An imbalance of dark matter has placed two realities in jeopardy, causing the separate universes to merge and threatening the stability of both realms. To preserve reality as it is known, the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager ? must defy a cosmic conspiracy and wrestle with shadows of the darkest degree! "Rescued" by strangers who may prove to be more dangerous than his original captors, Chakotay struggles to convince his new hosts of the danger posed by the mutated dark matter -- and the killer, or killers, still hunting the villages where Tom Paris has been left behind. In their own reality, as Harry Kim loses his heart to an enigmatic visitor from the shadow universe, Captain Janeway and the rest of her crew continue their search for the hidden dark matter that could cause the entire cosmos to contract in a fatal convulsion. But whose side are the Romulans really on? And what surprising Þgure from Voyager's past holds the ultimate key to the fate of both universes? Chapter One I've never considered myself the literary type. Well, I've now learned the hard way that when you're stuck so far from home that you don't even know where home is, in a civilization that's nothing like everything you left behind, you can go nuts without something that connects you to the life you used to know. So I started this. The Culilann are a little bit nervous about this writing thing I'm doing. It sort of feels like I'm violating the Prime Directive with the ABCs. But the Culilann certainly know about advanced technology, they just choose not to embrace it. The Alilann -- well, suffice to say that if I were with the Alilann right now I'd be writing this on something resembling a padd, not on dried and stretched tree bark. I somehow think the captain would be proud of this. Ensign Tom Paris paused and stretched his fingers, grimacing as they cracked. He was surprised at how badly his hand was cramping, but he wanted to get all this down. He used his hands all the time on Voyager, but he was learning that operating the responsive controls at his station and grasping a sharpened stick smudged with soot from the fire exercised very different finger muscles. He continued: My fingers hurt, but here goes, trying to make a long story short. A few -- He paused again. How long had it been? This place, with its slow pace and repetitive days, blurred time for him. And of course, being injured for so long, he'd really been out of it for a while. He thought back to when the strange wormholes had been "following" Voyager, opening and closing like the mouths of some kind of space monsters. No one had suspected that it was the Romulan scientist Telek R'Mor, a man who lived in the Alpha Quadrant dozens of light-years and twenty true years ago, trying to find them at the command of the Romulan Tal Shiar. What a weird tale Telek had told them, of powerful aliens called Shepherds, and of dark matter being mutated and causing terrible harm. They'd mistakenly beamed Telek aboard against his will, thinking he was in danger. What followed was one of the strangest adventures of Tom's life, and he knew he'd had his share of them. They had known something was dreadfully wrong when Neelix -- quite possibly the nicest person aboard the entire ship -- had tried to murder Telek R'Mor. It was the mutated dark matter, of course, affecting Neelix's mind. As it had affected Tom's own, as well. He frowned, and scratched down his thoughts. My personal experience with the dark matter was frightening. It made me completely paranoid. I had hallucinations, lost my enthusiasm for things -- it turned me into someone I wasn't. Someone I really didn't like. And it damaged people physically, too. He thought about the two Romulan scouts who had managed to get aboard the ship, the awful things the dark matter had done to them. He decided he didn't want to write that part down. It might have been Telek who got us into this mess, but he was also the one to get us out of it. He was able to track down one of the so-called good Shepherds, Tialin. She removed all the dark matter from our bodies and put it into a small, glowing sphere. She told us that she could give us the technology to do this ourselves, and asked Captain Janeway if she would agree to take Voyager and gather up the rest of this dangerous dark matter. The captain consented. I don't think any of us believed she'd refuse. Again he paused, and shook out his right hand, cursing. It was not cooperating. He would have to wait until later to describe being dragged by Chakotay into this strange place, injured and weak. The aliens here had not greeted them with overwhelming warmth. They had even put him and Chakotay into a pit for a few days. The "Ordeal," they called it, a sort of test to see if he and Chakotay were acceptable to their gods, the Crafters. He didn't remember a lot after that until he got better. Most troubling was the events of the last few days. Chakotay had mysteriously disappeared