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“All right,” he said, “so in order to escape, we have to loosen the pin.”

“That’s where I’m going. We have to shrink the white dwarf, kill it, stop the radiation.”

“Which will save the Monorhans,” Tuvok said, nodding his approval.

“And if we shrink it enough,” Harry said, “we can slip out in the gap.”

“Precisely.”

Chakotay sighed resignedly. “It’s a wonderful idea: shrinking a star. Any ideas how to do that?”

“There’s only one way I know,” she said. “We have to make some trilithium.”

Chapter 16

“Gora, my grandsire,” Kaytok began, “was an unusual person. Unusually intelligent, unusually persuasive, unusually…unusual. You could say that he was the most famous person in his generation.” They trudged along in silence for several seconds and B’Elanna wondered if she was supposed to make some kind of comment.

“You must have admired him very much,” she said.

“I didn’t know him well enough to admire him,” Kaytok replied, then snorted and kicked a small rock with the toe of his boot. B’Elanna, surprised that the Monorhan could see well enough to target a stone, let her visual receptors relax to human-normal and saw the eastern sky was beginning to grow lighter. “I won’t go into all the background details,” Kaytok continued, staring intently at the patch of ground a meter before them. “It’s all about religion and not a little about politics. I’m really not the person to give you an impartial account.”

“Don’t worry about being impartial,” B’Elanna said. “We all have our stories.” And, she added silently, you only have a little more time to talk. They were less than two kilometers from the shuttle now.

“I’m sure that’s true,” Kaytok said. “But there aren’t many like mine. My grandfather helped convince a lot of people that they should leave the planet and find a lost city built by…well, that’s the part they always had trouble explaining. Built by who? Built for what? And what would everyone do when they got there?” He threw his hands up in the air. “But enough people had heard this story enough times that they never doubted it would be a great idea to go there.”

“That’s impressive,” B’Elanna said, and meant it. “How many people are we talking about?”

“Not everyone who wanted to go could go,” Kaytok explained. “Space travel is difficult—I guess you know that—and the very old were asked to stay behind. Also, people in poor health, though I think Gora might have promised some of them that he would figure out a way to come back and collect them after he made it to Gremadia.”

“The mythical city?”

“Right. He’d come back and get them because in Gremadia they’d be able to cure any ailment these people might have. See how it works?”

“Sure,” B’Elanna said. She understood perfectly: Kaytok believed his grandfather had been some kind of trickster or confidence man. “But I’m guessing he managed to get a lot of people to come with him.”

“Almost ten thousand.”

B’Elanna whistled appreciatively: a ship that could carry so many people. She had, of course, seen bigger in her time, but these had been massive transports moving the immense replicators and gigakilos of raw material used to create colonies virtually out of thin air. “What happened to them?”

“Nobody really knows,” Kaytok said. “They left orbit successfully. They made it past the Blue Eye, which was considerably less active than it is right now, and then the radiation from the Eye made it impossible to communicate with the ship. Not that many people wanted to.”

“Not you?” B’Elanna asked. “Not your parents?”

“My sire—Gora’s third child—went along. My mother stayed here with me and my sister. She didn’t think going off into space with two young children was a good idea.”

That may be the understatement of the year, B’Elanna thought, but kept the comment to herself. She had never thought very highly of the practice of Starfleet allowing families to travel on the Galaxy-class ships. They walked for several minutes while she waited for Kaytok to say