Chapter 5: The Route Home
The humming in Tom’s skull escalated from a purr to a snarl as Voyager approached the anomaly. It was no longer a sound, but a pressure, a physical warping of thought that mirrored the space ahead. The main viewer filled with the lashing, sickly light. The ship began to tremble.
“Structural integrity field holding at 92 percent,” Tuvok reported, his voice calm against the building groan of the hull.
“Tetryon radiation is spiking. Shields are doing squat against it,” Harry said, fingers flying over his console. “It’s like they’re not even there.”
“It’s a Borg harmonic frequency,” Seven stated, her eyes fixed on her readouts. “Our shields are out of phase by point-zero-one-five microns. Adjusting.”
A slight easing of the shudder. Tom’s hands were damp on the conn. He felt the pull, a deep-space riptide tugging at the ship’s belly. “Captain, we’re getting some serious gravimetric shear. It’s trying to take the helm.”
“Compensate,” Janeway ordered, her knuckles white on the command chair.
“Trying.” He fired the lateral thrusters, fighting the pull. The ship yawed violently. Alerts chirped. It was like wrestling a leviathan. The classic moves—the Faustus Maneuver, the Picard Slalom—they were just theory here. This was raw, ugly physics. “It’s not a corridor. It’s a mouth. And it’s swallowing.”
The decision point vanished. The ragged edge of the wormhole flared a blinding, toxic green and yawned wide. The shear became a hand. It grabbed Voyager and yanked.
The stars vanished.
Sound died. Light fractured into impossible, non-visible spectra that seared the mind. The inertial dampeners screamed in protest, leaving a gut-churning sense of falling in seven directions at once. Tom’s vision swam. The console beneath his hands was melting, reforming, melting again. He clung to instinct. This wasn’t flying. This was surfing a collapsing volcano.
“Report!” Janeway’s voice was a distant crackle through the spatial distortion.
“We are within the anomaly!” Tuvok called out. “Chroniton levels are critical. We are experiencing temporal displacement—multiple micro-fractures along the hull!”
“Engineering to Bridge!” B’Elanna’s voice erupted, sharp with static and strain. “We’ve got a cascade failure in the primary deuterium manifold! The containment field is buckling. I’m reading a massive power surge backfeeding through the EPS grid. It’s gonna blow the whole tertiary bay if I don’t manually reset the flow!”
“Belay that, Lieutenant!” Janeway barked. “Use a repair team with force fields!”
“No time! The surge is cycling every fifteen seconds. I’m already in the bay. I can see the junction. I just need thirty seconds.” B’Elanna’s voice was all fierce, focused energy. The sound of her, doing her job, being a hero. It punched through the chaos and found the hollow center of Tom Paris.
“B’Elanna, don’t you dare—” he started, the husband rising in a panic, but his channel was overridden by the Captain.
“Do it, but be careful. Bridge out.”
The ship bucked again, a colossal convulsion. A shower of sparks erupted from Harry’s console. Through the viewer, Tom saw the tunnel walls—if they could be called walls—contracting like a diseased artery. They were being crushed.
“Seven, I need a stabilisation frequency now!” he shouted, his voice raw.
Her response was cool, immediate. “Modulating shield harmonics to match the Borg resonance pattern. Transferring control to your helm. You must ride the dissonance. Treat the turbulence as a wave form.”
He saw it. A flickering, painful pattern in the chaos. He stopped fighting the bucking and leaned into it. He banked the massive starship like a vintage hydrofoil on a stormy sea, matching the nightmare rhythms. The shuddering lessened from apocalyptic to merely terrifying.
“It’s working!” Harry yelled. “We’re stabilising!”
Ahead, a pinprick of normal star-flecked black appeared. It rushed at them, swelling.
“Exit point!” Tom called.
Voyager shot from the maw of the anomaly like a particle from a railgun. The horrific sensory noise cut off, replaced by the familiar, gentle hum of the warp core and the steady beep of consoles. The viewer stabilized on a field of serene, steady stars. A familiar nebula hung in the distance, a purple and blue swirl they’d all seen a thousand times on long-range charts.
For a beat, there was stunned silence.
Harry Kim broke it, his voice a whisper of disbelief. “Captain… astrometric sensors are back online. I’m verifying coordinates.” A longer pause. The click of keys. Then a soft, choked sound. “Oh my god.”
“Report, Ensign,” Janeway said, her voice tight.
“We’re… we’re in the Beta Quadrant. Sector 001. Captain, that’s… that’s Sol System on long-range scan. We’re home. We’re in the Alpha Quadrant.”
A collective breath was drawn, then held. Home. The word hung in the air, immense, fragile. Tom stared at the stars, the classic constellations of Earth’s night sky scrolling into alignment on his nav readout. Ursa Major. Orion. He should be feeling a surge of joy, a overwhelming flood of relief. He felt nothing but the cold, insistent hum in his mind and a void where his heart should be.
Then the ship-wide alert blared, red and urgent.
“Bridge, this is Doctor. We have a catastrophic emergency in Main Engineering. Multiple casualties. Critical plasma fires. Medical teams, converge immediately.”
Janeway was on her feet. “On screen! Get me visuals!”
The main viewer switched to a hellscape. Engineering was a cave of smoke and actinic blue flame. Crewmen in environmental suits were spraying chemical foam. Part of the upper gantry had collapsed. In the center of it all, where the primary manifold should have been, was a smoldering, fused crater of blackened duranium and crystallized coolant.
Tuvok’s voice was the quietest thing on the bridge. “Life signs in the affected area are minimal and fading.”
Tom’s blood turned to slurry in his veins. He couldn’t breathe.
The comm crackled. It was the Doctor, his usually priggish tone stripped away, leaving something stark and medical. “Captain… we’ve recovered Lieutenant Chapman and Ensign Lang from the periphery. They’re in critical condition. We… we cannot get a clear bio-sign from the epicenter of the breach. The radiation and thermal damage is absolute. From the position described by the survivors… Lieutenant Torres was at the manifold junction when the backfeed surge climaxed.”
The words were precise, clean, surgical. They cut everything away.
“Are you saying she’s dead, Doctor?” Janeway asked, each word a stone dropped into a bottomless well.
A pause. The sound of a hypospray hissing, a frantic beep of a medical tricorder. “I am saying that from the available sensor data and the physical condition of the location, survival is a statistical impossibility. There is nothing… nothing to recover.”
The hum in Tom’s mind spiked, a needle of pure, logical clarity through the roaring white noise that was supposed to be grief. It offered no comfort. It simply asserted a new reality.
Variable removed. The marital construct is terminated.
On the bridge, people were moving, speaking, their faces masks of shock and dawning horror. Chakotay had his head in his hands. Harry was crying openly, silently. Janeway’s posture was that of a statue, her face ashen.
Tom Paris sat perfectly still at the helm. He looked at the familiar, homecoming stars on the viewer. He smelled, faintly beneath the ozone and smoke from the vent, a last ghost of Klingon perfume.
Then he slowly turned his head. His eyes found Seven of Nine across the bridge.
She was already looking at him. Her expression was not one of sympathy, or pity, or shared loss. It was one of assessment. Her head tilted, just a degree. A question.
The hum in his mind formed a word, cool and unmistakable.
Mine.
Tom turned back to the stars, his face as smooth and blank as an event horizon. Inside, the void was complete. It was finally, perfectly, quiet.