NEW: VOY "West: Your Possible Pasts" PG-13 J, Q 5/6
Alara Rogers
Lady Q was sitting at a work table, with one other chair next to the
table. There was nothing else; the room was a whitish-gray mist,
similar to the one she had ended up in when she'd died and Lady Q had
offered her another form of life. "It's about time," the entity
said.
Janeway's eyes narrowed. "You're my teacher?"
"I brought you to the Continuum, so I'm told I'm stuck with you."
Lady Q stood up. "Believe me, it's not my preference either. This is
all Q's fault. Trust him to precipitate a situation that requires my
assistance without so much as word one to me about what he's up to."
"So he did this deliberately. He knew that giving me my memories
would give me... what can I even call this? I don't feel as if I have
superhuman powers; I can travel in the Continuum and I can apparently
make small sandstorms, and nearly kill myself doing it."
"You don't have to call them superhuman powers if you don't want,"
Lady Q said. "Call them Joe if you must. I really don't care what
words you put on the concepts. But yes, between them Q and Queria
seem to have arranged for you to acquire abilities a human wouldn't
normally have in the Continuum. Still vastly less than what any Q can
call on; q-ling can overwhelm any meager abilities you could muster
up."
"q-ling hangs planets she made as preschool art projects on your
refrigerator door," Janeway said dryly. "I'd *hope* she'd be more
powerful than me. I'm not ready for the ability to make planets."
"Neither is she, judging from some of those planets," Lady Q said. "I
do realize that you humans believe that parents are supposed to ooh
and ahh over every trivial and pathetic achievement your children
accomplish, but I've had two now and I still find their childish
attempts at creation to be tedious beyond belief."
"She's doing the best she can. You wanted a being who would be born
as a child, and would have to learn."
Lady Q made a face. "Yes, yes. That doesn't improve the quality of
her undertakings, though; it just makes the lack of quality
forgivable." She walked behind the table. "But we're not here to talk
about q-ling. The memories Q has given you back, and the perception
of the Continuum that Queria granted you, have accelerated your
development beyond what I expected when I brought you here. So you
now have abilities you have no idea how to control, and a critical
need to *learn* that control."
"I'd rather you simply took them away," Janeway said.
Lady Q gave her a long, scrutinizing look. Janeway recognized the
trick -- it was a dominance ploy, the sort of look a teacher would
give a naughty student. She kept her own gaze even and met Lady Q's
eyes without blinking. "Are you a person or a thing, Janeway?" Lady Q
said.
"I prefer to think that I'm a person."
"Do you prefer *us* to think that you're a person?"
It was plainly a rhetorical question, but Janeway answered it anyway.
"Ideally, yes."
"Then I can't do that. No Q may remove memories from a sentient being
as we define sentients, and when Q put Picard through his final exam,
humans were classified as... well, to be blunt, people. Beings
deserving of what we Q recognize to be the basic rights of sentient
beings, and for that reason we can't remove your memories without
proof that it would cause harm to you or other sentient beings if we
didn't. And if we can prevent such damage by training you, we must
take that step first. So if you demand to have your memories wiped,
without first trying to solve the problem through training, you'd be
declaring that humans are not people and can be treated as we treat
mere potential sentients... can be frozen solid, stabbed with
bayonets, thrown to the Borg..."
"You've made your point," Janeway said tightly, wondering why Q had
claimed that he could take the memories away if she didn't like them,
if his doing so would define her as a non-sentient being. "What do I
need to do?"
Lady Q gestured at the table. Janeway gasped slightly as her mother's
home appeared there, in miniature like a doll house. "What are you
doing?"
"Training you," Lady Q said cryptically. She passed her hand over the
house, and it unfolded, the roof lifting off as if it were on hinges,
the three floors of the house separating from each other as if they
were drawers pulling out of an invisible cabinet. Each floor was
connected to the one beneath it only by a narrow strip where the south
side of the upper floor rested on the north side of the lower one.
The whole thing looked completely lopsided and as if it might topple
over at any minute, but by now Janeway was used to the fact that
physics was optional in the Q Continuum.
The thing that drew her immediate attention was a tiny representation
of a woman sleeping in a bed on the third floor, neck-length gray hair
mussed and wild. It was like an incredibly lifelike doll of her
mother. And then the doll shifted restlessly in her sleep, and
Janeway realized with a stab of shock that that *was* her mother.
"Why is my mother here?" she asked, her voice just slightly too
shrill, betraying the edge of her panic.
"Q's supposed to do this kind of thing because he's good at it," Lady
Q said. "But he's been entirely too soft with you. You'd never
believe that he'd actually do anything to make you suffer." She waved
her hand over the first floor, and three Borg appeared in flashes of
light in the living room.
