String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [105]
“Stop that!” the gruff and ageless voice from the chair commanded. “You don’t know what you’re doing. None of them do.”
“But…” Kathryn started to protest.
“Give it to me!”
And with that, the misshapen planet flew from Kathryn’s hands, and with it went her ability to understand not only what she had been doing but why she had cared to do it at all. She watched, fascinated as the planet flew into the hands of the creature in the chair and evaporated into countless threads, which were busily woven into the ever-expanding tapestry.
Kathryn thought back.
The beginning.
The strings.
And now… the fabric of the universe.
She studied the tapestry more closely and realized that the edges crawling toward her were starting to fray. No matter how fast the creature in the chair sewed, it seemed some inevitable chaotic force was determined to unravel its work.
The imbalance.
“PHOEBE!” Kathryn shouted at the top of her lungs.
Phoebe rose from her position at one of the hundreds of workstations. Taking the steps that separated them two at a time, Kathryn rushed to her side.
“Are these your people?” the captain demanded.
“Yes,” Phoebe nodded.
“And that thing in the chair?”
“It is also of us.”
“What I did… with the planet… or what I thought I could do…” she stammered, struggling to find the right words.
“Is all within our grasp,” Phoebe finished for her.
Kathryn didn’t know which was worse, the ignorance or the arrogance she saw before her.
“And you are the Nacene?” Janeway asked.
“Before we opened the gateway, we did not understand that there were others. We did not call ourselves anything as there was no need to differentiate ourselves from any other sentient life-form. Only those who remain in your space-time construct understand that term as you do.”
“This power you wield… you enjoy it?” Kathryn demanded.
“It is of us. It is what we do,” Phoebe replied.
“But it is dangerous,” Kathryn said slowly as if she were trying to explain quantum mechanics to a very small, very stupid child.
“To you, certainly,” Phoebe said. “But we can undo what has been done.”
Janeway remembered the Caretaker, the first Nacene she encountered. She remembered how he had dismissed her as a “minor bipedal species.” Given what she now knew… what it was to be Nacene, she could hardly blame him. But she had never imagined hundreds or thousands like him, randomly experimenting with the fabric of space and time, matter and antimatter, life and death, simply because they could.
“Who is the Nacene in the chair?” Kathryn asked.
“They are the Others… the ones who locked themselves inside our former home when the gateway was closed.”
“The gateway…?” Janeway said, and as she did so, realized that Phoebe could be referring to only one thing… the entire artificially constructed Monorhan system.
Phoebe smiled, pleased at her pupil’s progress.
“The gateway is no longer stable, is it?” Janeway thought aloud. “When we collapsed that star and the singularity was formed… the singularity that is growing larger by the microsecond… we broke something we didn’t even know was there, didn’t we?”
“You couldn’t have known,” Phoebe said. “What you experience as ‘Monorhan space’ is unstable in ways you do not fully comprehend. Its instability is now unacceptable. The initial imbalance was temporarily corrected by closing the gateway, but I, and many others, believed that the patch would not hold. Those, like me, who remained in your construct did so in an honest effort to solve this problem, and now we require your help.”
Kathryn hated to rush to judgment, but based on what she had already seen, she had a hard time imagining herself helping Phoebe or her people do anything. The only being she had ever encountered with anything approaching their destructive capability was Q. But for all of his irritating arrogance, he had never done anything to her knowledge as massively careless as the Nacene.
Finally she asked, “Why must I help you?”
“Because you are the only one who can.”
Chapter 13
Chakotay hadn’t spent much