Title:   Colony
Author:  Jemima
Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net
Series:  VOY
Part:	 15/20
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 15

*****

   And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.
   Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again. 


After two days of coaxing basic chemical compounds out of the
replicators, B'Elanna and Tom donned their environmental suits and
took the turbolift to the outer surface.  Combined with the tricobalt
device and other explosives from Shuttle Fourth, the chemicals would
make a convincing firework show.  Tom's instructions were to set off
the blast at the precise moment Seven had calculated.  One of the
Leigi still on the outer surface would accompany him back to Voyager
in Shuttle Third, while the other two took Shuttle Second through the
gap in the blockade and reassured the populace of Leigus Prime that
their moon was in good hands.  B'Elanna returned, red-eyed, with Jenny
Delaney and Ken Dalby in tow.

A day later - the moon had set its nights and days by their
biorhythms, although Seven wasn't regenerating much and Chakotay
wasn't sleeping at all - they gathered in Engineering and prepared to
move Toleighanomir.  B'Elanna and Kathryn had set the course the night
before, so that when the explosion went off, the moon would be
propelled toward the sun along a slightly curved path.  Though at
first the moon would move only slightly faster than it had been going
in its more traditional orbit, the force of gravity would soon cause
it to accelerate into the sun.  Still, it would take a couple of weeks
to reach their fiery end.

Torres was confident that she could operate the controls.  Janeway and
Ovin desperately hoped that that was the case, while Seven and
Chakotay seemed to trust the Engineer, or the moon itself, to get them
where they were going.  The Borg, the Maquis and Toleighanomir were
survivors.

Seven counted down the seconds as they watched Shuttles Second and
Third on one of the screens.  Tom and his companion in the cloaked
shuttle had finished setting both sets of charges an hour before - a
much smaller explosion would suffice to take out the second
installation.  

Suddenly, B'Elanna swore furiously in Klingon.  "He's not cloaked!"
she concluded angrily, but, to her credit, she remained in position at
the console, ready to adjust the sub-lightspeed drive if anything went
amiss.

Seven paused in her countdown to comment, "Lieutenant Paris appears to
be drawing off the Periti so that Shuttle Second will not be attacked
when they launch."  She resumed, "Thirteen seconds, twelve, eleven,
ten, nine, eight..."

Chakotay stood by the console, awaiting his cue.  "Three, two, one..."
He put his hand down on the helix symbol as Seven said "Now!"  and a
blaze of light filled the viewscreen.  Kathryn, B'Elanna and Chakotay
searched the forward screen for the two shuttlecraft, while Ovin and
Seven concerned themselves with a readout of the moon's new
trajectory.

"The course change was successful," Seven reported calmly.  Chakotay
gingerly lifted his hand from the console and B'Elanna dashed to the
viewscreen.  She soon found Shuttle Third, still uncloaked, covering
Shuttle Second's descent to Leigus Prime.  She seemed to have lost the
energy to swear - Chakotay put an arm around the distraught wife as
she stared up at the display.  After several long, agonizing seconds,
Shuttle Second landed safely and Shuttle Third engaged the cloaking
device.  Invisible to the Periti, but still visible to them, Tom
turned his shuttle about and began the week-long trip to Leigus
Fifteenth.

"See you in a few weeks, Flyboy," B'Elanna whispered.

*****

They passed the time familiarizing themselves with Toleighanomir and
casting the occasional wary look at the ever-growing sun.  After a
week or so, Janeway noticed that Chakotay wasn't sleeping.

"I don't trust it," he answered when she asked him why.
"Toleighanomir could change course on its own, if it thinks we're
getting too close to the sun.  I want to keep an eye on our progress."

"We can keep an eye on it in shifts," she offered.  Chakotay nodded;
he'd have to not sleep less obviously from now on.

For its part, Toleighanomir behaved itself.  Without breaking a sweat,
they swung through the sun's corona and into warp.  After another
week, they dropped out of warp at Leigus Fifteenth and opened the
airlock door.  Voyager flew in and was drydocked at last.  Having
extracted the whole story from Tom, Tuvok merely insisted on a full
medical exam for the returning officers.

*****

   O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.
   Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two. 


The away team gathered in Sickbay.  The Doctor told Nurse Paris to
check Seven, Ovin, Jenny and Dalby while he himself examined the
Triumvirate - Tom's nickname for the three senior officers had already
spread around the ship.

The EMH had them sit on the biobeds and turned his attention to the
golden implants they'd picked up when first boarding Toleighanomir.
He'd noticed something else in his initial scans, something which
posed quite a challenge to his bedside manner subroutines.  Hopefully
his investigation of the implants would shed some light on that
mystery as well.  Unfortunately, his knowledge of Borg implants - the
best in Starfleet, if he said so himself - was of little use with the
subtle, wholly organic alterations he now faced.

"Fascinating," he said.  "This confirms my theory about the Leigi."

The Captain took his bait, if somewhat reluctantly, asking, "What
theory would that be, Doctor?"

"I have noticed several unusual factors in the Leigans' mitochondria.
I thought they might be artifacts of genetic engineering, and in
particular, that the Leigi's addiction to sunshine might have been
artificially induced.  Your cells show similar alterations."