Janeway lunged forward. Lady Q *looked* at her, and she froze in
place, all her muscles but those of her face locking up. "*What are
you doing to my mother?!"* she shouted, and hated that there was more
fear than fury in her voice. She could face down the death of her
crew, the destruction of her ship, even being assimilated by the Borg
herself, with steel and fire, but a threat to her mother turned a
hardened, experienced starship captain into a terrified little girl.
"Does it look like I'm doing anything to your mother?" Lady Q asked.
"Humans are sentient. I can't harm your mother. The real question
you want to ask is, what are those *Borg* going to do to your mother."
"That's semantics! You put them there!"
"These are Borg from the past, just so you know," Lady Q said, her
voice hard and pitiless. "They're under the control of the queen your
future self killed. You know, the one who hated you because you blew
up her primary unimatrix and took Seven of Nine away from her? They
*are* aware that this is the home of Kathryn Janeway's mother. And
while I would never accuse the Borg Queen of being particularly
knowledgeable about human emotions and family ties, she *does* know
that assimilating or killing your mother would hurt you."
"Please," Janeway said, struggling to move. Her muscles were locked
completely, unresponsive; she couldn't budge. "Don't do this."
"Stop them, Janeway," Lady Q said relentlessly.
"I *can't!* You won't let me move!"
"It would hardly matter if you could; your physical form can't have
any effect on that dimension. There's nothing you could accomplish by
moving. You need to focus power."
The Borg had found the staircase and were heading up it. They
disappeared from the representation of the first floor and reappeared
on the portion of the staircase shown in the second floor. "I don't
know how to do that. Whatever I did before, it just happened because I
was angry."
"I'd think you'd be extremely angry if the Borg assimilated your
mother."
"I don't know what to do! It isn't under my control!"
"Then I suggest you bring it under your control, very quickly."
"I *can't!*" The Borg were spreading out, exploring the second floor,
plainly scanning it. "What am I supposed to do?"
"What do you want to do?"
"Stop them!"
"Then do it."
"I *don't know how!*"
"Then get used to your mother's new name being Seventeen of Forty-
Three."
She wanted to kill Lady Q. But attacking a Q wasn't going to save her
mother, or, given how much more powerful Lady Q was, do much of
anything, really. Instead she focused her attention on the Borg. What
*could* she do? Why couldn't she feel the rush she had before when
she'd been angry at the Q who'd experimented on her children? Why
wasn't it just happening?
"This isn't a metaphor," Lady Q said. "You can change the form of the
Continuum by wanting to, badly enough, but the universe you come from
doesn't respond to mere willpower. You have to actually *do*
something. Use the power to affect the universe."
"I don't know what I'm doing. Even if I *had* the power and I could
direct it, how would I know what to do with it?"
"The same way Riker and Amanda knew. Ask the Continuum."
"Computer, how do I save my mother from the Borg?"
"Not like that," Lady Q said, exasperated. "Let go of the metaphor. It
isn't helping you right now. You can't have the Continuum verbalize
instructions to you; what you need to do has no words in your
language. Just open up your *mind*."
The Borg were done with the second floor and were heading up the
stairs again. Gretchen Janeway was asleep at the end of the third
floor hallway, her bedroom door open. Janeway took a deep breath.
Panic would get her mother killed. She closed her eyes for a moment,
remembering being Borg. Remembering how, when she had been the Borg
Queen, knowledge had just *come* to her, flowing through the
Collective directly into her mind. She knew that was how it worked
for the Q as well, as much as she disliked that analogy.
When she opened her eyes, she saw far, far too much. Each of the Borg
was like a snapshot overlaid over a thousand other pictures, from a
baby to nothingness. She saw energy flows all over their body, and she
saw the elements they were made of as different colors, where if she
focused she could actually make out the molecular structure of any
part of them. It was too much information, and she reeled.
"Decide what you want to happen to them, and want it more than you
want anything else right now. Stay open to the information. It's
difficult to hold so much knowledge when you're a mere human, but if
William Riker could do it you can too."
*I can do this. Humans have done this before.*
What did she want? Her rage, her fear, wanted her to destroy the Borg
-- who were walking down the hallway to her mother's bedroom. Make
them explode, vanish, cease to be. But she remembered Seven. Borg
could be other than Borg. She didn't *have* to kill them to save her
mother.
*Make them not-Borg*, she thought, and as if someone else was guiding
the image, her focus narrowed onto the timeshadows, the multiple
images of those three Borg overlaid over them that represented their
past selves and future potentials. She chose the timeshadows where
the Borg were last not-Borg, where they were of their original species
still, and something that was partially under her control and
partially guided, like an assisted piloting simulation in training at
the Academy, selected those timeshadows and foregrounded them. She
didn't feel anything -- like the cyclone, she knew that somehow she
was controlling this but it wasn't like muscles flexing, more like
giving orders with her mind and seeing reality comply.
