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by Christie Golden

INTERLUDE

THE ENTITY WAS PLEASED WITH ITSELF. AFTER so LONG drifting aimlessly throughout space and time, it had a purpose. A good purpose, a healing one, one that made it feel satisfied and content. It had not known it lacked, or perhaps had forgotten, these feelings until the Presence had contacted it, explained what was at stake, and begged for its assistance.

Dark matter, something simple and innocent of wrongdoing in its natural state, had been twisted. Mutated. Turned to aid evil. Both the Presence and the Entity were searching for it now, gathering it up; rendering it harmless, and helping restore the things it had damaged, sentient or no, to their true and rightful state.

The Entity had helped the Sikarians, the Beneans, the Kazan, and others. It had known these names, these people, these planets, but how? How had it known such things? It tasted curiosity. Another new sensation for something as powerful and yet as formless as the Entity.

On and on it floated, finding pockets of dark matter hidden in a nebula, gently plucking it from a wayward asteroid.

And then it found the Vidiians.

CHAPTER 1

I'VE NEVER CONSIDERED MYSELF THE LITERARY TYPE. WELL, I've now learned the hard way that when you're stuck so far from home that you don't even know where home is, in a civilization that's nothing like everything you left behind, you can go nuts without something that connects you to the life you used to know. So I started this.

The Culilann are a little bit nervous about this writing thing I'm doing. It sort of feels like I'm violating the Prime Directive with the ABCs. But the Culilann certainly know about advanced technology, they just choose not to embrace it. The Alilann-well, suffice to say that if I were with the Alilann right now I'd be writing this on something resembling a padd, not on dried and stretched tree bark. I somehow think the captain would be proud of this.

Ensign Tom Paris paused and stretched his ringers, grimacing as they cracked. He was surprised at how badly his hand was cramping, but he wanted to get all this down. He used his hands all the time on Voyager, but he was learning that operating the responsive controls at his station and grasping a sharpened stick smudged with soot from the fire exercised very different finger muscles.

He continued: My fingers hurt, but here goes, trying to make a long story short. A few-

He paused again. How long had it been? This place, with its slow pace and repetitive days, blurred time for him. And of course, being injured for so long, he'd really been out of it for a while. He thought back to when the strange wormholes had been "following" Voyager, opening and closing like the mouths of some kind of space monsters. No one had suspected that it was the Romulan scientist Telek R'Mor, a man who lived in the Alpha Quadrant dozens of light-years and twenty true years ago, trying to find them at the command of the Romulan Tal Shiar.

What a weird tale Telek had told them, of powerful aliens called Shepherds, and of dark matter being mutated and causing terrible harm. They'd mistakenly beamed Telek aboard against his will, thinking he was in danger. What followed was one of the strangest adventures of Tom's life, and he knew he'd had his share of them. They had known something was dreadfully wrong when Neelix-quite possibly the nicest person aboard the entire ship-had tried to murder Telek R'Mor. It was the mutated dark matter, of course, affecting Neelix's mind. As it had affected Tom's own, as well.

He frowned, and scratched down his thoughts. My personal experience with the dark matter was frightening. It made me completely paranoid. I had hallucinations, lost my enthusiasm for things-it turned me into someone I wasn't. Someone I really didn't like. And it damaged people physically, too.

He thought about the two Romulan scouts who had managed to get aboard the ship, the awful things the dark matter had done to them. He decided he didn't