Champion in the Light
A Voyager fanfic by Lt. Taya 17 Janeway (TaTTooGaL™)
Come to think of it, it was a pretty stupid thing to do, but he wasn't really thinking when he did it. Blame the stupidity of the human mind, that blatant impulsiveness which drives men to do the most illogical things. He immediately regretted it, of course, but it was too late to do anything but apologize. Which, as every man who offends a woman knows, isn't always the easiest thing to do.
It all started innocuously enough. They had dinner together, in his quarters, and when they were done it was fairly late at night so he offered to escort her back to her quarters. There was nothing implied in that gesture; he was just trying to be a gentleman. So she accepted with a smile, and he did just that, carrying on their conversation from dinner all the way to her door where they bade each other good night. And then he made his mistake.
He kissed her.
It was nothing, really, just a simple peck on the cheek done in the spur of the moment, (well, she did look so cute in that dress…) but her reaction was instantaneous. Her body stiffened and she recoiled from him like he'd turned into a serpent, gave him and icy glare and said, "I'll see you on the bridge tomorrow." And then she retreated to her room.
As the door slid shut in his face, he thought, damn!
It was worse than anyone had expected. She didn't just refuse to talk to Chakotay about it. She just refused to talk to Chakotay, period. Worse still, she went out of her way to avoid him, which wasn't good because, firstly, it was pretty dang annoying, and secondly, it was generating more than its fair share of gossip and rumors amongst the crewmembers, the last the thing the ship needed.
Tom was making the same observations to Harry, who was working on the isolinear relays in Astrometrics. "You notice anything weird about the captain and Commander Chakotay today?"
"Anything weird? Like what?"
"Come on, Harry, you're not serious! Surely you've noticed that they aren't on speaking terms anymore!"
Harry looked up, slightly annoyed. "Tom, you're over-dramatizing."
"It's the truth! Look, this morning B'Elanna and I were talking to the captain in the Mess Hall when he came along and she… well, I wouldn't say she just turned and ran in the opposite direction, but it was close."
"Coincidence."
"So, just how many words did they exchange on the bridge the last time you were there?"
Harry paused in thought and couldn't come up with a suitable answer. "Okay, fine, you win. So they've been avoiding each other. So what? She's probably just temporarily angry at him… again."
"Lover's quarrel."
Harry rolled his eyes. "Whatever…" He punched a few more commands into the console in front of him and grumbled, "They're not lovers."
"That's what they claim. Married men like me can smell woman trouble a mile away. And this ship isn't even a mile long."
Harry, painfully aware of his bachelor's status, made no move to comment on this.
"He must have done something really awful to her…" mused Tom. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"I don't know what you're thinking, Tom," replied Harry, more than slightly annoyed now, "so why don't you just enlighten me?"
Tom remained silent for a while, and the thought struck Harry. "No. You're not seriously thinking that."
Tom grinned cheekily at him. "Think what, Harry? That the two of them-"
Harry fought the impulse to clamp one hand over his friend's mouth. "You don't have to say it out loud!"
"But you can't think of any other explanation, can you," persisted Tom. "He hasn't broken any orders lately and we haven't had too many serious crises lately…"
"Maybe," suggested Harry slowly and patiently, "he kept annoying her with wild speculation and gossip about the love lives of other crew members."
Tom ignored his sarcasm completely.
"I mean, part of the reason why they're not together is probably because of people like you who revel in pointless scandals and sensationalism!"
Tom shrugged. "Hey, it keeps life on this ship interesting…"
"Life on this ship is interesting enough as it is, thank you very much. I didn't really need to hear all that."
Tom scowled. "What's wrong with you today, Harry? I thought I came here to have a really interesting conversation, but I think maybe talking to Toby the Targ might have been more effective, because at least he'd have kept it one-sided!"
"Maybe the fact that I'm trying to get some serious work done here and I'm not really in the mood to talk to anyone about anything, much less something as trivial as this, might factor a little in it, hmm?"
At this point Seven dived to his rescue my marching over and imperiously informing Tom, "Making pointless small talk does not aid in improving the efficiency of the isolinear relays, Lieutenant. Perhaps you should just… get lost."
Tom's eyes widened at that, but he kept his composure. "Aren't we all already lost in the Delta Quadrant?" he ribbed Seven as he made his retreat. As the door slid shut they could see him shaking his head and muttering.
"Thanks," grumbled Harry to Seven as he resumed his interrupted work. Seven smiled enigmatically and went back to her station.
