String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [30]
“Can I have it?” Phoebe asked.
Janeway was obviously taken aback. The real Phoebe wasn’t one to think before she spoke, but even so, this might have seemed unusually blunt.
“No,” Janeway replied, with a half-smile. “Phoebe, it’s a sphere. If da Vinci wants you to explore realism, I think he’d be a little disappointed with such a simple subject. Don’t you want something a little more challenging?”
“I suppose,” Phoebe shrugged. “I didn’t think it was that important to you. I mean, you can’t even remember what it’s called.”
Janeway considered the Key. “It’s not the object, Phoebe,” she said gently. “It’s what it represents-the gratitude of an entire planet.”
“I understand, Kath,” Phoebe replied.
“But if you seriously want to use it… if it inspires you… go ahead. Take it to Master da Vinci and see what he says.”
Phoebe considered for a moment. Borrowing the Key would not suit her purposes.
“I’ll think about it,” she finally answered. “Can we have dinner tonight?”
Janeway gave her sister’s hand a warm squeeze. “I certainly hope so… but I wouldn’t count on it.”
The Key was barely an arm’s length away from Phoebe, but it might as well have been buried beneath a frozen ocean on the other side of the galaxy. It was still vibrating, but at a rate so slow that the human eye would not normally detect it.
Once Janeway had left, she placed her hands around the sphere, absorbing some of the energy it was displacing. The effort cost her more than she had anticipated. Casting herself beyond the limited subatomic particles that were organized to form the substance of the ship and its crew, she searched for the source of the disruption the Key was responding to.
It didn’t take her long to discover the abominations. Trapped between this dimension and the existence Phoebe had forsworn long ago, they waited patiently for someone or something to guide them home. Somehow Tuvok had also been alerted to their presence. He could not have grasped the faintest fragment of their truth, but nonetheless she sensed the rapidly unraveling tether that bound his mind to theirs.
Their existence changed everything. She set out immediately for the array that she and so many others had devoted much of their existence to building and was determined to spend the remainder protecting.
For the moment, Janeway and the Key would have to wait.
Chapter 4
Seven of Nine rarely found anything shocking. Every significant fact of time, space, and quantum reality that could be calculated was contained within her mind. As a Borg, she had been privy to the experience of billions of others, and added their knowledge to her own. Though she was now severed from the hive mind, she had retained every facet of their collective knowledge, culled from the millions of sentients who had been assimilated into the Borg collective.
But there was no other word to adequately contain the disbelief with which she viewed the latest sensor logs Voyager had compiled as it neared the array. Although she no longer sympathized with the Borg imperative that perfection was attainable through assimilating unwilling individual life-forms, she took a moment to consider the fact that had the Borg ever encountered the array she was studying, and been able to successfully assimilate it, they not only might have achieved perfection, but would certainly have become a force against which no civilization in the galaxy including the Federation could have stood for long.
Scrolling through the data summarized on the padd she had brought with her to the captain’s ready room, she was almost at a loss to determine where exactly to begin her report.
“Seven?” the captain asked, her tone clearly communicating the concern awakened by the hesitant confusion plain on Seven’s face.
“I was able to compensate for the gravimetric interference that was blinding our sensors to the array’s interior,” Seven began, “and have compiled a complete schematic.”
“Go on,” Janeway encouraged.
“It is difficult to know where to begin. The array