Kat sat perfectly still. Well, it was easy, she'd simply explain to this woman...
...who had never met an alien before meeting Neelix Junior, the half-Haakonian, half-Talaxian son of your favorite cook's sister and the admiral who led the conquest of a sizable portion of his homeworld...
...that she had been in an open, polyamorous relationship with a Bynars pairlette named 9981 and 9982...
...to a woman from the 1930s...
...a pair of women, that is. Female Bynars.
Kat opened her mouth. She just needed to find the right place to begin explaining this. But instead, she closed it. "Kat?" Lindy asked, curiously.
"Oh, uh...well, uh..." Kat said, rubbing the back of her neck. She had been able to talk down a megalomaniac Augment. She should be able to explain this properly. But instead, her brain just started to throw up the image of Lindy turning away in confused disgust and leaving.
You're catastrophizing, sister, Phoebe whispered in the back of her mind while Kat finally managed to get out a lame: "It's complicated."
"Don't know I know that," Lindy said, sighing wistfully as she looked away from Kat and towards the hovering ship. "I still can't believe seeing things like that."
"You...you don't actually get used to them," Kat said, distractedly.
"Really?" Lindy asked.
"Oh, yes. It...it's kind of something we try and keep in the back of our mind. We have very powerful things under our control. We have responsibilities to use them - that ship out there could destroy this entire planet in a few minutes." Kat nodded to the USS
Voyager. "Without even trying particularly hard."
"Jesus," Lindy whispered, her voice reverent.
"You know, the last time I saw a ship like that, in a situation like that was in the old historical photographs of the Organian War," Kat said, thoughtfully. "Though, they were building orbital defenses, not a research base."
"Who were the Organians?" Lindy asked. "Some other group of aliens like those, uh, whatcha callems? Klingons?"
"Kind of," Kat said. "See, the Organian War was actually
against the Klingons. And it was started by the discovery of...well, of an M-class planet with a population in the few billions and a relatively modest technological infastructure - though, mostly agricultural."
"So, like us?" Lindy arched an eyebrow.
Kat felt a deep sense of relief at the conversation moving away from uncomfortable, personal topics.
That's because you hate talking about yourself. And you call me reclusive, Phoebe said, her voice prim and proper and ever so slightly judgmental. Kat forced herself to not roll her eyes, lest Lindy get the wrong idea from it. "Actually, quite similar to you, yes. It drew the two local powers out - the Klingons, so they could conquer the place. The Federation so they could offer a place in the Federation to them."
"So, conquering them but nicer," Lindy said, her voice dry.
"...well, uh..." Kat coughed. "The galaxy's a dangerous place. The Federation just tries to do what's right. Sometimes, that's murky. Sometimes, we have to ask people to join before we normally would - and the Organians were an example of that. We had two battlefleets in the general area - thirteen of the biggest heavy cruisers, thirty frigates, and maybe fifty odd escorts and support ships and transports, all of them arrayed against three Klingon fleets. They had the numbers, we had the tech. And the point of the spear was the USS
Enterprise, under Captain Kirk." She paused, half expecting to see Lindy's eyes widen, as most people in the Federation would. Then Kat kicked herself for being an idiot. "Kirk, uh...he's...he's kind of a famous navy man. A legend."
"Like...Nelson?" Lindy asked, hesitantly.
"Kind of!" Kat said, brightening. "So, the
Enterprise was there for forward recon and...well...best efforts aside, the Klingon and Federation fleets engaged one another over the planet. The war lasted thirty six seconds."
Lindy winced. "That bad?"
Kat smiled, wryly. "The Organians weren't actually terran-equivalent. They were higher life forms who had taken it on themselves to mediate the dispute between our astrostates. Everyone who tried to touch their consoles felt a red hot burning - we had hundreds of ships full of enough weaponry to shatter a gas giant and no one could flick the switch to shoot a damn thing. We
had to work out a peace treaty with the Klingons, then and there. It has lasted to this modern day." She spread her hands.
"Wow," Lindy said, softly.
"And to this day, armchair historians have been
furious about it." Kat's grin was playful. "You cannot believe how many people run Organian War Simulation Games. It's almost as popular as World War 2."