The three beings, suddenly not Borg, looked around themselves in
complete disorientation. They babbled at each other, asking where they
were, how they'd gotten here. Gretchen stirred in her sleep, mumbling
at them to keep it down, and Janeway realized that they were still a
potential danger to her mother; she knew nothing about what these
aliens had been like before they'd been assimilated. Aboard her ship,
with Tuvok and a security team backing her up, she'd have offered them
the hand of friendship and gotten them medical assistance, but they
were in her mother's bedroom and she didn't have the security of an
entire ship full of trained people who took her orders. She wanted
them to be healthy and cared for and not in her mother's bedroom.
*Home*, she thought, with a sense of terrible longing for her own
home, the childhood home spread out on the table below her. *Go home,
all of you.* The sense of the universe, of everything and where it was
and how it all connected, the knowledge she had gained as a salamander-
being, filled her now, and she saw how their timeshadows connected
back to far distant planets and she touched those planets with her
mind as if she were pointing at items on a touch-sensitive holographic
display. The three former Borg vanished in flashes of light, returned
to those homeworlds they were connected to.
Gretchen sat up. "Kathryn? Kathryn, is that you? Are you there?"
"*Yes!*" Janeway shouted. How was her mother sensing her presence?
Who cared? It was the first opportunity she'd had to send any sort of
message to her loved ones. "It's me, mom, I'm still alive! I didn't
die! Can you hear me?"
Gretchen shook her head, looking around the room. "Damn," she
whispered. "Another one of those dreams again. I'm... never going to
get it through my head that she's really gone this time, am I."
"No! Mom, I'm not really gone! I'm still alive!"
"She can't actually hear you," Lady Q said.
And suddenly Janeway could move. She rushed to the dollhouse, but her
hands went through it as if it were a hologram. Her mother turned
over and lay back down on the pillow, tears welling in her eyes, and
Janeway felt as if her heart would break. "How do I make her hear me?
You gave me the power to save her; give me the power to talk to her!"
"So much for 'wipe my memory and take my power away,'" Lady Q said
acerbically.
Janeway glared at her. "I *hope* you never have the opportunity to
know how she feels," she nearly spat at the entity. "Your children
are immortal. And I'm glad they're immortal; I like them. I don't
wish any harm on Junior or q-ling. But you're never going to know how
much a mother suffers when her children die, or are believed to be
dead. And since you don't have a mother yourself I know you'll never
comprehend how *I* feel."
"Yes, I'm sure your mother would be thrilled to know that benevolent
godlike aliens are watching out for her family *personally*, and went
out of their way to scoop up and rescue her daughter from certain
death. That would make dealing with her own inevitable death, or your
sister's death, or memories of your father's death, *so* much easier
for her."
"Yes, well, that's actually what happened. Why would it be so
terrible for her to learn the *truth?* It's one thing not to have a
blind belief in a God who watches over the entire universe, with no
evidence of any such thing; it's entirely another to know that a
powerful alien race saved your loved one's life."
"Right, and we'll be opening up an embassy to the Federation any day
now." Lady Q shook her head. "You don't acknowledge us as powerful
aliens. If you had been given a warning by the Vulcans that you
shouldn't go onto the Borg ship--"
"The Vulcans would have been able to explain *why.* Something you
never did. And if they couldn't explain why, I wouldn't necessarily
listen to them. And if *Kes* had told me, I would have listened,
although apparently she's also a godlike being now, because I *trust*
Kes. I had no reason to trust you."
The dollhouse vanished. A tiny part of Janeway's mind keened at the
lost opportunity, but the rest of her was just angry and shaken. "It
doesn't matter whether you comprehend my reasons, Janeway," Lady Q
said. "You are not nearly as smart as you think you are. I have
experience in these matters you lack."
"Why didn't you just allow me to return to my old life?" Janeway
asked. "You gave me a second chance at life, and thank you, I'm
grateful, but why did you bring me *here?* You have all sorts of
excuses for why I can't be allowed to send a message home, to tell
anyone I'm alive, but half of them boil down to not wanting to reveal
that the Q ever do anything benevolent for anyone, and I'd be
perfectly willing not to tell anyone the Q were responsible. And the
other half are related to my having too much knowledge *now*, but I
was in the Continuum for what I'm sure must have been months before I
gained that knowledge." She stepped forward. "You and Q and Queria.
You have some sort of hidden agenda where I'm concerned. I even think
q and Amanda might be in on it, or perhaps they're just cooperating
because they've been told to. But you've brought me here, you won't
let me go home, you won't let me *talk* to my people, and now you've
given me knowledge that seems to have granted me Q-like powers. What
are you doing? Trying to isolate me from my own kind? Make me a Q,
like you tried to do with Will Riker, except that you're cutting off
all my other options?"
Lady Q sneered. "Making a mortal into a Q is a singular *honor*,
Janeway. We wouldn't have to maneuver and trick you into it; if you
didn't want it, we certainly don't want you."