******
Janeway was in her ready room, sipping her usual mug of coffee and pondering about what Seven overheard in a conversation between Tom and Harry, Surely it wasn't that obvious that she was avoiding Chakotay? After all it had barely been a day…
Whatever it was, this that she was going to do was going to make it more obvious… but it seemed like a good path to take nonetheless.
Her door chimed. She knew it was Chakotay, so she pushed the relevant padd to the center of the table and silently allowed Chakotay in.
To his credit he didn't act too uncomfortable, but he picked up the padd with a slight touch of unease. "What's this?" he asked.
"Read it," she replied, without looking up.
He read it and she could sense rather than she the tightening of his lips, the tension growing in his body. "You're sending me to observe a dark matter nebula in a shuttle, by myself, for one whole week."
She glanced up icily at him. "Objections?"
"None at all," he said heavily. "Just that…" what the heck have I done to deserve this?
"Just that?"
"Nothing," he mumbled, anticipating and not looking forward to the prospect of the next week.
She sighed, feeling slightly sorry for him. "Look… I know you're not too happy about it, but it's in the best interests of the ship and its crew. We can talk more about this when you come back from this mission."
He tucked the padd under his arm and left without a word.
*******
He was fuming by the time he reached the shuttle Sausalito. For a brief, childish moment in his quarters he'd considered packing all his things into the shuttle, leaving and never coming back, until he realized that running away wasn't going to solve anything. So he resolved to sulk and maintain complete radio silence for the entire duration of his journey. If she wasn't going to talk, neither was he.
He tapped the controls with more force than necessary as he guided the shuttle out of the dock. He had no clue as to how the rest of the crew would react to the playing out of this little scene, but most of them had probably figured by now that all wasn't too well between the captain and the commander. He was being exiled for a week, for goodness' sake. And all because he what? Tried to be too nice to her?
He managed to stick to his resolution for the first few hours and ignore all the underhand "Report, Commander!" messages from the Voyager. But after a while he realized if he was going on for the whole week like this, he was going to get pretty dang bored. One certainly couldn't expect him to meditate all week… he sighed.
He switched to the last message from Voyager, a one-liner which simply went "Talk, Commander… please?" probably sent by Harry Kim, from the looks of it. What should he reply? "I'm fine, stop bothering me, it's getting on my nerves"?
The console beeped again and another message replaced Harry's. "Earth to Commander Chakotay. Chakotay, please respond. We've been waiting for more than six years, but you never answer our calls…" That was definitely Tom Paris. Chakotay rolled his eyes. The message changed again. "Voyager to lost shuttle Sausalito. Is anyone out there?"
Chakotay decided that maybe sitting there and letting Paris' inventive messages come in one after another might provide adequate entertainment for the rest of the week. But he didn't exactly want to send the rest of the crew into a panic attack just because his captain was acting like a spoilt child, either. So he decided to reply… just this once.
But before he could get very far, the shuttle rocked violently. Chakotay hit his head on the console in front of him, hard, and crumpled to the floor in a dazed heap. Before he slipped into unconsciousness, he saw all the power on the shuttle flicker weakly once and go out.
******
"What do you mean, you've lost all contact with the shuttle?" asked Janeway, annoyed. She stood in the center of the bridge, glaring at Harry, who was whitening visibly.
"I mean that the shuttle simply just disappeared from our sensors. We didn't detect anything around it when it happened… it was just as though it never existed."
"Could it be some sort of damping field from the dark matter nebula?" she asked.
"Unfortunately, no. I'm still getting readings for third degree black body radiation as well as neutrino flux for that entire sector." Harry frowned. "I can't explain the disappearance of that shuttle."
"Did Commander Chakotay mention anything unusual happening?"
Harry and Tom exchanged a tense glance. "Well… no, actually," Harry replied truthfully and reluctantly. "He said nothing at all."
"Nothing at all," hinted Tom from the helm.
Janeway put her hands on her hips and sighed, rolling her eyes a little. "You don't have to rub that in, Lieutenant." Fine, if he insisted on being childish and immature, she wasn't going to do anything about it. "Carry on as usual, Mr. Kim."
"But…" spluttered Harry. "What about the shuttle?"
"What about it? The shuttle will be fine, and it'll be back within the week." She began for the turbolift. "You have the bridge, Mr. Kim. If you need anything, I'll be in my quarters."
