Title: Colony Author: Jemima Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net Series: VOY Part: 10/20 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 IV: Moon Part 10 ***** Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn: Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn. Janeway, Torres, Seven and Ovin crossed the distance to Leigus Prime in Ovin's shuttlecraft. The Captain would have preferred travelling in one of her own, but Tuvok had cautioned against it, saying they couldn't be sure what Chakotay had said or done to the Periti with the Delta Flyer before its presumed demise. Besides, the Leigi still needed help from Voyager's shuttles to travel through the poisoned atmosphere of Leigus Fifteenth. For the first time in two months, the Captain had nothing to do. She was bored, B'Elanna was depressed, Ovin was solemn and Seven was efficient as usual. They made for strange company on the long trip to Leigus Prime. It was hard for Janeway to believe that her first officer had survived the simultaneous destruction of three shuttlecraft; it was correspondingly easy for her to dream of everything that had never been and now could never be between them. Judging by the look on Torres' face, the Klingon's thoughts were also filled with children who could never be born, houses that would not now be built, and sunsets that had somehow been missed. They had a harebrained scheme of drifting into orbit around the moon like a derelict, but Janeway hoped instead to find at least one of the missing shuttles along the return flight path Chakotay had left them. So the shuttle hung back from the Leigus Prime system once they reached it, ostensibly to monitor Periti activity. After two days of surveillance, B'Elanna announced excitedly, "There's a Leigan ship decloaking ahead of us." "Hail them," Janeway ordered, but the other ship hailed them first. "Greetings from Leigus Prime. Please identify yourselves," a familiar voice requested, and an image of Tom Paris slowly came into focus on the viewscreen. "Where have you been, Helmboy?" B'Elanna asked gruffly, angry at him for having feigned death. A voice from beyond the viewscreen said something, and Tom repeated, "Request permission to dock, B'E." The Captain began to breathe; she hadn't realized she had been holding her breath until she heard that other voice. All Leigan vessels were equipped with airlocks and docking ports - without transporter technology, they were the only way to move humanoids from ship to ship in space. Tom and B'Elanna blocked (and steamed up) the airlock for a few moments with their reunion, but the crowd behind Tom soon pushed their way into the other shuttle. Chakotay hung back, and signaled to Janeway to join him in the privacy of Shuttle Third. "It's good to see you again," he said. It was a mild enough greeting, but then he hadn't thought her dead. She, on the other hand, was hard-pressed to retain a captainly demeanor as she responded, "It's good to see you, too." She steeled herself with levity; "We heard you'd crashed all three shuttles." He replied in kind. "Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated." "Where are the others?" "Ken, Jenny and three of the Leigi are still on the moon, having a look around. They volunteered to remain together on the downed shuttle, since we didn't have room for them all. We dropped them some supplies. I knew you'd want to come back, anyway - though I didn't think it would be quite so soon." He grinned. "Did you get the dilithium?" she asked. The Commander opened a storage compartment in the back of Shuttle Third, saying "Take a look." Janeway reached in to touch the precious cargo. "And the Leigi?" "Chock full of nanoprobes and recovering nicely." He paused for a moment, then asked, "How did you know about our fireworks with the Periti?" "When Dalby's shuttle went down on the moon, another took off. He made for Leigus Eighth, but they sent him along to Voyager to tell us his story. We seem to have become the nerve center of the Leigus Union." "So you decided to come here and get yourselves killed, too?" He looked at her oddly for just a moment, then sat down on one of the benches and offered her the seat beside him. "So what now? I assume you still want to take a look at the moon." "Of course," she replied, "but we should get this dilithium back to Voyager." ***** Shuttle Third ended up even more crowded, though Talbid and Inna had remained behind on Leigus Prime. Neelix, Ayala and Icheb were dispatched to Voyager on the newly-christened Shuttle Fourth, leaving Janeway, Chakotay, Torres, Paris, Seven and Ovin on Shuttle Third. All of Shuttle Fourth's environmental suits and most of their supplies were also transferred to Shuttle Third in exchange for the dilithium and recorded messages from the inhabitants of Leigus Prime. Cloaked again, Shuttle Third landed gently beside Shuttle Second on the far side of the moon. The combined forces of seven humans and four Leigi continued the systematic investigation of the planetoid begun months before by Ovin and his colleagues. After a week of slogging through the cosmic dust with which the moon was covered, they had completed a map of the caves and tunnels which ran between the craters on certain areas of