20 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. ***** Section III: Sun Part 6 ***** Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. The plan had improved over the past week. Quite a bit of intelligence about the Periti forces surrounding Leigus Prime had been gathered. The Doctor and Seven had modified some of her Borg nanoprobes to produce the Leigi's missing enzyme. The Leigi, for their part, had offered to contribute two of their own shuttlecraft and whatever extra personnel might be required. In the end, Voyager stood to lose only the Delta Flyer II, Chakotay, his five hand-picked idealists and Icheb, who'd been added to the mission roster as a backup source of nanoprobes. Jenny Delaney was with Dalby and three Leigi on one of the Leigan shuttles. Neelix, Ayala and Icheb had just transported to the other, which was already manned by two Leigi. Tom and Chakotay were alone in the Delta Flyer with most of their supplies and equipment. As soon as they cleared the shuttlebay, Chakotay hailed Dalby and Ayala on a secure channel. The official plan was a mere flyby of Leigus Prime, beaming down the nanoprobes and a couple of the Leigi passengers and beaming up dilithium, under covering fire from their Leigan escort. Tom had never thought much of the plan, and now that they were moving away from Voyager, Chakotay voiced similar doubts to Dalby and Ayala. None of them expected to be able to transport through the Periti jamming field, so they discussed methods of disrupting it instead. It was standard Maquis practice to have a slew of contingency plans, and Tom listened to Chakotay with a mixture of excitement and dread as the plans multiplied. Most of them involved the destruction of the Delta Flyer, though some featured a very bumpy landing on Leigus Prime or its mysterious moon. He particularly liked the one where he and Chakotay would impersonate non-humanoids being pursued by the two Leigan ships. There was a good deal of poetic justice in that one, although it also involved the untimely demise of this his favorite shuttle. Chakotay, Dalby and Ayala were up to Plan F when Chakotay looked over at his pilot during a lull in the conversation. "Tom?" he said inquiringly. "Commander?" Paris replied in the same tone. "What's that supposed to mean?" Chakotay asked, staring at the Maquis insignia which had replaced the hard-won Starfleet lieutenant's pips on Tom's collar. "'By any means necessary', Commander," he answered, quoting a popular Maquis expression. "Be sure *she* doesn't see it, Tom." "Yes, sir." ***** Leigus Prime wasn't close by - it would take a week at high warp to reach the besieged planet. Neelix spent much of the time in the small kitchen of Shuttle Third mastering Leigan recipes. Tom had given it that name when he'd dubbed the Delta Flyer 'Shuttle Prime' and the other Leigan vessel 'Shuttle Second'. The Leigi were curious about the Federation - their fellow passengers on Shuttle Second kept Jenny and Ken busy discussing its extent, population, and colonial practices. Talbid and Inna, the Leigan crew of Shuttle Third, were at a disadvantage, since neither Neelix nor Icheb had ever been to the Alpha Quadrant and Ayala's tales were all dark ones of the Cardassians, whom he painted as an evil force not wholly unlike the Periti. Yet the natives were unwilling to talk about the Leigus Union, their two hundred colony worlds most of whose fates were still unknown. In such an atmosphere, Neelix was surprised when Inna joined him in the kitchen the third morning looking positively cheerful. He smiled back at her and asked, "What's gotten into you?" "I'm engaged!" "Congratulations! Who's the lucky man?" Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Talbid, but don't tell him. He doesn't know yet." Neelix fell back on the natural defense of the Talaxian: looking dumb and waiting for more information. Inna bubbled on. "What do they do in the Federation when someone gets engaged?" "Well, an engagement party would be in order - that is, unless you're planning to hold the wedding right away like Tom and B'Elanna did." It was Inna's turn to be puzzled. "You told me that Tom's wife was of a different race, but I've never heard of a humanoid whose gestational period was that short." "Gestational period?" he asked, in that shocked but debonair way Talaxians had honed to a fine art. She nodded. "Talbid and I will be married in seven months, when our child is born." Neelix explained to Inna that Tom and B'Elanna had no children yet, and that at the other end of the galaxy, people often got married before having offspring. This necessitated a description of the marriage ceremony as a thing distinct from childbirth itself. In the end, Inna decided to hold a little engagement party, and the look on Talbid's face when he found out he was engaged warmed Neelix's Talaxian toes. ***** Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by the phantom years, And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears; Harry had been dead tired when he crawled into the Jeffries tube to patch yet another plasma conduit. Ten minutes later, Torres heard him cry out in pain and rushed in after him. Finding him conscious, she reamed him out in Klingon, dragged him back into Engineering, and ordered Ensign Vorik to carry him to Sickbay. Fixing the internal transporters was at the very bottom of her to-do list, and, after twenty hours straight in Engineering, Vorik could use the walk. As the EMH ran a regenerator over the burns on Harry's arm and side, Vorik asked his professional opinion of the Leigi's mythology. Harry, however, had recovered enough to interrupt. "You don't seriously believe that story about humanoids coming from another galaxy, do you Vorik?" "It is within the realm of possibility, Ensign Kim. In fact, many scientists have speculated on this point. Am I not correct, Doctor?" The Doctor fairly