"Day twenty-one, sample sixty-two." He tipped the remains of the latest plant sample to disappoint them out the shuttlecraft hatch, to the sand below. "Conversion efficiency…just round it to zero again. You could burn down a continent's worth, and it would run my processor for another twelve minutes."
Kes noted it on the pad without comment. She had cut the sleeves of the shuttle's spare uniforms short, but cuffed them up further for writing; her forearms showed pale against the new brown of her hands. The rest of the uniform, of course, was still four sizes too big.
He suspected she'd been humoring him for days about trying to get convertible energy for him from the plant life, but he also thought the ritual had become therapeutic for them both. Doing something, instead of nothing.
So he didn't see it coming, when she then toggled the pad off and turned round to face him. "Doctor. It's time."
It's not. We don't know anything about the apex carnivores here yet. Your leg is barely healed, and you're still working with one lung. You're more likely to be injured or worse than to find anyone you can render aid to.
Inadequate objections; he should have been the one urging her to go search for the others by now. His own encoded motivation to find them seemed shockingly low. A quick self-diagnostic revealed why. His implicit estimate of the number of other unassimilated crew surviving - based on the events of landing and outcome statistics on the time elapsed now without contact - was now well under one.
Absurd. Other people's outcome statistics had never applied to Voyager before. He had a brief, horrified vision of his duty subroutines seizing on Kes as their entire revised crew complement, nursemaiding one healthy person with ever-evolving varieties of sunscreen, while his other crew out there succumbed, one by one, to frostbite and appendicitis.
A bit sick, not wanting to look up, he said, "Very well." Having come so far, he did turn to face her then. "You'll go in the morning?"
She nodded. "I think, three days out this first time, if all goes well. I'll work up to longer trips."
Over her dinner that night they talked of the others, under a reckless, unspoken mutual agreement to assume they'd all be reunited shortly. Ensign Kim would have worked out a novel Borg-proof communication system by now. Chakotay would have gathered up the survivors and taught them basic woodcraft; there could be no doubt all those skills would apply perfectly on any planet. Torres would have determined how to weaponize the submerged wreckage of the pods. It was only bad luck, and their own lack of training, that they hadn't joined the party yet. If they'd only done a few more rough-world away missions…
"That part's true. We should have gotten you free of sickbay sooner," Kes said abruptly. "It didn't need technology from the future. Emitters on the bridge, in the mess hall…We should have tried. I should have insisted. I'm sorry."
That was touching, and unsettling; and like everything else now, it took a moment to process. She had hacked her hair short again that afternoon to keep it from catching in the dense undergrowth, and in the fading light it gave her back the elfin look of the years before, as if time could be casually run backward that way.
Then she turned her head and it was something new again. A rough-and-ready look made by this world alone.
He said, "I would have settled for occasionally being warned when the world outside was about to come flooding in to Sickbay."
Kes laughed. But then her eyes went back to the viewport, to the dense forest crouched over the rising slope that walled off the rest of the planet. "I'm frightened," she said, low. "Not about living off the land. But of the Borg finding me."
Then don't go. Sentimental, and unprofessional, as if there were any alternative. He tried to formulate, instead, the sort of bracing response he'd often defaulted to in patient care. Facing fear when necessary is one of the responsibilities you undertook in joining the crew. It hardly requires further discussion.
What came out instead was, "I never for a day felt adequate to the full range of the Chief Medical Officer's responsibilities, either."
She blinked. "Well. You rose to the task. No one would have guessed."
"Thank you," he said, meaning it. "It always seemed to me the appearance of confidence was a part of the job."
Kes was silent for a moment. "I wish more had been expected of me too, before now."
He narrowly managed not to protest that her course of medical studies had been as rigorous as any in the Federation, as well as hand-tailored by himself to the demands of an uncharted quadrant. That wasn't her point.