the moon's surface. Fortunately, none of them were too near the two automated Periti installations, which seemed to be part of the jamming system Chakotay had temporarily disrupted when he'd blown up the Periti mothership. It was Jenny who made the discovery. The others were making and testing new sensor modifications and wondering what to look for that had never been looked for in Leigus Prime's 50,000 year history. Jenny, on the other hand, was leaning over Ken's shoulder, ostensibly looking at the new map displayed on Shuttle Third's tactical console. She was more interested in whispering Leigan endearments in his ear than in the map, but somehow, by only half-looking at the image, she saw a pattern the others hadn't noticed. "Hold on," she said, still speaking in Leigan, as he moved to adjust the readout. "I see something." Ken quickly pulled his hand away and peered at the screen. To him it looked like the same jumble of volcanic tunnels ostensibly formed by cooling rock when the moon was young. "K'naa?" he asked - the Leigan for "What is it?" "There's a circle there," Jenny answered, pointing at a corner of the display. Indeed, there was a dark, regular disk about three kilometers across, formed by the absence of tunnels. "It must be the compression ring of a new crater," Ken said, switching back to Standard for the technical vocabulary. He pulled up the standard Leigan topographical map of the moon, but there was no crater over Jenny's circle. "Captain, Commander, take a look at this." Ken showed Jenny's discovery to their superior officers. "Is there anything unusual about the location?" the Captain asked. Ken examined the readout and cross-referenced the standard Leigan databanks. "Yes," he finally answered, "its latitude is 31.3 degress south of the equator, the same as the Tropic of Capricorn of Leigus Prime." "I'd say that sounds artificial," Chakotay commented. Janeway glanced around the cramped interior of Shuttle Third. Seven was under the sensor console making experimental adjustments. The main viewscreen showed Tom and B'Elanna outside, balanced on the rim of a crater, testing similar modifications of their tricorders. Ovin was asleep in the back. She knew the other three Leigi were enjoying a dinner of short rations aboard the other shuttle. The Captain began to give orders. "Hail Shuttle Second; tell them where we're going and that we'll check in in twelve hours. Call Tom and B'Elanna in, but have them stay suited up. As soon as they're aboard, we'll take off." ***** Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time; Shuttle Third settled invisibly into a crater near Jenny's circle. Tom and B'Elanna, Janeway and Chakotay, and Ovin and Seven went out in pairs, while Ken and Jenny held down the fort and checked the map for any other unusual features. The three teams prowled around the caverns for two hours, gradually making their way to the edge of the circle. Most of their scans had been taken from the shuttlecraft or, when the rock was too thick overhead, from just inside the mouths of tunnels and caverns. Now they were deeper into the cave system than any of them, excepting Ovin, had been before. Even the space dust was thin on the ground this far in. Kathryn Janeway wondered, afterwards, why the tunnel opened up before her and Chakotay, rather than one of the other teams. Had the moon known, by some subtle science conceived in a distant galaxy, exactly how far she was from her native Indiana? Did it know precisely how many years - the last seven being just the tip of the iceberg - she had spent in subspace, crossing vast distances at warp speed? Or did it choose her and Chakotay simply because they were the oldest? Whatever the reason, when she reached out towards the cave wall, she touched only air. The stone of Jenny's dark circle dissolved before her very eyes, and the space dust around her ankles drifted slowly into a new tunnel. According to the tricorder, the tunnel before them was perfectly round, like some massive drainpipe rather than the natural formations they had seen everywhere else on the moon. The new path curved out of sight to the right. "It seems to spiral in towards the center, and slightly downward as well," Chakotay said, eyes still fixed on the tricorder. The Captain hailed the other two away teams. "B'Elanna, Seven, do you have a fix on our location?" They replied in the affirmative. "We've found something. When you get here, follow us in." The reckless redhead strode down the new tunnel, leaving Chakotay to follow in her wake. "I'm reading an atmosphere, Captain," he said as he caught up to her. "It's thin, but the concentration of oxygen is increasing as we go." To conserve the environmental suits' oxygen supplies, the Captain and Commander took off their helmets and gloves once the atmosphere became breathable. Chakotay convinced her to sit down on the floor of the curved corridor for a picnic of short rations while they waited for the other two teams to catch up. She commandeered his tricorder and studied the readout - the tunnel appeared to spiral around three times, ending in a large circular chamber in the exact center of the circle. "Definitely artificial," she said, smiling up at him and reaching for a ration cube. *****