Chapter 1 – Lost and found

The main idea came to me while re-reading The Deep Range by A.C Clarke, then it morphed into something darker. The title is from To Ride Pegasus by Anne McCaffrey.

Note:
EMU = Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Spacesuit for short.
EVA = Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk.

She was floating, free of gravity, free of pressure, the universe turning so very slowly around her. The ship was receding in the distance, like a model toy seen from across a room. Kathryn Janeway, captain of the mighty Voyager, smiled.

"ENSIGN JANEWAY."

Tom's voice echoed around the bridge, one octave below its normal pitch but it was the tone he had chosen that was most important. A no-nonsense, authoritarian tone, demanding an instant response. Anyone targeted by Owen Paris' sharp tongue had better take notice or they got his personal attention until they did.
Tom smiled as he watched as Chakotay sunk a little deeper in his chair while the effect of Paris' voice on Harry was the opposite. His back looked as tightly wound up as when he had introduced himself to Captain Janeway a few months before.

The stuff of nightmares. A hull breach large enough to fly a shuttle sideways had opened up where the screen once stood. Tom had found himself sitting on the edge of nothingness, the shimmering force field the only thing preventing everybody on the bridge from being sucked out in space.
Thankfully, the Kazons had retreated right there and then, leaving the ship licking deep wounds and the crew wondering when the next assault would come.

"What do you think you are still doing out there, Ensign? Taking a stroll?" Tom added mockingly. He had cast the lure into the current. Let's see what it would bring.
A few seconds passed and he begun to worry. He had not thought about the details of what to say. As usual, he was flying by the seat of his pants.

"Cap… Captain Paris?"

Tom let out his breath. Janeway was responding, something Chakotay had not been able to achieve and had seen him rushing to accept the pilot's help.
She did not sound like the calm and self-possessed Captain Tom was used to hear and obey. Her voice was that of a younger and less assured self, more susceptible to be dragooned back to Voyager he hoped.

"And who else do you think it could be, Ensign?" he asked sarcastically.
He winced. He wanted her to obey his voice, not question who was at the end of the comms line. "Don't answer that. Rather tell me what you are doing outside this forsaken lump of tritanium husk that you call a space ship?"

Janeway and Paris had led an EVA team to tackle the numerous hull breaches from the outside of the ship. Isolated in their self-contained space suits, the small crew had lugged unyielding metal plates over the gaping openings and fused them to the intact surrounding hull. The job demanded physical strength to counteract the inertial force imparted to any object in null gravity, and finesse while wielding massive phaser tools. The slow and patch up work was dangerous and exacting, sapping their energy with every hour spent in the forbidding environment.

"I went out on a hull inspection, Captain," Janeway answered, sounding worried. Tom knew too well the effect his dad had on most subalterns and his only son. His smile disappeared as he resumed his impersonation.
"An inspection. Of course," he said with a sarcastic drawl. "And what did you see, Ensign, on this very important inspection? Or have you already forgotten? Because I haven't heard any report from you for some time."

There was no normality to working in a space suit where the senses were either violently assaulted or utterly numbed. Helmet visors always took that tiny fraction of a second too long to adapt to changes in illumination, sending waves of pain rushing behind the eye balls from the blinding light of the powerful spot lights. The alternative was to peer in the night side at the turn of the head. Then it felt like falling into a bottomless hole. Tom was never sure which of the glare or the never-ending blackness was the least nauseating.
Sound was another casualty of EVA work. Dull reverberations from the power tools travelled through the magnetised soles, while the fans and pumps hummed away in the backpack, the comms reduced to the one channel to shut out distractions. Touch was non-existent, transmuted through thick gloves and waldos. The smell of recycled air, sweat and more pungent body odours was hard to forget. Overall, an experience Tom and most space farers hated thoroughly.
Grabbing a few hours of sleep dangling at the end of a short safety cable, the repair crew had only gone below deck to renew the breathing gas exchangers, flush out the sanitation plumbing and replenish the pap pouches that served nutritional snacks with all the flavour of composted cardboard. Painstakingly, the EVA team had repaired all the breaches. There was nothing more that could be done and Janeway had sent everybody back inside while she checked the integrity of the hull for the last time. After three long days strapped in a smelly suit, Paris had finally crashed in his own bed before a very concerned Harry had wakened him up.

"Hull integrity is back at a 100 per cent, Captain. However, I saw plasma venting from the starboard nacelle. As I approached to investigate, I got caught in the blast," reported Janeway.
Tom noticed Chakotay signalling to Tuvok, who left the bridge immediately. The plasma leak might be the cause of the warp core malfunction that a very pissed off Chief Engineer had been unable to re-start. Not the pilot's problem right now.

