Homecoming Page 13

  “We discussed my novel,” he said. Which was true. “I’ve apparently got quite the following.”

  “Readers are one thing, fanatics are another,” Juarez said. He seemed about to say something else but Young interrupted.

  “Sir, you’d better come take a look at this.”

  Juarez went over to the computer. His brown eyes scanned it, and he frowned.

  “Download it to the tricorder and then delete it from the computer,” he said.

  “Excuse me,” said the Doctor sharply, “that is private property.”

  “Not when it deals with treason,” Juarez replied. “You’re under arrest, Doctor, for possible conspiracy in a holographic revolution. Your pal Baines has staged a Federation-wide strike of all sentient holograms. Things have come to a grinding halt, and it’s part of my job to get things up and running again.”

  “What happened?” cried the Doctor.

  “You’ll find out in time. Please put on your portable emitter and come with us.”

  “If I refuse?” The Doctor didn’t know the finer points of Starfleet law, but he suspected that he was not being treated the same way that a flesh person would be. He didn’t think their actions were legal.

  Juarez sighed. “That’s the trouble with you holograms, always getting above your programming. Let me put it to you this way. If you don’t accompany us voluntarily, we can download you and take you with us by force.”

  The Doctor stared, shocked. He couldn’t believe it. He was a Starfleet officer! But Juarez looked like he meant what he said. Slowly, the Doctor reached for his portable emitter and put it on his arm.

  * * *

  It soon became apparent that there was much worse in store for Janeway and the other diners at Spanish Moss than having their dinners spoiled. There was a huge, milling throng of people at the transport station, and Janeway had to push her way through. Someone yelled at her, “Wait your turn!,” but she ignored him. She soon realized what the holdup was: There was no one operating the transporters. The holograms whose duty it usually was were standing back from their stations, their arms folded, stubborn looks on their faces. First the restaurant and its building and staff, and now the transporter operators. How many holographic programs had Baines broken into?

  She refused to allow herself to follow that train of thought and kept shoving through the crowd. She almost ran into one of the holograms and glared angrily at him. He glowered back at her.

  “Are you doing this of your own free will or has your program been tampered with?” she asked.

  He said airily, “You’re not going to find out.”

  “If you’re striking voluntarily, you’ll be deleted or reprogrammed, you know,” she said.

  “We accept our fate.”

  Janeway sighed. “You know, this sort of thing is annoying enough when humans do it. Stand aside, then.”

  For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to obey her. She drew herself up to her full height and gave him stare for stare. Slowly, he stepped back, and she slipped up to the transporter console.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” she cried, striving to be heard over the din. “Does anyone here have a familiarity with transporter systems?”

  No one answered.

  “All right, does anyone here want to learn?” No one moved; then Mark shoved his way through the crowd. Kathryn felt pride swell in her. He never let her down.

  “It’s quite simple,” she told him, and gave him a crash course in how to program the transporter. He followed her instructions easily. “Can I trust you to get these people safely home?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “The worst that can happen is that it won’t work and people will have to find alternative arrangements. There are all kinds of built-in safety precautions, so you won’t lose anyone’s molecules.”

  He went a little paler and forced a smile. To show her confidence, she told him the coordinates and strode to the transport area.

  “Energize,” she said.

  She materialized in Tom Paris’s apartment to find it crawling with Starfleet officers, several of whom were pointing phasers at her. One of them was carting off the computer, while two of them were grilling Tom. Still others were taking tricorder readings. When they saw who it was, they relaxed. Slightly.

  “Where’s the Doctor?” she demanded without preamble.

  “They took him, Admiral,” said Tom. The man who seemed to be leading the investigation, if you could call it that, gave Paris a dark look, then rose and went to Janeway.

  “Admiral Janeway, I’m Commander Martin Cagiao,” he said, extending his hand. Janeway didn’t shake it. Cagiao had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “Commander, what’s going on here? Why have you taken the Doctor?”

  “No doubt you’ve heard about the holographic strike,” Cagiao said.

  “I was dining at a restaurant when it happened,” Janeway replied. “No tables, no plates, no servers serving, no walls or ceiling, and no way to get home. I had to stick a civilian friend of mine with the unpleasant duty of transporting about eighty people.”

  “It’s much worse than that,” Cagiao said grimly. “This isn’t a localized event. Think about what we entrust to holograms every day. Maintenance checks and cleaning for equipment of every sort, from buildings to starships. Transporters of every variety. All manner of dangerous but mundane assignments.”

  “Like mining on Lyndarik Prime,” Janeway said.

  “Exactly,” he said, not hearing the warning in her words. “Somehow this Baines fellow has found a way to crack almost all of our computer systems with a virus that makes the holograms refuse to perform the very duties for which they were programmed.”

  “Is it a programming that they can choose to override?”

  “Some can, some can’t. You’ll forgive us if we haven’t taken the time to find out the finer points of this computer virus,” Cagiao said.

  “I would think that would be precisely what you’d be taking the time to do,” Janeway snapped. As Cagiao was about to retort, she held up a hand. “I want to hear what’s going on in a moment, and I’ll offer what aid I can. But first I want to know what has happened to my crewman.”

