Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame by Diane Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

his hesitation.
    “Reg told the Doctor everything,”
he said.
“And the Doctor told me.”
    “You'd think I'd have earned their loyalty after all these years,” Janeway complained, not without a grain of truth.
    “They care about you too much to let you do this. And so do I.”
    Janeway held up her hand before he made a direct command to anyone on his bridge and had her beamed aboard. “On one condition—you let me explain why I'm doing this.”
    “Done. Prepare to beam over.”
    * * *
    Janeway hardly had time to walk into Harry's—Captain Kim's—ready room when he laid into her.
“Chronexaline? A Klingon temporal deflector? Miral Paris in Klingon territory at your order . . . Chakotay's funeral, the tenth reunion . . . Admiral, it doesn't take a sixth-grade graduate to figure out what you have in mind. You have no idea what the consequences would be!”
    “I know what the consequences are if we do nothing,” Admiral Janeway said. “So do you.” Suddenly empassioned, she leaned forward. “I have a chance to change all that!”
    “If Starfleet command knew what you were trying to do—”
Kim cut himself off.
    Janeway took a moment to glance around Kim's ready room. A Kal-Toh game, a few photographs, and a weathered hockey stick showed her that while Harry might be a captain now, he was still in part the young man she had know so many years ago. “You haven't told them?”
    “The Doctor and I decided to keep things in the family.”
    She understood his problem from both sides. He was a Starfleet captain now, sworn not to do the bidding of his former captain, or even to look after the well-being of shipmates past and present, but to oversee the welfare of the entire Federation. His job was not to consider how the past had mutilated the present, but to defend the present as it had become.
    Yes, what she had in mind was a fabulous risk. Everybody in Starfleet knew how touchy these experimental missions could be. But they had been executed before and had worked out—if you could believe the logs of heroes and dreamers . . .
    “What about your crew?” she asked. After all, he had a new “family” now.
    “I told them I needed to take you back to Starfleet medical because you'd contracted a rare disease.”
    She smiled. “I hope it's not terminal.”
    “No,”
he said.
“But it's been known to affect judgment.”
    “I know what I'm doing, Harry.”
    “Do you? Can you say with absolute certainty that it'll work? Because if you can't . . . even if it weren't a violation of every rule in the book, it would still be far too risky.”
    Well, that was the obligatory argument, the one he must make by rote, the most obvious and clichéd of scoldings. At least it was out of the way. Risk had never been their problem. They had eaten it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every other day. None of the
Voyager
crew would be put off by such a claim anymore. Risk? Who was he kidding?
    She found herself smiling at him. As he watched her expression, he started to twitch.
    “What?”
he asked.
    “Oh, I'm . . . remembering a young ensign who wanted to fly into a Borg-infested nebula, just to explore the remote possibility that we might find a way home . . .”
    “If I remember correctly,”
he pointed out,
“you stopped me.”
    She nodded, caught in her own strictures. “We didn't know then what we know now.”
    “Our technology might have improved, but—”
    “I'm not talking about technology. I'm talking about people. People who weren't as lucky as you and I.”
    He was starting to waver. Janeway could read his expression. Harry Kim had no poker face at all. He might be a starship captain, but when he found himself dealing with the woman who had been
his
captain for virtually his entire life—well, he hadn't been in that command chair long enough to cancel out the schoolteacher effect.
    And there was more . . . he knew that she would be doing the same thing if he were one of the unfortunate among them. Their