Title:   Colony
Author:  Jemima
Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net
Series:  VOY
Part:	 12/20
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 12

*****

  Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
  And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns. 


"Main engineering, I presume," Tom announced.  Dazzled, the landing
party walked slowly along the catwalk, until it widened into a
circular platform ringed with plexiglas panels.  In the center of the
platform stood a single console, bearing the now familiar triangle of
the Trivium.

They gathered around the console.  "Well?" the Captain asked her first
officer, whose background in anthropology seemed to be coming in quite
handy now.

"I believe the star would be the most accessible," he answered,
gesturing toward it.  When Janeway touched the symbol, the panels
sprang to life.  Of the many computer readouts now displayed around
them, the blazing disk of the sun caught the Captain's eye. It filled
the upper portion of one viewscreen, while various smaller images of
the sun were displayed at eye-level and below.  On a nearby screen,
the solar system was featured prominently, with Leigus Prime and its
companion planets in position around that golden sun.

The sun remained a distinguishing shade of gold across the other
screens.  One panel displayed the sector, another showed about a third
of the galaxy.  Tom pointed to a screen near him, saying "The Milky
Way," and waved at a bank of displays beside it.  "I think all of
these are beyond the galactic scale."

"Abell 426," Seven identified a saddle-shaped mass at the corner of
one of those displays.  "The origin point."

Peachy, Janeway thought - now her best Borg had gone native too.
Jenny Delaney was one thing, but she'd thought Seven was a little
more...logical.  She removed her hand from the central console.  The
images remained, and she walked over to the viewscreen that showed the
local solar system.  Chakotay followed her and quietly urged, "Go for
the intuitive."

The Captain raised her hand towards the view of the system, ignoring
the smaller images below in which the planets were racing about their
sun in various formations and speeds.  With a finger she drew a circle
around Leigus Prime and its ersatz moon.

The display before her did not change, but the others did.  Four
screens to the right displayed Leigus Prime, including various smaller
multicolored images of the planet.  She thought perhaps the smaller
pictures represented plant life or mineral deposits.  One of the
larger ones was clearly a topographical map of the planet.

"Captain," Seven said when the changing viewscreens interrupted her
investigations, "my analysis of the starchart of our galaxy indicates
that it was made at least 40,000 years ago.  Although the stars were
shown in their current positions, the chart appears to be based on
projections, rather than current data."

"How can you tell?" Tom asked.

"Certain artificial cosmic events are not reflected in the chart.  For
instance, according to the legends of Species 1340, the star of their
original home system was completely destroyed by a chain reaction set
off accidentally by their scientists.  The Borg did not believe this
legend, but that star is depicted here in exactly the position Species
1340 believed it once occupied.  The nebula which replaced it is
absent.  I have found four other such anomalies, placing the date of
the starchart at least 40,000 years ago."

Tom shivered.  He wished he hadn't asked.

"Good work, Seven, but I think we need to see about the engines."  The
Captain turned toward the console, but Chakotay held her back.

"B'Elanna," he said, "touch the wheel."  When she did, the screens
flashed up an entirely new montage.  The solar system disappeared from
the screen before which the Captain and Commander still stood, and was
replaced by a diagram of - presumably - the engine room in which they
were now gathered.  The three symbols, helix, star and wheel, floated
in the center of the graphic, where the catwalk should have been.

The screens to the Captain's right showed various portions of the
cavernous room - several engines, a diagram of the catwalk system, and
other schematics resembling circuit diagrams or power grids.  To the
left, several screens displayed the moon as a whole.  The Captain was
drawn to a blueprint of its structure.  The moon was hollow, as they'd
expected, and its crust seemed to be reinforced with a skeleton shaped
like a geodesic dome.  The forces it was subjected to must be massive,
she reflected.  At this scale, the small hollow in the moon's crust
which was Engineering was obscured by the three golden symbols.  What
particularly intrigued her was a door, and behind it an airlock big
enough to hold several Kazon motherships.  Plenty of room for Voyager,
Janeway thought.

"Captain," Tom said from his position in front of another screen, "I
think these are the shuttles and the Periti installations."  They
shone brightly against the surface of the moon, despite the Periti
cloaking device still running on Shuttle Third.

"Captain," B'Elanna called from across the circular platform.

"Don't touch anything," Chakotay warned her as they approached the
screen which so fascinated Torres and Seven of Nine.

"It's a warp field," B'Elanna said of the familiar glowing torus
displayed before them.

