Disclaimer: Paramount, ye great and mighty, please do not suuuuuuue... Paramount, mum o' mountains, for Star Trek weeeee loooooove yoooooooooou!

AN: Due to many things, but mostly to the fact that I was distinctly dissatisfied with this story when I first posted it, I have decided to have another crack at it. Originally published under the title Shon Ha'Lock, it has now undergone extensive editing and, well, actually, even the core concept is changed, as well as how it ends. I decided that I wanted to know what happened in the alternate reality, and that there was a hell of a lot that I just let slip by in this one. That's why I like publishing on the computer. Hit a key, and start over. Simple as that.

And many many thanks to T'Prahn, a writer over in the TOS, who opened my eyes to many things, and made me brave. Go read her stories. She is a force of nature. So, onward.

Harry Kim stood at attention even when no one was watching. His deep brown eyes betrayed none of the boredom he felt, just in case the icy grey eyes of his captain might light on him from her command chair. Still, it was nearing the end of shift, and there was no harm in thinking, with a small portion of his thoughts, about the concert he had been programming into the holodeck for weeks.

The hardest had been the timpani and the percussion. While Harry had never struggled with music, except for his own beloved struggle of choice with the clarinet, he had never taken the time to study the bare rhythms of the drums. Writing his own composition had been a wondrous and often frustrating challenge, but the percussion most of all. Where did the beats hit? How fast? How heavy? Or maybe he should be thinking more of a delicate touch?

"Mr. Kim?" His eyes shot up, and found himself looking into the uncompromising grey eyes of his captain, her eyebrow raised in a flawless, slightly uncanny imitation of her Vulcan security chief. Harry realized that he had been drumming his fingers against the console, and he stopped, aghast, his golden skin flushing violently pink. He swallowed, and pulled himself as far to attention as he possibly could, and decided to play innocent, cheeks flaming and everything.

"Yes, Captain?"

She frowned at him. "Perhaps you think your watch shift is a little too long, Mr. Kim?"

"No, ma'am." Short and sweet. But she held his eyes for a moment, and he could hear his heart thundering in his chest, and he knew with a sudden, brilliant clarity that he would die for this woman without a second thought. That sort of loyalty put everything in perspective. His posture relaxed slightly, and she relaxed with him, and nodded.

"Good. I need you to run a full long-range sensor scan before you go off duty, Ensign."

"Aye, Captain." Just like that, he was absolved of all wrongdoing. He blinked very slowly as he keyed up the sensor sweep. After four years, he might be getting the hang of this. As he scanned carefully through his screens, something tickled just on the edge of his sensor-enhanced vision, and he frowned. "Hmm." He punched up the strength of the long-range scanner, and frowned, his creased brow making him look almost old enough to be on the bridge. And then his head tilted, and his captain noticed.

"What is it, Harry?" She was keying up her own console as she spoke, but waited for his answer, knowing that he was the one to make the first call. Janeway knew how to delegate, and she knew who her experts were, and how to stand back and watch them work. Still, when Harry made humming noises, it was bound to be something at least mildly interesting.

"Spatial anomaly. Not a body. Not an object. Not gaseous." He was running through his logs, and she waited patiently, allowing him to think out loud. No matter how much she wanted to begin peppering him with possibilities. It had been a long, boring shift. She had just been thinking about how much she wanted to go back to her cabin and take a long, luxurious bath in the hottest water she could stand, and then wrap up in a robe and read a novel, possibly skipping dinner altogether and just having coffee. Wicked thought, that. But now, all thoughts of a bath were gone. Well, most thoughts. Behind her, she fancied she heard the audible snap of Harry's thoughts as he came to a conclusion. "It appears to be a subspace rift, Captain."

"Natural or artificial?"

"Unknown."

"Send a probe."

"Aye, Captain." The deep crisp voice of her tactical officer answered her, and she could feel the curiosity in his tone. She tossed him a soft, commiserating smile, and he met her eyes with imperturbable calm. "Probe launched." Tuvok's near-black eyes never left hers. She wondered of he realized how intense he looked. Unlikely. Vulcans probably never felt the need to practice facial expressions in the bathroom mirror. She gave him a short nod, and he turned back to his console.

Well.

She turned and tried to follow the progress of the probe. It was likely that she would learn more watching the blackness of space than the dark, expressionless mask that was, as of late, all that Tuvok had shown of himself in public, and even in private when she consulted with him. She wondered if it had anything to do with her increasing comfort and familiarity with Chakotay, and her lip twitched involuntarily. Not going down that garden path, Kathryn, she thought to herself. And, if she was entirely truthful, her old and trusted Vulcan friend had been frequently shelved in favor of Chakotay's less experienced but often less painful counsel in these last months. The more she thought about it, the more ashamed she felt. Perhaps she needed to have dinner with Tuvok. Perhaps she owed him considerably more than a casual explanation.

"Contact in 10 seconds. 5 seconds. Contact with spatial rift." Expecting a flood of data, Janeway tensed. Harry tensed. Tuvok might have shifted. Tom Paris held steady at the conn.

"The probe is not sending any data, Captain." Harry's voice expressed puzzlement without irritation, and Janeway felt a small bloom of pride in his control, even over her own perplexity.

"Equipment malfunction?"

Tuvok worked for a moment, and then shook his head. "The probe is working perfectly. It is simply not transmitting."

Janeway frowned, her quick mind flying past a hundred possibilities to the most likely probability. "The probe was shut off?"

Tuvok nodded, having already come to the same conclusion. "Yes, Captain. It appears that we are dealing with someone who not only understands our technology, but has our operating codes."

The senior staff on the bridge all breathed the name of a ghost, and Janeway swore that the ambient temperature dropped a few degrees. But it was Harry Kim who said her name aloud, his voice like a prayer.

"Seska."