“Not a one,” Farkas replied.
“Very good. It has been a pleasure speaking with you, Captain. Thank you for your time.”
VOYAGER
“Resume the log,” Captain Chakotay ordered.
Admiral Kathryn Janeway, commander of the Full Circle Fleet and the only officer present who outranked Voyager’s captain, lifted her fingers from the table ever so slightly. Seven registered the gesture to belay Chakotay’s order and refrained from initiating playback. Since they had gathered in Voyager’s briefing room, the officers present had already watched four times the entire series of events leading up to the apparent destruction of the Galen.
“I presume that vessel does not correspond with anything in the fleet’s database?” Janeway asked of the room. In addition to Seven, Chakotay, Commanders Paris and Torres, Counselor Hugh Cambridge, and science officer Lieutenant Devi Patel were all assembled around the briefing room’s table.
Captain Chakotay seemed to barely register the question. Commander Torres, the fleet’s chief engineer, was the first to reply, “No, Admiral. There are minimal markers that suggest Borg origin, but we’ve never encountered a vessel capable of completely altering its entire configuration like that. Honestly, are we even sure it is a vessel?”
In the hours that had passed between the event itself and the commencement of this meeting, Seven had begun her own cursory review of the logs and made a few notable observations. The time had not been sufficient, however, for her to thoroughly analyze them. She did not doubt that as they spoke, every single officer on duty was busy scrutinizing the logs, nanosecond by nanosecond, and that additional data would be at the senior staff’s disposal shortly.
Still, Seven offered, “While the ship’s database would not have characterized the substance that attacked Ensign Gwyn on a nearby asteroid and subsequently began to transform the shuttle Van Cise as a vessel, there are significant similarities between it and the ship in question.”
“Meaning we have no idea what we’re dealing with at all here,” Torres said.
Janeway’s gaze settled on the former Borg mission specialist. “We’re not far from former Borg space,” she said, her low voice resonating in the range of gravel that typically indicated extreme exhaustion. “Did they ever encounter a ship like this?”
Seven shook her head. “No, Admiral. Nor did they record observing anything similar to the unusual living alloy that attacked the shuttle.”
“Don’t you mean ate the shuttle?” Commander Paris asked.
“Casual observation certainly suggested that,” Seven replied evenly. She could well imagine the torment Paris and Torres were suffering. Lieutenant Harry Kim was more like a brother than a fellow officer to them, and Lieutenant Conlon had been close to Commander Torres as well. For her part, Seven had barely begun to reconcile herself to the apparent loss of Galen’s CMO, the Emergency Medical Hologram known as the Doctor. She simply could not imagine her continued existence without him and therefore refused to acknowledge the reality until a final verdict on the events portrayed in the logs had been rendered.
“At this time it is impossible to accurately characterize the alloy based upon the data our sensors were able to collect,” Seven continued. “Whether we were witnessing metabolism or a form of subatomic transformation remains an open question.”
“In this case, I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction,” Lieutenant Patel piped up. Among those assembled, she and Seven were the only individuals who had closely observed the substance in question, Seven on an asteroid and Patel in a chamber below the surface of the planet DK-1116. Patel had barely survived her encounter, risking her life in an attempt to make certain that the data she and her team had collected on their away mission to one of several biodomes present on the surface was recovered by the fleet. At the time her choice might have appeared to be a youthful indiscretion or an extreme attempt to attract the attention of her commanding officers. While Seven could not speak to the emotional motivations of the lieutenant, she had already concluded that Patel’s choice to sacrifice herself in favor of transmitting the data had been a defensible calculation. That data was already proving invaluable in their analysis of the strange new world the fleet had chosen to study only a few days prior.
Patel continued, “The Edrehmaia substance is something we have never imagined as a possibility. We don’t know if it is naturally occurring or a product of centuries of genetic manipulation. While we have not been able to sample it, we know that it can integrate both simple matter as well as human and alien DNA into itself and create new forms with them. But more important, it is the most efficient energy storage and release system I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t be surprised if its structure is based on quantum scales.”
“That’s quite an intuitive leap,” Janeway noted.
“Perhaps,” Patel agreed. “I’m simply searching for a theoretical framework that incorporates all of the evidence we currently have at our disposal.”
“Fascinating as these hypotheses may be,” Captain Chakotay interjected, “can they help us understand what just happened or why of all the ships present, it chose to destroy the Galen?”
There was an edge to Chakotay’s question that did not go unnoticed by the group. Seven suddenly remembered that this entire endeavor, altering course to examine DK-1116 and the combined exploration and shore leave in which the crew engaged while there, had been Chakotay’s idea. He’s blaming himself for this, she realized.
“It is strange,” Janeway said. “Galen was the smallest ship in the fleet and her defensive capabilities were the weakest. That said, the energy present in that beam could likely have done the same to Vesta had she been the target.”
“Or Voyager,” Paris added somberly.
“From a tactical perspective, it makes no sense,” Seven agreed. “Therefore we should consider other ways in which Galen was unique.”
“I don’t care why they did it,” Chakotay said. “I just want to know where to find them.”
Seven turned her head to briefly study Chakotay’s face. His eyes were haunted and there was no trace of the