"Why make themselves dependent on the sun?" B'Elanna wondered aloud.

"It may not have been meant as a handicap.  Perhaps they'd suffered
from inbreeding or some inconvenient genetic drift over the thousands
of years they travelled in this...moon."  The McCoy substrate of his
program was stridently protesting all this mucking about with alien
technology.  It had required several overrides to sublimate his McCoy
tendencies into that modest theatrical pause.  "The engineered changes
may have been purely beneficial, at the time."

"Are you saying we've been genetically engineered?" the Captain
asked.  She might have been horrified if she hadn't already seen worse
as a Borg drone.

"No.  Not, at least, in such a full-scale way.  The effects seem to
have been limited to your mitochondria--"

Torres interrupted with her own medical opinion, sending several of
the Doctor's subroutines spinning in surprise.  "It's inherited,
passed down from the mother to her children.  I remember now - in one
of my dreams I was disappointed that I'd had no daughters to pass
it on."

The Doctor detected no irony in this statement.  It would appear that
Torres didn't know.  How could she?  Her condition was medically
impossible, after all.

"There do seem to have been some side-effects.  You are all much
healthier than when I last saw you.  Lieutenant Torres' iron levels
are up to Klingon norms, despite the lack of blood in her diet.  There
is not a trace of caffeine in the Captain's system.  Nor is there a
trace of artificial fertility suppressants in your bodies."

He surveyed his audience.  Torres seemed curious, but unmoved.  The
Captain gazed wistfully into a coffee cup she'd recently emptied.
Chakotay, on the other hand, paled visibly.  It was time to clear the
room.  "Medic," the EMH called, "are you finished with the others?"

Tom had just come out of the lab with Jenny Delaney, who was blushing
and smiling.  "Yes, Doc, they're all fine."

"They are released.  Come help me over here."  The Doctor waited
pointedly until the crowd had dispersed.  Then, he chickened out,
though most of his personality profiles considered it 'delegating'.
"Mr. Paris, please verify the readings on biobed three with a medical
tricorder."

The whirr of the tricorder filled the suddenly silent room.  "These
readings can't be right, Doc," Tom said.  He sounded strangely
hopeful.  The Captain frowned, and the Commander turned a whiter
shade of pale.  Tom grabbed another instrument from a nearby tray and
ran it over B'Elanna's abdomen.

Checking paternity while he's at it, the Doctor noted.  He had already
identified all parents, and would have evicted Tom with the others had
he not been one of them.

"What are you grinning at, Tom?" Torres growled.  Why isn't that
Klingon in restraints? the Doctor's McCoy subroutine complained idly.

"B'E, hon, you're pregnant," Tom gushed.  Chakotay almost fainted.
The new mother, however, laughed in Tom's face.

"You know that's not possible without..."  Her voice suddenly trailed
off, along with her laughter.

"...medical intervention, on account of your unique physiology," the
Doctor completed her sentence.  "Your implant, however, appears to be
capable of such delicate operations."  McCoy urged the Doctor to run
for his life, but B'Elanna remained perfectly still and
uncharacteristically non-violent.  So he turned to face the other
dangerous pregnant woman.

"Captain..." he said suggestively.

"What is it, Doctor?" she asked unsuspectingly.

Chakotay mouthed 'get out of here' to Tom, who immediately said, "You
have to start treating yourself better, B'E.  Let's go grab a snack in
the mess hall."  He helped her off the biobed, and scurried out of the
room with her, chattering about possible names for the baby.

"What is it, Doctor?" the Captain repeated, suspiciously this time.
Chakotay climbed down from his biobed to hold the Captain's hand.

The Doctor would have preferred to keep B'Elanna around, just in case
the Captain did anything untoward to his program in the next few
minutes.  It was time to face the music: "My scans show that you are
also pregnant."

"That's impossible."

"Such are the miracles of ancient technology."  The EMH was quite
impressed; not a single child had been conceived on Voyager in seven
years, but three out of the four women on the away team had come back
pregnant.  He had a direct connection to the medical database and had
been aware of Jenny's diagnosis as soon as Tom had made it.

The Captain looked even more stunned than B'Elanna had.  The Doctor
suppressed the urge to wonder exactly how all this had come about
without her knowledge.  There were advantages to being a hologram -
'Don't go there' could be hardwired in if necessary.

She shook herself out of her stupor and said, "Well, I've had alien
children before.  I suppose I can handle it."

"It's fully human, Captain," the EMH said, glancing at Chakotay.

"Well, technically, the last ones were too; just highly evolved
humans."

'Denial' diagnosed his Dr. Zimmerman substrate.  'You should know,'
the sum of all doctors answered his creator.  None of his constituent
personalities were sure how to deal with the situation - these two
weren't exactly Kirk and Spock.  Fortunately, Chakotay saved him from
having to spell it out for her.

"I'm the father, aren't I, Doctor?" he asked, bracing the Captain for
the shock by wrapping an arm around her.

The Doctor nodded, relieved that at least one of the parents knew what
was going on.  "Unless there's something else I can do for you..." he
prompted them, but the Captain remained silent and Chakotay shook his
head.  "Computer, deactivate Emergency Medical Hologram."  Ah, sweet
oblivion.

*****