So after a moment, he just went with the truth. "Human cultures are dominant in Starfleet, including on Voyager. Ocampa have a number of physical and behavioral features which, in many of those cultures, are associated with fragility and innocence. If as a result you were sometimes sheltered, instead of trained… it would have been with the best of intentions." He sighed. "But maybe not the best results."
She was looking out into the spreading darkness. "I don't blame anyone but myself. Voyager was a gift. All novelty and learning; no intentional risk for me. But these last few months, when I was looking for…experience, complication…being annoyed, when people didn't understand I don't have all the time in the world to grow up…I might have looked for more responsibility, too." She adjusted the straps on her pack, unnecessarily. "So. Now's my chance."
He pulled a repurposed ration tin from a storage drawer and handed it to her. "Take this with you."
Her eyebrows went up quizzically.
"From sample forty-six. It may not burn well, but it turned out to be a tolerable topical antibiotic."
She smiled, and held it up in mock salute. He recognized the move from Paris. Insufferable playboy, but if anyone might have brought a pod down safely…perhaps there would be a chance to suffer him once again.
It occurred to him that, outside medicine, little true initiative had been expected of him either. That somewhere between the extremes of explosive personality change and leaving his code untouched forever, there might be a middle ground. And that perhaps he, too, should take a bit of necessary risk.
"Kes," he said after a moment, "leave me running with the emitter off. The power cost should be minimal. I want to do some processing."
She looked at him for a moment; he didn't volunteer more, and she apparently decided not to pry. Instead, she turned and rummaged in cargo for a moment, and came back with a data drive in her palm.
"I couldn't get your arts and culture files off Voyager." No; those would have been stored outside sickbay, wherever he could find the free space. "But this is the Pan-Bolean Opera doing selections from Verdi and Crecenzo. It was to thank you, once I finished medic certification." Her lips quirked. "You could run it in background, while you process."
He looked at it for a long moment, sorely tempted, then closed her fingers over it. Absurd, almost superstitious; but he didn't want anything that smacked of a farewell gift. "We'll listen together when you're back." He looked up through the viewport, at the darkening sky above the low tangle of the trees. "Godspeed."
He was next activated into a storm, flashes of lightning through the viewports illuminating the waves lashing at the craft's runners. Kes was soaked and dripping there in front of him, alone, her skin darkened further, her frame at least two kilos leaner. She was smeared with something clumped and greenish, tracked with the paths of the raindrops running through it on her skin. The sea was roaring; he could barely hear his own voice completing the nature-of-the-emergency buffer text.
Six weeks had passed.
"No emergency," she shouted back, panting.
So he rummaged in the back for the survival blanket, and passed it over in another flash of lightning. She said something he couldn't hear, then repeated it with no greater success. He shook his head, exasperated with the planet, and pointedly turned his back to let her change.
Wrapped and dry, she sat beside him, the longer hairs in her uneven home-done haircut curling up round her head, as the shuttle filled with her body heat and the viewports steamed over. With some further repetition, what she managed to convey between wolfing down ration bites was "no pods", and "found the carnivores, though". There was something else too, some reason for excitement, but it would have to wait.
It waited another two hours, while she dozed against his shoulder as the rain battered the roof. It was foolish, using power to sit there beside her. But then, he'd apparently gone six weeks without using it at all, and there was no telling how long she'd gone without sleep.
When the storm passed, it was the quiet that woke her.
"No wreckage, no footprints, no signs of intelligent life. I went through most of your ointment from slipping on the shoreline rocks. And it gets worse. This-" – she gestured vaguely outside – "is an island. There is a mountain range across the water on the northern side, maybe fifty kilometers. Mainland, or another island; I couldn't tell. But without the engines, it doesn't matter."
That was worse, and also better. More likely that there was ocean between them and the others, but also more likely the ocean was the only reason they weren't here. All of it absurdly unnecessary, if any of the shuttle's three comms systems had been working or safe to use.
"Well, the Borg can't stay in orbit forever," he said finally.