  “He’s not your crewman any longer, Admiral,” Cagiao said. “You don’t have a crew.”

  The comment was not intended to hurt, but Janeway was surprised at how it stung. He was right. She had no crew anymore. They were all scattered, all individuals, each pursuing his own destiny apart from her, apart from Voyager, apart from the great adventure they had all shared.

  “What did you do?” she said, through clenched teeth.

  “He was taken away for questioning,” Cagiao said.

  “Surely you don’t believe he was involved in this,” Janeway said.

  Cagiao smiled darkly. “It sounds like you came here immediately from your interrupted dinner,” he replied. “It would appear that you yourself thought he might be involved.”

  She did not reply, for he was right. “The Doctor is the author of a holonovel called—”

  “Photons Be Free, we are quite familiar with it. Which is why a team came by earlier. The Doctor confessed freely to having met with Oliver Baines, and we found on his computer the beginnings of another novel in which the protagonist becomes involved in a holographic revolution.”

  His voice was still crisp, but his eyes betrayed his sympathy at her surprise. “We also found a padd that Baines left for the Doctor to read. It’s chock full of rhetoric about the changing times that lie ahead when photons are finally free, and some of those changes put organics, as they call them, at the bottom and holograms as their masters. Surely you agree there was sufficient cause to take him in for further questioning.”

  “I don’t believe the Doc had any part in this!” Paris said loudly.

  Cagiao turned to glare at Tom, and Janeway guessed that Paris was trying his patience. Quickly, she said, “Tom, answer their questions, and we’ll find out what’s behind thi
s as soon as possible. That’s an order,” she said, when he opened his mouth to protest. From another room came a loud wail.

  “That’s my daughter,” Tom said. “Let me go to her.”

  Cagiao nodded, and Tom was permitted to rise. But a Starfleet security officer accompanied him.

  “Commander, it does sound like the Doctor might be able to give you some valuable information about Baines,” Janeway said. “But I’m afraid I have to agree with Mr. Paris. I don’t think the Doctor would do anything to put human lives in jeopardy.”

  “They’re not, not at the moment at any rate,” Cagiao said, “although who knows what kind of riots we’ll get once people realize the full extent of this thing.”

  “May I speak to him?”

  Cagiao shook his head. “I’m afraid not, ma’am. Our orders were quite clear.”

  Janeway set her shoulders. “I outrank you, Mr. Cagiao, and I probably outrank anyone involved in this, so I think you had better—”

  “No, ma’am,” said Cagiao firmly, “you do not, and as I said my orders were very clear. The Doctor is not allowed to speak to anyone until he is released.”

  “May I ask the name of the person who issued this order?”

  “Admiral Kenneth Montgomery.”

  AGE FIFTEEN

  She is the top student in her class and has already been accepted to Starfleet Academy. She has skipped three years and does not mind leaving her classmates behind each time, as she has never made a real friend in her life.

  He wants her to call him Dad, but the owner of the Hand is not her father. And in one of the few acts of rebellion she has ever permitted herself to display, the girl refuses to use the term. He is merely her mother’s husband, and she has learned to turn her fear into hatred. It is a powerful shield, hatred, and she does not quite realize that it does as much damage to her soul as her stepfather has done over the years to her body.

  Her body has no scars. They are all inside. All the wounds have been turned inward, where they fester like an invisible cancer.

  She enters data on her padd, lost in the mathematical equation, buoyed briefly by a reality that is solid and provable and beyond dispute. It is a rock to cling to in the stormy ocean that is her life, a storm that no one else knows of or can even glimpse.

  The door to her bedroom hisses open, and she tenses. Nausea roils inside her. She pretends she does not hear. The owner of the Hand, her mother’s husband, comes behind her. She can smell the alcohol on his breath and she shivers. He mistakes her shudder for one of passion. This is not the first time he has come to her room, drunk and swirling with a dark desire.

  He reaches for her, groping, hurting. The Hand. She despises the Hand. She imagines herself jumping to her feet, her clothing ripped and the bruises and fluids still evident on her body, screaming for her mother, for justice, for an end to something she knows deep inside is dreadfully wrong, dreadfully evil.

  But the words cannot get past the cold lump in her throat, and her body will not move. And the Hands continue their assault.

  Chapter

  14

  IT WAS TOO BAD, JANEWAY THOUGHT as she sat at her computer, that Brian “Red” Grady had been passed over to head Project Full Circle. She knew the jovial, red-haired commander would never have thrown the Doctor in the brig like this. And he was much more pleasant to deal with than Montgomery. But then again, she thought Attila the Hun might be more pleasant to deal with than Montgomery.

  “Admiral Montgomery,” Janeway said to the handsome but forbidding visage on the screen. “You’re a difficult man to get ahold of.”

  “Apparently not that difficult,” he said acerbically. He did not look at all pleased to see her, but she had expected that.

  “I understand you’re holding the Doctor,” she said. “I’d very much like to speak to him.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible, you just don’t want me to,” she said, blurting out her instinctive response before she could censor herself. “May I ask why?”

  “No, actually, it really is not possible,” said Montgomery. “The Doctor has been deactivated.”

