Winter's Child, continued.

I didn't lie to my mother: I wasn't unhappy. Growing up on Voyager wasn't easy, and we shivered through our days and nights. It was a life of hard work, and we fought a never-ending battle against the crushing glacier and the endless cold. The adults I knew were shadows of their former selves, tired, worried, angry, and sad, but they taught and loved us all the more fiercely for it.

And what did I know about happiness? No matter how much they tried to teach us about life beyond the ship, stars remained purely theoretical, sunshine a dim flicker at planetary noon. We knew it was cold, but we'd never known a place where the air was as warm as our bodies and never climbed into bed at night without checking for frostbite first. The convenience of a food replicator, an escape to a holodeck, even the simple relief of a hypospray were beyond our understanding. So maybe my mother's happiness was harder to buy than mine.

It was enough, for me, that Zayek and I could explore the abandoned crew quarters and fight off imaginary aliens; it was enough that we sat for hours together behind the ops console, building cities from scraps and wires. When we gathered together to eat and Joe surprised us with something spicy or sweet, it didn't matter that most of the time we ate food more or less unflavored. I liked to solve the math problems everyone else gave up on, carving the equations into the frost on the walls until the solution came clear, and there was nothing so satisfying as patching the oxygen delivery wires, half buried inside the bulkhead, with B'Elanna whispering encouragement behind me.

I remember curling up behind Joe's oven, taking advantage of the rare warmth, devouring books I'd discovered below decks, and then arguing with Zayek about whether he should expect Jane Eyre to behave logically or not. Sometimes I would slip away from the adults and climb down to my mother's old quarters, to sift through what she couldn't bring with her through the crash. There was the time that Zayek tried to initiate a mind meld, and it worked, to our very real surprise; we yelled and broke the link, but dreamed each other's dreams for weeks afterward. One year Tom built a ramp of snow in the corridors on deck two, and we skidded and sled on old bulkhead casings until Tuvok insisted we get back to work.

That, I think, was happiness. However grim our circumstances, it seemed to me that I was still pretty lucky. The crew was dedicated and determined that their children never miss what they couldn't have, and between them they answered almost any question we could think to ask.

The few they couldn't answer, we took to be universal unknowns: if we would ever escape, the identity of the world we had crashed on, and if the Federation even knew to look for us.

Ada was born two years after the second marriage, and she seemed to me unreasonably lucky from the very beginning: she had three fathers, while I had none.

The second time that Tuvok underwent the pon farr, Maddie again volunteered. She must have been counting the days, because none of us noticed his increasing agitation before she sought him out. Despite his embarrassment, he assented, and the rest of the crew gave him space to struggle with this second transgression of his vows.

At that point, I was eight, and much more aware of the adult whispers around me. It was Joe who explained that Tuvok had another family, far away, and that he had never planned to start a second one; though he surely loved Zayek, it was hard to change your plans that way. That I understood, since we lived in the middle of a broken plan, but it was still hard to know what to say to Zayek about his parents. I remember my mother thanking Maddie for her willingness to help Tuvok, and Madelein saying that they all needed him and that sex was certainly the least she could do. Of all the questions I didn't know how to ask, this seemed a good place to start, and I soon learned much more about reproduction than I ever wanted to know; my mother, despite her urge to privacy, believes in being thorough.

No one missed the longing in Eddie's eyes as Maddie's belly swelled again, not even me. Tucked behind ops, I overheard her and Tuvok discussing the child, and her tentative suggestion that they let Greg and Eddie raise it. "We would be a part of the child's life, of course, but trapped down here… well, it may be their only chance to start a family. And we're hardly a loving couple, much as I respect you." Tuvok was unswayed by her sentimentality, but agreed that it would be a better allocation of resources, as long as the would-be parents understood the needs of a half-Vulcan child.