"I believe the smaller pictures below it are a time-lapse sequence,"
Seven added.  The first was dark, and the rest showed the warp field
in various stages of formation.  "According to my calculations, the
warp field formed when Lieutenant Torres touched the console.
Tricorder scans corroborate this theory."

*****

"I see what you mean about not touching anything," the Captain
remarked to Chakotay.  Turning back to the two women, she asked "Are
we moving?" 

"My tricorder cannot penetrate the moon's crust," Seven answered.

Chakotay reassured them, "I don't think B'Elanna can set a course
without your help, Captain, and we may not have helm control unless I
do...something."

"Mmm?" the Captain egged him on, touching his arm.

"Imagine the difficulty of communicating with your very distant
descendants," Chakotay began to explain.  "You don't know what they'll
look like, how they'll act, even whether they'll use spoken language -
they might use telepathy, sign language, or some other means of
communication.  And you don't want to just say 'Hi, how have you been?
Seen the galaxy?'  You want to leave them a valuable piece of
technology the size of Pluto, and you don't want them to break it
trying to use it."

"But it used the Universal Translator," Tom interrupted.

"No, *we* used the Universal Translator.  Besides, you can't fly a
starship in universal translation.  When the Captain says 'engage',
does she mean 'go to warp' or 'fire all phasers'?  A picture, in this
case, is worth a thousand words."

"But how would they know what our visual range was?  What if we saw in
infrared?"

"I suspect the hologram tested our visual acuity as well as our travel
experience," Chakotay answered Tom.

"They assumed we would remember the Trivium," Ovin commented.

"It wasn't necessary that we remember it, only understand it.  Even if
our concepts had changed enormously, we would have understood once the
wheel started the warp drive and the star produced starcharts.  It's a
completely intuitive computer interface."

"It's a Mac," Tom commented.

"Excuse me, Mr. Paris?" the Captain prompted him.

"The Macintosh was a very early Terran computer designed so that
people who had never seen a computer before in their lives could still
use it," Tom elaborated.  "It was known for its intuitive,
easy-to-operate interface.  They called it 'user-friendly'."

"Ah," Janeway acknowledged the superfluous information, and turned back
to Chakotay.  "Commander, what were you saying about laying in a
course?"

"It's not a matter simply of technology, or of cosmology, but a
combination of the two - the ship's power and maneuverability, the
local gravitational forces, the long-range destination...  Then
starting on that course is neither scientific nor mechanical, but an
act of will - the humanoid impulse."

"This is pure speculation," Seven complained.

"We haven't much else to go on right now," the Captain answered her.
She decided to try an experiment.  "Seven, could you touch the star on
the console?"

The former drone complied, but nothing happened.  The Captain returned
to the console and reached out to the uncooperative star.  The screens
switched back to the former display of cosmological data.  Nodding
towards the map of the sector, she asked Seven to point to Leigus
Fifteenth.

Though no other viewscreen changed, the one which Seven had touched
altered slightly.  The sector map remained on the top half of the
screen, while the bottom half displayed Leigus Fifteenth's sun and the
four planets of that now distant system.  Seven touched the planet
itself, and the small scene changed to a fuzzy visual of the
blue-purple erstwhile paradise.  Curious, the ex-Borg zoomed in on the
main land-mass of the planet, where the Periti had caused the most
damage.

"Captain," she reported, "this is a current scan of Leigus Fifteenth.
Here is the new crater."

B'Elanna's eyes sparkled fiercely.  Tom would have preferred that
greedy look to be directed to its usual object, himself, rather than
the long-range scanners of this treasure-trove of alien - he corrected
himself - ancestral technology.

"It would seem," the Captain theorized at the conclusion of her
experiment, that these marks on our hands are keys to more than just
the turbolift.

"A sensible precaution with humanoids," Seven opined.  "There could be
no guarantee that those accompanying you would share your goals for
the ship.  They might wish to destroy it, or perhaps just copy its
advanced technology and leave it as they found it."

"Isn't that what we came here to do?" Tom asked.

"Perhaps, but the selection process the hologram used was designed to
combat such tendencies."

"How?"

"They assumed that you," Seven addressed the hologram's selected trio,
"or rather, any humanoids who had managed to see as much of the galaxy
as you have, could not resist the opportunity to see another."

Did she have to be so blunt? Tom thought ruefully.  He'd been hoping
to die a novel and gruesome death in his own galaxy, at least.  This
moon really was made of green cheese - it was the bait of an ancient
mousetrap.

*****