String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [138]
Janeway sensed their motion and intent, took what she believed would be her final breath, and placed the Key into the lock.
Chapter 17
There was a faint click as the Key snapped into its place. The moment it did, the pink light was transmuted to orange, then yellow, finally resolving into blinding whiteness.
Janeway’s hands fell to her sides. The first thing she felt was an inexplicable sense of relief. It was as if the weight of a thousand worlds had been lifted from her shoulders.
She thought for a brief moment of Tuvok, and the peace and clarity of his final moments. She could not feel anything so absolute, but in the few seconds that were still hers and hers alone, she did feel something similar as a kind and loving face filled her mind’s eye. It was not the face of her former fiance, Mark, or her father, who had died so many years ago and whom she’d missed terribly since. It was not the face of her sister, stolen by the Nacene she could only think of as “Phoebe,” or the face of her beloved mother, Gretchen.
For reasons only the deepest recesses of her heart knew, the face that rose to her consciousness as she released herself to whatever must come of this choice was the face of her first officer, Chakotay. Perhaps this was her mind’s way of assuring her that she had left her crew in the best possible hands. Or perhaps he was the last person she thought of because his was the heart and spirit that had become the most important if unacknowledged part of her own in the joys and sorrows of the past four years.
And now he will never know, she realized with an overwhelming sense of regret.
But as the light emanating from the Key enveloped her, all thoughts of herself were wiped from her mind. She was lifted from the floor where she had knelt, her arms stretching out at her sides as her legs unfolded. The whiteness surged around her. She felt certain that it was pulling her apart. The tattered remains of the fragile spherical casing that had housed the spores disintegrated around her in a cascade of fiery sparks as she was drawn to the center of the ring and held aloft by the force of the Key.
And then, they were moving through her. One after another, the transformed Monorhans forced themselves into the center of her body. They sought out the impossibly small space between the subatomic particles of her being and passed through like tiny threads through the eye of a needle.
She did not know what awaited them on the other side. But in their passage she knew utter and complete joy. Somehow, they understood the sacrifice that she was making on their behalf, and in the fraction of a second that the essence of each was mingled with her own, she felt their gratitude.
It entered her mind and soul as the most beautiful of songs. Surging to a perfectly resolved crescendo within her, the fragmented and dissonant music that had first called to Tuvok now took its rightful place among the larger symphonic tapestry of the ever-resonating universe.
Phoebe watched this spectacle with rage. Janeway had betrayed her, just as she had attempted to betray the Others. The few spores that remained were drawn in their present form not to the Nacene who stood by, helplessly witnessing the end of their hopes, but to the conduit. Given the choice between the dimension where they had been trapped and that to which their true nature belonged, they sought Exosia, burrowing through Janeway’s chest, unaware that when they arrived, they would immediately meet their destruction.
The exiles who had been left behind were crowding around one another, a mass of confusion. They had chosen to return to the array and enter stasis because they had grown weary of their struggle. None of them would dared have disrupted the spores, but were content to wait patiently for the number to be complete before they attempted to reenter Exosia. Though they were, for the moment, trapped in whatever alien form they