They did, and were excited by the challenge. In the months before the birth, they spent a great deal of time with Zayek and pumped Tom, my mother, and Maddie for information on caring for an infant below zero degrees centigrade. When the baby arrived, Madelein insisted that the Doctor give her right to Eddie, and as soon as she slid up against his bare chest, skin to skin for warmth, she stopped wailing. Joe and Naomi laughed and began to applaud, and Maddie hugged Zayek against her, watching the little family that she'd just helped to create.

Ada was a serious baby; I suspected early on that she was a little more Vulcan than Zayek, for all his eyebrow raising. Eddie and Greg's excitement over her every squint and squirm was infectious, but I still felt irrationally angry about the whole thing. Sitting on Tom's lap at conn, having an imaginary piloting lesson, I let this resentment slip while carefully increasing thruster strength by tapping my fingers on the dead console. I couldn't see his face, but I heard his sharp inhalation and felt the sudden stillness of his body. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

"Bea, you have just as many fathers as Ada does."

"Well, obviously I don't. I don't even have one," I retorted, still sliding my fingers over the cold keys. "Ada has Tuvok, who made her, and Greg and Eddie, who will take care of her and keep her warm and teach her to read."

"And you have Kathryn – "

"My mama, Tom. That's different."

He continued doggedly. "You have Kathryn, who made you, and your father, who she must have loved very much. And who would be so proud of you if he knew you, because you're smart and pretty and brave."

"Tom." I tried to put ice in my voice.

"And a lot like your mother." He put his chin on my shoulder and hugged me. I stopped tapping the dark buttons. "And you have me, Beatrice. I'm your father just as much as Greg is Ada's, because I'll keep you safe and warm and teach you anything you need to know."

This was the moment, and Tom, who had never lied to me, the person to ask. "Who made me? Who would have been my father, without the crash?"

He let out all his breath at once, like he had been waiting for exactly that. The silence sank in, and he hugged me even tighter. "I don't know, Bea. Your mother never told us."

"You never even guessed?"

"Honestly?" He thought a moment, perhaps wondering how much gossip to share with a nine-year-old captain's daughter. The seconds stretched, and I was impatient.

"If she loved him so much, like you say and Naomi said, they you would have known. Everyone knows about you and B'Elanna. About Eddie and Greg."

"I know it seems crazy, sweetheart, but sometimes people don't like to admit that they're in love. It took B'Elanna and I a long time to tell each other, or anyone else, and your mother is more private than most people." He sighed again. "Isn't this something you should ask her?"

I twisted around to glare at him. "That's a great idea, Tom. 'Oh, by the by, mama, you've never ever said a word about my father to me or anyone else, so I was wondering, which of the dead bodies below decks was him?' Is that going to go over well?"

"I see your point." He shifted so that I could sit sideways on his lap, clasping his arms around my waist. "Well, Bea, I'll tell you the truth. I have guesses, but I don't really trust any of them. I don't know who your father is, and I don't know why your mother won't tell you. But I promise, I'm here to be as much your father as he would be, if he could. And I'm sure that Greg or Joe or Eddie or Tuvok would say the same."

I let him hug me again and get back to piloting Voyager through an asteroid field, but just like with Naomi, it wasn't the love I doubted. I knew that I had a family who would care for me; I knew my mother loved me with a crushing, almost desperate completeness. It was my own history I didn't know.

The trouble with a dead starship is that it's not very good at being anything else. Kilometers of hallways and access tubes, tons of bulkheads and circuitry – it all has a structure and serves a purpose that's obsolete. Voyager may have been an engineering marvel, but her propulsion systems and shield generators produced no heat; first-rate sensors and state-of-the-art weaponry couldn't keep us fed. She's empty, echoing, and purposeless. But just like she can't be anything but a starship, her crew can't stop being her crew, even when there are no red alerts, no first contacts, no malfunctions, and no strange new worlds.