She laughed, the sound of shared frustration more than humor, and shrugged. He interpreted it loosely as: Millions of other cubes, billions of drones; why can't they?
But Kes had had days to adjust to all this already. And when she spoke again, there was a new animation in her voice that he hadn't heard since Voyager.
"But. Two days ago, I sensed something stalking me. Borg wouldn't have played with me the way it did. Moving just in and out of sight, circling ahead, herding me into a clearing. Then…speed, something with a pattern like broken glass, coppery teeth." She twisted a bit to meet his eyes in the ringlight breaking through the clouds. "And I boiled its blood."
"Kes." He nearly took a genuine breath into nonexistent lungs. On Voyager, the resurgence of that particular power would have been cause for some concern. Here, it might make all the difference.
"It started when I chose, and it stopped when I chose. I don't know which was a bigger relief. But it's not just about the power. It's true, I wasn't sure if it would ever return; I think the contact from 8472 blazed the way. But it means more than that."
"A vindication of their…prophecy." It came out dryer than he intended – force of habit – but it didn't seem to phase her.
"Yes."
It was easy, momentarily, to understand why so many humanoid cultures still kept concepts of divine inspiration, or fated paths. Her news dovetailed so neatly with his, a humanoid would have taken it as a sign.
"Then it may please you to know I've done a bit of recoding on myself, while you were gone."
Not, in fact, the most pleasant thing for a humanoid with her recent experience of his attempts at self-coding to hear. So he had to give her credit for looking interested instead of horrified. Perhaps the power to boil blood altered one's perspective.
"Very limited this time, I should have said. I haven't meddled with my personality, or any behavior restraints. Still not a fighter, I'm afraid. But I needed to bring down the weighting on the crew survival probabilities, and bring up the risk acceptance values. It opened up some options."
She shifted round to face him, knees to knees.
"If you remain convinced that you're our weapon, and that I have a role in helping you somehow, it still comes down to keeping my program running. And that's where we've been going wrong. We're trying to treat all this-" - he gestured vaguely round the shuttlecraft – "like a twenty-fourth century engineering lab. But the 'me' that you brought was already ready to work with Stone Age resources."
He stretched his arm out toward the back of the craft, toward the blocky, jumbled bulk of his setup in the dark. "We don't need to power the processor. We need to feed the neural gelpacks."
At first, hope made them even more sparing with his remaining energy.
Kes ate her meals alone. She split her days between rendering the plant life down to nutrient paste candidates for the gelpacks and practicing Vulcan mental exercises to push the boundaries of her powers.
The doctor ran his program with the emitter off, simulating feeding the pastes into the gelpacks. That would be a step forward in risk acceptance indeed; the wrong technique or substance could kill the neurons in minutes. And even if it worked, he still didn't share Kes' conviction that an EMH could enhance some vaguely-conceived Ocampan counterattack or rescue attempt against an enemy in orbit.
But it was better than certain deactivation once the power ran out. And it would be grimly satisfying to keep functioning for a while. To somehow prolong her lifespan, perhaps, till she could hone her powers to a long-distance, genocidal edge.
His ethical subroutines gave a warning twinge at that thought. But he thought of Torres, learning EMH code to set him right when he went wrong; and of Kim, fitting his emitter for heavy transporter wear so he could try an away mission, all in their off-duty hours, and ignored them.
But the weeks stretched into months, and all they achieved was ruling out one paste after another. The slippery molecules that plant life on this planet used to carry energy were maddeningly hard to stabilize. This world held its energy close to the chest, and wasn't offering him a taste.
His programming didn't include despair, but it did include redirecting effort from dead ends. And so his real focus moved to solving something that might matter more: why the Borg, still hanging in the sky, still hadn't found Kes' lifesigns. Working on it without a lab felt a bit like performing a symbiont transplant blindfolded, with Neelix as a narrator.