hummed with self-importance, and began lecturing them as though this were another one of his 'Noses of the Delta Quadrant' slideshows: "The Distant Origin theory has a long and impressive history. Although most humanoid races prefer to believe that they evolved independently on the planets on which they now find themselves, the more intelligent ones, such as the Vulcans, are willing to consider the possibility that humanoids share a common origin." "Is that because we all have DNA?" Harry asked. "DNA is just one piece of evidence for the Distant Origin theory. Another frequently cited fact is the age of most planets on which humanoids dwell - the pattern, at least in the Alpha Quadrant, is that of settlement on newer planets around relatively young suns. Although the Earth may seem very old to you, Mr. Kim, many biologists believe that it has not been around long enough for a creature as complex as man to have evolved there. Ergo, humans must come from somewhere else." "But the Leigi said they came here only 50,000 years ago. What about the fossils?" "The Leigi came to Leigus Prime 50,000 years ago. They don't say how long beforehand they were at Earth, if they were the ones to colonize Earth. There are also some rather...esoteric theories about aliens seeding planets with DNA and coming back much later to see how things turned out. Following up the research of Professor Galen, his mentor, Captain Picard of the Enterprise discovered a message encoded in the DNA of several Alpha Quadrant species by just such a civilization, millions of years ago. They claimed to have seeded many worlds with DNA - Earth, Indrii VIII, Vilmor II, Loren III, and others. Perhaps that ancient humanoid race was an advance force, paving the way for the later Leigan colonists. "In any event, the relevant archaeological fact here is that humans clearly weren't leaving Earth on their own power 50,000 years ago, yet your humanoid relatives already filled the quadrant at that time. The probability that even two humanoid species arose through convergent evolution - in layman's terms, by dumb luck - is negligible." "Point zero zero zero zero zero one three percent, to be precise," Vorik added. "You would die of old age before Vorik could read out all the zeros involved in the convergent evolution of *all* of the several thousand humanoid species listed in the Federation databanks. Since we were flung across the galaxy, Voyager has found hundreds more. In a normal universe, Humans would be as different from Vulcans as you are from the Horta, and we would stumble across new races as rarely as we find non-humanoids like the Periti." "But Perseus, of all places!" Harry moaned, not at the lingering pain of the plasma burns but at the frightening vastness of space and time. "Perseus is actually a much better spot for humanoid life to have evolved - all those galaxies, all that variety. The Milky Way is just a lonely backwater of the universe." "But it's home - or at least it seemed like home." ***** Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Jenny Delaney missed her sister and wished she hadn't left in the middle of a fight - yet another fight about the Leigi. Even with a war going on, Jenny wanted to stay here in the Leigus Union. Why go home? she'd asked Megan even before the Periti came. Did she think the Federation was any safer from the Borg? Far from it. Considering all the problems Janeway had caused them, assimilating Starfleet ought to be the Borg's main strategic objective. Many of the Leigus colony worlds, on the other hand, were peaceful agricultural settlements with nothing to threaten or tempt the Borg. Jenny had a thing for Ken Dalby - her sister had forgotten about it, fortunately - and she worried more and more as they got closer to home that all their Maquis would end up in Federation prisons. While eavesdropping on Ken, she'd overheard talk among some of the Maquis about 'respect for colonists' and various other virtues of the Leigus Union as a place to settle down. She'd started to study Leigan culture then, furtively reading the data pads Ken lent her like they were contraband rather than publicly available information. The twin knew that taking too much interest in the local fauna wouldn't go over well with her superiors - there was no regulation against it, just the tacit understanding that they were only 'passing through'. When she'd finally gotten up the courage to mention deserting, her sister really got mad. How could she turn on the Captain that way? In the tight quarters of Shuttle Second, she'd been enraptured by Ken's tales of the outer colonies. She frowned as he talked of Picard's treaty and how those free worlds had become a 'demilitarized' zone. His Leigan audience could hardly believe that the Cardassians were humanoid. Jenny, for her part, made no attempt to defend the Federation or their warlike allies on Cardassia Prime. On the sixth day of their trip, she found herself seated next to Dalby on one of the cramped shuttle's benches, shivering involuntarily as the Leigan pilot announced ship after ship on the long-range sensors. Ken put an arm around her and she leaned against him - like a comrade in the trenches, she thought. But he kissed her hair and muttered something about getting engaged. With a wicked gleam in her eye, she whispered back, "You know how that's done here..." The last day of the trip to Leigus Prime was again consumed in plotting and evaluating the long-range sensor data. Chakotay and Ayala were not satisfied with the scans; they decided to send Shuttle Second ahead for a closer look. So the Commander hailed them and asked whether they'd like to make any crew rotations before heading out on the mission. Jenny recognized this as an oblique offer to her; seeing no hesitation in the faces of the Leigan crew, and expecting none from Ken, she replied, "Today is a good day to die." *****