Thanks to B'Elanna, I know what Voyager was. It's hard to see the humming, whole ship through the frost, but I've spent enough time below decks, in the wreckage of engineering and the undisturbed silence of sickbay. Somewhere between the twisted hologrid and the shadowy depths of the crushed shuttlebay, I got to know Voyager. She's still my mother's ship, but she's shown me a few secrets.

Ada and Harry never went below; the darkness and the deepened cold was unnerving, and the frozen bodies of the dead scared them. Zayek wasn't afraid, but couldn't see the appeal of leaving the shelter of the bridge if there were no imaginary enemies to be conquered. Even the adults tended to limit their time away from deck one, climbing down through the Jefferies tubes only to salvage some piece of machinery that might be useful. I can only imagine what it must be like, to tiptoe through a dark ship where the air is almost too thin to breathe, when you knew her bright and full of friends. All the same, I liked the ringing, abandoned corridors and the forgotten corners.

If my mother had ever asked why I spent so much time away from the bridge, I probably would have said that the quiet of the ship was peaceful, and I just wanted to get away from the other kids for a while. But that wasn't the whole truth: the nine decks that were left told me stories that even Tom wouldn't. Love affairs and secret hobbies, families left behind and irrational worries - I explored quarters and stations trying to learn about the people who had lived and worked there. They were my family, too, and I wanted to be able to share their stories, since they never would. And I had another aim I never named: if I could discover Voyager's crew, perhaps I could learn a little more about her captain.

Even the bodies didn't bother me. The glacier was impenetrable, and the energy required for cremation or burial equally impossible. In the weeks after the crash, the survivors had instead carried the bodies of their friends one by one and laid them along the corridors, not sure then if they would need the quarters or cargo bays for something else later. There was no rhyme or reason to the arrangement; science and command, crewmen and lieutenants, Starfleet and Maquis were all mingled. In places, the survivors had tried to let lovers and friends stay together in death, and here and there little shrines had been set up; the one by Samantha Wildman grew each year that passed, the only evidence that serene and mature Naomi still missed her mother terribly.

After I gleaned all I could from their quarters, I turned to the crew themselves for their stories. I spent weeks pacing the corridors, studying each face: was it kind? Lined with smiles or sobriety? Was Aimee Lang the kind of ensign who played practical jokes? Did Tal Celes like her holonovels to be mysteries or romances? I tried to see their histories in their final expressions, preserved forever under a dusting of frost.

I looked, too, for a broad brow like mine, for dark hair and golden skin, for a man who might smile with dimples like mine. There were several possibilities based purely on coloring, a few more who had my build; none had both, but what could I tell from a frozen corpse laced with snow? None of them had any keepsakes laid beside them, and the carpet of frost was undisturbed except for passing footprints. If one of these men was my father, my mother had never gone to kneel beside him, never written him a letter and slid it up against his heart.

But my footprints weren't the only ones that marked the corridors: there was another set of precise steps that I followed around the empty decks. I knew they weren't left over from salvage missions, because the adults always took the Jefferies tubes directly to their destinations, and because they were always new, cut into every day's new layer of ice.

I know that they were my mother's; I knew the first time I ventured alone among the silent dead. She is the captain of the dead and the living, and she is responsible to both; I've heard her say as much. As long as she was with her ship, with her crew, she wouldn't step down, and every day did all in her power to lead and love them, even if it was just to give each crewman a few minutes of her time.

But a promise like that can't be made without a price, and what it took her to keep living is immense. More than once I found her seated in the captain's chair, her gaze a million kilometers beyond the dead viewscreen, one hand absently stretched out toward the commander's empty place. When she came back from walking the corridors alone, she didn't say a word, just held me close while I read or studied or tried to rewire dead power cells. I've woken to feel her body shaking against mine, and I've heard her whisper names into the darkness. Some of them I know are lying below, but others I'd never heard before: was she repeating the names of her family? Her past lovers? The places she'd been, or the battles she'd fought? I don't know, but it's not something I can ask, and I have learned to be content with the mystery.