Such images of the crew were breaking into his processes more often now, intrusive but oddly comforting. When that thought of Neelix came, he tried to move on, but it reminded him of the parade of indigestion that shuffled through sickbay every time the fellow brought a new vegetable aboard, which brought up the thought of the local plant life, which led him to check a theory.
His own sensory channels were nothing compared to true sensors, but they could recalibrate to sense light outside the visible spectrum. With a little risk acceptance, what worked for medicine might also be enough for a bit of botany.
"Kes," he announced, activating his emitter in the middle of her midday meal. He almost got the air around him lit on fire for his trouble - "Don't ever do that again!" – but it didn't dampen his excitement.
"It is the planet," he nearly burst out, in non-reply. When that clearly failed to convey everything, he started over. "It's the structure of a trace mineral in the soil here." He keyed in his results on the pad and handed it over.
"Trace in the soil, but concentrated in the sand, and the plants take it up avidly. That silvery sheen's just the bit in the visible spectrum. See the refractive bands? That zone there covers both Starfleet and known Borg scanner frequencies. And look – at force field frequencies, it's worse. The forests would be a sort of thick mist for sensors, the same way the ground and airborne dust muffle power projection. It won't save us from visual detection. But if we keep avoiding the foolish mistakes, we should be able to rely on it."
Shading her eyes, she studied the outputs. "I do see." They might have been back in Sickbay, talking over efficacy titers for an antiviral for Delta quadrant flu strains, except for the light in her eyes when she looked back up. "We can hope it would have fouled their weapons targeting too."
"We can hope." They took the shared moment for all it was worth. His imaging routines flashed up the vision of a fleet of pods landing safe and shiny on the mainland. It gave him the strength to make a concession. "As far as your prophecy goes, you would also rise considerably in the ranks of dangerous powers on the planet."
Kes acknowledged the point with a faint, unsurprised smile. Then she sobered. "And it's no coincidence Voyager came here to die."
"No." The universe wasn't, statistically speaking, that generous. "The Captain is an accomplished physical scientist. And she always has a backup plan." Janeway had stayed aboard to ensure the self-destruct countdown finished, and here they were, still using 'is'.
Kes rubbed her eyes. "So we relax. A bit. And now we finish sorting out feeding your gelpacks."
But they didn't.
Flash-drying, powdering, boiling, extracting, and the twelve other methods available for peeling out the energy-bearing molecules all left them denatured and useless. The choice of plant species didn't matter. Stabilizing agents didn't matter. This world held its energy close to the chest, and wouldn't offer him a taste.
They'd agreed to draw the line at ten hours of energy remaining, leaving him deactivated thereafter except for emergencies.
Kes would, of course, keep trying. There might be other species in unexplored biomes, or parasitic fungi using some enzyme to stabilize their hosts' energy stores as they fed.
She had begun bringing up stories of the others again, both those they'd shared and those that were hers alone. Not spontaneously, but with an intentionality that made him think she was trying to keep them fixed in her mind. Moving the memories from direct recall into the thinner but more stable form of words.
It was an unexpected pleasure, until he noticed he himself was featuring in more of them.
The evening they hit fifteen hours remaining, after eating, she said, "Would you rather just stay active, till it's time?"
It was deeply inadvisable, but his probability estimates for its affecting outcomes were so low, he was free to choose. "Yes. I believe so."
They sat side by side, leaning back against the bunk, facing the hanging bundles of drying seaweed and tidy rows of tubers she had assembled. The mean temperature had fallen four degrees in the past six weeks; this world was moving into winter.
"I'll check your processor daily," she said after a minute. It felt like one of the humanoid farewell rituals in his database. "I'll keep the gelpacks between twenty and thirty-eight degrees. And I'll finish the redox trials on the xenoactineda species this week, and then move on to the mossy genuses. We'll have you awake before spring."
"Like the less fortunate hibernating organisms," he replied, heart not really in it.
