Caretaker - L. A. Graf [36]
"Very well. Since no one seems to care for any corn..."
The voice belonged to the aging banjo man, but it was the grandmotherly woman from the house who flashed into existence barely inches from Janeway's face. Behind her, around her, everywhere, the rest of the scenario's farm folk appeared in the same eye blink, and the barn was suddenly crowded with them.
Taking in their pitchforks and angry faces, Janeway suffered a sudden urge to laugh at the tired cliche. Except these angry peasants had already proven themselves too dangerous to take so lightly.
"We'll have to proceed ahead of schedule," the old woman announced in the old man's voice.
Janeway opened her mouth to protest, to question, and found her voice frozen in her throat. Behind the ring of farmers, a low, pulsing hum built like a wave, dissolving the barn's rear wall as though it were the butter on the old woman's corn. Kim gasped and looked away, but Janeway made herself stare at the horror without blinking as she fought to memorize every detail, just in case any of them lived long enough to find the information useful.
A room longer than Voyager's longest corridor extended past the back of the barn and into an unseen distance. Slabs hovered in neat, even rows along either wall, like examining tables in a monstrous mortuary, each holding a naked humanoid body. Tubes and wires and probes depended from the metallic ceiling to pierce the bodies below in more places than Janeway could count--like a life-support system, but with no life remaining in the subjects.
Janeway tried to see what kind of fluids or gases passed through the tubes, but could only focus on the smooth, dark face of the Vulcan three beds away from her.
Light, as white and hurtful as a sun, blasted outward from the holographic farm folk. They shattered into silence and nothing, engulfing all sight and sound, eradicating the barn and everything in it until Janeway felt herself suspended, frozen, fallingAnd then jerking back to awareness on her back. In the chamber.
Staring upward at an array of probes and needles. Janeway tried to struggle, tried to twist aside as the first of the long implements slithered down toward her naked body with a deliberateness that seemed somehow both alive and frighteningly mechanical. Somewhere to her left, Kim screamed. No! her mind railed. I won't allow this! They can't do this to my crew!
Then the probe made its inexorable contact, cold metal against warm flesh, and pushed its way inside her chest despite all her pain and fear and anger. She didn't want to die for it--didn't want to give whoever controlled this awful funhouse the satisfaction of seeing her give up just because it could hurt her. But when the second probe burrowed in past bone and muscle to join its companion, she found that her body gave her no choice. Her mind crashed down into silence even as her soul still cursed their tormentor in every way it knew how.
Chapter 8
She came awake neatly--without fanfare, without trauma. As if someone had flipped a switch in her brain. One moment she was aware of nothing, and the next her eyes were open and the lights were on and there was no jolt or fear or anguish between the two.
Pushing up to her knees, Janeway lifted her head and looked around.
She was in Engineering. Carey and the rest of his team lay scattered around the bay in roughly the same positions they'd occupied before being snatched, some of them sitting and waiting as though unsure what to do, others crawling stiffly upright as if just waking from some uncomfortable sleep. Beside Janeway, the core seal enveloping the warp drive hummed and glowed in placid oblivion. Just as if they hadn't left.
But Janeway knew that couldn't be true.
Climbing to her feet, she slapped at her comm badge as she moved to help Carey stand. "Janeway to bridge. Anybody there?"
"Yes, Captain." Rollins's voice sounded shaky, distracted.
"We're here."
"How long were we over there?"
There was a delay during which Janeway assumed he