By the third day of the survey, Tom Paris had established the rules of the Delta Flyer, and he recited them to Harry Kim every morning over breakfast like a pledge.

"One. The pilot picks the music. Two. Nobody touches the pilot's chair. Three. No clarinet."

"You've said that every day."

"And every day you look at that case like you're thinking about it." Tom pointed a fork at the long black case wedged behind the aft bench. "I built this ship, Harry. I know exactly how the sound carries."

Harry, who had brought the clarinet because a two-week survey mission was a long time and he'd been working on a piece, said nothing, and ate his eggs, and looked at the case.

The third member of the crew, Ensign Rhea Lomax of stellar cartography, did not look up from her console. She was twenty-six and very serious and had been assigned to the mission because she knew more about deuterium signatures in stellar nurseries than anybody else aboard Voyager, and in three days she had spoken perhaps forty words, most of them numbers. Tom had privately bet Harry a week of replicator rations that he could get her to laugh before they got home. So far he was losing.

The mission was simple. Voyager was running low on deuterium, as Voyager was always running low on something, and there was a cluster of young stars eleven light-years off her course, wrapped in gas, that Lomax thought might be worth a look. The captain couldn't spare the ship for a two-week detour. She could spare the Flyer and three people. Bring back something we can use, she'd told them in the shuttlebay. And bring back the Flyer in one piece, Mr. Paris. I know it's your baby. It's also the only one we've got.

So far it had been, as promised, boring. Beautifully boring. They'd spent three days drifting through clouds of glowing hydrogen the color of a sunset, taking readings, while Lomax filled up isolinear chips with numbers and Tom flew figure eights and Harry ran the sensors and tried not to think about his clarinet.

That was why, when the comm board chimed at 1140 on the third day, all three of them jumped.

*

"That's a signal," Harry said, leaning over his console. "Low power. Very old, from the look of the carrier. Coming from inside the cluster, about two million kilometers ahead."

"A beacon?" said Tom.

"Could be. It's repeating. Some kind of automated—" Harry stopped. His hands had gone still on the panel.

"Harry?"

"It's in English."

Tom swiveled his chair around, which was against rule two, but it was his chair. Even Lomax had looked up.

"That's impossible," Tom said. "Nobody out here speaks English. Nobody for a very, very long way. Put it on speaker."

Harry didn't move.

"Harry. Put it on."

Slowly, Harry touched the panel. There was a hiss of static, the wash of an old signal that had been crossing empty space for a long time, and then, through it, a voice. A man's voice, tired and patient, repeating a message he had clearly repeated many, many times.

"…is a message for the Federation starship Voyager. If you can hear this, do not approach the cluster. I say again, do not approach. You won't be able to leave. This is Ensign Harry Kim. If you're hearing this, I'm sorry. I tried. This is a message for the Federation starship Voyager…"

Nobody said anything. The Flyer hummed around them. Outside the viewport, the glowing gas of the nursery drifted past, rose and gold, beautiful and vast and silent.

Harry was staring at the speaker as though it had reached out and grabbed him by the collar.

"Harry," Tom said carefully. "Tell me that's a joke."

"I've never said that," Harry said. His voice was very quiet. "Tom, I've never said that in my life."

And at her console, Ensign Lomax, who had spoken perhaps forty words in three days, turned around in her chair and said the forty-first.

"Yet."

~ end of Chapter 1 ~