"That's not how it worked with Will."
"I realize you're getting this information from log entries and you
weren't actually there, but you *did* realize that we threw Q out
shortly after he pulled that stunt, didn't you? Did it ever occur to
you that there might be a causal connection there?"
"Then why are you doing this? What are you trying to do to me?"
"We're done here," Lady Q said. "Go home."
She waved her hand, and Janeway found herself in her "house" again.
The ball with her memories was still sitting on the bed. Janeway
picked it up, concentrated, and opened the door to her house onto the
Middle of Nowhere. She flung the ball into the shifting sands there,
as hard as she could, and shut the door. It didn't matter how much she
wanted those memories. Q obviously had had some sort of ulterior
motive in giving them to her; he and Lady Q and Queria were colluding
to turn her into... something. Someone else. Someone she wasn't. And
she wasn't putting up with it any more.
As she turned back toward her living room, she felt a sense of
emptiness and loss. She had no idea what to do next. Before Q had
given her the memories, she had spent her time here in using the
Continuum's database to explore the universe from her living room, but
it seemed hypocritical to refuse knowledge from the Continuum because
it was turning her into something she didn't want to be, and then
spend her time acquiring different knowledge from the Continuum.
And then her doorbell rang.
Startled, she turned around and opened the door. There was a man with
a round, ruddy face and thinning blond hair, holding her ball. "Hey,
you dropped this," he said.
"Thanks, but I was actually getting rid of it. You can put it back. Or
take it if you want it."
"Any reason why?"
"I don't have to justify myself to you," Janeway said tightly.
"'Course not, but I'm curious. Q put a lot of work into creating that
thing for you. Seemed to me that you were enjoying it. So why toss it
in the middle of nowhere?"
Janeway took a deep breath. "I don't enjoy being lied to or
manipulated. Q is colluding in some way with Lady Q and Queria; his
*gift* seems to be responsible for... changing me. Giving me some sort
of powers, which are being used as an excuse for why I can't go home,
even though I wasn't permitted to go home *before* I was given this
gift. I don't appreciate that."
The Q started to laugh. He half-stumbled into her home and flopped
down on the couch, still laughing. Janeway glared at him. "What's so
funny?"
"You... you seriously think *Q* would be colluding with Q in *anything?
* In case you didn't notice, he's *furious* with her. If anything,
he'd be likely to sabotage her plans."
Janeway blinked. "I... got the impression that she was trying to
support him."
"Oh, *she* wants to get back in *his* good graces, no question. Of
course she can't just apologize, that would make her look like she was
wrong in the first place. But she'll do stuff she thinks he'll
appreciate, sure. Such as saving you. That doesn't mean he's actually
going to forgive her, or play along with any of *her* plans."
"Why is that?"
The blond Q sat up on her couch. "She got mad at him and how he was
handling the kid, and shutting *her* out of handling the kid, so she
told him he was ruining the kid and the two of them were losers, and
she walked out on them both. Not like she hasn't done that kind of
thing half a million times before, and he's always forgiven her
before, so I could see why she doesn't get what she did. But Q isn't
going to forgive her for hurting the *kid* any time real soon. He can
put up with tons of abuse for himself, it's not like he doesn't dish
it out just as hard. But Junior's his weak point. He can't handle
someone hurting his son." He shook his head. "So whatever Q's hidden
agenda is, you can be pretty sure it's *not* to play along with
whatever Q wanted for you when she brought you here."
"But he does *have* a hidden agenda."
"Every Q does."
"Including you?"
"I'm a Q," he said, spreading his hands in a shrugging motion.
"So what's yours?" Janeway asked acerbically.
"Now how would it be a hidden agenda if I was gonna tell you what it
was?" He stood up. "But I can tell you this much. Whatever Q's
intentions were when he gave you that thing, he wasn't planning to
make you into somebody else. He isn't interested in changing people
into something they're not; he's more about getting people to realize
their potential. Frequently, the hard way. If all he has to do for you
to get you to become everything you can be is to give you a ball of
memories, you're luckier than most of the people he likes."
"What if my definition of 'everything I can be' and Q's are
different? The Borg certainly thought that I was improved by being
assimilated and becoming their queen."
"Yeah, that's the Borg for you. You ever known Q to override what
people think?"
"No, but--"
"Look, if this is what you're worried about... no one is trying to
sneak around your back to make you a Q. Like Q told you, that's an
honor we grant to very few, and it's always by choice. We don't *want*
someone who doesn't want to be part of us; then we'd have to put up
with someone who doesn't like us and doesn't want to be part of us for
the rest of eternity, and who wants that? Would you force someone to
be in your crew against their will?"
She hesitated. "I'm... not sure Seven joined freely. She had very
little will of her own when we first de-assimilated her. I might have
forced her into something she wouldn't have chosen otherwise."