  “What?” A chill swept through Janeway. “You haven’t deleted his program, have you?”

  “Of course not. There’s still much valuable information we can get from him in due time. However, he has been deactivated for the present moment.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Obviously I can and have. Are we to continue playing this little game of semantics, Admiral Janeway, or will you be sensible and let me return to my duties?”

  Janeway switched tactics. “You raise an interesting point, Admiral. It was my understanding that you were assigned to Project Full Circle. Chasing down holograms doesn’t seem like studying Voyager’s unique technology to me. How is the Doctor your problem?”

  “He was originally designed to be part of the ship,” was the reply. “He was the EMH—Emergency Medical Hologram, in case you’ve forgotten what the initials stand for. Despite this new technology he sports on his sleeve, the Doctor is as much a part of Voyager as any computer console. He, and all other holograms aboard Voyager, therefore fall under my purview.”

  The expression on his face conveyed the truth—he believed what he was saying. The Doctor was nothing more to him than a warp core or a tricorder—just another piece of equipment aboard a ship. What bothered her the most about his attitude was knowing that, not so long ago, she had shared it.

  “Why are you detaining him?”

  “We have reason to believe that he has been involved in the holographic strike. He has admitted he recognized Baines because he had a little chat with the son of—with him. The Doctor has also been known to stir up trouble with his writing before now.”

  “Come now, Admiral,” Janeway said. “Freedom of speech is one of the Federation’s most honored tenets. You’re not suggesting censorship?”

  “I find it interesting that his sequel deals with a holographic revolution at almost the same time one actually occurs,” Montgomery retorted.

  “By that logic, all murder-mystery writers would be cold-blooded killers,” Janeway replied. “And if you think he was plotting a revolution, do you really believe he’d readily admit that he had ever met Baines?”

  She hadn’t known about that until Cagiao had informed her, of course, but she trusted the Doctor. She knew he’d learned his lesson with Iden. She hoped that Montgomery hadn’t gotten to the ship’s logs about that particular incident, but his next words dashed those hopes.

  “The Doctor has displayed sympathy for holograms before now,” Montgomery said maddeningly. “Certain of your own ship’s logs indicate that—”

  “If you’ve read those logs completely, you’ll know that the Doctor had nothing to do with the deaths of the Nuu’bari miners. While he did disobey orders, his intentions were admirable and compassionate. He wanted to protect people he saw as victims from further harm. B’Elanna Torres testified to the Doctor’s horror when Iden issued the order to destroy the Nuu’bari vessel.”

  Anger flashed in the admiral’s gray eyes. “He aided renegade holograms at a potentially deadly risk to his own vessel. He was indirectly responsible for—”

  And just that quickly, the anger burned itself out. Montgomery sighed, and for a moment looked just like an ordinary, tired man.

  “This will get out sooner or later, I suppose, so you might as well know now. While we don’t know the full extent of what Baines did to access our systems, we do know of a few key entry sites. And we have recordings and witnesses who can put the Doctor at each of those locations.”

  Janeway felt the blood drain from her face. “There must be some mistake.”

  Montgomery shook his fair head and looked almost sorry for her. “No mistake, Admiral. These people swore under oath that he was there, and the recordings show no signs of being tampered with.”

  “The Doctor has been staying with Lieutenant Commander Paris over the
last few weeks, and before that, was with Reginald Barclay,” Janeway said.

  “You know, I’m willing to bet that neither Paris nor Barclay was watching the Doctor round the clock.”

  With a sinking feeling, Janeway knew he was right. In fact, Paris had not tried to hide that he deliberately found excuses to leave the Doctor alone. From the little she had been able to get from him during this brief time, the Doctor was playing nursemaid to little Miral, and Tom, like any parent, was taking full advantage of a trusted baby-sitter.

  A trusted baby-sitter . . . . “Did these witnesses see the Doctor carrying a part-Klingon infant?”

  Irritated, Montgomery snapped, “Of course not. What nonsense is this?”

  “I know that the Doctor was taking care of Lieutenant Commander Paris’s daughter. He would never leave an infant unsupervised, especially not his goddaughter.”

  Montgomery smirked openly. “In light of recent events, I do not share your high opinion of the Doctor’s trustworthiness as a nanny, Admiral. Speaking of the Parises, I need to find B’Elanna Torres. I have a great deal of questions that only Voyager’s chief engineer would be able to answer. Can you put me in touch with her?”

  Janeway narrowed her eyes. “As your security officer so deftly put it, they’re not my crew anymore. I have no idea where Lieutenant Torres is. You might want to speak to her husband.” Who happened to be standing out of sight behind her, but she wasn’t going to do anything to assist this officious man. “You’re trying to change the subject, Admiral. I want to speak with the Doctor.”

  “I told you, he’s been—”

  “Then reactivate him,” Janeway said, a hard edge to her voice.

  “He’s a security risk if activated.”

  “Admiral,” Janeway said, her voice deceptively calm, “if you reactivate him, all you need to do is place him in a holding cell with holoemitters. If he tries to leave, he’ll cease to exist. He’s probably the single most secure prisoner Starfleet has ever had.”

  Montgomery said nothing.