Caretaker - L. A. Graf [41]
She glanced back at Paris and Chakotay, but saw only the same confusion in their eyes. "Tell us what you're looking for." She turned to face the hologram again with what she hoped it would recognize as open honesty. Or, at least, a facsimile of same.
"Maybe we can help you find it."
"You?" It sniffed in amused derision--a frighteningly human sound.
"I've searched the galaxy with methods beyond your comprehension.
There is nothing you can do." Sighing, it looked down at its banjo, and Janeway noticed with a start that all the strings were broken.
"You're free to go. If it's ever possible to return your people, I promise you I will."
"That's not good enough," Chakotay growled, and Janeway spoke over him in frustration.
"You've taken us seventy thousand light-years from our home! We have no way back unless you send us--and we won't leave without the others."
The hologram stood and hugged its banjo to its chest, staring off toward the duck pond and the swollen sun beyond it. "Sending you back is terribly complicated," it sighed. "Don't you understand? I don't have time...." The bright pond faded, swallowing the trees behind it, then, the lowering sun, then the sky. "... not enongh time..."
Then, somehow, before Janeway had fully registered the fading of the light or the disintegration of the landscape, brightness took over where the artificial world no longer stoodAnd she was back on board the bridge of Voyager, facing the other four members of her landing party with no idea what to say to them, no idea what had brought them here.
No idea what to do.
* He didn't hear their voices so much as feel them.
"He's regaining consciousness..."
Then the light flared painfully bright in front of his eyes, and Kim realized he was seeing it through his lids, burning through the pink tissue and black dreams. He flicked his eyes open, only to be instantly sorry when the brilliance burned past pain and seared the back of his skull. He wanted to tell them to move the light away, but couldn't force more than a hoarse moan past his lips.
Still, the brightness receded on the heels of his thought, and the pain washed aside as he blinked his vision clear.
A face swam suddenly into focus above him. Above me? He was lying on his back. The awareness came abruptly, like a lightning flash. He was lying on his back, on a bed, and he was cold. And the warm face bending over him belonged to a man he didn't know, a smooth, beautiful man who could have been young or old if not for the wealth of wisdom in his large eyes. He smiled at Kim, and asked gently, (How do you feel?)
Terrible, Kim thought. I can't even see your lips move. But he made himself take an unsteady breath and say, "What am I doing here? Where am I?"
Something very much like unhappiness flashed across the man's face, and he turned a look toward someone on his right. Kim followed his gaze, and saw a woman with the same indeterminate yet beautiful features.
She took the man's shoulders and steered him away as she moved to stand beside Kim's bed.
It occurred to him without warning that he was in some kind of hospital. The smells--antiseptic yet sick--and the colors--heartless and drab--gave the place away as much as the overly calm and practiced behavior of this woman and all the others in the too-big room.
"Please, don't try to move yet." Her voice purred pleasantly, but the intonations sounded false somehow, not quite right. "You are very ill."
"Ill?" He didn't feel ill. Confused, maybe. Frightened, yes.
He pushed up onto his elbows and tried to kick himself free of the ice-green sheets tangling him to his bed. "There's some mistake," he tried feebly to explain. "I'm not--" Then he saw the thick knots of flesh distorting his hand and arm, and his voice constricted into a tiny cry.
What's wrong with me? Kim had never seen such grotesque masses on anything still purported to be alive. He jerked open the neck of his gown, found even more thick swellings