"Well, if she had no free will, then it was gonna be you, giving her
the space to develop one while she worked for you, or the Borg,
keeping her from developing one, so you still came down on the side of
her freedom. We don't do it differently here. You're alive because Q
thought it would please Q that you were alive, and because she's got
some idea of a thing she thinks you're needed for sometime down the
road. You're here because we can't run around resurrecting people and
letting them live when everyone knows damn well they're dead; maybe we
could have fudged it if Seven of Nine hadn't felt you die, or if
*she'd* died before she could tell anyone you were dead, but now
everyone pretty much knows you're dead, which would make it a lot more
of a hassle to send you back home than you think. And you've got a
ball of memories because Q feels guilty that he didn't do anything to
stop your death, and because he's all about people changing through
growth and learning, and you can't learn squat from experiences you
had if you can't remember them."
"What is it that Lady Q thinks I'm needed for?"
"You'd have to ask her. She's not telling us."
"She's not telling me, either."
"Then I guess you'll just have to wait."
"How is it that she can keep that information from you? I had thought
you all knew anything any one of you knew."
"There's ways," the Q said. "If we really wanted to force her, we
could, but no one really wants to push too hard on the being who
invented the way for mortals to kill Q. I mean, if she came up with
that on the spur of the moment just so's your crew could rescue Q and
you, who knows what she could pull off if she actually got *mad* at
us?" He grinned.
"If no one wants to change me into something I'm not, why do I have
powers now?"
"You've only got'em in the Continuum, Janeway. If we *did* send you
outta here, you'd be an ordinary human... with some pretty amazing
knowledge locked up in a kind of inefficient brain for it, and you
might be able to do some stuff with technological assistance that
maybe humanity as a whole shouldn't quite be messing with yet, but you
wouldn't be able to kill Borg with your brain, no. You can do that
'cause you've been given a limited ability to draw on and manipulate
the Continuum, and you've been given *that* 'cause you live here, and
it's sorta the minimum you need to get by here." He stood up. "If it
makes you feel better, you aren't the first... we brought in a Vulcan
doc to give us some advice during the war, and we gave her the same
abilities to manipulate the metaphor and channel Continuum energies
that you've got."
"What happened to her?"
"Ah, we sent her home after the war."
"And she wasn't harmed by the experience?"
"Nope. Stayed the same boring, super-logical Vulcan gal till she had a
kid with an accelerated life span and went kinda nuts trying to extend
his life, but that had nothing to do with us." He handed the ball
toward her. "Look, you're not gonna turn into a Q by accident. If we
make you an offer, which isn't certain at this point anyway, you'll
have a chance to say no, with no hard feelings. We might help you to
overcome some human limitations that you don't actually *have* right
now, given that, y'know, you're not made of meat anymore. But we're
not going to make you into anything you're not. We'd just help you to
use the potential you *do* have. And trust me, you're not gonna become
as powerful as a Q unless we actually give you the powers of the Q;
what you can achieve with what you are right now might be way nifty by
human standards, but it won't be much in comparison to us. It'd just
help you be independent and hold your own so long as you live here."
Janeway sighed. "If I take the rest of the memories, will Lady Q
threaten to kill my mother again? Or other family or friends?"
He laughed. "She's just trying to do Q's shtick," he said. "And she's
not experienced with it like he is. Tell you what, once you've
acquired all your memories, if you need some more training we'll give
you the right to pick who you want to train you. Q's a *lot* better
with it, but we figured you'd be better off at the moment with a
teacher you don't half suspect of wanting to get into your pants."
"I'd put up with being sexually harassed if it meant the people I care
about would be off limits," Janeway said.
"Sure you would, but would you learn that way?"
"If I had to."
"Well, it's your decision." He offered the ball again. This time she
took it.
"Thanks for clarifying the situation," she said. She wasn't certain
she could trust him, any more than she was certain she could trust any
of the other Q, but at the very least, she thought he was telling the
truth... and if he was telling the truth, she thought she could take
the risk. She *wanted* these memories; how could she not want to know
the things that had happened to her that she couldn't remember? They
were still things that had happened to *her*... or to a her she could
have been, to a different her so similar that the difference made no
difference. What she didn't want was to give up her humanity. But if a
Vulcan had had the abilities she was developing and had been able to
return to her old life, then Janeway's fears that she would become
something that could no longer be trusted around mortal humans were
probably unfounded.
"Any time," he said, waved at her, and vanished.
She sat down on the couch. "Let's see what else you've got for me,"
she murmured, and put it to her head.
//Moments after the com link to the Delta Flyer has gone down and
Lieutenant Paris has tried unsuccessfully to shut down the slipstream
drive, Seven of Nine raises her head and reports that she is receiving
course corrections, via her Borg implant. Janeway guesses that Ensign
Kim must have figured out how to transmit to Seven's implant directly,
and instructs her to implement them.