"And when were you going to let the rest of us know about it, Ensign?" asked Tom, keeping in character. His gamble to use his father's reminiscence was paying off. Janeway was responding to him and describing Voyager while thinking she was back on the Al-Batani replying to Captain Paris. A thoroughly confusing situation, which did say much about Janeway's current state of mind.

"I found myself thrown away from the ship at great speed," Janeway replied. "When I realised what had happened, I applied reverse thrust to stop and then checked on my suit functions. Sir."
At least, she had followed Starfleet protocols. Check the suit first. Locate yourself second. Ask for help third. Except she had never signalled she was in trouble.
Her voice turned dreamy. "I looked around to fix my position. It is magnificent out here. I can see the birth of stars ..." Her voice died down.
Tom closed his eyes. As Harry had suggested to him on their way to the bridge, she had gone space happy and there was no trusting her to be rational anymore.

Every so often, space spoke in whispering tones to a chosen few. There was beauty there, a harsh kind of beauty. Dangerous, seductive.
In a space suit though, one was at the centre of a giant immutable womb made just for you. There were no bulkheads, no sensors, no screens preventing you from touching space. Time disappeared and thoughts about the unimportant obligations of normal life were set aside, forgotten. Those affected lost themselves in the contemplation of the all-encompassing splendour of the universe. Some were eager to share their rapture with those poor souls bound by gravity and duties inside flimsy metal boxes. Others stay silent until their air reserves were gone and their corpses drifted away, preserved for eternity in the cold depth of space.
'Space addiction' was the medical term for the condition. Everyone else called it going space happy. Whatever its name, there was no cure. Since the early days of space exploration, the only sure prevention had been to restrict the time spent on EVA. Not an easy rule to follow when you were 70,000 light years from the nearest maintenance space station and had a minimum crew at your disposal.

Tom did some quick calculations. The Captain had spent nearly three days inside a space suit like most of the EVA team, catching a few hours of sleep here and there. Knowing her, she probably had started on the hull inspection immediately, without a break. That was what? Four, five hours ago?

The timing could not have been worse. The shuttles were still inoperable since the Kazon attack. Even Neelix' ship had taken part in the defence of the ship and had suffered major damage in return. The transporters were offline and the tractor beam useless as external sensors could not see anything as small and slow as a spacesuit until they were recalibrated. Which would take a day, maybe more.
They had weapons, environmental controls and shields. Perfect to protect those inside the ship but not what a lost crew member needed. The Captain would have to come back to Voyager by herself.
Tom corrected himself. She would have to want to come back. If she had enough fuel.

Chakotay moved his hand across his throat and Tom killed off the comms. "Now you've got her attention, tell her to get back. Now," the Commander hissed. Tom shook his head. "With all due respect, we can't just ask her. You've tried that and she didn't listen. First we need to know where she is but it will not be an easy task if she goes all stupid every time she looks around," he said. "Commander, you agreed to let me do it my way," he pleaded.
His face showing only frustration, Chakotay nodded curtly. "Carry on, Lieutenant."

Until Harry had told him the details on how Voyager was missing her captain, Tom had never made the link between the Captain Janeway he knew and Owen Paris' story all these years ago about a freshly minted Science officer who had gone space happy while under the elder Paris' command. As with most of his interactions with his father, Tom had pushed the memory in a corner of his mind marked 'not-to-be-opened'.
He now wished he could remember what Captain Paris had said he told Janeway to snap her out of this silly dream-like state. One thing was sure: Owen Paris had most probably be forceful. Very forceful.

Channelling an Admiral he knew all too well, Tom continued.
Her actions had been thoughtless and unbecoming of an officer in her situation who was to stay with the ship, not go off by herself every time she thought it was a good idea. The ship was not on a holiday at the seaside. Protocols and rules were what was important, not her little stroll.
Or maybe Starfleet rules were too onerous for her to follow? Take Captain Picard for example. There was a model Starfleet captain who fully understood the reasons for sending his Number One into situations that could prove dicey. Picard obeyed protocols and rules. He did not just ignore them when there were inconvenient. And he certainly did not go for all that unscientific crap about the magnificence of the universe.

Harry's jaw had dropped somewhere near his belly button. Back at his console, Tuvok had a permanent eyebrow fixed to his forehead. He was checking the reports from the rescue team, relaying the lack of news to his CO and Tom. Chakotay did not glance at the pilot.

