Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [114]
She took his hands into hers. “And I want to spend it with you, Harry Kim. I feel a connection between us, a real potential. I literally can’t pass up that potential. That’s what I need you to understand, Harry.”
Harry could hardly bring himself to meet her eyes. His own eyes were too blurred with the threat of tears. He pulled away. “Karah… I wish I could give you what you need. I really do. But… I’m just not strong enough.” He got a little distance from her, enough that he could bear to look at her. “I would love for you to be part of my life, Karah. But-but all I can think about when I look at you is how soon you’re going to be gone from my life forever. It just hurts too much. I can’t… I can’t stand to let you get too close.”
He quailed at the look in her eyes. “I know it’s selfish of me, and I feel terrible about-about having to let you down. But… I just can’t stop thinking about what’s going to happen. So I couldn’t make you happy. I’d just make you miserable. Believe me, you’d be better off giving up on me and finding someone else. I’m… I’m really sorry.”
Marika studied him grimly. “I’m sorry too, Harry. Sorry for you. It’s so easy to think up excuses not to live your life. Believe me, I know from experience. But I also know… how much it costs you.”
A short warp hop brought Voyager to its destination star comfortably ahead of the Voth cruiser, using the star’s L4 asteroid cluster as a “duck blind.” The star was a young, hot B9 giant, a good candidate from which to “draw energy.” Janeway was curious to see how the Voth would do this. And they didn’t leave her waiting long. The cruiser popped into the system on conventional warp drive, closer to the star than Janeway would risk with a Starfleet drive. “I’m reading gravimetric and EM fluctuations,” Harry reported as the cruiser swept in toward the star. “Increasing turbulence in the photosphere-a vortex is forming, Captain!”
But Janeway could see it happening on the viewscreen. They were light-minutes away, but the ship’s subspace sensors revealed it in real time. As the Voth cruiser soared over the star, a tightly spinning column of blue fire rose up behind it, trailing it like a kite’s tail. “That’s one fancy ramscoop,” Tom observed.
“It’s more than that,” Harry said. “It’s like the magnetic and gravimetric lines of force are getting drawn into the ship as well as the plasma. As if the star’s gravitational potential energy is being siphoned off.”
“Sounds like a plausible first step in opening a transwarp conduit,” Janeway observed. “Begin the multispatial scans.”
The telemetry from the probe supported Janeway’s conjecture. Over the next few moments, space and subspace near the star began to distort in complex ways. “Why go to all the trouble?” Tom wondered at one point. “We’ve seen them go to transwarp without needing a star.”
“This way probably saves energy,” Chakotay said. “The Voth are a conservative people; they wouldn’t like to expend more resources than they need to.”
“Besides,” Janeway added, “forty thousand light-years is a long trip.”
It soon became evident that the Voth ship was indeed taking gravitational energy from the star to power the conduit. The loss of energy meant that the star would fall into a lower orbit around the galactic center, but that wouldn’t be noticeable for a few million years.
“Uh-oh,” Harry said. “I’m getting feedback from the probe-the Voth may have detected it.”
“Keep it scanning. We need whatever data we can get. Tuvok, yellow alert, ready on shields.”
But as Chakotay had said, the Voth were disinclined to waste energy by coming