They make matters worse. The variance increases. The ship shakes
horribly. Paris reports that the hull is buckling. Shields don't help;
inertial dampeners fail, as they drop out of slipstream and careen
through normal space. Tuvok reports that the hull is breaching on
multiple decks, and they must land immediately or be destroyed.
They're only a few parsecs from the Alpha Quadrant. So close... but
they've got to repair the ship. Paris reports a planet nearby, and
Janeway orders him to head for that, intending to land there and make
repairs.
But they're going too fast. They can't decelerate enough to make a
controlled landing. Reverse thrusters do no good. "All hands, brace
for impact!" she shouts. As the surface of the planet rushes up at her
in the viewscreen, she knows that this will not be the sort of impact
anyone can brace for.
She's failed to get them home. She gambled with the lives of her crew,
and she lost.
And then there is bone-crunching pain and the sound of metal tearing,
sparks flying, things flying through the air or maybe it's her and
then--//
Janeway dropped the ball, her hands trembling. That wasn't how it
happened. The instructions Seven got through her implant caused the
slipstream to dissipate harmlessly, and the ID code and timestamp on
the instructions turned out to have come from Harry Kim, sometime
between 10 and 20 years in the future. She'd known, then, that
something must have gone wrong with the drive, that Kim must have come
back in time to save them. But she hadn't *felt* it. Not like this.
It was an axiom of her time in the Delta Quadrant that she never gave
up. She had single-mindedly sought a way to get her people home, no
matter what. Oh, there had been decisions she'd made to forgo a
possible route because the price was obviously too high or the danger
evidently too great, but she had known of the possible risks with the
slipstream drive, and she'd overlooked them, despite Tom Paris'
warnings, because she'd wanted to get home so badly. Kim and Torres
had both thought it would work, and she'd chosen to trust them over
Paris because it was obvious that Paris himself wanted to believe them
and not himself; he had brought Kim's suggestion about using the Delta
Flyer to her attention in the first place. And because she'd wanted to
get them home. And because she'd wanted to *go* home.
And she'd killed them all.
She'd known there was a risk. But she hadn't seriously *believed* in
it. Not the way she'd have believed in a Borg cube being a threat, or
Viidian ships, or the Devore. Even though physics was her field, she
had believed that somehow, her own force of belief would get them
through a dangerous situation, as if she had some power to bend the
laws of probability to her own will. She hadn't articulated it to
herself that way at the time, of course, or she'd have realized how
ridiculous it was. But in comparing her memories of the bio-mimetic
Janeway to the memories she herself had experienced, with the
knowledge that if it hadn't been for Harry Kim sending a message
through time, the same thing would have happened to her crew as
happened to the bio-mimetic Janeway's crew... it was the same thing.
She'd done the same thing, both times. She hadn't seriously wanted to
believe in a physical threat she and her crew couldn't overcome, if it
stood between her and getting home.
And she'd gotten them all *killed.* Janeway stood up and paced. This
was worse than the memories of the mimetic Janeway, because as much as
that person had believed herself to be Kathryn Janeway, Janeway
herself knew she wasn't. That incident hadn't happened to the real
her, only to a person who was an identical copy. But this incident had
been all her. And the fact that the sequence of memory for the
difference had been so short, that so much of that incident had been
part of her own memories already and it was only the small piece
containing all of their deaths that Kim's transmission through time
had overwritten, made it seem far more real, far more visceral than
the bio-mimetic copy's death. This time it had been her, specifically,
decisions she had known she'd made before she put the ball to her
head, that had killed them all, and if it hadn't been for Kim changing
the timeline -- which, she imagined, Starfleet might have attempted to
stop him from doing, given their beliefs about how time worked and the
Temporal Prime Directive -- they would all be dead.
She'd thought it was a strength, that she had never given up, that
she'd exploited every opportunity she could to get them home. But she
had that luxury only because she hadn't gotten them all killed. And,
in fact, she *had* gotten them all killed. Twice. But one hadn't
really been her (but if it had really been her, a small voice reminded
her, she would have made the same decision), and one, she'd gotten a
do-over by the grace of the future Harry Kim. Had her single-minded
determination to get home been a strength, or a deadly flaw?
What about now?
The Q hadn't explained to her why she couldn't go home in any greater
detail than to suggest that it was a bad idea to set the precedent
that the Q might bring mortals back from the dead, and it might end up
in people worshipping them... which she didn't take seriously as a
threat, and she couldn't believe they took it seriously either. But
they agreed, unanimously, that she should not go back. Even Junior
wasn't willing to send her home or let her send a message. She had
been convinced that she should find some way around their prohibition,
some means to get back home or at least transmit a message... and part
of the reason she'd been so confident in her belief was that she'd
been so confident in her determination to get home, and that had
worked out fine. Being doggedly determined to achieve something had
generally had good results for her. Except that it hadn't. At this
point, given that she'd gotten them all home once, and gotten them all
killed twice, one could even argue that her determination had been
more detrimental than beneficial.