"Captain!" protested Harry. "That shuttle has your first officer on it and it just disappeared for no apparent reason! Aren't you going to even bother looking for it?"
Janeway turned to glare at Harry, arms akimbo. "No, I'm not, and that's final."
Three hours later the Delta Flyer launched from the Voyager, carrying one Captain Janeway in search of the shuttle Sausalito.
******
When she arrived at the last known coordinates of the shuttle, her heart sank. It was there, all right, just as she had expected. But it also looked like it had been rammed into the back of a Borg Cube, which wasn't what she'd expected.
She beamed over to the shuttle armed with a large compression phaser rifle- not an easy task to do alone- and a large medikit. She needn't have bothered. The interior of the shuttle was as still as a grave. "Chakotay?" she called out, noting with detached interest that her voice echoed hollowly in the shuttle's empty bridge. The entire shuttle was dark and completely drained of power, as if someone had come along and sucked it dry. It wasn't even leaving a sizeable ion trail for the acute sensors of the Voyager to pick up.
She was worried. Maintaining total radio silence for several hours was one thing, but deserting like this was something that Chakotay would never do. He was too loyal to the ship. Too loyal to her. At that thought an inexplicable lump rose up in her throat as she remembered she'd been nothing but abominable towards him since the night before. Not like he'd actually done anything wrong… She berated herself. At least if they'd maintained radio contact with each other she'd at least have some clue as to what was going on. She began regretting not having brought Tuvok along. She needed someone to talk to, and all she was going to get now was this dead shuttle.
She picked up her tricorder and ran a surface scan of the shuttle's interior. A small anomaly caught her eye: an unusual neutrino flux density pattern, the same one that had prompted her to send Chakotay out to investigate the dark matter nebula. Without fully rationalizing it, she realized that the key to all her problems. She headed back to the Delta Flyer.
******
His world was nothing but a sea of blackness. Groaning, Chakotay rubbed at his face and opened his eyes.
His world was nothing but a sea of blackness.
Shocked, Chakotay sat up and blinked rapidly, convinced that he was just slow to wake up.
His world was still nothing but a sea of blackness.
Unbelieving, he put his hands in front of where his face was supposed to be. He couldn't see a thing. He tapped the back of his wrist to make sure he wasn't dreaming, but he couldn't see a thing, much less Terra's moon. For one horrible moment he thought he'd gone blind. Then he noticed the bright retinal flashes he saw streaking across his field of vision. Optical illusions, but it showed that at least his eyes were still working.
He figured that he first and foremost, wasn't on his shuttle anymore, nor was he anywhere near or on Voyager. He had probably been attacked and kidnapped; for what purpose, he didn't know. His tormentors had placed probably him into a sensory deprivation chamber to drive him out of his mind. He'd heard of them being used in the barbaric pasts of Terra's history: no light, no sound, no nothing. But he wasn't unduly worried about it. Sooner or later his captain would come rescue him.
He hoped.
******
Over the intercom to the Voyager, Harry Kim's voice sounded strained. "We didn't even get a visual from these ransomers," he told Janeway plaintively. "All they want from us are a few key technologies which we can't give away, like the warp core, firstly because it's against the Prime Directive, and secondly it's the only one we have."
Janeway gritted her teeth as she prepared to plunge into the dark matter nebula. "Tell them they're not going to get anything from us. Not our warp core, not our antimatter and definitely not our first officer."
"Aye, Captain. Voyager out."
She took a deep steadying breath. At last the problem was beginning to take shape: Chakotay had been captured by a bunch of galactic thieves who would only return him in exchange for some merchandize. Their philosophy disgusted Janeway entirely. It was boorish, immoral and puerile. She took the Delta Flyer out of warp and was instantly surprised.
In spite of their name, dark matter nebulas were actually invisible to everything but the most dedicated of sensors. The dense opaque mass of an unidentifiable substance hanging before the Delta Flyer certainly was anything but one. Yet it was emitting all the characteristic radiation, bells and whistles of a dark matter nebula. The readings were slightly anomalous, to be sure, but it was still identifiable. Janeway frowned. Whatever it was, it was obviously engineered to generate those readings. A stealth device, if anything. She radioed a message to Voyager, then guided the Delta Flyer into the dark cloud.
The interior of the cloud was pitch-black, and would have been impossible to navigate if not for the large, luminous ship sitting in the middle of it. It glowed bright and white in the middle of all the blackness. If Chakotay was anywhere, it had to be on that ship. Janeway inched the Delta Flyer closer.