"Damn. Wish we had these Organian guys around," Lindy said, her voice soft. "I mean. I hope none of those neighbors out there have noticed little old us yet."
"Don't be so sure," Kat said, quietly.
Lindy's brow furrowed.
"The Klingons ran a string of mining operations called Penthes - Rura Penthe, Durath Penthe, Qu'la Penthe, at the time. Prisoners - both political and civil - were sent there to be worked to death chiseling dilithium out of the ground. Nearly half two million of them died before we got the system shut down via diplomatic channels in the 2320s."
Lindy frowned, processing that, when Kat's combadge blipped. She touched it. "Janeway," she said.
"Janeway, it's Wacoche," the sound of the
Val Jean's voice was grainy and crackly, thanks to being bounced through a relatively sparse dusting of microsats in a world that still hadn't quite figured out that pumping pollutants into the atmosphere was a bad fucking idea. They could have used subspace transmitters, but shifting everyone in Khan's Empire off their subspace transmitters and back onto radio was taking time and causing a great deal of bottlenecking and irritation. The reason was simple: They were surrounded by greedy, vulture neighbors who would see this world...just as the Klingons and the Federation had seen Organia, as nothing but a prize to carve up between their imperial powers.
Janeway suddenly wished she had the 2nd and 3rd fleets. Even if the Constitution class was woefully out of date and her support ships had been aging and creaking and nearing obsolescence even in the 23rd century, it still would have been nice to have
some numbers on her side. For
once.
She shook her head and said: "What's up Brian?"
"We've...found something. You're going to want to see this."
Janeway nodded. "Be there in a bit." She stood up, and smiled at Lindy. "Sorry, buisness."
Lindy stood, grinning wryly. "It's okay," she said. "I'll be heading down to the construction site. Your holodeck is prepared for me."
"What are you doing in the holodeck?" Janeway asked, laughing.
"Learning to fly a shuttlecraft. Obviously," Lindy said.
Janeway blinked at her.
"Don't look so shocked," Lindy said. "Your Mr. Kim has me learning worker bee piloting. I want to help with construction."
"R-Right," Janeway said, trying to banish the alluring image of Amelia Earheart in a Type-10 shuttle, divebombing a Kazon attack cruiser with a spread of micro-photons. She didn't manage it before the image turned into Lindy bursting into flames as intersecting ion cannon beams met her shuttlecraft. She shook herself and said, despite herself: "Be careful?"
"It's a magic room." Lindy snorted. "How dangeorus can it be?"
And then she leaned over and kissed Janeway on the cheek.
Then she was off, down the street, humming.
***
Harry Kim was trying to get out the door and to work. The only problem was, well, Harry Kim seemed to be cursed to either feast or famine. An over serious boy in his youth who struggled with serious anxiety disorder and doctor phobia (a bad combination, all things considered), he hadn't exactly been swimming in girls during high school or the academy. Now?
"Come back to bedddd, Harry!" Soria said, lifting her head off her pillow, her arm holding up the blanket to reveal her sleek, pink, tailed, winged body. Her breasts were currently being cupped, shelved, and generally played with in a decidedly pornographic fashion by Cate, the split-dimensional robot girl who was laying behind her.
"I can't!" Harry said. "I need to get to the bridge!"
"Booo!" Soria called at him, but before Harry could get to the door, Princess Lyan emerged from his sonic shower and leaped onto him, kissing him so fiercely that Harry collapsed.
Harry's combadge blipped. "Mr. Kim, where are you?" Tuvok's voice asked as he tried to wriggle away from the delightful experience of being snogged by an alien princess. He managed to get his lips free.
"Just, uh, on my way!" Harry choked out.
When he got into the turbo-lift, he found it was occupied by the short, hunched, cane ridden Neelix Jetrel Haaktriar, who smiled brightly at Harry.
"Uh, good morning, Lieutenant," Harry said.
"Same to you, Lieutenant," Neelix Junior, as the crew of the USS
Voyager called the alien visitor, said. He paused as the turbolift whirred. "So, uh...I've been meaning to ask." Harry felt his stomach drop slightly and knew he must have missed some lipstick somewhere. But then Neelix Junior asked: "What is that curious necklace that Miss T'are wears? I've never seen her without it?"