His minor processes were glitching up a bit; he wasn't sure whether it was anger or sorrow, or an energy conservation subroutine. There were so many recommendations he wanted to make – don't get tempted into trying to get ship's sensors working; they'll pick that up for certain. Don't get distracted collecting eggs from the seabat nests and slip on the rocks. All things she knew already.
Instead, in the tens of thousands of patients' last words still accessible in memory, he found something closer to what he wanted.
"Thank you. For getting me off Voyager. Before that, for seeing me before I could see myself. For expecting more of me." Then he hit his stride. "I myself was programmed by humans. So if as a result, if I too ever…failed to expect more of you, in ways that might have made you doubt yourself here, then please accept my apologies for that as well. And for the doubtless many occasions on which I was inconsiderate and absurd." And finally, since this might be his last chance: "And for any other far more lethal situations to which my misjudgments may have recently exposed you."
At that, Kes, who had been listening intently, looked up at him for a moment. "Your alter-self. I've been wanting to tell you."
He braced himself.
"He was a bad man. But not as bad as you seem to fear."
I'm not afraid I'm like him, he wanted to reply. I fit into a petaram of memory; I don't have hidden depths. I'm afraid because competence is my reason for existing, and when I tried to increase it, I created a demon that put fear into my crew and my friend.
"Anyway, up till that last moment, I'd been pretty sure I could fry the emitter if I had to."
She dropped that conversational bomb in the purest tone of incidental recollection. He was glad the dark and the angle didn't let her see his jaw drop. It changed the way he imagined the trauma his alter-self had caused her; fully half the shame and guilt loops in his subroutines broke as he heard it.
After a moment, he was up to saying, "Thank you. For telling me."
"My real point was, you weren't wrong for wanting to change, grow, any of it. It went wrong because it was other peoples' code, and there was malice in it that you hadn't imagined could be there. You were naïve. Because you were young."
She met his eyes again. "Have you ever considered, even I was an adult when you were first activated? However much responsibility you were made for, you were an innocent yourself. But –" – this with a largely successful deadpan, and worse, what he suspected was her impression of his voice – "your imaging files have a number of physical and behavioral features I'm told humans associate with experience, and responsibility."
He surprised himself by laughing. He was momentarily baffled that this cruel chain of events had gifted him, alone out of his crew, that grace. And that it still managed to matter.
Then he noticed that having gotten all that out, she was shuddering now, and not with cold. She saw him noticing, and the wise self she had brought to the fore cracked a bit; she looked at her hands, and laughed once at herself. "I'm trying to handle this like she would. The Captain." She held her hand out in front; no little fine trembles there, but irregular jerky shocks of nervous energy with nowhere to go. "Already failing."
His grief was hard to process on this little current, and his legs glitched out for a moment, till he brought things under control. "She loved you like a daughter. I'm confident, if she saw you now, she'd feel nothing but pride."
Kes closed her eyes at that; moisture shivered underneath the lids, still held by surface tension. But she was determined, apparently, to finish. Her skin was chilling in the cooling air, the Ocampan version of goose bumps as her blood shunted close to the core. "What I'm still not saying clearly is, if you're next reactivated by archeologists in the twenty-ninth century, you should keep growing, if you want. Be happy there. And make them upgrade your emitter battery."
She spoke that last light sentence with the deliberation that the lucid dying used for their last words. He gave up trying to reply in words, rerouted a bit of remaining energy into bringing himself up to a humanoid body temperature, and pulled her against his shoulder. Kes leaned against him and was silent, just breathing, for a long moment. When she spoke again, her tone was carefully neutral.
"But deactivating tonight...are you really not afraid? Heroically brave? Or did you disconnect emotional subroutines from your imaging?"
He'd never thought of that last one, but filed the idea away for future use, if there was a future. "It's not courage, I'm sorry to say. Just lack of survival instinct." Unable to leave it there, he went on slowly, looking down at her, feeling out the truth. "But there are things I would be very sorry never to see again."
