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Turning to Chakotay who sat at her left hand, she saw the firm set of his jaw and knew he shared her concerns.

“Commander,” she asked, “is it possible to retrieve Tuvok without boarding the array?”

“Seven of Nine assures me it is not,” he replied evenly. “But don’t worry. Harry thinks we should be fine.”

Janeway caught the faint flicker of a smile. She trusted Chakotay as she had never trusted another first officer, and she had served with her fair share of fine and eminently capable ones. She did not doubt for a moment that in her absence, he had evaluated every possible course of action at their disposal. If he had chosen this path for them, odds were it was the safest and quickest way to accomplish their goal.

“That’s good enough for me,” she replied with a wry smile as the ship continued to rock and buck.

Scanning her readouts of the array, she asked, “No shields… no weapons?”

“Apparently not,” Chakotay replied. “There are a number of unusual alloys present in the hull and interior of the array. It’s possible that they provide sufficient defense against conventional weapon attack.”

“But anyone who wished to destroy the array wouldn’t have to target the construct itself. A properly targeted photon torpedo would destabilize the singularity and their structural containment systems,” Janeway theorized. “You would think at the least they would have created a countermeasure for that.”

“Self preservation, perhaps,” Chakotay suggested.

“What do you mean?”

“If you were willing to destroy the array by targeting the singularity, you would also have to be willing to die in the attempt,” he said.

“No you wouldn’t,” she argued. “You’d just launch the torpedo and go to warp… oh,” she said, as the simple brilliance dawned. “You can’t go to warp within the system.”

They both paused as Janeway added new information to the fragmented picture she had created in her head of the alien or aliens capable of creating the array and, for all she knew, the entire Monorhan system.

“That’s one anomaly of the system we’ve yet to explain,” Chakotay said finally. “If we’re right… if the entire system was created by some alien design, and if part of the purpose was to protect the array…”

Janeway picked up the thread. “The evolution of life on Monorha was unexpected. Since it shouldn’t have happened, we’ve been operating on the premise that it was a flaw in the design. But if the designers knew that life would evolve… if, in fact, they intended it… then the placement of the white dwarf which kept the Monorhans from detecting the array might only have been the first level of defense. Making warp travel within the system impossible could be the second.”

“We picked up a transmission from the array sent by the rih-hara-tan of a Monorhan tribe. Her name was Assylia,” Chakotay informed her.

“Do we know anything else about her?” Janeway asked.

“No.”

“But the ship carrying the Fourteenth Tribe only left Monorha fifty years ago, right?”

“Yes, and the message has been transmitting for almost that long.”

“So it’s possible they’re still there,” Janeway hoped. Whatever else they were about to find on the array, Janeway’s limited experience of the Monorhans told her that they could be rational, when they wanted to be. At this point, they could use all the allies they could get.

Finally she asked, “What was the message?”

“It’s hard to say definitively, but the suggestion is that they believed the array to be Gremadia,” he continued.

“Their mythological holy land,” Janeway added pensively.

“The rest of the message was a little disturbing,” Chakotay finally said.

“Go on.”

“The last words were ‘turn back.’ “

Janeway watched as the view of the array’s docking bays engulfed the entire viewscreen. Within moments, they would be on board.

“It’s a little late for that now, don’t you think?” she offered.

“I do,” he agreed.

“B’Elanna found the cause for the explosion in sickbay. The Key to Gremadia, the gift Kaytok gave me before we left, is made up of sporocystian remnants,” Janeway told him. “It’s literally the remnants of thousands of Nacene,