"Oh! It's a pheromone masker," Harry said as the doors opened and he stepped out, onto the bridge. "Orions emit a pheromone that can induce arousal in essentially any carbon based life form."
"How eminently unnecessary," Neelix Jr. said, quietly.
"Aww, thanks!" T'are said, startling him as she turned from her console.
"Just speaking the truth, my lady," Neelix Jr. said, giving her a bow.
T'are giggled. "You know what they say about size differences!" she said, her voice chipper as she turned back to coms. "Everyone's the same height laying down."
"A woman after my own heart," Neelix Junior murmured, while Tuvok - who was on duty as acting captain - did his best to glare at everyone without showing a single sign of emotion. Harry Kim took up his post while T'are settled back into her seat, her voice a quiet, almost melodic hum as she spoke instructions to the work crews on the ground, her eyes flicking from her communication set to the spooling arrays of instructions - bringing up and translating technical documents on the fly for people who had barely begun to grasp the idea of electro-mechanical computing.
Harry Kim, though, was on sensors. They weren't getting perfect resolution, but he did want to keep an eye on...
He frowned.
His fingers played along the console. "...we're getting a coded subspace transmission," he said. "Two of them. They're ciphered, but I've run a translation on them. One of them is Haakonian, one of them is...Talaxian."
"Fascinating," Tuvok said, walking to his console. "Can we crack them?"
"Not without a lot of work, sir," Harry said, frowning. His eyes drifted over to Neelix Junior. "...or maybe the codes."
***
Janeway stepped into the half finished building of the Imperial Field Hospital in Alexandria, past the two hoplite guards that had been tasked to protect the front doorway from the crowds of people that thronged outside, every day, beseeching the 'gods' for new magic. Janeway found the whole situation in Alexandria distasteful - even if the chance to meet Cleopatra was nothing to toss up. Khan had conquered it with ease, incinerating a few massed infantry units and cavalry detachments in a few seconds with a single light flier, then declared himself as a god and began to work his will on the place through local puppets and a dusting of imperial officers. Even with the Empire now 'playing nice', the boot hung heavy everywhere.
Wacoche was waiting for her inside the plasticrete building, the air tasting almost shockingly clean after the human stink outside. He nodded to Janeway. "It's right over here," he said, walking with her into a large wardroom. Here were dozens of people - most of them being treated free of charge using the impossibly primitive 20th century medicine that Khan's Empire had access to, which was still itself even better than the downright antediluvian medicine they had had access to before. It was still not good enough for some of these people, though...and these were sicknesses and aliments that they had gained
after the Strangeness had...
Corrected them.
Janeway and Wacoche came to the final bed, which was fenced off by a few curtains. She stepped in and then frowned at the Okampan man in a blue starfleet uniform, with a medical badge. He nodded. "Captain!" he said, then sighed. "...it's started."
Janeway felt her blood run cold. "What do you mean it started?"
"I mean the...hypothesized...shut down?" The Okampan - Janeway wracked her brain and...came up with Lieutenant Xess. "This man?" He gestured to the man - barely more than a boy, he looked about sixteen, he was frozen in place, arm outstretched, eyes glassy. "he stopped moving a few days ago, and his family called us in. It took some time for the report to filter in. It's...not rigor mortis or paralysis. It's as if his cells have locked into a...quantum super position." He patted the boy's shoulder. "We can't even take samples, Captain."
Janeway frowned. "How is this possible? The Doctor and T'are-"
"She said two years was the max," Wacoche said. "There are almost, what, three billion people on this planet? There's going to be some people ahead of the bell curve and some people behind it."
Janeway nodded. "This is very bad."
"Don't I know it," Wacoche said. "What's the plan, though?"
---
CURRENT TRUTHS: "Two Years To Doomsday"
CURRENT MOMENTUM: 0
What is the plan? And please use a plan vote, you wonderful people! <3
[ ] Focus on building this research bases and start collecting these cases for intensive study.
[ ] We have to work faster. Prep an away mission for the deep core expeditions.
[ ] Write In
And also, what does harry do?
[ ] try and crack the codes quietly
[ ] Ask Neelix for help on the codes
[ ] Ask Neelix Junior for help on the codes
[ ] Ask Neelix AND Neelix junior for help on the codes
[ ] Write In