She sighed. She was going to have to give this more thought. And take
in more of these memories. She needed all the information she could
get.
//She's very surprised to see the man she was sent to capture running
around on her ship. She's even more surprised by his wild story about
a temporal anomaly fracturing the ship into different timelines. When
he takes her hostage, she lets him, despite his sudden declaration
that his serum is poison, because the likelihood that Chakotay,
commander of the Maquis ship *Val Jean*, has snuck aboard Voyager
despite Tuvok being embedded as her spy in his crew, is actually
significantly less in her opinion than the possibility that he's
telling the truth. Who would ever make up a story like that, anyway?
As she and Chakotay travel around her ship, encountering numerous
things that will happen in her future, she becomes more and more
convinced that she's got to prevent this future coming into being. Her
CMO is going to die. Presumably others. She and her crew will be
stranded in the Delta Quadrant. They're going to encounter Borg,
macroviruses, and apparently so many incidents where some sort of
alien incursion knocks everyone unconscious that Chakotay isn't even
sure which one this is, when they run into it. And then there are the
two crewpeople she doesn't recognize, one of whom is the daughter of
her crewwoman Samantha Wildman, who report that she and Chakotay died
seventeen years ago. If she doesn't find some way to pull the entire
ship into her time frame, there will be disaster after disaster and
many of her crew will die.
Chakotay points out the beneficial things that have happened in the
future she hasn't seen yet -- the rescue of two Borg and their
transformation into valued crewmembers, the rehabilitation of the
angry Maquis half-Klingon woman into one of the best chief engineers
in Starfleet, young Ensign Kim uncovering his own genius, Tom Paris
redeeming himself... for that matter, the Maquis crew integrating with
her own, learning to work together with Starfleet again.
He intrigues her. She's been slightly obsessed with him, the target of
her mission in the Badlands, and she's starting to think that maybe
that obsession isn't entirely about bringing him to justice. Of
course, she loves Mark. It's ridiculous for her to imagine that she
might fall in love with a terrorist... but if they're stranded in the
Delta Quadrant with no way to contact home, won't Mark think she's
dead? What will happen to their relationship? What might happen with
this man? She's not a clueless teenager; she recognizes the attraction
she feels as soon as it's safe to feel it, as soon as she knows he's
not an enemy, not now. If she feels it now, before she's begun to live
and work with him for years, what will she feel later? And why the
hell is she obsessing over what's going to happen in her romantic life
in the future, when she's happily involved right now, and issues like
the possible death of many of her crew... and the salvation of many
people who are not currently in her crew, but will be... are at stake?
In the end, she comes down on the side of the Temporal Prime
Directive. She doesn't have the right to try to change a future she
knows so little about, not when it's already happened, from the
perspective of the person telling her about it. If the plan works, the
future they saw where Tuvok died, presumably the precursor to the
future where the two crewmembers who would be children or unborn now
told her that she had died, won't happen. Even Chakotay doesn't know
what's going to happen after that, but he seems confident. Everyone
she meets trusts in her to save them, to help them, to get this
problem solved. Is that the answer? That whatever happens in the
future, she'll be able to meet the challenge?
The last thing Chakotay tells her before he leaves for his own
timeline is that although they have become close, "there are some
barriers we never cross." She knows what he means by that, and smiles
wryly. Well, that's too bad. But hopefully that means that Mark will
know that she's alive, and wait for her. She knows that she'd never
give up on him, no matter how long they are separated, unless he gives
up on her and moves on.
"See you in the future," she says, and Chakotay vanishes.//
Well. That was different. Actually rather pleasant, in comparison to
so many that involved her own death. Technically she supposed she had
died in this one, in one of the timeframes, but presumably had died
the instant they hit the anomaly, because Q hadn't given her any
memory of it. Perhaps her own memories of the anomaly appearing in
front of them, and the energy discharge it had emitted, just hadn't
gone any further forward than that. In the timeline she remembered,
Chakotay had given orders to Torres to deflect the pulse moments
before it occurred; presumably in the original timeline, she'd been
killed instantly. In any case, she didn't remember it.
It was funny. Her previous self had been so confused by the time
jumps. Before the Delta Quadrant, Janeway had never been involved in
time travel. By now, with all her multiple sets of memories and her
knowledge of the multiple temporal loops, and the experiences she'd
been allowed to keep of time travel such as her experiences with the
*Relativity*, she would have been much more adept at handling the
shifts between timeframes. It was too bad she couldn't go back and
redo it with what she knew now, she thought, and smiled to herself,
because of course she didn't actually want to do that. What she
actually wanted was to be out in the universe again, having
experiences like that one, with the knowledge she had now, and the Q
had made it clear that they didn't think that was a good idea.