In the moment that followed, seared in high resolution straight to permanent memory, she pulled away just far enough to turn her face up toward him. A few centimeters apart, her eyes searched his face.
As the moment lengthened, the proximity began to shift his probability distribution of implications. He should have moved back, to resolve the ambiguity, but he didn't and didn't; he kept looking back at her.
"I don't suppose," she started, with visible effort. "You wouldn't want to, would you? With me?"
That took the intention probability estimate straight to critical.
And why not? It was a logical endpoint of prolonged isolation, humanoid touch-starvation, and the reasonable expectation of a solitary life and death from now on. For him, a final proof of her forgiveness; for her, a last chance to add a warm memory to light the coming years. No need to insult either of them by asking why the circumstances would make her see an old friend in a different light.
Only an opportunity to finally, in whatever way it meant to her, make things a small bit better.
Except it wasn't, and he couldn't.
He dropped eye contact and moved back.
Kes looked mortified. "I know it's not the same for you. I shouldn't have. It's just-"
"No, you, you don't have to explain. I do." No doubt the tripping over words was the processor's fault. "Kes, you still meet code criteria as a patient. And – against all evidence – a subordinate. If the intent is present for either of us, my medical ethics restraints won't allow it." Daring greatly, he added, "Otherwise, I believe I'd have no objection to…I would be more than happy to…I'm sorry."
That, unsurprisingly, sent his frayed ethics subroutines into a frenzy. They must be the reason for the perilous imagery yawning open in his mind now for the first time, the almost vertiginous feel of this conversation.
Kes sat back against the bunk and gave a wracked laugh. "I guess that's a better hypothetical than your other crew have gotten."
"It's certainly not one I would have raised with Mr. Paris," he agreed, and wasn't sure why that made her laugh harder. It should have been Paris here instead of him, or any of a number of free and doubtless willing crewmen. "I wish my…capacities were different, in so many ways."
She shook her head. "My fault, not yours. I'm sorry."
"I don't regret your saying it." He surprised himself. "But I plan to modify my program further before shutting down completely. If you wish, I can remove the memory."
"No. Your head's been poked in enough." She met his eyes again, with obvious effort. "Rest now."
It was midnight when he turned off the emitter. But he kept running a few minutes longer. There was work to be done, while he was still feeling reckless enough to do it. But it was surgeon's work, possibly his most difficult yet. So stay calm as well, and do it right.
First, he walled off the personality code; whatever she might say, his days of meddling there were over.
Then, in his coded restraints against lethal force, he carved out exceptions for present-danger defense of patients and self.
It felt nothing like his adaptive code adapting; perhaps more like burning down a temple might feel, to a certain sort of humanoid. And under the watchful eye of Voyager's main computer, which had learned from the disastrous last time, even trying would have gotten him decompiled for repair.
As it was, his matrix didn't like the changes either; the metaphorical joints began to creak a bit. But if no energy source was coming, it didn't matter if he broke himself. And if it was, he was done standing round, waiting for the Borg to return, armed with antibiotics and sunscreen.
It was so easy.
He went through the other requirements and restraints, leaving a scatter of deletions. Including, with grim satisfaction, that nature-of-the-medical-emergency buffer text.
Then, for good measure, he brought his emitter output under his direct control. As long as he'd gone mad on a beach, might as well have the option to project a ship.
That done, as a slightly spiteful afterthought, he enabled profanity.
The work felt perilous and vast, like those moments earlier that night. He didn't care. Whether he ever woke from this sleep or not, it was time to see himself, and start expecting more.
A/N: This story has one small departure from canon before our AU splits from it in Season 4, which appears at the end of this chapter. I've excluded the events of "Lifesigns" (season 2) from this AU's history. The ethical boundary stomp shown there of the Doctor pursuing a relationship with a current patient - dependent on him for minute-to-minute life support – felt too out-of-character to work with for me. This is the only departure from canon (that I'm aware of!) before the split.