Taking a breather, Tom pondered what he had told Chakotay back in the ready room when he had presented his rescue plan. He had braced himself for Chakotay to laugh at him, to say he was used to Tom being insolent, that it was going to be a breeze for an ex-con to demean one of his superior officers. Instead, Chakotay had accepted the idiotic plan without question. He had not seem angry or dismissive. In fact, he had looked as if he was the one drifting away, with no hope of seeing Voyager again.
When they had returned to the bridge, the Commander had dismissed the maintenance crew still working on the burnt out equipment and had put the pilot in charge, all incoming comms restricted to Janeway's EMU channel. In ten minutes, Tom had made more progress trying to reach the Captain than Chakotay had achieved since realising Janeway had gone walkabout.

However, the good news were beginning to sour. Tom continued the verbal flogging but he was not going anywhere fast. In fact, he felt Janeway slipping through his fingers. He was sure his father must have used the Starfleet angle on her as he had done often enough on his son, if to little avail. Tom knew the Captain; she was a sticker for protocols. She ought to respond to an appeal to procedures and rules. Except now she just laughed at them, for reasons he could not understand and did not have time to dwell on.
Somehow, he managed to get her to switch the suit telemetry back on. A small victory that left Chakotay in a frenzy as the figures scrolled on the screen. The fuel cell was in the red as expected but the bad news was that the EMU primary life support had also failed. Janeway's blood pressure and other vitals were way too low. The secondary pack was operational with less than half an hour of oxygen left. The Captain was not in a good place.

Nothing he said seemed to get to her. She was drifting away from the safety of the ship, getting high reciting poems about the beauty of nature and other such non-sense in a sultry voice that sent shivers down his spine. If his appeals to the captain and the scientist were not heeded, then he would have to make it personal and strike Janeway where it would really hurt.
For that, he needed to become completely insensitive to her feelings because he remembered too well the shame and self-loathing that his father's words could engender. But he could not give up. Not with his dad whispering in his ear about another failure to add to a long list.

With a sense of desperation, he let anger and contempt rise, feeling the blood rush as righteousness filled his thoughts. Janeway was the wayward ungrateful worthless child and he was the uncompromising bastard who was going to get her back in line, no matter what.
Now fully in control of the role reversal, Tom ripped into her. He accused her of sullying her own father's memory, dishonouring the Janeway's name and reputation, calling her a coward unfit to wear a uniform. He listed her poor decisions, starting with the destruction of the Caretaker's array and the casting out the crew to an exile they did not deserve. All because of her.
He cut her off, ignored her, insulted her and let silence stretch when she daydreamed again before reeling her back with more untruths and baseless assertions. He railed against his own words and persisted nonetheless, not letting his eyes stray away from the console in front of him showing the EMU air supply in free fall.

Under Tom's relentless assault, Janeway's ramblings slowed down and she started to react, diffidently at first, then with more vigour to what she thought were Owen Paris' verbal attacks. She recalled their friendship following the Arias mission and their capture by the Cardassians. Tom wavered, curious to learn more about a part of his father's life he knew little about but there was no time. Giving silent thanks to the Delta Quadrant's gods instead, he started to ease off his acting performance. The temperature on the bridge thawed as Janeway's voice regained its normal pitch and confidence.
Then she hesitated. The few suit sensors still working veered resolutely into the red as she wakened up to her plight.

Chakotay stood up, gesturing that he wanted to take over but Tom refused. He had just spent two days in an EMU and knew the suits inside out. Chakotay did not.
Tom cut through the panic he could hear edging in Janeway's tone. He asked her to describe what she could see of Voyager and estimate her distance from the ship. Following the Commander's instructions, the rescue crew concentrated their powerful spotlights in the area of space she indicated while Tom asked Janeway to use the EMU wrist mirror to signal and fix her position.

Eons passed. The telemetry figures took a nosedive. Then a 'we can see her!' boomed over the comms.
A few minutes later, two crewmembers had rendezvous with the drifting EMU and hooked on a spare support backpack to it before flying back to the ship. Ayala's relieved voice sounded through the bridge. "The Captain's back on Voyager, Commander. Getting her to sickbay now. Ayala out."

The bridge fell silent. Tom leaned against the bulkhead behind the comms console, Harry patting him on the arm, "You got her back. Thank God, you got her back."
Chakotay almost run towards the door. "I'll be in sickbay. Tuvok, you've got the bridge." He turned around before disappearing. "Thank you, Lieutenant Paris. You are relieved."

When Tom reached his quarters, he collapsed beside the bed, shaking uncontrollably.

TBC