She hadn't realized how early she'd felt an attraction to Chakotay.
When he'd been the Maquis leader she'd been thrown into the Delta
Quadrant with, and he'd been as prickly and mistrustful of her as she
was of him, she'd kept her guard up around him. As they'd settled into
a working relationship, it had been a *working* relationship, because
she wouldn't betray Mark. But the Chakotay she'd been dealing with in
the first two years in the Delta Quadrant wasn't the Chakotay of seven
years in the Delta Quadrant, the one she'd met in the past in the
flashback she'd just had; his far greater level of comfort and
familiarity with *her* must have allowed her to open up to him in a
way she didn't remember doing, or at least not that quickly, in the
timeline she remembered.
She put the ball down next to her on the couch, and stood up.
Chakotay. When they'd come back to the Alpha Quadrant, he'd been
dating Seven; she'd had no idea he was doing so, or that he was
serious about it, until Admiral Janeway from the future told her that
they were going to get married. That had hurt, but she'd gotten over
it. Admiral Janeway obviously wasn't bothered by it; she had talked
about Chakotay and Seven's marriage, and the devastation of Seven's
death, as if it simply hadn't occurred to her that her past self might
harbor feelings of her own toward Chakotay. And then that timeline had
been erased anyway -- well, not erased, if Q was telling the truth,
but at least, the path had changed -- and Seven had broken up with
Chakotay shortly after returning to the Alpha Quadrant, saying that
she had too much work to do in integrating herself into Federation
society to work on learning how to have a romantic relationship at the
same time.
She and Chakotay had talked about it, after he and Seven had broken up
amicably. The relationship between an Admiral and a Captain in
Starfleet was theoretically just as much a superior-subordinate
relationship as a Captain and First Officer, but admirals didn't have
the one-to-one relationship with captains that captains and first
officers did. There were many admirals, and any of them could command
any captain, and usually their commands weren't actually coming from
them anyway but were being transmitted from a decision made by the top
brass. There were a lot more checks on the power of admirals to misuse
power against captains than captains to first officers, because
captains and first officers were out there in space together, whereas
usually admirals were at home and captains were in the field.
They'd thought that perhaps it would work. She needed to settle into
her role, to figure out exactly how much power she did have and how
this was going to work. He needed to stand on his own feet -- a former
Maquis made captain, he'd have to prove himself without rumors that he
was sleeping with an admiral to get his crimes swept under the table.
They'd been together once, in Venice, but he was going back into the
field as *Voyager*'s captain, and they couldn't very well make the
relationship public yet. So they'd had to put it on hold, at least for
a little while. And now a little while had become forever.
She had promised Chakotay that she'd meet him in Venice, for the
anniversary of the day they'd acknowledged their feelings for one
another by consummating their relationship, finally, taking that
irrevocable step toward being lovers instead of just friends. She'd
thought that nothing would prevent her from making that rendezvous...
because she hadn't thought about dying, any more than any other
healthy mortal did. But she hadn't made it. She'd gone to the
supposedly dead Borg cube to study it, despite Lady Q's cryptic
warnings, three weeks before she'd been supposed to meet with Chakotay
again, three weeks before they would most likely have become engaged
or at least announced their relationship to friends and family. And
she'd been assimilated, and then she had died.
She wondered about herself and Chakotay in the alternate future. Had
Admiral Janeway (she still could not think of herself as Admiral
Janeway, although she had been an admiral for two years before she
died) lost any romantic interest in Chakotay so long before she'd
returned that she'd forgotten how her former self felt? Had she felt
intensely guilty over Seven's death because she'd been jealous of
Seven when she died, enough so that she'd been willing to go back and
change time? Had she found another lover, so the memory of the
feelings she'd never consummated for Chakotay had faded into the
distance of time? Had it been too painful to bring up? Had she been
secretly hoping that if she got Janeway and Voyager back to the Alpha
Quadrant before Chakotay married Seven, that what *had* happened would
happen and Seven would leave Chakotay, leaving him free for her
younger self?
Well, there was a way to find out, she supposed, looking at the ball.
This one intimidated her. Twenty-six years was half again her life.
All the experiences she had lived through had changed her; these extra
memories had changed her. How much more would the extra memories of
twenty-six years change her?
She was tempted to put it aside. Ignore it. Did she really need twenty-
six years of a future that would never happen? Did she need to see
Seven and Chakotay die, see Tuvok descend into dementia?
But she had to know. What would she have learned in the Delta Quadrant
if she'd stayed those sixteen years? How had her previous self found
the way home? Why had she been willing to violate the Temporal Prime
Directive just to save three people? Those were *her* memories, even
though she'd never experienced them because she'd looped through time.
She needed to close the loop.
She sat back down on the couch, and put the ball to her head.