Cybersong by S. N. Lewitt Page A

as much harm as the Kazon!
    That clear to her, she began. She had never done anything remotely like this before, but it seemed as easy and natural as walking or breathing. The strange feelings that were without a rational source were somehow separate from the rest of her thinking. She imagined a box around them, an Ocampa party box covered in pink cloth and decorated with fresh white flowers.
    She had been given such a box once, by her parents on the occasion of her maturity. It had contained her great-grandmother’s necklace, her naming bracelet, and a reader-player with all the most obscure traditional songs, each performed and annotated. She wondered where the box and its contents were now. She had had them with her in a bundle when she had taken the tunnels to the surface.
    The bundle had disappeared. Maybe it had been recovered by another of the traditional rebels. Or maybe the Kazon had it, which would mean that the jewelry was sold or adorned some ragged pirate, and that the reader-player was trash. That made her sad in a way that had nothing to do with the strange emotions at all.
    In fact, she could clearly feel the difference between this thought, which came from her own authentic life, and the feelings now wrapped in the box that had nothing at all to do with her.
    She hesitated telling The Doctor. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know she was an empath like a Betazoid. That would make her a thing again, the way she had been in the mines. And she was through with that forever.
    Besides, if the feelings were not hers, she would have to discover whose they were. She was suddenly worried that they were Neelix’s.
    That made sense. They were deeply bonded, and he was central to her life. He had rescued her, been brave for her sake.
    If this was his trouble she was experiencing, she didn’t want to reveal it. Not to anyone. Not ever.

CHAPTER 7
    “We’re in scanner range,” Paris announced.
    “Then take a look, and let’s see if there really are any lifeforms in that—mess,” Janeway said.
    There really was no other word for it. Ship, at least to a Starfleet officer, meant something spaceworthy. Whatever was out there certainly was not. Even from this distance and with all the interference, and the screen jury-rigged besides, it was obvious that this was not something any sensible Federation teenager would buy cut-rate from a Ferengi.
    What was discernible of the metal was dark and matte. It wasn’t black or really blue either, but some indecipherable shade in between. A few markings in bright orange were scattered over the main cylindrical segment, but were so worn and pitted that the original shapes of the letters or images were not clear.
    At least in design it was recognizable. The main segment was a simple cylinder. The other pieces were all curved and curled, and it was impossible to tell what their original alignment on the alien ship had been.
    “It” was too specific, actually. There were several pieces, or things, all different designs as if they had been trashed together in the sector junk heap well after any usefulness had been sucked out of them.
    At least one was ripped open to cold space and the tachyon bombardment that seemed to be coming from the central object in the collection.
    This one was smaller than many of the ships around it, more compact, and looked as if it had taken less damage.
    “Looks like the aftermath of a battle,” Tom Paris said to no one.
    He was right, it did look like the debris left by a skirmish, now ancient and lost to history. Perhaps these warriors had been dead when Earth itself was still covered by primal seas.
    Prehistoric space battles in skies that the Federation had never seen, for planets that might now be as dead and cold as the hulks outside.
    But they were far distant from any planetary base. They were far enough from any star system that supplies were a problem. If this was a moment of truth from the storybooks, it had drifted well away from its